Plus you wouldn't even have the intercept a truck with actual nukes! Just the ones with the plutonium cores!
Downsides : that's a lot of bombs to plant. How could someone plant them without getting caught? Rent a nearby structure to the highway and dig a tunnel? Or place the explosives inside a parked truck that is to the SIDE of the roadway?
The other problem is that after these epicly huge explosions all go off, (including secondaries perhaps when the explosives inside the bombs detonate), how do you even find the pieces of plutonium? What if they aren't intact?
And remember, there's still a QRF : other vehicles loaded full of soldiers who are ahead or behind the convoy. With only 3 people involved, there aren't enough people to both shoot it out and find the plutonium. So you'd need several more IEDs to delay them.
1. Right, I didn't think jamming would really work, anyways. Military radios use lots of different frequencies, and high end ones may be able to counter jamming.
2. Shaped charges lead to spalling, huh. Still, it is an 18 wheeler truck, and if the charges were linear cutting charges on one end of the trailer, it's plausible that at least 1 of the warheads would be undamaged.
3. I wasn't certain what kind of lift. Maybe hook one chain to the warhead and the other to a pickup? Drag the warhead to the edge? Then use a ramp or something to push it down into the bed of a truck? It is doable.
4. Yes, but it is at night, and I've traveled along the very highways involved. I'm not saying there wouldn't be witnesses, but if the ambush team were disciplined about light they might be able to set up without being seen and reported.
5. Witnesses might be able to make phone calls (which would be jammed...broad spectrum cell phone jammers ARE readily available) and uh..watch the show? Obviously the same team that can take out multiple armored vehicles full of troops could keep civilians from interfering.
6. The reason for a JDAM is that if you know the nuke is in a building, and is being prepared for detonation, you don't take chances. You level the place hoping at least some of the shrapnel disables the bomb.
7. All published info on nuclear warheads indicates multiple safety features, including sensors to detect if the weapon was deployed properly (rather than being hotwired). Like an ICBM warhead would have sensors to detect the acceleration of a missile launch, the vacuum of space, etc.
Hey, I didn't say it would be easy. Just that it isn't impossible.
The open question is what does the detonator actually do. If all it ultimately does is send some current to 16 or so places at the same time (the explosive charges around the sphere to be imploded) then that isn't hard to replicate. Nor would it require materials that cannot be purchased off the shelf.
I agree completely. In fact, if I were convoy commander, I would plan things so there's SEVERAL routes I might take, and figure out a "decision point" for each junction between routes. I'd tell HQ and the air escort, etc, the possible routes but NOT which one I was going to actually take.
Instead, at the decision point, which would be say 15 minutes before the turn off to take a particular route, I'd RANDOMLY flip a coin or whatnot to decide which one to use.
That way, NO ONE knows which of the routes will actually be used until the decision has to be made. Not even the convoy commander.
I was just saying that if you did somehow know the road it was going to be, because your traitor told you, and you had 12+ hours to set up, it could be done. The first part of the ambush would be an actual live, stunt "accident" that overturns an 18 wheeler or something to completely block the road.
That's another thing..the roadblock has to be set up RIGHT BEFORE the main part of the convoy reaches it. Having an "accident" occur right in front of the actual convoy would probably seem the least suspicious.
Again, I think it could be done...but I think robbing a bank would be a much better idea for long term survival.
Hypothetically, could terrorists or a determined government such as the Iranians steal nuclear weapons from a convoy like this?
Well, thinking about the problem step by step. How COULD an evil entity with a lot of resources (but not enough resources to make a bomb from scratch) steal a nuke?
First, they have to KNOW which convoy has the actual warheads, versus merely parts. Theoretically, secretly placed cameras outside the military bases known to have nukes being sent for disassembly could spot a convoy. If the convoys are multiple trucks in a row, alone with obvious escort vehicles, then MAYBE those are the ones with the bombs.
This is where the U.S. government might or might not be sneaky about it. One obvious trick would be to use decoy convoys that are heavily armed and escorted, and then to slip the truck with the actual warheads in with a bunch of trucks leaving the post returning from food deliveries. And to space the unmarked escort vehicles out so that it isn't obvious which truck they are protecting.
And remember, from the point of view of the Iranian terrorists, this is a trick that could only work once. Once they try to steal a bomb, the U.S. government would probably just cease transporting nukes by road at all, forever.
So they have to KNOW which truck it is. So they need a traitor, no other way. That would probably be difficult. If some sleeper agent tried to enlist tommorow, and to steer their career towards this area of the military, what are the chances they would succeed? I have no idea, but I am guessing that the military assigns people to sensitive positions like this with some degree of randomness. The terrorist sleeper agent could easily end up, even if they passed all the security checks, somewhere completely unrelated.
Perhaps they could replace a civilian contractor working on the post somewhere close enough to plant a bug or something. Dunno.
Ok, so the terrorists somehow know which truck. Now they need to stop the truck. They have to get ahead of it and set up an ambush.
Here's where this is somewhat plausible : in some rural stretch of road, far away from a populated area or military base, with terrain on either side of the road unable to support a truck, the terrorists set up their ambush. They stage an accident to cause the trucks to stop, and use fifty caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to disable the engines of the trucks. They then need enough shooters to win a gunbattle against the escorts AND the QRF. Who have heavy weapons and special forces training.
How many might it take? 50 men? A hundred? And all of them have to keep quiet until the attack. NONE of them would survive the retaliation, participating in something like this would be a guaranteed life prison sentence or death penalty. Probably the death penalty.
Anyways, the terrorists use armor piecing ammo from 50 caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to shoot through the armor of all the escort vehicles and the trucks. They attempt to jam the radios used by the escorts. They now have to somehow recover the warheads.
This is where surprises come in. How about a claymore mine embedded in the side of one of the trailers? Or some other defense? What if these convoys are escorted by attack helicopters? There's a lot of things that a traitor might not necessarily know about.
Ok, so they do manage to get to the trailers, and they use shaped charges to slice through the armored metal of the trailers. They find a warhead, and they have a cargo lift to remove it.
How long does this take? The moment the word gets out, EVERY available resources, every soldier, every jet, every cop, everything is going to be mobilized to stop these people. But this does take time, and if the terrorists are well equipped with lifting equipment and the right tools, they might manage to load the bombs up and attempt their escape. This is where even 1 surviving special forces commando trucker could make a difference, right out of a movie like Under Siege 2. I c
Reasonable speculation on what sentient AI or molecular manufacturing using nanotechnology suggests that this technology would make creating an isolated kingdom practical. Today, every sophisticated product depends on supply chains stretching thousands of miles, but nanotech printing machines would be capable of making any product at all, given the blueprints, and the needed time, energy, and raw elements.
Sentient AIs would be capable of the same feats that currently takes armies of engineers and workers to accomplish.
I've got a more clear idea than I can explain in one post, I've thought of writing a science fiction novel where the only human survivors live in isolated bunkers because the biosphere has been contaminated with various rogue devices.
I guess from my (admittedly biased) perspective, developing something that let you have more of EVERYTHING more easily and cheaply is a better investment than a moonshot effort that has no known payoff at all.
Self-replicating nanoscale machinery would be a risky effort that might result in enormous gains, but better robotics and machine intelligence and more infrastructure are all lower risk investments that definitely improve material wealth.
Here's my objection : when you're talking about spending resources towards advancing technology and knowledge, WHERE you choose to spend the money is of immense importance. Putting 20 billion towards something that only advances human knowledge a tiny bit (like exploration of subatomic particles that are not separable without exotic energy states) is a bad idea if there are other things the 20 billion could be spent on to get more useful results.
For example, instead of researching the basic nature of matter, we could be trying to build self-replicating nanoscale machinery that we DO know work from living examples. With such machinery, we could eventually gain real mastery of our planet and our bodies.
Or, instead of wasting money on wars to kill a bunch of brown skinned people so that they don't kill a small number of us (we hope), we could spend the same money on medical advances to prevent aging and death. (or cryogenically freezing the recently dead so that even clinical death doesn't end all hope)
Instead of exploring space, all that money spent on telescopes and probes could go towards laser launch or elevators or some other method to get off the rock for a price that can actually be afforded.
And so on. R&D funding ought to be at several times what we are spending now as a society, but it should also be allocated towards more useful goals.
Here's the counter-argument. I'm aware of these objections.
ACTUALLY, all life on this planet has a nasty case of "version lock-in". For the last 3 billion years or so, the codebase that all life depends on has been full. Every 3 base sequence already has a corresponding codon, so there's no room left for new amino acids. And, translation of the codebase for any organism would require a computing mechanism to take all 3 codon bases and translate them into an equivalent in an expanded base system (say 4 codon bases).
Well, there ARE limits to what random chance can result in. HARD LIMITS. There's no real probability that a complex mechanism able to translate the code of an existing organism into an expanded codebase could ever evolve by chance. This is something a 10 year old could write a script to do in a few minutes, however, no individual cell can translate it's own code.
Why is this important? Since all life is stuck using the existing code set (no new, novel life can evolve because all the niches are already occupied by more complex life. Apparently, there are in fact limits to the things that life can occupy and evolve by chance) life is stuck being constructed of floppy proteins strung together with RNA. Various extremely complex hacks have been evolved to deal with this, but they are NOT ideal solutions.
If you could start clean sheet, and design self-replicating machinery the competent way, you'd probably end up with a bunch of extremely stiff, reliable, high speed components that work together in a complex manner to accomplish each step of a process. The theory is, said machinery, if it were made with diamondoid parts and using the best components we can find drawn from all over the periodic table (rather than the limited subset that life uses), would more than likely be much, much better at occupying the same ecological niches that existing life occupies.
For a simple example : all the plant life on the planet is made using cellulose because even though the fundamental physics are such that breaking cellulose down to simpler components (CO2 and water) releases energy, it takes a very complex set of biological enzymes AND a series of pH changes to do it, IF the enzymes are made of proteins constructed of amino acids that there are codons for.
You could probably design a cellulose deconstructing nano-machine that would be orders of magnitude more efficient and fit within a single cell, without needing pH changes, if you could make it from anything on the periodic table in whatever arrangement desired.
So there you have it : a series of micro of nano machines that eat cellulose for energy, use the carbon and other components to construct more of themselves (and perhaps a touch of rare earths or other exotic parts) and gradually take over the biosphere. That's the real grey goo scenario. Except without the grey or the goo, I'm more picturing a bunch of extremely rapid growing plants with carbon nanotube weaves in the leaves.
But no, this wouldn't happen by accident : a basic nanotech safety mechanism is to not put the instructions needed to self replicate any device into an object that is not macroscopic and possibly to shut down.
If there isn't evolutionary pressure, you are relying on chance. There are limits to what chance alone can accomplish. This is why it took life about 3 billion years to evolve organisms as complex as us.
Let me give an example of an "on purpose" change. You could add extra proteins to the virus, that ONLY when present in a human cell with a specific messenger RNA, the messenger RNA would bind to a receptor site on the protein and activate it. This protein would cause the infected human cell to express a gene that would cause it to produce and export some product. I like steroids for this because they don't depend on external receptors that the immune system can detect. So suppose you have the infected cells producing a variant of testosterone borrowed from an animal, or some other steroid.
Well, the infected cells would also express the nuclear receptor for that same animal-derived steroid, and be tuned so that ONLY if a critical mass of other infected cells is reached, the next phase begins.
Once critical mass is reached, the infected cells start producing some type of toxin to kill human beings. Or, presumably, do some other unspeakable thing. (no, turning them into zombies is probably not technically possible).
So you'd have a virus that spreads throughout a population, by aerosol, and ONLY once a certain incubation period has passed does it produce some horrible effect all at once, before medical treatment could possibly react. For example, if millions of the cells in the lining of your lungs made botulism toxin all at the same time, you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. There would be no treatment that could save you, and no way to easily detect you had been infected.
Now, this kind of weapon wouldn't be the end of the world. However, in principle it could kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people in waves, all at once, and the first few waves could happen before anyone with authority could react to control the virus somehow. (with drugs, quarantine, etc)
There are also only a limited number of people in the western world with the skills and training to do anything. Make ground zero for the weapon the CDC headquarters and the European equivalent, and I would imagine that the damage caused by this kind of weapon could be a catastrophic, western civilization collapsing event. Sort of how HIV targets the particular T cell type that is effective against HIV itself.
And, I'm not a virologist or a scientist with the training to actually do these kinds of code tweaking. I'm sure much more clever doomsday solutions could be thought of.
Another imbalance is this : making a biological weapon that causes harm is like a BILLION times easier than making one that heals. If it causes harm, but doesn't work correctly, the "bugs" are probably nasty side effects that still accomplish the goal of causing harm. To make something that would heal, you have to make countless tries to find a change that is safe, and then spend billions of dollars proving it is safe enough, and then more billions defending yourself in court when it turns out not to be perfect. It's a lot easier to break something than to repair it, especially a system as complex as a human being.
So forget the idea of using the same tech to build a defense.
What I mean is, an engineered virus could have a number of changes that were essentially impossible to arise by chance. You could mix in alleles borrowed from otherwise incompatible cell types, custom code, complex features taken from other viruses, etc. Random chance COULD cause these kinds of things to happen, but evolutionary pressure wouldn't cause them to happen, and complex changes can be such that they never will occur by chance before the stars burn out.
Doesn't work this way. When they find the plants on the property of the official with the government connections, they won't arrest anyone and the local prosecutor will quietly decline to file charges. Nor will they do any civil forfeitures.
And when they find the exact same plants on the property of the hispanic/black guy's property, or that redneck fellow who has already had a few run ins with the law, that's when they slam on the cuffs and knock the suspect around a bit. And charge him with a crime, and take his property.
It will never even occur to the government officials doing this that what they are doing is hippo-critical. After all, they "know" the black/hispanic/white trash guy must be guilty of something, even if not this particular thing. And they "know" that judge or police chief is innocent or a good guy that deserves a break, even if the pot garden looks deliberately cultivated.
No one has ever built the kind of nanotechnological mechanisms that would be capable of self replication, much less "grey goo". Thus, without working examples of nano-machinery, we don't actually know if grey goo is a real risk or not. Every thing we have ever discovered about fundamental physics and working mechanisms in life says that self-replicating nanotechnology IS possible. Existing life is a working example of it. However, the engineering and technical barriers to building some are very large, and it will take many advances before we have any. I personal think the grey goo scenario is plausible, however, safeguards can be taken to make the chance of it happening by accident essentially 0.
Biological viruses are a different scenario. They are not hard to make, and while the chance of an accidental escape is low, if one WERE to happen and to reach a major hub, control would be impossible. Nature will not evolve organisms in the directions of deadly pandemics because evolutionary forces act against this sort of thing. However, doing it on purpose is straightforward and quite easy (the tough part is actually making the genetic changes actually stick in the real lab, but the code changes are not very complex at all)
ELECTRIC fields get blocked by the metal of the bullet itself. Magnetic fields don't affect semiconductors all that much. I think, I'm not an expert on the relevent physics. I know that it doesn't matter how much current is involved, faraday cages are perfect. And another complexity is the bullet needs a "window", made of sapphire or something, in order to see the laser beam reflected off of the target. Or It needs integrated antenna to receive GPS signals (although at the speeds we are talking about, I'm not sure if GPS is all that accurate).
Actually, the shells will be guided. They will adjust their course in flight to home in on a laser that is painting the target, or I've seen proposals for GPS guidance. A plausible scenario would be that you find the enemy ships or tanks or whatever with a fleet of small, cheap, possibly disposable drone aircraft and paint the target with one of those.
SpaceX has spent less money to get actual rockets to orbit than NASA spent to build a launchpad. Perhaps privatization isn't always better, but apparently in some cases it works incredibly well. Privatizing something is a bad thing, I think, when you are essentially having government give a private entity a natural monopoly. Hence, privatizing the power grid, etc.
Welcome to the 1970s? Solar panels + some kind of high ISP, extremely low thrust engine (used to be ion engines but apparently casamir effect thrusters are much better) have been planned ever since.
The problem is really simple. It's cheap to study a potential space travel mechanism on paper. But you cannot make any real progress unless real hardware is built and tested in space. And that costs a fortune, because a kilogram in space costs about $10,000 to get it there. Not to mention costs other than money, such as time and launch windows and delays and so forth.
SO...a rational person at NASA, if the organization was not at the mercy of Congress for every project, would dedicate ALL of their budget to getting that $10k/kilogram cost down to something affordable. Even if this took a large up-front investment to solve this problem.
Given how often this vulnerability has been published, it implies that 1. There are a lot of terrorists in the world, but most are illiterate
OR 2. There are very few actual terrorists in existence with the resources to attack the united states.
Every post here is just random noise about Apple itself, not about the device.
Was this a working prototype? Did they even have flatpanel displays like that in 1983? What kind of processor would drive the phone? Where the heck would all the internals fit, a 1983 era computer was 10x the volume of this phone "prototype".
I can't imagine that this device was anything but a non-functional "concept" mockup. I don't think it was feasible to build one of these for at least 10-15 years.
They are a lot cheaper than they were last year. Go to sunelec.com and pick up some for bargain basement prices. (no I do not have any relationship with that site, but that is one where the $1/watt cells can actually be bought. It's also a good site for figuring return on investment)
Even natural gas has a certain cost per liter. A helicopter uses something like 10 times the fuel that a car uses. (I can look up exact numbers if you wish, but I know it's a LOT of energy)
And the fuel cost is only one part of the problem, a helicopter also needs maintainence for every flight hour.
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I have to say, this is a MUCH better plot.
Plus you wouldn't even have the intercept a truck with actual nukes! Just the ones with the plutonium cores!
Downsides : that's a lot of bombs to plant. How could someone plant them without getting caught? Rent a nearby structure to the highway and dig a tunnel? Or place the explosives inside a parked truck that is to the SIDE of the roadway?
The other problem is that after these epicly huge explosions all go off, (including secondaries perhaps when the explosives inside the bombs detonate), how do you even find the pieces of plutonium? What if they aren't intact?
And remember, there's still a QRF : other vehicles loaded full of soldiers who are ahead or behind the convoy. With only 3 people involved, there aren't enough people to both shoot it out and find the plutonium. So you'd need several more IEDs to delay them.
I haven't seen Under Siege 2 in many years.
1. Right, I didn't think jamming would really work, anyways. Military radios use lots of different frequencies, and high end ones may be able to counter jamming.
2. Shaped charges lead to spalling, huh. Still, it is an 18 wheeler truck, and if the charges were linear cutting charges on one end of the trailer, it's plausible that at least 1 of the warheads would be undamaged.
3. I wasn't certain what kind of lift. Maybe hook one chain to the warhead and the other to a pickup? Drag the warhead to the edge? Then use a ramp or something to push it down into the bed of a truck? It is doable.
4. Yes, but it is at night, and I've traveled along the very highways involved. I'm not saying there wouldn't be witnesses, but if the ambush team were disciplined about light they might be able to set up without being seen and reported.
5. Witnesses might be able to make phone calls (which would be jammed...broad spectrum cell phone jammers ARE readily available) and uh..watch the show? Obviously the same team that can take out multiple armored vehicles full of troops could keep civilians from interfering.
6. The reason for a JDAM is that if you know the nuke is in a building, and is being prepared for detonation, you don't take chances. You level the place hoping at least some of the shrapnel disables the bomb.
7. All published info on nuclear warheads indicates multiple safety features, including sensors to detect if the weapon was deployed properly (rather than being hotwired). Like an ICBM warhead would have sensors to detect the acceleration of a missile launch, the vacuum of space, etc.
Hey, I didn't say it would be easy. Just that it isn't impossible.
The open question is what does the detonator actually do. If all it ultimately does is send some current to 16 or so places at the same time (the explosive charges around the sphere to be imploded) then that isn't hard to replicate. Nor would it require materials that cannot be purchased off the shelf.
I agree completely. In fact, if I were convoy commander, I would plan things so there's SEVERAL routes I might take, and figure out a "decision point" for each junction between routes. I'd tell HQ and the air escort, etc, the possible routes but NOT which one I was going to actually take.
Instead, at the decision point, which would be say 15 minutes before the turn off to take a particular route, I'd RANDOMLY flip a coin or whatnot to decide which one to use.
That way, NO ONE knows which of the routes will actually be used until the decision has to be made. Not even the convoy commander.
I was just saying that if you did somehow know the road it was going to be, because your traitor told you, and you had 12+ hours to set up, it could be done. The first part of the ambush would be an actual live, stunt "accident" that overturns an 18 wheeler or something to completely block the road.
That's another thing..the roadblock has to be set up RIGHT BEFORE the main part of the convoy reaches it. Having an "accident" occur right in front of the actual convoy would probably seem the least suspicious.
Again, I think it could be done...but I think robbing a bank would be a much better idea for long term survival.
Hypothetically, could terrorists or a determined government such as the Iranians steal nuclear weapons from a convoy like this?
Well, thinking about the problem step by step. How COULD an evil entity with a lot of resources (but not enough resources to make a bomb from scratch) steal a nuke?
First, they have to KNOW which convoy has the actual warheads, versus merely parts. Theoretically, secretly placed cameras outside the military bases known to have nukes being sent for disassembly could spot a convoy. If the convoys are multiple trucks in a row, alone with obvious escort vehicles, then MAYBE those are the ones with the bombs.
This is where the U.S. government might or might not be sneaky about it. One obvious trick would be to use decoy convoys that are heavily armed and escorted, and then to slip the truck with the actual warheads in with a bunch of trucks leaving the post returning from food deliveries. And to space the unmarked escort vehicles out so that it isn't obvious which truck they are protecting.
And remember, from the point of view of the Iranian terrorists, this is a trick that could only work once. Once they try to steal a bomb, the U.S. government would probably just cease transporting nukes by road at all, forever.
So they have to KNOW which truck it is. So they need a traitor, no other way. That would probably be difficult. If some sleeper agent tried to enlist tommorow, and to steer their career towards this area of the military, what are the chances they would succeed? I have no idea, but I am guessing that the military assigns people to sensitive positions like this with some degree of randomness. The terrorist sleeper agent could easily end up, even if they passed all the security checks, somewhere completely unrelated.
Perhaps they could replace a civilian contractor working on the post somewhere close enough to plant a bug or something. Dunno.
Ok, so the terrorists somehow know which truck. Now they need to stop the truck. They have to get ahead of it and set up an ambush.
Here's where this is somewhat plausible : in some rural stretch of road, far away from a populated area or military base, with terrain on either side of the road unable to support a truck, the terrorists set up their ambush. They stage an accident to cause the trucks to stop, and use fifty caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to disable the engines of the trucks. They then need enough shooters to win a gunbattle against the escorts AND the QRF. Who have heavy weapons and special forces training.
How many might it take? 50 men? A hundred? And all of them have to keep quiet until the attack. NONE of them would survive the retaliation, participating in something like this would be a guaranteed life prison sentence or death penalty. Probably the death penalty.
Anyways, the terrorists use armor piecing ammo from 50 caliber or 20 millimeter rifles to shoot through the armor of all the escort vehicles and the trucks. They attempt to jam the radios used by the escorts. They now have to somehow recover the warheads.
This is where surprises come in. How about a claymore mine embedded in the side of one of the trailers? Or some other defense? What if these convoys are escorted by attack helicopters? There's a lot of things that a traitor might not necessarily know about.
Ok, so they do manage to get to the trailers, and they use shaped charges to slice through the armored metal of the trailers. They find a warhead, and they have a cargo lift to remove it.
How long does this take? The moment the word gets out, EVERY available resources, every soldier, every jet, every cop, everything is going to be mobilized to stop these people. But this does take time, and if the terrorists are well equipped with lifting equipment and the right tools, they might manage to load the bombs up and attempt their escape. This is where even 1 surviving special forces commando trucker could make a difference, right out of a movie like Under Siege 2. I c
Reasonable speculation on what sentient AI or molecular manufacturing using nanotechnology suggests that this technology would make creating an isolated kingdom practical. Today, every sophisticated product depends on supply chains stretching thousands of miles, but nanotech printing machines would be capable of making any product at all, given the blueprints, and the needed time, energy, and raw elements.
Sentient AIs would be capable of the same feats that currently takes armies of engineers and workers to accomplish.
I've got a more clear idea than I can explain in one post, I've thought of writing a science fiction novel where the only human survivors live in isolated bunkers because the biosphere has been contaminated with various rogue devices.
Because they are an anonymous corporate entity protected by armies of sharply dressed lawyers. Not some poorly dressed unattractive man.
I guess from my (admittedly biased) perspective, developing something that let you have more of EVERYTHING more easily and cheaply is a better investment than a moonshot effort that has no known payoff at all.
Self-replicating nanoscale machinery would be a risky effort that might result in enormous gains, but better robotics and machine intelligence and more infrastructure are all lower risk investments that definitely improve material wealth.
I think you're completely wrong.
Here's my objection : when you're talking about spending resources towards advancing technology and knowledge, WHERE you choose to spend the money is of immense importance. Putting 20 billion towards something that only advances human knowledge a tiny bit (like exploration of subatomic particles that are not separable without exotic energy states) is a bad idea if there are other things the 20 billion could be spent on to get more useful results.
For example, instead of researching the basic nature of matter, we could be trying to build self-replicating nanoscale machinery that we DO know work from living examples. With such machinery, we could eventually gain real mastery of our planet and our bodies.
Or, instead of wasting money on wars to kill a bunch of brown skinned people so that they don't kill a small number of us (we hope), we could spend the same money on medical advances to prevent aging and death. (or cryogenically freezing the recently dead so that even clinical death doesn't end all hope)
Instead of exploring space, all that money spent on telescopes and probes could go towards laser launch or elevators or some other method to get off the rock for a price that can actually be afforded.
And so on. R&D funding ought to be at several times what we are spending now as a society, but it should also be allocated towards more useful goals.
Here's the counter-argument. I'm aware of these objections.
ACTUALLY, all life on this planet has a nasty case of "version lock-in". For the last 3 billion years or so, the codebase that all life depends on has been full. Every 3 base sequence already has a corresponding codon, so there's no room left for new amino acids. And, translation of the codebase for any organism would require a computing mechanism to take all 3 codon bases and translate them into an equivalent in an expanded base system (say 4 codon bases).
Well, there ARE limits to what random chance can result in. HARD LIMITS. There's no real probability that a complex mechanism able to translate the code of an existing organism into an expanded codebase could ever evolve by chance. This is something a 10 year old could write a script to do in a few minutes, however, no individual cell can translate it's own code.
Why is this important? Since all life is stuck using the existing code set (no new, novel life can evolve because all the niches are already occupied by more complex life. Apparently, there are in fact limits to the things that life can occupy and evolve by chance) life is stuck being constructed of floppy proteins strung together with RNA. Various extremely complex hacks have been evolved to deal with this, but they are NOT ideal solutions.
If you could start clean sheet, and design self-replicating machinery the competent way, you'd probably end up with a bunch of extremely stiff, reliable, high speed components that work together in a complex manner to accomplish each step of a process. The theory is, said machinery, if it were made with diamondoid parts and using the best components we can find drawn from all over the periodic table (rather than the limited subset that life uses), would more than likely be much, much better at occupying the same ecological niches that existing life occupies.
For a simple example : all the plant life on the planet is made using cellulose because even though the fundamental physics are such that breaking cellulose down to simpler components (CO2 and water) releases energy, it takes a very complex set of biological enzymes AND a series of pH changes to do it, IF the enzymes are made of proteins constructed of amino acids that there are codons for.
You could probably design a cellulose deconstructing nano-machine that would be orders of magnitude more efficient and fit within a single cell, without needing pH changes, if you could make it from anything on the periodic table in whatever arrangement desired.
So there you have it : a series of micro of nano machines that eat cellulose for energy, use the carbon and other components to construct more of themselves (and perhaps a touch of rare earths or other exotic parts) and gradually take over the biosphere. That's the real grey goo scenario. Except without the grey or the goo, I'm more picturing a bunch of extremely rapid growing plants with carbon nanotube weaves in the leaves.
But no, this wouldn't happen by accident : a basic nanotech safety mechanism is to not put the instructions needed to self replicate any device into an object that is not macroscopic and possibly to shut down.
Only if actual children are involved. Connected government officials aren't immune to being brought down by scandal, just highly resistant to it.
If there isn't evolutionary pressure, you are relying on chance. There are limits to what chance alone can accomplish. This is why it took life about 3 billion years to evolve organisms as complex as us.
Let me give an example of an "on purpose" change. You could add extra proteins to the virus, that ONLY when present in a human cell with a specific messenger RNA, the messenger RNA would bind to a receptor site on the protein and activate it. This protein would cause the infected human cell to express a gene that would cause it to produce and export some product. I like steroids for this because they don't depend on external receptors that the immune system can detect. So suppose you have the infected cells producing a variant of testosterone borrowed from an animal, or some other steroid.
Well, the infected cells would also express the nuclear receptor for that same animal-derived steroid, and be tuned so that ONLY if a critical mass of other infected cells is reached, the next phase begins.
Once critical mass is reached, the infected cells start producing some type of toxin to kill human beings. Or, presumably, do some other unspeakable thing. (no, turning them into zombies is probably not technically possible).
So you'd have a virus that spreads throughout a population, by aerosol, and ONLY once a certain incubation period has passed does it produce some horrible effect all at once, before medical treatment could possibly react. For example, if millions of the cells in the lining of your lungs made botulism toxin all at the same time, you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. There would be no treatment that could save you, and no way to easily detect you had been infected.
Now, this kind of weapon wouldn't be the end of the world. However, in principle it could kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people in waves, all at once, and the first few waves could happen before anyone with authority could react to control the virus somehow. (with drugs, quarantine, etc)
There are also only a limited number of people in the western world with the skills and training to do anything. Make ground zero for the weapon the CDC headquarters and the European equivalent, and I would imagine that the damage caused by this kind of weapon could be a catastrophic, western civilization collapsing event. Sort of how HIV targets the particular T cell type that is effective against HIV itself.
And, I'm not a virologist or a scientist with the training to actually do these kinds of code tweaking. I'm sure much more clever doomsday solutions could be thought of.
Another imbalance is this : making a biological weapon that causes harm is like a BILLION times easier than making one that heals. If it causes harm, but doesn't work correctly, the "bugs" are probably nasty side effects that still accomplish the goal of causing harm. To make something that would heal, you have to make countless tries to find a change that is safe, and then spend billions of dollars proving it is safe enough, and then more billions defending yourself in court when it turns out not to be perfect. It's a lot easier to break something than to repair it, especially a system as complex as a human being.
So forget the idea of using the same tech to build a defense.
What I mean is, an engineered virus could have a number of changes that were essentially impossible to arise by chance. You could mix in alleles borrowed from otherwise incompatible cell types, custom code, complex features taken from other viruses, etc. Random chance COULD cause these kinds of things to happen, but evolutionary pressure wouldn't cause them to happen, and complex changes can be such that they never will occur by chance before the stars burn out.
Doesn't work this way. When they find the plants on the property of the official with the government connections, they won't arrest anyone and the local prosecutor will quietly decline to file charges. Nor will they do any civil forfeitures.
And when they find the exact same plants on the property of the hispanic/black guy's property, or that redneck fellow who has already had a few run ins with the law, that's when they slam on the cuffs and knock the suspect around a bit. And charge him with a crime, and take his property.
It will never even occur to the government officials doing this that what they are doing is hippo-critical. After all, they "know" the black/hispanic/white trash guy must be guilty of something, even if not this particular thing. And they "know" that judge or police chief is innocent or a good guy that deserves a break, even if the pot garden looks deliberately cultivated.
No one has ever built the kind of nanotechnological mechanisms that would be capable of self replication, much less "grey goo". Thus, without working examples of nano-machinery, we don't actually know if grey goo is a real risk or not. Every thing we have ever discovered about fundamental physics and working mechanisms in life says that self-replicating nanotechnology IS possible. Existing life is a working example of it. However, the engineering and technical barriers to building some are very large, and it will take many advances before we have any. I personal think the grey goo scenario is plausible, however, safeguards can be taken to make the chance of it happening by accident essentially 0.
Biological viruses are a different scenario. They are not hard to make, and while the chance of an accidental escape is low, if one WERE to happen and to reach a major hub, control would be impossible. Nature will not evolve organisms in the directions of deadly pandemics because evolutionary forces act against this sort of thing. However, doing it on purpose is straightforward and quite easy (the tough part is actually making the genetic changes actually stick in the real lab, but the code changes are not very complex at all)
ELECTRIC fields get blocked by the metal of the bullet itself. Magnetic fields don't affect semiconductors all that much. I think, I'm not an expert on the relevent physics. I know that it doesn't matter how much current is involved, faraday cages are perfect. And another complexity is the bullet needs a "window", made of sapphire or something, in order to see the laser beam reflected off of the target. Or It needs integrated antenna to receive GPS signals (although at the speeds we are talking about, I'm not sure if GPS is all that accurate).
Faraday cage.
Actually, the shells will be guided. They will adjust their course in flight to home in on a laser that is painting the target, or I've seen proposals for GPS guidance. A plausible scenario would be that you find the enemy ships or tanks or whatever with a fleet of small, cheap, possibly disposable drone aircraft and paint the target with one of those.
SpaceX has spent less money to get actual rockets to orbit than NASA spent to build a launchpad. Perhaps privatization isn't always better, but apparently in some cases it works incredibly well. Privatizing something is a bad thing, I think, when you are essentially having government give a private entity a natural monopoly. Hence, privatizing the power grid, etc.
Welcome to the 1970s? Solar panels + some kind of high ISP, extremely low thrust engine (used to be ion engines but apparently casamir effect thrusters are much better) have been planned ever since.
The problem is really simple. It's cheap to study a potential space travel mechanism on paper. But you cannot make any real progress unless real hardware is built and tested in space. And that costs a fortune, because a kilogram in space costs about $10,000 to get it there. Not to mention costs other than money, such as time and launch windows and delays and so forth.
SO...a rational person at NASA, if the organization was not at the mercy of Congress for every project, would dedicate ALL of their budget to getting that $10k/kilogram cost down to something affordable. Even if this took a large up-front investment to solve this problem.
Given how often this vulnerability has been published, it implies that
1. There are a lot of terrorists in the world, but most are illiterate
OR
2. There are very few actual terrorists in existence with the resources to attack the united states.
Every post here is just random noise about Apple itself, not about the device.
Was this a working prototype? Did they even have flatpanel displays like that in 1983? What kind of processor would drive the phone? Where the heck would all the internals fit, a 1983 era computer was 10x the volume of this phone "prototype".
I can't imagine that this device was anything but a non-functional "concept" mockup. I don't think it was feasible to build one of these for at least 10-15 years.
They are a lot cheaper than they were last year. Go to sunelec.com and pick up some for bargain basement prices. (no I do not have any relationship with that site, but that is one where the $1/watt cells can actually be bought. It's also a good site for figuring return on investment)
Even natural gas has a certain cost per liter. A helicopter uses something like 10 times the fuel that a car uses. (I can look up exact numbers if you wish, but I know it's a LOT of energy)
And the fuel cost is only one part of the problem, a helicopter also needs maintainence for every flight hour.