The problem with this theory : it assumes that each universe has the capacity in terms of available matter that could build a computer capable of simulating an entire universe THE SAME SIZE as the one above it. Not possible.
Ok, my logic isn't based on math, it's based on common sense.
Go look at a a modern factory using current robotics. Do you notice that the factory could make some of the parts used in the machines in that factory? And that the robots can do basically anything that a human hand can do, given a proper setup?
It's perfectly reasonable to extrapolate just a LITTLE bit and imagine a very large factory that can make every part used in the factory itself, from the ICs in the control circuitry to lubricants for the moving parts. Said factory already exists, it is just distributed across the world and currently depends on human labor for many things.
Now, what ultimate needs does this factory have, if you could replace the human intelligence of the workers with really smart software? Well, it needs various metals and carbon and silicon and all sorts of other stuff that happen to be found all over our solar system, not just on earth.
It also would need energy, which happens to be freely created and dumped into space by our star.
So common sense is that once such a factory exists and no longer is constrained by human labor for it to grow, it could exponentially grow to swallow up all the available matter in the solar system, almost.
Yes, the curve would be sigmoidal...somewhere around the point that it comes time to assimilate pluto or Kuiper belt objects, the rate of growth would level off. And we'd never convert EVERY last scrap of matter, it would be an asymptotic end game at that point, yes.
But what's the difference between converting 90% of everything within a a light day of the Sun and 100% from a practical perspective? Either way, it is going to be pretty darn impressive for those humans that live to see it. (if any do)
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
It's neat to think that such a civilization could store even more information than an obvious cap of '1 bit per atom'.
The power cable might be an inch in diameter, and would have plastic tubes carrying distilled water spiralling around the cable sheath. There would be a ground sheath, electronically monitored, and a switch to kill the juice when there's a leak.
The power pack would use a similar coolant system, complete with fan and radiator. The Tesla power pack already has this.
Before I went to Army Basic Training, I had spent hours playing the game "America's Army". Among other features, that game has an extremely accurate simulated shooting range that is almost identical to the real one. (you shoot these green 'pop up' targets that are man-sized)
In the game, you had to score 'expert' in order to be issued a sniper rifle in online multiplayer battles. So I replayed that part of the game dozens of times in order to finally hit expert.
Anyways, shooting my real M-16, I found that the skill translated. My own breathing and the wobbling of my iron sights seemed just like the game, and I 'clicked' on each target. Hit 38/40 without any problems, 'expert' level.
I would say it was actually easier to do this in real life than in the video game.
I've read soldiers manning fixed machine gun turrets saying that shooting back felt just like a video game as well.
Well, here's the thing : think about the concept. What kind of vehicle technology would YOU rather have?
1. A vehicle that uses a complete gas engine, including fuel systems, air intakes, fuel injection, even a turbocharger. Throttles, radiators, lubricating oil, ect ect. AND a battery bank AND electric motors AND power conversion circuitry.
More than DOUBLE the number of drivetrain components.
2. A vehicle with a much bigger battery bank, using special batteries that can fast charge in 10 minutes so you can go across the state as long as there are enough electric charge station 'waypoints'. You have GPS so it takes a lot fewer of these than it did back in the days of the first gas cars.
Which technology do you think is going to be cheaper to keep running long term? Or to manufacture?
Plug in hybrids are a good start in that they spur developement of cheaper batteries, power conversion circuitry, and all electric drivetrains. But they are only a stopgap measure, and may never be economical.
For you questioning the "charge in 10 minutes" claim : be aware that a lithium ion battery exists that DOES have this feature. Altair nanotechnologies is shipping a battery right now that supposedly has an improved anode that solves the problems that prevent rapid charging conventional lithium ion batteries. Actually, they claim 5 minute recharges in their marketing materials.
They ALSO claim to have solved the other big problem with lithium ion batteries : finite lifespan. They claim their batteries do not 'wear' and can be put through at least 20 years worth of power cycling. Again, note that these special batteries can be purchased today, they are not vapor-ware. (I don't know if their claims are valid, but I do know the physical batteries exist)
Yes, I am aware that a 10 minute recharge would strain the capacity of standard electrical service. You would need the electric gas stations to either have extremely high amperage connections to the grid, or to have some kind of energy storage technology at the station. Such as super-capacitors, a bank of precharged batteries, flywheels, ect.
So could it be done? Mass produce these high end lithium ion batteries by the billions, putting banks of them in every new car and truck on the road and in electric gas stations? I think it could, but the huge upfront costs of such a conversion are going to put it off well into the future. The ultimate long run costs might be the same or cheaper than fossil fuels, but in the short term consumers won't pay for something that is significantly more expensive.
For the conversion to occur, one of these has to happen
1. "Moore's law" makes lithium ion batteries so cheap that electric cars are cheaper than gas
2. Oil shortages make gas so expensive that even electric cars look cheap
3. The government puts a huge tax on gasoline/diesel and artifically makes electric cars seem cheap
A lot of people have pointed out that an electric car is actually simpler than gas. The motors are a lot smaller, and the battery banks consist of thousands of identical battery cells. The only other thing in the car is the power handling circuitry, which is solid state. If the batteries didn't wear out with age, then an electric car would probably be much cheaper to maintain.
Well, you could arrange the shadows from the orbital sunshades to fall on non-arable land (oceans, deserts, ect).
And the ultimate problem is too much heat, not the gases. One advantage of my proposal is that hard laws of thermodynamics let us predict EXACTLY what our intervention will do to global temperatures. We can be sure that we won't get unexpected results this way, unlike methods that put more dust in the air or mess with CO2 absorption by adding iron to the oceans, ect.
The key element about global warming that seems relevant is this : how LONG will it take? If we have 200 years before the ice caps finish melting, then it's not really the crisis that it's made out to be.
Why won't it matter if it takes 200 years? Because realistically at even a fraction of the current rate of technological progress, mankind will have the technology to do something definitive about it in 200 years. The simplest, most elegant solution I can think of to global warming is to build giant orbital sunshades to reduce the total solar irradiance to the earth's surface.
I can even see how this would be done using a juiced version of current technology. Automated factories would produce the thousands of square kilometers of shade material (kind of like the automated factories in Japan right now...). The factories might be on the earth or the moon. We'd blast the shades into orbit using lasers (see Lockheed Martin's new LED pumped laser weapon for technology that could do the job TODAY) and they would automatically position themselves in the right location using tiny ion engines (also already been done).
The solar panels would produce electrical energy, which would be beamed down to earth via microwave. The panels would only be maybe 40-50% efficient, so the waste heat would radiate out to space, reducing the total thermal load on the planet.
Presto! Problem solved, and probably would be a profitable endeavor for some future megacorp.
Technically it wasn't perjury by a LOOOONNNNG stretching of the rules. And, anyways, what did you expect : Mr. President, did you diddle the chubby intern?
The point of all this security isn't to stop a serious, well funded attempt to assasinate this man. As many people have pointed out, unless they kept the person in a bunker or in a series of undisclosed locations, a well funded team could probably harm him or her.
Except...any sane organization has nothing to gain by killing this leader. Unlike a dictator, the president can be easily replaced with someone else, and routinely is swapped out ever 4-8 years. In fact, a reasonable person would expect a backlash. The real reason the U.S. government doesn't give two shits about the Palestinians is because they kind of seem like the same kind of guys who committed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's backlash.
Any group that killed the American president would be crushed, and would never get anything they wanted.
However, lone nuts and other poorly equipped people get mad at the President all the time. The secret service can probably stop such morons in almost all situations.
Also, a lot of the security is reactive. Presidents who were killed in the past were usually killed by some kind of small arms attack. Hence the bulletproof limo and the ring of armed guards. If some other form of attack ever succeeded, god forbid, then security precautions might change. Such as eliminating public appearances entirely and doing everything via teleconference and holograms.
Except that no-one at NASA is even TRYING to build a cheaper rocket. And they also have no concrete plans for a Mars mission, either. Meaning the engines you would need to even get the Mars are not even in the design stage.
So if you don't even have a guess as to how much stuff you could bring to Mars, then playing with habitats is pointless.
Best case scenario, we build a super-efficient laser launch system and a nuclear powered VASIMIR rocket to get to mars real fast. In that case, we could just cram the spaceship with a bunch of MREs and life support components right off of a nuclear submarine.
Worst case, it is still super-expensive to go to Mars, and NASA has to custom build every last part, min-maxing for mass.
I'd talk before they even got the 'waterboard' out of the case. Just the plane trip to Gitmo and the removal of my lawyer during questioning would be enough to get me to ask what they want me to confess to.
The most BASIC problem has yet to be solved : how do we loft things into orbit without blowing $10,000 of taxpayer money per kilogram? Every last dollar of the manned space division of NASA SHOULD go into solving this problem, FIRST.
THEN, once it is cheap and easy to put stuff into orbit, and only then, do we work out how to put up a real space station, then a trip to the moon, then to mars. In roughly that order.
And before you say something dumb like "well, a modern Saturn V is as cheap as possible"...no. Disposable giant rockets aren't cheap, they are just cheaper than rube goldberg spaceplanes (aka shuttle)
What do I think will work? Probably laser launch. LED Solid state laser technology is finally cheap enough that we could use infrared lasers to blast spaceships into orbit. Instead of one launch every few months, a laser launch system would fire a smaller payload off daily. After a few thousand successful unmanned launches, we would buy more laser modules and launch small manned capsules, probably one person at at time. (with a laser launch system, you can run the solid state lasers all day, so long as you pay the power bill. But adding more capacity costs money)
Rotons, or space elevators, or a railgun, or Saturn Vs made in China, or various other 'out there' ideas might also work. The point is, we need to keep working on better ideas until we get one of them to work, and then worry about conquering Mars.
I guess you must have a pretty tight definition of 'loser', or you don't ride the bus much. Fact is, people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are most commonly found on the bus.
The Soyuz space capsule was an incredible engineering accomplishment. Sometimes, a simpler, robust design is vastly superior to a complex, brilliant piece of engineering. It isn't always about min-maxing performance characteristics : engineering is about solving a problem with the least amount of resources used.
I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments on modern LCDs.
For various reasons, somehow NASA has never done this. Their solutions to problems have tended to be stupendously expensive, complex boondoggles. Any average joe can see that building a space station when your launch costs are $10,000 a kilogram is a horrifically bad decision : the money spent should go into working out a cheaper way to launch things into orbit, first.
Part of this is politics, of course. The only reason Mission Control was in Houston rather than in the same facility where the rockets are worked on is due to a certain powerful Texas politician, LBJ...
Ultimately, I am arguing this : we should barely give a shit what poor people, without any real access to serious weaponry, will do. If we were facing a competent enemy, they would have conducted a 9/11 scale assault, or at least attempted one, monthly. But we aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this theory : it assumes that each universe has the capacity in terms of available matter that could build a computer capable of simulating an entire universe THE SAME SIZE as the one above it. Not possible.
Ok, my logic isn't based on math, it's based on common sense.
Go look at a a modern factory using current robotics. Do you notice that the factory could make some of the parts used in the machines in that factory? And that the robots can do basically anything that a human hand can do, given a proper setup?
It's perfectly reasonable to extrapolate just a LITTLE bit and imagine a very large factory that can make every part used in the factory itself, from the ICs in the control circuitry to lubricants for the moving parts. Said factory already exists, it is just distributed across the world and currently depends on human labor for many things.
Now, what ultimate needs does this factory have, if you could replace the human intelligence of the workers with really smart software? Well, it needs various metals and carbon and silicon and all sorts of other stuff that happen to be found all over our solar system, not just on earth.
It also would need energy, which happens to be freely created and dumped into space by our star.
So common sense is that once such a factory exists and no longer is constrained by human labor for it to grow, it could exponentially grow to swallow up all the available matter in the solar system, almost.
Yes, the curve would be sigmoidal...somewhere around the point that it comes time to assimilate pluto or Kuiper belt objects, the rate of growth would level off. And we'd never convert EVERY last scrap of matter, it would be an asymptotic end game at that point, yes.
But what's the difference between converting 90% of everything within a a light day of the Sun and 100% from a practical perspective? Either way, it is going to be pretty darn impressive for those humans that live to see it. (if any do)
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
It's neat to think that such a civilization could store even more information than an obvious cap of '1 bit per atom'.
Solution : water cooling.
The power cable might be an inch in diameter, and would have plastic tubes carrying distilled water spiralling around the cable sheath. There would be a ground sheath, electronically monitored, and a switch to kill the juice when there's a leak.
The power pack would use a similar coolant system, complete with fan and radiator. The Tesla power pack already has this.
care to show some math?
Before I went to Army Basic Training, I had spent hours playing the game "America's Army". Among other features, that game has an extremely accurate simulated shooting range that is almost identical to the real one. (you shoot these green 'pop up' targets that are man-sized)
In the game, you had to score 'expert' in order to be issued a sniper rifle in online multiplayer battles. So I replayed that part of the game dozens of times in order to finally hit expert.
Anyways, shooting my real M-16, I found that the skill translated. My own breathing and the wobbling of my iron sights seemed just like the game, and I 'clicked' on each target. Hit 38/40 without any problems, 'expert' level.
I would say it was actually easier to do this in real life than in the video game.
I've read soldiers manning fixed machine gun turrets saying that shooting back felt just like a video game as well.
Well, here's the thing : think about the concept. What kind of vehicle technology would YOU rather have?
1. A vehicle that uses a complete gas engine, including fuel systems, air intakes, fuel injection, even a turbocharger. Throttles, radiators, lubricating oil, ect ect. AND a battery bank AND electric motors AND power conversion circuitry.
More than DOUBLE the number of drivetrain components.
2. A vehicle with a much bigger battery bank, using special batteries that can fast charge in 10 minutes so you can go across the state as long as there are enough electric charge station 'waypoints'. You have GPS so it takes a lot fewer of these than it did back in the days of the first gas cars.
Which technology do you think is going to be cheaper to keep running long term? Or to manufacture?
Plug in hybrids are a good start in that they spur developement of cheaper batteries, power conversion circuitry, and all electric drivetrains. But they are only a stopgap measure, and may never be economical.
The Prius batteries are not lithium ion, and are not appropriate for an all-electric car.
For you questioning the "charge in 10 minutes" claim : be aware that a lithium ion battery exists that DOES have this feature. Altair nanotechnologies is shipping a battery right now that supposedly has an improved anode that solves the problems that prevent rapid charging conventional lithium ion batteries. Actually, they claim 5 minute recharges in their marketing materials.
They ALSO claim to have solved the other big problem with lithium ion batteries : finite lifespan. They claim their batteries do not 'wear' and can be put through at least 20 years worth of power cycling. Again, note that these special batteries can be purchased today, they are not vapor-ware. (I don't know if their claims are valid, but I do know the physical batteries exist)
Yes, I am aware that a 10 minute recharge would strain the capacity of standard electrical service. You would need the electric gas stations to either have extremely high amperage connections to the grid, or to have some kind of energy storage technology at the station. Such as super-capacitors, a bank of precharged batteries, flywheels, ect.
So could it be done? Mass produce these high end lithium ion batteries by the billions, putting banks of them in every new car and truck on the road and in electric gas stations? I think it could, but the huge upfront costs of such a conversion are going to put it off well into the future. The ultimate long run costs might be the same or cheaper than fossil fuels, but in the short term consumers won't pay for something that is significantly more expensive.
For the conversion to occur, one of these has to happen
1. "Moore's law" makes lithium ion batteries so cheap that electric cars are cheaper than gas
2. Oil shortages make gas so expensive that even electric cars look cheap
3. The government puts a huge tax on gasoline/diesel and artifically makes electric cars seem cheap
A lot of people have pointed out that an electric car is actually simpler than gas. The motors are a lot smaller, and the battery banks consist of thousands of identical battery cells. The only other thing in the car is the power handling circuitry, which is solid state. If the batteries didn't wear out with age, then an electric car would probably be much cheaper to maintain.
The reason we can't fix the problem now is a fault with economics : tragedy of the commons. It's impossible.
Two words : nuclear fission. Sure, it 'sucks' in a lot of ways, but it would provide enough juice to do what I describe.
Well, you could arrange the shadows from the orbital sunshades to fall on non-arable land (oceans, deserts, ect).
And the ultimate problem is too much heat, not the gases. One advantage of my proposal is that hard laws of thermodynamics let us predict EXACTLY what our intervention will do to global temperatures. We can be sure that we won't get unexpected results this way, unlike methods that put more dust in the air or mess with CO2 absorption by adding iron to the oceans, ect.
No, I don't think he is a realistic sci-fi author. My proposed solution uses no tech that isn't within reach in 50 years or less.
The key element about global warming that seems relevant is this : how LONG will it take? If we have 200 years before the ice caps finish melting, then it's not really the crisis that it's made out to be.
Why won't it matter if it takes 200 years? Because realistically at even a fraction of the current rate of technological progress, mankind will have the technology to do something definitive about it in 200 years. The simplest, most elegant solution I can think of to global warming is to build giant orbital sunshades to reduce the total solar irradiance to the earth's surface.
I can even see how this would be done using a juiced version of current technology. Automated factories would produce the thousands of square kilometers of shade material (kind of like the automated factories in Japan right now...). The factories might be on the earth or the moon. We'd blast the shades into orbit using lasers (see Lockheed Martin's new LED pumped laser weapon for technology that could do the job TODAY) and they would automatically position themselves in the right location using tiny ion engines (also already been done).
The solar panels would produce electrical energy, which would be beamed down to earth via microwave. The panels would only be maybe 40-50% efficient, so the waste heat would radiate out to space, reducing the total thermal load on the planet.
Presto! Problem solved, and probably would be a profitable endeavor for some future megacorp.
I made a quick vandalization to the article after you told me about it.
A) Whatever you think of his politics, Bill Clinton was as smart or smarter
Technically it wasn't perjury by a LOOOONNNNG stretching of the rules. And, anyways, what did you expect : Mr. President, did you diddle the chubby intern?
"Uhhh.....no?"
The point of all this security isn't to stop a serious, well funded attempt to assasinate this man. As many people have pointed out, unless they kept the person in a bunker or in a series of undisclosed locations, a well funded team could probably harm him or her.
Except...any sane organization has nothing to gain by killing this leader. Unlike a dictator, the president can be easily replaced with someone else, and routinely is swapped out ever 4-8 years. In fact, a reasonable person would expect a backlash. The real reason the U.S. government doesn't give two shits about the Palestinians is because they kind of seem like the same kind of guys who committed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's backlash.
Any group that killed the American president would be crushed, and would never get anything they wanted.
However, lone nuts and other poorly equipped people get mad at the President all the time. The secret service can probably stop such morons in almost all situations.
Also, a lot of the security is reactive. Presidents who were killed in the past were usually killed by some kind of small arms attack. Hence the bulletproof limo and the ring of armed guards. If some other form of attack ever succeeded, god forbid, then security precautions might change. Such as eliminating public appearances entirely and doing everything via teleconference and holograms.
Except that no-one at NASA is even TRYING to build a cheaper rocket. And they also have no concrete plans for a Mars mission, either. Meaning the engines you would need to even get the Mars are not even in the design stage.
So if you don't even have a guess as to how much stuff you could bring to Mars, then playing with habitats is pointless.
Best case scenario, we build a super-efficient laser launch system and a nuclear powered VASIMIR rocket to get to mars real fast. In that case, we could just cram the spaceship with a bunch of MREs and life support components right off of a nuclear submarine.
Worst case, it is still super-expensive to go to Mars, and NASA has to custom build every last part, min-maxing for mass.
I'd talk before they even got the 'waterboard' out of the case. Just the plane trip to Gitmo and the removal of my lawyer during questioning would be enough to get me to ask what they want me to confess to.
This is stupendously stupid and idiotic.
The most BASIC problem has yet to be solved : how do we loft things into orbit without blowing $10,000 of taxpayer money per kilogram? Every last dollar of the manned space division of NASA SHOULD go into solving this problem, FIRST.
THEN, once it is cheap and easy to put stuff into orbit, and only then, do we work out how to put up a real space station, then a trip to the moon, then to mars. In roughly that order.
And before you say something dumb like "well, a modern Saturn V is as cheap as possible"...no. Disposable giant rockets aren't cheap, they are just cheaper than rube goldberg spaceplanes (aka shuttle)
What do I think will work? Probably laser launch. LED Solid state laser technology is finally cheap enough that we could use infrared lasers to blast spaceships into orbit. Instead of one launch every few months, a laser launch system would fire a smaller payload off daily. After a few thousand successful unmanned launches, we would buy more laser modules and launch small manned capsules, probably one person at at time. (with a laser launch system, you can run the solid state lasers all day, so long as you pay the power bill. But adding more capacity costs money)
Rotons, or space elevators, or a railgun, or Saturn Vs made in China, or various other 'out there' ideas might also work. The point is, we need to keep working on better ideas until we get one of them to work, and then worry about conquering Mars.
I guess you must have a pretty tight definition of 'loser', or you don't ride the bus much. Fact is, people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are most commonly found on the bus.
The Soyuz space capsule was an incredible engineering accomplishment. Sometimes, a simpler, robust design is vastly superior to a complex, brilliant piece of engineering. It isn't always about min-maxing performance characteristics : engineering is about solving a problem with the least amount of resources used.
I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments on modern LCDs.
For various reasons, somehow NASA has never done this. Their solutions to problems have tended to be stupendously expensive, complex boondoggles. Any average joe can see that building a space station when your launch costs are $10,000 a kilogram is a horrifically bad decision : the money spent should go into working out a cheaper way to launch things into orbit, first.
Part of this is politics, of course. The only reason Mission Control was in Houston rather than in the same facility where the rockets are worked on is due to a certain powerful Texas politician, LBJ...
A porno exists where people DO have sex in zero-G. I've never seen it, but I know it's out there. They used an airplane on a parabolic arc.
Ultimately, I am arguing this : we should barely give a shit what poor people, without any real access to serious weaponry, will do. If we were facing a competent enemy, they would have conducted a 9/11 scale assault, or at least attempted one, monthly. But we aren't.