First, that's not actually true, at least for Apollo, and, second, the Hubble is actually an argument for manned spaceflight. It would not have returned a fraction of the science return it did without the manned servicing missions (which, among other things, fixed the error in the mirror surface).
I predict that the Kepler will be serviced in-orbit as well. I also predict that the 40 years+ of Mars probes will become a historical footnote approximately one week after the first manned mission reaches Mars orbit.
I hope that they chose the "flexible path," maybe with a little more than $ 3 billion per year in extra spending they view as the minimum price. The asteroids are where it's at in a bunch of ways - easy to get to the first ones, easy to deal with, and the likely source of economic activities in space (raw materials, etc.) for the rest of this century. Plus, if a NEO was discovered that looked like a threat to the Earth, the flexible path would provide the infrastructure to deal with it.
One interesting thing you could do with the flexible path is build a lunar space elevator with existing technology. If that was done, you could then land on the Moon without building a new generation of lunar landers. That to me sounds like a cost effective and forward-thinking way to go to the Moon and develop a space flight infrastructure, not the lunar option outlined in the Augustine report summary.
Or, maybe, Bob, the evil co-worker, threatens to tell my wife and boss that I am a Nigerian prince who has obtained $ 1 billion USD in oil money that needs a US bank account to be successfully deposited...
(Unfortunately, I know that there is a fair amount of spam sent in my name. I get the backscatter from it.)
Dear AC, perhaps we are using different definitions of "obsession." Here's mine: when something cannot possibly benefit your life in any measurable way whatsoever, and you devote energy to pursuing it anyway, this is something of an obsession.
Tonight, I spent some time pursing a better view of the beautiful sunset here in Paris, and then observing it, which could not possibly benefit my life in any measurable way whatsoever. I will do it again, the next time such an opportunity arises. I recommend that you should be cautious before you label people obsessed.
I would guess that it's at one of the high locations where the Katabatic winds start from. They're like avalanches, they aren't bad at the top, just at the bottom.
I am involved with an Internet streaming site (AmericaFree.TV) and our traffic patterns follow normal Television "Prime Time" - i.e., traffic peaks at roughly 6:00 PM to Midnight in the evening. This happens in the US, Europe and Asia, and the local time zone pattern looks a lot like the "Consumer-Internet traffic" graph (# 2 in the original article). (Note that all of these graphs do not start at zero traffic, but some higher value, like 50%). In our case (long format video), there appears to be relatively little streaming from at work.
If you look at Craig Labovitz's previous's post, What Europeans do at Night, it appears that European Internet usage drops quickly after dinner time, but I would interpret these graphs a little differently - European traffic starts dropping at 10;00 PM, while US traffic starts dropping at Midnight. This roughly matches what we see, and also European TV viewing patterns (see pages 22 and 23 of this presenation). Of course, American TV prime time is pretty similar to Europe's. Putting all of this together, I don't think that streaming video is driving the differences seen by Labovitz.
An interesting corollary of all of this is that there is still substantial bandwidth available for P2P in the hours after midnight. Off-hours P2P use could triple and still not be more than the current day-time use.
About 8 years ago, I warned industry types that the end result of their activities would be the destruction of copyright - not because I wanted it destroyed, but because the more hysterical and unbalanced their attempts to protect their legacy business models become, the stronger the inevitable reaction would become.
I was roundly jumped on for that opinion, but I have seen nothing the period since to make me change it. In fact, I think it's now like Communism during the 20 years after the suppression of the Prague Spring - it's already too late to reform it, and the only real question is how the end will come.
Yes, and I have to wonder if that sort of self-cancelation could be built into a cellular autonoma model. That would be interesting.
I recently read Alastair Reynolds House of Suns, and this deals with causality violations, by name. I don't think his solution would work as physics, but it's not impossible, and I thought it was very cool that he recognized and described the issue.
See my response below - it has to be either non-local, non-causal or exceed the speed of light. (These are of course coupled possibilities.) If he has found another way around Bell's Theorem, I bet he would be touting that, not cellular automata.
Hidden variables in this case should be thought of as a hidden micro-states. A hidden variable theory would have quantum mechanics be something like thermodynamics; i.e., a theory that is not really basic, but appears so as we cannot see the fine scale true reality. Einstein was convinced that this had to be the case.
The tests of Bell's Theorem shows that no locally causal hidden variable theory is viable. This says basically that one of these must be the case
There are no hidden variables (i.e., true quantum uncertainty applies, and quantum mechanics is correct).
The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.
There is action at a distance (i.e., the theory is non-local).
There has long been a viable theory, that of Bohm, that replicates normal quantum mechanics. It's non-local.
I cannot tell from a read of the article (and without seeing the underlying paper) if 't Hoof has a non-local theory or just how he stays consistent with Bell's Theorem.
In 1980 I was programming on an Amdahl 470 with a whopping 1 Gigabyte of disk memory. This required a large room full of IBM Winchester drives, looking for all the world like some sort of high-tech laundromat. The computer itself was in another large room full of equipment, and a laser printer the size of a VW microbus (no kidding).
This machine also came with not one, but two full time consulting engineers, one from Amdahl for hardware problems, and one from IBM for software problems. The Amdahl CE made $ 50K per year, which seemed like an impossibly high salary to us grunt programmers.
The biggest game on this machine was a dungeons and dragons type game written in PL1. I have often wondered what that game really was and what its history was. ( I never played it since as a student I couldn't afford it - with the IBM mainframe philosophy, you were charged for everything, which came out of my grant, and machine time was not cheap. Logging in to check the status of my jobs and immediately logging out cost about $ 3.00, for example.)
What the cable companies are most afraid of right now is people "Cutting the Cord" (i.e., people leaving the walled garden and getting their TV purely over the Internet). This will happen whether or not privacy mode is instituted. These companies are fighting the last war, which is generally not good for your long-term survival.
I have no doubt in 16 years that you will be able to find CD readers, or DVD readers or, for that matter, 8-track players. (There is an active 8-track underground now, and they get players from somewhere.) They may or may not be common, but they will be available.
No, the real question is, whether your media will be playable. Will a particular CD-ROM or DVD-ROM you make last that long ? And the answer is - who knows ? It depends on your particular physical artifact. how it was made, how it is stored, etc. This is typically way longer than the manufacturers will guarantee.
My rule of thumb is that only data that is "live" will last. So, if you want this to last, burn some DVD's, and then give the same data to every member of the family who will take it, and tell them to put it on their hard drives and keep it there. And then, make a list of those people, and the file names, and put that list in your time capsule. If you do that, between the chance of your media being readable, and the chance of someone keeping that file for 16 years, you will probably be OK.
Presumably you would unpack the sail at 0.1 AU. Before you deploy it, the light pressure acceleration would be much, much, smaller. To conserve even more fuel, you could do a Jupiter gravity assist or multiple Venus gravity assists to help you get there.
The JPL ODP (Orbit Determination Program) has incorporated relativity since the 1960's and uses the proper Einstein Infeld Hoffmann (EIH) equations of motion for the harmonic gauge.
Twitter goes down a lot now (or at least partially). For example, I cannot post at this moment. It's going to be hard to base serious programs on a service that is down so frequently.
Slashdot Mirror
I have read the summary and think it seems well-thought out and positive and not at all aligned with the title of this original post.
First, that's not actually true, at least for Apollo, and, second, the Hubble is actually an argument for manned spaceflight. It would not have returned a fraction of the science return it did without the manned servicing missions (which, among other things, fixed the error in the mirror surface).
I predict that the Kepler will be serviced in-orbit as well. I also predict that the 40 years+ of Mars probes will become a historical footnote approximately one week after the first manned mission reaches Mars orbit.
I hope that they chose the "flexible path," maybe with a little more than $ 3 billion per year in extra spending they view as the minimum price. The asteroids are where it's at in a bunch of ways - easy to get to the first ones, easy to deal with, and the likely source of economic activities in space (raw materials, etc.) for the rest of this century. Plus, if a NEO was discovered that looked like a threat to the Earth, the flexible path would provide the infrastructure to deal with it.
One interesting thing you could do with the flexible path is build a lunar space elevator with existing technology. If that was done, you could then land on the Moon without building a new generation of lunar landers. That to me sounds like a cost effective and forward-thinking way to go to the Moon and develop a space flight infrastructure, not the lunar option outlined in the Augustine report summary.
Or, maybe, Bob, the evil co-worker, threatens to tell my wife and boss that I am a Nigerian prince who has obtained $ 1 billion USD in oil money that needs a US bank account to be successfully deposited...
(Unfortunately, I know that there is a fair amount of spam sent in my name. I get the backscatter from it.)
Dear AC, perhaps we are using different definitions of "obsession." Here's mine: when something cannot possibly benefit your life in any measurable way whatsoever, and you devote energy to pursuing it anyway, this is something of an obsession.
Tonight, I spent some time pursing a better view of the beautiful sunset here in Paris, and then observing it, which could not possibly benefit my life in any measurable way whatsoever. I will do it again, the next time such an opportunity arises. I recommend that you should be cautious before you label people obsessed.
I am going to be redundant here, but this is not news. It is, however, perfect fare for the "The Telegraph."
Sorry - it's 144 km from Plato. Blasted English units.
It's 89 km from Plato - a Chinese-Australian robotic observatory at "Dome A".
That's at 80 deg 22' S 77 deg 21' E and 4093 meters above sea level.
I have to wonder if it's that much better than PLATO that there is a need for 2 observatories 89 km apart.
I would guess that it's at one of the high locations where the Katabatic winds start from. They're like avalanches, they aren't bad at the top, just at the bottom.
Located within the Australian Antarctic Territory
Note that the USA, Russia, China, and many other countries do not recognize this territory as being in any way Australian.
If I had a zillion little microbots or nanobots, I could find a LOT of better uses than spying on my neighbor.
You don't understand how political power works.
I am involved with an Internet streaming site (AmericaFree.TV) and our traffic patterns follow normal Television "Prime Time" - i.e., traffic peaks at roughly 6:00 PM to Midnight in the evening. This happens in the US, Europe and Asia, and the local time zone pattern looks a lot like the "Consumer-Internet traffic" graph (# 2 in the original article). (Note that all of these graphs do not start at zero traffic, but some higher value, like 50%). In our case (long format video), there appears to be relatively little streaming from at work.
If you look at Craig Labovitz's previous's post, What Europeans do at Night, it appears that European Internet usage drops quickly after dinner time, but I would interpret these graphs a little differently - European traffic starts dropping at 10;00 PM, while US traffic starts dropping at Midnight. This roughly matches what we see, and also European TV viewing patterns (see pages 22 and 23 of this presenation). Of course, American TV prime time is pretty similar to Europe's. Putting all of this together, I don't think that streaming video is driving the differences seen by Labovitz.
An interesting corollary of all of this is that there is still substantial bandwidth available for P2P in the hours after midnight. Off-hours P2P use could triple and still not be more than the current day-time use.
About 8 years ago, I warned industry types that the end result of their activities would be the destruction of copyright - not because I wanted it destroyed, but because the more hysterical and unbalanced their attempts to protect their legacy business models become, the stronger the inevitable reaction would become.
I was roundly jumped on for that opinion, but I have seen nothing the period since to make me change it. In fact, I think it's now like Communism during the 20 years after the suppression of the Prague Spring - it's already too late to reform it, and the only real question is how the end will come.
That's OK, I criticize James Murdoch's News Corporation for providing false news.
I know which I would rather not be accused of.
Yes, and I have to wonder if that sort of self-cancelation could be built into a cellular autonoma model. That would be interesting.
I recently read Alastair Reynolds House of Suns, and this deals with causality violations, by name. I don't think his solution would work as physics, but it's not impossible, and I thought it was very cool that he recognized and described the issue.
See my response below - it has to be either non-local, non-causal or exceed the speed of light. (These are of course coupled possibilities.) If he has found another way around Bell's Theorem, I bet he would be touting that, not cellular automata.
Hidden variables in this case should be thought of as a hidden micro-states. A hidden variable theory would have quantum mechanics be something like thermodynamics; i.e., a theory that is not really basic, but appears so as we cannot see the fine scale true reality. Einstein was convinced that this had to be the case.
The tests of Bell's Theorem shows that no locally causal hidden variable theory is viable. This says basically that one of these must be the case
There are no hidden variables (i.e., true quantum uncertainty applies, and quantum mechanics is correct).
The speed of Light can be violated (i.e., there are hidden states that can exchange information faster than the speed of light). This implies, by the way, causality failures would be possible, so that in principle you could do something like kill your grandfather and prevent your own existence.
There is action at a distance (i.e., the theory is non-local).
There has long been a viable theory, that of Bohm, that replicates normal quantum mechanics. It's non-local.
I cannot tell from a read of the article (and without seeing the underlying paper) if 't Hoof has a non-local theory or just how he stays consistent with Bell's Theorem.
The thing that struck me the most was what they did to Alan Turing.
In 1980 I was programming on an Amdahl 470 with a whopping 1 Gigabyte of disk memory. This required a large room full of IBM Winchester drives, looking for all the world like some sort of high-tech laundromat. The computer itself was in another large room full of equipment, and a laser printer the size of a VW microbus (no kidding).
This machine also came with not one, but two full time consulting engineers, one from Amdahl for hardware problems, and one from IBM for software problems. The Amdahl CE made $ 50K per year, which seemed like an impossibly high salary to us grunt programmers.
The biggest game on this machine was a dungeons and dragons type game written in PL1. I have often wondered what that game really was and what its history was. ( I never played it since as a student I couldn't afford it - with the IBM mainframe philosophy, you were charged for everything, which came out of my grant, and machine time was not cheap. Logging in to check the status of my jobs and immediately logging out cost about $ 3.00, for example.)
What the cable companies are most afraid of right now is people "Cutting the Cord" (i.e., people leaving the walled garden and getting their TV purely over the Internet). This will happen whether or not privacy mode is instituted. These companies are fighting the last war, which is generally not good for your long-term survival.
I have no doubt in 16 years that you will be able to find CD readers, or DVD readers or, for that matter, 8-track players. (There is an active 8-track underground now, and they get players from somewhere.) They may or may not be common, but they will be available.
No, the real question is, whether your media will be playable. Will a particular CD-ROM or DVD-ROM you make last that long ? And the answer is - who knows ? It depends on your particular physical artifact. how it was made, how it is stored, etc. This is typically way longer than the manufacturers will guarantee.
My rule of thumb is that only data that is "live" will last. So, if you want this to last, burn some DVD's, and then give the same data to every member of the family who will take it, and tell them to put it on their hard drives and keep it there. And then, make a list of those people, and the file names, and put that list in your time capsule. If you do that, between the chance of your media being readable, and the chance of someone keeping that file for 16 years, you will probably be OK.
Let us know in 2025, OK ?
Presumably you would unpack the sail at 0.1 AU. Before you deploy it, the light pressure acceleration would be much, much, smaller. To conserve even more fuel, you could do a Jupiter gravity assist or multiple Venus gravity assists to help you get there.
The JPL ODP (Orbit Determination Program) has incorporated relativity since the 1960's and uses the proper Einstein Infeld Hoffmann (EIH) equations of motion for the harmonic gauge.
Twitter goes down a lot now (or at least partially). For example, I cannot post at this moment. It's going to be hard to base serious programs on a service that is down so frequently.
Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.