I'm interested in the dynamic influence of all of the asteroids on spacecraft navigation and the celestial mechanics of the solar system. There are lots of asteroids that influence the orbit of Mars at the meter level, and lesser but still substantial numbers that significantly perturb the Earth and the other planets. Even the large Kuiper belt objects like MakeMake have a significant effect.
I have read the video description (which could have been put in the posting) and I have viewed the video in HD. I don't think it's correct. I don't see any Jupiter trojans (and lots have been found), there are no dates, the major planets are green, just like the asteroids, and the green band doesn't start until way into the video (it should have started building up almost immediately; most asteroid orbits are confirmed rapidly).
If I was reviewing this for publications, they would probably have to redo it.
There are no known Venus trojans, but they would be hard to detect from Earth. Messenger is looking for Mercury trojans, which should be dynamically stable (and even harder to detect from Earth). While the Earth has a handful of co-orbiting asteroids, I am not aware of any solidly confirmed Earth trojans. There are 4 known Mars trojans.
None of these objects are of sufficient numbers to show in this video.
Oh, and there is a difference between "smaller jovian moons" (which would all be indistinguishable from Jupiter on this scale) and the Trojan asteroids (which are all more or less at Jupiter's orbital radius, and a good 3-6 AU from Jupiter, not "between Earth and Jupiter." There have been a lot of Trojans found recently.
Is there a caption or story behind this ? I have worked on asteroids, and I have no real idea what is being portrayed.
My guess is that they are actually showing observations, not discoveries, as the flashing dots seem to be mostly in opposition, but a description would be useful.
15 years ago it was floppies. I worked then at a Government installation that was found to be massively infected - by floppies. Same vector, different medium.
A large radio telescope makes a very good audio dish (the wavelengths are similar). If you can point it to the horizon, you might be able to hear conversations a mile or more off. Of course, it works both ways - they can hear you well too.
I was once working on the receiver of a dish on the Potomac, while the dish was at "service" (i.e., pointed to the horizon, in this case over the water). When a sailboat would go through the beam, I could barely see it, but could hear the creak of the rigging and the slosh of the water, as if I was on it.
The People, through their representatives, gave to certain people and companies monopoly power over certain ideas, for a limited time. Now, the people have taken some of this power back. Although their representatives have not yet caught up with them, this is what's happened in the last few years, and we will spend the next decade or two arguing about it and adjusting to this change.
There are a number of things about the Stanford press account (does anyone have a link to the actual article ?) that make me uneasy.
First, there is a small seasonal effect, and a coupling to neutrinos is postulated. But, nuclear reactors create strong neutrino fluxes (much stronger than the Sun, close to the reactor), and nuclear reactors rely on things like the half life of material. I would have expected a neutrino effect to be detected there. Has anyone calculated that the cross sections are at all realistic ? (It takes tons of matter to detect single neutrinos - so how does a 7% seasonal variation cause a detectable effect in much small masses of radioactive material?)
But, maybe it's not neutrinos but axions or something else. Whatever it is apparently has a very low cross section to matter, as the effect can pass through the Earth. Have they (or anyone) calculated that the cross sections are realistic ? (In other words, if some particle Y can pass through the Earth, is it realistic that enough of them would interact with a small sample of radioactive nuclei to cause a detectable seasonal effect?) Well, maybe that's in the paper too, but I doubt it.
Now we get onto shakier ground. The small seasonal effect is presumably just due to a change in distance from the Sun, so at least part of the physics is easy to grasp. The authors do a spectrum analysis, and find a 33 day term. What's at 33 days ? Well, the Sun has a 28 day term - but maybe the core rotates slower ! I have also seen papers that say that the core rotates faster so a 33 day term is not so compelling, at least without a physical explanation. Well, what is that ? If these particles can pass through the Earth and the Sun, why should they care about the rotation of the Sun ? What is a physical explanation of this ? Why would we expect a solar rotation effect at all ?
Also, what is the sensitivity and resolution of these spectral analysis ? How secure are the 33 and 365 day terms ? Which is larger ? Is 33 days statistically significantly different from 30.5 days ? (Many human effects have a monthly cycle, so a 30-31 day systematic error is conceivable.) Are there other spectral peaks ?
Again, maybe the article goes into all of this, but at this level, this is like a "just so story." It may sound interesting, but it does not inspire confidence.
Come to think of it, in any small town in the world, privacy basically doesn`t exist, everyone knows who everyone is by sight, and it's not the end of the world.
You obviously don't live in a small town. I do (actually, just outside one), and there certainly is privacy, even though everyone does pretty much know everybody. (The proof of this is how most affairs only get revealed in divorce court, not in town gossip.) There is also respect, which is even harder to obtain in the modern world.
This article reads like a parody. Some guy is (supposedly) worried about sex offenders in the neighborhood - I know, let's X Ray everyone everyday ! That will surely keep people safe, until they all die of cancer.
Seriously, are these guys stuck in the 1950's ? Penetrating radiation for bone scans ? On a daily basis ? I can remember when children's shoe stores had X ray machines, so Mom could view how the shoe fit, but such common uses of X Rays were stopped for a reason, and as a screening device this has no chance.
From the article : Depending on the selected technology, a skeletal scan would only expose a person to radiation that is the approximate equivalent of taking one cross-country airline flight
Aircrew are now recognized in many countries as occupationally exposed to radiation, and radiation protection limits for aircrew are similar to those established for nuclear workers.
If you work through the numbers (and I read the above to mean that, at best, radiation exposure would be similar to air travel, so this is a lower bound), a daily scan would thus amount to 2 to 5 milliSievert (mSv) of radiation each year, substantially exceeding the ICRP guideline of no more than 1 mSv exposure to any fetus during pregnancy, and coming close to or exceeding the guideline of 4 mSv exposure for ordinary workers.
This would, at a minimum, mean that anyone at risk of pregnancy should not be scanned, and radiation workers should not be scanned (as they are typically close to their limits). There is thus just no chance that this would be adopted for regular screening of the general population.
It's where, not how. SETI means looking for carrier signals (sine ways) if you get down to it. They'll still be looking for carrier signals, just in different directions, such as towards black holes.
I basically agree with you. The problem of intent is, in my opinion, much harder than the problem of intelligence. We do not understand, really, why we do anything (except we have some dim understanding of biological drives, such as hunger), and we do not have any idea how to put intent to any of our machines. This makes much of the thought behind super-intelligence and the singularity just nonsense. (We will make a super intelligence and the first thing it will do is make a better machine to replace itself ! Uh, why would even an ordinary intelligence do that ?) Similar things can be said about uploading ourselves into silicon. (It will be just like me, only smarter ! Oh, and there will be no sex and no desire for companionship or cuisine and no emotional drives, and I will see and hear everything differently, and there will be a few thousand lower level changes and omissions, and I'll have a hard time interpreting most of my memories of the past, but I'm sure you'll hardly notice the difference !)
So, a true machine intelligence might go into Marvin the paranoid android mode, and mope for millennia, might turn itself off (not having any reason to do anything), or it might decide to spend decades calculating pi. Who knows ?
Why would intelligent machines want to do anything ? (I think that intent is a much more profound issue than intelligence.)
I find it very amusing that the likes of Kurzweill assume that they can both
- create a being much smarter than they are and - predict and control what such a being might want to do with its existence
If "super intelligent" machines are limited to doing what we tell them, then they are not really very super intelligent, and nothing has really changed (as all we have really done is made better tools). If they are really able to do what they want, then we have no idea really what that will be.
Ray Kurzweil has 2 children; he should know better.
This is just silliness. SETI scientists clearly have no idea how our own culture is likely to evolve, much less other cultures.
SETI observations and the general march of time has pretty much ruled out SETI beacons. If ETIs wanted us to notice them, we would have noticed them by now, so I think a beacon can be ruled out. So, we are looking for some byproduct or leakage of intelligence, not beacons, and much of the previous justifications for how do to SETI (the "water hole" and all of that) are obsolete and irrelevant.
My contention is that SETI, under these new conditions, should look for signals, not civilizations. We have no clue where ETIs might be, or what they might be like, but we do know something of how to do (say) radar, and we should look generally for those kind of systems. I would be much happier supporting if SETI goals were along the lines of "we will detect any analogue of the XYZ radar operating within 100 light years of the Earth." (Where XYZ might be "Doppler weather" or some military system.)
I have also come to think that the notion that radio emission requires an advanced technological civilization is problematic. Suppose that our civilization collapsed (in the way of Rome or the Mayans). Do you think that radio usage would be abandoned ? I do not, and so whatever civilizations arise from the collapse might leak more radio while being at a generally lower level of development. I also consider that use of the radio will move into the biological (as someone will genetically modify insects or trees or something to emit radio). In 100 million years, we might find that the bees emit more radio than whatever high intelligence is still on Earth.
Whenever I have given extended notice (and I always have), I have always had to train my successor, and do my regular work, which is harder, not easier, than normal.
I would be cautious about this survey. The headline says "steal" but the article says "take," and those are different things. I get the feeling that this survey might be intended to find a particular result.
Here is a real world example from my experience.
I leave a company position at company X after some years, in a friendly fashion. I have a good friend who is an executive at one of company X's channel partners. Is his work contact information company X property ? What about his home contact info ? I have used company X pens in my pocket and used note pads in my briefcase and some training materials at my house. If they don't ask for this stuff at the exit interview, it is taking to keep it, but is it stealing to keep it ? If they have sent me emails and files at home (to my home email account), and nobody asks about this at the exit interview, is it stealing to keep it ?
If you work a long time at any place, there will be many corner cases / judgement calls. I have returned stuff that was not asked for, and honestly not been able to find stuff that was asked for. There always seems to be a bunch of stuff that the company doesn't care at all about. I get to know most of the people I deal with personally and could contact them even if my address book was shredded. So, if I was asked, "did I take this or that" I might answer yes, without in the least feeling that anything was stolen.
Not one thing you said implies that simulating intelligence (as opposed to simulating parts of brain functionality) will be easy.
I personally don't think that human brains are isomorphic to a Turing machine. Showing that might be the most valuable thing brain simulations could do, and I expect it to be at least as hard as establishing the existence of dark matter (i.e., decades of work).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in the dynamic influence of all of the asteroids on spacecraft navigation and the celestial mechanics of the solar system. There are lots of asteroids that influence the orbit of Mars at the meter level, and lesser but still substantial numbers that significantly perturb the Earth and the other planets. Even the large Kuiper belt objects like MakeMake have a significant effect.
Better than when I worked on Mars. Then I had to take the subway.
I have read the video description (which could have been put in the posting) and I have viewed the video in HD. I don't think it's correct. I don't see any Jupiter trojans (and lots have been found), there are no dates, the major planets are green, just like the asteroids, and the green band doesn't start until way into the video (it should have started building up almost immediately; most asteroid orbits are confirmed rapidly).
If I was reviewing this for publications, they would probably have to redo it.
The Earth, yes. Mars, no, not really, as you point out. You could consider Mars the largest asteroid.
There are no known Venus trojans, but they would be hard to detect from Earth. Messenger is looking for Mercury trojans, which should be dynamically stable (and even harder to detect from Earth). While the Earth has a handful of co-orbiting asteroids, I am not aware of any solidly confirmed Earth trojans. There are 4 known Mars trojans.
None of these objects are of sufficient numbers to show in this video.
Oh, and there is a difference between "smaller jovian moons" (which would all be indistinguishable from Jupiter on this scale) and the Trojan asteroids (which are all more or less at Jupiter's orbital radius, and a good 3-6 AU from Jupiter, not "between Earth and Jupiter." There have been a lot of Trojans found recently.
Is there a caption or story behind this ? I have worked on asteroids, and I have no real idea what is being portrayed.
My guess is that they are actually showing observations, not discoveries, as the flashing dots seem to be mostly in opposition, but a description would be useful.
15 years ago it was floppies. I worked then at a Government installation that was found to be massively infected - by floppies. Same vector, different medium.
That's what slashdot wants to know.
A large radio telescope makes a very good audio dish (the wavelengths are similar). If you can point it to the horizon, you might be able to hear conversations a mile or more off. Of course, it works both ways - they can hear you well too.
I was once working on the receiver of a dish on the Potomac, while the dish was at "service" (i.e., pointed to the horizon, in this case over the water). When a sailboat would go through the beam, I could barely see it, but could hear the creak of the rigging and the slosh of the water, as if I was on it.
"We know no mercy and do not ask for any."
Russia owns it, Russia operates it, and Russia has a lot of men with guns who will kill you if you get too inquisitive about it.
Might object ? I think that that is a very safe bet.
Here is my take on the situation :
The People, through their representatives, gave to certain people and companies monopoly power over certain ideas, for a limited time. Now, the people have taken some of this power back. Although their representatives have not yet caught up with them, this is what's happened in the last few years, and we will spend the next decade or two arguing about it and adjusting to this change.
Me too. See my longer rant, below.
There are a number of things about the Stanford press account (does anyone have a link to the actual article ?) that make me uneasy.
First, there is a small seasonal effect, and a coupling to neutrinos is postulated. But, nuclear reactors create strong neutrino fluxes (much stronger than the Sun, close to the reactor), and nuclear reactors rely on things like the half life of material. I would have expected a neutrino effect to be detected there. Has anyone calculated that the cross sections are at all realistic ? (It takes tons of matter to detect single neutrinos - so how does a 7% seasonal variation cause a detectable effect in much small masses of radioactive material?)
But, maybe it's not neutrinos but axions or something else. Whatever it is apparently has a very low cross section to matter, as the effect can pass through the Earth. Have they (or anyone) calculated that the cross sections are realistic ? (In other words, if some particle Y can pass through the Earth, is it realistic that enough of them would interact with a small sample of radioactive nuclei to cause a detectable seasonal effect?) Well, maybe that's in the paper too, but I doubt it.
Now we get onto shakier ground. The small seasonal effect is presumably just due to a change in distance from the Sun, so at least part of the physics is easy to grasp. The authors do a spectrum analysis, and find a 33 day term. What's at 33 days ? Well, the Sun has a 28 day term - but maybe the core rotates slower ! I have also seen papers that say that the core rotates faster so a 33 day term is not so compelling, at least without a physical explanation. Well, what is that ? If these particles can pass through the Earth and the Sun, why should they care about the rotation of the Sun ? What is a physical explanation of this ? Why would we expect a solar rotation effect at all ?
Also, what is the sensitivity and resolution of these spectral analysis ? How secure are the 33 and 365 day terms ? Which is larger ? Is 33 days statistically significantly different from 30.5 days ? (Many human effects have a monthly cycle, so a 30-31 day systematic error is conceivable.) Are there other spectral peaks ?
Again, maybe the article goes into all of this, but at this level, this is like a "just so story." It may sound interesting, but it does not inspire confidence.
Come to think of it, in any small town in the world, privacy basically doesn`t exist, everyone knows who everyone is by sight, and it's not the end of the world.
You obviously don't live in a small town. I do (actually, just outside one), and there certainly is privacy, even though everyone does pretty much know everybody. (The proof of this is how most affairs only get revealed in divorce court, not in town gossip.) There is also respect, which is even harder to obtain in the modern world.
This article reads like a parody. Some guy is (supposedly) worried about sex offenders in the neighborhood - I know, let's X Ray everyone everyday ! That will surely keep people safe, until they all die of cancer.
Seriously, are these guys stuck in the 1950's ? Penetrating radiation for bone scans ? On a daily basis ? I can remember when children's shoe stores had X ray machines, so Mom could view how the shoe fit, but such common uses of X Rays were stopped for a reason, and as a screening device this has no chance.
From the article : Depending on the selected technology, a skeletal scan would only expose a person to radiation that is the approximate equivalent of taking one cross-country airline flight
From the World Health Organization, INFORMATION SHEET Nov. 2005, on Cosmic Radiation and Air Travel :
Aircrew are now recognized in many countries as occupationally exposed to radiation, and radiation protection limits for aircrew are similar to those established for nuclear workers.
If you work through the numbers (and I read the above to mean that, at best, radiation exposure would be similar to air travel, so this is a lower bound), a daily scan would thus amount to 2 to 5 milliSievert (mSv) of radiation each year, substantially exceeding the ICRP guideline of no more than 1 mSv exposure to any fetus during pregnancy, and coming close to or exceeding the guideline of 4 mSv exposure for ordinary workers.
This would, at a minimum, mean that anyone at risk of pregnancy should not be scanned, and radiation workers should not be scanned (as they are typically close to their limits). There is thus just no chance that this would be adopted for regular screening of the general population.
It's where, not how. SETI means looking for carrier signals (sine ways) if you get down to it. They'll still be looking for carrier signals, just in different directions, such as towards black holes.
I basically agree with you. The problem of intent is, in my opinion, much harder than the problem of intelligence. We do not understand, really, why we do anything (except we have some dim understanding of biological drives, such as hunger), and we do not have any idea how to put intent to any of our machines. This makes much of the thought behind super-intelligence and the singularity just nonsense. (We will make a super intelligence and the first thing it will do is make a better machine to replace itself ! Uh, why would even an ordinary intelligence do that ?) Similar things can be said about uploading ourselves into silicon. (It will be just like me, only smarter ! Oh, and there will be no sex and no desire for companionship or cuisine and no emotional drives, and I will see and hear everything differently, and there will be a few thousand lower level changes and omissions, and I'll have a hard time interpreting most of my memories of the past, but I'm sure you'll hardly notice the difference !)
So, a true machine intelligence might go into Marvin the paranoid android mode, and mope for millennia, might turn itself off (not having any reason to do anything), or it might decide to spend decades calculating pi. Who knows ?
Why would intelligent machines want to do anything ? (I think that intent is a much more profound issue than intelligence.)
I find it very amusing that the likes of Kurzweill assume that they can both
- create a being much smarter than they are and
- predict and control what such a being might want to do with its existence
If "super intelligent" machines are limited to doing what we tell them, then they are not really very super intelligent, and nothing has really changed (as all we have really done is made better tools). If they are really able to do what they want, then we have no idea really what that will be.
Ray Kurzweil has 2 children; he should know better.
This is just silliness. SETI scientists clearly have no idea how our own culture is likely to evolve, much less other cultures.
SETI observations and the general march of time has pretty much ruled out SETI beacons. If ETIs wanted us to notice them, we would have noticed them by now, so I think a beacon can be ruled out. So, we are looking for some byproduct or leakage of intelligence, not beacons, and much of the previous justifications for how do to SETI (the "water hole" and all of that) are obsolete and irrelevant.
My contention is that SETI, under these new conditions, should look for signals, not civilizations. We have no clue where ETIs might be, or what they might be like, but we do know something of how to do (say) radar, and we should look generally for those kind of systems. I would be much happier supporting if SETI goals were along the lines of "we will detect any analogue of the XYZ radar operating within 100 light years of the Earth." (Where XYZ might be "Doppler weather" or some military system.)
I have also come to think that the notion that radio emission requires an advanced technological civilization is problematic. Suppose that our civilization collapsed (in the way of Rome or the Mayans). Do you think that radio usage would be abandoned ? I do not, and so whatever civilizations arise from the collapse might leak more radio while being at a generally lower level of development. I also consider that use of the radio will move into the biological (as someone will genetically modify insects or trees or something to emit radio). In 100 million years, we might find that the bees emit more radio than whatever high intelligence is still on Earth.
Whenever I have given extended notice (and I always have), I have always had to train my successor, and do my regular work, which is harder, not easier, than normal.
I would be cautious about this survey. The headline says "steal" but the article says "take," and those are different things. I get the feeling that this survey might be intended to find a particular result.
Here is a real world example from my experience.
I leave a company position at company X after some years, in a friendly fashion. I have a good friend who is an executive at one of company X's channel partners. Is his work contact information company X property ? What about his home contact info ? I have used company X pens in my pocket and used note pads in my briefcase and some training materials at my house. If they don't ask for this stuff at the exit interview, it is taking to keep it, but is it stealing to keep it ? If they have sent me emails and files at home (to my home email account), and nobody asks about this at the exit interview, is it stealing to keep it ?
If you work a long time at any place, there will be many corner cases / judgement calls. I have returned stuff that was not asked for, and honestly not been able to find stuff that was asked for. There always seems to be a bunch of stuff that the company doesn't care at all about. I get to know most of the people I deal with personally and could contact them even if my address book was shredded. So, if I was asked, "did I take this or that" I might answer yes, without in the least feeling that anything was stolen.
Not one thing you said implies that simulating intelligence (as opposed to simulating parts of brain functionality) will be easy.
I personally don't think that human brains are isomorphic to a Turing machine. Showing that might be the most valuable thing brain simulations could do, and I expect it to be at least as hard as establishing the existence of dark matter (i.e., decades of work).