Good point - you are correct and I was sloppy about "stationary" vs "synchronous."
Inclined orbits like this will generally go through "eclipse periods" twice per year (when the orbit appears edge on from the Sun, and thus goes through the Earth's shadow). Each eclipse period will last a few days, and the spacecraft will be in shadow for order an hour each orbit. Also during these periods the satellite will pass in front of the Sun, which is also likely to cut down on communication due to Solar interference. I assume that this is what they mean by "nearly continuous observations" - i.e., they might loose maybe 15-20 hours per year.
Not really - flare particles ("coronal mass ejections") travel at about 400 km/sec, much less than the speed of light, giving plenty of time for predictions if you can see the flare erupt on the Sun.
The loudest noise of any kind at all was clearly the Big Bang (the universe supported sound waves before recombination). It came with a pretty cool light show, too.
For safety, I prefer viewing this performance from 13 billion light years away. At this distance, ear plugs are not necessary.
I think that I will go outside and rendezvous with the Sun too.
However, even if it isn't going much closer to the Sun than my back yard, it is in a cool orbit.
SDO is a sun-pointing semi-autonomous spacecraft that will allow nearly continuous observations of the Sun with a continuous science data downlink rate of 130 Megabits per second (Mbps). The spacecraft is 4.5 meters high and over 2 meters on each side, weighing a total of 3100 kg (fuel included). SDO's inclined geosynchronous orbit was chosen to allow continuous observations of the Sun and enable its exceptionally high data rate through the use of a single dedicated ground station.
So, it is in a geostationary orbit with the major advantage of the L1 Lagrange point (continuous observations) but requiring less fuel to reach, less power to communicate, and only one ground station (a L1 observatory needs 3, or sufficient on-board recording). That sounds like a major win for this new orbit, which I predict will be used more in the future.
With this orbit, it might also be able to get some cool pictures of Lunar eclipses, which SOHO (at the L1 Lagrange point) can never do.
Given that all experimental science for decades has been mediated by computers, I would say that many Nobel prizes have been awarded for findings that "had [they] been found by a human would be considered deserving of the Nobel Prize."
I expect that this will continue, no matter how advanced the computer systems get.
AI experts have a really poor track record at prediction. I can, for example, remember Marvin Minsky in 1973 talking about how true AI would just require a fairly modest increase in computer power, and should occur within one or two decades. He also said that achieving AI would lead to a general understanding of human intelligence. AI is littered with such confident predictions, starting in the 1950's if not earlier, which never seem to come to pass. With that track record I wouldn't give any weight to any new predictions.
BTW, I personally think that the Eliza program passed the Turning test in a limited area (in that it could fool some of the people, some of the time), and (given its effectiveness and its simplicity) haven't felt that there is any real scientific interest in the Turing test since.
Because the ones who are small have no real recourse, and the ones that are large are mostly institutions with upper management making these decisions, and why should they want to rock this boat ?
Here is a theory that I heard expressed by a C level corporate executive :
The top people should be paid enough to make the people on the rung just below them green with envy, so that they will work their butts off to get to the top, and so on, proportionally, down the line. (In other words, the motivation is not greed, but envy.)
I haven't heard this expressed much in public, but it explains the high payments and bonuses in bad times much better than the "we pay them for their successes" theory.
We used Census records (supposedly secret for a century) to help find Japanese to intern in World War II.
In the same war the Germans, of course, respected no privacy constraints at all, and used any information they could get for all sorts of much more nefarious projects.
I am old enough to remember that, not only were blacks segregated in the South, but that blood tests would be run to determine just who was and wasn't black, in borderline cases. If DNA testing had been available, I have no doubt it would have been used.
So it seems pretty clear that DNA information, if kept indefinitely in an identifiable fashion, will eventually be used maliciously. A long and lamentable history shows that we can count on that. The question is, are we going to act on this knowledge, or do nothing about it, and continue to let things slide into what could be a very nasty future.
Pluto is not the only large body out there - Makemake, Haumea and Eris, among others, are just as large or larger, and also have signs of changes on their surface, but don't have the "planetary" history and don't get nearly the attention.
These experiments are not about terraforming (Mars, for example, does not have a vacuum at the surface), they are about the exchange of biological material between the Earth and Mars. We know that material can be sent between the two planets relatively gently (by big meteorite impacts); this research makes it almost a certainty that some life could survive the trip.
Oh, you can bet it's being discussed. Just not publicly. That's why people go to Davos in the first place, to have the ability to discuss things privately.
Here is an example - we communicate easily with spacecraft at a distance of 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). The nearest stars are a little less than 300,000 AU away, and so the signal from the same DSN transmitter would be about 10^-11 as weak there as it is a 1 AU. That amounts to 110 dB.
Even at the Andromeda galaxy, this same signal would "only" be down by 224 dB as compared to 1 AU.
So, yes, 100 dB is a big deal. It is comparable to the difference between the planets and the nearest stars, or the nearest stars and other galaxies.
Arguably, though, any sufficiently advanced civilization will monitor all RF passing through their solar system and will be able to detect anything which has a pattern which can be synched up. Although carriers are going away, all signals between distant points need some form of synchronization information. The synch information may be a tiny fraction of the transmitted data, but there has to be something upon which the receiver can lock.
Not necessarily. If VLBI can detect radio noise from Quasars, it can detect radio noise from ETI with the same sensitivity.
If you use phase interferometry, you can get in principle the same SNR from an unknown incoming signal as from a matched filter decoder, and use all of the received power; the unpredictable signal power, as well as the more predictable synch information and carrier. All you need to optimize SNR is a knowledge of the signal bandwidth (assuming it is less than your record bandwidth). I have thought for a long time that SETI would move to a VLBI mode of operation, with widely separated receivers looking at the same patch of sky and cross-correlating the recorded radio noise. With a software correlator, and lots of CPU, you could do this for a wide variety of nominal bandwidths to look for different amounts of spread spectrum. You would also get an excellent rejection of terrestrial and satellite interference in the bargain.
You are ignoring radar. Radar tends to have very simple spectra, to make it easy to detect a weak reflected signal. There are excellent reasons why weather radars in the GHz range will be around for a long time to come (what other wavelength is small enough to reflect from raindrops but able to penetrate through clouds ?), and no apparent technical reason for such radars to use spread spectrum.
And, by the way, the FCC had no problem approving NEXRAD, with 750 KW narrow band transmitters.
Basically what Frank Drake is complaining about is the disappearance of the carrier wave (the large spike of energy at the center of most broadcasts). Most broadcasts are indeed moving to a suppressed carrier, as the carrier carries no information.
That is not, however, true for radar, at least for civilian radar, which typically has a very strong carrier for detection of the returned signal. While planetary radar from Arecibo (1 MegaWatt, 305 meter antenna) is without doubt our strongest signal, in most cases a distant receiver would only be in the beam for order 1000 seconds - a single signal lasting less than an hour is unlikely to be detected light years away.
I think that our most detectable signal right now is the NEXRAD Doppler Weather radar, and similar systems in other countries. These are fairly dense arrays (159 in the US) and scan the horizon continuously with (for NEXRAD) a 750 KW beam from a 8.5 meter dish. While the Arecibo radar would appear roughly 1700 times stronger to any distant alien receiver, for roughly 6 hours twice per day any alien receiver anywhere in the Northern sky would be scanned over more or less continuously by one or more NEXRAD beams as it rose or set across the NEXRAD array. This large duty cycle makes it much more detectable than the planetary radars, which are highly unlikely to illuminate any particular point in the sky, ever. (This beam, being directed, is also a much better signal than TV broadcasts, of comparable power, but uniformly directed to the entire horizon at once.)
So, I think that Frake Drake is worried a little unnecessarily. We are still pumping out a lot of power for aliens to see, if they are there and care to look.
In a personal defense situation, this is security by obscurity. It will only help as long as the mugger doesn't know what the little red / green light means.
I think it would take a human geologist a few days to do what the MER have done - they have looked at a few sites over a few km. But, I agree with your point.
BTW. the radiation at Europa is bad enough that an unprotected human would probably die from the radiation before they died from the vacuum.
why send humans there when robots can do a job as great as Opportunity, Spirit, MGS and all that?
Here is a simple reason why : Unmanned exploration is too slow. We learned more about the Moon in 2 years of Apollo than we have learned about Mars in the 40 years since Viking. We, for example, still don't know why the Viking biological experiments gave positive responses. The whole question of present-day life on Mars could be answered in days by a manned mission.
I have said this before, but see no reason to change my mind : One week after the first manned mission to Mars lands on the planet, all of the unmanned landers will be footnotes.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point - you are correct and I was sloppy about "stationary" vs "synchronous."
Inclined orbits like this will generally go through "eclipse periods" twice per year (when the orbit appears edge on from the Sun, and thus goes through the Earth's shadow). Each eclipse period will last a few days, and the spacecraft will be in shadow for order an hour each orbit. Also during these periods the satellite will pass in front of the Sun, which is also likely to cut down on communication due to Solar interference. I assume that this is what they mean by "nearly continuous observations" - i.e., they might loose maybe 15-20 hours per year.
Not really - flare particles ("coronal mass ejections") travel at about 400 km/sec, much less than the speed of light, giving plenty of time for predictions if you can see the flare erupt on the Sun.
The loudest noise of any kind at all was clearly the Big Bang (the universe supported sound waves before recombination). It came with a pretty cool light show, too.
For safety, I prefer viewing this performance from 13 billion light years away. At this distance, ear plugs are not necessary.
I think that I will go outside and rendezvous with the Sun too.
However, even if it isn't going much closer to the Sun than my back yard, it is in a cool orbit.
SDO is a sun-pointing semi-autonomous spacecraft that will allow nearly continuous observations of the Sun with a continuous science data downlink rate of 130 Megabits per second (Mbps). The spacecraft is 4.5 meters high and over 2 meters on each side, weighing a total of 3100 kg (fuel included). SDO's inclined geosynchronous orbit was chosen to allow continuous observations of the Sun and enable its exceptionally high data rate through the use of a single dedicated ground station.
So, it is in a geostationary orbit with the major advantage of the L1 Lagrange point (continuous observations) but requiring less fuel to reach, less power to communicate, and only one ground station (a L1 observatory needs 3, or sufficient on-board recording). That sounds like a major win for this new orbit, which I predict will be used more in the future.
With this orbit, it might also be able to get some cool pictures of Lunar eclipses, which SOHO (at the L1 Lagrange point) can never do.
Given that all experimental science for decades has been mediated by computers, I would say that many Nobel prizes have been awarded for findings that "had [they] been found by a human would be considered deserving of the Nobel Prize."
I expect that this will continue, no matter how advanced the computer systems get.
In 30 years AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs
should be
In 30 years, almost all of today's decently paying jobs will be done on computers
Wait...
No, no, no, they said that the odds of catastrophe for the human race as a result of a Pepsi product was 60%
AI experts have a really poor track record at prediction. I can, for example, remember Marvin Minsky in 1973 talking about how true AI would just require a fairly modest increase in computer power, and should occur within one or two decades. He also said that achieving AI would lead to a general understanding of human intelligence. AI is littered with such confident predictions, starting in the 1950's if not earlier, which never seem to come to pass. With that track record I wouldn't give any weight to any new predictions.
BTW, I personally think that the Eliza program passed the Turning test in a limited area (in that it could fool some of the people, some of the time), and (given its effectiveness and its simplicity) haven't felt that there is any real scientific interest in the Turing test since.
Why do shareholders tolerate this?
Because the ones who are small have no real recourse, and the ones that are large are mostly institutions with upper management making these decisions, and why should they want to rock this boat ?
Here is a theory that I heard expressed by a C level corporate executive :
The top people should be paid enough to make the people on the rung just below them green with envy, so that they will work their butts off to get to the top, and so on, proportionally, down the line. (In other words, the motivation is not greed, but envy.)
I haven't heard this expressed much in public, but it explains the high payments and bonuses in bad times much better than the "we pay them for their successes" theory.
The headline should read "30 months," as in the Network World Article (2 and 1/2 years is 30 months).
We used Census records (supposedly secret for a century) to help find Japanese to intern in World War II.
In the same war the Germans, of course, respected no privacy constraints at all, and used any information they could get for all sorts of much more nefarious projects.
I am old enough to remember that, not only were blacks segregated in the South, but that blood tests would be run to determine just who was and wasn't black, in borderline cases. If DNA testing had been available, I have no doubt it would have been used.
So it seems pretty clear that DNA information, if kept indefinitely in an identifiable fashion, will eventually be used maliciously. A long and lamentable history shows that we can count on that. The question is, are we going to act on this knowledge, or do nothing about it, and continue to let things slide into what could be a very nasty future.
The solar system does not exist to make things easier for third graders. If there are 80 planets, then so be it.
Pluto is not the only large body out there - Makemake, Haumea and Eris, among others, are just as large or larger, and also have signs of changes on their surface, but don't have the "planetary" history and don't get nearly the attention.
These experiments are not about terraforming (Mars, for example, does not have a vacuum at the surface), they are about the exchange of biological material between the Earth and Mars. We know that material can be sent between the two planets relatively gently (by big meteorite impacts); this research makes it almost a certainty that some life could survive the trip.
Oh, you can bet it's being discussed. Just not publicly. That's why people go to Davos in the first place, to have the ability to discuss things privately.
I don't think you understand how dB work.
Here is an example - we communicate easily with spacecraft at a distance of 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). The nearest stars are a little less than 300,000 AU away, and so the signal from the same DSN transmitter would be about 10^-11 as weak there as it is a 1 AU. That amounts to 110 dB.
Even at the Andromeda galaxy, this same signal would "only" be down by 224 dB as compared to 1 AU.
So, yes, 100 dB is a big deal. It is comparable to the difference between the planets and the nearest stars, or the nearest stars and other galaxies.
Arguably, though, any sufficiently advanced civilization will monitor all RF passing through their solar system and will be able to detect anything which has a pattern which can be synched up. Although carriers are going away, all signals between distant points need some form of synchronization information. The synch information may be a tiny fraction of the transmitted data, but there has to be something upon which the receiver can lock.
Not necessarily. If VLBI can detect radio noise from Quasars, it can detect radio noise from ETI with the same sensitivity.
If you use phase interferometry, you can get in principle the same SNR from an unknown incoming signal as from a matched filter decoder, and use all of the received power; the unpredictable signal power, as well as the more predictable synch information and carrier. All you need to optimize SNR is a knowledge of the signal bandwidth (assuming it is less than your record bandwidth). I have thought for a long time that SETI would move to a VLBI mode of operation, with widely separated receivers looking at the same patch of sky and cross-correlating the recorded radio noise. With a software correlator, and lots of CPU, you could do this for a wide variety of nominal bandwidths to look for different amounts of spread spectrum. You would also get an excellent rejection of terrestrial and satellite interference in the bargain.
You are ignoring radar. Radar tends to have very simple spectra, to make it easy to detect a weak reflected signal. There are excellent reasons why weather radars in the GHz range will be around for a long time to come (what other wavelength is small enough to reflect from raindrops but able to penetrate through clouds ?), and no apparent technical reason for such radars to use spread spectrum.
And, by the way, the FCC had no problem approving NEXRAD, with 750 KW narrow band transmitters.
Basically what Frank Drake is complaining about is the disappearance of the carrier wave (the large spike of energy at the center of most broadcasts). Most broadcasts are indeed moving to a suppressed carrier, as the carrier carries no information.
That is not, however, true for radar, at least for civilian radar, which typically has a very strong carrier for detection of the returned signal. While planetary radar from Arecibo (1 MegaWatt, 305 meter antenna) is without doubt our strongest signal, in most cases a distant receiver would only be in the beam for order 1000 seconds - a single signal lasting less than an hour is unlikely to be detected light years away.
I think that our most detectable signal right now is the NEXRAD Doppler Weather radar, and similar systems in other countries. These are fairly dense arrays (159 in the US) and scan the horizon continuously with (for NEXRAD) a 750 KW beam from a 8.5 meter dish. While the Arecibo radar would appear roughly 1700 times stronger to any distant alien receiver, for roughly 6 hours twice per day any alien receiver anywhere in the Northern sky would be scanned over more or less continuously by one or more NEXRAD beams as it rose or set across the NEXRAD array. This large duty cycle makes it much more detectable than the planetary radars, which are highly unlikely to illuminate any particular point in the sky, ever. (This beam, being directed, is also a much better signal than TV broadcasts, of comparable power, but uniformly directed to the entire horizon at once.)
So, I think that Frake Drake is worried a little unnecessarily. We are still pumping out a lot of power for aliens to see, if they are there and care to look.
In a personal defense situation, this is security by obscurity. It will only help as long as the mugger doesn't know what the little red / green light means.
Once people like this find a mark, they will always keep coming back.
Make an actual functioning He3 fusion reactor, and it would sell better.
I think it would take a human geologist a few days to do what the MER have done - they have looked at a few sites over a few km. But, I agree with your point.
BTW. the radiation at Europa is bad enough that an unprotected human would probably die from the radiation before they died from the vacuum.
why send humans there when robots can do a job as great as Opportunity, Spirit, MGS and all that?
Here is a simple reason why : Unmanned exploration is too slow. We learned more about the Moon in 2 years of Apollo than we have learned about Mars in the 40 years since Viking. We, for example, still don't know why the Viking biological experiments gave positive responses. The whole question of present-day life on Mars could be answered in days by a manned mission.
I have said this before, but see no reason to change my mind : One week after the first manned mission to Mars lands on the planet, all of the unmanned landers will be footnotes.