Well, it depends. There's a big difference between an Earthlike planet and an honest-to-God habitable one. Look at our own biosphere: humans survive within a very narrow range of conditions, given the possibilities. Sure, if you happen to have FTL travel just send a scout ship to take a look. No problem. But if we're talking about a slowboat (which is the best we can do for the foreseeable future) you're going to want some specifics about conditions on the planet, unless you consider the ship and crew to be entirely expendable. You wouldn't want the ship to arrive and find out that the world is entirely covered in water with no land mass, or contaminated by heavy metals, or infected with a bacterium or other form of life that makes it uninhabitable by humans. There are a billion things that could go wrong with such an expedition, and while a probe wouldn't give all the answers it would be better than nothing.
Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"?
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A better question would not be "why do civilised people buy cars, motorhomes, and boats... etc." but why do said people not abandon their homes, and cubicles, and all their other civilized accoutrement and live an ideal existence as hunter-gatherers? For that matter, why buy a motorhome: all they're doing is taking their "civilization" with them! Your presumption is that people buy those things because they have some inbuilt urge to return to a "better" way of life. I disagree strongly: the bulk of us have no problem recognizing that the civilization that you disparage offers us many things that a simple hunter-gatherer economy would not, could not. Be careful of drawing specific conclusions from a (from my perspective, aberrant) subset of the population.
I consider myself reasonably civilized (I don't own a gun and haven't raised a fist since grade school) but after having gotten the whole camping thing out of my system decades ago I feel zero desire to bond with Mother Nature, ever again. She's a bitch, pure and simple, and after she washed me down a hill in my tent into a lake I had enough of her. I also don't watch TV and I don't buy anything from advertising. Admittedly, however, I do work in a cubicle, for now. But you know what? I wouldn't trade my access to medical care, my Internet connection, my work as a software engineer, and my nice, comfortable bed to live in your world. Too civilized, I guess. Oh well, that's my problem.
Now, I'm not entirely sure why you would expect Stephen Hawking (a physicist, after all, not a sociologist or cultural morphologist) to bother coming up with a rebuttal to your view of civilization. Regardless, one might ask how different life would be had other cultures, over the past thousand years, shown the same interest in the rest of the planet that the offspring of a small part of north-Western Europe did. Perhaps they'd not have been overrun... indeed, perhaps they would have done some of the overrunning. Anything else is just sour grapes.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the spread of our kind of life to other worlds, ask yourself this question. If (and yes, it's a big if) there are other civilizations in our corner of the Universe, creatures that might very well see us as a threat (or at least as competitors), would you rather we come out on top... or them? Here on Earth, the competition has been for land, in space, it may very well be for colonizable worlds. If our scouts don't find them, others may get there first: they may already have for all we know. I'll put my money on the explorers... when the big ships come for us I'd like us to have a few colonies elsewhere.
No matter how you look at life in your idealized world, there is always something that wants what you have. That is the nature of existence on this planet: it is the nature of life itself. What you're really complaining about is that, historically, some people showed more aptitude for this than everyone else combined, and part of that aptitude was expressed as a willingness to explore and take measured risks for some perceived gain. Personally, I don't consider that wrong: cows in fields aren't curious, and I know which I'd rather be.
Get too close to the planet's gravity well, and the jump drive will drop you out God-knows-where, or simply blow up on the spot. That's how it is in most novels that use some kind of a hyperspace jump.
Or a Dyson sphere or a Ringworld. Then you don't need to leave the solar system until the Sun runs out... unless aliens attack it, the Sun becomes unstable, a meteor pokes a hole in it and lets all the air out, or something else bad happens. Either way, from a survival perspective it's probably best to become a starfaring race in a big way. I mean, how possible would it be to ever really wipe out a civilization that's had interstellar travel for a couple thousand years.
Well, if you have enough power could take a large, nickel-iron asteroid and hollow it out for living quarters and turn it into a ship. No problem with micrometeors or radiation bursts.
Personally, short of a major breakthrough in propulsion my bet is on cold-sleep.
Re:maybe I misunderstood but...
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
which translates into the squaring of the exponential:
What? Is that anything like a reverse-algorithmic?
Why bother with a human consciousness. Just send a spaceship with a powerful AI in charge of frozen fertilized ova of humans and thousands of other species, and have the ship decant them into artificial wombs and grow all the colonists, plants and animals from scratch. Have the AI and robot extensions raise the children and teach them how to be good colonists. That would probably be easier (and a lot more predictable) that trying use a human brain translated into a computer ala Max Headroom or a simulated "human".
That was the basic plot of James Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear". Interesting read.
Probably the way the people of Diaspar survived in The City and the Stars: longer generations and a self-aware central computer capable of keeping things on track. In other words, you don't leave them to themselves. In any event, that's why I think it would be much better to forget the Heinlein-style Generation Ship and focus on developing cold-sleep technologies instead. That way you just fish-stick the original crew and have the ship thaw 'em out when they get where they're going.
At least, to make something of the time we have. As Chris Danchekker from the Inherit the Stars trilogy said, "The pressure of finite time is surely the greatest motivator."
A robot-piloted ship with the crew held in suspended-animation or some kind of a stasis field until vessel arrived at the target star. That is preferable to a generation ship, in that (assuming by some miracle I got to be a crewmember on such a vessel) I would actually be alive when the ship reached its destination, rather that hoping that my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandkids make it there. You know, kind of like the Botany Bay, where Khan and his friends were stored fish-stick fashion until Kirk & Co. foolishly thawed them out.
Well, that would mean sending a robot probe first, I would think. With no living crew it could theoretically be able to travel even faster, shaving some time off that 700 years, and then you wait 10.5 years for the answer to come back at the speed of light. Still we're talking centuries to find out, if nothing happens to the machine on the way out and if no alien race that's already there vaporizes it before it can report back.
Better would be to give the ship a list of target stars likely to have planets, and give it enough reserves to hit every star on the list if necessary. That would take a few thousand years of real-time, but I don't suppose it matters. Nobody that was around when it was launched would live to hear about the first planetfall anyway.
I don't mean to be pragmatic about this but why not? There have always been people that have said, "Why? Why go exploring? What's the point? We're all quite comfortable right here, thank you very much." Fortunately for the human race, there have always been those who pushed off into the unknown anyways. Frequently they're never heard from again, but it is surprising how often they succeed, and bring back new discoveries and ideas.
This is no different. You don't learn much by sitting in a cave, and there's no telling what we might become, what might happen in all that time. It's worth a shot.
And if a few billion years is all we have... I say let's take it! That's much better than just sitting here on that cosmic bullseye known as "Earth" waiting for the next cataclysmic event to take us out for good.
The goal is to spread the evil tendrils of humanity throught all of space, destroying and/or subjugating everything we encounter. As it has been, so it shall always be.
Serving Wikipedia would be a drop in the proverbial bucket to Google. And I would tend to agree... something a bit more, well, scaleable would probably be in order.
Don't you think private foundations and individuals would be better off donating to other causes?
I don't know... would they? Making vast amounts of knowledge readily available to everyone worldwide for free is, as you say, one of the most noble efforts of this century. Why would that be less deserving than UNICEF? I mean, if another poster's figures are correct, Wikipedia's infrastructure costs are around a million a year: that's not much when you get right down to it. My only point was that if "commercializing" Wikipedia is unacceptable, they should find some other way to fund it.
Now advertising, per se, may not be bad, but I don't know if I want it in my face every time I go look up something on Wikipedia. Granted, Google's adverts are unobtrusive but there's no guarantee that if Wikipedia gets picked up by some corporation that wants to capitalize on the name that it would go the same way. I happen to find the ubiquitous advertising on the modern Web a continual irritant. I have never clicked an ad and will never click an ad, so my personal preference is that Wikipedia find some other way to get their operating capital. If that means that I have to (*gasp!*) pay Wikipedia for the services they offer then I would, if it meant no advertising, and frankly I wouldn't care if Wikipedia continued to offer its service for free to the rest of the world.
No argument from me on that score: they probably have several sugar-daddies. Seems to me the only real trouble Wikipedia is likely to get into is one of content management, if they can't keep the quality up and people start losing interest.
Still, a mil a year is peanuts to any major corporation, or for that matter any seriously rich philanthropist. Wikipedia just needs to find a sugar daddy, that's all. Preferably one that uses Wikipedia a lot and wouldn't want it to go away.
Regarding some of the comments elsewhere in this thread, I think it's a mistake to assume that all corporate money is tainted. Take an entity like, say, IBM. Do you really think that a company the size of IBM is going to need to "monetize" Wikipedia? Put advertising all over it? Hell, they'd fund it just for the tax writeoff and be happy if it earned them some more goodwill, which it certainly would. Cheap at the price. So far as corporate influence is concerned, if the contract specifies the sponsorship is hands-off I wouldn't see a problem.
Now that I think about it, approaching IBM might not be such a bad idea for Jimbo and the rest of the Wikipedia crowd.
It seems to me that there would be any number of private foundations and individuals that might be willing to help. Granted that takes a lot of work, but at least you won't have to commercialize Wikipedia.
Put it back the way it was! The patent system wasn't "broken" until Congress started meddling with it, as it happens in direct violation of the Constitution. Matter of fact, it worked well for a couple of centuries until some corrupt politicians screwed us over. Roll it back, and then see what, if anything, really needs to be fixed.
Yes, but presumably you are properly compensated for the impact that extra responsibility has upon your private life. And if you're not... well. The problem we're discussing in this thread is about people whose job has negative impacts upon their personal life, but for which they are not compensated.
Besides, being reached in an emergency has nothing to do with the Director of Marketing sending an email on a Sunday morning. If it's so goddamned important, he can just use the phone like a normal person.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it depends. There's a big difference between an Earthlike planet and an honest-to-God habitable one. Look at our own biosphere: humans survive within a very narrow range of conditions, given the possibilities. Sure, if you happen to have FTL travel just send a scout ship to take a look. No problem. But if we're talking about a slowboat (which is the best we can do for the foreseeable future) you're going to want some specifics about conditions on the planet, unless you consider the ship and crew to be entirely expendable. You wouldn't want the ship to arrive and find out that the world is entirely covered in water with no land mass, or contaminated by heavy metals, or infected with a bacterium or other form of life that makes it uninhabitable by humans. There are a billion things that could go wrong with such an expedition, and while a probe wouldn't give all the answers it would be better than nothing.
A better question would not be "why do civilised people buy cars, motorhomes, and boats ... etc." but why do said people not abandon their homes, and cubicles, and all their other civilized accoutrement and live an ideal existence as hunter-gatherers? For that matter, why buy a motorhome: all they're doing is taking their "civilization" with them! Your presumption is that people buy those things because they have some inbuilt urge to return to a "better" way of life. I disagree strongly: the bulk of us have no problem recognizing that the civilization that you disparage offers us many things that a simple hunter-gatherer economy would not, could not. Be careful of drawing specific conclusions from a (from my perspective, aberrant) subset of the population.
... indeed, perhaps they would have done some of the overrunning. Anything else is just sour grapes.
... or them? Here on Earth, the competition has been for land, in space, it may very well be for colonizable worlds. If our scouts don't find them, others may get there first: they may already have for all we know. I'll put my money on the explorers ... when the big ships come for us I'd like us to have a few colonies elsewhere.
I consider myself reasonably civilized (I don't own a gun and haven't raised a fist since grade school) but after having gotten the whole camping thing out of my system decades ago I feel zero desire to bond with Mother Nature, ever again. She's a bitch, pure and simple, and after she washed me down a hill in my tent into a lake I had enough of her. I also don't watch TV and I don't buy anything from advertising. Admittedly, however, I do work in a cubicle, for now. But you know what? I wouldn't trade my access to medical care, my Internet connection, my work as a software engineer, and my nice, comfortable bed to live in your world. Too civilized, I guess. Oh well, that's my problem.
Now, I'm not entirely sure why you would expect Stephen Hawking (a physicist, after all, not a sociologist or cultural morphologist) to bother coming up with a rebuttal to your view of civilization. Regardless, one might ask how different life would be had other cultures, over the past thousand years, shown the same interest in the rest of the planet that the offspring of a small part of north-Western Europe did. Perhaps they'd not have been overrun
Getting back to the topic at hand, the spread of our kind of life to other worlds, ask yourself this question. If (and yes, it's a big if) there are other civilizations in our corner of the Universe, creatures that might very well see us as a threat (or at least as competitors), would you rather we come out on top
No matter how you look at life in your idealized world, there is always something that wants what you have. That is the nature of existence on this planet: it is the nature of life itself. What you're really complaining about is that, historically, some people showed more aptitude for this than everyone else combined, and part of that aptitude was expressed as a willingness to explore and take measured risks for some perceived gain. Personally, I don't consider that wrong: cows in fields aren't curious, and I know which I'd rather be.
Get too close to the planet's gravity well, and the jump drive will drop you out God-knows-where, or simply blow up on the spot. That's how it is in most novels that use some kind of a hyperspace jump.
Or a Dyson sphere or a Ringworld. Then you don't need to leave the solar system until the Sun runs out ... unless aliens attack it, the Sun becomes unstable, a meteor pokes a hole in it and lets all the air out, or something else bad happens. Either way, from a survival perspective it's probably best to become a starfaring race in a big way. I mean, how possible would it be to ever really wipe out a civilization that's had interstellar travel for a couple thousand years.
Well, if you have enough power could take a large, nickel-iron asteroid and hollow it out for living quarters and turn it into a ship. No problem with micrometeors or radiation bursts.
Personally, short of a major breakthrough in propulsion my bet is on cold-sleep.
which translates into the squaring of the exponential:
What? Is that anything like a reverse-algorithmic?
Why bother with a human consciousness. Just send a spaceship with a powerful AI in charge of frozen fertilized ova of humans and thousands of other species, and have the ship decant them into artificial wombs and grow all the colonists, plants and animals from scratch. Have the AI and robot extensions raise the children and teach them how to be good colonists. That would probably be easier (and a lot more predictable) that trying use a human brain translated into a computer ala Max Headroom or a simulated "human".
That was the basic plot of James Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear". Interesting read.
Probably the way the people of Diaspar survived in The City and the Stars: longer generations and a self-aware central computer capable of keeping things on track. In other words, you don't leave them to themselves. In any event, that's why I think it would be much better to forget the Heinlein-style Generation Ship and focus on developing cold-sleep technologies instead. That way you just fish-stick the original crew and have the ship thaw 'em out when they get where they're going.
At least, to make something of the time we have. As Chris Danchekker from the Inherit the Stars trilogy said, "The pressure of finite time is surely the greatest motivator."
A robot-piloted ship with the crew held in suspended-animation or some kind of a stasis field until vessel arrived at the target star. That is preferable to a generation ship, in that (assuming by some miracle I got to be a crewmember on such a vessel) I would actually be alive when the ship reached its destination, rather that hoping that my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandkids make it there. You know, kind of like the Botany Bay, where Khan and his friends were stored fish-stick fashion until Kirk & Co. foolishly thawed them out.
Well, that would mean sending a robot probe first, I would think. With no living crew it could theoretically be able to travel even faster, shaving some time off that 700 years, and then you wait 10.5 years for the answer to come back at the speed of light. Still we're talking centuries to find out, if nothing happens to the machine on the way out and if no alien race that's already there vaporizes it before it can report back.
Better would be to give the ship a list of target stars likely to have planets, and give it enough reserves to hit every star on the list if necessary. That would take a few thousand years of real-time, but I don't suppose it matters. Nobody that was around when it was launched would live to hear about the first planetfall anyway.
I don't mean to be pragmatic about this but why not? There have always been people that have said, "Why? Why go exploring? What's the point? We're all quite comfortable right here, thank you very much." Fortunately for the human race, there have always been those who pushed off into the unknown anyways. Frequently they're never heard from again, but it is surprising how often they succeed, and bring back new discoveries and ideas.
... I say let's take it! That's much better than just sitting here on that cosmic bullseye known as "Earth" waiting for the next cataclysmic event to take us out for good.
This is no different. You don't learn much by sitting in a cave, and there's no telling what we might become, what might happen in all that time. It's worth a shot.
And if a few billion years is all we have
The goal is to spread the evil tendrils of humanity throught all of space, destroying and/or subjugating everything we encounter. As it has been, so it shall always be.
... and he is us.
We have seen the Borg
Serving Wikipedia would be a drop in the proverbial bucket to Google. And I would tend to agree ... something a bit more, well, scaleable would probably be in order.
Don't you think private foundations and individuals would be better off donating to other causes?
... would they? Making vast amounts of knowledge readily available to everyone worldwide for free is, as you say, one of the most noble efforts of this century. Why would that be less deserving than UNICEF? I mean, if another poster's figures are correct, Wikipedia's infrastructure costs are around a million a year: that's not much when you get right down to it. My only point was that if "commercializing" Wikipedia is unacceptable, they should find some other way to fund it.
I don't know
Now advertising, per se, may not be bad, but I don't know if I want it in my face every time I go look up something on Wikipedia. Granted, Google's adverts are unobtrusive but there's no guarantee that if Wikipedia gets picked up by some corporation that wants to capitalize on the name that it would go the same way. I happen to find the ubiquitous advertising on the modern Web a continual irritant. I have never clicked an ad and will never click an ad, so my personal preference is that Wikipedia find some other way to get their operating capital. If that means that I have to (*gasp!*) pay Wikipedia for the services they offer then I would, if it meant no advertising, and frankly I wouldn't care if Wikipedia continued to offer its service for free to the rest of the world.
No argument from me on that score: they probably have several sugar-daddies. Seems to me the only real trouble Wikipedia is likely to get into is one of content management, if they can't keep the quality up and people start losing interest.
Still, a mil a year is peanuts to any major corporation, or for that matter any seriously rich philanthropist. Wikipedia just needs to find a sugar daddy, that's all. Preferably one that uses Wikipedia a lot and wouldn't want it to go away.
Regarding some of the comments elsewhere in this thread, I think it's a mistake to assume that all corporate money is tainted. Take an entity like, say, IBM. Do you really think that a company the size of IBM is going to need to "monetize" Wikipedia? Put advertising all over it? Hell, they'd fund it just for the tax writeoff and be happy if it earned them some more goodwill, which it certainly would. Cheap at the price. So far as corporate influence is concerned, if the contract specifies the sponsorship is hands-off I wouldn't see a problem.
Now that I think about it, approaching IBM might not be such a bad idea for Jimbo and the rest of the Wikipedia crowd.
It seems to me that there would be any number of private foundations and individuals that might be willing to help. Granted that takes a lot of work, but at least you won't have to commercialize Wikipedia.
Water computer, eh? Sounds like a new market for Watcom C.
What would it take you to move to this over Tivo or MythTV?
No DRM and completely portable data. If it can't do that, it's no better than an ordinary PVR.
How would you fix the patent system?
Put it back the way it was! The patent system wasn't "broken" until Congress started meddling with it, as it happens in direct violation of the Constitution. Matter of fact, it worked well for a couple of centuries until some corrupt politicians screwed us over. Roll it back, and then see what, if anything, really needs to be fixed.
Ah, you must mean Ted "Tubesteak" Stevens. Most of Congress is also composed of tubes ... vacuum tubes.
That's because their networks run on these
So, what is holding us back?
Regional Bell Operating Companies
Yes, but presumably you are properly compensated for the impact that extra responsibility has upon your private life. And if you're not ... well. The problem we're discussing in this thread is about people whose job has negative impacts upon their personal life, but for which they are not compensated.
Besides, being reached in an emergency has nothing to do with the Director of Marketing sending an email on a Sunday morning. If it's so goddamned important, he can just use the phone like a normal person.