500 people...With the resources to produce a Rama like ship. Even a relatively modest ship, say the size of a couple of aircraft carriers stuck together...Can you even conceive of the cost?
I don't foresee a time when slower-than-light arc ships are anything but a project formed with the backing of a massive political/financial entity. That would require the resources of a large group of people, most of whom will not be traveling on the ship.
Keeping up that effort for a long period of time, putting forth enough effort to send off a ship every few years...I don't see it. People aren't that altruistic. I mean, they're spending this huge amount of money to send this handful of people off into space. People bitch about the nasa budget. We're talking Nasa, plus National Defense, plus Social Security, and once the money is invested, you send it off, never to return.
The progress would be so slow as well. If you built one, it'd probably take it 30 years to leave the solar system, and god help you if there were awake people on board. They'd have their first war in about 20 years, and by year 30 it'd be Lord of the Flies in there.
I was assuming a seed ship that would plant a colony, and the colony would build up it's tech, then start building new seed ships. If you assume marginal real estate (e.g. the Oort Cloud) is habitable, that wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.
This is obviously more fraught (need to be able to build a colony of some kind), but even being crazier, it's a lot less crazy than an autonomous self-replicating machine with a 100,000 year maintenance cycle.
That is in no way within our technological reach, and I don't see people ever being really keen on the idea...A machine with that mission, and that much autonomy is a danger to everything in its path, including, possibly, us.
Not at all. Think how many they'd have to send out. Think about the transit time, think about the number that would be lost. You can't really assume a straight geometric progression for something so incredibly fraught.
For a civilization to be able to keep up that level of commitment for as long as it would take would be inconceivable. This isn't to say that it couldn't happen, but it is to say that it's damn unlikely, even by the standards of the universe.
It would be one thing if people actually could get on a starship and zip off to some neighboring star.
Chances are, however, that we'd be sending out some sort of automated ship, and the odds of that are substantially lower. Either spaceflight would have to become dirt cheap and simple, or you'd have to have a population that is astoundingly wedded to the idea of spreading out across the stars.
Imagine holding up a lit LED on top of Mt Everest. How far away do you think you'd be able to see that, even assuming clear viewing conditions.
Now back off and imagine how far away our sun would be easily distinguishable from every other star in the milky way. The closest neighboring star to us isn't even the brightest star in our sky.
Compared to our sun, all of our communications are on the level of that LED on Everest. That will give you an idea of the likelihood of spotting a signal from any distance, even without the background noise.
Maybe there really is no FTL, and other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in as we are, and are thus still hanging out in their home starsystem.
Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate.
Disproving aliens deductively is the opposite of science. The lack of easily obtained evidence for alien life is far from damning given the area that we are capable of observing with any real scrutiny.
Maybe a zillion races have achieved the capability at roughly the same time, and are just more than 100 light years away from us.
What are the odds of anyone picking up our broadcast noise anyhow? It's not like we're aiming high wattage transmissions directly at likely stars, and with the transition to digital, our signal becomes even more ellusive (smaller spectrum footprint).
It's just as likely that other races only went through a brief period of wideband, and then switched to wired or line of sight optical or quantum bits or some crap we haven't even thought of yet.
The whole paradox is the height of hubris: aliens have to be like us, they have to advance along the same technological track, and they have to be broadcasting on a scale that we can easily pick up...We haven't cataloged every star yet, and that's an order of magnitude over any artificial broadcast we can understand.
This is hardly a new idea. It's so not new that I think I remember saying something similar about two years ago, and I'm not exactly an expert.
Analog signals degrade quickly, and digital signals are worse, in their way, because they don't tolerate degrading as well. Couple that with broadcast limitations imposed by local governments to keep signal strength down, and I can't see how our signal could be reliably detected more than a few light years away without a HUGE radio antenna array.
It's not about stockpiling bomb grade material, it's about using it to produce electricity. Plutonium works fine in power plants (indeed, most fission plants make a decent proportion of their power off plutonium, because U-238 transitions to Pu-239 during the fission process).
Switching to fast neutron plants would cut the waste by 99%, which would cut the cost of reprocessing as well. All the "worst" nuclear waste is high energy stuff that needs to be stuffed back into a reactor, not stored under a mountain. The only stuff that can't be reused is on the level of the stuff we use for medical imaging.
I would love to see every existing plant decommissioned and replaced with something that wasn't hip in the 70's. We need the power, it's cheaper and cleaner than coal and better for the environment.
Yea, there are a lot of things on the horizon right now, lot of things that could cause problems for thousands of years to come, but only one of us (apparently) knows the form all those things will take.
On top of that astounding hubris, you walk around throwing out cryptic pronouncements over pieces of tech which, while interesting, will do absolutely zero to change the next 50 years. This ain't cold fusion buddy, this is just a way to reduce the waste output of a fission reactor. If we really gave a damn about that, we'd have been building fast neutron reactors for decades, and that hasn't happened.
So in my opinion, your pronouncements are on the level of the crazy hobo with a sandwich board walking around the streets proclaiming the end of the world.
There are risks to all methods of energy production. There are plenty of other countries who routinely reprocess their waste already, so that scary bomb-grade material you're scared of is already available.
Our disinclination to do reprocessing, coupled with the irrational nuclear paranoia of a subset of our population saddles us with a massive waste problem, outdated power plants, and a dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
If we could build fast neutron plants, even, it would reduce our waste output by 99%, with no increase in likelihood of meltdowns.
Thinking about it further, weapons grade waste is almost all transuranic (e.g. plutonium), so if the purpose of this is to reduce that, then there should be less weapons grade waste, not more.
If it's actually using that plutonium to sustain it's reaction, and produce more energy, it would seem like a good solution.
I RTFA, but I'm still a bit snowjobbed because it's pretty light on detail.
It seems like their touting the solution primarily as a way to reduce transuranic waste (sludge). There were no numbers based on how much more or less energy this process would produce.
It's my understanding that re-enrichment is more about separating undepleted U-235 from depleted U-238, so I have no idea what reducing transuranic sludge would have to do with this. It might increase the (relative) percentage of U-235 enough to keep the fission reaction going, or it might just make the reaction slightly cleaner.
THIS is EXACTLY the problem. It is NOT always easy to install a GUI app from some other version of Windows.
I have seen so many goddamn OS specific applications in my time, that I have to restrain myself from reaching across the table and killing the guy whenever it's brought up as an idea.
Even nice Java apps can be a PITA, because you end up with apps that depend on this or than specific JRE release, and while you can bundle your release with the code, that doesn't always ensure error free delivery across multiple OS versions.
With a standards compliant web app, it works fine across all common browsers, and, in the worst case, it's much much easier to install an old browser on a modern system than it is to force a user to use an old operating system.
When I'm in a certain mood, I love humanity. We're self-centered, short-sighted, competitive assholes, but we have our moments. Creating a self-sustaining machine is pretty cool, and the second it's practical, some ad agency will buy a thousand of them to walk around the cities, eating your garbage, and trying to get you to buy their products.
Fricking newage babble. Emotional states can be quantized as well as any other mental state. I'd normally say, "They just look that way" but they don't even appear continuous internally!
Emotional states change all day long, and it is perfectly cromulent to say "I was sad this morning, but I feel better now"
Well, I imagine that after billions of years of work, and uncountable design changes, our robots will be able to do it too.
In other words, it's not apples to apples. It would take me less energy to build a car from parts than it would take a car to drive a hundred miles. That's because I'm a machine at the end of a multi-million year design process, optimized to live on a wide variety of biomass, in a wide variety of terrains, that is capable of reproducing myself and building semi-autonomous tools.
That gasoline engine in your car is inefficient compared to a big power generator that uses the same fuel. The size, the inability to efficiently process the waste heat...It all adds up.
Taking into account the returns of biomass plants that use high-grade biomass (e.g. corn, unprocessed chicken/pig parts, etc) and then taking into account the efficiency that will certainly be lost by reducing that process to something small enough to be mobile, and I'll be surprised if they can make it work at all.
Slashdot Mirror
500 people...With the resources to produce a Rama like ship. Even a relatively modest ship, say the size of a couple of aircraft carriers stuck together...Can you even conceive of the cost?
I don't foresee a time when slower-than-light arc ships are anything but a project formed with the backing of a massive political/financial entity. That would require the resources of a large group of people, most of whom will not be traveling on the ship.
Keeping up that effort for a long period of time, putting forth enough effort to send off a ship every few years...I don't see it. People aren't that altruistic. I mean, they're spending this huge amount of money to send this handful of people off into space. People bitch about the nasa budget. We're talking Nasa, plus National Defense, plus Social Security, and once the money is invested, you send it off, never to return.
The progress would be so slow as well. If you built one, it'd probably take it 30 years to leave the solar system, and god help you if there were awake people on board. They'd have their first war in about 20 years, and by year 30 it'd be Lord of the Flies in there.
I was assuming a seed ship that would plant a colony, and the colony would build up it's tech, then start building new seed ships. If you assume marginal real estate (e.g. the Oort Cloud) is habitable, that wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.
This is obviously more fraught (need to be able to build a colony of some kind), but even being crazier, it's a lot less crazy than an autonomous self-replicating machine with a 100,000 year maintenance cycle.
That is in no way within our technological reach, and I don't see people ever being really keen on the idea...A machine with that mission, and that much autonomy is a danger to everything in its path, including, possibly, us.
Not at all. Think how many they'd have to send out. Think about the transit time, think about the number that would be lost. You can't really assume a straight geometric progression for something so incredibly fraught.
For a civilization to be able to keep up that level of commitment for as long as it would take would be inconceivable. This isn't to say that it couldn't happen, but it is to say that it's damn unlikely, even by the standards of the universe.
It would be one thing if people actually could get on a starship and zip off to some neighboring star.
Chances are, however, that we'd be sending out some sort of automated ship, and the odds of that are substantially lower. Either spaceflight would have to become dirt cheap and simple, or you'd have to have a population that is astoundingly wedded to the idea of spreading out across the stars.
Imagine holding up a lit LED on top of Mt Everest. How far away do you think you'd be able to see that, even assuming clear viewing conditions.
Now back off and imagine how far away our sun would be easily distinguishable from every other star in the milky way. The closest neighboring star to us isn't even the brightest star in our sky.
Compared to our sun, all of our communications are on the level of that LED on Everest. That will give you an idea of the likelihood of spotting a signal from any distance, even without the background noise.
Maybe there really is no FTL, and other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in as we are, and are thus still hanging out in their home starsystem.
Maybe aliens are everywhere, aware of us, and simply choosing not to communicate.
Disproving aliens deductively is the opposite of science. The lack of easily obtained evidence for alien life is far from damning given the area that we are capable of observing with any real scrutiny.
Maybe a zillion races have achieved the capability at roughly the same time, and are just more than 100 light years away from us.
What are the odds of anyone picking up our broadcast noise anyhow? It's not like we're aiming high wattage transmissions directly at likely stars, and with the transition to digital, our signal becomes even more ellusive (smaller spectrum footprint).
It's just as likely that other races only went through a brief period of wideband, and then switched to wired or line of sight optical or quantum bits or some crap we haven't even thought of yet.
The whole paradox is the height of hubris: aliens have to be like us, they have to advance along the same technological track, and they have to be broadcasting on a scale that we can easily pick up...We haven't cataloged every star yet, and that's an order of magnitude over any artificial broadcast we can understand.
This is hardly a new idea. It's so not new that I think I remember saying something similar about two years ago, and I'm not exactly an expert.
Analog signals degrade quickly, and digital signals are worse, in their way, because they don't tolerate degrading as well. Couple that with broadcast limitations imposed by local governments to keep signal strength down, and I can't see how our signal could be reliably detected more than a few light years away without a HUGE radio antenna array.
It's not about stockpiling bomb grade material, it's about using it to produce electricity. Plutonium works fine in power plants (indeed, most fission plants make a decent proportion of their power off plutonium, because U-238 transitions to Pu-239 during the fission process).
Switching to fast neutron plants would cut the waste by 99%, which would cut the cost of reprocessing as well. All the "worst" nuclear waste is high energy stuff that needs to be stuffed back into a reactor, not stored under a mountain. The only stuff that can't be reused is on the level of the stuff we use for medical imaging.
I would love to see every existing plant decommissioned and replaced with something that wasn't hip in the 70's. We need the power, it's cheaper and cleaner than coal and better for the environment.
Yea, there are a lot of things on the horizon right now, lot of things that could cause problems for thousands of years to come, but only one of us (apparently) knows the form all those things will take.
On top of that astounding hubris, you walk around throwing out cryptic pronouncements over pieces of tech which, while interesting, will do absolutely zero to change the next 50 years. This ain't cold fusion buddy, this is just a way to reduce the waste output of a fission reactor. If we really gave a damn about that, we'd have been building fast neutron reactors for decades, and that hasn't happened.
So in my opinion, your pronouncements are on the level of the crazy hobo with a sandwich board walking around the streets proclaiming the end of the world.
Eviscerate? I think you mean incinerate.
There are risks to all methods of energy production. There are plenty of other countries who routinely reprocess their waste already, so that scary bomb-grade material you're scared of is already available.
Our disinclination to do reprocessing, coupled with the irrational nuclear paranoia of a subset of our population saddles us with a massive waste problem, outdated power plants, and a dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
If we could build fast neutron plants, even, it would reduce our waste output by 99%, with no increase in likelihood of meltdowns.
I'm sure with your amazing powers, you know where to put the bill.
Thinking about it further, weapons grade waste is almost all transuranic (e.g. plutonium), so if the purpose of this is to reduce that, then there should be less weapons grade waste, not more.
If it's actually using that plutonium to sustain it's reaction, and produce more energy, it would seem like a good solution.
Thanks for sharing, Nostradumas. While you're pulling prophecies out of your ass, can you tell me when my 401k is going to rebound?
I RTFA, but I'm still a bit snowjobbed because it's pretty light on detail.
It seems like their touting the solution primarily as a way to reduce transuranic waste (sludge). There were no numbers based on how much more or less energy this process would produce.
It's my understanding that re-enrichment is more about separating undepleted U-235 from depleted U-238, so I have no idea what reducing transuranic sludge would have to do with this. It might increase the (relative) percentage of U-235 enough to keep the fission reaction going, or it might just make the reaction slightly cleaner.
Goddamn it, beat me to it.
Well played sir, well played.
THIS is EXACTLY the problem. It is NOT always easy to install a GUI app from some other version of Windows.
I have seen so many goddamn OS specific applications in my time, that I have to restrain myself from reaching across the table and killing the guy whenever it's brought up as an idea.
Even nice Java apps can be a PITA, because you end up with apps that depend on this or than specific JRE release, and while you can bundle your release with the code, that doesn't always ensure error free delivery across multiple OS versions.
With a standards compliant web app, it works fine across all common browsers, and, in the worst case, it's much much easier to install an old browser on a modern system than it is to force a user to use an old operating system.
Meh, what does he know? He's just a nut gatherer.
When I'm in a certain mood, I love humanity. We're self-centered, short-sighted, competitive assholes, but we have our moments. Creating a self-sustaining machine is pretty cool, and the second it's practical, some ad agency will buy a thousand of them to walk around the cities, eating your garbage, and trying to get you to buy their products.
This is an attempt to make a first gen self-sustaining robot.
We're cool, it's undeniable. But we're not that cool.
Fricking newage babble. Emotional states can be quantized as well as any other mental state. I'd normally say, "They just look that way" but they don't even appear continuous internally!
Emotional states change all day long, and it is perfectly cromulent to say "I was sad this morning, but I feel better now"
Well, I imagine that after billions of years of work, and uncountable design changes, our robots will be able to do it too.
In other words, it's not apples to apples. It would take me less energy to build a car from parts than it would take a car to drive a hundred miles. That's because I'm a machine at the end of a multi-million year design process, optimized to live on a wide variety of biomass, in a wide variety of terrains, that is capable of reproducing myself and building semi-autonomous tools.
It's still probably better to grab a big resin-filled chunk of a pine tree than to try and render down Fluffy for biodiesel, but I take your point.
The odds of Fluffy wandering by are a bit higher than a chunk of pine tree wandering by.
No, more like "Genuine Corn Fed Humans, no extra processing, no artificial hormones or sweeteners! Raised on the farm without cages!"
Yea, but for this, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
It's almost certainly wildly inefficient.
That gasoline engine in your car is inefficient compared to a big power generator that uses the same fuel. The size, the inability to efficiently process the waste heat...It all adds up.
Taking into account the returns of biomass plants that use high-grade biomass (e.g. corn, unprocessed chicken/pig parts, etc) and then taking into account the efficiency that will certainly be lost by reducing that process to something small enough to be mobile, and I'll be surprised if they can make it work at all.