Who cares about how long it takes to charge a car with a set of batteries that has a range of 1000 km. In that case, if it does take 8 hours to fully recharge, so what? I'll worry about that as I fall asleep.
... they must also promise never to become a publicly traded company, such as a corporation, because if they do that, then we will only be able to trust that they will forget that they ever said that.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a world of rationalism, but in one of greed. Our scientists were right to sound the alarm and draw people's attention to the problem at hand, but it's simplistic to think that simply stating the obvious was ever going to solve anything. Fossil fuel has been a free lunch for our civilization for over 250 years, so we're not just going to give it up for any problems it might cause many years from now -- we're far too short-sighted for that.
The only way out is develop cheaper and more efficient alternatives as quickly as possible. Luckily, the rising prices of fossil fuels are also helping to push consumers towards these new technologies, but the sooner they become the more desirable solution for everyone the better.
... particles which are entangled at the quantum level have an instant and equal reaction on one another regardless of distance. Would it not be possible to use this "Quantum Internet" for C from say, a satellite controller a rover on Mars and one on Earth?...
It would be cool, but a quick search shows that the answer is apparently No. It seems two entangled atoms are like two coins that mirror each other such that if one is tossed, the next time the other is tossed it will show the same value. It's weird, but it can't be used for communication, something that also prevents causality from being violated.
Sounds desperate, and like they'd rather not spend the money to hire the personnel necessary to follow a decent shift schedule. What a bunch of cheap bastards.
Imagine being an Iranian open source guy and then being cut off from the rest of your community. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft will have solutions for using their operating systems in that environment, but otherwise it seems to me that cutting itself off from the Internet is a good way to take Iran back to the 1980s. In the end, however, I think there will be something for all of us to learn from this cruel experiment as well. That's why other countries that live with despotic regimes and/or severe restrictions (e.g. Saudi Arabia) will be watching with interest.
PS -- By the way, this is another good reason for the US and/or Israel not to attack Iran. They're so busy making life miserable for themselves that eventually their theocratic government is bound to fall due to another popular uprising. If they are attacked from the outside, however, it will only serve to make the theocrats stronger.
For years now, I've been making all of my backups with a script I wrote that uses rsync and faubackup, the latter being a disk-based backup solution. All important data is backed up on a daily basis, locally and to other servers across the Internet. All partitions involved (source and target) are on RAID1 or RAID5 arrays (by itself, RAID is not a backup solution, but does increase the reliability of the storage medium). The only way I've ever lost any data with this system is when I forget to add a source to the backup script.
Agreed. These fantasy stories frequently take place in surroundings full of "props" (castles, dungeons, swords
alchemy) people (kings, knights, wizards, peasants) and other elements (witches, dragons) that belong to a period that people generally identify with medieval Europe. English was used in that area at the time, and although the way it was spoken then is not easy for most modern anglophones to follow, most would likely recognize it as something from England or thereabouts.
Other English accents, such as American and Australian, are much too modern for that period and whenever they are used in such fantasy film productions it makes the experience seem less "authentic", and therefore more difficult to suspend belief.
In addition, I suspect the Bard is also partly responsible for this situation. Although he lived and died just after the Middle Ages, his plays have been repeated ever since. Remember, his influence is so strong that his style has even helped the British accent cross effortlessly over into science fiction (I'm thinking of Christopher Plummer's wonderful portrayal of General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).
People seem to have this idea that rogue planets are each out there all alone. I figure that's unlikely. Many (if not most) of them should occur in systems with multiple bodies orbiting a common center of gravity, just like the sun and planets do in our own solar system. If so, then if one of these "rogue" systems were to stray too closely to another system with a more massive central body, such as HIP 11952, then one or more of its constituents may end up being captured by the more massive body while the rest of the rogue system moves off at a (perhaps only slightly) higher velocity. In this scenario, I believe the total momentum of both systems is preserved.
IMO organized religion is to blame for this. Even 35 years ago there was plenty of religion around, but it wasn't an issue because America has no state religion and all the organized religions of the day were highly fractionalized and didn't trust each another. Therefore, the separation of church and state still made sense and almost everyone wanted to send their kids to college.
With preachers like Billy Graham, a new brand of evangelicalism (American evangelism) in the mid 20th century changed all that. Their idea was that, as opposed to many other churches, it was better set a low threshold for entry for anyone who wanted to join: all that was necessary was to "accept Jesus as your personal savior" and the rest would come later. Of course, anyone who once you joined would then be fed all kinds of fundamentalist crap. The result was that religion in the US became much more organized than ever before. This really started to take off in the late 1970s.
For today's "leading lights" in this movement it's really about the money. They live in opulent mansions, have huge incomes and pay no taxes. Of course, their tactics have earned them plenty of criticism and anyone with an ounce of skepticism can see what they're up to. So, to defend themselves and maintain their flock numbers, the preachers have learned to criticize the origins of all of the accusations thrown at them, which includes science itself. It seems this method has worked a little too well.
The solution? Education, education, education, and as much of it as every individual is willing to take. It should be mandatory up to at least 18 years of age (no home schooling), as well as free (or at least affordable) at all levels for everyone.
For any society that aspires to constantly increase the average standard of living of its citizens, education is just as much a basic need as food, clothing, shelter and medical assistance. Better education, and thus more commonly found critical thinking skills, is the reason why evangelicalism never made any serious inroads in Europe, despite many efforts.
There is still time, although it's limited. America has the money to educate its people, but does it have the will?
That's what I was thinking too. A recent study estimates that there may be 100,000 times (!) as many nomad planets in our galaxy as there are stars (est. 100 billion). Considering this huge number and given a time span not far short of the age of the universe, I would think that the likelihood of a long-lived star, such as HIP 11952 (est. 0.83 solar masses), to eventually capture a few of these highly numerous interstellar orphans to be not insignificant.
It sounds like the studio bosses have decided to hedge their bets. On the one hand they are constantly busy lobbying to have laws passed to introduce more censorship that will hopefully be effective enough at countering piracy. On the other hand they may actually realize at some point that their lobbying efforts are futile and want to try out new business strategies, but of course any such efforts are bound to take place while their anti-piracy policing efforts are still in full swing.
So perhaps the next question should be, If one of more of the various publishing industries eventually decides on a new business strategy, will they ever bother to stop their anti-piracy efforts? I don't think so. Why would they? Even if their new strategy is wildly successful and most pirates decide that rewarding the publishers for producing good content is better than not rewarding them, there will always be those who will want to watch, listen or read for nothing and thus, in the eyes of the publishers, will still need a little extra prodding before they do do the right thing. It would be a classic carrot and stick strategy. But even if this never convinces all of the pirates, as long as it convinces a few more of them it will still worth keeping those laws in place. Besides, who knows what would happen if those anti-piracy measures were removed...
"... there are cloud backup solutions that encrypt your data *before* it leaves the machine...."
That's nice, but there are some other issues. First, a major one: he has too much data for that -- it seems to be measured in terabytes. Since he's complaining that blue-ray is too slow, his upload speed will likely make backups up to the cloud an impractical solution also.
Second, there are some minor issues: cost and reliability. Even if he has plenty of upload bandwidth, having some cloud service hold on to that much data for you is not going to be cheaper than buying the extra hard drives yourself. After all, how can their storage space be so much cheaper than yours? As for reliability, if Amazon can make mistakes and lose your data than others can too. Of course, they will tell you afterwards to make backups of your data (which are your backups) to store it in their various data centers, but that only makes it all more expensive.
Therefore I've concluded that it's still better to do it all yourself. It's cheaper and you have more control.
They're not my favorites either, but let's not become too pessimistic. All is not lost. The most important thing is that the free world remain so and that we retain the ability to resist all efforts to introduce censorship of any type.
We refer to this era we live in as the information age because the Internet is so amazingly effective at making it possible for people all over the world to freely exchange information. This has been great for most people, but since it has also had the effect of decommoditizing information in general, it has been bad news for the various publishing industries and their centuries-old business model, so don't be surprised if they continue to put up a fight.
They see censorship as the best way to once again make information scarce and thereby raise the value of their products, so our task is to raise public (and ultimately political) awareness that such an artificial measure can only be counterproductive at best. It will be much better for society in general if the publishing industries learned to develop new business models, rather than if our governments effectively allow them to dictate rules that will lead to the implementation of tools more befitting of a police state. If we allow that to happen, then we may wake up one day to find that the clock has indeed been turned back... to 1984.
... The bulk of the universe is made up from just a few dozen elements, and each of these elements is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on....
Wrong! The bulk of the universe -- about 70% -- is made of dark energy and we have no idea what that's made of. Then there's dark matter -- about 25% (no idea what that's made of either) -- while less than 5% is made of normal, barionic matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on).
Agreed. After setting up a completely new open source network system for a client, I had been planning on giving a presentation on the subject for all of the employees.... to give them an idea about what's there now and how to use it.
But, then I realized that, no matter how enthusiastic I might be about it, I really needed to present far too much information and it would be almost impossible for me to hold their attention for more than a few minutes before their eyes would inevitably glaze over. Probably only a few of them would be able follow it for any length of time, while the rest would really not be interested and would just be waiting for me to please shut up and let them all go home.
So, after some consultation with the management, we've instead decided that I will instead write a FAQ and/or a series of instructive articles in the organization's private wiki and announce each of the new articles via email. That way, if they're interested they can read the information themselves when they want to -- like when they have to use the system to get some work done. With any luck they'll also start telling each other where to find the information. Who knows, perhaps they'll even start asking some questions as a result.
As for all developers being technically inclined, you'd be surprised how limited their understanding of networking concepts can be. I guess it's just something you have to appreciate.
...The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet....
We could be the first civilization in our galaxy with such grand aspirations, but with so many stars and planets around the odds are very much against that. IMO a likely explanation is that what you propose is actually much harder than you think and therefore much less likely to ever happen.
There are many serious obstacles that any such project would have to overcome before even a fleet of robots of our manufacture were ever to reach the closest nomad planet. Some obstacles are close to home, such as human nature. For instance, the grey goo scenario comes to mind, so there's a good chance that many people would object to the development of nanobots capable of consuming whole planets. On the other hand, an interstellar effort that would not involve nanobots would probably be prohibitively expensive. I mean, why would anyone ever want to pay for something like that? Unless religion gets involved, which was great for building cathedrals, people tend to be far too concerned with their own welfare (and reproduction) to want to pay for a projects that will never benefit them. Hell, lots of people don't even like seeing their tax dollars spent on general education.
Furthermore, the distances between the stars are really, really huge. So big, in fact, you'd almost think there was a plot to prevent us from ever escaping the solar system. To put things in perspective, I once calculated that if the distance between the Earth and the Sun (1 AU) were shrunk down to 1 millimeter, the distance to Proxima Centauri would still be 267 meters. It's just not fair! When this is combined with the fact that very high speeds are necessary for long periods of time, and with this most recent discovery that space likely contains much more junk than we first thought, then it seems almost inevitable that any would-be interstellar craft will suffer too many collisions before it reaches its destination. And I'm not the first person to consider this problem. Do you remember the deflector dish on the Enterprise? Gene Roddenberry thought it would be a good idea for his starship
to push space junk out of the way to prevent en-route collisions.
As for how energetic such en-route collisions would be, if the spacecraft were traveling at only 10% of the speed of light and were to hit a grain of sand, the energy released would be Ek = (1/2) x 0.00000000035 x (29,979,245 x 29,979,245)J = 157.28 MJ, which is equivalent to more than 33 kg of TNT.
Can anyone spot any holes in this logic? I hope so, because if I'm right it looks like we're stuck here.
... What does a body look like under all that pressure?...
Pretty much the same as at the surface.
The notion that everything gets "crushed" at great depths is a common misconception. Submarines (and submersibles) run the risk of getting crushed at depth because they usually include cavities of air held at a constant surface pressure. Therefore, the deeper they go, the more their internal pressure gets out of equilibrium with the ambient pressure and the greater the risk becomes of violent equalization.
On the other hand, not much happens to a human body (or any other kind) as it sinks to the bottom of an ocean trench. As it descends any air cavities soon shrink to nothing and that's about it. Perhaps its flesh and bones will be compressed and even shrink slightly, as the article suggests happens to Cameron's submersible and even the water around it at that depth, but it won't be by much and I don't see why our imaginary sinking body would not still be quite recognizable once it reaches the bottom. All the way the increasing pressures in and around it will be in equilibrium, so there's never anything to force it out of shape.
... Also pretty sure no human bodies will be experiencing that pressure
On the contrary, it's most likely that they have and will... though not while alive.
Some years ago I was into technical diving and learned that the deepest dive ever for a human was a simulated one in a pressure chamber. Using a special, and no-doubt constantly changing mixture of gasses that included plenty of helium, they were able to crank up the pressure to a simulated depth of about 750 meters (only about 7% of the Challenger Deep) before the "diver" could go no further. Apparently, his nervous system was no longer able to function properly beyond that point... just because of the pressure. His simulated ascent, by the way, took something like a month.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn all this, because it meant that a really deep dive using a liquid rebreather, like in The Abyss (1989, James Cameron), would never be possible.
Yes, a wiki are great, but in this case it needs to contain useful information. The wiki forces you to organize what you know about the network and how everything is related, but it's a lot of work and it takes time and effort to do it properly. The bigger and/or more complicated the network in question, the longer it will take to complete an adequate set of documents.
Documentation is not something you start on a day or a week before you leave: it's something that should be created as soon as possible and maintained for the life of the network. It's damn useful even if you're not planning on going anywhere! But if you're only considering it after handing in your resignation, you're too late.
Slashdot Mirror
Recharge in less then 5 minutes?
Who cares about how long it takes to charge a car with a set of batteries that has a range of 1000 km. In that case, if it does take 8 hours to fully recharge, so what? I'll worry about that as I fall asleep.
... they must also promise never to become a publicly traded company, such as a corporation, because if they do that, then we will only be able to trust that they will forget that they ever said that.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a world of rationalism, but in one of greed. Our scientists were right to sound the alarm and draw people's attention to the problem at hand, but it's simplistic to think that simply stating the obvious was ever going to solve anything. Fossil fuel has been a free lunch for our civilization for over 250 years, so we're not just going to give it up for any problems it might cause many years from now -- we're far too short-sighted for that.
The only way out is develop cheaper and more efficient alternatives as quickly as possible. Luckily, the rising prices of fossil fuels are also helping to push consumers towards these new technologies, but the sooner they become the more desirable solution for everyone the better.
... particles which are entangled at the quantum level have an instant and equal reaction on one another regardless of distance. Would it not be possible to use this "Quantum Internet" for C from say, a satellite controller a rover on Mars and one on Earth? ...
It would be cool, but a quick search shows that the answer is apparently No. It seems two entangled atoms are like two coins that mirror each other such that if one is tossed, the next time the other is tossed it will show the same value. It's weird, but it can't be used for communication, something that also prevents causality from being violated.
Sounds desperate, and like they'd rather not spend the money to hire the personnel necessary to follow a decent shift schedule. What a bunch of cheap bastards.
Imagine being an Iranian open source guy and then being cut off from the rest of your community. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft will have solutions for using their operating systems in that environment, but otherwise it seems to me that cutting itself off from the Internet is a good way to take Iran back to the 1980s. In the end, however, I think there will be something for all of us to learn from this cruel experiment as well. That's why other countries that live with despotic regimes and/or severe restrictions (e.g. Saudi Arabia) will be watching with interest.
PS -- By the way, this is another good reason for the US and/or Israel not to attack Iran. They're so busy making life miserable for themselves that eventually their theocratic government is bound to fall due to another popular uprising. If they are attacked from the outside, however, it will only serve to make the theocrats stronger.
... the fact that we can't resist buying his shit is what gives him the money to keep trying to censor our Internet.
For years now, I've been making all of my backups with a script I wrote that uses rsync and faubackup, the latter being a disk-based backup solution. All important data is backed up on a daily basis, locally and to other servers across the Internet. All partitions involved (source and target) are on RAID1 or RAID5 arrays (by itself, RAID is not a backup solution, but does increase the reliability of the storage medium). The only way I've ever lost any data with this system is when I forget to add a source to the backup script.
Agreed. These fantasy stories frequently take place in surroundings full of "props" (castles, dungeons, swords alchemy) people (kings, knights, wizards, peasants) and other elements (witches, dragons) that belong to a period that people generally identify with medieval Europe. English was used in that area at the time, and although the way it was spoken then is not easy for most modern anglophones to follow, most would likely recognize it as something from England or thereabouts.
Other English accents, such as American and Australian, are much too modern for that period and whenever they are used in such fantasy film productions it makes the experience seem less "authentic", and therefore more difficult to suspend belief.
In addition, I suspect the Bard is also partly responsible for this situation. Although he lived and died just after the Middle Ages, his plays have been repeated ever since. Remember, his influence is so strong that his style has even helped the British accent cross effortlessly over into science fiction (I'm thinking of Christopher Plummer's wonderful portrayal of General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).
Okay, then how about this.
People seem to have this idea that rogue planets are each out there all alone. I figure that's unlikely. Many (if not most) of them should occur in systems with multiple bodies orbiting a common center of gravity, just like the sun and planets do in our own solar system. If so, then if one of these "rogue" systems were to stray too closely to another system with a more massive central body, such as HIP 11952, then one or more of its constituents may end up being captured by the more massive body while the rest of the rogue system moves off at a (perhaps only slightly) higher velocity. In this scenario, I believe the total momentum of both systems is preserved.
IMO organized religion is to blame for this. Even 35 years ago there was plenty of religion around, but it wasn't an issue because America has no state religion and all the organized religions of the day were highly fractionalized and didn't trust each another. Therefore, the separation of church and state still made sense and almost everyone wanted to send their kids to college.
With preachers like Billy Graham, a new brand of evangelicalism (American evangelism) in the mid 20th century changed all that. Their idea was that, as opposed to many other churches, it was better set a low threshold for entry for anyone who wanted to join: all that was necessary was to "accept Jesus as your personal savior" and the rest would come later. Of course, anyone who once you joined would then be fed all kinds of fundamentalist crap. The result was that religion in the US became much more organized than ever before. This really started to take off in the late 1970s.
For today's "leading lights" in this movement it's really about the money. They live in opulent mansions, have huge incomes and pay no taxes. Of course, their tactics have earned them plenty of criticism and anyone with an ounce of skepticism can see what they're up to. So, to defend themselves and maintain their flock numbers, the preachers have learned to criticize the origins of all of the accusations thrown at them, which includes science itself. It seems this method has worked a little too well.
The solution? Education, education, education, and as much of it as every individual is willing to take. It should be mandatory up to at least 18 years of age (no home schooling), as well as free (or at least affordable) at all levels for everyone.
For any society that aspires to constantly increase the average standard of living of its citizens, education is just as much a basic need as food, clothing, shelter and medical assistance. Better education, and thus more commonly found critical thinking skills, is the reason why evangelicalism never made any serious inroads in Europe, despite many efforts.
There is still time, although it's limited. America has the money to educate its people, but does it have the will?
That's what I was thinking too. A recent study estimates that there may be 100,000 times (!) as many nomad planets in our galaxy as there are stars (est. 100 billion). Considering this huge number and given a time span not far short of the age of the universe, I would think that the likelihood of a long-lived star, such as HIP 11952 (est. 0.83 solar masses), to eventually capture a few of these highly numerous interstellar orphans to be not insignificant.
It sounds like the studio bosses have decided to hedge their bets. On the one hand they are constantly busy lobbying to have laws passed to introduce more censorship that will hopefully be effective enough at countering piracy. On the other hand they may actually realize at some point that their lobbying efforts are futile and want to try out new business strategies, but of course any such efforts are bound to take place while their anti-piracy policing efforts are still in full swing.
So perhaps the next question should be, If one of more of the various publishing industries eventually decides on a new business strategy, will they ever bother to stop their anti-piracy efforts? I don't think so. Why would they? Even if their new strategy is wildly successful and most pirates decide that rewarding the publishers for producing good content is better than not rewarding them, there will always be those who will want to watch, listen or read for nothing and thus, in the eyes of the publishers, will still need a little extra prodding before they do do the right thing. It would be a classic carrot and stick strategy. But even if this never convinces all of the pirates, as long as it convinces a few more of them it will still worth keeping those laws in place. Besides, who knows what would happen if those anti-piracy measures were removed...
"... there are cloud backup solutions that encrypt your data *before* it leaves the machine. ..."
That's nice, but there are some other issues. First, a major one: he has too much data for that -- it seems to be measured in terabytes. Since he's complaining that blue-ray is too slow, his upload speed will likely make backups up to the cloud an impractical solution also.
Second, there are some minor issues: cost and reliability. Even if he has plenty of upload bandwidth, having some cloud service hold on to that much data for you is not going to be cheaper than buying the extra hard drives yourself. After all, how can their storage space be so much cheaper than yours? As for reliability, if Amazon can make mistakes and lose your data than others can too. Of course, they will tell you afterwards to make backups of your data (which are your backups) to store it in their various data centers, but that only makes it all more expensive.
Therefore I've concluded that it's still better to do it all yourself. It's cheaper and you have more control.
They're not my favorites either, but let's not become too pessimistic. All is not lost. The most important thing is that the free world remain so and that we retain the ability to resist all efforts to introduce censorship of any type.
We refer to this era we live in as the information age because the Internet is so amazingly effective at making it possible for people all over the world to freely exchange information. This has been great for most people, but since it has also had the effect of decommoditizing information in general, it has been bad news for the various publishing industries and their centuries-old business model, so don't be surprised if they continue to put up a fight.
They see censorship as the best way to once again make information scarce and thereby raise the value of their products, so our task is to raise public (and ultimately political) awareness that such an artificial measure can only be counterproductive at best. It will be much better for society in general if the publishing industries learned to develop new business models, rather than if our governments effectively allow them to dictate rules that will lead to the implementation of tools more befitting of a police state. If we allow that to happen, then we may wake up one day to find that the clock has indeed been turned back... to 1984.
'Nuf said.
Phew, I wasn't the only one.
Indeed, but let's not forget that the surname of the famous Ringworld protagonist was spelled "Wu", not "Woo".
Wrong! The bulk of the universe -- about 70% -- is made of dark energy and we have no idea what that's made of. Then there's dark matter -- about 25% (no idea what that's made of either) -- while less than 5% is made of normal, barionic matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on).
Agreed. After setting up a completely new open source network system for a client, I had been planning on giving a presentation on the subject for all of the employees.... to give them an idea about what's there now and how to use it.
But, then I realized that, no matter how enthusiastic I might be about it, I really needed to present far too much information and it would be almost impossible for me to hold their attention for more than a few minutes before their eyes would inevitably glaze over. Probably only a few of them would be able follow it for any length of time, while the rest would really not be interested and would just be waiting for me to please shut up and let them all go home.
So, after some consultation with the management, we've instead decided that I will instead write a FAQ and/or a series of instructive articles in the organization's private wiki and announce each of the new articles via email. That way, if they're interested they can read the information themselves when they want to -- like when they have to use the system to get some work done. With any luck they'll also start telling each other where to find the information. Who knows, perhaps they'll even start asking some questions as a result.
As for all developers being technically inclined, you'd be surprised how limited their understanding of networking concepts can be. I guess it's just something you have to appreciate.
...The ultimate Fermi paradox is why has this not happened yet. ...
We could be the first civilization in our galaxy with such grand aspirations, but with so many stars and planets around the odds are very much against that. IMO a likely explanation is that what you propose is actually much harder than you think and therefore much less likely to ever happen.
There are many serious obstacles that any such project would have to overcome before even a fleet of robots of our manufacture were ever to reach the closest nomad planet. Some obstacles are close to home, such as human nature. For instance, the grey goo scenario comes to mind, so there's a good chance that many people would object to the development of nanobots capable of consuming whole planets. On the other hand, an interstellar effort that would not involve nanobots would probably be prohibitively expensive. I mean, why would anyone ever want to pay for something like that? Unless religion gets involved, which was great for building cathedrals, people tend to be far too concerned with their own welfare (and reproduction) to want to pay for a projects that will never benefit them. Hell, lots of people don't even like seeing their tax dollars spent on general education.
Furthermore, the distances between the stars are really, really huge. So big, in fact, you'd almost think there was a plot to prevent us from ever escaping the solar system. To put things in perspective, I once calculated that if the distance between the Earth and the Sun (1 AU) were shrunk down to 1 millimeter, the distance to Proxima Centauri would still be 267 meters. It's just not fair! When this is combined with the fact that very high speeds are necessary for long periods of time, and with this most recent discovery that space likely contains much more junk than we first thought, then it seems almost inevitable that any would-be interstellar craft will suffer too many collisions before it reaches its destination. And I'm not the first person to consider this problem. Do you remember the deflector dish on the Enterprise? Gene Roddenberry thought it would be a good idea for his starship to push space junk out of the way to prevent en-route collisions.
As for how energetic such en-route collisions would be, if the spacecraft were traveling at only 10% of the speed of light and were to hit a grain of sand, the energy released would be Ek = (1/2) x 0.00000000035 x (29,979,245 x 29,979,245)J = 157.28 MJ, which is equivalent to more than 33 kg of TNT.
Can anyone spot any holes in this logic? I hope so, because if I'm right it looks like we're stuck here.
Perhaps, but Microsoft Bob was the more memorable.
... What does a body look like under all that pressure? ...
Pretty much the same as at the surface.
The notion that everything gets "crushed" at great depths is a common misconception. Submarines (and submersibles) run the risk of getting crushed at depth because they usually include cavities of air held at a constant surface pressure. Therefore, the deeper they go, the more their internal pressure gets out of equilibrium with the ambient pressure and the greater the risk becomes of violent equalization.
On the other hand, not much happens to a human body (or any other kind) as it sinks to the bottom of an ocean trench. As it descends any air cavities soon shrink to nothing and that's about it. Perhaps its flesh and bones will be compressed and even shrink slightly, as the article suggests happens to Cameron's submersible and even the water around it at that depth, but it won't be by much and I don't see why our imaginary sinking body would not still be quite recognizable once it reaches the bottom. All the way the increasing pressures in and around it will be in equilibrium, so there's never anything to force it out of shape.
... Also pretty sure no human bodies will be experiencing that pressure
On the contrary, it's most likely that they have and will ... though not while alive.
Some years ago I was into technical diving and learned that the deepest dive ever for a human was a simulated one in a pressure chamber. Using a special, and no-doubt constantly changing mixture of gasses that included plenty of helium, they were able to crank up the pressure to a simulated depth of about 750 meters (only about 7% of the Challenger Deep) before the "diver" could go no further. Apparently, his nervous system was no longer able to function properly beyond that point... just because of the pressure. His simulated ascent, by the way, took something like a month.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn all this, because it meant that a really deep dive using a liquid rebreather, like in The Abyss (1989, James Cameron), would never be possible.
Remember that it's a finite resource.
Yes, a wiki are great, but in this case it needs to contain useful information. The wiki forces you to organize what you know about the network and how everything is related, but it's a lot of work and it takes time and effort to do it properly. The bigger and/or more complicated the network in question, the longer it will take to complete an adequate set of documents.
Documentation is not something you start on a day or a week before you leave: it's something that should be created as soon as possible and maintained for the life of the network. It's damn useful even if you're not planning on going anywhere! But if you're only considering it after handing in your resignation, you're too late.