It was not a matter of collections of sounds, but rather the societal context of those sounds.
"Where's the Beef?" when put into a literal translator will never come up with "this is insufficient", and that is precisely how the aliens communicated. No search of the words "Where" "Is" "The" and "Beef" will ever give you the meaning of the colloquialism. All the translator will do is make you think the person has lost a farm animal.
[back on the planet]
"I made a shelter for us. I think it will protect us from the storms tonight."
[exasperatedly waving arms and pointing at the flimsy shelter] "My cow is missing !"
My sister-in law was excitedly showing off her new car to me, and I said that I didn't care for the idea of a remote-start function for cars. "But it's security coded." she said. My response was this:
If a device can be controlled with an electronic signal, that means that the device can be controlled with an electronic signal.
Sometimes that signal will come from where you want it to, but there can be no guarantee that it will not come from somewhere else.
Seeing as they specifically mention Electro-Optical and Infra-Red guided missiles, It seems that the objective is not to 'blow up' a missile as the linked article suggests, but rather to use a laser to blind the missile's tracking systems, causing it to lose tracking and veer off target or "generate a miss" as they say.
Getting a laser to destroy a missile requires about 100 kW of energy and a few tons of hardware to focus it.
Getting a laser to blind optical sensors requires a $10 Radio Shack gift card.
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan
And potentially very profitable. Huge chunks of valuable metals floating around waiting to be mined..
I seem to recall reading that If there were a mass of gold ingots in low Earth orbit, it would not be economically feasible to send the Space Shuttle up to bring them back to Earth. You'd spend more on training, parts, maintenance and fuel than a cargo hold full of pure bullion could offset. If you had a factory in orbit to use the gold to some purpose, that might be different, but that's putting the cart before the horse.
Islam has never killed anyone. Islam has never detonated a suicide bomb. Islam has never called for the downfall of Western Culture. Also, Christianity has never declared a Crusade, rallied against equal rights for homosexuals or called for the killings of doctors who perform abortions.
All these things have been done by *humans* who have decided to hijack an entire religion and twist it in order to accomplish their secular goals.
Instead of having a specially-made or retrofitted baton, how about having the area in front of the podium encased in a magnetic field like that of a theremin, such that the baton would provide data on horizontal position by pitch and vertical position by volume. That would give you all the data you need to feed to whatever peripheral signals the musician (come to think of it, an earbud with the output would help for the beginning of the piece, but it might be too distracting for things like tempo changes.
Diverting the asteroid means, that 1) we can track it accurately
2) the lasers have enough accuracy to hit the asteroid on the same spot, and not cancel each other out
3) the asteroid isn't spinning (but this might allow it to slow down a bit)
Well, if we're shooting at it, it means we can see it. If we see it we can track it.
Accuracy? A laser is a straight line of photons that travel at the speed of light. If we can track it, we can hit it. It's just a matter of calculating trajectories and factoring in gravitiational effects. At the distance it would be at, i'm not sure how lasers could possibly cancel each other out.
A spinning asteroid wouldn't matter much... just calculate its center of mass then fire appropriately to effect the greatest change in desired direction. You might be shooting at empty space part of the time, but the rest will do the work you want.
And only one of those species, extinct or alive has built a civilization.
And if we get wiped out, what difference will all that have made? All the things we've learned and done will be for nothing, save perhaps a step up for the next dominant species.
So in half a billion years, someone needs to do something. Ok. If you going to claim that we should do something now in space, then you need to have a more compelling reason than something that happens long from now.
An asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow.
Evolution never stops. All it could take is one organism able to capitalize quickly and efficiently on the truly huge food supply that is Humanity, and it could all be over for us in a matter of months. That could happen tomorrow, too. Or yesterday, for that matter.
And even if nothing needs to be done for a few hundred years, the fact remains that right now, we *have* the capability. All those hundreds of years from now when things get really grim for whatever remnants of humanity remain after our species-wide catastrophe, it might be impossible to save ourselves.
By acting now, what we're doing is taking out an insurance policy. And in a country where the average person spends about 10% of their income insuring their homes, health and vehicles, it seems odd that we're not willing to go the extra step and insure our Species... But I guess like any other terrifying event, the internal refrain of "It won't happen to me." is hard to contend with.
We humans would like to think that we're special, but the fact is, we're just another species on this planet.
And 99.99% of the species that have evolved on this planet have gone extinct on this planet.
Doesn't matter if it's failure to compete, a slow climate change, a rapid disease or a near-instant asteroid strike, sooner or later, nearly every species gets wiped out.
If we really want to be special, we need to leave Earth and spread out, because while the Earth's environment is the safest for us *individually* over the short term, it is also a near-guaranteed death sentence for our *species* over the long term.
I'm pretty sure *every* camera I've ever used could see radiation... In the visible spectrum anyways.
Back in the stone age of wet photography, it wasn't all that difficult to take pictures of IR or UV, either, come to think of it. Either by accident or design.
On the serious side, I imagine it was a technical hurdle to manage to filter a CCD in such a way that it could capture useful information from various highly energetic particles hitting it without it being degraded or destroyed in the process.
The Large-Impact Hypothesis is the current consensus. One smaller protoplanet grazed a larger one, leaving a large chunk of itself behind. The larger became the Earth, the smaller, the moon.
As to why the Lunar crust is (believed to be) about 1/3 thicker of the far side than the near side, no one is quite sure.
"Polite Society" only exists because of the evolutionary imperative to avoid pain. If you break society's rules, sooner or later, you go one step too far and get punched in the mouth. In our overly PC society we seem to have forgotten that this is a tremendously effective, tried and tested method of behavior modification.
I don't get the "Eww" comments. You do realize that what you flush down the toilet goes to a gigantic pond where the solids settle out then the remaining liquids are pumped through filters and sent right back to your faucet, don't you?
This is just a handy portable (potable?) option to the system already in place in most North American cities.
The name of the guy who'll be in charge of decontaminating the TiME Capsule before launch, so if the Galactic Overlords show up and ask why we used a bioweapon to commit genocide on the peaceful bottom-dwelling protoplasmoids of Titan, I can point at *them* !
Slashdot Mirror
It was not a matter of collections of sounds, but rather the societal context of those sounds.
"Where's the Beef?" when put into a literal translator will never come up with "this is insufficient", and that is precisely how the aliens communicated. No search of the words "Where" "Is" "The" and "Beef" will ever give you the meaning of the colloquialism. All the translator will do is make you think the person has lost a farm animal.
[back on the planet]
"I made a shelter for us. I think it will protect us from the storms tonight."
[exasperatedly waving arms and pointing at the flimsy shelter] "My cow is missing !"
My sister-in law was excitedly showing off her new car to me, and I said that I didn't care for the idea of a remote-start function for cars. "But it's security coded." she said. My response was this:
If a device can be controlled with an electronic signal, that means that the device can be controlled with an electronic signal.
Sometimes that signal will come from where you want it to, but there can be no guarantee that it will not come from somewhere else.
Seeing as they specifically mention Electro-Optical and Infra-Red guided missiles, It seems that the objective is not to 'blow up' a missile as the linked article suggests, but rather to use a laser to blind the missile's tracking systems, causing it to lose tracking and veer off target or "generate a miss" as they say.
Getting a laser to destroy a missile requires about 100 kW of energy and a few tons of hardware to focus it.
Getting a laser to blind optical sensors requires a $10 Radio Shack gift card.
"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom.
There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path."
-Carl Sagan
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan
And potentially very profitable. Huge chunks of valuable metals floating around waiting to be mined. .
I seem to recall reading that If there were a mass of gold ingots in low Earth orbit, it would not be economically feasible to send the Space Shuttle up to bring them back to Earth. You'd spend more on training, parts, maintenance and fuel than a cargo hold full of pure bullion could offset. If you had a factory in orbit to use the gold to some purpose, that might be different, but that's putting the cart before the horse.
If it is indeed a 'garden spot' for life, we should be extra careful to not send any wayward seeds with our robotic emissaries.
"Oh, hello deep-dwelling sentient beings. Yeah, sorry about those microbes that got stuck to our probe and seem to be causing your extinction."
O The Embarrassment.
Islam has never killed anyone. Islam has never detonated a suicide bomb. Islam has never called for the downfall of Western Culture. Also, Christianity has never declared a Crusade, rallied against equal rights for homosexuals or called for the killings of doctors who perform abortions.
All these things have been done by *humans* who have decided to hijack an entire religion and twist it in order to accomplish their secular goals.
Instead of having a specially-made or retrofitted baton, how about having the area in front of the podium encased in a magnetic field like that of a theremin, such that the baton would provide data on horizontal position by pitch and vertical position by volume. That would give you all the data you need to feed to whatever peripheral signals the musician (come to think of it, an earbud with the output would help for the beginning of the piece, but it might be too distracting for things like tempo changes.
Does wonders for produce by killing the living heck out of bacteria... Not sure if there would be 'harmful' side effects though.
They did, after all, pardon Galileo in 1992 after having sentenced him to life in prison for his heretical beliefs in a non-heliocentric cosmology.
We see lots of stories with headlines like "Nation's Millionaire College Dropouts."
Odd that we never see "Nation's Minimum-Wage College Dropouts."
I suppose they only have so much newsprint...
You still use Balonium? If you want to maximize your nucleonic blasts, you need to refine it into Phoni-Balonium
Umm... Yes. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
Diverting the asteroid means, that 1) we can track it accurately 2) the lasers have enough accuracy to hit the asteroid on the same spot, and not cancel each other out 3) the asteroid isn't spinning (but this might allow it to slow down a bit)
Well, if we're shooting at it, it means we can see it. If we see it we can track it.
Accuracy? A laser is a straight line of photons that travel at the speed of light. If we can track it, we can hit it. It's just a matter of calculating trajectories and factoring in gravitiational effects. At the distance it would be at, i'm not sure how lasers could possibly cancel each other out.
A spinning asteroid wouldn't matter much... just calculate its center of mass then fire appropriately to effect the greatest change in desired direction. You might be shooting at empty space part of the time, but the rest will do the work you want.
And only one of those species, extinct or alive has built a civilization.
And if we get wiped out, what difference will all that have made? All the things we've learned and done will be for nothing, save perhaps a step up for the next dominant species.
So in half a billion years, someone needs to do something. Ok. If you going to claim that we should do something now in space, then you need to have a more compelling reason than something that happens long from now.
An asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow.
Evolution never stops. All it could take is one organism able to capitalize quickly and efficiently on the truly huge food supply that is Humanity, and it could all be over for us in a matter of months. That could happen tomorrow, too. Or yesterday, for that matter.
And even if nothing needs to be done for a few hundred years, the fact remains that right now, we *have* the capability. All those hundreds of years from now when things get really grim for whatever remnants of humanity remain after our species-wide catastrophe, it might be impossible to save ourselves.
By acting now, what we're doing is taking out an insurance policy. And in a country where the average person spends about 10% of their income insuring their homes, health and vehicles, it seems odd that we're not willing to go the extra step and insure our Species... But I guess like any other terrifying event, the internal refrain of "It won't happen to me." is hard to contend with.
We humans would like to think that we're special, but the fact is, we're just another species on this planet.
And 99.99% of the species that have evolved on this planet have gone extinct on this planet.
Doesn't matter if it's failure to compete, a slow climate change, a rapid disease or a near-instant asteroid strike, sooner or later, nearly every species gets wiped out.
If we really want to be special, we need to leave Earth and spread out, because while the Earth's environment is the safest for us *individually* over the short term, it is also a near-guaranteed death sentence for our *species* over the long term.
Wait! So the Northern Hemisphere is being destroyed in 2012 and the Southern Hemisphere not until 5015 ?
Rio, here I come !
I'm pretty sure *every* camera I've ever used could see radiation... In the visible spectrum anyways.
Back in the stone age of wet photography, it wasn't all that difficult to take pictures of IR or UV, either, come to think of it. Either by accident or design.
On the serious side, I imagine it was a technical hurdle to manage to filter a CCD in such a way that it could capture useful information from various highly energetic particles hitting it without it being degraded or destroyed in the process.
The Large-Impact Hypothesis is the current consensus. One smaller protoplanet grazed a larger one, leaving a large chunk of itself behind. The larger became the Earth, the smaller, the moon.
As to why the Lunar crust is (believed to be) about 1/3 thicker of the far side than the near side, no one is quite sure.
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. - Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 BCE)
"Polite Society" only exists because of the evolutionary imperative to avoid pain. If you break society's rules, sooner or later, you go one step too far and get punched in the mouth. In our overly PC society we seem to have forgotten that this is a tremendously effective, tried and tested method of behavior modification.
I don't get the "Eww" comments. You do realize that what you flush down the toilet goes to a gigantic pond where the solids settle out then the remaining liquids are pumped through filters and sent right back to your faucet, don't you?
This is just a handy portable (potable?) option to the system already in place in most North American cities.
It's whether or not you can hit all the notes in the right order... Sheesh.
The name of the guy who'll be in charge of decontaminating the TiME Capsule before launch, so if the Galactic Overlords show up and ask why we used a bioweapon to commit genocide on the peaceful bottom-dwelling protoplasmoids of Titan, I can point at *them* !