" The diversity of life has historically increased with warming".
Sure, but the same can be said of asteroid impacts; new studies have indicated that after as short as 10 million years, the biosphere has recovered and maybe even opened up a few new ecological niches by dislodging the old dominant species (bye bye dinosaurs!).
The problem is the word "short". On any human timescale, ten million years is a long time. In a few centuries which really is the blink of an eye in a geological sense, we'll be altering the climate substantially. For many species (millions?) it will be too fast for them to evolve.
So they'll die.
Global warming will NOT extinguish life on earth (well not unless we manage to cause a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus). It does have the potential of creating a less diverse world filled with crabgrass, cockroaches and rats and other generalist species (like us) that will take over. Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century.
(Bjorn Lomborg) as two prominent if not THE most prominent AGW skeptics to change their minds. (I've heard of these guys and if I've heard of them, since I'm not a specialist, I figure they must be prominent).
So what's it going to take? Convincing every last person that this isn't real? That's going to be pretty damned impossible because as Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.". Substitute the word "salary" with "lifestyle" (or even "SUV") and you'll see how the average American thinks.
I've read that a ten percentage increase in electrical costs would be enough to sequester all the CO2 we're currently emitting. So the fact that a ten percentage increase in something that is not a big item in the average American budget is keeping us from potentially preventing great harm to our ecology, biosphere and a great number of species on this planet (including us!) makes me realize that we will deserve the hell on earth we get.
"A new airplane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new airplane possible".
While this may be the right thing to do, admit your mistake (cough "shuttle" cough), and use a simple cheap design for a big dumb booster, I'm a little sad for possibilities lost.
Too bad the linear aerospike engines never panned out (X-37?) or the hypersonic scramjet hasn't been fully developed. While the F-1 may reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, it'll take some revolutionary new technology to bring it down by a factor of 100. (Unless I'm seriously wrong and Elon Musk can do it by reusability and sheer operational efficiency). So maybe space flight for the ultra-rich but not for the rest of us. Not until the space elevator at least.
I'm also afraid that the rebirth and re-design of the F-1 will suffer "mission creep" like; let's make it out of some super-exotic alloy to protect against corrosion for possible ocean recovery and we need to add the capability for a restart. By the way, just how reliable were the original F-1s? Didn't one fail on the way to orbit on Apollo 13? Any other failures?
I mean, technically you COULD direct a car (or almost any vehicle, they're so ubiquitous) without it but they're so useful it seems almost mandatory. (I think, maybe, the first Wright brother's planes didn't use them but last I checked they're actually two of them in every cockpit). I'm not a patent attorney or IP expert so this is just my guess as to what the issues are.
However, that's a pretty high "standard". What should be the standard? Should it be determined by a popularity contest? User interface designer's testimony? Shouldn't Apple be entitled to something (I mean they spent time and money coming up with their ideas, not to mention that "utility" patents which are essential, are not free).
Yet another issue to be debated during possible patent reform.
I know we shouldn't be screwing around with the environment but it looks like we'll be getting desperate by the time we get off our butts to do something. And anyway, as other posters have mentioned, we've been running an uncontrolled experiment into the release of many gigatons of CO2 for quite some time now.
So, while their are undeniable risks that this entails, are there any benefits? If these phytoplankton aren't snapped up by noxious jellyfish* (and all of them don't sink to the bottom although that wouldn't be all bad) could this bolster the food chain? I mean wouldn't this cause an increase in the productivity of the whole food chain? They don't call some parts of the ocean (the southern pacific I think) a "desert" for nothing. We are basically fertilizing the ocean, if done right that might be a very good thing! (sushi)
Did the researchers look into the fish/krill/higher predators populations? Did they see any noticeable increase (or decrease)?
*even this might not be too bad, don't pelagic sunfish and sea turtles eat jellyfish? Turtle soup anyone?
... of components due to lack of air (and gravity!) for convection cooling. I think that these are not the same things (although they are related) the sunlit side of the satellite could be a toasty 100 degrees C, while the dark side could be -100. If the satellite is spinning but not fast enough perhaps some traces could expand and contract enough to break. Meanwhile without air to conduct heat, a single small component on the board could overheat and fail.
I think the Russians (at least in the early days), put their electronics in pressured boxes with fans to stir the air. The Americans developed space (vacuum) ready components and designs from the get go.
This is really a significant breakthrough. I mean good looking, glasses free 3D (please look at the video) which means MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS VIEWERS using CHEAP components. The only difficulty is the compute power requirement is a little high but that's nothing that won't be solved quickly thanks to Dr. Moore. (I think they are also able to use GPUs so massive cheap parallelism can overwhelm the problem).
A previous poster brought up the good point that it wasn't clear if the scene was pre-rendered. If/when it can be done on the fly (just a matter of CPU power), think of the applications. CAD, GAMES!
In 10 years (or less hopefully) we should have really large (80") true 3D displays that a bunch of people can stand around and touch (like what those guys in Perceptive Pixel, recently bought by Microsoft*, do). Talk about science fiction.
I actually submitted this story a day or two ago but I didn't understand how it worked (and still really don't get it, the math is beyond me). Anyway I'm glad it's getting the attention it deserves.
*Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't kill it, or use the patents it acquired to block progress.
The one big (science) flaw in the movie "The Matrix" was why they needed to use humans.
They had some pseudo babble involving using the humans as batteries (involving cold fusion I think).
Instead, they should've had the machines using the unused portions (we're only using 10 percent right?)* of the humans brains for things like this, image recognition which machines suck at.
Anyway, anytime the Wachowski brothers need a science consultant I'm right here (Wisebabo:). (I actually helped with the writing of one of the episodes of "The Animatrix" but that's another story).
Ok, I know this is desperate but with the ecosystem facing another Great Extinction (where a substantial portion of the species on Earth are going to be driven to extinction except this time is because of US)* we've got to do something.
Why not auction off the names of newly discovered species? (And preferably give the money to conservation efforts).
I think people (and maybe even corporations) would be more interested in conservation if they had a species named after them. If they knew their species was endangered or the habitat their species lived in was threatened, they might rally to save it. I mean, this is another form of IMMORTALITY, very few people will be remembered after a few centuries but a species name? It reminds me of the scientist Seaborg, he said while other scientists got Nobel prizes he was on the periodic table for eternity! (or something like that).
Maybe if we get REALLY desperate we could re-name already named species. I know it's repulsive but surely Exxon would pay a huge amount to have the (scientific) name of the Tiger changed to it. Or Apple would similarly pay perhaps for the entire family of apples to be named, well you get it.
While unglamorous (is that a word?) species wouldn't fetch much money perhaps, in some cases, that could be turned around. Consider the guinea worm, a species very close to eradication (yay!). Just like smallpox, it could be named because there is no such thing as bad publicity. (Some pest removal company would probably pay dearly for that name!).
*no I don't mean US as in United States (although I know we bear more than our share of the blame). Anyway, have you seen the funny video "So you've got a case of the Humans"?
One benefit of multi-screen games is that they can provide, when angled inward, is peripheral vision.
Even an infinitely wide flat display can only provide 180 degrees of view. However, depending on the widths, position of the viewer and amount the panels are angled, a multi-screen system can do much better.
Anyway, are there any tweaks in the softawe to account for this? If you DO angle the displays, then you no longer have a flat "window" into the virtual 3D world. So the software should account for this (and ideally also the size of the bevels) and ask you the angles that you've set up your monitors. (I'm not a gamer so I don't know, maybe this is commonplace).
A really sophisticated setup would allow you to place arbitrarily sized monitors at arbitrary locations and angles, like portals onto an imaginary world. Would be best for flight/ship/tank simulators. Actually, if you're going to go this far, maybe it's just easier to use a virtual reality headset.
... but all they did was change the formatting a little and delete one or two sentences. As my only defense all I can say is I wrote it very quickly because I didn't want to be scooped. Here's my original submission:
Cloned Horses Ok To Compete In The Olympics
"Of course they'll still be restricted to the equestrian events (ha ha).
One wonders if they'll be allowed to do the same in say horse or dog racing. It'll then just come down to the ability of the jockeys I guess (or training).
I wonder why they don't make all Olympic athletes use the same exact "equipment" as their competitors. That would get rid of situations like with those super efficient swimsuits that were banned. Of course they really should return to the spirit of the original Games and compete NAKED. That would really improve ratings! (But it would make the winter games rather hazardous.)
When do you think cloning ATHELETES will become legal? That's something I wouldn't put past the old USSR/East European Block. Remember the "women" atheletes they sent?"
DNA (and in fact the cells in which it is encased) is so unbelievably light that if you could get it out of the atmosphere, the light pressure from the sun could blow it to the moon in a matter of days(?).
So just take some skin flakes and grind it up into an extremely fine powder. Attach it to a weather balloon (with an optional rocket stage). At the edge of the atmosphere with the setting sun in one direction and the moon in another, release the powder.
Is it absolutely positively guaranteed to get to the moon undamaged? Will any of it/you survive? No, but it's not like you were going to do something useful with it anyway (like make a clone). Anyway, some of the bacteria that lives on you might conceivably make the trip. Think of this as the poor man's version of panspermia.
... of the Sea" (With the cool sub that had a giant viewport in the front and could launch a flying saucer like aircraft).
I seem to remember a nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere causing the ionosphere(?) to ignite(?) and BAD THINGS happening. They are sent to launch a counter missile(?) which will extinguish the "flame". (Sorry, it's late here in Vietnam and I'm too lazy to research.
Unfortunately, this is probably a good argument against project Orion. Hundreds (thousands?) of tiny nukes going off in LEO would probably also do bad things.
Was this a factor leading up to the above ground test ban treaty? I mean it wouldn't be good to accidentally wipe out the world's electronics industry. (Now doing it on purpose, that's something else entirely). The test ban treaty probably stopped the development of "shaped" nuclear charges (blasting a city from an explosion in orbit) and other exotic weapons like fission bomb pumped x-ray lasers. Oh well, let's hope the Aliens are friendly!
Come'on when was the last time you've ever heard the words "not as cool" coming from a bunch of silly looking serious magistrates (with those funky white hairpieces).
Look, tampering or wholesale stealing of the vote is about the worst thing that can happen in a democracy. No really.
So punish the people caught with VERY severe punishments, like multi-decade stints in prison (sorry I'm against the death penalty). That way, even if you catch a little fish, chances are good he'll squeal like a pig and rat out the higher ups.
My only fear is that some of the people who are crazy motivated might actually think that their cause is worth sacrificing the rest of their lives for. Fortunately the U.S. hasn't quite gotten to the point where those people are more than a tiny fraction of the population; otherwise you'd see suicide bombers at political events.
(Also, "dirty tactics" like fraudulent robo-calls which claim to be someone who they aren't or send people to the wrong polling place, should have their punishments significantly increased. Again, you're subverting the basic premise of a democracy).
So I seem to remember a proposal to use pulsars to provide a sort of galactic GPS. (Pulsars, spinning neutron stars, are extremely stable periodic emitters of radio waves at interstellar distances). I think this might be what an earlier poster was referring to for spacecraft navigation, I believe they were used on the famous Pioneer 10 plaque (with the naked humans) to show aliens where we live.
Anyway, what's the accuracy for this (the previous poster mentions several hundred meters over hundreds of kilometers but I don't know if it's the same system)? Is it as good as (terrestrial) GPS? Will it be good enough to use for the upcoming GAIA mission which will map the 3D location of a billion stars in our galaxy?* (The positioning requirements of that mission are borderline insane!). Is there any way to use these celestial beacons as (another) GPS backup or are the signals far too weak (or unstable or blocked by our atmosphere or are in already used radio bands)?
Sorry about the more than one questions but they're all related.:)
*actually since most (all?) of these pulsars are within our galaxy maybe they are not far enough away to have no apparent motion (in which case they would be hard for GAIA to use as a reference). Are there any extra-galactic sources (Quasars?) that could serve a similar function?
So I've heard that a problem with the GPS and presumably other systems is that the radio signals are slowed by varying amounts by going through the ionosphere (thus reducing accuracy). I realize that you cannot use quantum entanglement to send (new?) information but does that include the information that a measurement has been made (if not the result)?
So could GPS use entanglement to precisely determine the time of a measurement? I think it's been demonstrated that they can send an entangled photon hundreds of kilometers so it's only a matter of time before it becomes practical to use these devices on satellites.
So, since the GPS satellites and other systems are enmeshing the world in streams of digital data, can a portion of the data stream be used to transmit some sort of key so that it can be proven the receiver was at a specific space-time coordinate?
Like if satellite A was transmitting a continuously varying stream of random numbers and satellite B was doing the same then a receiver could take the product of the "random" numbers that it captured over a short window of time and use it to encrypt and "space-time" stamp it (neat concept, can I patent it?).
If the flow of numbers is sufficiently fast perhaps it would be impractical for a third party to retain and compare all possible products of the numbers sent by all the satellites. (Maybe it'll need another source if random numbers to mix in, say from a natural source like a pulsar?). Then again since I'm not a cryptographer/signal specialist perhaps there is a very simple reason why this won't work.
I seem to remember another Apple patent that did something very interesting. It had most (all?) of the electronics, lasers and what not on a separate unit that presumably would be worn on the belt (or I guess hand held).
Then, it would deliver the images VIA FIBER OPTICS (I guess like an endoscope) up to the "glasses" where presumably they would be displayed. This would (presumably) keep the weight and bulkiness of the glasses down although it introduces a cable. Still since having a cable hasn't kept millions of iPod/iPhone users from their iconic white earbuds, that may not be a serious impediment to its adoption. (Would the cable be white? Would it be called "eye buds"?)
So perhaps the iPhone X will have a little fiber optic jack (combined somehow with a copper wire so audio can be delivered).. Of course there might be a warning "Do not look into optical port with remaining eye!".
I don't know if this patent complements the previous one or represents another approach.
And not just because, well, civilization has collapsed.
See a big revolution (the first industrial revolution?) was through interchangeable parts. That's what (I've heard) gave the Union armies such an advantage over the Confederates, if something broke you didn't need a skilled craftsman to repair it. Just replace the broken part.
With custom made items from 3D prototypers everything will be unique. If civilization breaks down (no Internet!) being able to find the plans (or getting them scanned) will be much more difficult. Probably doesn't rank up there with water, food and shelter but it might be a serious impediment to recovery.
By the way, if I'm correct about the first industrial revolution, was the second one caused by the assembly line? Or am I completely off (from what most people think). Was the first caused by something like steam power and the second by electricity?
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
— Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
Ok, I didn't get the quote exactly right but I think I captured the gist of it.
I remember reading some of Larry Niven's earlier SF stories in which a variation of this was used on his spacecraft. They were made out of Puppeteer General Product hulls which were transparent in the wavelengths their customers "saw" in. Anyway, the spacecraft hulls had this sun screening trick.
There was one story ("Neutron Star"?) in which the protagonist worried if any of the other alien species saw in X-Rays.
Slashdot Mirror
" The diversity of life has historically increased with warming".
Sure, but the same can be said of asteroid impacts; new studies have indicated that after as short as 10 million years, the biosphere has recovered and maybe even opened up a few new ecological niches by dislodging the old dominant species (bye bye dinosaurs!).
The problem is the word "short". On any human timescale, ten million years is a long time. In a few centuries which really is the blink of an eye in a geological sense, we'll be altering the climate substantially. For many species (millions?) it will be too fast for them to evolve.
So they'll die.
Global warming will NOT extinguish life on earth (well not unless we manage to cause a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus). It does have the potential of creating a less diverse world filled with crabgrass, cockroaches and rats and other generalist species (like us) that will take over. Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century.
And Americans in particular.
(Bjorn Lomborg) as two prominent if not THE most prominent AGW skeptics to change their minds. (I've heard of these guys and if I've heard of them, since I'm not a specialist, I figure they must be prominent).
So what's it going to take? Convincing every last person that this isn't real? That's going to be pretty damned impossible because as Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.". Substitute the word "salary" with "lifestyle" (or even "SUV") and you'll see how the average American thinks.
I've read that a ten percentage increase in electrical costs would be enough to sequester all the CO2 we're currently emitting. So the fact that a ten percentage increase in something that is not a big item in the average American budget is keeping us from potentially preventing great harm to our ecology, biosphere and a great number of species on this planet (including us!) makes me realize that we will deserve the hell on earth we get.
"A new airplane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new airplane possible".
While this may be the right thing to do, admit your mistake (cough "shuttle" cough), and use a simple cheap design for a big dumb booster, I'm a little sad for possibilities lost.
Too bad the linear aerospike engines never panned out (X-37?) or the hypersonic scramjet hasn't been fully developed. While the F-1 may reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, it'll take some revolutionary new technology to bring it down by a factor of 100. (Unless I'm seriously wrong and Elon Musk can do it by reusability and sheer operational efficiency). So maybe space flight for the ultra-rich but not for the rest of us. Not until the space elevator at least.
I'm also afraid that the rebirth and re-design of the F-1 will suffer "mission creep" like; let's make it out of some super-exotic alloy to protect against corrosion for possible ocean recovery and we need to add the capability for a restart. By the way, just how reliable were the original F-1s? Didn't one fail on the way to orbit on Apollo 13? Any other failures?
TFA says there is a webcam. Anyone know if there will be a way for us not on NASA's payroll to watch?
I mean, technically you COULD direct a car (or almost any vehicle, they're so ubiquitous) without it but they're so useful it seems almost mandatory. (I think, maybe, the first Wright brother's planes didn't use them but last I checked they're actually two of them in every cockpit). I'm not a patent attorney or IP expert so this is just my guess as to what the issues are.
However, that's a pretty high "standard". What should be the standard? Should it be determined by a popularity contest? User interface designer's testimony? Shouldn't Apple be entitled to something (I mean they spent time and money coming up with their ideas, not to mention that "utility" patents which are essential, are not free).
Yet another issue to be debated during possible patent reform.
I know we shouldn't be screwing around with the environment but it looks like we'll be getting desperate by the time we get off our butts to do something. And anyway, as other posters have mentioned, we've been running an uncontrolled experiment into the release of many gigatons of CO2 for quite some time now.
So, while their are undeniable risks that this entails, are there any benefits? If these phytoplankton aren't snapped up by noxious jellyfish* (and all of them don't sink to the bottom although that wouldn't be all bad) could this bolster the food chain? I mean wouldn't this cause an increase in the productivity of the whole food chain? They don't call some parts of the ocean (the southern pacific I think) a "desert" for nothing. We are basically fertilizing the ocean, if done right that might be a very good thing! (sushi)
Did the researchers look into the fish/krill/higher predators populations? Did they see any noticeable increase (or decrease)?
*even this might not be too bad, don't pelagic sunfish and sea turtles eat jellyfish? Turtle soup anyone?
... of components due to lack of air (and gravity!) for convection cooling. I think that these are not the same things (although they are related) the sunlit side of the satellite could be a toasty 100 degrees C, while the dark side could be -100. If the satellite is spinning but not fast enough perhaps some traces could expand and contract enough to break. Meanwhile without air to conduct heat, a single small component on the board could overheat and fail.
I think the Russians (at least in the early days), put their electronics in pressured boxes with fans to stir the air. The Americans developed space (vacuum) ready components and designs from the get go.
This is really a significant breakthrough. I mean good looking, glasses free 3D (please look at the video) which means MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS VIEWERS using CHEAP components. The only difficulty is the compute power requirement is a little high but that's nothing that won't be solved quickly thanks to Dr. Moore. (I think they are also able to use GPUs so massive cheap parallelism can overwhelm the problem).
A previous poster brought up the good point that it wasn't clear if the scene was pre-rendered. If/when it can be done on the fly (just a matter of CPU power), think of the applications. CAD, GAMES!
In 10 years (or less hopefully) we should have really large (80") true 3D displays that a bunch of people can stand around and touch (like what those guys in Perceptive Pixel, recently bought by Microsoft*, do). Talk about science fiction.
I actually submitted this story a day or two ago but I didn't understand how it worked (and still really don't get it, the math is beyond me). Anyway I'm glad it's getting the attention it deserves.
*Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't kill it, or use the patents it acquired to block progress.
Otherwise it'll be pretty obvious (in any atmospheric conditions where there are particles or aerosols) as to just where the drone (and base!) is.
Of course with a pair of night vision goggles the same might be true of an infra-red laser. How about x-ray? ;)
The one big (science) flaw in the movie "The Matrix" was why they needed to use humans.
They had some pseudo babble involving using the humans as batteries (involving cold fusion I think).
Instead, they should've had the machines using the unused portions (we're only using 10 percent right?)* of the humans brains for things like this, image recognition which machines suck at.
Anyway, anytime the Wachowski brothers need a science consultant I'm right here (Wisebabo :). (I actually helped with the writing of one of the episodes of "The Animatrix" but that's another story).
*I know that's an urban myth but it fits here.
Ok, I know this is desperate but with the ecosystem facing another Great Extinction (where a substantial portion of the species on Earth are going to be driven to extinction except this time is because of US)* we've got to do something.
Why not auction off the names of newly discovered species? (And preferably give the money to conservation efforts).
I think people (and maybe even corporations) would be more interested in conservation if they had a species named after them. If they knew their species was endangered or the habitat their species lived in was threatened, they might rally to save it. I mean, this is another form of IMMORTALITY, very few people will be remembered after a few centuries but a species name? It reminds me of the scientist Seaborg, he said while other scientists got Nobel prizes he was on the periodic table for eternity! (or something like that).
Maybe if we get REALLY desperate we could re-name already named species. I know it's repulsive but surely Exxon would pay a huge amount to have the (scientific) name of the Tiger changed to it. Or Apple would similarly pay perhaps for the entire family of apples to be named, well you get it.
While unglamorous (is that a word?) species wouldn't fetch much money perhaps, in some cases, that could be turned around. Consider the guinea worm, a species very close to eradication (yay!). Just like smallpox, it could be named because there is no such thing as bad publicity. (Some pest removal company would probably pay dearly for that name!).
*no I don't mean US as in United States (although I know we bear more than our share of the blame). Anyway, have you seen the funny video "So you've got a case of the Humans"?
One benefit of multi-screen games is that they can provide, when angled inward, is peripheral vision.
Even an infinitely wide flat display can only provide 180 degrees of view. However, depending on the widths, position of the viewer and amount the panels are angled, a multi-screen system can do much better.
Anyway, are there any tweaks in the softawe to account for this? If you DO angle the displays, then you no longer have a flat "window" into the virtual 3D world. So the software should account for this (and ideally also the size of the bevels) and ask you the angles that you've set up your monitors. (I'm not a gamer so I don't know, maybe this is commonplace).
A really sophisticated setup would allow you to place arbitrarily sized monitors at arbitrary locations and angles, like portals onto an imaginary world. Would be best for flight/ship/tank simulators. Actually, if you're going to go this far, maybe it's just easier to use a virtual reality headset.
... but all they did was change the formatting a little and delete one or two sentences. As my only defense all I can say is I wrote it very quickly because I didn't want to be scooped. Here's my original submission:
Cloned Horses Ok To Compete In The Olympics
"Of course they'll still be restricted to the equestrian events (ha ha).
One wonders if they'll be allowed to do the same in say horse or dog racing. It'll then just come down to the ability of the jockeys I guess (or training).
I wonder why they don't make all Olympic athletes use the same exact "equipment" as their competitors. That would get rid of situations like with those super efficient swimsuits that were banned. Of course they really should return to the spirit of the original Games and compete NAKED. That would really improve ratings! (But it would make the winter games rather hazardous.)
When do you think cloning ATHELETES will become legal? That's something I wouldn't put past the old USSR/East European Block. Remember the "women" atheletes they sent?"
Link to Original Source
DNA (and in fact the cells in which it is encased) is so unbelievably light that if you could get it out of the atmosphere, the light pressure from the sun could blow it to the moon in a matter of days(?).
So just take some skin flakes and grind it up into an extremely fine powder. Attach it to a weather balloon (with an optional rocket stage). At the edge of the atmosphere with the setting sun in one direction and the moon in another, release the powder.
Is it absolutely positively guaranteed to get to the moon undamaged? Will any of it/you survive? No, but it's not like you were going to do something useful with it anyway (like make a clone). Anyway, some of the bacteria that lives on you might conceivably make the trip. Think of this as the poor man's version of panspermia.
... of the Sea" (With the cool sub that had a giant viewport in the front and could launch a flying saucer like aircraft).
I seem to remember a nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere causing the ionosphere(?) to ignite(?) and BAD THINGS happening. They are sent to launch a counter missile(?) which will extinguish the "flame". (Sorry, it's late here in Vietnam and I'm too lazy to research.
Unfortunately, this is probably a good argument against project Orion. Hundreds (thousands?) of tiny nukes going off in LEO would probably also do bad things.
Was this a factor leading up to the above ground test ban treaty? I mean it wouldn't be good to accidentally wipe out the world's electronics industry. (Now doing it on purpose, that's something else entirely). The test ban treaty probably stopped the development of "shaped" nuclear charges (blasting a city from an explosion in orbit) and other exotic weapons like fission bomb pumped x-ray lasers. Oh well, let's hope the Aliens are friendly!
Come'on when was the last time you've ever heard the words "not as cool" coming from a bunch of silly looking serious magistrates (with those funky white hairpieces).
It's a funny image.
Look, tampering or wholesale stealing of the vote is about the worst thing that can happen in a democracy. No really.
So punish the people caught with VERY severe punishments, like multi-decade stints in prison (sorry I'm against the death penalty). That way, even if you catch a little fish, chances are good he'll squeal like a pig and rat out the higher ups.
My only fear is that some of the people who are crazy motivated might actually think that their cause is worth sacrificing the rest of their lives for. Fortunately the U.S. hasn't quite gotten to the point where those people are more than a tiny fraction of the population; otherwise you'd see suicide bombers at political events.
(Also, "dirty tactics" like fraudulent robo-calls which claim to be someone who they aren't or send people to the wrong polling place, should have their punishments significantly increased. Again, you're subverting the basic premise of a democracy).
So I seem to remember a proposal to use pulsars to provide a sort of galactic GPS. (Pulsars, spinning neutron stars, are extremely stable periodic emitters of radio waves at interstellar distances). I think this might be what an earlier poster was referring to for spacecraft navigation, I believe they were used on the famous Pioneer 10 plaque (with the naked humans) to show aliens where we live.
Anyway, what's the accuracy for this (the previous poster mentions several hundred meters over hundreds of kilometers but I don't know if it's the same system)? Is it as good as (terrestrial) GPS? Will it be good enough to use for the upcoming GAIA mission which will map the 3D location of a billion stars in our galaxy?* (The positioning requirements of that mission are borderline insane!). Is there any way to use these celestial beacons as (another) GPS backup or are the signals far too weak (or unstable or blocked by our atmosphere or are in already used radio bands)?
Sorry about the more than one questions but they're all related. :)
*actually since most (all?) of these pulsars are within our galaxy maybe they are not far enough away to have no apparent motion (in which case they would be hard for GAIA to use as a reference). Are there any extra-galactic sources (Quasars?) that could serve a similar function?
So I've heard that a problem with the GPS and presumably other systems is that the radio signals are slowed by varying amounts by going through the ionosphere (thus reducing accuracy). I realize that you cannot use quantum entanglement to send (new?) information but does that include the information that a measurement has been made (if not the result)?
So could GPS use entanglement to precisely determine the time of a measurement? I think it's been demonstrated that they can send an entangled photon hundreds of kilometers so it's only a matter of time before it becomes practical to use these devices on satellites.
So, since the GPS satellites and other systems are enmeshing the world in streams of digital data, can a portion of the data stream be used to transmit some sort of key so that it can be proven the receiver was at a specific space-time coordinate?
Like if satellite A was transmitting a continuously varying stream of random numbers and satellite B was doing the same then a receiver could take the product of the "random" numbers that it captured over a short window of time and use it to encrypt and "space-time" stamp it (neat concept, can I patent it?).
If the flow of numbers is sufficiently fast perhaps it would be impractical for a third party to retain and compare all possible products of the numbers sent by all the satellites. (Maybe it'll need another source if random numbers to mix in, say from a natural source like a pulsar?). Then again since I'm not a cryptographer/signal specialist perhaps there is a very simple reason why this won't work.
I seem to remember another Apple patent that did something very interesting. It had most (all?) of the electronics, lasers and what not on a separate unit that presumably would be worn on the belt (or I guess hand held).
Then, it would deliver the images VIA FIBER OPTICS (I guess like an endoscope) up to the "glasses" where presumably they would be displayed. This would (presumably) keep the weight and bulkiness of the glasses down although it introduces a cable. Still since having a cable hasn't kept millions of iPod/iPhone users from their iconic white earbuds, that may not be a serious impediment to its adoption. (Would the cable be white? Would it be called "eye buds"?)
So perhaps the iPhone X will have a little fiber optic jack (combined somehow with a copper wire so audio can be delivered).. Of course there might be a warning "Do not look into optical port with remaining eye!".
I don't know if this patent complements the previous one or represents another approach.
And not just because, well, civilization has collapsed.
See a big revolution (the first industrial revolution?) was through interchangeable parts. That's what (I've heard) gave the Union armies such an advantage over the Confederates, if something broke you didn't need a skilled craftsman to repair it. Just replace the broken part.
With custom made items from 3D prototypers everything will be unique. If civilization breaks down (no Internet!) being able to find the plans (or getting them scanned) will be much more difficult. Probably doesn't rank up there with water, food and shelter but it might be a serious impediment to recovery.
By the way, if I'm correct about the first industrial revolution, was the second one caused by the assembly line? Or am I completely off (from what most people think). Was the first caused by something like steam power and the second by electricity?
But I later checked and found the correct quote (by Laplace). See below.
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
— Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
Ok, I didn't get the quote exactly right but I think I captured the gist of it.
I remember reading some of Larry Niven's earlier SF stories in which a variation of this was used on his spacecraft. They were made out of Puppeteer General Product hulls which were transparent in the wavelengths their customers "saw" in. Anyway, the spacecraft hulls had this sun screening trick.
There was one story ("Neutron Star"?) in which the protagonist worried if any of the other alien species saw in X-Rays.