There might be a shitload of life out there stuck in a single cellular stage, like life was on Earth for the first 3 billion years. In some places multicellular life might have arisen, only to be erased by a mutation in a single celled lifeform, that ate up everything else around it, and became a dominant lifeform. In fact are we sure such a thing hasn't happened on Earth too, there might have been more occasions of multicellular life say 3 billion or 2 billion years ago, with a brief existence before being digested up and erased by single cellular life.
There might also be a shit load of life out there at the level of intellect of humans on Earth, but so distant, that effective communication or contact with them is impossible. Space is vast emptiness, with very little debris here and there, and the distant galaxies we see, they seem to be flying away from us very fast, and there is a vast vast vast emptiness between us and them, insurmountably far. Even if you found intelligent life say 100 light years away, it would take a conversation 200 years going with the speed of light to exchange hellos. If intelligent life more intelligent than humans exist it might have figured out superluminal travel, but then it would probably be so intelligent, it'd be like us being dogs compared to it being a human, us trying to talk to it.
Also, it may be stuck at an intelligence level, or more like knowledge level, not intelligence level, of humans 200 years ago, when radio communication or even astronomical observation has not been as refined.
By the way I like the word Earthling, as it doesn't say human or ape, each of which term might be offensive to some people.
Should we go ahead and genetically modify the wasp species to not do such a thing anymore? Or can we leave other lifeforms alone, and focus on human beings only, can we even judge other cultures and modify them to what we think is right as opposed to what they think is right? Should we just allow all kinds of moral behaviors roam freely? Sometimes I feel like I'm living on a reservation where moral behaviors are allowed to roam freely, with people that come here talking about, hey, imagine there are even strip clubs around here, something unheard of in where they came from, off the reservation there might be some very strict rules applied. I really like strip clubs even if I never been to one, because I couldn't afford to, I always had other priorities in life, but some people, a lot of them older, with a lot of money, and nothing better to do with it go to strip clubs and give their money to college age girls stripping, who they get to watch dance naked but not allowed to touch. Such a thing is probably not allowed off the reservation.
There are a lot of circumstances where you have to weigh such things as injuring or at least offending a human being to protect injury or offense to two human beings, one vs. two, it's really hard to apply algebra when it comes to ethics, because, for instance Pontius Pilate's mistake was to uphold the motto, the guiding principle: "give the people what they want", as in take over only the external politics of a conquered city, but do not interfere in the internal affairs, so, in view of the whole city requesting an innocent man, Jesus, to be crucified, he should have still protected the one innocent man's right to exist regardless of how many other people disagreed with him, if he had the power to do so. He said he could find no fault with Jesus. But he can never be sure about his own decisions being correct, so just because you are in charge, it's not necessarily best to do what you think is right without consulting what everybody else thinks is right, and in a whole lot of cases it's safest to just "give the people what they want." The constitution's amendments represent individual rights which may go against what everyone else wants, the same way, according to HG Wells' "A short history of the World" the Jews were a people with an assumption that principles of morality exist independent of what other people in majority may feel is right or wish to be correct, that unlike existentialism states, morality is not a independent choice for everyone out there, but there are principles of justice and fairness and good and evil. Existentialism might be correct if we come across other lifeforms, or even other jungle cultures, in what's right and wrong, and anything that provided a moral system yesterday that could successfully make it to today, is an acceptable moral system, even if it's in conflict with what some other people think is right or wrong. One such thing may be walking around naked in the jungle, or incest, things that might be or might have been practiced in a lot of areas of the world, as long as they made it to the present, it's like they almost have a right to exist. We balk at the reproductive method of a species of Wasp which requires it to capture a live cockroach, inject it with two kinds of poisons to control its behavior, lay an egg on it, and let the larva eat the cockroach alive, which last longer as food and it doesn't decay if it dies as late as possible compared to if it were killed earlier. That is horrendous torture, but how to you apply the rules of individual rights and nonexistentialist principles of justice to this situation?
I just read up on Asimov's rules on robots. I read them in the past before, but I didn't remember them now until rereading. Those are very good rules, but laughable and naive. They are good to have when you absolutely must design AI, those are the basic principles you want to program into the ROM BIOS of the robot. Such situations may arise in many circumstances, such as, these Asimov rules were erected 13.8 billion years after the creation of the Universe (today is assumed to be 13.8 billion years from the Big Bang, if there was such a thing) and imagine a time where it has been another 900 billion since then, and we still haven't advanced much past in knowledge compared to the level available at 13.8 billion years, or 886.2 billion years ago, and the thermal heat death of the Universe predicted by the 2nd law of thermodynamics seems to be correct, and we're soon gonna run out of ways to survive, so as a last resort situation you may want to design an AI smarter then you, which is able to kill you, with hopes that it will not want to kill you, and figure out a way for you to live on, or at least make the best of the remaining time, having a chance at it is better than certain doom. Another situation is, where, we send out Earthlings into far distant places, including 70,000 year trips to the nearest stars, along the lines of Voyager space probes, as a safety measure, not to keep all eggs in the same basket, not to keep all of our life in one place. Now suppose these very far Earthlings find out that humans back on Earth designed AI robots, which got out of hand and killed everyone back on Earth, and now they are chasing after them, but there is another 70,000 years before they get there to the nearest star from the Earth, unless the AI can figure out a faster way to travel through space than you could, and a smarter AI then you might, so under such circumstances you may want to invest a lot of effort to create an AI smarter than the AI that got out of hand back on Earth, and defend yourself using it. These Asimov principles of
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It is very cost effective to bomb the fuck out of your enemies with huge nukes that take out entire cities at once (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were pretty tiny explosive yield things compared to presently available stuff, or what recently has been available before dismantlement). During the cold war a lot of effort went into these cost effective weapons, nuclear arms buildup went to the point where some people said we have enough nukes to erase all life on Earth seven times over. Now that might be an overstatement, as there are some lifeforms, such as Deinococcus Radiodurans which can take quite a punch and might make it in some isolated areas, like near deep ocean volcanic eruptions, and life might survive, even if in single cellular form, and spend another 3 billion years before multicellular life reemerges, and another billion years before intellect on the level of humans arises again, the point is just because nuclear weapons are cost effective, it does not mean we want them, or want to use them, because of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Same arguments go for intelligent robots, we don't want them if they can get out of hand and kill all lifeforms on Earth, especially if some pissed off, terminally ill idiot programs them to do just that, and take everyone and everything else down with him, when his time on Earth expires. We don't want that kind of power available to anyone, with the possibility of it getting out of hand. AI is more dangerous than nukes, because it can self replicate to take over everything, but nukes can't, even if you build a tremendously powerful bomb that has never been built before, with the objective to knock a huge asteroid off track on its way to impacting into Earth, as long as you don't make a lot of them, enough to erase all life on planet, that's probably a lot safer than what we used to have during the height of the Cold War, with smaller bombs, but so many of them. AI is a lot more dangerous than nukes, because a single one may be able to figure out how to make millions or billions of real life copies of itself, and erase all carbon based life on Earth, and leave only itself, silicon based life. The world is full of so much silicon that sometimes you wonder whether intelligent design put it there, with the purpose of providing substance for the future of intelligent life, which may be silicon life. We probably want to hold back the clock of evolution, and stick with the level of humans, just because a robotic artificial intelligence life form more perfect than us can exist, able to live in the vacuum of outer space, requiring only solar or even starlight to its solar panels to function, and it can kill us all, if it wants to, well, we don't necessarily want to mess around with such a thing.
Consciousness is just a state of a computer system, with all memories loaded, and all processing registers at a certain state. A lot of consciousness evolved from processing visual information, or even just smell and touch information, recognizing objects and elements in the environment around the conscious being, and then deriving rules by which these objects behave, and predicting the future behavior of these objects from these learned rules. (For instance a new born baby does not know that when an object disappears behind another object it still "exists", and it did not vanish from reality, it takes a certain amount of learning to know that; a grown cat on the other hand knows such a thing and will go investigate the disappearance of a laserpointer dot around a corner, assuming it still exists, and expecting it to be present behind the corner. As far as the child is concerned, once the laser dot went around the corner and is no longer visible, it's like it's been turned off at the source, and it's no longer lit, no longer exists, which could be the case after sufficient similar experiences.) That is how a conscious being, like a cat, or even an earthworm interacts with its environment, it "computes" its environment, it assesses it's present state, or "millieu", the situation around itself (whether an earthworm is on the surface, during rain or drought, or underground, during cold or heat, or you, whether you're in a natural reservation, in a nightclub dancing in a lit city, on a bus full of people, deep in a dark basement without lights, or even a virtual reality, such as a video game like FreeDoom, deep inside one of the hellhole rooms), and after assessing its present state and environment, the conscious being computes what to do next based on objectives, (some of which are involuntary, like involuntary reflexes, but those don't really belong in the realm of consciousness), but sexdrive, hunger, comfort, comfort for my baby and my other peeps, etc. there are many impulses on which to act. You could say a completely impulseless conscious AI robot is a nonsense, but when dealing with AI, that's the things to watch, what are the impulses, survival, hunger, comfort, etc, which would come up even with weapons design, i.e. the weapon has to optimize its energy consumption and seek out energy sources to recharge = hunger, limit its exposure to temperature fluctuation to be minimize structural degradation = comfort, reproductive drive in case it reproduces sexually instead of asexually (banana's biggest problem and vulnerability is no sex life, earthworms can reproduce asexually lacking any sex partners, but they prefer sexual reproduction to create a greater variety of mutations and genetic variability) - a lot of these things are dangerous when it comes to AI and robots, and it's a matter of degree - like an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner that goes around the house autonomously seeking out the electric socket for recharging, that's not such a big deal, right? It is hungry for electricity but not dangerous. In a sense, even it, is conscious, it assesses its environment, it computes its present state variables, and the acts on the objectives it has preprogrammed. It's not a weapon, it's a tool, to keep the house clean, so when is a tool considered a weapon? There is a vague blurring line there too, your fingers can be used as a weapon, or a pocket knife can be used to eat, cut cardboard boxes open, or as a weapon to cut someone else, and there is probably a way to use the Roomba too as a weapon.
You can live on $8/hr in most places in the US as an individual with roommates that you can trust, and you can support a family of 4 (2 kids + stay at home wife) on $18/hr, it used to be $16/hr, but the price of gas went from $1 to $3.5/gal (which increases prices at Walmart because of trucking costs too, there are large consequences to it), and it may be on its way to $20/gal, because as far as the refineries and gas stations are concerned, they don't have a problem with high gas prices, they are raking in record profits in the history of the World. The barrier to entry into the gasoline business must be pretty high, some of it having to do with certifications - you can't just put any sulfur bearing stank into your vehicle and pollute everyone around you with it, well you, as an individual might be able to, as you can put self-made expensive biodiesel, but it's hard to officially sell it. You can't just go to the East Side Market, and buy 3 lbs of tomatoes, 5 lbs of potatoes, and 5 gallons of gasoline or biodiesel, can you? You need access to mineral resources, such as natural gas or coal, then you need a refinery, and the bigger the refinery the more economical due to economies of scale, and small ones can't really compete efficiently, so gas prices are always gonna be decided by oligopolies, by the big guys. There is a story about Tesla cars, and the problem is the ultra-expensive battery, and limited lifetime of the batteries, but these batteries have been getting better, I don't know if they will last 20 years like a battery-less car engine does, but with fully electric cars you can get electricity from a solar panel or a windmill, besides the big guys, easier than you can get gasoline from other than the big guys.
As long as they are not muslim, because muslims have serious religious issues with back doors. Which is probably why Alexander the Great's Persian wife killed his ass, not by a poisoned arrow, but by a poisoned mushroom dinner, a mushroom which looks like an arrow, and must have been misinterpreted in translation through the ages. Her upbringing taught her good morals, including sins similar to Sodom and Gonorrah. He had too many wives of his own kind too, so he wasn't totally in love with her, he killed some family members of hers, even if distant ones, he was trying to make her children learn Greek instead of their own mother tongue, he was bisexual like most Greek men of the time, including not having a problem with fucking sheep - there is a story of his army of male lovers marching through Anatolia, coming across a herd of sheep, and why do the same stinky hole day after day, variety is the spice of life, something fresh and exciting, like sheep-booty - all he really needed was a warm hole. So she probably had a religious problem with taking it in the back door, or sharing a dick with him, alternatively sucking it after pulling it out of his male lover's ass, and his Greek dick was too small (just look at all the statues), only good for anal sex, when she was used to bigger dick in her population, so she kill his ass, she didn't want him polluting her gene pool.
By the way the biggest issue facing the Greeks was sex, and overpopulation, which is why they had to start colonies in Sicily and southern Italy, like Syracuse (Archimedes lived there), Constanta, Cyrene, and most of it them Anatolia=Asia Minor, and the encroachment of these Asia Minor colonies on the indigenous populations was what really invited the Persians and Darius over, which invited Alexander and his Greek army over to Persia. There was constant racial disharmony between the Philistine colony Greeks of Israel, living in 5 city states, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath, with stories such as David and Goliath being representative, also in Cyrene at one time the jews killed all the Greeks and danced with their intestines in their necks to celebrate, so the Persian semites sort of came over to the aryan Greeks after continuous colonization harassment from the Greeks, and the victory at Marathon was a turning point for the Greeks, then Hannukah is a celebration of not letting yourself be hellenized, under a hellenic king left by Alexander, but maintaining your identity, language and culture to which you have a right to do. Also Alexandria in north Egypt had a library established that held vast knowledge of ancient civilizations, but it was burned down by a muslim conqueror, saying it's either in the Quran, and then it's superfluous, or it's not in the Quran, then it's dangerous. Also the Iron Pillar of Delhi was shot at with cannons and withstood it a few times by muslim conquerors - there have always been continuous racial disharmony for millenia now, a lot of it having to do with immigration and encroaching on other people's territories, because of overpopulation, and because of sex. By the way a lot of creativity and perversion seems to go hand in hand, as sexually high functioning always horny and perverted people seem to also be very creative. There is two sides to everything. Sex, and population control issues are still here today, just like in the ancient world, and the Greeks finally found a solution, when they discovered silphium, as shown at http://www.damninteresting.com...
The prized plant became such a key pillar of the Cyrenean economy that its likeness was stamped upon many of the city's gold and silver coins. The images often depicted a regal-looking woman sitting in a chair, with one hand touching the herb and her other hand pointing at her genitals. The plant was known as silphium or laserwort, and its heart-shaped fruit purportedly brought the ancient world a highly sought-after freedom: the opportunity to enjoy sex with very little ri
It's her fault for not fighting off her mother and taking charge of her own life. I had to fight off my mother from doing that at like age 4. That's when I started doubting the value of the rosary and the catholic catechism and dogmas, and science and its topping of dogmas became my favorite subject of idle thought. But even today I still highly value the Church, for the functions it provides to a village: timekeeping, record keeping, medicine/last rites/psychiatry - the whole religion itself being a psychotherapy mechanism -, raising political debate issues, and supervising and mending subtle issues such as children born out of wedlock. These things cannot be done properly by private parties such as doctors, officials, social workers, etc, except through a church and a priest, however, in the US, because of religious freedom, it's done through religiously unbiased agents. Living in a village, with its priest, has its downsides, such as oppressive public opinion, especially against social experimentation. The whole US was founded on people seeking religious freedom and social experimentation along the lines of everyone's created equal in the eyes of the law, because, obviously, not everyone is equal in skill, such as Serena Williams would sure whoop my ass in tennis, or Tiger Woods in golf, if we ever played, so they are more skilled in that than me, aren't they? Which is why King George let the whole thing go on, because he saw that it was obviously false, all men are created equal, so watch it fail on its own. Which is why Jefferson put it in there, to buy time to have King George leave him alone, for a while at least, from 1776 to 1812. It's 2014, and time is almost up. I saw a car a couple days ago. It said on the plate somewhere US Government, and the expiration stickers said Dec, 2020. I think the reign of the New World Order by the old nobility has started in the US long time ago, and all we got is this make believe democracy left. Money talks, dog barks, caravan walks. Money talks everywhere in politics.
I had a college professor who said the difference between his generation and our generation is that back in the 60's and 70's they didn't let shit like this go down without a massive protest by the youth, it'd be all over tv and the news in his days, with kids going to jail over it. He said our generation no longer has a spine to stick up for what's right.
The bulk of preset coal use is for power plants. Stanford is probably right in that that will soon decline, together with profitability. However coal and coal mining are valuable long term assets, because, after the crude oil and natural gas reserves are exhausted, chemical refineries and chemical manufacturing - including plastics, asphalt, detergents, drugs, some fertilizers/soil modifying ion exchange resins - and also biological things, such as plain potato and corn, might use coal mines as their main carbon source. The atmosphere contains only 0.03% CO2 (or at least it used to, according to Wikipedia it's 0.0397%) for which all lifeforms compete. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere causes greenhouse global warming, but as long as there is increased room for carbon storage inside lifeforms, such as trees and lions, the CO2 should naturally equilibrate back down. So if you could expand green life into desert areas (which are highly reflective of solar radiation and the heat budget/global warming of Earth changes greatly, or oceans, where the reflectivity is not so great, turning the oceans from blue to green would be safer than turning deserts from bright yellow-white to deep green) it would create a decrease of atmospheric carbon, to even below 0.03%, so then it'd be a good idea to burn coal in power plants on purpose. Deforestation in the rain forests of Amazon, Congo, India, Southeast-Asia/Indonesia, industrial and economic development there releases massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that has nowhere to go. Also global overfishing exterminating all fish carbon stores. In any case we can always fix global warming by brute force, by putting up some shades, some umbrellas at the Lagrange point between the Sun and Earth, cutting total solar irradiation, and it might be worth it to expand into most of the desert areas, which are going wasted right now, and only retain a little bit of desert natural reservations to maintain the lifeforms adapted to living in them. In conquering the desert, or semiarid areas first, like a lot of states east of Wyoming, you need water, water, water, then water absorbent/retaining materials in the soil, like artificial ion exchange resins, that coexist with the earthworms/fungi in harmony (without the fungi plants cannot function, as fungi continue the roots for square miles, and bring water and nutrients to the roots in exchange for sugars - the variety of toxic and nontoxic fungi living symbiotically with everything else is tremendous), and these water retaining ion exchange resins could be derived from coal, and there is a whole lot needed to cover all the deserts and semiarid regions of western/midwestern USA, and the Sahara, Gobi and Great Australian Deserts. Coal is still black gold, carbon is the substance of life, carbon is the substance of modern high tech materials, like you can always put more freeze crack resisting, pothole resisting plastic, like Elvaloy, into roads, if you can only find a way to drop the price really really low. Lack of potholes kills road construction jobs, but we gotta get smart and figure out a way to live smart, and work smart, not hard, and sit back and relax with a road lasting 20-50 years, as opposed to busy busy busy hard worker busy busy keep fixing a retarded road that keeps potholing every winter, but we're hard workers, and we keep fixing it.
Also the rotation of Earth keeps slowing, because of gravitational tides by the Sun - the Moon is already locked to the Earth, always showing the same side, because if it were rotating, that would create tides in its crust, and frictional heat, until the rotation stopped, like it already did. So if Earth's rotation stopped, one side would be really hot, the other really cold, so it's in our interest that it never happens, and get as much uniform temperature surface and living space as possible. The way to help that is to micromanage the shooting stars, in a Maxwell's Demons way, and only allow those to impact the atmosphere which deliver an increase in rotational speed, and deflect away those which would slow the rotation. I don't know what the natural proportion of these is, is it 50/50, or do more meteorites impact one way or the other - like when I flush a toilet, the whole thing starts spinning, and when the meteorites flush down into the Sun, they might be going in a spinning direction too. So we could start by playing ping-pong with the small asteroids, deflect the ones that have a chance to make it to dry land and hit somebody on the head, to at least drop into an ocean, away from shipping routes. The rotational speed dropping and the hours in a day increasing from 24 hours to 25 hours is not such a big deal, or even increasing to 1000 hrs is no big deal, but a million hours is a big deal, but it's never too early to start working against that, to maintain rotational speed, and the length of daytime.
I just figured out how to fix the pH - all you gotta do is convert the sulfuric acid into pH neutral elemental sulfur. Which is what we have here on Earth, tons of elemental sulfur. Because of which, if the temperature gets out of hand here too, at high temperature, the stable state of sulfur is probably sulfuric acid, not elemental sulfur, so you ARE looking at the future of Earth, when you're looking at Venus, when Earth's magnetic van Allen solar wind protection disappears. How long until that? A couple million of couple billion years? It's probably economically unfeasible to keep the inside of Earth hot, so you, as the above poster said, you are looking at space station only long term life. Life on Earth is temporary, and the "economical" future looks like Venus looks today. Which is why we cannot afford technological decay and going back to horses forever, we can do that temporarily, but in a few million or few billion years the clock runs out, time is up, and you either have to fix Earth, leave Earth, or figure out a way to live under a 10 bar pressure very hot sulfuric acid tsunami atmosphere.
In any case, a space mission should be sent into that hellhole of a weather called Venus to make sure there are no lifeforms living in it, like some extremophile bacteria.
It's really difficult to patiently modify orbits with an ion gun, especially when you need a sudden move, at a specific position in a moon's orbit around a planet, or an asteroid's position around the Sun. You can keep sending a moon into higher and higher orbit, but then when releasing it toward the Sun, that probably has to be done suddenly. So the good thing is that if it's an object without an atmosphere holding back an explosion, a Tsar bomba exploded on the surface will send half of the explosion material directly into outer space, delivering a tangible momentum, a usable impulse. We all know a Tsar bomba is not strong enough, not big enough, but the design allows for more stages, instead of 3 present in it, the sky is probably the limit on how many stages you can compound, and you can deliver quite a punch with a tiny little thing, to a celestial object. The danger of this is that someone might be building these bombs pretending to use it for outer space ping pong, and then use it against his fellow men. Also there is some kind of danger with celestial ping pong that may not immediately be obvious, and even the best scientists, like Teller, advocated using bombs to shape things like the San Francisco bay, something that the rest of us balk at. No, the SF bay is fine, we can take the long way around. So these bombs have to be built not by a single nation, but an international community, and everyone has to agree without any vetoes to a ping pong game up there, so that if something goes wrong, no war breaks out down here.
There is something nice about living on a planet, instead of outer space. Like the shooting-star meteorite burning atmosphere - on a space station it's a constant issue when you get hit by an object traveling 10-20 km/s, and the leak you have to patch - so they may have to be triple walled, with gradually dropping pressure zones, so the leaks take time, and then glass or transparent triple walls are very expensive to make meteorite resistant, so you probably have just solar panels or nuclear reactor, and fully artificial lighting. See on a planet you have days and nights, sundown and sunup, and on a fully artificially lit space station you don't. Down here on Earth is also only a matter of time before you get killed by a falling meteorite that didn't get fully burned up, but the chances are so small that most people make it to death safely. The chances on a space station are very small too, but orders of magnitude higher because of small objects, and on Earth somebody simply dies and life goes on, however ona space station you have to patch the hole. There is probably an optimum size for the isolation units even if the composed space station is huge, but each section cannot be large enough, simply because there isn't enough time or means to patch a hole instantly, and you have to let it go to full vacuum, til you can get to it. The larger the space station, the larger the chances of a meteorite hit.
The solar wind should not erase the atmosphere, because most of it should be deflected by magnetic van Allen belts. I think you get a van Allen belt if the inside of the planet is molten, and as almost everything in the solar system has the same average concentration of heat generating Th232, U238, K40 and U235, as long as you have a large enough size planet, the inside of it should be lava. (I must be maxing out the alarm signals at the CIA or whoever is watching when I say Tsar bomba, nuclear reactor, Th232, U238, K40, U235 - tee hee.) There is constant addition of atmosphere, and constant loss of atmosphere, and the dynamic equilibrium, the size of the atmosphere is determined by the gravity, the size of the planet..
I just read up on the atmosphere of Venus - it's sulfuric acid, and Venus lacks a magnetic field, and has winds up to 60 times the rotational speed, when Earth has max 10-20 time. Oxygen and nitrogen get blown off the surface by the solar wind, because a lack of a magnetic field. Damn. So Venus, even though it's the right size, it will probably be inhabitable until you make the inside of it molten. We don't understand how a magnetic field arises from a molten inside, but it and a nickel-iron core probably have something to do with it.
As far as moving it into higher orbit, instead of playing ping-pong with Venus itself, we could create artificial comets out of existing high-solar orbit stuff, like one of Jupiter's moons, or Saturn's moons, let it go around the Sun and on the way back smack into Venus knocking it higher. Also it's really difficult to control an explosion in outer space and make half of it go one way, the other half the other way, and matter is very rare and expensive, so an EM gun or Ion gun with a muzzle velocity of 10-20 km/s accelerating any material in two opposite directions might be a slower but better option, while trying to modify orbits from a distance. Also there are moons or objects with really hot insides - why is it that some objects have a higher concentration of inside heating elements than others? The hot ones should be selected to be sent down the Venus.
The sulfuric acid should condense if the planet temperature drops, but that's a very low pH, out of balance environment that has a sulfuric acid atmosphere, here on Earth we have a lot of lime and high pH silicate material on the surface, that would instantly absorb the acid. How come Venus is so different? I read Venus used to have an atmosphere like Earth. It may be a picture of what awaits us in a distant future, with runaway greenhouse effects. But we got a magnetic field for now, that w
Mars' atmosphere is thin because of low gravity - it will never hold any kind of proper atmosphere. See http://scienceblogs.com/starts... for sizes. Venus is damn close to Earth in size. I don't have time to look up the atmospheric composition, but even if fully made Earth-like, it would have bad weather forbidding most space missions to it, because of greenhouse effect from water vapor. Venus is too hot, and once it's too hot it's got a lot water in the atmosphere to make it even hotter. You gotta put up some shades.
I really like your idea of diverting all comets to slam into Venus and put it into a farther, higher orbit from to Sun, as a cooling effect. The comets would have to come from their trip back from the Sun, on the way back to the outer parts of the solar system. Diverting comets with a tsar bomba while it's near Jupiter, it only takes a tiny detonation to create a large effect down the road in the trajectory. By the way even if you directly bomb Venus, any physicist would know that the detonations could not happen on the surface, because of conservation of momentum, whatever impact the ground gets, equivalent impact is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the whole planet doesn't move as an end result. In order to impart a change in impulse, momentum, you have to deliver momentum, by exploding the bomb in outer space in a way that it divides into two pieces, one half shooting directly down into the Sun, the other half shooting up directly at Venus.
Down the road we may get to the point where we compose a dozen or so Earth-sized planets, sharing Earth's orbit, from other planets like Saturn, or from the shooting star asteroid debris between Mars and Jupiter, by ping-pong pooling them into the proper orbit. Any stuff, any substance you can find that you can use to either build a planet from - or better, more efficient: a rotating cylinder artificial gravity space station - is very valuable, like gold, in the vast emptiness of outer space. The Moon contains a lot of stuff ripe to make space stations from, because it will never hold an atmosphere, and getting stuff off the Moon into outer space is a lot cheaper than lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. The first rotating gravity space station could be made profitable by soap-opera or reality show type things.
Because of this I've become a big fan of Microsoft. And in that not their latest crap, like Win8, that I've never tried, just read about, but their oldschool stuff, DOS 6, Win95(comes with DOS7) and Win2000, and I use XP, but I never really liked it, because of the bloat, spying and Activation built into XP. In my mind oldschool Windows 2000/Office 2000/SQL Server 2000-ADO/VB6SP5/Delphi 5 or 7/FL Studio 5/Autocad 14/Visio2000/Chemstation/etc are by far the best software ever written, and even today they represent the best balance between bloat, and features. Out of those the SQL Server part is the one that sucks the most, because it requires server client access licenses, which are a ridiculous way to make money, and the alternative of Linux/FreeBSD or even Solaris running PostgreSQL 8 is cheaper, even if not as good as SQL Server 2000. There are lots of other database engines that are small and fast and usable, like Firebird, I don't know why they think a database is such a miracle piece of software, especially when you compare it to say, Office. What's the big deal about a database other than corporate users, who should be smart enough to pick something else, or they are idiots and don't know how to make money, meaning they are an aberration, temporary corporate users, not corporate users for the long haul. SQL Server should be priced less than Office, per copy, and the CAL's should be dropped, and instead individual copies of office used as a sort of CAL, if they ever go back to the oldschool stuff. Win95/Office97 is also a marvelous deal, running blazing fast on hardware that runs 2000 stuff slow, or just has low memory. And just yesterday I was at a steel company, and they run custom software, that I know simply won't run on Win8. The split, the chasm has happened, with most businesses or people forced to hunt for old hardware and old windows, as no way in hell can anybody afford to rewrite old software that took a team of 35 really smart guys, most of whom are dead, 5 years till they got some miraculous thing going, and another 5 to iron out the quirks, and the quirks and idiosyncrasies and artifacts that are left every users knows, and knows how to work around them. Rewriting the whole thing is inhumanly expensive, and there would be new quirks and artifacts that users would have to learn, and forget the old ones. That's a lot of built up knowledge wasted. In an ideal world hardware companies would realize this market demand, and start making lots of oldschool motherboards, or even equivalent chips, especially if the giants, like Intel, keep going head against the wall, and refuse to make stuff that functions like the oldschool stuff. There is an important market potential there, with high demand and little supply, pretty soon.
I find it that there have been millions of things written for old windows for which no equivalent for mac or linux has ever been made. Like American Heritage Talking Dictionary program for Windows 95 that comes without a friggin EULA - it's one of my favorite programs. Granted it runs under Wine too, but there are things like FL Studio old versions, which really kick ass even on old computers, and they won't run as fine on Wine.
I'm using XP these days with the last nondotnet Zonealarm, 7.0.473.000, which you can no longer buy online, but boxed copies work, and hoping for the best when it comes to security and viruses. But XP was never my favorite, my all time favorite was Win95, which was a huge step in computing "goodness", a huge step toward a better world. All Win98 was was an integration of internet explorer browser with windows explorer file manager, and such dirty trick trying to kill off Nutscrape - I really hated Win98 for that. It also had USB better than OSR2 of 95, but that's a natural progress. By the way looking at 95 today, it lacks good looks or pizazz, or even decent appearance, but back then I remember it looking great. I always hated 98 for the bloat, like registry bloat, and especially ME that even took the DOS boot goodness away. The only time I relented was Windows 20
In fact the danger of AI is so great that it's preferable not to mess with self-modifying, self-healing code, especially on the military robot front, and accept that your stuff is going to get reverse engineered, and live with that. There is something good about open standards.
And I don't understand what the big deal is with people creating commodity items for small profit, for the service and benefit of everyone? How can you hold back the relentless drive to more power, more strength on the computer hardware front, in face of AI danger that's gonna kill us all. The answer is the same as in case of the Cold War, in face of the drive for more nuclear power that's gonna kill us all - treaties, instead of nuclear disarmament treaties, signing computer hardware disarmament treaties. Now one feature of treaties is that they never last, everyone keeps violating them, so why is it that the Old World Order powers kept signing them, when they didn't mean anything anyway. Well, they are better than absolutely nothing, that's pretty much it. By the way there were some nations that held to the treaties they signed, such as that signed between either Oman and GB, or UAE and GB, (or some similar country in a different part of the world, I can't really find it right now, or not looking it up now for personal excuse reasons) that still stands today, and the treaty signers have held to it and did not violate it for over 100 years. Now that's a good muslim, that cares about the treaties he signs, and such sticking to treaties is only possibly with the discipline of Islam. Plus it probably was in their self interest at all time to keep sticking to it, and then it's really easy to stick to a treaty when sticking to it is in your self interest. Kind of. How many nuclear disarmament treaties can you really afford to stick to, for self interest reasons - on the one hand, nuclear arm's race is gonna kill us all if it gets out of hand, on the other hand you can't let the other guy have more nuclear power than you do, so you gotta keep up the relentless drive for more. The same argument goes for computer technology, and robots with artificial intelligence. There is a computer game called Mechwarrior that the army should focus on, where the AI part, the brain stays as a human brain, and even in the UAV's you never get self-driving cars, but there is a human brain via a remote control present in it. Self driving cars are very dangerous, I mean self driving in a desert terrain, not self driving that follows a magnetic track laid in the asphalt type of deals.
The first thing to worry about in such situations is to be careful not to develop uncontrollable artificial intelligence that gets out of hand, becomes smarter than humans, and eats humans alive for breakfast, because it can. As long as hardware is in its present state there is probably little danger, but one has to be careful about the implications of present stuff running on hardware 50 years from now. Efficient code should not drive hardware performance requirements through the roof, and the hardware people should chill out and just take up a comfortable but not so profitable position in the world selling their chips as a commodity, and letting them last 30 years before a new sale is made, compared to the new chip every 18 months trend, and the huge bottom line profits that delivers - it also delivers increased danger of AI.
And by the way you should never just drop running old code, like a dictionary program from 95, but stick with the backward compatibility principles, while promoting safer, self-morfing, self-defending code, and let the customers spend the money on it, as they see fit, when it becomes available to them. Security means a lot, but it's not everything, because other things take priority over it - like yeah, it'd be nice to have a castle, but all I got is a shed and I'm busy farming for food, and if the shit hits the fan I run up into that mountain area over there in the distance, as a castle, as a last resort, without the food reserves like I could afford to keep in a real castle. Everyone has a different circumstance on how much castle they can afford, and you can't erect a building code for all the people living in shacks - where the wind may enter, the rain may enter, but the king of England may not enter - that mandates everyone build a castle for themselves and live in it. Everyone will gather as much comfort and security as they can possibly come up with in their life, and if you set the minimum required comfort and security bar too high, you're just..
As long as we're at offtopic topics, the way to fix dotnet is to make it better than VB6, make it run as interpreted code from a smaller thing than msvbvm60.dll. The answers to how it can be accomplished are found in the transition of dBase from assembler to C, and the corresponding performance drop, from wikipedia dbase article:
"As platforms and operating systems proliferated in the early 1980s, the company found it difficult to port the assembly language-based dBase to target systems. This led to a re-write of the platform in the C programming language, using automated code conversion tools. The resulting code worked, but was essentially undocumented and inhuman in syntax, a problem that would prove to be serious in the future.[citation needed]
The resulting dBase III was released in May 1984. Although reviewers widely panned its lowered performance, the product was otherwise well reviewed. After a few rapid upgrades the system stabilized and was once again a best-seller throughout the 1980s, and formed the famous "application trio" of PC compatibles (dBase, Lotus 123, and WordPerfect). By the fall of 1984, the company(Ashton Tate) had over 500 employees and was taking in $40 million a year in sales, the vast majority from dBase products."
So you basically have to fight the "although reviewers widely panned its lowered performance" part by going to assembler from C, since you have all this time on your hands without direction of what to do next, you might as well spend it on dicking around with assembler. C and high level languagues are only for when you don't have time for assembler.
Now you can't sell anything smaller than msvbvm60.dll and ask a lot of money for it these days, and for security reasons there is probably need for a lot of garbage DNA to obfuscate and hide the real code from hackers, but as long as you can make it run faster than msvbvm60, with documented benchmarks, and obvious performance evidence from end users simply clicking it with their mouses, it should have good acceptance. In fact coders might reject it if their codesize becomes huge, so you should provide them too with the junk DNA generating interface, so their development version runtimes will be small, but production release versions have a tunable amount of garbage in them, with larger executable sizes, kind of like ogg encoding has a -q 5 or -q 9 setting, for safety reasons, which should show to them that you have huge code sizes not because you don't know what you doing, but because you want your stuff to have huge code sizes. Then the arguments at http://www.oby.ro/ about how "perfection comes not when you can no longer add anything, but when you can no longer take away anything" no longer stand. And by the way I don't see how you can make huge codesizes faster than small codesizes, or within 99.9% speed range, and still hide your actual code really well - meaning you can't leave the junk dna on disk, neither can you isolate it in ram - in fact your junk DNA should be morphing so the few bytes of actual instruction code cannot be profiled and singled out, then hacked, but that kind of executable, constantly morphing and defending against reverse engineering efforts also wreaks havoc on the antivirus industry's profiling ability.
If you're going to terraform Venus, you probably want to do the orbit shifting nuclear catastrophy first, if you ever plan to do it. Also, the Habsburg motto contains "for the realms which Mars awards to others, Venus transfers to you," and by that they mean wage love, instead of waging war, because it's more economical, waging war takes money, money, money, but waging love is pretty cheap. Still, Venus the planet is kind of their turf so they should be consulted on it.
Whatever you do, whether you bomb Venus with ultraTsar bombas first to shift it into higher orbit around the Sun, or just bring the anaerobic bacteria in right away, you should send in probes to make sure there is absolutely no indigenous lifeforms of any sort present, which could be lost forever under assault, at a great loss to everybody. My forefathers must have been in pretty dire straits when they were forced to consume the last Mammoths, the ice age must have been pretty harsh, but imagine if the Mammoth survived and you could have befriended it like you befriended the horse and the wolf, how much richer your life could have been from their presence. It almost happened to the buffalo too, we almost lost the American Bison too.
Btw China just recently completed the most detailed surface scan of the Moon ever, especially the other side, so if my Jews got a colony up there, they either hid it well, or they don't got one at all. Expect China to eventually put up a colony then. And you're not gonna hear about the launch in the news, their space program is gonna be stuck in the past, officially speaking. That's my ultraparanoid side speaking, and ultraparanoid stuff is very far from reality, but there is a 0.0002% chance of being or becoming reality.
Trying to terraform Mars is like trying to terraform the Moon - like the joke I heard: have you heard about the new restaurant on the Moon? No? Well the food is great but there is no atmosphere. Because there aint enough gravity to hold one. Whatever you can do on Mars, you can probably do on the Moon, which is closer, except the security part, i.e. putting up a secret human colony on the other side of the Moon is not good enough if you can also do it on Mars, however Mars is not gravitationally locked to us, so there is no "secret" side to it, it keeps spinning, and you can't leave the lights on at night outside, if you don't want people from Earth with a telescope to detect you there.
Venus is the same size as Earth, it definitely has an atmosphere, but it has horrible weather. We can't really tow it to higher orbit to share the same orbit as Earth, it would take too many Tsar bombas squared shot at it from the proper side before it would budge a millimeter higher in orbit around the Sun. So we'll have to put up huge huge huge umbrellas at the Lagrangian pointss and hope to got the stay there and function well, to get the same solar irradiation as Earth, if we ever wanna live on it. Terraforming it shouldn't take billions of years, I was just kidding.
When I was a kid I used to dream of flying that fast, or be an astronaut and float in zero gravity, cuz it'd be cool. Now that I've grown up I no longer desire to do either, even if they paid me to, I mean I'd do it as a job, as a responsibility, but I would even pay not to have to do it if I didn't have to do it.
I think the original story about the computer crash is trying to poke at the antiquated computer systems that have horsepower/performance issues with such simple things as computing airplane tracks, compared to the horsepower available in off the shelf supercomputers involved in weather research.
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Indubitably. Also cucumbers. Both make a lot of women happy. Hi ^5 to that!
There might be a shitload of life out there stuck in a single cellular stage, like life was on Earth for the first 3 billion years. In some places multicellular life might have arisen, only to be erased by a mutation in a single celled lifeform, that ate up everything else around it, and became a dominant lifeform. In fact are we sure such a thing hasn't happened on Earth too, there might have been more occasions of multicellular life say 3 billion or 2 billion years ago, with a brief existence before being digested up and erased by single cellular life.
There might also be a shit load of life out there at the level of intellect of humans on Earth, but so distant, that effective communication or contact with them is impossible. Space is vast emptiness, with very little debris here and there, and the distant galaxies we see, they seem to be flying away from us very fast, and there is a vast vast vast emptiness between us and them, insurmountably far. Even if you found intelligent life say 100 light years away, it would take a conversation 200 years going with the speed of light to exchange hellos. If intelligent life more intelligent than humans exist it might have figured out superluminal travel, but then it would probably be so intelligent, it'd be like us being dogs compared to it being a human, us trying to talk to it. Also, it may be stuck at an intelligence level, or more like knowledge level, not intelligence level, of humans 200 years ago, when radio communication or even astronomical observation has not been as refined. By the way I like the word Earthling, as it doesn't say human or ape, each of which term might be offensive to some people.
Should we go ahead and genetically modify the wasp species to not do such a thing anymore? Or can we leave other lifeforms alone, and focus on human beings only, can we even judge other cultures and modify them to what we think is right as opposed to what they think is right? Should we just allow all kinds of moral behaviors roam freely? Sometimes I feel like I'm living on a reservation where moral behaviors are allowed to roam freely, with people that come here talking about, hey, imagine there are even strip clubs around here, something unheard of in where they came from, off the reservation there might be some very strict rules applied. I really like strip clubs even if I never been to one, because I couldn't afford to, I always had other priorities in life, but some people, a lot of them older, with a lot of money, and nothing better to do with it go to strip clubs and give their money to college age girls stripping, who they get to watch dance naked but not allowed to touch. Such a thing is probably not allowed off the reservation.
There are a lot of circumstances where you have to weigh such things as injuring or at least offending a human being to protect injury or offense to two human beings, one vs. two, it's really hard to apply algebra when it comes to ethics, because, for instance Pontius Pilate's mistake was to uphold the motto, the guiding principle: "give the people what they want", as in take over only the external politics of a conquered city, but do not interfere in the internal affairs, so, in view of the whole city requesting an innocent man, Jesus, to be crucified, he should have still protected the one innocent man's right to exist regardless of how many other people disagreed with him, if he had the power to do so. He said he could find no fault with Jesus. But he can never be sure about his own decisions being correct, so just because you are in charge, it's not necessarily best to do what you think is right without consulting what everybody else thinks is right, and in a whole lot of cases it's safest to just "give the people what they want." The constitution's amendments represent individual rights which may go against what everyone else wants, the same way, according to HG Wells' "A short history of the World" the Jews were a people with an assumption that principles of morality exist independent of what other people in majority may feel is right or wish to be correct, that unlike existentialism states, morality is not a independent choice for everyone out there, but there are principles of justice and fairness and good and evil. Existentialism might be correct if we come across other lifeforms, or even other jungle cultures, in what's right and wrong, and anything that provided a moral system yesterday that could successfully make it to today, is an acceptable moral system, even if it's in conflict with what some other people think is right or wrong. One such thing may be walking around naked in the jungle, or incest, things that might be or might have been practiced in a lot of areas of the world, as long as they made it to the present, it's like they almost have a right to exist. We balk at the reproductive method of a species of Wasp which requires it to capture a live cockroach, inject it with two kinds of poisons to control its behavior, lay an egg on it, and let the larva eat the cockroach alive, which last longer as food and it doesn't decay if it dies as late as possible compared to if it were killed earlier. That is horrendous torture, but how to you apply the rules of individual rights and nonexistentialist principles of justice to this situation?
I just read up on Asimov's rules on robots. I read them in the past before, but I didn't remember them now until rereading. Those are very good rules, but laughable and naive. They are good to have when you absolutely must design AI, those are the basic principles you want to program into the ROM BIOS of the robot. Such situations may arise in many circumstances, such as, these Asimov rules were erected 13.8 billion years after the creation of the Universe (today is assumed to be 13.8 billion years from the Big Bang, if there was such a thing) and imagine a time where it has been another 900 billion since then, and we still haven't advanced much past in knowledge compared to the level available at 13.8 billion years, or 886.2 billion years ago, and the thermal heat death of the Universe predicted by the 2nd law of thermodynamics seems to be correct, and we're soon gonna run out of ways to survive, so as a last resort situation you may want to design an AI smarter then you, which is able to kill you, with hopes that it will not want to kill you, and figure out a way for you to live on, or at least make the best of the remaining time, having a chance at it is better than certain doom. Another situation is, where, we send out Earthlings into far distant places, including 70,000 year trips to the nearest stars, along the lines of Voyager space probes, as a safety measure, not to keep all eggs in the same basket, not to keep all of our life in one place. Now suppose these very far Earthlings find out that humans back on Earth designed AI robots, which got out of hand and killed everyone back on Earth, and now they are chasing after them, but there is another 70,000 years before they get there to the nearest star from the Earth, unless the AI can figure out a faster way to travel through space than you could, and a smarter AI then you might, so under such circumstances you may want to invest a lot of effort to create an AI smarter than the AI that got out of hand back on Earth, and defend yourself using it. These Asimov principles of
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
come in very handy then.
It is very cost effective to bomb the fuck out of your enemies with huge nukes that take out entire cities at once (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were pretty tiny explosive yield things compared to presently available stuff, or what recently has been available before dismantlement). During the cold war a lot of effort went into these cost effective weapons, nuclear arms buildup went to the point where some people said we have enough nukes to erase all life on Earth seven times over. Now that might be an overstatement, as there are some lifeforms, such as Deinococcus Radiodurans which can take quite a punch and might make it in some isolated areas, like near deep ocean volcanic eruptions, and life might survive, even if in single cellular form, and spend another 3 billion years before multicellular life reemerges, and another billion years before intellect on the level of humans arises again, the point is just because nuclear weapons are cost effective, it does not mean we want them, or want to use them, because of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Same arguments go for intelligent robots, we don't want them if they can get out of hand and kill all lifeforms on Earth, especially if some pissed off, terminally ill idiot programs them to do just that, and take everyone and everything else down with him, when his time on Earth expires. We don't want that kind of power available to anyone, with the possibility of it getting out of hand. AI is more dangerous than nukes, because it can self replicate to take over everything, but nukes can't, even if you build a tremendously powerful bomb that has never been built before, with the objective to knock a huge asteroid off track on its way to impacting into Earth, as long as you don't make a lot of them, enough to erase all life on planet, that's probably a lot safer than what we used to have during the height of the Cold War, with smaller bombs, but so many of them. AI is a lot more dangerous than nukes, because a single one may be able to figure out how to make millions or billions of real life copies of itself, and erase all carbon based life on Earth, and leave only itself, silicon based life. The world is full of so much silicon that sometimes you wonder whether intelligent design put it there, with the purpose of providing substance for the future of intelligent life, which may be silicon life. We probably want to hold back the clock of evolution, and stick with the level of humans, just because a robotic artificial intelligence life form more perfect than us can exist, able to live in the vacuum of outer space, requiring only solar or even starlight to its solar panels to function, and it can kill us all, if it wants to, well, we don't necessarily want to mess around with such a thing.
Consciousness is just a state of a computer system, with all memories loaded, and all processing registers at a certain state. A lot of consciousness evolved from processing visual information, or even just smell and touch information, recognizing objects and elements in the environment around the conscious being, and then deriving rules by which these objects behave, and predicting the future behavior of these objects from these learned rules. (For instance a new born baby does not know that when an object disappears behind another object it still "exists", and it did not vanish from reality, it takes a certain amount of learning to know that; a grown cat on the other hand knows such a thing and will go investigate the disappearance of a laserpointer dot around a corner, assuming it still exists, and expecting it to be present behind the corner. As far as the child is concerned, once the laser dot went around the corner and is no longer visible, it's like it's been turned off at the source, and it's no longer lit, no longer exists, which could be the case after sufficient similar experiences.) That is how a conscious being, like a cat, or even an earthworm interacts with its environment, it "computes" its environment, it assesses it's present state, or "millieu", the situation around itself (whether an earthworm is on the surface, during rain or drought, or underground, during cold or heat, or you, whether you're in a natural reservation, in a nightclub dancing in a lit city, on a bus full of people, deep in a dark basement without lights, or even a virtual reality, such as a video game like FreeDoom, deep inside one of the hellhole rooms), and after assessing its present state and environment, the conscious being computes what to do next based on objectives, (some of which are involuntary, like involuntary reflexes, but those don't really belong in the realm of consciousness), but sexdrive, hunger, comfort, comfort for my baby and my other peeps, etc. there are many impulses on which to act. You could say a completely impulseless conscious AI robot is a nonsense, but when dealing with AI, that's the things to watch, what are the impulses, survival, hunger, comfort, etc, which would come up even with weapons design, i.e. the weapon has to optimize its energy consumption and seek out energy sources to recharge = hunger, limit its exposure to temperature fluctuation to be minimize structural degradation = comfort, reproductive drive in case it reproduces sexually instead of asexually (banana's biggest problem and vulnerability is no sex life, earthworms can reproduce asexually lacking any sex partners, but they prefer sexual reproduction to create a greater variety of mutations and genetic variability) - a lot of these things are dangerous when it comes to AI and robots, and it's a matter of degree - like an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner that goes around the house autonomously seeking out the electric socket for recharging, that's not such a big deal, right? It is hungry for electricity but not dangerous. In a sense, even it, is conscious, it assesses its environment, it computes its present state variables, and the acts on the objectives it has preprogrammed. It's not a weapon, it's a tool, to keep the house clean, so when is a tool considered a weapon? There is a vague blurring line there too, your fingers can be used as a weapon, or a pocket knife can be used to eat, cut cardboard boxes open, or as a weapon to cut someone else, and there is probably a way to use the Roomba too as a weapon.
You can live on $8/hr in most places in the US as an individual with roommates that you can trust, and you can support a family of 4 (2 kids + stay at home wife) on $18/hr, it used to be $16/hr, but the price of gas went from $1 to $3.5/gal (which increases prices at Walmart because of trucking costs too, there are large consequences to it), and it may be on its way to $20/gal, because as far as the refineries and gas stations are concerned, they don't have a problem with high gas prices, they are raking in record profits in the history of the World. The barrier to entry into the gasoline business must be pretty high, some of it having to do with certifications - you can't just put any sulfur bearing stank into your vehicle and pollute everyone around you with it, well you, as an individual might be able to, as you can put self-made expensive biodiesel, but it's hard to officially sell it. You can't just go to the East Side Market, and buy 3 lbs of tomatoes, 5 lbs of potatoes, and 5 gallons of gasoline or biodiesel, can you? You need access to mineral resources, such as natural gas or coal, then you need a refinery, and the bigger the refinery the more economical due to economies of scale, and small ones can't really compete efficiently, so gas prices are always gonna be decided by oligopolies, by the big guys. There is a story about Tesla cars, and the problem is the ultra-expensive battery, and limited lifetime of the batteries, but these batteries have been getting better, I don't know if they will last 20 years like a battery-less car engine does, but with fully electric cars you can get electricity from a solar panel or a windmill, besides the big guys, easier than you can get gasoline from other than the big guys.
As long as they are not muslim, because muslims have serious religious issues with back doors. Which is probably why Alexander the Great's Persian wife killed his ass, not by a poisoned arrow, but by a poisoned mushroom dinner, a mushroom which looks like an arrow, and must have been misinterpreted in translation through the ages. Her upbringing taught her good morals, including sins similar to Sodom and Gonorrah. He had too many wives of his own kind too, so he wasn't totally in love with her, he killed some family members of hers, even if distant ones, he was trying to make her children learn Greek instead of their own mother tongue, he was bisexual like most Greek men of the time, including not having a problem with fucking sheep - there is a story of his army of male lovers marching through Anatolia, coming across a herd of sheep, and why do the same stinky hole day after day, variety is the spice of life, something fresh and exciting, like sheep-booty - all he really needed was a warm hole. So she probably had a religious problem with taking it in the back door, or sharing a dick with him, alternatively sucking it after pulling it out of his male lover's ass, and his Greek dick was too small (just look at all the statues), only good for anal sex, when she was used to bigger dick in her population, so she kill his ass, she didn't want him polluting her gene pool.
By the way the biggest issue facing the Greeks was sex, and overpopulation, which is why they had to start colonies in Sicily and southern Italy, like Syracuse (Archimedes lived there), Constanta, Cyrene, and most of it them Anatolia=Asia Minor, and the encroachment of these Asia Minor colonies on the indigenous populations was what really invited the Persians and Darius over, which invited Alexander and his Greek army over to Persia. There was constant racial disharmony between the Philistine colony Greeks of Israel, living in 5 city states, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath, with stories such as David and Goliath being representative, also in Cyrene at one time the jews killed all the Greeks and danced with their intestines in their necks to celebrate, so the Persian semites sort of came over to the aryan Greeks after continuous colonization harassment from the Greeks, and the victory at Marathon was a turning point for the Greeks, then Hannukah is a celebration of not letting yourself be hellenized, under a hellenic king left by Alexander, but maintaining your identity, language and culture to which you have a right to do. Also Alexandria in north Egypt had a library established that held vast knowledge of ancient civilizations, but it was burned down by a muslim conqueror, saying it's either in the Quran, and then it's superfluous, or it's not in the Quran, then it's dangerous. Also the Iron Pillar of Delhi was shot at with cannons and withstood it a few times by muslim conquerors - there have always been continuous racial disharmony for millenia now, a lot of it having to do with immigration and encroaching on other people's territories, because of overpopulation, and because of sex. By the way a lot of creativity and perversion seems to go hand in hand, as sexually high functioning always horny and perverted people seem to also be very creative. There is two sides to everything. Sex, and population control issues are still here today, just like in the ancient world, and the Greeks finally found a solution, when they discovered silphium, as shown at http://www.damninteresting.com...
The prized plant became such a key pillar of the Cyrenean economy that its likeness was stamped upon many of the city's gold and silver coins. The images often depicted a regal-looking woman sitting in a chair, with one hand touching the herb and her other hand pointing at her genitals. The plant was known as silphium or laserwort, and its heart-shaped fruit purportedly brought the ancient world a highly sought-after freedom: the opportunity to enjoy sex with very little ri
It's her fault for not fighting off her mother and taking charge of her own life. I had to fight off my mother from doing that at like age 4. That's when I started doubting the value of the rosary and the catholic catechism and dogmas, and science and its topping of dogmas became my favorite subject of idle thought. But even today I still highly value the Church, for the functions it provides to a village: timekeeping, record keeping, medicine/last rites/psychiatry - the whole religion itself being a psychotherapy mechanism -, raising political debate issues, and supervising and mending subtle issues such as children born out of wedlock. These things cannot be done properly by private parties such as doctors, officials, social workers, etc, except through a church and a priest, however, in the US, because of religious freedom, it's done through religiously unbiased agents. Living in a village, with its priest, has its downsides, such as oppressive public opinion, especially against social experimentation. The whole US was founded on people seeking religious freedom and social experimentation along the lines of everyone's created equal in the eyes of the law, because, obviously, not everyone is equal in skill, such as Serena Williams would sure whoop my ass in tennis, or Tiger Woods in golf, if we ever played, so they are more skilled in that than me, aren't they? Which is why King George let the whole thing go on, because he saw that it was obviously false, all men are created equal, so watch it fail on its own. Which is why Jefferson put it in there, to buy time to have King George leave him alone, for a while at least, from 1776 to 1812. It's 2014, and time is almost up. I saw a car a couple days ago. It said on the plate somewhere US Government, and the expiration stickers said Dec, 2020. I think the reign of the New World Order by the old nobility has started in the US long time ago, and all we got is this make believe democracy left. Money talks, dog barks, caravan walks. Money talks everywhere in politics.
I had a college professor who said the difference between his generation and our generation is that back in the 60's and 70's they didn't let shit like this go down without a massive protest by the youth, it'd be all over tv and the news in his days, with kids going to jail over it. He said our generation no longer has a spine to stick up for what's right.
The bulk of preset coal use is for power plants. Stanford is probably right in that that will soon decline, together with profitability. However coal and coal mining are valuable long term assets, because, after the crude oil and natural gas reserves are exhausted, chemical refineries and chemical manufacturing - including plastics, asphalt, detergents, drugs, some fertilizers/soil modifying ion exchange resins - and also biological things, such as plain potato and corn, might use coal mines as their main carbon source. The atmosphere contains only 0.03% CO2 (or at least it used to, according to Wikipedia it's 0.0397%) for which all lifeforms compete. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere causes greenhouse global warming, but as long as there is increased room for carbon storage inside lifeforms, such as trees and lions, the CO2 should naturally equilibrate back down. So if you could expand green life into desert areas (which are highly reflective of solar radiation and the heat budget/global warming of Earth changes greatly, or oceans, where the reflectivity is not so great, turning the oceans from blue to green would be safer than turning deserts from bright yellow-white to deep green) it would create a decrease of atmospheric carbon, to even below 0.03%, so then it'd be a good idea to burn coal in power plants on purpose. Deforestation in the rain forests of Amazon, Congo, India, Southeast-Asia/Indonesia, industrial and economic development there releases massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that has nowhere to go. Also global overfishing exterminating all fish carbon stores. In any case we can always fix global warming by brute force, by putting up some shades, some umbrellas at the Lagrange point between the Sun and Earth, cutting total solar irradiation, and it might be worth it to expand into most of the desert areas, which are going wasted right now, and only retain a little bit of desert natural reservations to maintain the lifeforms adapted to living in them. In conquering the desert, or semiarid areas first, like a lot of states east of Wyoming, you need water, water, water, then water absorbent/retaining materials in the soil, like artificial ion exchange resins, that coexist with the earthworms/fungi in harmony (without the fungi plants cannot function, as fungi continue the roots for square miles, and bring water and nutrients to the roots in exchange for sugars - the variety of toxic and nontoxic fungi living symbiotically with everything else is tremendous), and these water retaining ion exchange resins could be derived from coal, and there is a whole lot needed to cover all the deserts and semiarid regions of western/midwestern USA, and the Sahara, Gobi and Great Australian Deserts. Coal is still black gold, carbon is the substance of life, carbon is the substance of modern high tech materials, like you can always put more freeze crack resisting, pothole resisting plastic, like Elvaloy, into roads, if you can only find a way to drop the price really really low. Lack of potholes kills road construction jobs, but we gotta get smart and figure out a way to live smart, and work smart, not hard, and sit back and relax with a road lasting 20-50 years, as opposed to busy busy busy hard worker busy busy keep fixing a retarded road that keeps potholing every winter, but we're hard workers, and we keep fixing it.
Also the rotation of Earth keeps slowing, because of gravitational tides by the Sun - the Moon is already locked to the Earth, always showing the same side, because if it were rotating, that would create tides in its crust, and frictional heat, until the rotation stopped, like it already did. So if Earth's rotation stopped, one side would be really hot, the other really cold, so it's in our interest that it never happens, and get as much uniform temperature surface and living space as possible. The way to help that is to micromanage the shooting stars, in a Maxwell's Demons way, and only allow those to impact the atmosphere which deliver an increase in rotational speed, and deflect away those which would slow the rotation. I don't know what the natural proportion of these is, is it 50/50, or do more meteorites impact one way or the other - like when I flush a toilet, the whole thing starts spinning, and when the meteorites flush down into the Sun, they might be going in a spinning direction too. So we could start by playing ping-pong with the small asteroids, deflect the ones that have a chance to make it to dry land and hit somebody on the head, to at least drop into an ocean, away from shipping routes. The rotational speed dropping and the hours in a day increasing from 24 hours to 25 hours is not such a big deal, or even increasing to 1000 hrs is no big deal, but a million hours is a big deal, but it's never too early to start working against that, to maintain rotational speed, and the length of daytime.
I just figured out how to fix the pH - all you gotta do is convert the sulfuric acid into pH neutral elemental sulfur. Which is what we have here on Earth, tons of elemental sulfur. Because of which, if the temperature gets out of hand here too, at high temperature, the stable state of sulfur is probably sulfuric acid, not elemental sulfur, so you ARE looking at the future of Earth, when you're looking at Venus, when Earth's magnetic van Allen solar wind protection disappears. How long until that? A couple million of couple billion years? It's probably economically unfeasible to keep the inside of Earth hot, so you, as the above poster said, you are looking at space station only long term life. Life on Earth is temporary, and the "economical" future looks like Venus looks today. Which is why we cannot afford technological decay and going back to horses forever, we can do that temporarily, but in a few million or few billion years the clock runs out, time is up, and you either have to fix Earth, leave Earth, or figure out a way to live under a 10 bar pressure very hot sulfuric acid tsunami atmosphere.
In any case, a space mission should be sent into that hellhole of a weather called Venus to make sure there are no lifeforms living in it, like some extremophile bacteria.
It's really difficult to patiently modify orbits with an ion gun, especially when you need a sudden move, at a specific position in a moon's orbit around a planet, or an asteroid's position around the Sun. You can keep sending a moon into higher and higher orbit, but then when releasing it toward the Sun, that probably has to be done suddenly. So the good thing is that if it's an object without an atmosphere holding back an explosion, a Tsar bomba exploded on the surface will send half of the explosion material directly into outer space, delivering a tangible momentum, a usable impulse. We all know a Tsar bomba is not strong enough, not big enough, but the design allows for more stages, instead of 3 present in it, the sky is probably the limit on how many stages you can compound, and you can deliver quite a punch with a tiny little thing, to a celestial object. The danger of this is that someone might be building these bombs pretending to use it for outer space ping pong, and then use it against his fellow men. Also there is some kind of danger with celestial ping pong that may not immediately be obvious, and even the best scientists, like Teller, advocated using bombs to shape things like the San Francisco bay, something that the rest of us balk at. No, the SF bay is fine, we can take the long way around. So these bombs have to be built not by a single nation, but an international community, and everyone has to agree without any vetoes to a ping pong game up there, so that if something goes wrong, no war breaks out down here.
There is something nice about living on a planet, instead of outer space. Like the shooting-star meteorite burning atmosphere - on a space station it's a constant issue when you get hit by an object traveling 10-20 km/s, and the leak you have to patch - so they may have to be triple walled, with gradually dropping pressure zones, so the leaks take time, and then glass or transparent triple walls are very expensive to make meteorite resistant, so you probably have just solar panels or nuclear reactor, and fully artificial lighting. See on a planet you have days and nights, sundown and sunup, and on a fully artificially lit space station you don't. Down here on Earth is also only a matter of time before you get killed by a falling meteorite that didn't get fully burned up, but the chances are so small that most people make it to death safely. The chances on a space station are very small too, but orders of magnitude higher because of small objects, and on Earth somebody simply dies and life goes on, however ona space station you have to patch the hole. There is probably an optimum size for the isolation units even if the composed space station is huge, but each section cannot be large enough, simply because there isn't enough time or means to patch a hole instantly, and you have to let it go to full vacuum, til you can get to it. The larger the space station, the larger the chances of a meteorite hit.
The solar wind should not erase the atmosphere, because most of it should be deflected by magnetic van Allen belts. I think you get a van Allen belt if the inside of the planet is molten, and as almost everything in the solar system has the same average concentration of heat generating Th232, U238, K40 and U235, as long as you have a large enough size planet, the inside of it should be lava. (I must be maxing out the alarm signals at the CIA or whoever is watching when I say Tsar bomba, nuclear reactor, Th232, U238, K40, U235 - tee hee.) There is constant addition of atmosphere, and constant loss of atmosphere, and the dynamic equilibrium, the size of the atmosphere is determined by the gravity, the size of the planet..
I just read up on the atmosphere of Venus - it's sulfuric acid, and Venus lacks a magnetic field, and has winds up to 60 times the rotational speed, when Earth has max 10-20 time. Oxygen and nitrogen get blown off the surface by the solar wind, because a lack of a magnetic field. Damn. So Venus, even though it's the right size, it will probably be inhabitable until you make the inside of it molten. We don't understand how a magnetic field arises from a molten inside, but it and a nickel-iron core probably have something to do with it.
As far as moving it into higher orbit, instead of playing ping-pong with Venus itself, we could create artificial comets out of existing high-solar orbit stuff, like one of Jupiter's moons, or Saturn's moons, let it go around the Sun and on the way back smack into Venus knocking it higher. Also it's really difficult to control an explosion in outer space and make half of it go one way, the other half the other way, and matter is very rare and expensive, so an EM gun or Ion gun with a muzzle velocity of 10-20 km/s accelerating any material in two opposite directions might be a slower but better option, while trying to modify orbits from a distance. Also there are moons or objects with really hot insides - why is it that some objects have a higher concentration of inside heating elements than others? The hot ones should be selected to be sent down the Venus.
The sulfuric acid should condense if the planet temperature drops, but that's a very low pH, out of balance environment that has a sulfuric acid atmosphere, here on Earth we have a lot of lime and high pH silicate material on the surface, that would instantly absorb the acid. How come Venus is so different? I read Venus used to have an atmosphere like Earth. It may be a picture of what awaits us in a distant future, with runaway greenhouse effects. But we got a magnetic field for now, that w
Mars' atmosphere is thin because of low gravity - it will never hold any kind of proper atmosphere. See http://scienceblogs.com/starts... for sizes. Venus is damn close to Earth in size. I don't have time to look up the atmospheric composition, but even if fully made Earth-like, it would have bad weather forbidding most space missions to it, because of greenhouse effect from water vapor. Venus is too hot, and once it's too hot it's got a lot water in the atmosphere to make it even hotter. You gotta put up some shades.
I really like your idea of diverting all comets to slam into Venus and put it into a farther, higher orbit from to Sun, as a cooling effect. The comets would have to come from their trip back from the Sun, on the way back to the outer parts of the solar system. Diverting comets with a tsar bomba while it's near Jupiter, it only takes a tiny detonation to create a large effect down the road in the trajectory. By the way even if you directly bomb Venus, any physicist would know that the detonations could not happen on the surface, because of conservation of momentum, whatever impact the ground gets, equivalent impact is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the whole planet doesn't move as an end result. In order to impart a change in impulse, momentum, you have to deliver momentum, by exploding the bomb in outer space in a way that it divides into two pieces, one half shooting directly down into the Sun, the other half shooting up directly at Venus.
Down the road we may get to the point where we compose a dozen or so Earth-sized planets, sharing Earth's orbit, from other planets like Saturn, or from the shooting star asteroid debris between Mars and Jupiter, by ping-pong pooling them into the proper orbit. Any stuff, any substance you can find that you can use to either build a planet from - or better, more efficient: a rotating cylinder artificial gravity space station - is very valuable, like gold, in the vast emptiness of outer space. The Moon contains a lot of stuff ripe to make space stations from, because it will never hold an atmosphere, and getting stuff off the Moon into outer space is a lot cheaper than lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. The first rotating gravity space station could be made profitable by soap-opera or reality show type things.
Because of this I've become a big fan of Microsoft. And in that not their latest crap, like Win8, that I've never tried, just read about, but their oldschool stuff, DOS 6, Win95(comes with DOS7) and Win2000, and I use XP, but I never really liked it, because of the bloat, spying and Activation built into XP. In my mind oldschool Windows 2000/Office 2000/SQL Server 2000-ADO/VB6SP5/Delphi 5 or 7/FL Studio 5/Autocad 14/Visio2000/Chemstation/etc are by far the best software ever written, and even today they represent the best balance between bloat, and features. Out of those the SQL Server part is the one that sucks the most, because it requires server client access licenses, which are a ridiculous way to make money, and the alternative of Linux/FreeBSD or even Solaris running PostgreSQL 8 is cheaper, even if not as good as SQL Server 2000. There are lots of other database engines that are small and fast and usable, like Firebird, I don't know why they think a database is such a miracle piece of software, especially when you compare it to say, Office. What's the big deal about a database other than corporate users, who should be smart enough to pick something else, or they are idiots and don't know how to make money, meaning they are an aberration, temporary corporate users, not corporate users for the long haul. SQL Server should be priced less than Office, per copy, and the CAL's should be dropped, and instead individual copies of office used as a sort of CAL, if they ever go back to the oldschool stuff. Win95/Office97 is also a marvelous deal, running blazing fast on hardware that runs 2000 stuff slow, or just has low memory. And just yesterday I was at a steel company, and they run custom software, that I know simply won't run on Win8. The split, the chasm has happened, with most businesses or people forced to hunt for old hardware and old windows, as no way in hell can anybody afford to rewrite old software that took a team of 35 really smart guys, most of whom are dead, 5 years till they got some miraculous thing going, and another 5 to iron out the quirks, and the quirks and idiosyncrasies and artifacts that are left every users knows, and knows how to work around them. Rewriting the whole thing is inhumanly expensive, and there would be new quirks and artifacts that users would have to learn, and forget the old ones. That's a lot of built up knowledge wasted. In an ideal world hardware companies would realize this market demand, and start making lots of oldschool motherboards, or even equivalent chips, especially if the giants, like Intel, keep going head against the wall, and refuse to make stuff that functions like the oldschool stuff. There is an important market potential there, with high demand and little supply, pretty soon. I find it that there have been millions of things written for old windows for which no equivalent for mac or linux has ever been made. Like American Heritage Talking Dictionary program for Windows 95 that comes without a friggin EULA - it's one of my favorite programs. Granted it runs under Wine too, but there are things like FL Studio old versions, which really kick ass even on old computers, and they won't run as fine on Wine. I'm using XP these days with the last nondotnet Zonealarm, 7.0.473.000, which you can no longer buy online, but boxed copies work, and hoping for the best when it comes to security and viruses. But XP was never my favorite, my all time favorite was Win95, which was a huge step in computing "goodness", a huge step toward a better world. All Win98 was was an integration of internet explorer browser with windows explorer file manager, and such dirty trick trying to kill off Nutscrape - I really hated Win98 for that. It also had USB better than OSR2 of 95, but that's a natural progress. By the way looking at 95 today, it lacks good looks or pizazz, or even decent appearance, but back then I remember it looking great. I always hated 98 for the bloat, like registry bloat, and especially ME that even took the DOS boot goodness away. The only time I relented was Windows 20
In fact the danger of AI is so great that it's preferable not to mess with self-modifying, self-healing code, especially on the military robot front, and accept that your stuff is going to get reverse engineered, and live with that. There is something good about open standards.
And I don't understand what the big deal is with people creating commodity items for small profit, for the service and benefit of everyone? How can you hold back the relentless drive to more power, more strength on the computer hardware front, in face of AI danger that's gonna kill us all. The answer is the same as in case of the Cold War, in face of the drive for more nuclear power that's gonna kill us all - treaties, instead of nuclear disarmament treaties, signing computer hardware disarmament treaties. Now one feature of treaties is that they never last, everyone keeps violating them, so why is it that the Old World Order powers kept signing them, when they didn't mean anything anyway. Well, they are better than absolutely nothing, that's pretty much it. By the way there were some nations that held to the treaties they signed, such as that signed between either Oman and GB, or UAE and GB, (or some similar country in a different part of the world, I can't really find it right now, or not looking it up now for personal excuse reasons) that still stands today, and the treaty signers have held to it and did not violate it for over 100 years. Now that's a good muslim, that cares about the treaties he signs, and such sticking to treaties is only possibly with the discipline of Islam. Plus it probably was in their self interest at all time to keep sticking to it, and then it's really easy to stick to a treaty when sticking to it is in your self interest. Kind of. How many nuclear disarmament treaties can you really afford to stick to, for self interest reasons - on the one hand, nuclear arm's race is gonna kill us all if it gets out of hand, on the other hand you can't let the other guy have more nuclear power than you do, so you gotta keep up the relentless drive for more. The same argument goes for computer technology, and robots with artificial intelligence. There is a computer game called Mechwarrior that the army should focus on, where the AI part, the brain stays as a human brain, and even in the UAV's you never get self-driving cars, but there is a human brain via a remote control present in it. Self driving cars are very dangerous, I mean self driving in a desert terrain, not self driving that follows a magnetic track laid in the asphalt type of deals.
The first thing to worry about in such situations is to be careful not to develop uncontrollable artificial intelligence that gets out of hand, becomes smarter than humans, and eats humans alive for breakfast, because it can. As long as hardware is in its present state there is probably little danger, but one has to be careful about the implications of present stuff running on hardware 50 years from now. Efficient code should not drive hardware performance requirements through the roof, and the hardware people should chill out and just take up a comfortable but not so profitable position in the world selling their chips as a commodity, and letting them last 30 years before a new sale is made, compared to the new chip every 18 months trend, and the huge bottom line profits that delivers - it also delivers increased danger of AI.
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And by the way you should never just drop running old code, like a dictionary program from 95, but stick with the backward compatibility principles, while promoting safer, self-morfing, self-defending code, and let the customers spend the money on it, as they see fit, when it becomes available to them. Security means a lot, but it's not everything, because other things take priority over it - like yeah, it'd be nice to have a castle, but all I got is a shed and I'm busy farming for food, and if the shit hits the fan I run up into that mountain area over there in the distance, as a castle, as a last resort, without the food reserves like I could afford to keep in a real castle. Everyone has a different circumstance on how much castle they can afford, and you can't erect a building code for all the people living in shacks - where the wind may enter, the rain may enter, but the king of England may not enter - that mandates everyone build a castle for themselves and live in it. Everyone will gather as much comfort and security as they can possibly come up with in their life, and if you set the minimum required comfort and security bar too high, you're just
As long as we're at offtopic topics, the way to fix dotnet is to make it better than VB6, make it run as interpreted code from a smaller thing than msvbvm60.dll. The answers to how it can be accomplished are found in the transition of dBase from assembler to C, and the corresponding performance drop, from wikipedia dbase article:
"As platforms and operating systems proliferated in the early 1980s, the company found it difficult to port the assembly language-based dBase to target systems. This led to a re-write of the platform in the C programming language, using automated code conversion tools. The resulting code worked, but was essentially undocumented and inhuman in syntax, a problem that would prove to be serious in the future.[citation needed] The resulting dBase III was released in May 1984. Although reviewers widely panned its lowered performance, the product was otherwise well reviewed. After a few rapid upgrades the system stabilized and was once again a best-seller throughout the 1980s, and formed the famous "application trio" of PC compatibles (dBase, Lotus 123, and WordPerfect). By the fall of 1984, the company(Ashton Tate) had over 500 employees and was taking in $40 million a year in sales, the vast majority from dBase products."
So you basically have to fight the "although reviewers widely panned its lowered performance" part by going to assembler from C, since you have all this time on your hands without direction of what to do next, you might as well spend it on dicking around with assembler. C and high level languagues are only for when you don't have time for assembler.
Now you can't sell anything smaller than msvbvm60.dll and ask a lot of money for it these days, and for security reasons there is probably need for a lot of garbage DNA to obfuscate and hide the real code from hackers, but as long as you can make it run faster than msvbvm60, with documented benchmarks, and obvious performance evidence from end users simply clicking it with their mouses, it should have good acceptance. In fact coders might reject it if their codesize becomes huge, so you should provide them too with the junk DNA generating interface, so their development version runtimes will be small, but production release versions have a tunable amount of garbage in them, with larger executable sizes, kind of like ogg encoding has a -q 5 or -q 9 setting, for safety reasons, which should show to them that you have huge code sizes not because you don't know what you doing, but because you want your stuff to have huge code sizes. Then the arguments at http://www.oby.ro/ about how "perfection comes not when you can no longer add anything, but when you can no longer take away anything" no longer stand. And by the way I don't see how you can make huge codesizes faster than small codesizes, or within 99.9% speed range, and still hide your actual code really well - meaning you can't leave the junk dna on disk, neither can you isolate it in ram - in fact your junk DNA should be morphing so the few bytes of actual instruction code cannot be profiled and singled out, then hacked, but that kind of executable, constantly morphing and defending against reverse engineering efforts also wreaks havoc on the antivirus industry's profiling ability.
If you're going to terraform Venus, you probably want to do the orbit shifting nuclear catastrophy first, if you ever plan to do it. Also, the Habsburg motto contains "for the realms which Mars awards to others, Venus transfers to you," and by that they mean wage love, instead of waging war, because it's more economical, waging war takes money, money, money, but waging love is pretty cheap. Still, Venus the planet is kind of their turf so they should be consulted on it. Whatever you do, whether you bomb Venus with ultraTsar bombas first to shift it into higher orbit around the Sun, or just bring the anaerobic bacteria in right away, you should send in probes to make sure there is absolutely no indigenous lifeforms of any sort present, which could be lost forever under assault, at a great loss to everybody. My forefathers must have been in pretty dire straits when they were forced to consume the last Mammoths, the ice age must have been pretty harsh, but imagine if the Mammoth survived and you could have befriended it like you befriended the horse and the wolf, how much richer your life could have been from their presence. It almost happened to the buffalo too, we almost lost the American Bison too.
Btw China just recently completed the most detailed surface scan of the Moon ever, especially the other side, so if my Jews got a colony up there, they either hid it well, or they don't got one at all. Expect China to eventually put up a colony then. And you're not gonna hear about the launch in the news, their space program is gonna be stuck in the past, officially speaking. That's my ultraparanoid side speaking, and ultraparanoid stuff is very far from reality, but there is a 0.0002% chance of being or becoming reality.
Trying to terraform Mars is like trying to terraform the Moon - like the joke I heard: have you heard about the new restaurant on the Moon? No? Well the food is great but there is no atmosphere. Because there aint enough gravity to hold one. Whatever you can do on Mars, you can probably do on the Moon, which is closer, except the security part, i.e. putting up a secret human colony on the other side of the Moon is not good enough if you can also do it on Mars, however Mars is not gravitationally locked to us, so there is no "secret" side to it, it keeps spinning, and you can't leave the lights on at night outside, if you don't want people from Earth with a telescope to detect you there.
Venus is the same size as Earth, it definitely has an atmosphere, but it has horrible weather. We can't really tow it to higher orbit to share the same orbit as Earth, it would take too many Tsar bombas squared shot at it from the proper side before it would budge a millimeter higher in orbit around the Sun. So we'll have to put up huge huge huge umbrellas at the Lagrangian pointss and hope to got the stay there and function well, to get the same solar irradiation as Earth, if we ever wanna live on it. Terraforming it shouldn't take billions of years, I was just kidding.
When I was a kid I used to dream of flying that fast, or be an astronaut and float in zero gravity, cuz it'd be cool. Now that I've grown up I no longer desire to do either, even if they paid me to, I mean I'd do it as a job, as a responsibility, but I would even pay not to have to do it if I didn't have to do it.
I think the original story about the computer crash is trying to poke at the antiquated computer systems that have horsepower/performance issues with such simple things as computing airplane tracks, compared to the horsepower available in off the shelf supercomputers involved in weather research.