Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all?;)
Well, now seriously, I have some idea of my own on the topic. Whatever we meet, true, won't even vaguely resemble HOMO SAPIENS. On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.
For a start I'm going to assume that life is going to evolve from individual mollecules that self-replicate and get increasingly more complex. This kinda means a primal pond for those chemical reactions to thrive. This kinda rules out the most exotic scenarios like gas bags floating in gas giants. Ephemereal water droplets just won't last enough for that kind of evolution.
Second, I'm only interested in sentients. While life can also just mean some weird rock-eating bacteria, it's not going to be the kind you make contact with. That kind of thing just gets written under local flora at best, not alien contact.
Then you have constraints like that probably the simplest complex and mobile shape that can pump that pond through and extract nutrients is some kind of tube. It evolved so many times on Earth that there must be some merit to it. So you'll pretty much have critters based on a body plan that takes in food at one end, and dumps waste out the other end.
Or that if that kind of life form has SOME equivalent to DNA -- doesn't mean actual DNA, just SOME way to encode how to make more copies of itself --- you'll probably get SOME symmetry, because it saves on complexity there.
Then if you think of it, it makes sense to have the sensor organs to the front of that tube. It makes more sense to see or smell what you're about to swallow than what just passed you by. Critters with the sensor organs up front will have a strong evolutionary advantage in just about any imaginable setup.
At that point, you have to worry about reaction times, Whatever means of processing information it will have, whether it will be like our neurons or not, it will have finite speed and bandwidth. The main sensor organs, like eyes (or equivalent) need massive bandwidth and quick processing (our eyes even have basic image processing built right into the retina), so you'll want that trunk kept short. So that gives you a "brain" or equivalent quite close to the front of that tube, i.e., it gives you a head.
It will be a generic purpose "brain". Hard-wired reflexes that have to be pre-wired for your exact limb lengths and whatnot, are actually a major handicap, so no complex animal does that. Most brains just learn to use whatever body they got, to the point where animals can in actual studies learn to use eyes that detect a fourth colour, or a CCD camera sensor instead of a retina, or a culture of rat neurons can learn to use a truck with wheels instead of a rat body. In the end it's a problem of survivable complexity. You are much more adaptable evolving if mutations to body shape don't have to happen at the same time as mutations to a brain that is already fine-tuned to that body, to be survivable. Mutations to the body have to be able to just happen by themselves, and the brain must be able to learn to use that body.
Plus, if it were hard-wired, the reflexes that helped avoid predators as a dumb animal, won't help it be able to do maths or operate a spaceship. Any alien that can really operate new tools and think abstractly, will have a general-purpose enough brain to do that.
A complex enough head, gives you a long childhood. Whether you believe that that species give birth to live offspring, or lays eggs, or whatever, there's only so big a head you can get out of the mother or that you can grow out of the limited nutrients in an egg, or whatever. You'll continue building processing units for a long time afterwards, and a complex enough brain needs some time to figure out a complex world model. (See the Piaget childhood development theories, for how long it takes for a human brain to fi
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that energy is why it can't EVENTUALLY be done. I'm just saying it's why it won't be done during the lifetime of generation Y either. Since, really, that's what I was answering to: whether it will inspire the next generation to not fail to move on with space travel.
I'm just saying that, yeah, focusing on the here and now, I wouldn't bet on the next generation getting a guy out of the solar system.
Further in the future... who knows? We've only had even cities for like 10,000 years, and existed as a species for 200,000 years. It would be presumptuous of me to state what can't be done in the next 4-5 billion years we can exist on this planet. (Past which point if it's not done yet, it effectively means "never.") I'm perfectly willing to say I have no bloody clue what will happen that far in the future.
Well, that price is actually a function of supply and demand. Namely the supply is infinitessimal. If you start bringing back tons of it, I would expect the price to drop a heck of a lot.
After all, the same happened already to several materials. E.g., at one point aluminium was more expensive than gold, and that's why it was chosen for the cap of the Washington monument. It was a statement to put a cap of a ridiculously expensive precious metal on it. But then in a couple of years a new process started churning out aluminiums by the tens of tons, and the price dropped to the point where we make inexpensive foil for packing or baking things in, or make disposable beer cans out of it. In ye olde days it would have been like putting beer in solid platinum cans, but that changed a lot.
But yeah, if you somehow had a market that doesn't drop prices when supply is abundant, that would be one heck of a business model:P
I have to ask one thing Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would you want HK-47 as a bank teller?
Heh, well, as an adult, I wouldn't. I already said in there that ATMs are the more logical solutions. Just imagine telling your pin by voice to a robot, with 20 people in line behind you, and you'll see the problem.
But as a kid? HK-47 is the kewlest droid EVAR, meatbag:p
1. I'm not sure you're right about the efficiency of the system.
Well, I probably am not. You'll notice that in the equivalence to nukes I assumed you can get 29/30=0.9667, i.e., 96,67% efficiency in getting 30 kilotons of energy in the fuel into 29 kilotons of energy in moving that gram of matter. Real engines will be worse than that. I'm trying to be as geberous as I can with the assumptions, really.
2. Which planet are you thinking? I'm thinking to simply get to the next system - forget planets for a second, Orion may be the way to go.
Well, the one I had in the back of the head was the 22 light-years one mentioned in IIRC yesterday's front page.
But given that the problem was the energy in reaching a certain speed, I'd say the problem is the target speed, not the distance. After all, if you can reach 0.9c between here and Proxima Centauri, you can also coast on the same 0.9c to however far you wish. So the question isn't as much what distance, but at what speed do you want to get there.
All I'm saying is that things get ridiculously expensive close to c. And 0.75c is only half as much kinetic energy, so that's probably too high too.
But if you want to reach Proxima Centauri in a millennium, yeah, things get cheaper:p
Exactly where did you see anything about refusing to grow up, or using fiction as proof, or not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, in the actual message you answer to?
By actually reading the message while sober and in full possession of my faculties.
Provide an exact quote, my dear troll, or piss off. Just more postulating that your delusional strawmen are there, just won't cut it.
We're on a board where the message is still readable on the same page. Just postulating I said something I didn't is stupid, when it's trivial to see I actually said and what was being discussed.
That whole tirade of insults of yours contained stuff like, and this is a direct quote: "Are you seriously so immature as to be disappointed that something as amazing as real time machine translation (which was nothing put a pipe dream when I was in high school a mere thirty years ago) is available 24/7 in something you can put in your pocket rather than being a 'kewl' 'droid?"
Provide an exact quote where I said anything even remotely resembling that I'm disappointed in that, or piss off.
But, yes, that's what is sadder, that that's the full extent of your capacities: reading a text twice and coming out with something wildly unrelated to what was actually in it.
I also notice that you carefully picked just pieces out of context that are easy to sound smart about, while leaving out what was actually the point there. Whop-de-do, such a surprise;)
No, I don't. But neither do those little girls (now grown into adults or even seniors) go on and on about how much reality sucks compared to the fiction they read as youth. On the other hand, such things are part and parcel of the discussion pretty much everywhere nerds and geeks gather.
Again, provide an exact quote where I said that reality sucks, or piss off. I'm getting tired of your arguing with your own strawmen. If you just want to argue with your own delusions, you can spare my time and do that in Notepad.
Take your own advice: if someone is that unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, they need professional help. If you genuinely can't distinguish between the kind of claim you had a canned answer for, and what I actually wrote, see a psychiatrist.
Again: the whole topic was whether the state of space travel will inspire kids or not. It's not even about reality as a whole, but about getting kids dreaming about a narrow domain.
What I AM saying is that if I were 6 nowadays, I'd probably find other pieces of reality to get excited about. Maybe I'd want to be a formula 1 driver, or maybe I'd want to make computer games, or God knows what else, but aiming to be the guy who'll study mold growth in zero g probably wouldn't be it. Precisely because there are enough other pieces of reality where the future prospects aren't nearly as underwhelming.
Yeah, there's just no way universal access to things beyond even the wildest dreams of SF (like near universal access to knowledge, in a handy pocket size package) is as cool as something so common in SF it's practically a cliche.
The part you conveniently left out was: to a kid. Address what is actually being said, not sentences taken out of context allow you to give your canned answers.
Do you genuinely think that someone will grow up dreaming to have something mundane, and at this point something which they already have? What kind of aiming short for an aspiration is that?
You don't grow up dreaming of having a cell phone with a browser. (Or if anyone does, well, they probably need help.)
I need help because I think that something like a Star Trek communicator or the MINISEC depicted in Imperial Earth is cool?
At this point, I'd say you need help because you fail elementa
Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either. It's economics and technology that put the kibosh on it.
Going anywhere in the solar system is, of course, going to be an easier proposition, and you can get some of that energy by slingshot fly-bys of planets. It's still going to involve a lot of time, a lot of shielding, and ultimately a lot of energy. I don't think technology and economics will make that a realistic goal for most people in any foreseeable future.
Helium 3 mining on the moon for example sounds the most feasible, but the economics just aren't there yet. If you need to get a 50 ton truck to moon and back (chosen as close enough to the total weight of the orbiter and lander for Apollo 11), exactly how much Helium 3 can you get back to even pay for the costs?
Or let's think big. Let's say we have a space truck roughly about the size of the late Space Shuttle. Let's also say that technology evolves so, adjusted for inflation, it costs as much to get it to moon and back as it costs currently to get it to LEO. Let's also say that on that cost, it can haul as much payload to moon and back as it currently can haul to LEO.
Not exceedingly SF scenarios, I think you'll agree. I mean, we're not talking warp engines and antimatter there, but the kind of better engines you'd expect to happen somewhere in the near-ish future.
Well, the Space Shuttle cost per mission according to NASA, as of 2011, was about 450 million dollars. So in my scenario, we'll pay that for a trip to the moon and back, so it's not that huge. It can haul 24,400 kg to LEO, let's say our space truck can do 25 tons to the moon and back. (Probably 25 tons of supplies in one direction, and 25 tons of He3 on the return route, not counting the weight of the tanks and such, which would probably be a part of the cosmic tanker truck as the cheapest solution.) It's a fair amount actually, since Helium is lightweight.
Well, now we have 450 million dollars / 25t = 18 million dollars per ton. That's how much you'd have to sell that He3 for, to just break even.
In fact, even if the cost of that round trip dropped by an order of magnitude (hey, technology progresses), it still has to be worth nearly 2 million dollars a ton to be worth just the trip alone, never mind the costs of the moon base.
So I still think that even that won't happen any time soon. Sorry. Adam Smith's invisible hand is flipping us SF nerds the bird:p
You obviously forgot the obvious solution. A freaking big solar sail and a bunch of Lasers placed somewhere in our solar system. Then you only need to have fuel for the deceleration. and who cares about deceleration? If we are going to send something to another solar system it will obviously be to spy on and then destroy some aliens. Having a few tons of spy satelite traveling at 0.9c whould obviously do some damage.
Well, that was of course about space TRAVEL. Which usually is understood as involving at least one human, but basically the problems are the same even for sending a robotic probe to bring back samples.
If what you want to do is just blow the shit out of some alien planet, then, yeah, things are a lot simpler. A ton worth of solid warhead coming at you at 0.9c will pack 29 gigatons of TNT worth of kinetic energy, i.e., will hit like 600 Tsar Bombas.
Though it will still fall short of, say, the Yucatan impact that killed the dinosaurs. That's estimated at 100 million megatons, while we just reached 29,000 megatons here. We'll have to do about 3000 times more energy into ours to do the same kind of destruction.
Hmm... A bit over 220 tons at 0.999c should do the trick:p
And that's the basic problem - too many people refuse to grow the hell up and shed that naivete. They insist on blaming reality for not living up to their childish beliefs, and then they use fiction as 'proof' that those beliefs were reasonable.
Seriously, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the juveniles of Robert Heinlein are all creations of imagination. If you're over eighteen and can't tell the difference between them and reality, you're in need of some serious professional help.
LOLWUT?
Exactly where did you see anything about refusing to grow up, or using fiction as proof, or not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, in the actual message you answer to? Please do address what was actually said, not what imaginary faults of other people you need to postulate to feel good about yourself.
First of all, the whole point there was about inspiring future generations of very young schoolboys. That was the gist of the message exchange you butted into. Which of course didn't grow up yet. Yes, I realize that a certain kind of loser needs to hear himself say "grow up", and thinks it makes hims sound so superior, but it's a pretty stupid thing to say when the topic is actually inspiring elementary school students. Of course those didn't grow up.
And of course a certain amount of unrealism will be involved. You don't actually think that little girls dreaming of being princesses and having a pony actually thought through such aspects as "and be some piece of property to pawn off or give as a reward" like real princesses were, or about having to shovel the crap a pony produces, do you?
Second, I dare say that being able to distinguish between reality and those future scenario is kinda a pre-requisite for their being something to dream about in the first place. Nobody grows up dreaming to be a garbage truck driver. Dreaming of growing up to be a cool spaceship pilot was only cool and inspirational because we knew it's not something from the reality of here and now. If anyone actually thought that space cities and space freighters are real in the here and now, they'd have been mundane things for them.
Using fiction as proof? Where the fuck did you actually see me say or do that? Again, kindly address what's actually written, not what kind of strawmen would let you sound smart.
So the f' what? Are you seriously so immature as to be disappointed that something as amazing as real time machine translation (which was nothing put a pipe dream when I was in high school a mere thirty years ago) is available 24/7 in something you can put in your pocket rather than being a 'kewl' 'droid? Hell, I consider the whole "in your pocket" thing far more impressive than the "being a droid" part. When I was a kid, we expected such things to take a whole room of computers, if it was ever possible at all.
You'll notice that I hadn't used the word "disappointed" in what you quoted there, or really in the whole message you answer to. So, again, please do address what's actually written, not what strawmen make you feel better.
It has nothing to do with being disappointed that translation apps are small. The point is what looks cool if you want to inspire kids, because that's what we were talking about. Functionalism is certainly good and fine, but you're not going to get a school-kid interested in science so they can design an own logo and catchy name for cell phones designed by Google and manufactured in China.
A talking robot is "cool" enough to be an inspiration. Using a browser to access Google translations is not. You can grow up dreaming to have a cool talking robot like Luke Skywalker. You don't grow up dreaming of having a cell phone with a browser. (Or if anyone does, well, they probably need help.)
And just to add one thing about interstellar travel at relativistic speeds: that energy per gram works both ways. If you're going at 0.9c and hit a grain of mater (e.g., ice) just half a gram in weight, that's pretty much stationary compared to your own speed, the energy in that impact is going to be equivalent to having the Hiroshima bomb strapped to your ship and detonated.
When you're moving at relativistic speeds, every single spec of dust or ice is a relativistic weapon, packing energies measured in kilotons.
We're not talking something that will crack your windshield, but something that will vapourize even battleship-class armour and send chunks of it doing a mega shotgun blast through the rest of the ship.
So, you know, even if we figured out the engines, then we'd have to figure out some kind of Star Trek or Star Wars energy shield before we can actually make like an exorcist and get the hell out of here;)
I don't think they'll have a choice, though. The problems are that:
1. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." So you'll need incredible speeds to get anywhere interesting even within one lifetime.
2. In that domain, Albert Einstein is the biggest mofo. He'll be a bigger pain in your dreams of space domination than Mace Windu.
Everyone has some half-baked solution like "well, just keep accelerating at 1g for a few years, and you'll be at 0.9c". What they don't think about is what kind of energy you need to keep doing that. Even fusion won't cut it.
At 0.9c, every gram of your ship packs enough kinetic energy as a 29 kiloton atom bomb. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. Even at near perfect efficiency, you'd need two of those to accelerate just one gram of matter to 0.9c.
If you want to do a round trip, you have to accelerate then decelerate in one direction, then accelerate and decelerate again in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And that's with a cannon kind of a setup, so you only accelerate that one gram of matter, not also the rocket and fuel and whatnot. If you carry your own fuel and engines, you'll have to accelerate those too.
Doing it slowly or doing it fast, won't change anything. At the end of the acceleration period, each gram of your ship will still pack that much kinetic energy, so still that much energy will have gone into accelerating it.
Take your choice of realistic engine. Orion? If you took all the atom bombs ever made, they still wouldn't be enough to push even a modest capsule for a one way trip to a good habitable planet. Engine with uranium salts in water? Ditto, plus you now have to accelerate the water and the moderator bars too. Ion thrusters? Well, you still need that much energy piped into accelerating the ions. You'll still need a reactor that produces that much energy, and there just ain't enough uranium produced in the world for that.
The point is that even the next generation still ain't going anywhere. It doesn't matter if they want to push space travel or not, they're still not going to put a guy farther than maybe Mars. Unless some miraculous new source of energy is found -- note that even Star Trek essentially has infinite energy and stored as densely as antimatter -- the next generation is just tied to this rock as we are.
I mean, think of what really inspired generation X. I don't think it was just the prospect of having a chance to sit in a cramped capsule in orbit for two days, and even that chance being lower than being hit by lightning.
I think it was more like the extrapolation of where it's going. SF told us stories of it becoming a mass thing, every other guy being at least a space freighter pilot, and the cool ones like us would be space FIGHTER pilots, exploration, whole colonies on other planet and in orbit, meeting horny green alien babes, and going bald where nobody had gone before. Oh wait, the last one was the porn;) And not just space travel. It told us tales of robots, lasers, near-infinite sources of energy, etc.
It was an age of very rapid progress in a whole bunch of domains, and a naive linear extrapolation ahead promised to soon take us where we can't even imagine. Now it was the moon, tomorrow it will be colonies on Mars, and the day after tomorrow probably meeting the Vulcans.
It was that imaginary destination, not the current state that got us SF nerds dreaming.
Nowadays, it seems to have pretty much become a horizontal asymptote. Or near enough. Within your lifetime, or even your kids' lifetime, we'll probably still have half a dozen people in orbit. Your grandkids' chances of being an astronaut will still be lower than winning the jackpot and retiring to a tropical resort.
And even if they won that lottery, what will they do in orbit? Where does that extrapolation lead nowadays? They'll maybe levitate droplets of oil instead of water? Study the growth of mold on a petri dish in zero gravity?
Even robots are not what we dreamed they would be. Instead of cool HK-47 style androids at the bank teller, we have the more logical thing of a box with a screen and a keypad. Instead of robotic vendors, we have the more logical vending machines. And instead of having a robot copilot, you just have an autopilot AI, because it would be stupid to build a humanoid frame where just a few chips will do the same job better. And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
And you can forget the whole space fighter thing, since not only it turns out that blowing enough shit up in orbit would nix all our access to space, but pilots are being replaced by remote controlled drones even on Earth. And in space probably even more so, since you can do much tighter turns and accelerations if you don't have to worry about squishing the human inside.
So, you know, inspire kids to aspire to... what?
But even forgetting the extrapolation, the thing about the human brain is that it works with differences more than with absolutes. To be interesting enough, something must be different enough. You wouldn't think for example that a new LCD TV is new and interesting if it just has the buttons in a different position than yours.
At some point there was enough change per time unit to be interesting. Yay, we went to the moon. Yay, we have a space shuttle that promises to make space travel cheap and often (yeah, right.) Yay, we have a space station.
Now it's, what? Yay, we're stuck in the same orbit, but we can do another elementary-school level science experiments in space?:p
1 gram of matter travelling at 0.75c packs about 4.6 x 10^13 J of energy, or the equivalent of a 11 kiloton bomb. By comparison the "little boy" bomb used at Hiroshima was 15 kiloton. (At 0.9c it becomes 29 kilotons, and for 0.99c it's 132 kilotons, while 0.999c it's 454 kilotons.)
So even forgetting chemical rockets, if you took enough uranium to get about 15 kilotons of energy out of it, and accelerated a single gram of matter with it, and had an efficiency of about 73% for the whole thing (i.e., not just blow a nuke under that gram of matter, but somehow focused it so about three quarters of the energy go into pushing that gram), then you'd get a gram of matter moving at 0.75c. One gram.
Note that this already means pretty much some kind of cannon setup. If you put all that uranium and stuff in a rocket, then you accelerate the whole rocket, not just that gram of matter, and end up with a _much_ lower speed.
The energy necessary to do that for even a modest spacecraft weighing 50 tons -- barely more than the combined command module and lunar lander of the Apolo 11 mission -- is left as an exercise to the reader. Remember though that for a round trip you need to accelerate AND decelerate once in one direction, and then accelerate AND decelerate once more in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And again, that was under the assumption that we have some kind of Mass Effect style accelerator at both ends, so the spacecraft doesn't have to carry and accelerate/decelerate its own fuel and engines and whatnot. If you actually do need to haul your own uranium and engines, which at least the first mission would, then things get even more ridiculous.
So even with nuclear engines (this kind of talks are like a honeypot for the kind of SF-fetishist who heard something vague about Orion rockets or engines with water and uranium salts, and thinks they're kinda like a warp drive and make everything magically possible), the energy budget necessary for even a modest mission at 0.75c is immense. Mind bogglingly immense.
Sorry, folks, it's just not going to happen in your lifetimes. Sorry to be the one to piss on the parade of every fellow nerd who grew up with Star Wars fantasies, but there simply is no feasible way to just get to it and pack someone on a 44 year trip.
Sure, some people are stupid, and prefer to take an iron age fairy tale book for illiterate backwater tribes (even under the Romans, literacy in Palestine is estimated at 3%, and most of those in the cities) for 100% accurate, against all proof to the contrary. But at least they''re consistent about it, in their stupidity. They only have one premise they have to hang onto, to make that seem to make sense.
The ones I understand even less are those who are at least vaguely aware that some stuff isn't exactly true -- or needs some extensive editing and playing mad-libs with putting your own words into their sentence structure, under the guise of "what it REALLY meant" -- but still insist that the REST of it must be literally true and come from an omniscient source. Even though that source fucks up all over the place.
It seems to me like if some guy came at work to give one rules under the claimed authority of being the CEO's bestest buddy and knowing everything about him and the company, one would be at least a little skeptical. If the guy then gets the founding year (and even century) of the company wrong, and the position in the city wrong (or for that matter doesn't know there's a city around it at all), and generally gets a dozen things awfully wrong even in one sitting, then everyone would think "what a poser" and be at least vaguely aware that everything else he says might be wrong too.
But here we have a bunch of guys who had hallucinations... err... "visions" (no, really, Paul for example even says so, plus it's more than once in the OT that that's how God talks to prophets) and get a lot of stuff awfully wrong. Yet even people aware that it gets the timescale of creation wrong, and talks about events that blatantly didn't happen and nobody else heard about (e.g., Matthew's zombie invasion or the physically impossible 3 hour eclipse on a full moon), and stuff where you have to take some illiterate goat-herder's word that the proven and tested laws of physics got raped six ways to sunday over the guys who have evidence (e.g., the flood, the braking the Earth so the Sun stands still in the sky, etc), and the supposedly omniscient God doesn't know the basic biology of those he created (e.g., Jesus ranting that you don't have to wash your hands and dishes before eating, because everything that goes into your mouth is destroyed anyway, or his thinking that by worrying about your body and what you eat you can't add even an hour to your life)... still go basically "that was... err... metaphor. But the rest of it? It's all literally true."
Jesus Christ, how can one know that a text told lies in dozens of places and still take it on faith that, no, see, everything else is literally true? They say that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing ten times and expecting different results. Well here we have dozens of places where people tried to find unerring truth in a text, and it turned out to be a falsehood. How insane does one need to be to keep trying?
Actually, I've seen stuff like that in action, except the (sadder) underlying assumption isn't just that they're now somehow immune, but that they've got experience.
As a trivial example, just think of companies and/or designers who've fucked up two MMOs in a row, and then suddenly get a third, bigger budget MMO to make, because, hey, they're the guys who have experience with making MMOs. And when that turns out to be a fuckup too, hey, lookit all that experience they have making MMOs, someone actually gives them money to make a fourth. (And if you think that that's a totally made up example, and nobody would be that stupid, it's actually the verbatim story of Funcom.)
Though an even better example is Michael Brown of FEMA fame, the guy who majorly fucked up during two disaster recoveries in a row and had to resign... consulting as a disaster recovery expert afterwards.
I'm not sure if the explanation is as much "that's Japan" as "that's Sony."
For the last decade (at the very least) Sony has acted like a bad stereotype of the guy obsessed with not losing face, and always being right. Every single bad decision, PR gaffe or just someone from Sony putting his foot in his mouth in an interview, they've dug themselves deeper and deeper just to not admit "ok, it was dumb." They'd rather put the other foot in their mouth too than admit that the first one was a foot after all.
I'm not even sure it has anything to do with Japan per se. While Asians generally are more careful about not losing respect, I don't think they're anywhere near the bad caricature that Sony has become. Plus, I see lots of us westerners doing the same too. I think it's more about hubris and/or insecurity than anything particularly Japanese.
But, anyway, I can actually see some guys at Sony prefer to promote him than admit that he might have said anything stupid ever.
Just look up on a clear night. See all those stars? Every single one of them is outside the solar system!
Nonsense. Genesis 1 clearly states
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
[...]
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
So clearly the sky is a dome dividing the waters below from the water above, and the sun and the stars are set on/in it. All this talk of space and great distances and things outside our system is just you science-y servants of Satan trying to test our faith;)
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
And really, it applies not just to distances, but masses, speeds, etc. As a rule of thumb, if it even deserves being mentioned in astronomy, it's frikken mind-bogglingly big.
The Earth, for example, is 6x10^24 kg, so basically 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Or about 600,000,000,000,000,000 Nimitzes.
Or more to the point of the planet being discussed here, they say it's a little bigger than Mercury, which in turn is 3.3x10^23 kg. I.e., 330,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Yeah, that's the kind of numbers that astronomy is about. Well, not really. These are small planets. Now stars and black holes and galaxies, that's the real bread and butter. And you can pretty much stick the zero key down and go brew some coffee, if you want to write the weights for that.
And then come the distances, yes. Douglas Adams was certainly up to something there.
You know where in Men In Black, agent K says, "You want to stay away from that guy. He's, uh, he's grouchy. A three hour delay in customs after a trip for 17 trillion miles is gonna make anybody cranky." You'd think 17 trillion miles is half-way across the galaxy, right? Actually the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 25 trillion miles away. So that alien would have had to make a stop at some cosmic gas station in between, if he only had a 17 trillion miles trip.
It's things like these that... well, let's just say they seriously put the kibosh on most nerds "we should totally do some SF thing right now" scenarios. E.g., since we talk mass, there are all the "oh, let's terraform [insert planet]" stupidities. Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves. (There are 1.4x10^18 tons of water on Earth for example.) Nor where they'd come from, nor what the energy budget for that would be.
Spider silk isn't sticky by itself. It's essentially some very long protein filaments, same as worm-butt silk.
What makes spider orbs sticky is that the spider then deposits small droplets of glue along the threads.
But even spiders produce non-glued silk all the time. E.g., when a spider lowers itself by dangling on a silk filament, it doesn't bother putting glue on it.
Well, dunno about him, but before I gave in and tried an antivirus again around Christmas, I can say that everything loaded much faster, there was no suspicious modem activity, there were no popups telling me to pay X dollars or else, and haven't had any funny charges on my credit card either.
Honestly, if I had any malware, it was far better behaved than any antivirus I've ever seen. From a simple pragmatic point of view, I should have stuck with that.
When a bug report is filed, the experienced programmer thinks "Oh shit. What did I miss."
The junior programmer thinks "Damn users. Always complaining. They don't know how anything works."
And then you see bugs like "It doesn't work" or "I get an error", without even the faintest clue included as to what doesn't work, what were they trying to do, how to reproduce whatever unspecified error was popped up at them, and so on. And then it turns out that -- I kid you not, true case -- the user had read some blog about hackers and installed some firewall on her workstation, effectively forbidding the client program from talking to the server.
Or then there was the case of my friend who wrote a database application for some small company which shall remain unnamed to protect the idio... err... innocent. He gets a call to the effect of "this crap stopped working completely", goes there, checks the ini files, then finally has the insight to look for the database tablespace files. Missing. He asks those guys. Their answer: "Oh, that huge file? We deleted it 'cause it was taking up all the space on the machine."
Or in the spirit of TFA, the boss who thinks he knows everything better than you anyway. So a long time ago, in a galaxy far away... err.. just a long time ago, I make a program for some guys, and let's just say that one part involved uncompressing some data using a sliding buffer. At the start, the buffer was initialized with all zeroes, and the algorithm actually depended on that. So at some point I get a phone call passed to me from their PHB, who's pretty much foaming at the mouth about how the crap just stopped working, and he's going to sue us for millions of dollars, and so on. Turned out he decided to look through the sources (which he had received as per the contract) and "optimize" it himself by removing that buffer initialization. And that was C, not Java, so no zeroing happening automatically either. When the program promptly started producing crap, instead of coming to the idea that maybe his changes made it stop working, he decided that obviously the program had been defective all along. So he calls and threatens to sue.
Or then there's stuff like change requests disguised as bug reports, apparently as someone's idea of being "smart" and trying to not pay for the changes. Or the guy who, when asked why he did a certain thing in a certain way (which incidentally was very very stupid), breaks up into a whole rant about our stuff lacking documentation and how much it sucks that he has to do that by trial and error and generally poor little him and evil us for not giving him documentation... except actually there was ample documentation, including the very specific case of what he was trying to do, and he had been given it too. Or as a more extreme example of that, the PHB who it turned out, didn't read more than the first paragraph, because more than once he did the exact opposite of what told to do or not to do in the second paragraph of an email. And then it turned out he genuinely had no idea of anything that was in the rest of the text.
Etc, etc, etc.
Yes, we make bugs, yes most of us start from the assumption "what did I miss?" but a LOT of times it turns out that the user actually IS retarded. And don't get me wrong, I don't expect the user to be a Linux kernel programmer or anything. But when you hear someone ranting about how much it sucks that action X does nothing whatsoever... when he hits "Cancel" on the second page of the nicely designed GUI wizard for action X, instead of actually continuing... but it's still somehow the program's fault... well, you just have to wonder how few neurons someone can have and still not stop breathing.
I see only one problem with that plan. By the end of it, you'll have had
- your country used for everything from getting rid of old bombs by dropping them on you to testing new weapons by dropping them on you
- some hospital hit by cruise missiles which the USA still claims they hit their intended super-secret bunkers that nobody else ever heard of
- a few dozen children born with flippers because of all the uranium oxide dust from the depleted uranium ammunitions used. (While DU is actually pretty inert and safe as a penetrator rod that's not been fired yet, when it goes through armour at high speed it melts and burns, creating a lot of uranium oxide dust. Which is just as toxic as any other heavy metal compound, and for the same reasons: it's a frikken huge atom. So think spiking a well with lead paint, because that's the equivalent of what a few villages will be drinking afterwards.)
- a bunch of kids without fingers because they tried picking up unexploded cluster-bomblets which are about the size of a coke can
- a bunch of civilians shot or tortured by bored Blackwater mercenaries, and occasionally by actual soldiers
- an election overturned because it didn't elect the puppet government the USA wanted
- virtually all your natural resources and infrastructure handed over to western companies by the government, when the proper puppet government IS elected
- a LOT of news about idiot protestant ministers calling for essentially a crusade against your country for not worshipping the exact same as them
And other such stuff that's guaranteed to rile the population and get a bunch of lemmings to actually start shooting back at the troops and place roadside IEDs and whatnot, because pron be damned, they actually hate those invading soldiers by now. Which in turn will get anyone asking to pull back your troops from your country, bleated at that they're "not supporting the troops." So oil or no oil, now you'll have the US army loving you long time, and not the consensual kind of love. You probably spotted the vicious circle there.
But now it creates a bunch of other problems. Even if you somehow got out of it eventually, by now
- a bunch of people were pissed enough to join any fundamentalist sect or ideology that's against the Americans. If at the start you just had a religion that's just not American, now you'll have every shade of Wahhabi extremists who actually do want sharia law and executions for apostasy and burqas and whatnot
- those extremist guys bombing each other for not being the exact same flavour of extremism, plus bombing a few civilians just to drive their point across. Which will eventually add up to more dead people than the war and the bored Blackwater mercenaries ever caused.
- all sorts of corruption and local warlords, since that kind of thing thrives in such chaos
So all things considered, it seems like a bad plan if you just want to get fast internet for pron. Especially since that kinda extremists will then want to kill you if you actually watch pron, or for that matter even get a barbie doll with less clothing than a burqa.
Sorta, good for you, but people doing that would make the game a dismal failure for bioware/EA.
Point duly taken, but there was an "if" there. IF it stops being fun.
I'm sure Bioware and EA are also fully aware that they need to keep people entertained over more than a couple of months and are working on new quests, instances, expansion packs, etc. So this would be their motivation to, you know, negate that "if".
And at least Bioware has proven great skill so far. So I wouldn't worry all that much about them yet.
But, be that as it may, my point was merely that I don't see a point in pessimism now over what might or might not happen in a few months. The game is great fun right now, and that's a good reason for me to play it right now. I like having fun. No point getting all worried now and ruining my enjoyment in the process. If something changes in a few months, well, I'll worry about that bridge when I cross it.
There is no reason to not have some SW fun right now over worries about what might happen later, really.
Also as someone who actually plays it, I think it's inexact. It's like calling Skyrim "Fallout 3 with swords."
The only similarity to WOW is that both are games in the same genre. So, yes, certain mechanics are going to be shared between the two, by necessity. Some because frankly, they're part of the whole MMO premise, and some because we have a decade and a half of figuring out what players like and what players don't like. In a new game you want more of the former and less of the latter.
And it's not even a bad thing. We had an attempt at ignoring everything that other MMOs showed that works or doesn't work. It was called Tabula Rasa. Yeah, Lord British thought he's so great that he can simply wipe the slate of everything that had been learned in a decade of MMOs and reinvent everything his way. It wasn't much fun to play for most people who've tried it and it bombed badly.
And really, most of that stuff isn't even particularly specific to WoW. As someone who's played half a dozen MMOs before, I don't see why I should reduce a whole genre to one game. It's called MMO, not "WoW clone". You could just as accurately say it's Everquest 2 with lightsabers, or City Of Heroes with lightsabers, or, really, whatever.
The classes for example are not really clones of WoW, suprisingly enough. The companions mechanic is also not very WoW. Actually branching available quests based on what you did before (e.g., alignment) is also not very closely mirroring any WoW mechanic I can think of. Having a choice of how you want to end a quest is also not very WoW-like. Etc. The point is that it's different enough to feel different and interesting, and in the end that's all that matters.
As for what happens in a few months, meh, nothing is for ever. I bought a game, not entered a marriage and made a kid, you know? If it stops being fun to play in a few months, for whatever reason, I'll move on then. And hey, at that point I will have got a couple of months of fun. Am I right?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all? ;)
Well, now seriously, I have some idea of my own on the topic. Whatever we meet, true, won't even vaguely resemble HOMO SAPIENS. On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.
For a start I'm going to assume that life is going to evolve from individual mollecules that self-replicate and get increasingly more complex. This kinda means a primal pond for those chemical reactions to thrive. This kinda rules out the most exotic scenarios like gas bags floating in gas giants. Ephemereal water droplets just won't last enough for that kind of evolution.
Second, I'm only interested in sentients. While life can also just mean some weird rock-eating bacteria, it's not going to be the kind you make contact with. That kind of thing just gets written under local flora at best, not alien contact.
Then you have constraints like that probably the simplest complex and mobile shape that can pump that pond through and extract nutrients is some kind of tube. It evolved so many times on Earth that there must be some merit to it. So you'll pretty much have critters based on a body plan that takes in food at one end, and dumps waste out the other end.
Or that if that kind of life form has SOME equivalent to DNA -- doesn't mean actual DNA, just SOME way to encode how to make more copies of itself --- you'll probably get SOME symmetry, because it saves on complexity there.
Then if you think of it, it makes sense to have the sensor organs to the front of that tube. It makes more sense to see or smell what you're about to swallow than what just passed you by. Critters with the sensor organs up front will have a strong evolutionary advantage in just about any imaginable setup.
At that point, you have to worry about reaction times, Whatever means of processing information it will have, whether it will be like our neurons or not, it will have finite speed and bandwidth. The main sensor organs, like eyes (or equivalent) need massive bandwidth and quick processing (our eyes even have basic image processing built right into the retina), so you'll want that trunk kept short. So that gives you a "brain" or equivalent quite close to the front of that tube, i.e., it gives you a head.
It will be a generic purpose "brain". Hard-wired reflexes that have to be pre-wired for your exact limb lengths and whatnot, are actually a major handicap, so no complex animal does that. Most brains just learn to use whatever body they got, to the point where animals can in actual studies learn to use eyes that detect a fourth colour, or a CCD camera sensor instead of a retina, or a culture of rat neurons can learn to use a truck with wheels instead of a rat body. In the end it's a problem of survivable complexity. You are much more adaptable evolving if mutations to body shape don't have to happen at the same time as mutations to a brain that is already fine-tuned to that body, to be survivable. Mutations to the body have to be able to just happen by themselves, and the brain must be able to learn to use that body.
Plus, if it were hard-wired, the reflexes that helped avoid predators as a dumb animal, won't help it be able to do maths or operate a spaceship. Any alien that can really operate new tools and think abstractly, will have a general-purpose enough brain to do that.
A complex enough head, gives you a long childhood. Whether you believe that that species give birth to live offspring, or lays eggs, or whatever, there's only so big a head you can get out of the mother or that you can grow out of the limited nutrients in an egg, or whatever. You'll continue building processing units for a long time afterwards, and a complex enough brain needs some time to figure out a complex world model. (See the Piaget childhood development theories, for how long it takes for a human brain to fi
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that energy is why it can't EVENTUALLY be done. I'm just saying it's why it won't be done during the lifetime of generation Y either. Since, really, that's what I was answering to: whether it will inspire the next generation to not fail to move on with space travel.
I'm just saying that, yeah, focusing on the here and now, I wouldn't bet on the next generation getting a guy out of the solar system.
Further in the future... who knows? We've only had even cities for like 10,000 years, and existed as a species for 200,000 years. It would be presumptuous of me to state what can't be done in the next 4-5 billion years we can exist on this planet. (Past which point if it's not done yet, it effectively means "never.") I'm perfectly willing to say I have no bloody clue what will happen that far in the future.
Well, that price is actually a function of supply and demand. Namely the supply is infinitessimal. If you start bringing back tons of it, I would expect the price to drop a heck of a lot.
After all, the same happened already to several materials. E.g., at one point aluminium was more expensive than gold, and that's why it was chosen for the cap of the Washington monument. It was a statement to put a cap of a ridiculously expensive precious metal on it. But then in a couple of years a new process started churning out aluminiums by the tens of tons, and the price dropped to the point where we make inexpensive foil for packing or baking things in, or make disposable beer cans out of it. In ye olde days it would have been like putting beer in solid platinum cans, but that changed a lot.
But yeah, if you somehow had a market that doesn't drop prices when supply is abundant, that would be one heck of a business model :P
Heh, well, as an adult, I wouldn't. I already said in there that ATMs are the more logical solutions. Just imagine telling your pin by voice to a robot, with 20 people in line behind you, and you'll see the problem.
But as a kid? HK-47 is the kewlest droid EVAR, meatbag :p
Well, I probably am not. You'll notice that in the equivalence to nukes I assumed you can get 29/30=0.9667, i.e., 96,67% efficiency in getting 30 kilotons of energy in the fuel into 29 kilotons of energy in moving that gram of matter. Real engines will be worse than that. I'm trying to be as geberous as I can with the assumptions, really.
Well, the one I had in the back of the head was the 22 light-years one mentioned in IIRC yesterday's front page.
But given that the problem was the energy in reaching a certain speed, I'd say the problem is the target speed, not the distance. After all, if you can reach 0.9c between here and Proxima Centauri, you can also coast on the same 0.9c to however far you wish. So the question isn't as much what distance, but at what speed do you want to get there.
All I'm saying is that things get ridiculously expensive close to c. And 0.75c is only half as much kinetic energy, so that's probably too high too.
But if you want to reach Proxima Centauri in a millennium, yeah, things get cheaper :p
Provide an exact quote, my dear troll, or piss off. Just more postulating that your delusional strawmen are there, just won't cut it.
We're on a board where the message is still readable on the same page. Just postulating I said something I didn't is stupid, when it's trivial to see I actually said and what was being discussed.
That whole tirade of insults of yours contained stuff like, and this is a direct quote: "Are you seriously so immature as to be disappointed that something as amazing as real time machine translation (which was nothing put a pipe dream when I was in high school a mere thirty years ago) is available 24/7 in something you can put in your pocket rather than being a 'kewl' 'droid?"
Provide an exact quote where I said anything even remotely resembling that I'm disappointed in that, or piss off.
But, yes, that's what is sadder, that that's the full extent of your capacities: reading a text twice and coming out with something wildly unrelated to what was actually in it.
I also notice that you carefully picked just pieces out of context that are easy to sound smart about, while leaving out what was actually the point there. Whop-de-do, such a surprise ;)
Again, provide an exact quote where I said that reality sucks, or piss off. I'm getting tired of your arguing with your own strawmen. If you just want to argue with your own delusions, you can spare my time and do that in Notepad.
Take your own advice: if someone is that unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, they need professional help. If you genuinely can't distinguish between the kind of claim you had a canned answer for, and what I actually wrote, see a psychiatrist.
Again: the whole topic was whether the state of space travel will inspire kids or not. It's not even about reality as a whole, but about getting kids dreaming about a narrow domain.
What I AM saying is that if I were 6 nowadays, I'd probably find other pieces of reality to get excited about. Maybe I'd want to be a formula 1 driver, or maybe I'd want to make computer games, or God knows what else, but aiming to be the guy who'll study mold growth in zero g probably wouldn't be it. Precisely because there are enough other pieces of reality where the future prospects aren't nearly as underwhelming.
The part you conveniently left out was: to a kid. Address what is actually being said, not sentences taken out of context allow you to give your canned answers.
Do you genuinely think that someone will grow up dreaming to have something mundane, and at this point something which they already have? What kind of aiming short for an aspiration is that?
At this point, I'd say you need help because you fail elementa
Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either. It's economics and technology that put the kibosh on it.
Going anywhere in the solar system is, of course, going to be an easier proposition, and you can get some of that energy by slingshot fly-bys of planets. It's still going to involve a lot of time, a lot of shielding, and ultimately a lot of energy. I don't think technology and economics will make that a realistic goal for most people in any foreseeable future.
Helium 3 mining on the moon for example sounds the most feasible, but the economics just aren't there yet. If you need to get a 50 ton truck to moon and back (chosen as close enough to the total weight of the orbiter and lander for Apollo 11), exactly how much Helium 3 can you get back to even pay for the costs?
Or let's think big. Let's say we have a space truck roughly about the size of the late Space Shuttle. Let's also say that technology evolves so, adjusted for inflation, it costs as much to get it to moon and back as it costs currently to get it to LEO. Let's also say that on that cost, it can haul as much payload to moon and back as it currently can haul to LEO.
Not exceedingly SF scenarios, I think you'll agree. I mean, we're not talking warp engines and antimatter there, but the kind of better engines you'd expect to happen somewhere in the near-ish future.
Well, the Space Shuttle cost per mission according to NASA, as of 2011, was about 450 million dollars. So in my scenario, we'll pay that for a trip to the moon and back, so it's not that huge. It can haul 24,400 kg to LEO, let's say our space truck can do 25 tons to the moon and back. (Probably 25 tons of supplies in one direction, and 25 tons of He3 on the return route, not counting the weight of the tanks and such, which would probably be a part of the cosmic tanker truck as the cheapest solution.) It's a fair amount actually, since Helium is lightweight.
Well, now we have 450 million dollars / 25t = 18 million dollars per ton. That's how much you'd have to sell that He3 for, to just break even.
In fact, even if the cost of that round trip dropped by an order of magnitude (hey, technology progresses), it still has to be worth nearly 2 million dollars a ton to be worth just the trip alone, never mind the costs of the moon base.
So I still think that even that won't happen any time soon. Sorry. Adam Smith's invisible hand is flipping us SF nerds the bird :p
Well, that was of course about space TRAVEL. Which usually is understood as involving at least one human, but basically the problems are the same even for sending a robotic probe to bring back samples.
If what you want to do is just blow the shit out of some alien planet, then, yeah, things are a lot simpler. A ton worth of solid warhead coming at you at 0.9c will pack 29 gigatons of TNT worth of kinetic energy, i.e., will hit like 600 Tsar Bombas.
Though it will still fall short of, say, the Yucatan impact that killed the dinosaurs. That's estimated at 100 million megatons, while we just reached 29,000 megatons here. We'll have to do about 3000 times more energy into ours to do the same kind of destruction.
Hmm... A bit over 220 tons at 0.999c should do the trick :p
LOLWUT?
Exactly where did you see anything about refusing to grow up, or using fiction as proof, or not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, in the actual message you answer to? Please do address what was actually said, not what imaginary faults of other people you need to postulate to feel good about yourself.
First of all, the whole point there was about inspiring future generations of very young schoolboys. That was the gist of the message exchange you butted into. Which of course didn't grow up yet. Yes, I realize that a certain kind of loser needs to hear himself say "grow up", and thinks it makes hims sound so superior, but it's a pretty stupid thing to say when the topic is actually inspiring elementary school students. Of course those didn't grow up.
And of course a certain amount of unrealism will be involved. You don't actually think that little girls dreaming of being princesses and having a pony actually thought through such aspects as "and be some piece of property to pawn off or give as a reward" like real princesses were, or about having to shovel the crap a pony produces, do you?
Second, I dare say that being able to distinguish between reality and those future scenario is kinda a pre-requisite for their being something to dream about in the first place. Nobody grows up dreaming to be a garbage truck driver. Dreaming of growing up to be a cool spaceship pilot was only cool and inspirational because we knew it's not something from the reality of here and now. If anyone actually thought that space cities and space freighters are real in the here and now, they'd have been mundane things for them.
Using fiction as proof? Where the fuck did you actually see me say or do that? Again, kindly address what's actually written, not what kind of strawmen would let you sound smart.
You'll notice that I hadn't used the word "disappointed" in what you quoted there, or really in the whole message you answer to. So, again, please do address what's actually written, not what strawmen make you feel better.
It has nothing to do with being disappointed that translation apps are small. The point is what looks cool if you want to inspire kids, because that's what we were talking about. Functionalism is certainly good and fine, but you're not going to get a school-kid interested in science so they can design an own logo and catchy name for cell phones designed by Google and manufactured in China.
A talking robot is "cool" enough to be an inspiration. Using a browser to access Google translations is not. You can grow up dreaming to have a cool talking robot like Luke Skywalker. You don't grow up dreaming of having a cell phone with a browser. (Or if anyone does, well, they probably need help.)
And just to add one thing about interstellar travel at relativistic speeds: that energy per gram works both ways. If you're going at 0.9c and hit a grain of mater (e.g., ice) just half a gram in weight, that's pretty much stationary compared to your own speed, the energy in that impact is going to be equivalent to having the Hiroshima bomb strapped to your ship and detonated.
When you're moving at relativistic speeds, every single spec of dust or ice is a relativistic weapon, packing energies measured in kilotons.
We're not talking something that will crack your windshield, but something that will vapourize even battleship-class armour and send chunks of it doing a mega shotgun blast through the rest of the ship.
So, you know, even if we figured out the engines, then we'd have to figure out some kind of Star Trek or Star Wars energy shield before we can actually make like an exorcist and get the hell out of here ;)
I don't think they'll have a choice, though. The problems are that:
1. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." So you'll need incredible speeds to get anywhere interesting even within one lifetime.
2. In that domain, Albert Einstein is the biggest mofo. He'll be a bigger pain in your dreams of space domination than Mace Windu.
Everyone has some half-baked solution like "well, just keep accelerating at 1g for a few years, and you'll be at 0.9c". What they don't think about is what kind of energy you need to keep doing that. Even fusion won't cut it.
At 0.9c, every gram of your ship packs enough kinetic energy as a 29 kiloton atom bomb. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. Even at near perfect efficiency, you'd need two of those to accelerate just one gram of matter to 0.9c.
If you want to do a round trip, you have to accelerate then decelerate in one direction, then accelerate and decelerate again in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And that's with a cannon kind of a setup, so you only accelerate that one gram of matter, not also the rocket and fuel and whatnot. If you carry your own fuel and engines, you'll have to accelerate those too.
Doing it slowly or doing it fast, won't change anything. At the end of the acceleration period, each gram of your ship will still pack that much kinetic energy, so still that much energy will have gone into accelerating it.
Take your choice of realistic engine. Orion? If you took all the atom bombs ever made, they still wouldn't be enough to push even a modest capsule for a one way trip to a good habitable planet. Engine with uranium salts in water? Ditto, plus you now have to accelerate the water and the moderator bars too. Ion thrusters? Well, you still need that much energy piped into accelerating the ions. You'll still need a reactor that produces that much energy, and there just ain't enough uranium produced in the world for that.
The point is that even the next generation still ain't going anywhere. It doesn't matter if they want to push space travel or not, they're still not going to put a guy farther than maybe Mars. Unless some miraculous new source of energy is found -- note that even Star Trek essentially has infinite energy and stored as densely as antimatter -- the next generation is just tied to this rock as we are.
Is it really that inspirational, though?
I mean, think of what really inspired generation X. I don't think it was just the prospect of having a chance to sit in a cramped capsule in orbit for two days, and even that chance being lower than being hit by lightning.
I think it was more like the extrapolation of where it's going. SF told us stories of it becoming a mass thing, every other guy being at least a space freighter pilot, and the cool ones like us would be space FIGHTER pilots, exploration, whole colonies on other planet and in orbit, meeting horny green alien babes, and going bald where nobody had gone before. Oh wait, the last one was the porn ;) And not just space travel. It told us tales of robots, lasers, near-infinite sources of energy, etc.
It was an age of very rapid progress in a whole bunch of domains, and a naive linear extrapolation ahead promised to soon take us where we can't even imagine. Now it was the moon, tomorrow it will be colonies on Mars, and the day after tomorrow probably meeting the Vulcans.
It was that imaginary destination, not the current state that got us SF nerds dreaming.
Nowadays, it seems to have pretty much become a horizontal asymptote. Or near enough. Within your lifetime, or even your kids' lifetime, we'll probably still have half a dozen people in orbit. Your grandkids' chances of being an astronaut will still be lower than winning the jackpot and retiring to a tropical resort.
And even if they won that lottery, what will they do in orbit? Where does that extrapolation lead nowadays? They'll maybe levitate droplets of oil instead of water? Study the growth of mold on a petri dish in zero gravity?
Even robots are not what we dreamed they would be. Instead of cool HK-47 style androids at the bank teller, we have the more logical thing of a box with a screen and a keypad. Instead of robotic vendors, we have the more logical vending machines. And instead of having a robot copilot, you just have an autopilot AI, because it would be stupid to build a humanoid frame where just a few chips will do the same job better. And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
And you can forget the whole space fighter thing, since not only it turns out that blowing enough shit up in orbit would nix all our access to space, but pilots are being replaced by remote controlled drones even on Earth. And in space probably even more so, since you can do much tighter turns and accelerations if you don't have to worry about squishing the human inside.
So, you know, inspire kids to aspire to... what?
But even forgetting the extrapolation, the thing about the human brain is that it works with differences more than with absolutes. To be interesting enough, something must be different enough. You wouldn't think for example that a new LCD TV is new and interesting if it just has the buttons in a different position than yours.
At some point there was enough change per time unit to be interesting. Yay, we went to the moon. Yay, we have a space shuttle that promises to make space travel cheap and often (yeah, right.) Yay, we have a space station.
Now it's, what? Yay, we're stuck in the same orbit, but we can do another elementary-school level science experiments in space? :p
Just to elaborate on why it's such a big if.
1 gram of matter travelling at 0.75c packs about 4.6 x 10^13 J of energy, or the equivalent of a 11 kiloton bomb. By comparison the "little boy" bomb used at Hiroshima was 15 kiloton. (At 0.9c it becomes 29 kilotons, and for 0.99c it's 132 kilotons, while 0.999c it's 454 kilotons.)
So even forgetting chemical rockets, if you took enough uranium to get about 15 kilotons of energy out of it, and accelerated a single gram of matter with it, and had an efficiency of about 73% for the whole thing (i.e., not just blow a nuke under that gram of matter, but somehow focused it so about three quarters of the energy go into pushing that gram), then you'd get a gram of matter moving at 0.75c. One gram.
Note that this already means pretty much some kind of cannon setup. If you put all that uranium and stuff in a rocket, then you accelerate the whole rocket, not just that gram of matter, and end up with a _much_ lower speed.
The energy necessary to do that for even a modest spacecraft weighing 50 tons -- barely more than the combined command module and lunar lander of the Apolo 11 mission -- is left as an exercise to the reader. Remember though that for a round trip you need to accelerate AND decelerate once in one direction, and then accelerate AND decelerate once more in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And again, that was under the assumption that we have some kind of Mass Effect style accelerator at both ends, so the spacecraft doesn't have to carry and accelerate/decelerate its own fuel and engines and whatnot. If you actually do need to haul your own uranium and engines, which at least the first mission would, then things get even more ridiculous.
So even with nuclear engines (this kind of talks are like a honeypot for the kind of SF-fetishist who heard something vague about Orion rockets or engines with water and uranium salts, and thinks they're kinda like a warp drive and make everything magically possible), the energy budget necessary for even a modest mission at 0.75c is immense. Mind bogglingly immense.
Sorry, folks, it's just not going to happen in your lifetimes. Sorry to be the one to piss on the parade of every fellow nerd who grew up with Star Wars fantasies, but there simply is no feasible way to just get to it and pack someone on a 44 year trip.
TBH it's not those who worry me the most.
Sure, some people are stupid, and prefer to take an iron age fairy tale book for illiterate backwater tribes (even under the Romans, literacy in Palestine is estimated at 3%, and most of those in the cities) for 100% accurate, against all proof to the contrary. But at least they''re consistent about it, in their stupidity. They only have one premise they have to hang onto, to make that seem to make sense.
The ones I understand even less are those who are at least vaguely aware that some stuff isn't exactly true -- or needs some extensive editing and playing mad-libs with putting your own words into their sentence structure, under the guise of "what it REALLY meant" -- but still insist that the REST of it must be literally true and come from an omniscient source. Even though that source fucks up all over the place.
It seems to me like if some guy came at work to give one rules under the claimed authority of being the CEO's bestest buddy and knowing everything about him and the company, one would be at least a little skeptical. If the guy then gets the founding year (and even century) of the company wrong, and the position in the city wrong (or for that matter doesn't know there's a city around it at all), and generally gets a dozen things awfully wrong even in one sitting, then everyone would think "what a poser" and be at least vaguely aware that everything else he says might be wrong too.
But here we have a bunch of guys who had hallucinations... err... "visions" (no, really, Paul for example even says so, plus it's more than once in the OT that that's how God talks to prophets) and get a lot of stuff awfully wrong. Yet even people aware that it gets the timescale of creation wrong, and talks about events that blatantly didn't happen and nobody else heard about (e.g., Matthew's zombie invasion or the physically impossible 3 hour eclipse on a full moon), and stuff where you have to take some illiterate goat-herder's word that the proven and tested laws of physics got raped six ways to sunday over the guys who have evidence (e.g., the flood, the braking the Earth so the Sun stands still in the sky, etc), and the supposedly omniscient God doesn't know the basic biology of those he created (e.g., Jesus ranting that you don't have to wash your hands and dishes before eating, because everything that goes into your mouth is destroyed anyway, or his thinking that by worrying about your body and what you eat you can't add even an hour to your life)... still go basically "that was... err... metaphor. But the rest of it? It's all literally true."
Jesus Christ, how can one know that a text told lies in dozens of places and still take it on faith that, no, see, everything else is literally true? They say that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing ten times and expecting different results. Well here we have dozens of places where people tried to find unerring truth in a text, and it turned out to be a falsehood. How insane does one need to be to keep trying?
Actually, I've seen stuff like that in action, except the (sadder) underlying assumption isn't just that they're now somehow immune, but that they've got experience.
As a trivial example, just think of companies and/or designers who've fucked up two MMOs in a row, and then suddenly get a third, bigger budget MMO to make, because, hey, they're the guys who have experience with making MMOs. And when that turns out to be a fuckup too, hey, lookit all that experience they have making MMOs, someone actually gives them money to make a fourth. (And if you think that that's a totally made up example, and nobody would be that stupid, it's actually the verbatim story of Funcom.)
Though an even better example is Michael Brown of FEMA fame, the guy who majorly fucked up during two disaster recoveries in a row and had to resign... consulting as a disaster recovery expert afterwards.
I'm not sure if the explanation is as much "that's Japan" as "that's Sony."
For the last decade (at the very least) Sony has acted like a bad stereotype of the guy obsessed with not losing face, and always being right. Every single bad decision, PR gaffe or just someone from Sony putting his foot in his mouth in an interview, they've dug themselves deeper and deeper just to not admit "ok, it was dumb." They'd rather put the other foot in their mouth too than admit that the first one was a foot after all.
I'm not even sure it has anything to do with Japan per se. While Asians generally are more careful about not losing respect, I don't think they're anywhere near the bad caricature that Sony has become. Plus, I see lots of us westerners doing the same too. I think it's more about hubris and/or insecurity than anything particularly Japanese.
But, anyway, I can actually see some guys at Sony prefer to promote him than admit that he might have said anything stupid ever.
Nonsense. Genesis 1 clearly states
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
[...]
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
So clearly the sky is a dome dividing the waters below from the water above, and the sun and the stars are set on/in it. All this talk of space and great distances and things outside our system is just you science-y servants of Satan trying to test our faith ;)
Yes, it's between the Sun and some stars even farther back :p
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
And really, it applies not just to distances, but masses, speeds, etc. As a rule of thumb, if it even deserves being mentioned in astronomy, it's frikken mind-bogglingly big.
The Earth, for example, is 6x10^24 kg, so basically 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Or about 600,000,000,000,000,000 Nimitzes.
Or more to the point of the planet being discussed here, they say it's a little bigger than Mercury, which in turn is 3.3x10^23 kg. I.e., 330,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Yeah, that's the kind of numbers that astronomy is about. Well, not really. These are small planets. Now stars and black holes and galaxies, that's the real bread and butter. And you can pretty much stick the zero key down and go brew some coffee, if you want to write the weights for that.
And then come the distances, yes. Douglas Adams was certainly up to something there.
You know where in Men In Black, agent K says, "You want to stay away from that guy. He's, uh, he's grouchy. A three hour delay in customs after a trip for 17 trillion miles is gonna make anybody cranky." You'd think 17 trillion miles is half-way across the galaxy, right? Actually the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 25 trillion miles away. So that alien would have had to make a stop at some cosmic gas station in between, if he only had a 17 trillion miles trip.
It's things like these that... well, let's just say they seriously put the kibosh on most nerds "we should totally do some SF thing right now" scenarios. E.g., since we talk mass, there are all the "oh, let's terraform [insert planet]" stupidities. Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves. (There are 1.4x10^18 tons of water on Earth for example.) Nor where they'd come from, nor what the energy budget for that would be.
Spider silk isn't sticky by itself. It's essentially some very long protein filaments, same as worm-butt silk.
What makes spider orbs sticky is that the spider then deposits small droplets of glue along the threads.
But even spiders produce non-glued silk all the time. E.g., when a spider lowers itself by dangling on a silk filament, it doesn't bother putting glue on it.
Well, dunno about him, but before I gave in and tried an antivirus again around Christmas, I can say that everything loaded much faster, there was no suspicious modem activity, there were no popups telling me to pay X dollars or else, and haven't had any funny charges on my credit card either.
Honestly, if I had any malware, it was far better behaved than any antivirus I've ever seen. From a simple pragmatic point of view, I should have stuck with that.
And then you see bugs like "It doesn't work" or "I get an error", without even the faintest clue included as to what doesn't work, what were they trying to do, how to reproduce whatever unspecified error was popped up at them, and so on. And then it turns out that -- I kid you not, true case -- the user had read some blog about hackers and installed some firewall on her workstation, effectively forbidding the client program from talking to the server.
Or then there was the case of my friend who wrote a database application for some small company which shall remain unnamed to protect the idio... err... innocent. He gets a call to the effect of "this crap stopped working completely", goes there, checks the ini files, then finally has the insight to look for the database tablespace files. Missing. He asks those guys. Their answer: "Oh, that huge file? We deleted it 'cause it was taking up all the space on the machine."
Or in the spirit of TFA, the boss who thinks he knows everything better than you anyway. So a long time ago, in a galaxy far away... err.. just a long time ago, I make a program for some guys, and let's just say that one part involved uncompressing some data using a sliding buffer. At the start, the buffer was initialized with all zeroes, and the algorithm actually depended on that. So at some point I get a phone call passed to me from their PHB, who's pretty much foaming at the mouth about how the crap just stopped working, and he's going to sue us for millions of dollars, and so on. Turned out he decided to look through the sources (which he had received as per the contract) and "optimize" it himself by removing that buffer initialization. And that was C, not Java, so no zeroing happening automatically either. When the program promptly started producing crap, instead of coming to the idea that maybe his changes made it stop working, he decided that obviously the program had been defective all along. So he calls and threatens to sue.
Or then there's stuff like change requests disguised as bug reports, apparently as someone's idea of being "smart" and trying to not pay for the changes. Or the guy who, when asked why he did a certain thing in a certain way (which incidentally was very very stupid), breaks up into a whole rant about our stuff lacking documentation and how much it sucks that he has to do that by trial and error and generally poor little him and evil us for not giving him documentation... except actually there was ample documentation, including the very specific case of what he was trying to do, and he had been given it too. Or as a more extreme example of that, the PHB who it turned out, didn't read more than the first paragraph, because more than once he did the exact opposite of what told to do or not to do in the second paragraph of an email. And then it turned out he genuinely had no idea of anything that was in the rest of the text.
Etc, etc, etc.
Yes, we make bugs, yes most of us start from the assumption "what did I miss?" but a LOT of times it turns out that the user actually IS retarded. And don't get me wrong, I don't expect the user to be a Linux kernel programmer or anything. But when you hear someone ranting about how much it sucks that action X does nothing whatsoever... when he hits "Cancel" on the second page of the nicely designed GUI wizard for action X, instead of actually continuing... but it's still somehow the program's fault... well, you just have to wonder how few neurons someone can have and still not stop breathing.
I see only one problem with that plan. By the end of it, you'll have had
- your country used for everything from getting rid of old bombs by dropping them on you to testing new weapons by dropping them on you
- some hospital hit by cruise missiles which the USA still claims they hit their intended super-secret bunkers that nobody else ever heard of
- a few dozen children born with flippers because of all the uranium oxide dust from the depleted uranium ammunitions used. (While DU is actually pretty inert and safe as a penetrator rod that's not been fired yet, when it goes through armour at high speed it melts and burns, creating a lot of uranium oxide dust. Which is just as toxic as any other heavy metal compound, and for the same reasons: it's a frikken huge atom. So think spiking a well with lead paint, because that's the equivalent of what a few villages will be drinking afterwards.)
- a bunch of kids without fingers because they tried picking up unexploded cluster-bomblets which are about the size of a coke can
- a bunch of civilians shot or tortured by bored Blackwater mercenaries, and occasionally by actual soldiers
- an election overturned because it didn't elect the puppet government the USA wanted
- virtually all your natural resources and infrastructure handed over to western companies by the government, when the proper puppet government IS elected
- a LOT of news about idiot protestant ministers calling for essentially a crusade against your country for not worshipping the exact same as them
And other such stuff that's guaranteed to rile the population and get a bunch of lemmings to actually start shooting back at the troops and place roadside IEDs and whatnot, because pron be damned, they actually hate those invading soldiers by now. Which in turn will get anyone asking to pull back your troops from your country, bleated at that they're "not supporting the troops." So oil or no oil, now you'll have the US army loving you long time, and not the consensual kind of love. You probably spotted the vicious circle there.
But now it creates a bunch of other problems. Even if you somehow got out of it eventually, by now
- a bunch of people were pissed enough to join any fundamentalist sect or ideology that's against the Americans. If at the start you just had a religion that's just not American, now you'll have every shade of Wahhabi extremists who actually do want sharia law and executions for apostasy and burqas and whatnot
- those extremist guys bombing each other for not being the exact same flavour of extremism, plus bombing a few civilians just to drive their point across. Which will eventually add up to more dead people than the war and the bored Blackwater mercenaries ever caused.
- all sorts of corruption and local warlords, since that kind of thing thrives in such chaos
So all things considered, it seems like a bad plan if you just want to get fast internet for pron. Especially since that kinda extremists will then want to kill you if you actually watch pron, or for that matter even get a barbie doll with less clothing than a burqa.
Point duly taken, but there was an "if" there. IF it stops being fun.
I'm sure Bioware and EA are also fully aware that they need to keep people entertained over more than a couple of months and are working on new quests, instances, expansion packs, etc. So this would be their motivation to, you know, negate that "if".
And at least Bioware has proven great skill so far. So I wouldn't worry all that much about them yet.
But, be that as it may, my point was merely that I don't see a point in pessimism now over what might or might not happen in a few months. The game is great fun right now, and that's a good reason for me to play it right now. I like having fun. No point getting all worried now and ruining my enjoyment in the process. If something changes in a few months, well, I'll worry about that bridge when I cross it.
There is no reason to not have some SW fun right now over worries about what might happen later, really.
Also as someone who actually plays it, I think it's inexact. It's like calling Skyrim "Fallout 3 with swords."
The only similarity to WOW is that both are games in the same genre. So, yes, certain mechanics are going to be shared between the two, by necessity. Some because frankly, they're part of the whole MMO premise, and some because we have a decade and a half of figuring out what players like and what players don't like. In a new game you want more of the former and less of the latter.
And it's not even a bad thing. We had an attempt at ignoring everything that other MMOs showed that works or doesn't work. It was called Tabula Rasa. Yeah, Lord British thought he's so great that he can simply wipe the slate of everything that had been learned in a decade of MMOs and reinvent everything his way. It wasn't much fun to play for most people who've tried it and it bombed badly.
And really, most of that stuff isn't even particularly specific to WoW. As someone who's played half a dozen MMOs before, I don't see why I should reduce a whole genre to one game. It's called MMO, not "WoW clone". You could just as accurately say it's Everquest 2 with lightsabers, or City Of Heroes with lightsabers, or, really, whatever.
The classes for example are not really clones of WoW, suprisingly enough. The companions mechanic is also not very WoW. Actually branching available quests based on what you did before (e.g., alignment) is also not very closely mirroring any WoW mechanic I can think of. Having a choice of how you want to end a quest is also not very WoW-like. Etc. The point is that it's different enough to feel different and interesting, and in the end that's all that matters.
As for what happens in a few months, meh, nothing is for ever. I bought a game, not entered a marriage and made a kid, you know? If it stops being fun to play in a few months, for whatever reason, I'll move on then. And hey, at that point I will have got a couple of months of fun. Am I right?