"... it would still be there for tens of thousands of generations." Not good enough. If you make Mars habitable, that work will get leveraged, as in it will be inhabited. What will those distant generations think if we set up an unstable atmospheric dynamic and knowingly doom future generations to suffocating? The atmospheric dynamic must be stable, like it is on Earth. Robust and even largely self-correcting.
Not really. If we can do it once, we can keep it supplied with atmosphere in plenty of time. We keep importing resources to places that don't have them all the time. However, although about a fifth of the needed material might be already on Mars in the form of ice, the only real option would be to bring in comet type material from the oort cloud. Last time I did rough estimates on doing that, the energy needed to move all that material in ten years was measured in days total output of the sun. Move the cometary material slower, and it takes longer but the energy needed is less. Increase the time to 10,000 years, the time that an astrophysicist friend of mine said it would take for Mars, give an Earth-like atmosphere to degenerate to one that wasn't, and that makes the constant power requirement to keep Mars supplied with atmosphere at 3.8*10^14 W. That's about 2000 times what the we generate currently on the Earth, just to keep Mars' atmosphere stable.
It's also been proposed to ship Venus' atmophere to Mars, but I haven't seen any estimates on the energy needed to do that.
I like the people management part of the job and I do like it when the customer is happy with what the team have delivered but if it were the same pay scale, Id be on the shop floor.
Exactly the point. You seem to have become a manager because of the promise of more money. I don't think you addressed the issue of if you make the best manager or if you are more of an asset to the company as a manger rather than a techie. In the end, if you are worth more money, you should be promoted to "uber techie" get more money and let managing be left to somebody who would rather manage and is better than you at managing. Just because a manager might not make as much money as a techie, doesn't mean their job can't be to issue marching order sad set goals.
Somebody has to deal with the board of directors, senior managers, and large clients, ensuring that they're wishful thinking and lack of technical expertise doesn't destroy any chance that the project will be successful.
Sure, but do they need to be place above the people who actually do the work? Instead, just act as a liaison between those that set the expectations versus those that have to make it happen.
If you play chess, you join the chess club. You can even have competitions with other schools. But it's not a sport and it's not sponsored by the athletics competition and no one was inane enough to invent the word "cSports". What's wrong with being "an official club" as opposed to "an official club sport"?
Being a sport seems to involve having money at stake and a significant number of people willing to pay to support it as a requirement.
People who attend cons are self-selected groups, and trying to determine a "norm" from such a group would be a mistake. It is also a positive feedback loop, where edge-of-the-curve geeks flock because they create an environment where they're comfortable.
This is different from higher academia how? Especially for Physics which, unlike say Engineering, is pretty much isolated from the professional world.
"small government" is just a b.s. mantra to support reduced taxes and regulations. Its proponents generally advocate a big, intrusive government, so long as the haves can have and do whatever they want.
More to the point, "small government" is just a b.s. mantra to do away with the other guys political programs. People pushing for it never talk about how they're going to limit the ones they're in favor of.
Is there some technical reason the ISS will no longer work after the mid-2020s or is it merely a budget issue? Why are we not keeping it up there if it is still serving whatever purpose it was designed for?
IIRC from a previous./ article, the gaskets and seals are only rated to work so long and their effectiveness is decreasing with time. The ISS already leaks and has to be resupplied and as time goes on, the cost of maintenance will go up. Any attempt to replace these parts in space would end up costing so much that it would be cheaper to just build a new space station and send it up. This is one of the obstacles to any Mars trip. They'll need something that can contain its atmosphere with minimal leakage over a time period of years. Right now, such a thing would have been like looking for a 50's American car that doesn't leak oil. It's probably possible, but won't be around for many years from now.
An orbiting colony is far, far more challenging than a Mars colony would be. You've got your cart and horse switched.
Nope. You'll essentially need an orbiting colony for the trip and back to Mars. They won't be the same thing as the deep space habitat needed to go to Mars, but will develop much of the tech and engineering needed to build one. This depends on what you mean by "colony" but also what is planned for Mars. Still, until you have an orbiting space station that can be on it's own for a few years, there's no realistic way of going to Mars.
If we want a permanent off-world habitat, would it not be more worthwhile to devote energy to exploring the possibility of permanently-habitable, (near) self-sustaining space stations?
If we plan to go to Mars, we'll have to head that way. For a Mars mission, we'll need a long term deep space habitat that can stand to be without or with minimal re-supply for three years for all the astronauts. The main issue for colonization is that one of the main reasons for colonizing space would be to mine asteroids and due to the distance and energies involved, the time scale for such is large. Just moving those materials, or the space habitat, to where we want them will not be quick.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
You say there is a case study? Can I get a link to that paper? Is is Psychological or Sociological in scope?
The problem with Nazism is that it required the whole world to be invaded and run as one big slave camp. The problem with Hitler is that he was a poor military strategist.
In both cases, early successes led them to believe that they were unbeatable.
I was working on an alternate history story where the Nazis got super tech. I got together with a military buff/history major friend of mine to discuss the ramifications and figure out how the Nazis could still fail when given super tech. The end answer that seems most plausible to us both was to let Hitler be Hitler and prevent it from being used effectively and micromanage it into uselessness.
Thank you for offering a great example of what Costlow says is wrong with Millennials. Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions.
I lack to see how that differs from any other generation. "Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions." is a prefect description of not only my generation for the most part (Gen X) but certainly the current state of mind of the Baby Boomers as evidenced by my parents and their friends.
I don't think even the United Federation of Planets qualifies as Type II. They haven't harnessed the entire energy output of a star.
Which is why the entire Kardashev Type scale is trivially useless. Nobody is going to harness the entire energy output of a star unless it is more practical than just going to another star and getting the low hanging fruit there first. One the planetary scale, we do not harness the entire energy output of a single country, continent, or planet. Before we harness the entire energy output of a planet, we'll be off this rock and harnessing the energy output of the star. before we harness the entire energy output of the star, we'll be off to other solar systems. Since harnessing the entire resource of a star will probably require resources from other systems, it's not likely to ever occur except as a proof of concept or in a very limited number of systems.
Basically : we would not be able to detect ourselves. Nobody would when the signal amplitude is dwarfed by noise. So unless some ET is continuously sending ginormous amount of energy in a directed radio signal toward us, there is no chance we would catch them.
I think that the current attempts proposed (by Hawking and others IIRC) are to look for evidence of radar and radar astronomy. Such use of radar to keep track of things like aircraft and used to map out their own solar system should be detectable by a dedicated search within quite some distance from Earth even if just used at the levels we are currently using.
Wrong. A conclusion based on ill conceived science fiction.
Any civilization that can travel between star systems will be so advanced that it will not need to plunder whoever is at their destination.
I propose that your conclusion is also based on ill conceived science fiction. It's similar to primitive humans saying that any tribe or nation that had plenty to eat and the ability to fly through the air and create miracles would be so advanced they would never need to plunder them. Yet it happens all the time for a variety of reasons.
Maybe it's just the machines left over from another species.
But broadcasting where you are without knowing who is listening, stupid.... that's the only word for it.
Possibly, but if the listeners had the ability to travel here, they'd probably be or otherwise find us here long before we called to them. It's not like native Americans went to Europe and told them about a new world to explore.
Right, but the real question is, once radio is invented, how long will they keep using it?
Not really. There are other uses for EM radiation besides communication. IIRc, the most resent proposal is to search for radar. Long after radio or broadcast TV dies down or off as a form of communication, they will still be using radar to locate and direct planes and spacecraft as well as to survey their own solar system. The wavelengths will be dictated by physics according for what they are used for, so we'll have a good idea of what to look for and be recognizable when we find it.
Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
Because the idea that physics is the same everywhere is one of the assumptions that our physics, especially relativity, is based upon. By stating that the physics at point A is the same as at point B allows us to make some assumptions and delete some variables via symmetry. This gives us the general theory of relativity not to mention science itself, which so far has been shown to be upheld. If the the physics in a black hole is different from the physics outside of it, then it most certainly is the end of physics as we know it because assumptions of physics as we know it is based on it all being the same everywhere.
The fact is, Television today is simply bottom of the barrel bad!
Depends on what you mean by television. As far as programmed TV with channels and such, the only people left viewing it seem to be the elderly like my Fox watching father. I and my friends are in our 40's now and rarely watch any network TV. It's all on demand and we consider it the new golden age of TV because there are more seasonal shows that we want to watch than we can watch even if only adding the ones we hear by word of mouth to our viewing schedules. Add in the older TV series, rewatching favorites, and movies, and there's no spare time to bother with broadcast TV.
So, what about making things work isn't support, at least in the context of making things work for a company whose primary mission isn't itself doing IT work for the rest of the world?
What we're really talking about here is training. I'll bet all that equivilent stuff of what they want is installed on the computers, but that's easy. Even putting icons on the desktop and telling the users which icon corresponds to what use they want. However, actual training in how to use those programs beyond open, save, close, is usually batted around from department to department as it requires trainers with specialized knowledge, lots of time to hand hold users, and usually at odd hours as the users still have work to do. Where I work, IT installs the programs, but training for common programs is pushed back to the department and they can use their budgets for trainers. IT installs Excel but they're not going to train the users how to create their spread sheets with functions and and macros. Training for in house programs usually goes to special people who only deal with those programs, or more often than not, is just undocumented knowledge taught from old workers to new ones as they are hired. For a new deployment like this, I wouldn't be surprised if someproject manager wasn't put in charge of training and either they dropped the ball, or more likely, the users just flat out don't want to learn anything outside of what they already know.
High school's great for industrial factory workers, but we've moved past that. We don't have that many untrained industrial factory jobs anymore and we really don't want to go back any more than we want to go back to being an agricultural nation. Now even ditch diggers are going to handed a quarter of a million dollar machine to operate rather than a shovel. We need to make high education easier so we can compete with modern nations as the larger the high trained workforce is, the better our manufacturing can be. There will always be plenty of drop outs to fill the role of untrained labor, which these days means a high school diploma.
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"... it would still be there for tens of thousands of generations." Not good enough. If you make Mars habitable, that work will get leveraged, as in it will be inhabited. What will those distant generations think if we set up an unstable atmospheric dynamic and knowingly doom future generations to suffocating? The atmospheric dynamic must be stable, like it is on Earth. Robust and even largely self-correcting.
Not really. If we can do it once, we can keep it supplied with atmosphere in plenty of time. We keep importing resources to places that don't have them all the time. However, although about a fifth of the needed material might be already on Mars in the form of ice, the only real option would be to bring in comet type material from the oort cloud. Last time I did rough estimates on doing that, the energy needed to move all that material in ten years was measured in days total output of the sun. Move the cometary material slower, and it takes longer but the energy needed is less. Increase the time to 10,000 years, the time that an astrophysicist friend of mine said it would take for Mars, give an Earth-like atmosphere to degenerate to one that wasn't, and that makes the constant power requirement to keep Mars supplied with atmosphere at 3.8*10^14 W. That's about 2000 times what the we generate currently on the Earth, just to keep Mars' atmosphere stable.
It's also been proposed to ship Venus' atmophere to Mars, but I haven't seen any estimates on the energy needed to do that.
I like the people management part of the job and I do like it when the customer is happy with what the team have delivered but if it were the same pay scale, Id be on the shop floor.
Exactly the point. You seem to have become a manager because of the promise of more money. I don't think you addressed the issue of if you make the best manager or if you are more of an asset to the company as a manger rather than a techie. In the end, if you are worth more money, you should be promoted to "uber techie" get more money and let managing be left to somebody who would rather manage and is better than you at managing. Just because a manager might not make as much money as a techie, doesn't mean their job can't be to issue marching order sad set goals.
Somebody has to deal with the board of directors, senior managers, and large clients, ensuring that they're wishful thinking and lack of technical expertise doesn't destroy any chance that the project will be successful.
Sure, but do they need to be place above the people who actually do the work? Instead, just act as a liaison between those that set the expectations versus those that have to make it happen.
If you play chess, you join the chess club. You can even have competitions with other schools. But it's not a sport and it's not sponsored by the athletics competition and no one was inane enough to invent the word "cSports". What's wrong with being "an official club" as opposed to "an official club sport"?
Being a sport seems to involve having money at stake and a significant number of people willing to pay to support it as a requirement.
People who attend cons are self-selected groups, and trying to determine a "norm" from such a group would be a mistake. It is also a positive feedback loop, where edge-of-the-curve geeks flock because they create an environment where they're comfortable.
This is different from higher academia how? Especially for Physics which, unlike say Engineering, is pretty much isolated from the professional world.
"small government" is just a b.s. mantra to support reduced taxes and regulations. Its proponents generally advocate a big, intrusive government, so long as the haves can have and do whatever they want.
More to the point, "small government" is just a b.s. mantra to do away with the other guys political programs. People pushing for it never talk about how they're going to limit the ones they're in favor of.
Is there some technical reason the ISS will no longer work after the mid-2020s or is it merely a budget issue? Why are we not keeping it up there if it is still serving whatever purpose it was designed for?
IIRC from a previous ./ article, the gaskets and seals are only rated to work so long and their effectiveness is decreasing with time. The ISS already leaks and has to be resupplied and as time goes on, the cost of maintenance will go up. Any attempt to replace these parts in space would end up costing so much that it would be cheaper to just build a new space station and send it up. This is one of the obstacles to any Mars trip. They'll need something that can contain its atmosphere with minimal leakage over a time period of years. Right now, such a thing would have been like looking for a 50's American car that doesn't leak oil. It's probably possible, but won't be around for many years from now.
We are never going to get to Mars so long as NASA is projecting on these time scales.
True. A realistic plan with a chance of success will take at least twice as long.
An orbiting colony is far, far more challenging than a Mars colony would be. You've got your cart and horse switched.
Nope. You'll essentially need an orbiting colony for the trip and back to Mars. They won't be the same thing as the deep space habitat needed to go to Mars, but will develop much of the tech and engineering needed to build one. This depends on what you mean by "colony" but also what is planned for Mars. Still, until you have an orbiting space station that can be on it's own for a few years, there's no realistic way of going to Mars.
If we want a permanent off-world habitat, would it not be more worthwhile to devote energy to exploring the possibility of permanently-habitable, (near) self-sustaining space stations?
If we plan to go to Mars, we'll have to head that way. For a Mars mission, we'll need a long term deep space habitat that can stand to be without or with minimal re-supply for three years for all the astronauts. The main issue for colonization is that one of the main reasons for colonizing space would be to mine asteroids and due to the distance and energies involved, the time scale for such is large. Just moving those materials, or the space habitat, to where we want them will not be quick.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
You say there is a case study? Can I get a link to that paper? Is is Psychological or Sociological in scope?
The problem with Nazism is that it required the whole world to be invaded and run as one big slave camp. The problem with Hitler is that he was a poor military strategist.
In both cases, early successes led them to believe that they were unbeatable.
I was working on an alternate history story where the Nazis got super tech. I got together with a military buff/history major friend of mine to discuss the ramifications and figure out how the Nazis could still fail when given super tech. The end answer that seems most plausible to us both was to let Hitler be Hitler and prevent it from being used effectively and micromanage it into uselessness.
It's in-house and they aren't trying to sell it. No reason not to use Linux.
Then why did they destroy Danger Labs and the Side-Kick trying to migrate everything to their own servers?
Thank you for offering a great example of what Costlow says is wrong with Millennials. Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions.
I lack to see how that differs from any other generation. "Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions." is a prefect description of not only my generation for the most part (Gen X) but certainly the current state of mind of the Baby Boomers as evidenced by my parents and their friends.
Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.
Well, yes, it usually all comes down to that the Nazis could have won if they weren't Nazis, or hadn't had Hitler as their leader.
I don't think even the United Federation of Planets qualifies as Type II. They haven't harnessed the entire energy output of a star.
Which is why the entire Kardashev Type scale is trivially useless. Nobody is going to harness the entire energy output of a star unless it is more practical than just going to another star and getting the low hanging fruit there first. One the planetary scale, we do not harness the entire energy output of a single country, continent, or planet. Before we harness the entire energy output of a planet, we'll be off this rock and harnessing the energy output of the star. before we harness the entire energy output of the star, we'll be off to other solar systems. Since harnessing the entire resource of a star will probably require resources from other systems, it's not likely to ever occur except as a proof of concept or in a very limited number of systems.
Basically : we would not be able to detect ourselves. Nobody would when the signal amplitude is dwarfed by noise. So unless some ET is continuously sending ginormous amount of energy in a directed radio signal toward us, there is no chance we would catch them.
I think that the current attempts proposed (by Hawking and others IIRC) are to look for evidence of radar and radar astronomy. Such use of radar to keep track of things like aircraft and used to map out their own solar system should be detectable by a dedicated search within quite some distance from Earth even if just used at the levels we are currently using.
Wrong. A conclusion based on ill conceived science fiction.
Any civilization that can travel between star systems will be so advanced that it will not need to plunder whoever is at their destination.
I propose that your conclusion is also based on ill conceived science fiction. It's similar to primitive humans saying that any tribe or nation that had plenty to eat and the ability to fly through the air and create miracles would be so advanced they would never need to plunder them. Yet it happens all the time for a variety of reasons.
Maybe it's just the machines left over from another species.
But broadcasting where you are without knowing who is listening, stupid.... that's the only word for it.
Possibly, but if the listeners had the ability to travel here, they'd probably be or otherwise find us here long before we called to them. It's not like native Americans went to Europe and told them about a new world to explore.
Right, but the real question is, once radio is invented, how long will they keep using it?
Not really. There are other uses for EM radiation besides communication. IIRc, the most resent proposal is to search for radar. Long after radio or broadcast TV dies down or off as a form of communication, they will still be using radar to locate and direct planes and spacecraft as well as to survey their own solar system. The wavelengths will be dictated by physics according for what they are used for, so we'll have a good idea of what to look for and be recognizable when we find it.
Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
Because the idea that physics is the same everywhere is one of the assumptions that our physics, especially relativity, is based upon. By stating that the physics at point A is the same as at point B allows us to make some assumptions and delete some variables via symmetry. This gives us the general theory of relativity not to mention science itself, which so far has been shown to be upheld. If the the physics in a black hole is different from the physics outside of it, then it most certainly is the end of physics as we know it because assumptions of physics as we know it is based on it all being the same everywhere.
The fact is, Television today is simply bottom of the barrel bad!
Depends on what you mean by television. As far as programmed TV with channels and such, the only people left viewing it seem to be the elderly like my Fox watching father. I and my friends are in our 40's now and rarely watch any network TV. It's all on demand and we consider it the new golden age of TV because there are more seasonal shows that we want to watch than we can watch even if only adding the ones we hear by word of mouth to our viewing schedules. Add in the older TV series, rewatching favorites, and movies, and there's no spare time to bother with broadcast TV.
So, what about making things work isn't support, at least in the context of making things work for a company whose primary mission isn't itself doing IT work for the rest of the world?
What we're really talking about here is training. I'll bet all that equivilent stuff of what they want is installed on the computers, but that's easy. Even putting icons on the desktop and telling the users which icon corresponds to what use they want. However, actual training in how to use those programs beyond open, save, close, is usually batted around from department to department as it requires trainers with specialized knowledge, lots of time to hand hold users, and usually at odd hours as the users still have work to do. Where I work, IT installs the programs, but training for common programs is pushed back to the department and they can use their budgets for trainers. IT installs Excel but they're not going to train the users how to create their spread sheets with functions and and macros. Training for in house programs usually goes to special people who only deal with those programs, or more often than not, is just undocumented knowledge taught from old workers to new ones as they are hired. For a new deployment like this, I wouldn't be surprised if someproject manager wasn't put in charge of training and either they dropped the ball, or more likely, the users just flat out don't want to learn anything outside of what they already know.
Google has over 50,000 employees. They can do more than one thing at a time.
Yes, but do they have enough to move any of those things out of beta?
High school's great for industrial factory workers, but we've moved past that. We don't have that many untrained industrial factory jobs anymore and we really don't want to go back any more than we want to go back to being an agricultural nation. Now even ditch diggers are going to handed a quarter of a million dollar machine to operate rather than a shovel. We need to make high education easier so we can compete with modern nations as the larger the high trained workforce is, the better our manufacturing can be. There will always be plenty of drop outs to fill the role of untrained labor, which these days means a high school diploma.