Just look at the toxicity of elements we have not evolved around (in high quantities) e.g lead. Lead is not somehow inherently deadly to any form of life -- we just didn't evolve in the presence of high quantities of it.
The article arguing that the ability to pass on information happens spontaneously given a system with a certain ratio of chaos and order. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, this passing on of information is analogous to the "instructions" that you mentioned in your post.
I just recently finished a fascinating article in "Artificial Life II" from the Santa Fe Institute in the Sciences of Complexity. The author used Cellular Automata (think Conway's game of life) to show that complex structures only occur when the rules of the Cellular automata fall within a certain range of the possible sets of rules.
The range works like this (this is over-simplified btw):
If the rules tend too much towards the "quiescent state" (think all the cells turning black in conways game of life), then the automata is too simple, there is no way for any self-replicating order complex or even simple to develop.
If the rules don't tend towards the quiescent state enough, then the automata is too chaotic. Forms self-interfere in too chaotic a way, and it is impossible for order of any kind to develop.
While examining the data from the different automata with different rule sets, he noticed a "phase change" in the patterns of artifial life that came to be given the different rule sets, and found the complex/interesting "creatures" only would exist at around this phase change. He then went on to suggest that the origin of _real_ life may also only come to be where there is the right balance of order and chaos, and suggests that the phase changes seen in physical systems (solid/liquid/gas) are analagous to the rule sets in the cellular automata (Solids = Order, Gasses = Chaos*, Liquids = Right Balance). Finally this puts forward my hypothesis that life may only require liquids to form (i.e. perhaps it's not necessary to have liquid _water_, but just liquid something).
* The chaos of gasses and their simultaneous lack of informational complexity: Think about how with gasses: while there are shitloads of molecules flying about at insane speeds, the overall behaviour of the gas can be really simply summarized with a high degree of accuracy -- e.g. Pressure*Volume=Temperature
Carl Sagan in Cosmos suggested that some where out there, there might be some sort of hard-wired life (e.g. an electronics based life that is a solid), but the theories I mentioned here would suggest that the solid-life forms would not come about (at least not with out an intermediate period of development in a liquid). Finally, it is interesting to think about how life even once it left the ocean has maintained its base in liquids. Are there any examples of life that are more solid than liquid?
Hmmm..thinking I might get modded off-topic, but I think this is interesting and relevant enough to bring up.
The article was titled "Life at the Edge of Chaos" and its by Christopher G. Langton.
Energy is not just "energy", unfortunately. There is such a thing as the "quality" of that energy, which is essentially a measure of how easy it is to use.
Although energy is conserved in all processes, it is converted from higher quality to lower quality, typically ending up as heat. Heat is extremely difficult to use productively.
Thanks for your informative response. You said that the "quality" is a measure of how easy it is to use. Is there an objective scale for measuring this ease of use?
What I'm wondering is if the ease-of-use measurement is actually a measurement of something else (e.g. is it a measurement of energy level relative to local energy levels? Or something less conventional like a measurement of entropy in the energy source?)
Thanks again.
Question from non-physicist:
Why can't the space stations / space craft use the heat energy instead of trying to get rid of it? Isn't there some way to transform it into mechanical / electrical energy? It suprises me that having too much of a form of energy is a problem.
I think that the scientific experiment backfiring explanation of Fermi's paradox is one of the most convincing of all of the explanations I've heard.
While it's difficult to not be anthropocentric, it seems fair to assume that the timeline of technological development of an extra-terrestrial intelligence would be roughly similar to ours (e.g. no species will experience their equivalent steel age before their stone age, nor their nuclear age before their steel age). It is conceivable that along this natural progression of technological development there is an experiment that has unexpected, catastrophic results (e.g. an experimental black hole that is expected to evaporate but instead destroys the planet). It is also possible that that experiment comes sooner in the technological advancement timeline than the technology necessary to "put your eggs in multiple baskets" i.e. get your population far enough away to be safe from The Experiment or to even warn other ETI (e.g. us).
Perhaps "far enough away" is Mars or the Moon -- in which case perhaps we are very close to carrying out this experiment...or perhaps Mars isn't far enough away, and we'd need to be light years away to be safe from the fallout of the experiment...the good news then, is that even if you beleive this explanation to Fermi's paradox to be the truth, perhaps the experiment won't take place next year.
Profitability and Creative Works
on
Reining in Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To all the people that beleive that free content "crushes" creativity:
Creativity is more obviously crushed by the idea that you should use your creativity to make money. Some examples:
How creative are Hollywood films? How much more creative are independant films that do not exist solely to make a profit?
How many local bands can't get radio time / aren't heard because of the MEGABANDS that have had millions of dollars put into them (so that a huge profit can be made off of them). Now, if you think "but local bands all suck!" Then (a) you're wrong, and (b) you've just made my point by being brainwashed by the moneymakers.
How many bands "make it" and are told how / forced to make their music more marketable? This is a pretty direct example of destruction of creativity.
How many mom and pop restaurants are put out of business by chains? (Yes, cooking is a form of creativity.)
How many playwrights and authors are unread / unknown by their local community -- because they're all watching the latest blockbuster or reading the current Top-Seller?
Creativity isn't quashed by making content free. The potential for making money from being creative is reduced by making content free. There are millions of people who enjoy being creative for creativity's sake and not for money-making. Look at all the bands that have supported free downloading of their MP3s etc.
Huge big budget creative projects (e.g. War of the Worlds) couldn't afford to be produced with out profiting from ticket-sales etc....but free content doesn't prevent them from doing so -- it just reduces their potential profit (from DVD sales etc.).
So maybe, if the potential for profit from creative-works were reduced (e.g. by making content more free), then the Big Companies would butt-out a little bit and let people be creative for creativity's sake!
Rather than having "geek-brain-developed-for-technical-stuff-at-the-c ost-of-everything-else-itis", it's more likely that you have some hearing loss. Perhaps in the high treble area. This would make it difficult to distinguish between certain consonants for example 't' and 'c'. Hearing loss in lower frequencies makes discerning between vowels more difficult. Either way, your brain has to work harder than others to decode language.
I have alot of hearing loss (from a combination of loud noises and as the indirect result of a nasty ear infection (that later madated surgery)), and while I love music and feel that I hear it quite well, I'm actually wrong, and I can't hear it well compared to people with good hearing. Also, I often have to do the 'decoding' thing that you mention.
Hearing loss can be conductive (the bones conducting the sound to your cochlea) or can be more-permanent when hairs inside your cochlea (that vibrate at different resonant frequencies to trigger nerves to send the info to your brain) break due to loud or long duration noise.
I've been told (by my surgeon) that they have found an enzyme that actually repairs the hairs inside the cochlea but haven't found a safe way to get the enzyme into the cochlea without further damaging it. My surgeon also mentioned that experimentation of using viruses to carry the enzyme to the cochlea are taking place (if the experiments go wrong though, I'd hate to have a stomach that can hear;).
Does anyone know about any of the research that's going on in this area? Or have any (informed) forecasts as to when average-joe-semi-deaf-blokes like myself might be able to opt-in for some miraculous hearing-regenative viral infection?
Are there any more below Atto or above Yota? Or are we going to have to create new terms in a few years? I mean saying that you have a 100,000 YotaByte hard drive is unwieldy.
I'm always sceptical when I read a "Scientists Baffled by WotNot-X" article.
I think that they're not actually all that baffled about what's going on, but that saying "We're baffled, and learning SOOO much from this" is intelligent PR that helps these scientists get more public support, and indirectly funding as well.
I mean if they said "Great - now we understand (most) everything that's going on at Saturn." then they'd be up excrement-creek without funding.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm all for money being spent on scientific research. I'm even for this tactic being used to do so.
What about those super-high pressure bits at the top of the phase diagram...what are they? I know water is less dense as a solid (floating ice-cubes for example)...and you can melt an icecube by increasing the pressure, can't you?
..but what happens with water at super high pressure? Anyone knowledgable know?
Granted this guy I quote below is a promoter of his own cause, looking for funds - but I like to think his guesstimate of the timescale isn't too far off. Anyone (who knows anything) think he's wrong?
"Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said."http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/tech nology/space_elevator_020327-1.html
Aren't the posters of "too bad slashdot members aren't smart anymore" even worse than the non-nerds you refer to?
Aren't you guilty of spamming slashdot with comments like this? Aren't I?
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at the toxicity of elements we have not evolved around (in high quantities) e.g lead. Lead is not somehow inherently deadly to any form of life -- we just didn't evolve in the presence of high quantities of it.
The article arguing that the ability to pass on information happens spontaneously given a system with a certain ratio of chaos and order. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, this passing on of information is analogous to the "instructions" that you mentioned in your post.
The range works like this (this is over-simplified btw):
While examining the data from the different automata with different rule sets, he noticed a "phase change" in the patterns of artifial life that came to be given the different rule sets, and found the complex/interesting "creatures" only would exist at around this phase change. He then went on to suggest that the origin of _real_ life may also only come to be where there is the right balance of order and chaos, and suggests that the phase changes seen in physical systems (solid/liquid/gas) are analagous to the rule sets in the cellular automata (Solids = Order, Gasses = Chaos*, Liquids = Right Balance). Finally this puts forward my hypothesis that life may only require liquids to form (i.e. perhaps it's not necessary to have liquid _water_, but just liquid something).
* The chaos of gasses and their simultaneous lack of informational complexity: Think about how with gasses: while there are shitloads of molecules flying about at insane speeds, the overall behaviour of the gas can be really simply summarized with a high degree of accuracy -- e.g. Pressure*Volume=Temperature
Carl Sagan in Cosmos suggested that some where out there, there might be some sort of hard-wired life (e.g. an electronics based life that is a solid), but the theories I mentioned here would suggest that the solid-life forms would not come about (at least not with out an intermediate period of development in a liquid). Finally, it is interesting to think about how life even once it left the ocean has maintained its base in liquids. Are there any examples of life that are more solid than liquid?
Hmmm..thinking I might get modded off-topic, but I think this is interesting and relevant enough to bring up.
The article was titled "Life at the Edge of Chaos" and its by Christopher G. Langton.
What I'm wondering is if the ease-of-use measurement is actually a measurement of something else (e.g. is it a measurement of energy level relative to local energy levels? Or something less conventional like a measurement of entropy in the energy source?) Thanks again.
Question from non-physicist: Why can't the space stations / space craft use the heat energy instead of trying to get rid of it? Isn't there some way to transform it into mechanical / electrical energy? It suprises me that having too much of a form of energy is a problem.
That's the best slashdot insult I've ever seen. :)
While it's difficult to not be anthropocentric, it seems fair to assume that the timeline of technological development of an extra-terrestrial intelligence would be roughly similar to ours (e.g. no species will experience their equivalent steel age before their stone age, nor their nuclear age before their steel age). It is conceivable that along this natural progression of technological development there is an experiment that has unexpected, catastrophic results (e.g. an experimental black hole that is expected to evaporate but instead destroys the planet). It is also possible that that experiment comes sooner in the technological advancement timeline than the technology necessary to "put your eggs in multiple baskets" i.e. get your population far enough away to be safe from The Experiment or to even warn other ETI (e.g. us).
Perhaps "far enough away" is Mars or the Moon -- in which case perhaps we are very close to carrying out this experiment...or perhaps Mars isn't far enough away, and we'd need to be light years away to be safe from the fallout of the experiment...the good news then, is that even if you beleive this explanation to Fermi's paradox to be the truth, perhaps the experiment won't take place next year.
Creativity is more obviously crushed by the idea that you should use your creativity to make money. Some examples:
Creativity isn't quashed by making content free. The potential for making money from being creative is reduced by making content free. There are millions of people who enjoy being creative for creativity's sake and not for money-making. Look at all the bands that have supported free downloading of their MP3s etc.
Huge big budget creative projects (e.g. War of the Worlds) couldn't afford to be produced with out profiting from ticket-sales etc....but free content doesn't prevent them from doing so -- it just reduces their potential profit (from DVD sales etc.).
So maybe, if the potential for profit from creative-works were reduced (e.g. by making content more free), then the Big Companies would butt-out a little bit and let people be creative for creativity's sake!
Rather than having "geek-brain-developed-for-technical-stuff-at-the-c ost-of-everything-else-itis", it's more likely that you have some hearing loss. Perhaps in the high treble area. This would make it difficult to distinguish between certain consonants for example 't' and 'c'. Hearing loss in lower frequencies makes discerning between vowels more difficult. Either way, your brain has to work harder than others to decode language.
;).
I have alot of hearing loss (from a combination of loud noises and as the indirect result of a nasty ear infection (that later madated surgery)), and while I love music and feel that I hear it quite well, I'm actually wrong, and I can't hear it well compared to people with good hearing. Also, I often have to do the 'decoding' thing that you mention.
Hearing loss can be conductive (the bones conducting the sound to your cochlea) or can be more-permanent when hairs inside your cochlea (that vibrate at different resonant frequencies to trigger nerves to send the info to your brain) break due to loud or long duration noise.
I've been told (by my surgeon) that they have found an enzyme that actually repairs the hairs inside the cochlea but haven't found a safe way to get the enzyme into the cochlea without further damaging it. My surgeon also mentioned that experimentation of using viruses to carry the enzyme to the cochlea are taking place (if the experiments go wrong though, I'd hate to have a stomach that can hear
Does anyone know about any of the research that's going on in this area? Or have any (informed) forecasts as to when average-joe-semi-deaf-blokes like myself might be able to opt-in for some miraculous hearing-regenative viral infection?
Are there any more below Atto or above Yota? Or are we going to have to create new terms in a few years?
I mean saying that you have a 100,000 YotaByte hard drive is unwieldy.
I think that they're not actually all that baffled about what's going on, but that saying "We're baffled, and learning SOOO much from this" is intelligent PR that helps these scientists get more public support, and indirectly funding as well.
I mean if they said "Great - now we understand (most) everything that's going on at Saturn." then they'd be up excrement-creek without funding.
Now don't get me wrong here. I'm all for money being spent on scientific research. I'm even for this tactic being used to do so.
What about those super-high pressure bits at the top of the phase diagram...what are they? I know water is less dense as a solid (floating ice-cubes for example)...and you can melt an icecube by increasing the pressure, can't you?
..but what happens with water at super high pressure? Anyone knowledgable know?
Companys have been formed to massproduce the carbon fibres necessary to build the space elevator cables. http://www.liftport.com/nanotech.php
Granted this guy I quote below is a promoter of his own cause, looking for funds - but I like to think his guesstimate of the timescale isn't too far off. Anyone (who knows anything) think he's wrong?
"Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said."http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/tech nology/space_elevator_020327-1.html
Aren't the posters of "too bad slashdot members aren't smart anymore" even worse than the non-nerds you refer to? Aren't you guilty of spamming slashdot with comments like this? Aren't I?
If we massed produced them, we'd deplete the earth of it's natural vibrations....the real question is: What would that be like?