Not sure how any serious engineer or scientist works at NASA these days.
I work at a NASA research lab, and find it a rewarding way to spend my time... I've seen exoplanets through the eyes of space telescopes. I've invented AI algorithms and then flown them on smart satellites. My code has run on a rover traversing the surface of Mars.
I agree that commercial enterprise has a role to play - but for all its imperfections, NASA is still a pretty remarkable institution at this particular moment in human history.
Point taken, but if science is our goal then our performance metric should be discoveries achieved per dollar spent.
The Mars Exploration Rover mission cost less than $1 billion total. In contemporary dollars the Apollo program cost $150-200 billion (and going to Mars would be WAY tougher than the Moon). Imagine - the price of a human mission we could fill the solar system with squadrons of rovers. The numbers are rough, but they suggest that we can get more science for our buck with robots.
The big reason for 3d virtual worlds in business is the same as for gaming: They have the potential to be a richer, more natural and engaging user experience. Imagine trying to sustain participants' attention in a 30-minute SMS business meeting.
I disagree that space exploration has nothing to show for the past two generations... in fact, if you look at the track record of unpiloted exploration the progress has been nothing short of remarkable. Despite getting de-funded by an order of magnitude, after accounting for inflation, NASA has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system and the universe through missions like the Voyager probes, the Mars exploration rovers, and the Hubble telescope. Consider everything (that we can now take for granted) which space science has given us since the moon landing:
- first close-up images of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn
- dunes, fjords and rivers on Titan
- icy volcanoes on IO
- subsurface oceans on Europa
- images from the surface of Mars and Venus
- dark matter
- discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets, with some evidence of "terrestrial type" worlds
- proof of historical liquid water on Mars
- visible evidence of black holes
...And the list goes on. It's easy to forget how much we've learned since the 60's - I was browsing an old textbook from the era and was startled to find that the best map they could offer was a crummy, blurred-out and largely incorrect artist's "impression." Contrast with our current understanding: http://www.google.com/mars/
So I would agree with you that human spaceflight has gone basically nowhere since the moon, but I would draw a different conclusion. It's not that exploration has gone away, it's just that all the successes have been in the area of unpiloted missions. Which ironically cost much, much less than the piloted ones!
"Walk into the bowl of a crater, poke around for interesting rocks, and carry the interesting rocks out."
"Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions."
There's been a lot of work on this in the past few years, and researchers have made some significant progress. The upgraded Mars Rovers can already understand enough about their environment to recognize interesting atmospheric phenomena and collect extra data. Tests have demonstrated the ability to identify rocks, approach them, and deploy sensors. And automatic geology analysis (e.g. 'finding the interesting rock') isn't too far off either. In any case, I wouldn't bet against improved AI for mission planning on decade scales.
I agree - on a 1,000 year timescale who knows what will happen. But IMHO the main import of the article was to show just how infeasible colonization is in the short term - say, the next century. Policy decisions are being made right now about how to spend billions of dollars to establish a permanent moonbase settlement. Many of these efforts are grounded in traditional romanticized notions of spaceflight that are totally out of touch with the scales and distances involved.
These "romanticized notions" of space exploration (dating from Jules Verne onwards, and recently espoused by Steven Hawking) draw on a nautical metaphor - you put a crew of humans in a "space ship" and after a long journey they make landfall on some distant world. This notion is deeply ingrained in our culture and policy, but it's a poor match to the technology and the actual science of spaceflight. Not only are space and planetary environments way harsher than most people realize, but the energies required to carry even a single human to other planets are (oof) astronomical for every propulsion method we can build or envision.
Moreover, robots are proving themselves able to do just about everything that canned meat can do. They are resistant to radiation, vacuum, boredom, and they eat sunlight. They don't require massive pressurized capsules for living quarters I suspect, as the article hints, that machines will completely replace astronauts long before we have magic 1000-years-in-the-future human spaceflight technology.
For those willing to forgo drag-and-drop interfaces, the shared hosting account is a much better storage deal for the buck. The better companies will provide in excess of 100GB for $5-8 per month with regular off-site backups. Oh, and you get web hosting too.
In contrast, the consumer market companies in the article generally charge the same amount for an order of magnitude less storage. Maybe there's less competition for consumer storage, or higher marketing costs? Regardless, the discrepancy looks like a market imbalance that can't continue for long.
It's interesting that in interpreting the play on words, so many of us (myself included) jumped to the initial assumption that this "European" was male.
Actually you were sort of right, though perhaps not for the reason you intended. While the 100^0.95 calculation assumes that the missile interception attempts are independent events, they will not be for any practical situation. Any factors that thwart your first interception - bad weather, solar noise disrupting your radar, a particularly tricky target trajectory, whatever - can persist to complicate the 99 other interception attempts. So depending on the way the "5% hit rate" is calculated, lots of interceptors still might not work to bring down a sufficiently difficult target.
In all fairness, writing code for a spacecraft is a lot harder than most of our Earthbound coding projects. These are custom-built machines running one-of-a-kind hardware; one can simulate components independently but it's very difficult to figure out how the hardware is going to behave up there in the vacuum.
For example, consider the one function of maintaining orientation. Most spacecraft use telescopes that look for star reference points. They look for particular star configurations and use microthrusters or gyroscopes to adjust their orientation. Imagine what it would take to simulate this: a zero-gravity vacuum with a realistic star-field at focus=infinity. Any laboratory mock up is going to cost a lot more than launching a new spacecraft. And that's just one subsystem.
Software upgrades at NASA go through a really rigorous quality control regimen, often requiring programmers to justify _individual_lines_ of their code to a review committee. Even then they usually won't patch noncritical bugs until the primary mission is completed.
I think your point is a good one. And the key lesson is not that NASA QA sucks, it's that programming for spacecraft is _tough_. I know they are constantly investigating new ways (like more standardization, code re-use, and formal verification procedures) of improving software reliability.
Agreed that we need all the improvements you mention. But these smart technologies (voice or handwriting recognition, machine learning, et cetera) are mostly computationally-intensive, number crunching statistics tasks. The AI software you desire could benefit _greatly_ from multicore FP architectures.
> You're eyes have to scan the entire page to figure out where content is. Which is exactly their plan. The onion's busy new look integrates ads and content, preventing you from "tuning out" the advertising. It's a pity, but usability and revenue generation are often at odds. Hopefully slashdot will continue to favor the former.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure how any serious engineer or scientist works at NASA these days.
I work at a NASA research lab, and find it a rewarding way to spend my time... I've seen exoplanets through the eyes of space telescopes. I've invented AI algorithms and then flown them on smart satellites. My code has run on a rover traversing the surface of Mars. I agree that commercial enterprise has a role to play - but for all its imperfections, NASA is still a pretty remarkable institution at this particular moment in human history.
Point taken, but if science is our goal then our performance metric should be discoveries achieved per dollar spent.
The Mars Exploration Rover mission cost less than $1 billion total. In contemporary dollars the Apollo program cost $150-200 billion (and going to Mars would be WAY tougher than the Moon). Imagine - the price of a human mission we could fill the solar system with squadrons of rovers. The numbers are rough, but they suggest that we can get more science for our buck with robots.
The big reason for 3d virtual worlds in business is the same as for gaming: They have the potential to be a richer, more natural and engaging user experience. Imagine trying to sustain participants' attention in a 30-minute SMS business meeting.
I disagree that space exploration has nothing to show for the past two generations... in fact, if you look at the track record of unpiloted exploration the progress has been nothing short of remarkable. Despite getting de-funded by an order of magnitude, after accounting for inflation, NASA has revolutionized our understanding of the solar system and the universe through missions like the Voyager probes, the Mars exploration rovers, and the Hubble telescope. Consider everything (that we can now take for granted) which space science has given us since the moon landing:
...And the list goes on. It's easy to forget how much we've learned since the 60's - I was browsing an old textbook from the era and was startled to find that the best map they could offer was a crummy, blurred-out and largely incorrect artist's "impression." Contrast with our current understanding: http://www.google.com/mars/
- first close-up images of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn
- dunes, fjords and rivers on Titan
- icy volcanoes on IO
- subsurface oceans on Europa
- images from the surface of Mars and Venus
- dark matter
- discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets, with some evidence of "terrestrial type" worlds
- proof of historical liquid water on Mars
- visible evidence of black holes
So I would agree with you that human spaceflight has gone basically nowhere since the moon, but I would draw a different conclusion. It's not that exploration has gone away, it's just that all the successes have been in the area of unpiloted missions. Which ironically cost much, much less than the piloted ones!
"Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions."
There's been a lot of work on this in the past few years, and researchers have made some significant progress. The upgraded Mars Rovers can already understand enough about their environment to recognize interesting atmospheric phenomena and collect extra data. Tests have demonstrated the ability to identify rocks, approach them, and deploy sensors. And automatic geology analysis (e.g. 'finding the interesting rock') isn't too far off either. In any case, I wouldn't bet against improved AI for mission planning on decade scales.
I agree - on a 1,000 year timescale who knows what will happen. But IMHO the main import of the article was to show just how infeasible colonization is in the short term - say, the next century. Policy decisions are being made right now about how to spend billions of dollars to establish a permanent moonbase settlement. Many of these efforts are grounded in traditional romanticized notions of spaceflight that are totally out of touch with the scales and distances involved.
These "romanticized notions" of space exploration (dating from Jules Verne onwards, and recently espoused by Steven Hawking) draw on a nautical metaphor - you put a crew of humans in a "space ship" and after a long journey they make landfall on some distant world. This notion is deeply ingrained in our culture and policy, but it's a poor match to the technology and the actual science of spaceflight. Not only are space and planetary environments way harsher than most people realize, but the energies required to carry even a single human to other planets are (oof) astronomical for every propulsion method we can build or envision.
Moreover, robots are proving themselves able to do just about everything that canned meat can do. They are resistant to radiation, vacuum, boredom, and they eat sunlight. They don't require massive pressurized capsules for living quarters I suspect, as the article hints, that machines will completely replace astronauts long before we have magic 1000-years-in-the-future human spaceflight technology.
Here's a chunk of the stuff. The picture quality isn't too good, but it gives you the idea. http://tinyurl.com/rahn6/
For those willing to forgo drag-and-drop interfaces, the shared hosting account is a much better storage deal for the buck. The better companies will provide in excess of 100GB for $5-8 per month with regular off-site backups. Oh, and you get web hosting too.
In contrast, the consumer market companies in the article generally charge the same amount for an order of magnitude less storage. Maybe there's less competition for consumer storage, or higher marketing costs? Regardless, the discrepancy looks like a market imbalance that can't continue for long.
I don't know... Try ordering a bitter and a packet of crisps, and then chat with the bartender who might come up with some ideas.
It's interesting that in interpreting the play on words, so many of us (myself included) jumped to the initial assumption that this "European" was male.
Actually you were sort of right, though perhaps not for the reason you intended. While the 100^0.95 calculation assumes that the missile interception attempts are independent events, they will not be for any practical situation. Any factors that thwart your first interception - bad weather, solar noise disrupting your radar, a particularly tricky target trajectory, whatever - can persist to complicate the 99 other interception attempts. So depending on the way the "5% hit rate" is calculated, lots of interceptors still might not work to bring down a sufficiently difficult target.
Yeah, some line breaks would have been welcome. Should have tested my post with a mock-up before submitting I guess.
In all fairness, writing code for a spacecraft is a lot harder than most of our Earthbound coding projects. These are custom-built machines running one-of-a-kind hardware; one can simulate components independently but it's very difficult to figure out how the hardware is going to behave up there in the vacuum. For example, consider the one function of maintaining orientation. Most spacecraft use telescopes that look for star reference points. They look for particular star configurations and use microthrusters or gyroscopes to adjust their orientation. Imagine what it would take to simulate this: a zero-gravity vacuum with a realistic star-field at focus=infinity. Any laboratory mock up is going to cost a lot more than launching a new spacecraft. And that's just one subsystem. Software upgrades at NASA go through a really rigorous quality control regimen, often requiring programmers to justify _individual_lines_ of their code to a review committee. Even then they usually won't patch noncritical bugs until the primary mission is completed. I think your point is a good one. And the key lesson is not that NASA QA sucks, it's that programming for spacecraft is _tough_. I know they are constantly investigating new ways (like more standardization, code re-use, and formal verification procedures) of improving software reliability.
Agreed that we need all the improvements you mention. But these smart technologies (voice or handwriting recognition, machine learning, et cetera) are mostly computationally-intensive, number crunching statistics tasks. The AI software you desire could benefit _greatly_ from multicore FP architectures.
> You're eyes have to scan the entire page to figure out where content is.
Which is exactly their plan. The onion's busy new look integrates ads and content, preventing you from "tuning out" the advertising. It's a pity, but usability and revenue generation are often at odds. Hopefully slashdot will continue to favor the former.