The relevance is that, unless they want to guarantee a disaster blotting out the human/transhuman races, they will exercise judgement in who they upload. Anyone so lacking in empathy and compassion for the human race would be a prime candidate for weeding out.
Wired published an article suggesting that the rise in autism and Asperger's syndrome in Silicon Valley resulted from a concentration of math-and-tech genes.
Well, faced with a choice which would you rather have:
1) The Singularity won't happen. We all die. There is nothing after death - there was no point to anything while alive.
2) The Singularity happens - there is an unknown chance that it results in immortality, transhumanism and an eternity of living and experiencing.
I choose
1) The Singularity won't happen - the human race goes on, people live, love, have friends, enjoy pleasures, some people do good for others. That seems plenty of point to life. I can guarantee you that if you can't see any point to life now, you won't see any point to it in transhumanism, even if it lasts forever.
Transhumanists pretty obviously don't believe there is an "unknown chance" of a desirable result to the Singularity, but that there will be immortality, transhumanism, and so forth, and that they personally will survive the Singularity and benefit from it. That is where their hearts are, despite the window dressing about not knowing anything beyond the Singularity. It seems to me that if the Singularity happens, it will far more likely cause the death of every human being.
This silliness reveals the lack of understanding in a list like this. It needs to be remembered that these are works of fiction, and events in them are story elements, not predictions. Science fiction writers are not mediums peering into crystal balls. To the extent that science fiction can be judged on predictive abilities, it is in the general shape of future technology, and the effects it has on people's lives. Furthermore, elements of technology can be in the story, not because the author believes them probable or even possible, but because it allows a certain kind of story to be told. For example, rapid and common interstellar travel is part of the background of many stories just because it is the only way to tell that sort of story. Especially, conflating elements from various stories into a timeline is only reasonable if the author has included them into a coherent "future history", which many stories are not.
What I find interesting (or disturbing) is how often those who believe in the Singularity want it to be true. Despite their repeated statements that whatever lies beyond the Singularity is completely unknowable, they have a fundamental irrational belief that somehow it will be desirable. Predictions that would have this or any previous generation recoiling from in horror or disgust, they find attractive and yearn for. Somehow the concept of the Singularity makes it OK for them to look forward eagerly to the end of the human race.
No, as I see it, the core problem is that today manned spaceflight is so difficult, so close to the limit of what is possible with chemical rockets, that every safety margin has to be shaved down to the bone for it to be even possible. There are a million things that can go wrong, because every part is designed as close to the limit of the materials as it can be. If we put in a safety margin that would be considered normal in most earthly applications, we could never get to orbit.
IAAME (I am a mechanical engineer) and it would drive me crazy if I had to shave everything so close just to make the thing work marginally.
The biggest global effects outside the US would be the ash and sulfur emissions in the stratosphere that would block off sunlight. There might not be any crops produced in the northern hemisphere for several years, and the climate of the southern hemisphere would also be severely affected. It might throw us into an ice age.
Taking another look, the shape of the curve has to do with the time during the night, with it dropping off at dawn. But if you change the date setting, you can see the meteor flux tonight is well above that of last night or tomorrow night.
The NASA website has a Fluxtimator that predicts the meteor flux (meteors per hour) for various cities around the world during the night of August 11-12. It will also work for the Leonid shower in November. It looks like the peak is fairly sharp, and drops off quickly thereafter.
In the last 2.1 million years, Yellowstone erupted 3 times at intervals of between 600,000 and 800,000 years. Even allowing a statistical analysis of such a small sample size, the expected interval would be something more like 700,000 years plus/minus 100,000 years. Yes, Yellowstone may erupt again someday, but calling it overdue is listening too much to the tinfoil hat folks.
It's a Doppler effect. Police radar works on the Doppler wavelength shifting of the reflection from the moving car, and the microwaves of radar are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum along with light.
Well, from this website, you convert from UT to GMT by adding 0 hours. If there are technical niceties involved, they aren't relevant to the ordinary person.
In The Mote in God's Eye the method used was to dive close to the destination star, so the much more concentrated light pressure would bring the ship to a stop. One of the characters suggested that they could have gone past, electrically charged up their ship to make a u-turn by the galactic magnetic field, and come back toward the destination star from the opposite direction, and had the lasers back at their home add their power to the destination star's light.
Unless somebody is hypothesizing that photons exhibit a red-shift when they bounce off of a mirror?
Sure. Think of the light as a wave train. One peak hits, and bounces away (at the speed of light, of course). The next peak hits, but by this time the sail has moved a tiny bit away, so the wave peaks are a tiny bit further apart. Longer wavelength = red shift = lower energy. Where did the energy go? Into accelerating the sail.
While the shower goes on for several days, the peak, when we go through a filament of material, is August 12, 09:20 UT (what used to be Greenwich time). With daylight savings time, that will be 2:20am here in California.
Because it is a solid, it won't remain in "orbit", but will degenerate, with one edge sliding into the sun, in spite of rotation?
Dyson's original concept for a Dyson Sphere was not a solid sphere, but the idea that there would be sufficient solar collectors in orbit around the star to intercept its light. This is a form of SETI, detecting ET civilizations by seeing their sun's light degrade down to infrared heat radiation.
For interstelar travel, you can't rely on the sun. You need big honking lasers in your home system. The light from the lasers will be much stronger than the light from the target star, at least until the probe gets rather close.
Coincidentally, the next story posted on/. (about SETI) talks about lasers 10000 brighter than the sun.
You see you can tack with a solar sail, but you can only tack to go in different directions [i]downwind[/i]. You can't tack upwind without the equivalent of a keel, something thats sort of hard to come by in space.
The analogy with sailing on water is not perfect, but when the analogy breaks down, it does not mean the solar sail does not work, but just that you have to deal with the real physics of the situation, rather than reasoning from analogy. If a solar sail vehicle is in orbit around the sun, by tilting the sail to make the reflection go toward the forward direction of the orbit, you slow its orbital speed, causing it to descend into a lower orbit closer to the sun.
My interpretation of this and the rest of the article is that they were testing deployment mechanisms for sail material, rather than deploying a working solar sail.
Makes sense to me. I sure would want to test the deployment mechanism before going to the expense of a real mission, putting it into orbit along with an expensive scientific probe.
This is why Newton's laws of motion still hold, and why you don't need special relativity to find kinetic energy of slow-moving objects
Yes, but I find it interesting that you can derive kinetic energy of slow-moving objects from special relativity. Apply the relation for relativistic mass, m(r) = m(0)* 1/(1 - v^2 / c^2)^.5, to the energy equation E = m * c^2
Now 1/(1 - v^2 / c^2)^.5 can be written out as a series whose first few terms are 1 + 1/2 * v^2/c^2 + 3/8 * v^4/c^4 + . ..
So therefore E = m(0) * c^2 + 1/2 * m(0) * v^2 + (higher order terms), showing that energy of motion (kinetic energy) is well approximated by KE = 1/2*m*v^2 for velocities much slower than light.
I wouldn't exactly call Titan "warm". Even with a small greenhouse effect, the temperature gets up to -180 C. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, which has a boiling point of -196 C (at 1 atm pressure).
Reporters always seem to make a big deal about the total distance, but it just comes from the fact that Messenger will be in orbit around the sun for a long time as it uses the occasional planetary swingby to adjust its orbit. In the six-and-a-half years until Messenger begins orbiting Mercury, the Earth will have travelled 6.1 billion miles in its orbit, and Mercury will have travelled 9.8 billion miles in its orbit. Since Messenger's orbital speed will be changing gradually from one to the other, naturally the total distance will be between the distances the planets travel also.
Slashdot Mirror
The relevance is that, unless they want to guarantee a disaster blotting out the human/transhuman races, they will exercise judgement in who they upload. Anyone so lacking in empathy and compassion for the human race would be a prime candidate for weeding out.
Wired published an article suggesting that the rise in autism and Asperger's syndrome in Silicon Valley resulted from a concentration of math-and-tech genes.
1) The Singularity won't happen. We all die. There is nothing after death - there was no point to anything while alive.
2) The Singularity happens - there is an unknown chance that it results in immortality, transhumanism and an eternity of living and experiencing.
I choose
1) The Singularity won't happen - the human race goes on, people live, love, have friends, enjoy pleasures, some people do good for others. That seems plenty of point to life. I can guarantee you that if you can't see any point to life now, you won't see any point to it in transhumanism, even if it lasts forever.
Transhumanists pretty obviously don't believe there is an "unknown chance" of a desirable result to the Singularity, but that there will be immortality, transhumanism, and so forth, and that they personally will survive the Singularity and benefit from it. That is where their hearts are, despite the window dressing about not knowing anything beyond the Singularity. It seems to me that if the Singularity happens, it will far more likely cause the death of every human being.
This silliness reveals the lack of understanding in a list like this. It needs to be remembered that these are works of fiction, and events in them are story elements, not predictions. Science fiction writers are not mediums peering into crystal balls. To the extent that science fiction can be judged on predictive abilities, it is in the general shape of future technology, and the effects it has on people's lives. Furthermore, elements of technology can be in the story, not because the author believes them probable or even possible, but because it allows a certain kind of story to be told. For example, rapid and common interstellar travel is part of the background of many stories just because it is the only way to tell that sort of story. Especially, conflating elements from various stories into a timeline is only reasonable if the author has included them into a coherent "future history", which many stories are not.
What I find interesting (or disturbing) is how often those who believe in the Singularity want it to be true. Despite their repeated statements that whatever lies beyond the Singularity is completely unknowable, they have a fundamental irrational belief that somehow it will be desirable. Predictions that would have this or any previous generation recoiling from in horror or disgust, they find attractive and yearn for. Somehow the concept of the Singularity makes it OK for them to look forward eagerly to the end of the human race.
No, as I see it, the core problem is that today manned spaceflight is so difficult, so close to the limit of what is possible with chemical rockets, that every safety margin has to be shaved down to the bone for it to be even possible. There are a million things that can go wrong, because every part is designed as close to the limit of the materials as it can be. If we put in a safety margin that would be considered normal in most earthly applications, we could never get to orbit. IAAME (I am a mechanical engineer) and it would drive me crazy if I had to shave everything so close just to make the thing work marginally.
The biggest global effects outside the US would be the ash and sulfur emissions in the stratosphere that would block off sunlight. There might not be any crops produced in the northern hemisphere for several years, and the climate of the southern hemisphere would also be severely affected. It might throw us into an ice age.
Taking another look, the shape of the curve has to do with the time during the night, with it dropping off at dawn. But if you change the date setting, you can see the meteor flux tonight is well above that of last night or tomorrow night.
The International Dark-Sky Association has a locator for finding the places near your location in the US with least light pollution.
The NASA website has a Fluxtimator that predicts the meteor flux (meteors per hour) for various cities around the world during the night of August 11-12. It will also work for the Leonid shower in November. It looks like the peak is fairly sharp, and drops off quickly thereafter.
In the last 2.1 million years, Yellowstone erupted 3 times at intervals of between 600,000 and 800,000 years. Even allowing a statistical analysis of such a small sample size, the expected interval would be something more like 700,000 years plus/minus 100,000 years. Yes, Yellowstone may erupt again someday, but calling it overdue is listening too much to the tinfoil hat folks.
It's a Doppler effect. Police radar works on the Doppler wavelength shifting of the reflection from the moving car, and the microwaves of radar are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum along with light.
Well, from this website, you convert from UT to GMT by adding 0 hours. If there are technical niceties involved, they aren't relevant to the ordinary person.
In The Mote in God's Eye the method used was to dive close to the destination star, so the much more concentrated light pressure would bring the ship to a stop. One of the characters suggested that they could have gone past, electrically charged up their ship to make a u-turn by the galactic magnetic field, and come back toward the destination star from the opposite direction, and had the lasers back at their home add their power to the destination star's light.
The Planetary Society is planning to launch their Cosmos 1 solar sail later this year. It was built in Russia, and will be launched from a Russian submarine, aboard a converted SS-N-18 ballistic missile. The Cosmos 1 solar sail has multiple triangular vanes, and looks a little like a windmill.
Sure. Think of the light as a wave train. One peak hits, and bounces away (at the speed of light, of course). The next peak hits, but by this time the sail has moved a tiny bit away, so the wave peaks are a tiny bit further apart. Longer wavelength = red shift = lower energy. Where did the energy go? Into accelerating the sail.
While the shower goes on for several days, the peak, when we go through a filament of material, is August 12, 09:20 UT (what used to be Greenwich time). With daylight savings time, that will be 2:20am here in California.
Dyson's original concept for a Dyson Sphere was not a solid sphere, but the idea that there would be sufficient solar collectors in orbit around the star to intercept its light. This is a form of SETI, detecting ET civilizations by seeing their sun's light degrade down to infrared heat radiation.
Coincidentally, the next story posted on /. (about SETI) talks about lasers 10000 brighter than the sun.
The analogy with sailing on water is not perfect, but when the analogy breaks down, it does not mean the solar sail does not work, but just that you have to deal with the real physics of the situation, rather than reasoning from analogy. If a solar sail vehicle is in orbit around the sun, by tilting the sail to make the reflection go toward the forward direction of the orbit, you slow its orbital speed, causing it to descend into a lower orbit closer to the sun.
Makes sense to me. I sure would want to test the deployment mechanism before going to the expense of a real mission, putting it into orbit along with an expensive scientific probe.
I don't think we disagree; I just think it's cool to spell out how it works in this instance.
Yes, but I find it interesting that you can derive kinetic energy of slow-moving objects from special relativity. Apply the relation for relativistic mass, m(r) = m(0)* 1/(1 - v^2 / c^2)^.5, to the energy equation E = m * c^2
E = m(r) * c^2 = m(0) * c^2 * 1/(1 - v^2 / c^2)^.5
Now 1/(1 - v^2 / c^2)^.5 can be written out as a series whose first few terms are 1 + 1/2 * v^2/c^2 + 3/8 * v^4/c^4 + . . .
So therefore E = m(0) * c^2 + 1/2 * m(0) * v^2 + (higher order terms), showing that energy of motion (kinetic energy) is well approximated by KE = 1/2*m*v^2 for velocities much slower than light.
I wouldn't exactly call Titan "warm". Even with a small greenhouse effect, the temperature gets up to -180 C. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, which has a boiling point of -196 C (at 1 atm pressure).
Reporters always seem to make a big deal about the total distance, but it just comes from the fact that Messenger will be in orbit around the sun for a long time as it uses the occasional planetary swingby to adjust its orbit. In the six-and-a-half years until Messenger begins orbiting Mercury, the Earth will have travelled 6.1 billion miles in its orbit, and Mercury will have travelled 9.8 billion miles in its orbit. Since Messenger's orbital speed will be changing gradually from one to the other, naturally the total distance will be between the distances the planets travel also.