Getting above the atmosphere is more important than getting farther away from the center of the Earth.
If that were true, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne could easily go to orbit. The higher you are, the lesser atmospheric drag there is, but Earth's gravity well is still very much present (diminishing gradually in accordance to Newton/Einstein long after air drag has fallen essentially to zero).
Wow, I'm utterly amazed at how many so called NEW inventions or ideas come today... this one brought to you straight from the 60's!
Could you provide me with a reference? I'd like to look it up.
Some French guy named Jules called from the 19th century, he wants his idea back.
I'm fully aware of Jules Verne's "Moon gun", but this concept could never work for humans due excessive acceleration. Maglev approach is the only one that I am aware of (other than rockets) that can provide a kind of "long-distance" acceleration to orbital speed tolerable by humans. Are there any other approaches I am not aware of?
Making the launch system more efficient is best done by leaving as much of it as possible on Earth, and only carry to space what's going to be used in space.
I fully agree with that. The proposed concept will require some heat shielding (hopefully, reusable on reentry), but essentially all the mass that you eject is usable in orbit (propulsion system is left back on Earth), unlike current systems that have 90-something % of their mass spent on fuel, leaving very little "usable" mass.
If you're in the business of hugely expensive, why not scrap the whole super-fast airlock and put the exit of the launch tube far enough from Earths surface that the density of the atmosphere isn't a problem anymore?
You cannot structurally put the exit of the tunnel high enough to completely avoid the atmosphere. If you could - why not just build a space elevator or even space "tower" or "needle"? For the same reason, you cannot put the tunnel in vertical position because it would be too short for comfortable acceleration, not to mention hugely more difficult to build (compared to what is already an incredibly difficult project).
Of course, the higher you are the lesser problem you have (less friction, lesser "airlock" tolerances). Running the end of the tunnel up the (very high) mountain slope comes to mind.
The reason I made this post is to see if there is anything obvious that could stop this concept from being implemented in principle. So, if anyone has more criticisms - keep them coming!
A tunnel, probably around 2000 km long, without any air in it, lined with magnetic levitation tracks.
The human "cargo" is placed in what is essentially a maglev "train" and accelerates at relatively comfortable G to orbital speed (+ whatever extra is necessary to punch through the atmosphere).
Near its end, the tunnel curves upwards and has a kind of super-fast airlock mechanism to let the "train" transition between vacuum and the atmosphere.
This would be hugely expensive to build, of course, but I have a strong feeling its capital cost would still be less then, say, annual US wasteful spending related to healthcare. Operational costs, one the other hand, would probably be just a tiny fraction of today's chemical rocket based approach.
"Get to low-Earth orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar system" - Robert Heinlein
Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
The development of teamwork, communication, logical thinking, usage of tools etc... is a direct consequence of evolutionary pressures - without all these tools of survival, we would not have become an evolutionary success we are today.
The "complex machines" are inevitable extension of this survival strategy.
Valid points, if we organize extra-Terrestrial hydrocarbon extraction operation in the same way as Apollo.
However, setting a factory that would produce rockets on site (on the given moon) and fill them with fuel available on site would change the dynamics of the problem significantly. We don't need anything sophisticated - just "point and shoot" rocket that can lift off the moon and make minimal corrections so it hits the Earth. Basically, you would have a huge financial hit at the start, but the more is produced on site, the less needs to be (expensively) carried from Earth and more economical this scheme becomes.
All of this is extremely far fetched, or course, but I don't see a reason why it shouldn't technically work by the time hydrocarbons on Earth become scarce. Whether we should try it at all (instead of developing alternative energy sources) is another matter entirely.
One more reason to look at developing technology and, perhaps, biology for self-sustained survival outside of Earth...
The return trip would require just as much effort.
Actually it wouldn't (measured by required energy).
The gravitational well of a small moon can be defeated using much smaller amount of energy compared to Earth's gravitational well. That's why Apollo landers could take off from Moon on puny thrusters compared Saturn 5s required for escaping Earth.
Thousands of V2 rockets had gotten "out of our atmosphere" by 1945.
Getting out of atmosphere is not the same thing as entering the orbit, much less breaking it (as required for inter-planetary travel).
Not long ago it was believed the Sun rotated around the Earth and now we believe that the speed of light in the universe is just like ours.
However, they were believed in for a drastically different reasons. The first was due unwillingness of organized religion to accept the evidence, while the second is because of the willingness of the scientific community to accept the evidence.
As a consequence, if evidence changes, we will change our conclusions about the speed of light.
where do they get the reference light to base their redshift
I'm no astronomer, but I think it goes something like this:
Chemical elements "soak up" precise wavelengths, leaving narrow black lines in a spectrum of light. When you compare black lines of a nearby star (say, our Sun) to a lines in a spectrum of a (sufficiently) distant star, you'll notice that they look similar, but "translated" (due to a redshift). The rate or translation will give you a clue about the distance.
In this particular case, why should it be a risk to disclose your email address by ccing everyone?
Because you are not just disclosing your address (to all the people on the CC list), but addresses of all the people on the CC list (to all the people on the CC list).
While I agree with most of what you said, I'd like to point out that...
"pointlessness of your existence"
..is relative.
While from the perspective of "swirling vortexes of particles interacting with other particles" our existence may well be pointless, from our own perspective, it certainly is not.
I'm glad you agree that the problem is not technical, but political/sociological. This is exactly what I think, except I have a little more faith in human race then you do.
It took over twelve years from the doom and gloom alarm over global warming before we even convened a pannel that created the Kyoto protocol.
Large asteroid is extinction event. Global warming is not, as far as we know (unless we overlooked some tipping point that would suddenly turn Earth into Venus). I like to believe that in face of such great danger, there would be proportionally effective response from the policymakers. You are, of course, free to believe otherwise and we won't know who's right until the day we can see it with our own eyes.
We have had the threat of near earth collisions before and we have mobilized nothing to the extent remotely necessary to effective.
True, mostly because we were blissfully ignorant of the threat. And we were lucky: what would happen if Tunguska meteoroid exploded over New York or if it were larger then it was? Dinosaurs, on the other hand, were unlucky.
I'd rather be sure then lucky the next time.
The problem is, we don't have rockets that can or will meet an object that is also set up to carry and detonate a nuclear explosion in the scale that would be needed.
Ever heard of "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth" (Archimedes)? Surely a nuclear explosion is stronger then Archimedes and asteroid is smaller then Earth;)
Joking aside, if you detonate early enough, you don't really need that powerful explosion at all: a minuscule change in trajectory will add-up to the huge difference by the time the asteroid reaches us.
One misconception that exists in mass-media is that we would need to destroy the asteroid. That's not true. We only need to deflect it (e.g. by blowing the nuclear warhead laterally or providing some other thrust).
...but they don't go into deep space and most likely couldn't be converted in time to do something meaningful.
You keep saying "we don't have enough time". I guess you don't realize that properly executed monitoring program would likely give us warning decades in advance. That should be enough to invent/modify the needed technology, test it, then re-test it and finally deploy it with high probability of success. Even if we got much shorter warning, packing a nuclear warhead onboard an existing commercial launcher should be good enough quick fix.
I know you have a Wikipedia article claiming otherwise but without going into the reliability of Wikki, or the fact that the author could be a tenured professor of his mom's basement in Kentucky, I think this article is more wishful thinking then anything else.
I provided Wikipedia article as a convenient source of "compressed information". Similar ideas were heard for a long time in popular science and various sources off and on the Web, which you are free to investigate at your discretion. While I'm not claiming all of these ideas are feasible, don't you think we should at least try the most promising ones?
Extinction implies we are all going to die. There is nothing we can do about it and there is nothing Hollywood can do to make their fantasies a reality in the amount of time necessary to do something before the extinction. So if we cannot do anything, they why worry?
Actually, there are lot of things we can do to avert asteroid impact.
And the earlier we see the threat the more effective our defense will be. That's why Arecibo and programs such as Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking are important.
Why not worry about the now and something you can do something about?
Asteroid impact is something we can do something about, so why not worry about it now (especially when considered how comparatively cheap it is)?
...is much better of derailing than staying on track. Derailing means only the first few cars will crash into the obstacle...
And the rest will tumble over each other and "pile up".
...staying on track means they all jam up.
Which one is actually more deadly I don't know, and I suspect you don't either, but I do know that derailment alone (without direct hit to an obstacle) is a great risk in itself.
For example, much publicized German ICE derailment caused all the cars to slam into a concrete bridge and "pile up", without hitting any obstacle directly on the track.
I can imagine that there are situations where derailment can actually be preferable, but I'm also pretty sure that derailment itself poses a significant risk. However, I don't think that any of this demonstrates that maglev technology is inherently less safe then conventional rail...
In addition, german Maglev technology is rather dangerous...
It might be worth noting that during this head-on 200 km/h (125 mph) collision, maglev train did not derail (since it firmly "hugs" the elevated magnetic "rail") and did not ignite (since no fuel is carried onboard). The accident itself was caused by human error and the lack of safety control systems that would be present on any commercial track. The technology itself is probably safer then the classical rail.
Whether maglev is a dead-end technology will be decided on economical grounds.
My point was that you are the one that needs to supply this information - whether this was done through traditional mechanisms (such as locking) or through data-flow languages.
The main difference between a data-flow language and imperative language is that in the data-flow language the programmer explicitly states which operation depends on which (not unlike "make"), instead of explicitly putting them in a specific order as in the imperative language.
What I did was: I limited possible orders of execution, I did not choose single specific order.
I suspect your "which operation depends on which" and my "limiting operation sequences" are different names for the essentially same thing.
Admittedly I don't have any experience with data-flow languages - did you implement any actual project with them and can you tell me if they actually make multithreading easier in practice?
Besides, from what I've understood, a large amount of the performance of a modern processor comes from having multiple execution pipelines and a capability to find from the binary program stream instructions which can be run in parallel, by analyzing their dependencies. A data-flow language simply makes it easy for the compiler to perform a similar function.
While true, this is done on a micro-level and totally transparently for the programmer; the end of "free lunch" of MHz race forces programmers to redesign their software in a non-transparent way. I hope data-flow languages are a tool that will ease multithreading development, but if history of software development teaches us anything, there are no silver bullets.
Sure, if you're futzing with locks in a shared memory model that's true. If you implement any of the reasonably simple abstraction techniques that have been well understood for something like 20 years now (say... CSP for example) then your concurrent program ends up being deterministic and reasonably easy to follow.
I must admit I didn't know about CSP. Did you actually use it and what are you practical experiences with it?
Basically the "multithreaded programming is hard" argument is no more interesting than the "programming is hard because you have to manually free allocated memory all the time and if you don't your program breaks horribly" argument.
This is totally uncalled for. If you are suggesting that multithreading is as easy as correctly releasing the dynamic memory than I must wonder if you have any practical experience with either.
You fix that by implementing some sort of garbage collector.
Memory is just one possible resource that has to be managed in any non-trivial program. Garbage collectors will not save you from releasing other kinds of resources such as file handles, sockets, database cursors etc, and they have their own set of problems (usually performance related such as non-deterministic garbage collection).
To manage resources, you will typically use RAII (resource acquisition is initialization) paradigm in languages with real stack-based variables such as C++ or some simulation of it in languages that don't (e.g. IDisposable/using in C#).
But even with these complications, I fail to see how memory/resource management even approaches multithreading in complexity.
That way the compiler can automatically parallelize the task, instead of the programmer having to do so manually.
This might be practical for specialist number-crunching applications, but is not possible in general. Basically, whenever you need to manipulate any non-trivial data structure from multiple threads, you'll need to explicitly state how to do it.
Classical example is writing into stream (e.g. file or console). While entity that represents a stream in the given programming language might be thread-safe in a sense that it will not crash when two threads attempt to write to it in the same time, this still does not make it thread-safe from the logical point of view. Consider this:
Thread 1:
(1) Write "A" to stream.
(2) Write "B" to stream.
Thread 2:
(1) Write "C" to stream.
(2) Write "D" to stream.
Depending on thread scheduling, you may end-up with "ABCD", "ACBD", "CABD" etc... If you only want "ABCD" or "CDAB", you would need to state this explicitly in your source code like this:
Thread 1:
(0) Lock stream.
(1) Write "A" to stream.
(2) Write "B" to stream.
(4) Unlock stream.
Thread 2:
(0) Lock stream.
(1) Write "C" to stream.
(2) Write "D" to stream.
(4) Unlock stream.
My point is that compiler (interpreter, VM...) simply cannot infer this kind of information on its own (it cannot "make up" information that does not exist).
Functional programming is not a silver bullet either. While pure functional programming, through its lack of side-effects might be considered a candidate for "automatic" parallelization, bear in mind that functional programs live in a world full of side effects. So most functional languages are really "purely" functional only while you don't attempt to interact with the world outside them (e.g. simple writing into file).
Programming for multi-core systems isn't so much hard as it is different, and people *hate* having to learn new things.
While multithread programming is different, this is not the whole story. The main reason multithread programming is so hard is that it is non-deterministic. In other words, for the same input data, you are not guaranteed to have same result over multiple runs (due different thread scheduling, other processes currently running on the system, varying number of cores from system to system etc.).
This makes multithreaded program significantly harder to design and especially to test.
...this is only in a lab environment with only oxygen. The reality is that the split off oxygen cells bond with other gasses and molecules, not just with other O^1 molecules.
My point was that I didn't think O^1 would occur in "normal" conditions. I didn't say that other molecules are not possible - they are indeed mentioned by chemical equations in said Wikipedia article.
While not being a scientist myself, I do have a cursory interest in science and I always attempt to not just believe what I read, but try to think with my own head and draw my own conclusions. And the article you mention has couple of "red flags" preventing me from taking it on a face value.
The article basically says that since anaerobic cells do not like oxygen, all we have to do is pump oxygen into our bodies (quote from the article: The basic concept is to "flood the body with oxygen" and ozone.) and we will be purified of many ailments.
This foregoes that fact that to parts of our own cells, including DNA and many organelles, oxygen is toxic (even O^2, not to mention O^3 and many compounds produced from it). As explained here and (more verbosely) here, our cells are product of evolution of both aerobic and anaerobic life. The life of an average eukaryote cell is a balancing act between metabolic need for oxygen and a need to protect its own DNA and organelles from it. Simply pumping oxygen indiscriminately into our bodies would offset this fine balance.
Later, the article even goes on to claim that Ozone has been used to "cure" cancer and aids and many other "incurable" diseases in Germany for more than 50 years!. Now to claim for a chemical that damages DNA to cure a disease that results from a damage to DNA is a very strange claim indeed!
In any case, we agree that "too large of a quantity is bad":)
Slashdot Mirror
Getting above the atmosphere is more important than getting farther away from the center of the Earth.
If that were true, Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne could easily go to orbit. The higher you are, the lesser atmospheric drag there is, but Earth's gravity well is still very much present (diminishing gradually in accordance to Newton/Einstein long after air drag has fallen essentially to zero).
Wow, I'm utterly amazed at how many so called NEW inventions or ideas come today... this one brought to you straight from the 60's!
Could you provide me with a reference? I'd like to look it up.
Some French guy named Jules called from the 19th century, he wants his idea back.
I'm fully aware of Jules Verne's "Moon gun", but this concept could never work for humans due excessive acceleration. Maglev approach is the only one that I am aware of (other than rockets) that can provide a kind of "long-distance" acceleration to orbital speed tolerable by humans. Are there any other approaches I am not aware of?
Making the launch system more efficient is best done by leaving as much of it as possible on Earth, and only carry to space what's going to be used in space.
I fully agree with that. The proposed concept will require some heat shielding (hopefully, reusable on reentry), but essentially all the mass that you eject is usable in orbit (propulsion system is left back on Earth), unlike current systems that have 90-something % of their mass spent on fuel, leaving very little "usable" mass.
If you're in the business of hugely expensive, why not scrap the whole super-fast airlock and put the exit of the launch tube far enough from Earths surface that the density of the atmosphere isn't a problem anymore?
You cannot structurally put the exit of the tunnel high enough to completely avoid the atmosphere. If you could - why not just build a space elevator or even space "tower" or "needle"? For the same reason, you cannot put the tunnel in vertical position because it would be too short for comfortable acceleration, not to mention hugely more difficult to build (compared to what is already an incredibly difficult project).
Of course, the higher you are the lesser problem you have (less friction, lesser "airlock" tolerances). Running the end of the tunnel up the (very high) mountain slope comes to mind.
The reason I made this post is to see if there is anything obvious that could stop this concept from being implemented in principle. So, if anyone has more criticisms - keep them coming!
Ideal human delivery-to-orbit system:
This would be hugely expensive to build, of course, but I have a strong feeling its capital cost would still be less then, say, annual US wasteful spending related to healthcare. Operational costs, one the other hand, would probably be just a tiny fraction of today's chemical rocket based approach.
"Get to low-Earth orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar system" - Robert Heinlein
Actually, making a ballistic rocket is probably easier than making an orbital one...
If you can find 500 people every few years who are willing to do something like the above, you will eventually become a pan-galactic civilization.
Actually that's how we colonized Earth. Majority of today's humans are descendants of pioneers!
Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
The development of teamwork, communication, logical thinking, usage of tools etc... is a direct consequence of evolutionary pressures - without all these tools of survival, we would not have become an evolutionary success we are today.
The "complex machines" are inevitable extension of this survival strategy.
Science:
Valid points, if we organize extra-Terrestrial hydrocarbon extraction operation in the same way as Apollo.
However, setting a factory that would produce rockets on site (on the given moon) and fill them with fuel available on site would change the dynamics of the problem significantly. We don't need anything sophisticated - just "point and shoot" rocket that can lift off the moon and make minimal corrections so it hits the Earth. Basically, you would have a huge financial hit at the start, but the more is produced on site, the less needs to be (expensively) carried from Earth and more economical this scheme becomes.
All of this is extremely far fetched, or course, but I don't see a reason why it shouldn't technically work by the time hydrocarbons on Earth become scarce. Whether we should try it at all (instead of developing alternative energy sources) is another matter entirely.
One more reason to look at developing technology and, perhaps, biology for self-sustained survival outside of Earth...
Actually it wouldn't (measured by required energy).
The gravitational well of a small moon can be defeated using much smaller amount of energy compared to Earth's gravitational well. That's why Apollo landers could take off from Moon on puny thrusters compared Saturn 5s required for escaping Earth.
Getting out of atmosphere is not the same thing as entering the orbit, much less breaking it (as required for inter-planetary travel).
However, they were believed in for a drastically different reasons. The first was due unwillingness of organized religion to accept the evidence, while the second is because of the willingness of the scientific community to accept the evidence.
As a consequence, if evidence changes, we will change our conclusions about the speed of light.
I'm no astronomer, but I think it goes something like this:
Chemical elements "soak up" precise wavelengths, leaving narrow black lines in a spectrum of light. When you compare black lines of a nearby star (say, our Sun) to a lines in a spectrum of a (sufficiently) distant star, you'll notice that they look similar, but "translated" (due to a redshift). The rate or translation will give you a clue about the distance.
Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Because you are not just disclosing your address (to all the people on the CC list), but addresses of all the people on the CC list (to all the people on the CC list).
While I agree with most of what you said, I'd like to point out that...
"pointlessness of your existence"
..is relative.
While from the perspective of "swirling vortexes of particles interacting with other particles" our existence may well be pointless, from our own perspective, it certainly is not.
I'm glad you agree that the problem is not technical, but political/sociological. This is exactly what I think, except I have a little more faith in human race then you do.
Large asteroid is extinction event. Global warming is not, as far as we know (unless we overlooked some tipping point that would suddenly turn Earth into Venus). I like to believe that in face of such great danger, there would be proportionally effective response from the policymakers. You are, of course, free to believe otherwise and we won't know who's right until the day we can see it with our own eyes.
Let us hope this day will never come...
True, mostly because we were blissfully ignorant of the threat. And we were lucky: what would happen if Tunguska meteoroid exploded over New York or if it were larger then it was? Dinosaurs, on the other hand, were unlucky.
I'd rather be sure then lucky the next time.
Ever heard of "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth" (Archimedes)? Surely a nuclear explosion is stronger then Archimedes and asteroid is smaller then Earth ;)
Joking aside, if you detonate early enough, you don't really need that powerful explosion at all: a minuscule change in trajectory will add-up to the huge difference by the time the asteroid reaches us.
One misconception that exists in mass-media is that we would need to destroy the asteroid. That's not true. We only need to deflect it (e.g. by blowing the nuclear warhead laterally or providing some other thrust).
You keep saying "we don't have enough time". I guess you don't realize that properly executed monitoring program would likely give us warning decades in advance. That should be enough to invent/modify the needed technology, test it, then re-test it and finally deploy it with high probability of success. Even if we got much shorter warning, packing a nuclear warhead onboard an existing commercial launcher should be good enough quick fix.
I provided Wikipedia article as a convenient source of "compressed information". Similar ideas were heard for a long time in popular science and various sources off and on the Web, which you are free to investigate at your discretion. While I'm not claiming all of these ideas are feasible, don't you think we should at least try the most promising ones?
Actually, there are lot of things we can do to avert asteroid impact.
And the earlier we see the threat the more effective our defense will be. That's why Arecibo and programs such as Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking are important.
Asteroid impact is something we can do something about, so why not worry about it now (especially when considered how comparatively cheap it is)?
And the rest will tumble over each other and "pile up".
Which one is actually more deadly I don't know, and I suspect you don't either, but I do know that derailment alone (without direct hit to an obstacle) is a great risk in itself.
For example, much publicized German ICE derailment caused all the cars to slam into a concrete bridge and "pile up", without hitting any obstacle directly on the track.
I can imagine that there are situations where derailment can actually be preferable, but I'm also pretty sure that derailment itself poses a significant risk. However, I don't think that any of this demonstrates that maglev technology is inherently less safe then conventional rail...
It might be worth noting that during this head-on 200 km/h (125 mph) collision, maglev train did not derail (since it firmly "hugs" the elevated magnetic "rail") and did not ignite (since no fuel is carried onboard). The accident itself was caused by human error and the lack of safety control systems that would be present on any commercial track. The technology itself is probably safer then the classical rail.
Whether maglev is a dead-end technology will be decided on economical grounds.
My point was that you are the one that needs to supply this information - whether this was done through traditional mechanisms (such as locking) or through data-flow languages.
What I did was: I limited possible orders of execution, I did not choose single specific order.
I suspect your "which operation depends on which" and my "limiting operation sequences" are different names for the essentially same thing.
Admittedly I don't have any experience with data-flow languages - did you implement any actual project with them and can you tell me if they actually make multithreading easier in practice?
While true, this is done on a micro-level and totally transparently for the programmer; the end of "free lunch" of MHz race forces programmers to redesign their software in a non-transparent way. I hope data-flow languages are a tool that will ease multithreading development, but if history of software development teaches us anything, there are no silver bullets.
This is totally uncalled for. If you are suggesting that multithreading is as easy as correctly releasing the dynamic memory than I must wonder if you have any practical experience with either.
Memory is just one possible resource that has to be managed in any non-trivial program. Garbage collectors will not save you from releasing other kinds of resources such as file handles, sockets, database cursors etc, and they have their own set of problems (usually performance related such as non-deterministic garbage collection).
To manage resources, you will typically use RAII (resource acquisition is initialization) paradigm in languages with real stack-based variables such as C++ or some simulation of it in languages that don't (e.g. IDisposable/using in C#).
But even with these complications, I fail to see how memory/resource management even approaches multithreading in complexity.
This might be practical for specialist number-crunching applications, but is not possible in general. Basically, whenever you need to manipulate any non-trivial data structure from multiple threads, you'll need to explicitly state how to do it.
Classical example is writing into stream (e.g. file or console). While entity that represents a stream in the given programming language might be thread-safe in a sense that it will not crash when two threads attempt to write to it in the same time, this still does not make it thread-safe from the logical point of view. Consider this:
Thread 1: (1) Write "A" to stream. (2) Write "B" to stream.
Thread 2: (1) Write "C" to stream. (2) Write "D" to stream.
Depending on thread scheduling, you may end-up with "ABCD", "ACBD", "CABD" etc... If you only want "ABCD" or "CDAB", you would need to state this explicitly in your source code like this:
Thread 1: (0) Lock stream. (1) Write "A" to stream. (2) Write "B" to stream. (4) Unlock stream.
Thread 2: (0) Lock stream. (1) Write "C" to stream. (2) Write "D" to stream. (4) Unlock stream.
My point is that compiler (interpreter, VM...) simply cannot infer this kind of information on its own (it cannot "make up" information that does not exist).
Functional programming is not a silver bullet either. While pure functional programming, through its lack of side-effects might be considered a candidate for "automatic" parallelization, bear in mind that functional programs live in a world full of side effects. So most functional languages are really "purely" functional only while you don't attempt to interact with the world outside them (e.g. simple writing into file).
While multithread programming is different, this is not the whole story. The main reason multithread programming is so hard is that it is non-deterministic. In other words, for the same input data, you are not guaranteed to have same result over multiple runs (due different thread scheduling, other processes currently running on the system, varying number of cores from system to system etc.).
This makes multithreaded program significantly harder to design and especially to test.
My point was that I didn't think O^1 would occur in "normal" conditions. I didn't say that other molecules are not possible - they are indeed mentioned by chemical equations in said Wikipedia article.
While not being a scientist myself, I do have a cursory interest in science and I always attempt to not just believe what I read, but try to think with my own head and draw my own conclusions. And the article you mention has couple of "red flags" preventing me from taking it on a face value.
The article basically says that since anaerobic cells do not like oxygen, all we have to do is pump oxygen into our bodies (quote from the article: The basic concept is to "flood the body with oxygen" and ozone.) and we will be purified of many ailments.
This foregoes that fact that to parts of our own cells, including DNA and many organelles, oxygen is toxic (even O^2, not to mention O^3 and many compounds produced from it). As explained here and (more verbosely) here, our cells are product of evolution of both aerobic and anaerobic life. The life of an average eukaryote cell is a balancing act between metabolic need for oxygen and a need to protect its own DNA and organelles from it. Simply pumping oxygen indiscriminately into our bodies would offset this fine balance.
Later, the article even goes on to claim that Ozone has been used to "cure" cancer and aids and many other "incurable" diseases in Germany for more than 50 years!. Now to claim for a chemical that damages DNA to cure a disease that results from a damage to DNA is a very strange claim indeed!
In any case, we agree that "too large of a quantity is bad" :)