You're likely right, but understanding how intelligence works isn't necessarily a precursor to AGI. We also don't need to mimic the brain. Good analogy I heard is we are still hundreds (or thousands) of years away from making a bird from scratch, but we can make the Sr-71.
You could probably fund the Future Circular Collider, ITER and its successor, a new ISS, and every proposed physics experiment and mars lander for something like the F35 program. Which do you think is a better investment for society?
They may very well have - but my guess would be error in the known temperature of thermal gradients within the ocean would contribute far greater error. Temperature, salinity, and currents all contribute far more than gravity.
Disregard comment below - went full/.'er and just skimmed the summary. Missed "negative" mass - now I can safely say I don't understand the results at all.
Also, I would be more surprised if quasiparticles *didn't* have mass associated with them - would be a violation of matter energy conservation. With inelastic scattering you can map out phonon energy distribution as well. Not belittling any of their work, always neat to see things confirmed experimentally.
There are many functions of sleep, but conserving energy is not one of them. Sleeping is quite a handicap in terms of "staying alive" as it leaves you open to predation, yet *every* animal studied has some form of sleep. List of things that occur while you sleep is always growing, but for starters: memory consolidation, neuron connection/deletion optimization, neuron protein and contaminate cleanup, body immunity boosting / cleanup, etc. If you don't get enough sleep certain things skyrocket: heart disease and heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer's, neurological disease, depression, illness, obesity, etc. The book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is fantastic, although it resulted in me quite becoming anxious about not getting 8 hours of sleep (hard with young kids!).
Twitter is mostly a platform for recreational outrage, hardly any threads there are positive contributions. Even a few I follow (for example Musk) don't say anything of any importance, just meme dumps and inane comments. Only thing I find useful are people I respect posting links to content outside twitter.
...then Obama nearly doubled the debt, and Trump is doing his best to beat that record. The two parties are just divorced parents competing to spoil their children during visitation rights.
Branson and Musk are both pursuing this. Musk has the tech advantage with low cost to orbit, and is rumored to have an assembly line for satellites in the works (test satellites are already in orbit). What could Zuck possibly bring to the table here? No tech, no brand, no trust - why are investors even behind this?
The power and distance of the signal means it's certainly something astronomical like a neutron star or quasar etc. There would be far more efficient directed means of attempting communication (e.g. laser sending non-random repeating math contact style).
Everything is under ITAR regulations, it's not like any company can call up NASA and request a USB stick of design plans. I'm very curious how much direct tech transfer there was to SpaceX.
You seem knowledgeable about battery tech -- I understand the capacity issue, but how exactly do the ionic conductivity and discharge rate figure into the ultimate performance? The much lower ionic conductivity corresponds to slower discharge even if it could still hold 400Wh/kg? Would this still be useful although not for something like an electric car where fast charge/discharge matter?
Zubrin walks through many of these problems and their potential solutions in his book "Case for Mars", an interesting read. Biggest unknown is how much adsorbed CO2 is in the regolith IIRC.
I'm sure there are ways of using new materials, but the high temp alloys used in rockets aren't exactly directly applicable to cutting machines. New computational modelling techniques could def be used to generate materials. Used to be years and millions of $ to create a new material but modern CALPHAD / DFT / Diffusion thermo techniques can shrink this to thousands $ and months. There are ceramics that are nearly as hard as diamond that have friction coefficients almost that of teflon. Even nano-polycrystalline diamond NPD would eat through rock like butter. For some reason industries are unbelievably resistant to trying new materials - especially aero.
I'm very impressed with what SpaceX has done, but keep in mind before them rockets were things governments made with little regard for cost savings or drastic advances. For example if there was a commercial driver for particle accelerators you'd see these things become a lot simpler, more effective, etc. with time.
OTOH "digging" is about as competitive as it gets. Brilliant engineers and billions of dollars go into digging. There may be some intransigence with adoption of new materials and technologies but huge leaps in the same manner as SpaceX seem very unlikely to me. If he pulls it off I'll be more impressed than the double landing of the Falcon heavy...
While the fuel in theory should be cheaper, it's using the deuterium from sea water which needs refining / separation. Tritium will require a fusion reactor to breed more tritium with a lithium blanket, otherwise every fusion reactor will rely on a fission reactor for tritium. The overall power output of proposed fusion reactors are roughly that of fission reactors. So, the verdict is still out on whether or not these things will be economically viable once we solve all the technical issues in this next century. Eventually we'll get there, but not the easiest thing.
The last sentence - fusion reactors really are pretty tame and won't be doing any obliterating. Good way to think of it : in fission the difficulty is preventing too much power and taming the core while fusion is the exact opposite and requires every trick in the book to make it do anything at all. Makes safety inherent though. We're probably many centuries away from fusion spaceflight given how heavy and massively complex the infrastructure is, and no rockets will be launched with fusion.
In talking with physicists over lunch it seems no one takes it seriously. One did point out that if you replaced the liquid with a molten salt you could possibly get a safe fission fusion hybrid, but not sure how practical that would be.
I'm not sure where you heard that thallium is a possibility, but if you look at charts of nuclear binding energies any element beyond iron requires energy to fuse. This is why stars can produce elements up to iron as they age but supernovas produce the heavier and rarer elements. Maybe you were thinking of thorium fission?
As alpha particles coming from the sun the regolith of the moon should be full of helium 3. However, the fusion we are attempting here relies on D-T fusion. Any fusion attempts with He3 will require much much higher temperatures - the nuclear cross-sections are much smaller. See graph here:
Even if technically possible it wouldn't be economically for a long time, if ever. If a reactor can increase to these much higher energies boron proton fusion is also a possibility, and much cheaper (tri-alpha in CA is attempting this).
I had done some design work on a nuclear fusion reactor, we mainly used common alloys like stainless steel (with special control over cobalt content), aluminum, titanium, etc. Aluminum alloys are great as they don't activate and self anneal radiation damage. The zirconium you mention might be more towards the intense plasma facing components. I've seen tungsten, carbon-carbon, and beryllium used in this area - particularly in the diverter area.
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The microtubule "theory" has no substance.
You're likely right, but understanding how intelligence works isn't necessarily a precursor to AGI. We also don't need to mimic the brain. Good analogy I heard is we are still hundreds (or thousands) of years away from making a bird from scratch, but we can make the Sr-71.
You could probably fund the Future Circular Collider, ITER and its successor, a new ISS, and every proposed physics experiment and mars lander for something like the F35 program. Which do you think is a better investment for society?
You made the same mistake I initially did. They are saying phonons carry *negative* mass, which to me is very counter-intuitive.
They may very well have - but my guess would be error in the known temperature of thermal gradients within the ocean would contribute far greater error. Temperature, salinity, and currents all contribute far more than gravity.
Disregard comment below - went full /.'er and just skimmed the summary. Missed "negative" mass - now I can safely say I don't understand the results at all.
Also, I would be more surprised if quasiparticles *didn't* have mass associated with them - would be a violation of matter energy conservation. With inelastic scattering you can map out phonon energy distribution as well. Not belittling any of their work, always neat to see things confirmed experimentally.
There are many functions of sleep, but conserving energy is not one of them. Sleeping is quite a handicap in terms of "staying alive" as it leaves you open to predation, yet *every* animal studied has some form of sleep. List of things that occur while you sleep is always growing, but for starters: memory consolidation, neuron connection/deletion optimization, neuron protein and contaminate cleanup, body immunity boosting / cleanup, etc. If you don't get enough sleep certain things skyrocket: heart disease and heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer's, neurological disease, depression, illness, obesity, etc. The book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is fantastic, although it resulted in me quite becoming anxious about not getting 8 hours of sleep (hard with young kids!).
When you can't innovate, litigate!
If only there were a good way to avoid the whole Google ad / analytics network for sites. I can't stand using them but not a whole lot of options.
Twitter is mostly a platform for recreational outrage, hardly any threads there are positive contributions. Even a few I follow (for example Musk) don't say anything of any importance, just meme dumps and inane comments. Only thing I find useful are people I respect posting links to content outside twitter.
...then Obama nearly doubled the debt, and Trump is doing his best to beat that record. The two parties are just divorced parents competing to spoil their children during visitation rights.
Branson and Musk are both pursuing this. Musk has the tech advantage with low cost to orbit, and is rumored to have an assembly line for satellites in the works (test satellites are already in orbit). What could Zuck possibly bring to the table here? No tech, no brand, no trust - why are investors even behind this?
The power and distance of the signal means it's certainly something astronomical like a neutron star or quasar etc. There would be far more efficient directed means of attempting communication (e.g. laser sending non-random repeating math contact style).
When I was younger I fell asleep and woke up via a rumble strip, very lucky. Naive me thought it's very difficult to fall asleep while driving.
Everything is under ITAR regulations, it's not like any company can call up NASA and request a USB stick of design plans. I'm very curious how much direct tech transfer there was to SpaceX.
You seem knowledgeable about battery tech -- I understand the capacity issue, but how exactly do the ionic conductivity and discharge rate figure into the ultimate performance? The much lower ionic conductivity corresponds to slower discharge even if it could still hold 400Wh/kg? Would this still be useful although not for something like an electric car where fast charge/discharge matter?
Zubrin walks through many of these problems and their potential solutions in his book "Case for Mars", an interesting read. Biggest unknown is how much adsorbed CO2 is in the regolith IIRC.
I'm sure there are ways of using new materials, but the high temp alloys used in rockets aren't exactly directly applicable to cutting machines. New computational modelling techniques could def be used to generate materials. Used to be years and millions of $ to create a new material but modern CALPHAD / DFT / Diffusion thermo techniques can shrink this to thousands $ and months. There are ceramics that are nearly as hard as diamond that have friction coefficients almost that of teflon. Even nano-polycrystalline diamond NPD would eat through rock like butter. For some reason industries are unbelievably resistant to trying new materials - especially aero.
I'm very impressed with what SpaceX has done, but keep in mind before them rockets were things governments made with little regard for cost savings or drastic advances. For example if there was a commercial driver for particle accelerators you'd see these things become a lot simpler, more effective, etc. with time.
OTOH "digging" is about as competitive as it gets. Brilliant engineers and billions of dollars go into digging. There may be some intransigence with adoption of new materials and technologies but huge leaps in the same manner as SpaceX seem very unlikely to me. If he pulls it off I'll be more impressed than the double landing of the Falcon heavy...
While the fuel in theory should be cheaper, it's using the deuterium from sea water which needs refining / separation. Tritium will require a fusion reactor to breed more tritium with a lithium blanket, otherwise every fusion reactor will rely on a fission reactor for tritium. The overall power output of proposed fusion reactors are roughly that of fission reactors. So, the verdict is still out on whether or not these things will be economically viable once we solve all the technical issues in this next century. Eventually we'll get there, but not the easiest thing.
The last sentence - fusion reactors really are pretty tame and won't be doing any obliterating. Good way to think of it : in fission the difficulty is preventing too much power and taming the core while fusion is the exact opposite and requires every trick in the book to make it do anything at all. Makes safety inherent though. We're probably many centuries away from fusion spaceflight given how heavy and massively complex the infrastructure is, and no rockets will be launched with fusion.
In talking with physicists over lunch it seems no one takes it seriously. One did point out that if you replaced the liquid with a molten salt you could possibly get a safe fission fusion hybrid, but not sure how practical that would be.
I'm not sure where you heard that thallium is a possibility, but if you look at charts of nuclear binding energies any element beyond iron requires energy to fuse. This is why stars can produce elements up to iron as they age but supernovas produce the heavier and rarer elements. Maybe you were thinking of thorium fission?
As alpha particles coming from the sun the regolith of the moon should be full of helium 3. However, the fusion we are attempting here relies on D-T fusion. Any fusion attempts with He3 will require much much higher temperatures - the nuclear cross-sections are much smaller. See graph here:
https://www.researchgate.net/f...
Even if technically possible it wouldn't be economically for a long time, if ever. If a reactor can increase to these much higher energies boron proton fusion is also a possibility, and much cheaper (tri-alpha in CA is attempting this).
I had done some design work on a nuclear fusion reactor, we mainly used common alloys like stainless steel (with special control over cobalt content), aluminum, titanium, etc. Aluminum alloys are great as they don't activate and self anneal radiation damage. The zirconium you mention might be more towards the intense plasma facing components. I've seen tungsten, carbon-carbon, and beryllium used in this area - particularly in the diverter area.