Sure it does. C2H2 + H2 --> CH4 is exothermic by about 300 kJ/mol. That is, 300 kJ of heat are released for every mole of acetylene consumed.
Maybe it's confusing because we usually think of energy-releasing respiration-type reductions in the context of our nice highly oxidizing atmosphere? So that most reactions we think of as "energy producing" are combustion reactions, combinations of hydrocarbons with oxygen? But there's no free oxygen on Titan, so that's out. Nevertheless, there are zillions of chemical reactions that produce energy.
And on that note, I have to say the existence of some chemical reaction that can generate energy seems pretty much a given on any planet with an abundance of light elements and temperatures nontrivially above 0K. How could it be otherwise? The universe has hardly had time to reach complete chemical equilibrium...
So I guess I'm underwhelmed by the realization that this or that chemical reaction could power life. I'd think there's always a chemical reaction that can produce mere energy. That's the least of life's problems, maybe.
The trick, as I see it, lies more in figuring out what system of complex chemical reactions under Titanian conditions could mimic the Terrestrial transcription-translation-replication pas de deux our nucleic acids and proteins execute to regenerate and duplicate themselves indefinitely.
Here's one problem with Titan I see on general thermodynamic grounds: I would argue one of the key aspects of DNA/protein chemistry is the primacy of hydrogen bonds, which have an energy comparable to Earth's average temperature. That makes much of its chemistry nicely reversible -- you can build proteins or digest them, bind with DNA or unbind, and so on, by exerting only small control forces, e.g. by using enzymes.
Alas, the temperatures on Titan are only about 100K, so that's right out. At those temperatures hydrogen bonds are stronger than steel, so to speak. Their chemistry is no longer easily reversible.
But what else is there? It's hard to think of any chemistry which is easily reversible -- easily controllable -- at 100K, because there isn't anything even remotely like a chemical bond with energy that low.
Maybe life -- in the sense of self-replicating large molecules -- is pretty much impossible except where the temperatures are near the energy of a hydrogen bond, which -- aha -- means temperatures near the melting point of water.
Well, I believe caveat emptor is a very old principle in English common law. The idea, I expect, is that taking ownership of property means taking ownership of any hidden and unknown advantages and disadvantages at the same time as you take ownership of the known and obvious advantages and disadvantages. You're expected to take into consideration the fact that there might be hidden features of the property, and adjust your buying price, willingness to buy, et cetera accordingly.
In this case, for example, as many others have suggested, you're expected to be appropriately suspicious of a very low-priced laptop, and even perhaps insist that the seller provide you with some proof of his ownership before you plunk down the cash. (This is, after all, routine in larger transactions. No one would dream of buying a house without proof that the seller really did hold good title to the property. And if you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a guy standing on the sidewalk, well, you're an idiot.)
If you think it through, you'll realize that if caveat emptor does not generally apply, things become a mess, because buy/sell transactions are never final. You can always revisit the transaction and perhaps revoke it, based on some novel aspect of the property that one or the other of you discover.
For example, in this case, you're wanting the buyer to be able to void the transaction if he discovers the property is stolen, so as to avoid the consequences of possessing stolen property, and thereby depriving the rightful owner of its use. Sounds nice I guess.
But then we have to give the seller a similar right to void the transaction if he discovers something untoward about the property. For example, suppose the laptop is legitimately owned and offered, but the buyer discovers some previous owner has left a file on it with detailed engineering drawings of a fusion power plant that would cost $2000 to build and fit under the hood of a Corolla. Whoa! Soon as you file the patent, the owner comes to you -- sorry, I sold that laptop "in good faith" meaning I thought it was no more and no less than what it appeared to be. Having now discovered it is far more valuable than I thought, I'm going to void the transaction -- give it back!
These are extreme cases, but the idea is simple: a sale transaction must be final at some point, or else the whole idea of ownership is thrown into chaos. We have to pick a point where every consequence of ownership passes from seller to buyer. It's an old tradition that this occurs when physical possession changes. But it's got to happen sometime. You can't allow endless revisiting of contracts and transactions as new information turns up. Nor, as you almost seem to be suggesting, award ownership and the consequences thereof to he for whom you feel the most sympathy (and anyway that way lies the socialist worker's paradise, the largest incarnation of which self-destructed in 1991).
Are you sure you want to worry specifically about radioactive waste? Radioactive waste does, at least, decay and become harmless, more rapidly early on than later (i.e. it becomes half as dangerous every half-life). Moreover it's very easy to detect from a distance (with a Geiger counter, for example). Furthermore it's dangerous only in fairly large amounts (milligrams to grams).
Now compare that to, say, chemical waste such as mercury or lead from disposed batteries, or polycyclic aromatics from the smokestacks of coal plants. Mercury and lead are dangerous in exceedingly small quantities (which is why leaded gasoline was banned -- even the tiny amount in the vapor of gasoline is dangerous). Polycyclic aromatics can cause cancer forever -- they never get less dangerous. And so on.
Put it simply: of all the waste control and disposal issues presented to us by technology, radioactive waste probably does not actually rank near the top. It may be prominent in public discussion primarily because of its unfamiliarity, and because we are fully committed already to the technology (e.g. electronics) that generates chemical waste, whereas we thought in the era of cheap oil that we could do without nuclear power.
I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
Well, I doubt it, although perhaps I am being overly cynical with respect to you personally.
My experience is that all that is required for people to rapidly abandon principle is a steep rise in the expense of maintaining that principle. It's amazing how clever people are about talking themselves into a new universal principle when the old one runs up against sheer basic personal need.
So, let the price of electricity from fossil fuels rise a factor of 10 or so, and I think we'll be amazed at how little work it will take to convince people formerly passionately opposed to nuclear power to accept it.
Hmmm. In assessing the value of smarts to species survival, we should remember roaches have inherited several islands in the Pacific after we "smart" humans rendered them uninhabitable for our species via uncontrolled nuclear fusion reactions....
Perhaps the Neanderthals were smarter than us and had a higher technology and perhaps they used it to wipe themselves out, and we just picked up their chips after they cashed out.
We always assume that more of what we call "intelligence" must improve the survivability of a species. But is this really true? Perhaps not. What we call "intelligence" is not so much a pipeline to the truth, a way of knowing instinctively the significance of facts, but rather more of a generalized pattern-recognition ability: we are good at guessing underlying patterns from incomplete and noisy data.
But it is not clear that survivability is indefinitely increased by increasing one's sensitivity to patterns. Indeed, psychotic people are often helpless in part because they detect "patterns" in pure noise:
They're all staring at me! There's a plot to ambush me!
No, they're not all staring at you. Only a few are looking this way, and that's probably just chance. Most of the rest are looking elsewhere.
But that's because there's also a plot to keep the ambush plot secret! Wheels within wheels! Some of them have been instructed to look away whenever we look over at them...devious bastards...
And so on. If you turn up the sensitivity on your significance detector too high, you get overwhelmed with bogus significance.
So, maybe we won the race because the Neanderthals were mental rabbits to our mental tortoises.
"Several considerations influenced the overall RCC test design:
RCC panel assemblies were limited, particularly those with a flight history similar to Columbia's.
The basic material properties of new RCC were known to be highly variable and were not characterized for high strain rate loadings typical of an impact.
The influence of ageing was uncertain."
On page 83 we find some CAIB findings:
"F3.8-2 The wing leading edge Reinfoced Carbon-Composite material and associate support hardware are remarkably tough and have impact capabilities that far exceed the minimal impact resistance specified in their original design requirements. Nevertheless, these tests demonstrate that this inherent toughness can be exceeded by impacts representative of those that occured during Columbia's ascent.
F3.8-3 The response of the leading edge to impacts is complex and can vary greatly, depending on the location of the impact, projectile mass, orientation, composition and the material properties of the panel assembly, making analytical predictions of damage to RCC assemblies a challenge.
F3.8-6 NASA's curent tools, including the Crater model, are inadequate to evaluate Orbiter Thermal Protection System damage from debris impacts..."
Further technical detail is provided earlier, on page 56:
"The rate of oxidation is the most important variable in determining the mission life of RCC components. Oxidation of the carbon substrate results when oxygen penetrates the microscopic pores or fissures of the silicon carbide protective coating. The subsequent loss of mass due to oxidation reduces the load the structure can carry and is the basis for establishing a mission life limit...Currently, the mass loss of flown RCC components cannot be directly measured. Instead, mass loss and mission life reduction are predicted analytically..."
One part of what you say is true: the original design specs did not call for any significant impact resistance. However, what the engineers produced did in fact have significant impact resistance. Not all of the impact tests produced holes, and it is unknown whether the foam impact would have busted a new RCC panel.
But it's clear aging is important to the material properties of the RCC, and also that NASA found it impossible to measure the effects of aging and predict a lifetime, and that they relied instead on an (apparently inadequate) analytical model to guess the aging and lifetime.
I can find no evidence that the CAIB concluded, as you say, that ageing played "no" role, and plenty of at least indirect evidence to the contrary, that they believed ageing did play a role, and, more worrisomely, that the effects of ageing complicated greatly any attempt to predict the response of the RCC to impact.
As I said, composite have wonderful properties, but one of the challenges in using them is predicting how those properties change with age. I think Columbia is a good illustration of that problem.
Well, I think the problem with your argument is that you have forgotten the existence of competition.
Suppose I, drug overlord for Merck, accept your argument and decide fooey on research into a genetic cure for diabetes -- instead we'll just sell recombinant insulin to keep our customers paying and paying. I chortle, rub my hands together with glee, and all seems serene, my pension is safe...
Except...until some smartass hungry upstart entrepreneur realizes he can steal all our customers by finding and selling an actual genetic cure for diabetes. Who will buy a lifetime's supply of insulin from Merck when he can buy a one-time cure from UpStart Biotech, Inc.? Sure, Dr. UpStart will make less money than I was planning to do, but he'll still make a bundle and retire filthy rich.
Is this fantasy? Hardly. The competition among pharma companies for clever new therapies is fierce, in part because of competition with generics and the interesting vagaries of patent law, both domestically and internationally. You just can't count on making money out of a new drug for very long, because your competitors are going to engineer their own patentable microvariations, not to mention the Chinese who couldn't care less about American patents, and anyway your patent is only good for 17 years and then every cheap drug factory can horn in.
So what do you do? You strive to find new amazing stupendous drugs that do what no other drug can possibly do, something that people are going to demand, and for which, for a while, you are going to be the sole source.
So, while I agree big pharma would love to pursue the policy you suggest (develop chronic treatments rather than cures), I don't think they can do so. There are just too many smart people snapping at their heels, hungry to get a slice of the market.
He means it would have to be freakin' enormously strong, not necessarily large in extent.
Typical cosmic rays have energies from a few GeV up to a TeV, although some go astonishingly higher. To deflect TeV protons 90 degrees over a distance of 3 kilometers, the Fermilab Tevatron needs to feed thousand ampere currents into the world's largest superconducting magnets, each of which weighs hundreds of tons and must be cooled with liquid helium.
So it is utterly impractical to build a lab magnet to deflect cosmic rays.
I understand one of the disadvantages composite materials have, besides the fact that they cost more and are generally harder to work with, is that their aging and failure modes are hard to predict. If you build airplane or spaceship parts out of metal, you can do small-scale short-time testing of the material and accurately predict the lifetime of the part, its probable failure mode, how its properties will decline as it ages, and the warning signs of imminent failure.
This is not true for composites. Accurate theory to scale up small and short tests to the full design lifetime does not yet exist. Furthermore, composites tend to fail all at once, without warning, and sometimes in response to stresses that previously they easily withstood.
Recall the RSS panels on the Space Shuttle, which failed in Columbia and in the CAIB test under surprisingly small impacts. This is not, I think, because the original engineers had their heads up their asses and didn't design for an impact with a bird or some such. I suspect it's because these composite parts are now 25 years old, and subtle changes due to aging have ruined their original design impact resistance, and have opened up unsuspected new failure modes.
In other words, one of the big virtues of metals is that they are much simpler materials, and the ability to predict the performance of your material accurately is a nontrivial criterion in selecting it.
Polyethylene is almost never transparent because it crystallizes very easily with its nice simple...-CH2-CH2-CH2-... backbone. The resulting microcrystals scatter light and make the stuff milky. If you want transparent polymers, you use a backbone structure that doesn't easily form crystals, for example polystyrene, where the big benzene rings tend to jut randomly left or right out of the backbone.
I would guess that their new form of PE is a variant on long linear PE, with reduced branching of the CH2 backbone. This is going to have an even greater tendency to form crystals (Indeed, the crystals may be an essential part of the high strength feature, because they tie different PE chains together.) So I very much doubt it would be transparent.
No metal can ever be transparent, Star Trek IV notwithstanding, because to be a metal is to have free electrons, and free electrons absorb a broad spectrum of light. Put it another way: if you're a metal, you're a conductor, or equivalently an antenna, and that means you absorb electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light. So you can't be transparent.
I suggest, contrary to the perennial paranoid populist fantasy, that companies over the long run do what they need to do to survive, namely give the market what it wants. Do you think the demand for one-time genetic fixes is going to be indefinitely weaker than the demand for indefinite drug therapy?
Hey, thanks for the informed reflections, and I sure do hope you guys come up with some radical cool innovations. I'm old enough to have used Telenet with a 300 baud modem, and the change wrought by ARPAnet was breathtaking. These youngsters don't appreciate the triumph any more than they appreciate not being afraid of polio, and for much the same reasons, I guess.
If you know, I'd be interested in your comments on why the Internet is so much less reliable than the phone network. What's up with that? Is it just that we're still in the early years, and we should be comparing network reliability in 2005 with phone reliability in 1905? Or is there something fundamental about the way it's implemented that makes it intrinsically less reliable?
I recall hearing that the primary goal of the ARPAnet was robust communication when multiple nodes were knocked out, e.g. during wartime. Did this compromise the design from the point of view of everyday reliability? Inquiring minds want to know...
Yup, I'd heard that, although the billion beats per life thingy breaks down a bit for humans, 'cause we reach that at about age 30. We can chalk that up to our extended lifespan in captivity versus the wild, perhaps.
Probably, yes. But when people get impatient they sometimes short-circuit the ineluctable but cruel free market. They come to believe that the reason only the rich have the goodies is because they're greedy hoarding bastards, and all that's needed for everyone to share is a proletariat revolution followed by expropriation.
Then, alas, it's always found that (1) there wasn't a secret stash of cheap goodies, and (2) you've ruined the engine that might have made the goodies cheap and widely available by and by.
I'd say the history of Russia after its wealthy class tasted the sweet fruits of industrialization in 1900-1915 are a sobering caution.
Why do we have the lifespan we do? Why are we designed for 40-50 years (in the wild), while Galapagos tortoises for 150 and rabbits for 3?
A physicist would figure there must be some characteristic external time scale to which we are optimally matched -- but what could it be?
Here's a wild guess: our overall lifetime is set to be roughly twice our youth, so that we have a chance to oversee the education of our young, and the length of our youth is set to roughly one sunspot cycle, which corresponds to the (very small) variation in solar output, which might be correlated with variations in Earth's climate.
In other words, Nature concluded it's worthwhile to keep individuals around for a few solar cycles, but for times much more than that, it's better to roll the genetic dice again, to be sure of having a robust genetic diversity that stands a good chance of coping with climate and habitat variations.
Well, you'd have to treat a whole lot of people, because individual intelligence is a highly overrated virtue in a social species, such as ours. Look, suppose the magic gene therapy shaved off 20 years but made Mr. Brain 10 times as intelligent as everyone else. (I'm assuming merely boosting his IQ by 10% would seem like a crappy trade-off, since it means not much more than he gets A's instead of B's at MIT and can play Mozart as well as program computers. Nice, but hardly worth an early death.)
So what good would it do to be 10 times smarter than the rest of us? What could Mr. Brain hope to accomplish? The problem is, he'd be as much smarter than the rest of us as an ordinary human is smarter than a horse. So, what kind of clever advanced technology can an ordinary human create with only horses to help him? Not much. Same for Mr. Brain.
The problem is, as a highly social species pretty near every significant thing we do relies on large cooperative teams.
This is a bit naive. In fact there exists research that suggests people actually tend to adapt quite well to moderate disability, and remain just about as happy as they were before it. You just can't know until you get there yourself.
Mmm, I'm less confident than you that mere demand produces the technology to lower price. Wouldn't you say the demand for nice clean fusion energy is enormous? Still doesn't seem to be cheap, however. Sometimes Mother Nature has the final say in how cheap a technology is.
But in any event, my point is simply that, however cheap it might become to engineer therapy on a full-grown adult, it will always be far cheaper and easier to do the same therapy on a fertilized ovum.
There are huge advantages to working with the fertilized ovum. First, there's only one cell to deal with -- easy to target, easy to monitor. Second, your target is not embedded in a complex system of a trillion other cells, with a powerful immune system guarding it. Third, you have few clinical side-concerns with this "patient" -- it doesn't feel pain, get bored or become noncompliant, can't develop mild but tiresome side effects like massive diarrhea or intense itching, and, finally, if 20% of the time your therapy goes wrong and the "patient" dies, this is no big deal -- mom and pop just try again.
It's going to be a long, long time before the various regulatory agencies let that one happen.
Ha ha, well, here I'm going to be politically cynical. If a therapy provides 50% more life, I predict it's going to be approved instantly, or at the latest just after the next Presidential election, when any elected official who has stood in its way gets swept right out of office.
Sometimes, yes. For example, for short-term therapy for an acute condition. But not, I think, in this case, with an attempt at permanent change. You want to cleanly fix the DNA once and for all, not screw around with designing very expensive drugs that your patient has to take the rest of his life, with all kinds of annoying side effects.
I suspect the best analogy is with CF, where I think gene therapy is still considered the best long-term hope, despite recent setbacks.
But I admit how this or really any biotech will translate to late 21st century medicine is still one of the great unknowns. If I knew how it would play out, why, I'd be selling that knowledge to VC firms for $1000/hour...
You know, it's very likely the only way a beneficial artificial genetic variation like this would reach the masses is by a technology that modifies your genes very soon after conception. Because once you're born, or (worse) reach adulthood, it becomes very tricky and expensive to evade the body's built-in defenses against alien genetic material (e.g. viruses). So even if a life-extending genetic treatment became available, you'd very likely only be able to take advantage of it (1) before you're born or (2) after you become fabulously rich.
And doesn't that open an interesting can of worms? If, for example, it turns out that some people with decently well-off and very foresightful parents can live 50% longer than the rest of us? If you think we have nasty debates now about, say, equal opportunity in college education, just wait a few decades, when it's a question of equal opportunity for that extra 30 years of life...
An excellent point. It makes no more sense to believe men and women should have exactly the same average IQ than to expect they should have exactly the same life expectancy.
The sticking point seems to be that people want to avoid the frightening thought that a lower average IQ necessarily translates to lower average competence or success in women. But, as others have pointed out, this is clearly not necessarily the case, since there are many other factors in success.
More interestingly, I think, is the evolutionary biology point of view. If women indeed have on average a lower IQ than men, this cannot be by accident. Four million years of evolution have certainly optimized all the important distinctions between the sexes, including emotional instincts, physical size, longevity, and IQ.
So whatever the difference between male and female average IQ, it is very likely this difference is precisely what optimizes our survival as a species, and hence the general success of both men and women. That is, if women are on average less intelligent than men, it's because that actually optimizes their success.
But...then you'd need another, smarter AI to identify and fix problems in the AI that's monitoring Windows, and another, even smarter AI to monitory that one....
while (!fork()) { init_AI(getppid(),++intelligence) ; } ;
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...all the fusion takes place at the center of the Sun, which is at millions of degrees, not thousands, and at extraordinary pressures.
This reaction doesn't make any sense.
Sure it does. C2H2 + H2 --> CH4 is exothermic by about 300 kJ/mol. That is, 300 kJ of heat are released for every mole of acetylene consumed.
Maybe it's confusing because we usually think of energy-releasing respiration-type reductions in the context of our nice highly oxidizing atmosphere? So that most reactions we think of as "energy producing" are combustion reactions, combinations of hydrocarbons with oxygen? But there's no free oxygen on Titan, so that's out. Nevertheless, there are zillions of chemical reactions that produce energy.
And on that note, I have to say the existence of some chemical reaction that can generate energy seems pretty much a given on any planet with an abundance of light elements and temperatures nontrivially above 0K. How could it be otherwise? The universe has hardly had time to reach complete chemical equilibrium...
So I guess I'm underwhelmed by the realization that this or that chemical reaction could power life. I'd think there's always a chemical reaction that can produce mere energy. That's the least of life's problems, maybe.
The trick, as I see it, lies more in figuring out what system of complex chemical reactions under Titanian conditions could mimic the Terrestrial transcription-translation-replication pas de deux our nucleic acids and proteins execute to regenerate and duplicate themselves indefinitely.
Here's one problem with Titan I see on general thermodynamic grounds: I would argue one of the key aspects of DNA/protein chemistry is the primacy of hydrogen bonds, which have an energy comparable to Earth's average temperature. That makes much of its chemistry nicely reversible -- you can build proteins or digest them, bind with DNA or unbind, and so on, by exerting only small control forces, e.g. by using enzymes.
Alas, the temperatures on Titan are only about 100K, so that's right out. At those temperatures hydrogen bonds are stronger than steel, so to speak. Their chemistry is no longer easily reversible.
But what else is there? It's hard to think of any chemistry which is easily reversible -- easily controllable -- at 100K, because there isn't anything even remotely like a chemical bond with energy that low.
Maybe life -- in the sense of self-replicating large molecules -- is pretty much impossible except where the temperatures are near the energy of a hydrogen bond, which -- aha -- means temperatures near the melting point of water.
Well, I believe caveat emptor is a very old principle in English common law. The idea, I expect, is that taking ownership of property means taking ownership of any hidden and unknown advantages and disadvantages at the same time as you take ownership of the known and obvious advantages and disadvantages. You're expected to take into consideration the fact that there might be hidden features of the property, and adjust your buying price, willingness to buy, et cetera accordingly.
In this case, for example, as many others have suggested, you're expected to be appropriately suspicious of a very low-priced laptop, and even perhaps insist that the seller provide you with some proof of his ownership before you plunk down the cash. (This is, after all, routine in larger transactions. No one would dream of buying a house without proof that the seller really did hold good title to the property. And if you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a guy standing on the sidewalk, well, you're an idiot.)
If you think it through, you'll realize that if caveat emptor does not generally apply, things become a mess, because buy/sell transactions are never final. You can always revisit the transaction and perhaps revoke it, based on some novel aspect of the property that one or the other of you discover.
For example, in this case, you're wanting the buyer to be able to void the transaction if he discovers the property is stolen, so as to avoid the consequences of possessing stolen property, and thereby depriving the rightful owner of its use. Sounds nice I guess.
But then we have to give the seller a similar right to void the transaction if he discovers something untoward about the property. For example, suppose the laptop is legitimately owned and offered, but the buyer discovers some previous owner has left a file on it with detailed engineering drawings of a fusion power plant that would cost $2000 to build and fit under the hood of a Corolla. Whoa! Soon as you file the patent, the owner comes to you -- sorry, I sold that laptop "in good faith" meaning I thought it was no more and no less than what it appeared to be. Having now discovered it is far more valuable than I thought, I'm going to void the transaction -- give it back!
These are extreme cases, but the idea is simple: a sale transaction must be final at some point, or else the whole idea of ownership is thrown into chaos. We have to pick a point where every consequence of ownership passes from seller to buyer. It's an old tradition that this occurs when physical possession changes. But it's got to happen sometime. You can't allow endless revisiting of contracts and transactions as new information turns up. Nor, as you almost seem to be suggesting, award ownership and the consequences thereof to he for whom you feel the most sympathy (and anyway that way lies the socialist worker's paradise, the largest incarnation of which self-destructed in 1991).
Are you sure you want to worry specifically about radioactive waste? Radioactive waste does, at least, decay and become harmless, more rapidly early on than later (i.e. it becomes half as dangerous every half-life). Moreover it's very easy to detect from a distance (with a Geiger counter, for example). Furthermore it's dangerous only in fairly large amounts (milligrams to grams).
Now compare that to, say, chemical waste such as mercury or lead from disposed batteries, or polycyclic aromatics from the smokestacks of coal plants. Mercury and lead are dangerous in exceedingly small quantities (which is why leaded gasoline was banned -- even the tiny amount in the vapor of gasoline is dangerous). Polycyclic aromatics can cause cancer forever -- they never get less dangerous. And so on.
Put it simply: of all the waste control and disposal issues presented to us by technology, radioactive waste probably does not actually rank near the top. It may be prominent in public discussion primarily because of its unfamiliarity, and because we are fully committed already to the technology (e.g. electronics) that generates chemical waste, whereas we thought in the era of cheap oil that we could do without nuclear power.
I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
Well, I doubt it, although perhaps I am being overly cynical with respect to you personally.
My experience is that all that is required for people to rapidly abandon principle is a steep rise in the expense of maintaining that principle. It's amazing how clever people are about talking themselves into a new universal principle when the old one runs up against sheer basic personal need.
So, let the price of electricity from fossil fuels rise a factor of 10 or so, and I think we'll be amazed at how little work it will take to convince people formerly passionately opposed to nuclear power to accept it.
Perhaps the Neanderthals were smarter than us and had a higher technology and perhaps they used it to wipe themselves out, and we just picked up their chips after they cashed out.
We always assume that more of what we call "intelligence" must improve the survivability of a species. But is this really true? Perhaps not. What we call "intelligence" is not so much a pipeline to the truth, a way of knowing instinctively the significance of facts, but rather more of a generalized pattern-recognition ability: we are good at guessing underlying patterns from incomplete and noisy data.
But it is not clear that survivability is indefinitely increased by increasing one's sensitivity to patterns. Indeed, psychotic people are often helpless in part because they detect "patterns" in pure noise:
And so on. If you turn up the sensitivity on your significance detector too high, you get overwhelmed with bogus significance.
So, maybe we won the race because the Neanderthals were mental rabbits to our mental tortoises.
No, they should think I do that.
From page 79 of Volume I of the CAIB Report:
"Several considerations influenced the overall RCC test design:
On page 83 we find some CAIB findings:
Further technical detail is provided earlier, on page 56:
One part of what you say is true: the original design specs did not call for any significant impact resistance. However, what the engineers produced did in fact have significant impact resistance. Not all of the impact tests produced holes, and it is unknown whether the foam impact would have busted a new RCC panel.
But it's clear aging is important to the material properties of the RCC, and also that NASA found it impossible to measure the effects of aging and predict a lifetime, and that they relied instead on an (apparently inadequate) analytical model to guess the aging and lifetime.
I can find no evidence that the CAIB concluded, as you say, that ageing played "no" role, and plenty of at least indirect evidence to the contrary, that they believed ageing did play a role, and, more worrisomely, that the effects of ageing complicated greatly any attempt to predict the response of the RCC to impact.
As I said, composite have wonderful properties, but one of the challenges in using them is predicting how those properties change with age. I think Columbia is a good illustration of that problem.
Well, I think the problem with your argument is that you have forgotten the existence of competition.
Suppose I, drug overlord for Merck, accept your argument and decide fooey on research into a genetic cure for diabetes -- instead we'll just sell recombinant insulin to keep our customers paying and paying. I chortle, rub my hands together with glee, and all seems serene, my pension is safe...
Except...until some smartass hungry upstart entrepreneur realizes he can steal all our customers by finding and selling an actual genetic cure for diabetes. Who will buy a lifetime's supply of insulin from Merck when he can buy a one-time cure from UpStart Biotech, Inc.? Sure, Dr. UpStart will make less money than I was planning to do, but he'll still make a bundle and retire filthy rich.
Is this fantasy? Hardly. The competition among pharma companies for clever new therapies is fierce, in part because of competition with generics and the interesting vagaries of patent law, both domestically and internationally. You just can't count on making money out of a new drug for very long, because your competitors are going to engineer their own patentable microvariations, not to mention the Chinese who couldn't care less about American patents, and anyway your patent is only good for 17 years and then every cheap drug factory can horn in.
So what do you do? You strive to find new amazing stupendous drugs that do what no other drug can possibly do, something that people are going to demand, and for which, for a while, you are going to be the sole source.
So, while I agree big pharma would love to pursue the policy you suggest (develop chronic treatments rather than cures), I don't think they can do so. There are just too many smart people snapping at their heels, hungry to get a slice of the market.
He means it would have to be freakin' enormously strong, not necessarily large in extent.
Typical cosmic rays have energies from a few GeV up to a TeV, although some go astonishingly higher. To deflect TeV protons 90 degrees over a distance of 3 kilometers, the Fermilab Tevatron needs to feed thousand ampere currents into the world's largest superconducting magnets, each of which weighs hundreds of tons and must be cooled with liquid helium.
So it is utterly impractical to build a lab magnet to deflect cosmic rays.
I understand one of the disadvantages composite materials have, besides the fact that they cost more and are generally harder to work with, is that their aging and failure modes are hard to predict. If you build airplane or spaceship parts out of metal, you can do small-scale short-time testing of the material and accurately predict the lifetime of the part, its probable failure mode, how its properties will decline as it ages, and the warning signs of imminent failure.
This is not true for composites. Accurate theory to scale up small and short tests to the full design lifetime does not yet exist. Furthermore, composites tend to fail all at once, without warning, and sometimes in response to stresses that previously they easily withstood.
Recall the RSS panels on the Space Shuttle, which failed in Columbia and in the CAIB test under surprisingly small impacts. This is not, I think, because the original engineers had their heads up their asses and didn't design for an impact with a bird or some such. I suspect it's because these composite parts are now 25 years old, and subtle changes due to aging have ruined their original design impact resistance, and have opened up unsuspected new failure modes.
In other words, one of the big virtues of metals is that they are much simpler materials, and the ability to predict the performance of your material accurately is a nontrivial criterion in selecting it.
Polyethylene is almost never transparent because it crystallizes very easily with its nice simple ...-CH2-CH2-CH2-... backbone. The resulting microcrystals scatter light and make the stuff milky. If you want transparent polymers, you use a backbone structure that doesn't easily form crystals, for example polystyrene, where the big benzene rings tend to jut randomly left or right out of the backbone.
I would guess that their new form of PE is a variant on long linear PE, with reduced branching of the CH2 backbone. This is going to have an even greater tendency to form crystals (Indeed, the crystals may be an essential part of the high strength feature, because they tie different PE chains together.) So I very much doubt it would be transparent.
No metal can ever be transparent, Star Trek IV notwithstanding, because to be a metal is to have free electrons, and free electrons absorb a broad spectrum of light. Put it another way: if you're a metal, you're a conductor, or equivalently an antenna, and that means you absorb electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light. So you can't be transparent.
I suggest, contrary to the perennial paranoid populist fantasy, that companies over the long run do what they need to do to survive, namely give the market what it wants. Do you think the demand for one-time genetic fixes is going to be indefinitely weaker than the demand for indefinite drug therapy?
Hey, thanks for the informed reflections, and I sure do hope you guys come up with some radical cool innovations. I'm old enough to have used Telenet with a 300 baud modem, and the change wrought by ARPAnet was breathtaking. These youngsters don't appreciate the triumph any more than they appreciate not being afraid of polio, and for much the same reasons, I guess.
If you know, I'd be interested in your comments on why the Internet is so much less reliable than the phone network. What's up with that? Is it just that we're still in the early years, and we should be comparing network reliability in 2005 with phone reliability in 1905? Or is there something fundamental about the way it's implemented that makes it intrinsically less reliable?
I recall hearing that the primary goal of the ARPAnet was robust communication when multiple nodes were knocked out, e.g. during wartime. Did this compromise the design from the point of view of everyday reliability? Inquiring minds want to know...
Yup, I'd heard that, although the billion beats per life thingy breaks down a bit for humans, 'cause we reach that at about age 30. We can chalk that up to our extended lifespan in captivity versus the wild, perhaps.
Probably, yes. But when people get impatient they sometimes short-circuit the ineluctable but cruel free market. They come to believe that the reason only the rich have the goodies is because they're greedy hoarding bastards, and all that's needed for everyone to share is a proletariat revolution followed by expropriation.
Then, alas, it's always found that (1) there wasn't a secret stash of cheap goodies, and (2) you've ruined the engine that might have made the goodies cheap and widely available by and by.
I'd say the history of Russia after its wealthy class tasted the sweet fruits of industrialization in 1900-1915 are a sobering caution.
Why do we have the lifespan we do? Why are we designed for 40-50 years (in the wild), while Galapagos tortoises for 150 and rabbits for 3?
A physicist would figure there must be some characteristic external time scale to which we are optimally matched -- but what could it be?
Here's a wild guess: our overall lifetime is set to be roughly twice our youth, so that we have a chance to oversee the education of our young, and the length of our youth is set to roughly one sunspot cycle, which corresponds to the (very small) variation in solar output, which might be correlated with variations in Earth's climate.
In other words, Nature concluded it's worthwhile to keep individuals around for a few solar cycles, but for times much more than that, it's better to roll the genetic dice again, to be sure of having a robust genetic diversity that stands a good chance of coping with climate and habitat variations.
Well, you'd have to treat a whole lot of people, because individual intelligence is a highly overrated virtue in a social species, such as ours. Look, suppose the magic gene therapy shaved off 20 years but made Mr. Brain 10 times as intelligent as everyone else. (I'm assuming merely boosting his IQ by 10% would seem like a crappy trade-off, since it means not much more than he gets A's instead of B's at MIT and can play Mozart as well as program computers. Nice, but hardly worth an early death.)
So what good would it do to be 10 times smarter than the rest of us? What could Mr. Brain hope to accomplish? The problem is, he'd be as much smarter than the rest of us as an ordinary human is smarter than a horse. So, what kind of clever advanced technology can an ordinary human create with only horses to help him? Not much. Same for Mr. Brain.
The problem is, as a highly social species pretty near every significant thing we do relies on large cooperative teams.
I know that I would not want live in that state.
This is a bit naive. In fact there exists research that suggests people actually tend to adapt quite well to moderate disability, and remain just about as happy as they were before it. You just can't know until you get there yourself.
Erm, the body is hardly a closed system.
Mmm, I'm less confident than you that mere demand produces the technology to lower price. Wouldn't you say the demand for nice clean fusion energy is enormous? Still doesn't seem to be cheap, however. Sometimes Mother Nature has the final say in how cheap a technology is.
But in any event, my point is simply that, however cheap it might become to engineer therapy on a full-grown adult, it will always be far cheaper and easier to do the same therapy on a fertilized ovum.
There are huge advantages to working with the fertilized ovum. First, there's only one cell to deal with -- easy to target, easy to monitor. Second, your target is not embedded in a complex system of a trillion other cells, with a powerful immune system guarding it. Third, you have few clinical side-concerns with this "patient" -- it doesn't feel pain, get bored or become noncompliant, can't develop mild but tiresome side effects like massive diarrhea or intense itching, and, finally, if 20% of the time your therapy goes wrong and the "patient" dies, this is no big deal -- mom and pop just try again.
It's going to be a long, long time before the various regulatory agencies let that one happen.
Ha ha, well, here I'm going to be politically cynical. If a therapy provides 50% more life, I predict it's going to be approved instantly, or at the latest just after the next Presidential election, when any elected official who has stood in its way gets swept right out of office.
Sometimes, yes. For example, for short-term therapy for an acute condition. But not, I think, in this case, with an attempt at permanent change. You want to cleanly fix the DNA once and for all, not screw around with designing very expensive drugs that your patient has to take the rest of his life, with all kinds of annoying side effects.
I suspect the best analogy is with CF, where I think gene therapy is still considered the best long-term hope, despite recent setbacks.
But I admit how this or really any biotech will translate to late 21st century medicine is still one of the great unknowns. If I knew how it would play out, why, I'd be selling that knowledge to VC firms for $1000/hour...
You know, it's very likely the only way a beneficial artificial genetic variation like this would reach the masses is by a technology that modifies your genes very soon after conception. Because once you're born, or (worse) reach adulthood, it becomes very tricky and expensive to evade the body's built-in defenses against alien genetic material (e.g. viruses). So even if a life-extending genetic treatment became available, you'd very likely only be able to take advantage of it (1) before you're born or (2) after you become fabulously rich.
And doesn't that open an interesting can of worms? If, for example, it turns out that some people with decently well-off and very foresightful parents can live 50% longer than the rest of us? If you think we have nasty debates now about, say, equal opportunity in college education, just wait a few decades, when it's a question of equal opportunity for that extra 30 years of life...
An excellent point. It makes no more sense to believe men and women should have exactly the same average IQ than to expect they should have exactly the same life expectancy.
The sticking point seems to be that people want to avoid the frightening thought that a lower average IQ necessarily translates to lower average competence or success in women. But, as others have pointed out, this is clearly not necessarily the case, since there are many other factors in success.
More interestingly, I think, is the evolutionary biology point of view. If women indeed have on average a lower IQ than men, this cannot be by accident. Four million years of evolution have certainly optimized all the important distinctions between the sexes, including emotional instincts, physical size, longevity, and IQ.
So whatever the difference between male and female average IQ, it is very likely this difference is precisely what optimizes our survival as a species, and hence the general success of both men and women. That is, if women are on average less intelligent than men, it's because that actually optimizes their success.
But...then you'd need another, smarter AI to identify and fix problems in the AI that's monitoring Windows, and another, even smarter AI to monitory that one....
while (!fork()) { init_AI(getppid(),++intelligence) ; } ;
hmmm.....