That's an unacceptably high failure rate of 1 person in 6593 or 0.00015% and that's accurate only if only 1000 people have been affected since the software began being used. Bureaucrats may find that failure rate acceptable but it's an unwarranted exercise of power and an intrusion on people's daily lives. This exact kind of error was commented on by Paulos in his article "Who's Counting?: Privacy and Terrorists" (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=97755&page=1) :
"Assume for the sake of the argument that eventually..., some system of total information-gathering becomes so uncannily accurate that when it examines a future terrorist, 99 percent of the time it will correctly identify him as a pre-perpetrator. Furthermore, when this system examines somebody who is harmless, 99 percent of the time the system will correctly identify him as harmless. In short, it makes a mistake only once every 100 times.
Now let's say that law enforcement apprehends a person by using this technology. Given these assumptions, you might guess that the person would be almost certain to commit a terrorist act. Right? Well, no. Even with the system's amazing data-mining powers, there is only a tiny probability the apprehended person will go on to become an active terrorist."
One of the reasons for the prediction of Japanese dominance was the anticipated success of the Fifth Generation Project. That effort failed for the Japanese. Unfortunately software development worldwide has essentially stagnated over the past 15 years (these mostly wasted years have mostly seen the same bad database systems moved from corporate servers to the web and now to the cloud - we have mostly been reinventing a bad wheel on three different platforms [two of which are different Internet versions]). The Chinese may not repeat those mistakes and could actually leverage weak AI more rapidly than the longterm AI winter in other countries can respond to. In so doing, the Chinese could further leapfrog their nation and actually maximize utility.
>> I get the contract, because I had the better product at the better price.
This is the essential English fallacy wrt capitalism. Plentiful counterexamples are provided over the past 30 years esp. but not exclusively in software development. It is clear that the better product at a better price does not automatically win or even confer an advantage. Business today is primarily a form of nepotism based on the inelasticity of market entry (or if you prefer the high cost of market entry). Another point is good enough often is able to garner dominant market share and the better mousetrap is unable to break that grip.
The PRC moderates a command driven economy that has judiciously used capitalism to advance their country primarily industrially and secondarily materially. They are not market fundamentalists like the moronic US and they do have have the goal of universal social happiness like Western European social democracies. Therefore they will take whatever action is necessary to continue their growth. Reducing growth to a 3-6% range is totally fine with them as their long term goals are to reacquire the means to virtually unlimited industrial domination by any means necessary. Therefore they will avoid war, continue to supplant minority culture with the now dominant neo-Han culture based strictly on materialism, educate as many people as possible, and eventually mine the oceans and space. They are not constrained by anyone else's economic considerations. They current underemployment crisis of recent college graduates will be solved within a few short years whereas US unemployment will lumber along for at least 4 more years. In effect the PRC is playing a different game than everyone else and will succeed no matter what because they are not constrained by the frivolous desires of their people.
>> I too suspect that the Chinese are not interested in empire although the whole 'blue water navy' thing makes me suspect. I submit that its probably just a 'me too' thing.
For the Han Chinese the Opium Wars have just ended and they finally won. They will now attempt to resume their 4000 or so year history of being the dominant power on the planet and recover from the bad history of the past 500 years. The Han do in fact seek to reassert their historic role in history minus isolationism.This is quite different from the goals of the Western capitalist mafia who are more or less just Borgia's + 500 years.
I was last on campus at George Mason University in Fairfax for a class in 2003 but they did support Linux. They are essentially os neutral - except that it wasn't all that long ago that Windows would have elicited that response there (okay, it *was* quite a while ago - I just remember it).
The space station is an international effort - and we currently do not have access to it without help from the Russians. Other stars aren't an issue right now - managing technological research programs that can lead to the development of future technology is. A comprehensive Chinese space program will result in a massive leap forward for Chinese technology.
One disappointment in the way we have misused space technology is in the development of new materials in a low-g. Apparently this failed or else the promise just wasn't there. If you re-read Gerald O'Neill's proposals, one of the things he suggested was the development of purified materials in low-g. Perhaps terrestrial manufacturing solves these problems - but then the US also unilaterally de-industrialized as well...
We need a well-developed space program to develop and advance technology for it's own sake (as it delivers vast benefit to the public), to advance science and education and to put colonies on other planets so that the human race has less of a chance of being wiped out by comets or asteroids.
No - we (humanity) could actually put bases on the moon within a decade if we decided to do so. The same with Mars. For that matter it's the same with Earth crossing asteriods but with those we have a real problem - they don't have resources to sustain life whereas the moon has enough and Mars certainly can support thousands, perhaps millions of people. So to begin with the moon and Mars we are set already.
Most people have no real appreciation of the scale involved in psace travel. As daunting as our own solar system is, even that pales in comparison to the scales involved in traveling to other solar systems. Currently it takes us about 9 years for a probe to reach Pluto. When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
120,000 years is the correct answer. Most people guess between 100-1000. That's why people think it is plausible for mankind to colonize space. They don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
Sure - powers of ten are still difficult even for people who think of themselves as technologically sophisticated. The solution is better education as always.
That's true but if we made it a goal then we could launch interstellar missions within 50 years with velocities of 1/10th the speed of light. So it's a step forward if we decide to take it. More to the point, we could within 50 years easily travel at 1/100th the speed of light and that opens up the solar system and the closest parts of the Oort Cloud.
Making predictions about future technology is foolish at best.... go and speak to anyone in the 1950's about a compter with 6,000 logic gates, contained within 40 square mm they would say that was against the laws of physics and chemistry... but the Intel 8800 had this in 1974
But people would have reacted that way in the 50's because they didn't know about Moore's Law. In fact a person who did know about Moore's Law reacted that way to me in person when he asserted in 1977 (to a person that he regarded as an ignorant kid) that the PET and Apple machines would never lead to anything and would always be toys. I reminded him of Moore's Law which he then dismissed out of hand.
So it depends on whether we have a solid basis for making predictions about the future. If we have such a basis then we can make reliable predictions. And Kurzweil does a good job of this in one of his books (it wasn't Spiritual Machines I don't think).... as did the overly optimistic Clarke - our future is more likely something like what he envisioned in Songs of a Distant Earth - not that good but also not all that bad.
We (in our lives) will probably never get to anywhere near 1% accuracy of how many habitable planets are out there. Its all theory.
We only have solid data since 1995 (except for the pulsar system from around 1969 that showed three planets one of them Earth sized). Given the results from the past 15 years we will know fairly well over the next 15 and max 30 years the percentage of Earth like planet in our stellar neighborhood and can continue to refine the estimate. So in our lifetime we are really going to know accurately the percentage of habitable planets at least in the stellar neighborhood. Now whether they are inhabited in some way is another matter.
The diversity of life on Planet Earth is amazing. And we have at least three separate life systems: energy from the Sun (most of life), energy from the earth (microbes living under extreme temperature and pressure beginning a mile or so under our feet and getting energy from the Earth's core), and some sea life getting energy from volcanic vents (also from the core but I think they also live on other organic sea matter). Given this it appears likely that if the conditions for life arise, physics and biology guarantee life. So the fraction that develop life is probably close to 1.
Phobos and Deimos are too small to create tidal effects. The point is that a moon large enough to produce tidal effects is likely necessary for life to evolve. This may be rare. The Earth and Moon are more or less a double planet system and that may be needed for carbon based life.
Except it's not. We are doing it now with Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager will cease to be useful by 2025 but they will continue their journey until the Big Crunch (or they are physically destroyed by something along the way). Voyagers 1 and 2 will pass "close" to two different stars in 40,000 years. The Pioneer spacecraft will pass close to two other stars in 2 - 4 million years. Of course none of the four had an explicit interstellar mission.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an unacceptably high failure rate of 1 person in 6593 or 0.00015% and that's accurate only if only 1000 people have been affected since the software began being used. Bureaucrats may find that failure rate acceptable but it's an unwarranted exercise of power and an intrusion on people's daily lives. This exact kind of error was commented on by Paulos in his article "Who's Counting?: Privacy and Terrorists" (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=97755&page=1) : "Assume for the sake of the argument that eventually ..., some system of total information-gathering becomes so uncannily accurate that when it examines a future terrorist, 99 percent of the time it will correctly identify him as a pre-perpetrator. Furthermore, when this system examines somebody who is harmless, 99 percent of the time the system will correctly identify him as harmless. In short, it makes a mistake only once every 100 times.
Now let's say that law enforcement apprehends a person by using this technology. Given these assumptions, you might guess that the person would be almost certain to commit a terrorist act. Right? Well, no. Even with the system's amazing data-mining powers, there is only a tiny probability the apprehended person will go on to become an active terrorist."
One of the reasons for the prediction of Japanese dominance was the anticipated success of the Fifth Generation Project. That effort failed for the Japanese. Unfortunately software development worldwide has essentially stagnated over the past 15 years (these mostly wasted years have mostly seen the same bad database systems moved from corporate servers to the web and now to the cloud - we have mostly been reinventing a bad wheel on three different platforms [two of which are different Internet versions]). The Chinese may not repeat those mistakes and could actually leverage weak AI more rapidly than the longterm AI winter in other countries can respond to. In so doing, the Chinese could further leapfrog their nation and actually maximize utility.
>> I get the contract, because I had the better product at the better price. This is the essential English fallacy wrt capitalism. Plentiful counterexamples are provided over the past 30 years esp. but not exclusively in software development. It is clear that the better product at a better price does not automatically win or even confer an advantage. Business today is primarily a form of nepotism based on the inelasticity of market entry (or if you prefer the high cost of market entry). Another point is good enough often is able to garner dominant market share and the better mousetrap is unable to break that grip.
The PRC moderates a command driven economy that has judiciously used capitalism to advance their country primarily industrially and secondarily materially. They are not market fundamentalists like the moronic US and they do have have the goal of universal social happiness like Western European social democracies. Therefore they will take whatever action is necessary to continue their growth. Reducing growth to a 3-6% range is totally fine with them as their long term goals are to reacquire the means to virtually unlimited industrial domination by any means necessary. Therefore they will avoid war, continue to supplant minority culture with the now dominant neo-Han culture based strictly on materialism, educate as many people as possible, and eventually mine the oceans and space. They are not constrained by anyone else's economic considerations. They current underemployment crisis of recent college graduates will be solved within a few short years whereas US unemployment will lumber along for at least 4 more years. In effect the PRC is playing a different game than everyone else and will succeed no matter what because they are not constrained by the frivolous desires of their people.
>> I too suspect that the Chinese are not interested in empire although the whole 'blue water navy' thing makes me suspect. I submit that its probably just a 'me too' thing. For the Han Chinese the Opium Wars have just ended and they finally won. They will now attempt to resume their 4000 or so year history of being the dominant power on the planet and recover from the bad history of the past 500 years. The Han do in fact seek to reassert their historic role in history minus isolationism.This is quite different from the goals of the Western capitalist mafia who are more or less just Borgia's + 500 years.
I was last on campus at George Mason University in Fairfax for a class in 2003 but they did support Linux. They are essentially os neutral - except that it wasn't all that long ago that Windows would have elicited that response there (okay, it *was* quite a while ago - I just remember it).
The space station is an international effort - and we currently do not have access to it without help from the Russians. Other stars aren't an issue right now - managing technological research programs that can lead to the development of future technology is. A comprehensive Chinese space program will result in a massive leap forward for Chinese technology. One disappointment in the way we have misused space technology is in the development of new materials in a low-g. Apparently this failed or else the promise just wasn't there. If you re-read Gerald O'Neill's proposals, one of the things he suggested was the development of purified materials in low-g. Perhaps terrestrial manufacturing solves these problems - but then the US also unilaterally de-industrialized as well ...
We need a well-developed space program to develop and advance technology for it's own sake (as it delivers vast benefit to the public), to advance science and education and to put colonies on other planets so that the human race has less of a chance of being wiped out by comets or asteroids.
No - we (humanity) could actually put bases on the moon within a decade if we decided to do so. The same with Mars. For that matter it's the same with Earth crossing asteriods but with those we have a real problem - they don't have resources to sustain life whereas the moon has enough and Mars certainly can support thousands, perhaps millions of people. So to begin with the moon and Mars we are set already.
Most people have no real appreciation of the scale involved in psace travel. As daunting as our own solar system is, even that pales in comparison to the scales involved in traveling to other solar systems. Currently it takes us about 9 years for a probe to reach Pluto. When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
120,000 years is the correct answer. Most people guess between 100-1000. That's why people think it is plausible for mankind to colonize space. They don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
Sure - powers of ten are still difficult even for people who think of themselves as technologically sophisticated. The solution is better education as always.
That's true but if we made it a goal then we could launch interstellar missions within 50 years with velocities of 1/10th the speed of light. So it's a step forward if we decide to take it. More to the point, we could within 50 years easily travel at 1/100th the speed of light and that opens up the solar system and the closest parts of the Oort Cloud.
Making predictions about future technology is foolish at best .... go and speak to anyone in the 1950's about a compter with 6,000 logic gates, contained within 40 square mm they would say that was against the laws of physics and chemistry ... but the Intel 8800 had this in 1974
But people would have reacted that way in the 50's because they didn't know about Moore's Law. In fact a person who did know about Moore's Law reacted that way to me in person when he asserted in 1977 (to a person that he regarded as an ignorant kid) that the PET and Apple machines would never lead to anything and would always be toys. I reminded him of Moore's Law which he then dismissed out of hand. So it depends on whether we have a solid basis for making predictions about the future. If we have such a basis then we can make reliable predictions. And Kurzweil does a good job of this in one of his books (it wasn't Spiritual Machines I don't think) .... as did the overly optimistic Clarke - our future is more likely something like what he envisioned in Songs of a Distant Earth - not that good but also not all that bad.
Actually any publication on a resume is a plus in the work world.
We (in our lives) will probably never get to anywhere near 1% accuracy of how many habitable planets are out there. Its all theory.
We only have solid data since 1995 (except for the pulsar system from around 1969 that showed three planets one of them Earth sized). Given the results from the past 15 years we will know fairly well over the next 15 and max 30 years the percentage of Earth like planet in our stellar neighborhood and can continue to refine the estimate. So in our lifetime we are really going to know accurately the percentage of habitable planets at least in the stellar neighborhood. Now whether they are inhabited in some way is another matter.
The diversity of life on Planet Earth is amazing. And we have at least three separate life systems: energy from the Sun (most of life), energy from the earth (microbes living under extreme temperature and pressure beginning a mile or so under our feet and getting energy from the Earth's core), and some sea life getting energy from volcanic vents (also from the core but I think they also live on other organic sea matter). Given this it appears likely that if the conditions for life arise, physics and biology guarantee life. So the fraction that develop life is probably close to 1.
Phobos and Deimos are too small to create tidal effects. The point is that a moon large enough to produce tidal effects is likely necessary for life to evolve. This may be rare. The Earth and Moon are more or less a double planet system and that may be needed for carbon based life.
The galactic core is too hostile an environment for life to arise.
We don't need strong AI to begin interstellar exploration. Our current systems will work just fine.
Except it's not. We are doing it now with Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager will cease to be useful by 2025 but they will continue their journey until the Big Crunch (or they are physically destroyed by something along the way). Voyagers 1 and 2 will pass "close" to two different stars in 40,000 years. The Pioneer spacecraft will pass close to two other stars in 2 - 4 million years. Of course none of the four had an explicit interstellar mission.