Solar doesn't work so well in a crater at the pole and in permanent darkness. The other problem is that it will be very cold there, small extra RTGs are very useful for helping to keep things warm.
First thought - two things pretty much totally incompatible - general relativity and black holes. (the problem is the physics inside the outer event horizon) Astronomy now has pretty much watertight proof that black holes exist. Doesn't look good for general relativity.. No new physics???
A very good idea. Of course how do you steer or move a comet? About the only mechanism that has the power to do it today is 'Super Orion' - pushing them using lots of small nukes..
The other 'tiny' problem with Super Orion is that the ship has to launch from the Earth - and that means detonating dozens of small nukes in the atmosphere and in low orbit here. - Launching a Super Orion ship might (statistically) kill a couple of hundred or even a couple of thousand people over the world from cancer. Given that pollution from cars kills about half a million people a year, and pollution from burning coal kills over a million a year, and smoking kills about 10 million a year, a few thousand is just statistical noise - but I bet people will still complain about it.
Dumbass. There are a lot of things wrong with idea which is incredibly stupid. The radiation from the bombs however would be almost totally irrelevant.
The real danger from radiation on Mars and on the way to Mars is NATURAL solar cosmic radiation, the shields against cosmic radiation would also stop any radiation from nuclear bombs. Fallout would be a small issue but the solution there is just to wait a year or two.
The real problem of course is that REAL nuclear bombs are not actually anywhere near powerful enough to do what Musk is suggesting..
Sadly there's also the problem that they are using the Disney magically enhanced nuclear weapons. Real nuclear weapons are about a million times less powerful. Elon Musk's idea is about as realistic as firing an assault rifle at the ground and using it to get yourself into space..
"You too should jam a big black penis up your anus, preferably forcefully and without lube. Black penis doesn't get quite as hard as white penis you know, so it will flex a little and ease the initial entry."
The real problem though is identifying the weaknesses in the technology and improving it. We have identified the main weaknesses of current rocket technology - The main one is that 90% + of what goes up is merely fuel, the system only works once and then is destroyed, only being used once limits the safety and reliability of rockets, the fuels are highly dangerous volatile & corrosive.
It all comes down to the fact that rockets are still a pretty marginal technology and the core problem is the rocket engine itself. The only real way to improve the efficiency of rockets is to have a higher exhaust velocity, and the energy required increases as the square of the exhaust velocity. With a higher exhaust velocity we can get to orbit in a single stage - and then use retro breaking in orbit and then return to the ground and then be reused. With that technology sending humans to Mars and beyond would be relatively easy. (Skylon is another alternative.)
Of course the only type of rockets that can achieve enough power and efficiency are nuclear rockets. The difficulty is designing a nuclear rocket 'safe' enough to use in the atmosphere. The basic solid core engines already tested could probably be developed and improved enough to do it. A better bet though is 'Gas Core Closed Cycle' GCCC 'nuclear lightbulb' engines as these could potentially achieve even higher efficiencies.
The number itself is a total joke. I did a brief extrapolation five or six years ago working on the costs to fix the environment post climate change. The global figure I came up with was $40 trillion to $100 trillion - and that's still probably a conservative estimate. - If the figure is even in the right side of the park a liability of $4 trillion for the US would be the bargain of the century....
If I was going to guess a division in blame it might go:- 22% US, 12% USSR/Russia, 12% China, 10% UK, 8% S.Korea, 7% Germany, 7% Japan, 5% India, 4% France, 2% Australia, etc.. The real values are so complicated that they are virtually impossible to calculate. The UK is special because it was among the first industrial polluters and was the worlds biggest polluter until about 1930 - 1940. One of the most difficult & vaguest parts is the division between developed verses undeveloped nations. - The vast rump of the undeveloped/developing world is very hard to estimate..
The number itself is a total joke. I did a brief extrapolation five or six years ago working on the costs to fix the environment post climate change. The global figure I came up with was $40 to $100 trillion - if that's even in the right side of the park a liability of $4 trillion for the US would be the bargain of the century....
If I was going to guess a division in blame it might go:- 22% US, 12% USSR/Russia, 12% China, 10% UK, 8% S.Korea, 7% Germany, 7% Japan, 5% India, 4% France, 2% Australia, etc.. The real values are so complicated that they are virtually impossible to calculate. One of the most difficult & vaguest parts is the division between developed verses undeveloped nations. - The vast rump of the undeveloped/developing world is very hard to estimate.. (Think I will also append this post at the bottom..)
Just a few months ago I moved to a new PC, moved my entire Steam archive of about 300 gigabytes - just took a few hours of copying on each side. The system has to revalidate each game manually but its basically no problem.
Compare that to moving an archive of disk based games or other less intelligent online services - where basically the only solution is to completely reinstall everything from scratch - and that's not even including moving the game saves..
Or even worse the proprietary online services like say with Sony. - I had/have a PSP Go, great until the arrival of the Vita when they basically completely abandoned updating the PSP services... Talk about built in obsolescence.
I agree. I keep my PS3 going but really cant remember the last time I used it to play a game. I use it as an internet TV box and Bluray player - that's about it.. With a PC you can play games and have the TV on at the same time.. Steam all the way..
Doesn't matter how much research they do, this kind of vision only will only work if part of a Strong AI. The keyword is 'dynamic processing' and its pretty difficult even with Strong AI. I know, its a field I have worked on directly.
Funny thing is that virtually all AI vision systems have problems with black faces. It isn't human racism that is the cause or 'machine' racism, its the physics of cameras and optics and light itself. At least with modern HDR cameras it is a problem we have some hope of beating..
How about aiding terrorists? Bush and Obama together first invaded and destroyed Iraq militarily and then abandoned it to whatever came along. Bushes actions aided and protected Al Qaida, and Obama seeded the way for ISIS. ISIS are bigger, stronger, more dangerous, and worse than Al Qaida, and a far bigger threat to the world. And all that is not even mentioning the shear incompetence blundering and criminality of everything the US did in Iraq. In case you've forgotten US troops acting as prison guards did use torture on Iraqi prisoners, its only plausible deniability and corruption that stopped the charges going to the top..
Hmmm that's funny. In the mid 90's I developed a core model for building a Strong AI. The design was essentially robust and at some level quite simple. Implementing it has turned out to be a total nightmare. One standard part after another didn't quite fit. Today the design looks like a complete hardware floor-plan, with custom CPU's, motherboards, interconnect logic, memory managers, OS, everything. And that also means custom coding tools and pretty much everything else.. Standards are great until you run off the end...
"And WTF? Software isn't 'industrialized'? The A380, the 787, the LHC, the Internet - these are 'artisanal' products?"
At the software level -at least partly- yes.
Also when it comes to one-offs and special custom designs or prototypes, even with industrial products - you will find 'artisanal' type work in many places. A particularly good example is machines that go into space which are almost all at least partly hand built.
And those are the companies that have gone to the wall and continue to go to the wall. Because their Indian coders produce designs that ultimately don't work. They're cheap - but they don't speak English very well, and their reading and writing of English - and especially code is also not so good.. It doesn't help that some Indian universities have extremely low standards and are extremely lax on cheating and fraud - while organised crime and corruption throughout Indian education is very powerful..
Now places that are a real threat to Western coders are Poland, Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe..
This is as fanciful as shop workers and burger flippers being replaced by robots.. "So this is your new 'Atlas Ten' robot, this is what we're going to use to replace our human employees....And how much does it cost?" "Oh about $3 million per unit, plus about $70,000 a year in maintenance costs and another $10,000 a year on battery replacement." There's a good reason that CEO is the first job that will be threatened by Strong AI - CEO's frequently earn enough to make the machines cost efficient.
Now Strong AI can replace your human coders - maybe - in about 20 years. Until then, I'm cynical that anything will. I remember hearing almost identical stuff about replacing coders with designers since about 1990, and I'm sure they were talking about it even before then..
Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...
Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)
The real problem with assemblers is that there is so much BS about them. The technology's so complicated that even with a working machine it might take another 10 - 20 years before anyone can do anything useful with it. People also totally over-estimate what the things will be able to do - and massively under-estimate how long the machines would take to do it. - The 'perfect' worst example that comes to mind is the Knight Rider remake - sure assemblers could reshape a car like that -MAYBE- but it would take them months or years to do it each time someone pushed the button.
The first real problem with diamond assemblers is that they would need to be cryogenically cooled to work and kept in an environment even more extreme and clean than the current best IC factories... The things will have terrible problems getting enough power to work and even worse problems with overheating.. The real killer though is that the 'reproduction' process itself is the hardest of all - and either very slow and complex - or actually just about impossible..
On the other side of the coin, research totally away from assemblers has already achieved virtually the same thing - synthetic life. Ok today everything is still very primitive, but it has a broad front of research and things are definitely actually advancing.. The simple real truth is that new science and new technologies are difficult and don't take five minutes to get right.. Doesn't mean its not worthwhile..
"Compared to what? Certainly not Germany, a country that is run by a small elite of the wealthy, old aristocrats, and intellectuals. They are so good at indoctrinating you that you don't even notice it how much they have you by the balls, and you are so disconnected from your history that you don't even recognize how old a lot of these power structures are."
Why are you only attacking space and science? what about the $150 billion+ every year spent on the military?, or the money spent on a hundred other things? What about the foreign aid so much of which ends up in the pockets of foreign governments or foreign local traders or various corrupt or criminal people?
Money spent at NASA ultimately goes to pay scientific workers and their families, and NASA makes a massive on-going positive contribution to Americas and humanities future.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar doesn't work so well in a crater at the pole and in permanent darkness. The other problem is that it will be very cold there, small extra RTGs are very useful for helping to keep things warm.
More stupid. Who could have predicted relativity in Kelvins time?
First thought - two things pretty much totally incompatible - general relativity and black holes. (the problem is the physics inside the outer event horizon)
Astronomy now has pretty much watertight proof that black holes exist.
Doesn't look good for general relativity..
No new physics???
A very good idea. Of course how do you steer or move a comet? About the only mechanism that has the power to do it today is 'Super Orion' - pushing them using lots of small nukes..
The other 'tiny' problem with Super Orion is that the ship has to launch from the Earth - and that means detonating dozens of small nukes in the atmosphere and in low orbit here. - Launching a Super Orion ship might (statistically) kill a couple of hundred or even a couple of thousand people over the world from cancer.
Given that pollution from cars kills about half a million people a year, and pollution from burning coal kills over a million a year, and smoking kills about 10 million a year, a few thousand is just statistical noise - but I bet people will still complain about it.
The first thing you need on Mars is an atmosphere. With virtually no atmosphere CO2 levels are totally irrelevant.
Dumbass. There are a lot of things wrong with idea which is incredibly stupid. The radiation from the bombs however would be almost totally irrelevant.
The real danger from radiation on Mars and on the way to Mars is NATURAL solar cosmic radiation, the shields against cosmic radiation would also stop any radiation from nuclear bombs. Fallout would be a small issue but the solution there is just to wait a year or two.
The real problem of course is that REAL nuclear bombs are not actually anywhere near powerful enough to do what Musk is suggesting..
Sadly there's also the problem that they are using the Disney magically enhanced nuclear weapons. Real nuclear weapons are about a million times less powerful. Elon Musk's idea is about as realistic as firing an assault rifle at the ground and using it to get yourself into space..
"You too should jam a big black penis up your anus, preferably forcefully and without lube. Black penis doesn't get quite as hard as white penis you know, so it will flex a little and ease the initial entry."
An expert speaks..
Cheap space suits and thin domes..
The real problem though is identifying the weaknesses in the technology and improving it. We have identified the main weaknesses of current rocket technology - The main one is that 90% + of what goes up is merely fuel, the system only works once and then is destroyed, only being used once limits the safety and reliability of rockets, the fuels are highly dangerous volatile & corrosive.
It all comes down to the fact that rockets are still a pretty marginal technology and the core problem is the rocket engine itself.
The only real way to improve the efficiency of rockets is to have a higher exhaust velocity, and the energy required increases as the square of the exhaust velocity. With a higher exhaust velocity we can get to orbit in a single stage - and then use retro breaking in orbit and then return to the ground and then be reused. With that technology sending humans to Mars and beyond would be relatively easy. (Skylon is another alternative.)
Of course the only type of rockets that can achieve enough power and efficiency are nuclear rockets. The difficulty is designing a nuclear rocket 'safe' enough to use in the atmosphere. The basic solid core engines already tested could probably be developed and improved enough to do it. A better bet though is 'Gas Core Closed Cycle' GCCC 'nuclear lightbulb' engines as these could potentially achieve even higher efficiencies.
Going bare chested on Mars might not be a good idea. The atmosphere there is basically a (slightly thick) vacuum.
The number itself is a total joke. I did a brief extrapolation five or six years ago working on the costs to fix the environment post climate change. The global figure I came up with was $40 trillion to $100 trillion - and that's still probably a conservative estimate. - If the figure is even in the right side of the park a liability of $4 trillion for the US would be the bargain of the century....
If I was going to guess a division in blame it might go :- 22% US, 12% USSR/Russia, 12% China, 10% UK, 8% S.Korea, 7% Germany, 7% Japan, 5% India, 4% France, 2% Australia, etc.. The real values are so complicated that they are virtually impossible to calculate. The UK is special because it was among the first industrial polluters and was the worlds biggest polluter until about 1930 - 1940. One of the most difficult & vaguest parts is the division between developed verses undeveloped nations. - The vast rump of the undeveloped/developing world is very hard to estimate..
The number itself is a total joke. I did a brief extrapolation five or six years ago working on the costs to fix the environment post climate change. The global figure I came up with was $40 to $100 trillion - if that's even in the right side of the park a liability of $4 trillion for the US would be the bargain of the century....
If I was going to guess a division in blame it might go :- 22% US, 12% USSR/Russia, 12% China, 10% UK, 8% S.Korea, 7% Germany, 7% Japan, 5% India, 4% France, 2% Australia, etc.. The real values are so complicated that they are virtually impossible to calculate. One of the most difficult & vaguest parts is the division between developed verses undeveloped nations. - The vast rump of the undeveloped/developing world is very hard to estimate..
(Think I will also append this post at the bottom..)
Just a few months ago I moved to a new PC, moved my entire Steam archive of about 300 gigabytes - just took a few hours of copying on each side. The system has to revalidate each game manually but its basically no problem.
Compare that to moving an archive of disk based games or other less intelligent online services - where basically the only solution is to completely reinstall everything from scratch - and that's not even including moving the game saves..
Or even worse the proprietary online services like say with Sony. - I had/have a PSP Go, great until the arrival of the Vita when they basically completely abandoned updating the PSP services... Talk about built in obsolescence.
I agree. I keep my PS3 going but really cant remember the last time I used it to play a game. I use it as an internet TV box and Bluray player - that's about it.. With a PC you can play games and have the TV on at the same time.. Steam all the way..
Doesn't matter how much research they do, this kind of vision only will only work if part of a Strong AI. The keyword is 'dynamic processing' and its pretty difficult even with Strong AI. I know, its a field I have worked on directly.
Funny thing is that virtually all AI vision systems have problems with black faces. It isn't human racism that is the cause or 'machine' racism, its the physics of cameras and optics and light itself. At least with modern HDR cameras it is a problem we have some hope of beating..
How about aiding terrorists? Bush and Obama together first invaded and destroyed Iraq militarily and then abandoned it to whatever came along. Bushes actions aided and protected Al Qaida, and Obama seeded the way for ISIS. ISIS are bigger, stronger, more dangerous, and worse than Al Qaida, and a far bigger threat to the world.
And all that is not even mentioning the shear incompetence blundering and criminality of everything the US did in Iraq. In case you've forgotten US troops acting as prison guards did use torture on Iraqi prisoners, its only plausible deniability and corruption that stopped the charges going to the top..
Hmmm that's funny. In the mid 90's I developed a core model for building a Strong AI. The design was essentially robust and at some level quite simple. Implementing it has turned out to be a total nightmare. One standard part after another didn't quite fit. Today the design looks like a complete hardware floor-plan, with custom CPU's, motherboards, interconnect logic, memory managers, OS, everything. And that also means custom coding tools and pretty much everything else.. Standards are great until you run off the end ...
"And WTF? Software isn't 'industrialized'? The A380, the 787, the LHC, the Internet - these are 'artisanal' products?"
At the software level -at least partly- yes.
Also when it comes to one-offs and special custom designs or prototypes, even with industrial products - you will find 'artisanal' type work in many places. A particularly good example is machines that go into space which are almost all at least partly hand built.
And those are the companies that have gone to the wall and continue to go to the wall. Because their Indian coders produce designs that ultimately don't work. They're cheap - but they don't speak English very well, and their reading and writing of English - and especially code is also not so good.. It doesn't help that some Indian universities have extremely low standards and are extremely lax on cheating and fraud - while organised crime and corruption throughout Indian education is very powerful..
Now places that are a real threat to Western coders are Poland, Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe..
This is as fanciful as shop workers and burger flippers being replaced by robots.. "So this is your new 'Atlas Ten' robot, this is what we're going to use to replace our human employees. ...And how much does it cost?" "Oh about $3 million per unit, plus about $70,000 a year in maintenance costs and another $10,000 a year on battery replacement."
There's a good reason that CEO is the first job that will be threatened by Strong AI - CEO's frequently earn enough to make the machines cost efficient.
Now Strong AI can replace your human coders - maybe - in about 20 years. Until then, I'm cynical that anything will. I remember hearing almost identical stuff about replacing coders with designers since about 1990, and I'm sure they were talking about it even before then..
Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...
Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)
The real problem with assemblers is that there is so much BS about them. The technology's so complicated that even with a working machine it might take another 10 - 20 years before anyone can do anything useful with it. People also totally over-estimate what the things will be able to do - and massively under-estimate how long the machines would take to do it. - The 'perfect' worst example that comes to mind is the Knight Rider remake - sure assemblers could reshape a car like that -MAYBE- but it would take them months or years to do it each time someone pushed the button.
The first real problem with diamond assemblers is that they would need to be cryogenically cooled to work and kept in an environment even more extreme and clean than the current best IC factories... The things will have terrible problems getting enough power to work and even worse problems with overheating.. The real killer though is that the 'reproduction' process itself is the hardest of all - and either very slow and complex - or actually just about impossible..
On the other side of the coin, research totally away from assemblers has already achieved virtually the same thing - synthetic life. Ok today everything is still very primitive, but it has a broad front of research and things are definitely actually advancing.. The simple real truth is that new science and new technologies are difficult and don't take five minutes to get right.. Doesn't mean its not worthwhile..
"Compared to what? Certainly not Germany, a country that is run by a small elite of the wealthy, old aristocrats, and intellectuals. They are so good at indoctrinating you that you don't even notice it how much they have you by the balls, and you are so disconnected from your history that you don't even recognize how old a lot of these power structures are."
Sounds unpleasantly like the UK.
Why are you only attacking space and science? what about the $150 billion+ every year spent on the military?, or the money spent on a hundred other things? What about the foreign aid so much of which ends up in the pockets of foreign governments or foreign local traders or various corrupt or criminal people?
Money spent at NASA ultimately goes to pay scientific workers and their families, and NASA makes a massive on-going positive contribution to Americas and humanities future.