That's just as big a problem for (future) genuinely intelligent Strong AI, unfortunately it does what its told to do - or what any successful hacker tells it. That's why its security has to be literally unbreakable..
It is a single insight actually. (with about a million others piled behind it) The insight is - the core of sentience is consciousness, and that the core of consciousness is a Turing Machine. The joke of course is that they might have had the core of the answer since the 1940's but computers weren't nearly powerful enough to achieve sentience, and software technology was nowhere near, and behind these problems was that the maths and logic theory wasn't advanced enough. Now its only a matter of time before all these things converge and we start seeing real machines appearing everywhere. My own project is ahead of the curve and all it needs is financing and about ten years before I have a working machine. Unfortunately building a working machine is the easy part - its what we/I do with it then that's the difficult part. As for safety - the level of intelligence is completely irrelevant, any Strong AI an be completely safe as long as its properly designed and protected from electronic intrusion. The real danger with Strong AI is hacking and infiltration. - So a big focus on all sane designs is impregnable security.. and with a closed single application system, with a bespoke OS, built on custom hardware, heavy encryption, and no direct network access - that's surprisingly easy.:)
I work in the field of Strong AI. - Real Strong AI's will require specially designed hardware to be able to run correctly. Its not so much about processing power as reliability, conformity, encapsulation, low level stability, and subtle things like Turing completeness.. The basic spec for the current design plan puts the power consumption at between about 200 and 500 watts and the whole machine core should roughly fit inside a 20 cm sided cube. As for reproduction the basic plan is for the hardware to be produced, tested, loaded with a software base and coding system, and then be custom programmed by another AI system to produce a working system. A Strong AI requires about 10 GB of online ram, and about 100 GB of non-volatile Flash ram, its core should be about 10,000 lines of code supported by about 100,000 lines of support and interface code (including OS)...
That's a weird "what if." We already know that spirits and souls are imaginary. "
That is the same kind of 'know' I take it as when religious people say they 'know' that god exists. Sure a lot of religious beliefs are obviously delusions or simple primitivism, and generally all public 'psychics' are obvious frauds - but from a reductionist perspective the soul and spirit are unproven either way. In fact if anything modern physics leans heavily on the side of it all being real at some small level. Just try looking up quantum mechanics - time and space superposition, entanglement, wave like behaviour, spin, uncertainty principle, quantum teleportation, etc, etc.. Ok the quantum is restricted to very small scales - but brains are made of structures ordered on those scales..
There's an 'amusing' statistic that about a thousand people are killed every year by radiation released during the burning of coal. In comparison the basic estimate is that about 50 to 100 people per year are killed by radiation released from the nuclear industry..
A lot of that fly ash also contains uranium so it could theoretically be mined to extract it.
I typed 239 then changed it to 238 - but didn't double check. - The next time the nuclear reactor I'm building in my back yard has a meltdown you'll know why.:) (PS : To any security officials or AI reading this, that was a joke. The only nuclear material I possess is a dust grain sized sample of U238 containing about 100mg of U235 )
The problem is plutonium, or rather the perception of plutonium as more dangerous than uranium - largely because the name sounds more dangerous. The perfect example is plutonium 239 - which is as safe as most medical radiation sources, cannot be used to make bombs, and has in the past been used as a safe long term power source for pacemaker implants.
Since 1940, nuclear power in total has killed something like half a million (500,000 to 600,000) people - - about 250,000 to 300,000 from the two atomic bomb tests, - about 200,000 from indirect radiation from over 2000 atomic and nuclear bomb tests, - about 10,000 to 100,000 from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Windscale, and all other nuclear accidents and disasters, - about 5,000 from general radiation from all nuclear energy production.
Compared to that in the same time coal has killed about 50 million to 120 million people. From this we can estimate that anti-nuclear protest has indirectly killed between about 2 million to 10 million people. In the same time as coal and nuclear, that radiation from the sun (the symbol of the anti-nuclear movement) has killed something like 20 million to 50 million people.
In China nuclear costs about half as much, plants take half the time to build, but the safety is about the same. As an industry nuclear power is about 1000 times safer than coal but 100 times more regulated. The real problem is that the creeping dead hand of the regulators have all but stopped nuclear research. - Small plants, CHP, gas core reactors, hydrogen cooled, advanced combined cycle with fuel recycling, plutonium or thorium fuel, bunker self-containment storage designs, etc.. Small fast reactors (as used in nuclear rockets) are inherently safer than big low yield reactors and potentially much more efficient, but its a technology we have barely begun to touch or design.. Then there are technologies developed at the high point of nuclear research way back in the 1950's and 60's - such as pure fusion nuclear bombs which could potentially be adapted for nuclear fusion energy production... though people would probably have to tolerate how such plants actually work remaining secret...
Actually my university was pretty strict. You basically had to pass every module-course to get the full degree, though if you had less you could get an ordinary rather than the full honours degree. We were allowed a certain number of exam resits but the exams only counted for about 60% of the mark for each course and the rest came from the assignments - we weren't allowed to redo them and if they were late they were marked as zero.. We had to get a cumulative mark of 40% to pass each course, but the marks from all the courses formed a cumulative average for the final grade and you needed about 60 to 70% to get a First. - That was very hard, and only about 3 would get firsts out of 150 - 200 people.
With that rule you would end up with about three graduating out of several hundred at each uni, at least in computing. I remember there were so many assignments where basically no one had a clue, and basically the first few to work it out would get cribbed by everybody. They did test the assignments, and if cribbing was too obvious it would get picked up, but the punishment wasn't that serious they would get a fail for that assignment. - The same as handing it in too late. - Too many fails though would make it far harder to get a good degree at the end. Do anything in an exam though and I think you would be out immediately..
The thing that others haven't mentioned is that the primary thing for universities is reputation - allowing cheating and it getting caught at it could do enormous damage to a university. Does the article above make anyone want to hire Indian graduates? or want an Indian doctor operating on them? or Indian scientists writing critical software for their new aircraft? No. Now this is just guessing, but from rumours in the scientific press I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese graduates have many of the same problems.
See that right there - that's hindsight that is. You could say the same about the First World War, probably the Second World War, maybe the Korean war, certainly the Vietnam war. Then there is Bush and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - forget about the morals or the half million dead, the money wasted in the Iraq war and the global bad feeling it caused are why Americas economy is now a wasted wreak. Go back in time and vote Gore and he could have popped a nuke on Bin Laden's head - no need for war. Actually he could have not closed the FBI's international anti-terrorist division and 9/11 would never have happened. Hindsight is Great..
".. Then we get into the cruel backbreaking journey accross the ocean, which killed as many as %30 of the slaves even before they reached America, and then grueling labor they performed once they got there. Niether turks, no africans, nor anyone else did that... "
You need to read a bit more history - try looking at the history of the working poor in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the slaves were treated appallingly the ordinary white poor were frequently treated even worse. Children were used as workers, they were indentured, they worked seven days a week, were paid a pittance in company money (ie not real money) - in places like the mines or the worse factories 60 - 70% of them died before they even reached adulthood. Wealth defined everything so the life of a poor person was often worth almost nothing, a pauper stealing a loaf of bread would carry a more severe punishment than someone with money killing a child if they were destitute. Many poor starved to death or died of disease, and the 'Christian' moral codes of the time said that anyone without money was by definition a criminal and amoral and their lives literally worth nothing.* The slaves were treated better even if only because they had been paid for and were 'owned' and so their lives had a real (fiscal) value.
(* If that sounds familiar its the code of the Tea party and the right wing extremists in the GOP.) I once came across a story that said the British police got the nickname 'Pigs' because they once disposed of the bodies of the poor or criminals by feeding them to pigs. (the kind of thing that Political Correctness a 'la UK likes to censor)
Ok - I agree. The tin hat comment was because I haven't actually seen much PR' from Virgin over this - but I have seen a concerted campaign against Virgin by Murdoch and Fox. (Maybe you don't realize this but if the whole US or the UK were obliterated in war Murdoch wouldn't care, he would probably celebrate. From the things he attacks he seems to hate anything to do with science or advanced tech like space technology or climate science. He's been quietly attacking Musk, SpaceX, and Virgin and others for several years. If you think that American politics is hopelessly corrupt (or UK, or Europe or..) - he is basically THE primary mover behind that corruption. He's a bigger threat to democracy or our futures than Bin Laden or the other terrorists or even ISIL..)
As for this accident I'm not jumping to conclusions either - just going by what I've read on more trustworthy news-sites. And it certainly isn't proven that it is pilot error - one possibility I have heard is that the pilots reacted to an instrument error. With the amount of information they have to hand this is a disaster the NTSB should be able to solve with some certainty - and hopefully quickly.
Spaceship 2 is kind of similar to NASA's X-15 and to their supersonic lifting bodies - they had a long series of crashes and fatal incidents. In any aircraft / spacecraft in atmosphere at supersonic or transonic speeds its very easy to get torn apart by the aerodynamic forces. - For instance if a pilot accidently put down the undercarriage at supersonic speeds that would almost certainly be enough to rip their aircraft apart..
Oops your tin foil hat slipped.. It was the NTSB that found the pilot error. Because it was a test flight they had voluminous data collection and there is apparently video of the co-pilot pulling the switch. If that's true its pretty much end of story.. Apparently with the latch released aerodynamic forces would have/ could have been enough to extend the 'feathers' into the breaking position.. and with the position -climbing and accelerating- that would have been enough to tear the craft to pieces.
There's just one thing wrong with your idea - theoretical neurology and modern psychology are both total pseudoscience's. You'll get more effective and reliable results if you get Uri Geller to give you a tea leaf reading. I'm not speaking as a layman here, I'm speaking as an expert in Strong AI and machine/human consciousness. If you read the scientific literature you will find theoretical neurologists arguing about whether consciousness even exists, you will also find a lot of theories about neural networks and systems that are totally unrealistic or ludicrously wrongheaded - and they still haven't even learned basic lessons that people who work with neural networks have known for decades. (for instance they haven't even figured out that the brain is primarily a synchronous sequential machine) Modern Psychology is even worse - giving advice to people that is hopelessly erroneous or even downright dangerous. Modern Psychology seemingly hasn't yet even discovered/acknowledged the implications of humans being evolved animals - mammals, with self-evolving mammal brains. - If humans have mammalian brains then this has the implication that the psychology of not smacking and of totally withholding all physical punishments from children could cause them a type of systematic brain damage that could make them psychologically weak and or deformed for the rest of their future lives.
Now I don't believe in god as such and have to say the beliefs and behaviour of the most heavily religiously indoctrinated are pretty unpleasant. However it is still ultimately an open question and from a reductionist perspective there is insufficient data either way. God gets a lot more complex when you look inside the brain, god is literally part of the wiring of the brain, part of its core algorithm - but is it a physical god? not really, it is a logical god. Its not surprising that we invent gods and spirits and stuff.
I was talking to a Muslim just the other day , he was advocating that God commands Muslims to kill all gays. I'm sure if he wasn't a liberal Muslim he would have included Christians and Atheists as well, the beheading of women who get raped, and the death penalty for anyone who accidently insults the prophet or his 'god' in any way. Very tolerant.
BTW I'm Liberal and I vote UKIP. - As for racism at least UKIP don't have a whites only immigration policy - unlike the EU. And as for the Sun, I would rather be associated with paedophiles and child molesters than them..
"Why? Isn't it true that we've launched probes well beyond the asteroid belt without nuclear rockets? Is there a reason why we couldn't get this "equipment" out to this asteroid efficiently using a solar sail, VASIMR, or even a conventional ion thruster (all of which could be launched from Earth using a large chemical rocket)? I mean, shit, if you want to maximize efficiency, we'd launch something using pulsed nuclear propulsion, but is there a reason we can't accept lower levels of efficiency?"
The basic argument about efficiency is about whether you want to get out to that asteroid in 1 or 2 years as opposed to 10 years or more, and if you want your chunk back in 10 years rather than 30 or more years. (maybe 100 years with solar sails) If a chemical rocket needs 95% of its mass to be fuel for a given trajectory, then using nuclear roughly halves that to maybe 45%. Chemical rockets have a maximum Isp of about 450 while nuclear rockets tested in the 1970's achieved about 1100. (The even more efficient gas core nuclear might theoretically achieve over 2000, and fusion would be more efficient again.)
For larger asteroids of say 500 meters across or more pulse nuclear is actually the only method that is possible today that even looks tenable, it is also one of the few methods that looks like it could probably push rubble piles without breaking them up.
VASMIR and Ionic thrusters can achieve even higher thrust efficiencies than nuclear but to provide enough thrust for a 100 - 200 ton vehicle using high energy trajectories either would still need to be powered by high energy nuclear reactors or something similar like high performance gas turbines - solar arrays would need to be enormously huge to provide enough power. .
"... Oh, I see. Your ideas, even if the theory ends up being proven out, can't actually be implemented. How practically useful."
The UN rules make all progress in space practically impossible not just using nuclear rockets. Those treaties were written by people with less understanding of space or technology than a mollusc. Also as one of the primary impediments to humanity dealing with climate change the UN is actually a threat to the whole species and the whole world would be much better off if a nuclear bomb or an asteroid were to crush it flat. Eventually (we can only hope) the politicians will realize this and we will get the future back.
Its funny how Slashdot is such a repository of ignorance. Firstly to get the equipment out to this asteroid efficiently you are going to need nuclear rockets. Then you are going to need to mine water to use as reaction mass to move the rock - again with nuclear rockets. The most efficient method isn't electrolysis its just to make the water very hot and it cracks all by itself - the details get a bit more involved and complicated. Hydrogen is the ideal reaction mass fuel for nuclear rockets. For larger objects nuclear rockets become to weak, so we switch to pulse nuclear propulsion aka Project Orion. For even larger objects we might use the even more powerful Super Orion instead...
BTW Your already out of date on the other materials, 3D printing and other techniques are already being developed for doing this now. There are four basic main areas - high temperature materials for building smelters, metals for various, silicon materials for building solar panels, and materials for fuels. A fifth is developing organics for making plastics and resins, etc. As for t being fantasy, I expect to see working test beds on the Moon in about ten years.
The main impediments to nuclear tech in space and to a human future in space in general are not technical they are actually the nuclear over-regulators and the UN.. Most UN treaties are not worth the paper they are written on anyway.
It's also always locally curved, for other definitions of "locally".
Yes, for wrong definitions. Curvature is a global property, not local.
Hate to break it to you but every property is 'local' in general relativity, even the speed of light. In any absolute frame GR defines the speed of light as variable or non-defined.
If you want to replace general relativity with an absolute frame physics you need three things - - An absolute frame - an FTL 3D hyperspace with an FTL Simultaneity backbone. - To restrict the maximum size of dimensional time and 4D space time to quantum scales. - The third thing is that you need to build a complete new FTL based physics to replace general relativity and quantum mechanics.. Easy eh... (the hardest part is designing a new mathematics that can work with non-finite contexts..)
It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are; the public fears it after several high profile disasters and that isn't likely to change.
Yup. Ordinary people is stupid dumb chickens, 'panic em and keep em running'. Coal is 10,000 times more dangerous than standard nuclear but their not afraid of that. The things that make a stupid mindless animal panic and run and the things that don't - now there is a fascinating science... Radiation is invisible (makes heeby jeeby ghost noises), whereas the pollution from coal that kills is oh wait its invisible to. . Of course dying of asthma or cancer from airborne nano-scale coal dust is not as scary as dying from radiation. Even if we had 10 Chernobyl's per year nuclear would probably still be safer than coal...
Of coarse unlike coal the nuclear industry haven't secretly had Greenpeace and CND working for them for the last 40 years...
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget delta wing jet fighters, or guided rockets and missiles,, or a million other little things.
That's just as big a problem for (future) genuinely intelligent Strong AI, unfortunately it does what its told to do - or what any successful hacker tells it. That's why its security has to be literally unbreakable..
It is a single insight actually. (with about a million others piled behind it) The insight is - the core of sentience is consciousness, and that the core of consciousness is a Turing Machine. The joke of course is that they might have had the core of the answer since the 1940's but computers weren't nearly powerful enough to achieve sentience, and software technology was nowhere near, and behind these problems was that the maths and logic theory wasn't advanced enough. Now its only a matter of time before all these things converge and we start seeing real machines appearing everywhere. :)
My own project is ahead of the curve and all it needs is financing and about ten years before I have a working machine. Unfortunately building a working machine is the easy part - its what we/I do with it then that's the difficult part. As for safety - the level of intelligence is completely irrelevant, any Strong AI an be completely safe as long as its properly designed and protected from electronic intrusion. The real danger with Strong AI is hacking and infiltration. - So a big focus on all sane designs is impregnable security.. and with a closed single application system, with a bespoke OS, built on custom hardware, heavy encryption, and no direct network access - that's surprisingly easy.
I work in the field of Strong AI. - Real Strong AI's will require specially designed hardware to be able to run correctly. Its not so much about processing power as reliability, conformity, encapsulation, low level stability, and subtle things like Turing completeness..
The basic spec for the current design plan puts the power consumption at between about 200 and 500 watts and the whole machine core should roughly fit inside a 20 cm sided cube. As for reproduction the basic plan is for the hardware to be produced, tested, loaded with a software base and coding system, and then be custom programmed by another AI system to produce a working system. A Strong AI requires about 10 GB of online ram, and about 100 GB of non-volatile Flash ram, its core should be about 10,000 lines of code supported by about 100,000 lines of support and interface code (including OS)...
">What if spirit and souls do exist
That's a weird "what if." We already know that spirits and souls are imaginary. "
That is the same kind of 'know' I take it as when religious people say they 'know' that god exists. Sure a lot of religious beliefs are obviously delusions or simple primitivism, and generally all public 'psychics' are obvious frauds - but from a reductionist perspective the soul and spirit are unproven either way. In fact if anything modern physics leans heavily on the side of it all being real at some small level. Just try looking up quantum mechanics - time and space superposition, entanglement, wave like behaviour, spin, uncertainty principle, quantum teleportation, etc, etc.. Ok the quantum is restricted to very small scales - but brains are made of structures ordered on those scales..
There's an 'amusing' statistic that about a thousand people are killed every year by radiation released during the burning of coal. In comparison the basic estimate is that about 50 to 100 people per year are killed by radiation released from the nuclear industry..
A lot of that fly ash also contains uranium so it could theoretically be mined to extract it.
I typed 239 then changed it to 238 - but didn't double check. - The next time the nuclear reactor I'm building in my back yard has a meltdown you'll know why. :) (PS : To any security officials or AI reading this, that was a joke. The only nuclear material I possess is a dust grain sized sample of U238 containing about 100mg of U235 )
The problem is plutonium, or rather the perception of plutonium as more dangerous than uranium - largely because the name sounds more dangerous. The perfect example is plutonium 239 - which is as safe as most medical radiation sources, cannot be used to make bombs, and has in the past been used as a safe long term power source for pacemaker implants.
Since 1940, nuclear power in total has killed something like half a million (500,000 to 600,000) people -
- about 250,000 to 300,000 from the two atomic bomb tests,
- about 200,000 from indirect radiation from over 2000 atomic and nuclear bomb tests,
- about 10,000 to 100,000 from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Windscale, and all other nuclear accidents and disasters,
- about 5,000 from general radiation from all nuclear energy production.
Compared to that in the same time coal has killed about 50 million to 120 million people.
From this we can estimate that anti-nuclear protest has indirectly killed between about 2 million to 10 million people.
In the same time as coal and nuclear, that radiation from the sun (the symbol of the anti-nuclear movement) has killed something like 20 million to 50 million people.
In China nuclear costs about half as much, plants take half the time to build, but the safety is about the same. As an industry nuclear power is about 1000 times safer than coal but 100 times more regulated.
The real problem is that the creeping dead hand of the regulators have all but stopped nuclear research. - Small plants, CHP, gas core reactors, hydrogen cooled, advanced combined cycle with fuel recycling, plutonium or thorium fuel, bunker self-containment storage designs, etc..
Small fast reactors (as used in nuclear rockets) are inherently safer than big low yield reactors and potentially much more efficient, but its a technology we have barely begun to touch or design.. Then there are technologies developed at the high point of nuclear research way back in the 1950's and 60's - such as pure fusion nuclear bombs which could potentially be adapted for nuclear fusion energy production... though people would probably have to tolerate how such plants actually work remaining secret...
No. :(
Actually my university was pretty strict. You basically had to pass every module-course to get the full degree, though if you had less you could get an ordinary rather than the full honours degree. We were allowed a certain number of exam resits but the exams only counted for about 60% of the mark for each course and the rest came from the assignments - we weren't allowed to redo them and if they were late they were marked as zero.. We had to get a cumulative mark of 40% to pass each course, but the marks from all the courses formed a cumulative average for the final grade and you needed about 60 to 70% to get a First. - That was very hard, and only about 3 would get firsts out of 150 - 200 people.
With that rule you would end up with about three graduating out of several hundred at each uni, at least in computing. I remember there were so many assignments where basically no one had a clue, and basically the first few to work it out would get cribbed by everybody. They did test the assignments, and if cribbing was too obvious it would get picked up, but the punishment wasn't that serious they would get a fail for that assignment. - The same as handing it in too late. - Too many fails though would make it far harder to get a good degree at the end. Do anything in an exam though and I think you would be out immediately..
The thing that others haven't mentioned is that the primary thing for universities is reputation - allowing cheating and it getting caught at it could do enormous damage to a university. Does the article above make anyone want to hire Indian graduates? or want an Indian doctor operating on them? or Indian scientists writing critical software for their new aircraft? No.
Now this is just guessing, but from rumours in the scientific press I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese graduates have many of the same problems.
See that right there - that's hindsight that is. You could say the same about the First World War, probably the Second World War, maybe the Korean war, certainly the Vietnam war. Then there is Bush and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - forget about the morals or the half million dead, the money wasted in the Iraq war and the global bad feeling it caused are why Americas economy is now a wasted wreak.
Go back in time and vote Gore and he could have popped a nuke on Bin Laden's head - no need for war. Actually he could have not closed the FBI's international anti-terrorist division and 9/11 would never have happened. Hindsight is Great..
" .. .. "
Then we get into the cruel backbreaking journey accross the ocean, which killed as many as %30 of the slaves even before they reached America, and then grueling labor they performed once they got there. Niether turks, no africans, nor anyone else did that.
You need to read a bit more history - try looking at the history of the working poor in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the slaves were treated appallingly the ordinary white poor were frequently treated even worse. Children were used as workers, they were indentured, they worked seven days a week, were paid a pittance in company money (ie not real money) - in places like the mines or the worse factories 60 - 70% of them died before they even reached adulthood. Wealth defined everything so the life of a poor person was often worth almost nothing, a pauper stealing a loaf of bread would carry a more severe punishment than someone with money killing a child if they were destitute. Many poor starved to death or died of disease, and the 'Christian' moral codes of the time said that anyone without money was by definition a criminal and amoral and their lives literally worth nothing.*
The slaves were treated better even if only because they had been paid for and were 'owned' and so their lives had a real (fiscal) value.
(* If that sounds familiar its the code of the Tea party and the right wing extremists in the GOP.)
I once came across a story that said the British police got the nickname 'Pigs' because they once disposed of the bodies of the poor or criminals by feeding them to pigs. (the kind of thing that Political Correctness a 'la UK likes to censor)
Ok - I agree. The tin hat comment was because I haven't actually seen much PR' from Virgin over this - but I have seen a concerted campaign against Virgin by Murdoch and Fox.
(Maybe you don't realize this but if the whole US or the UK were obliterated in war Murdoch wouldn't care, he would probably celebrate. From the things he attacks he seems to hate anything to do with science or advanced tech like space technology or climate science. He's been quietly attacking Musk, SpaceX, and Virgin and others for several years. If you think that American politics is hopelessly corrupt (or UK, or Europe or..) - he is basically THE primary mover behind that corruption. He's a bigger threat to democracy or our futures than Bin Laden or the other terrorists or even ISIL..)
As for this accident I'm not jumping to conclusions either - just going by what I've read on more trustworthy news-sites. And it certainly isn't proven that it is pilot error - one possibility I have heard is that the pilots reacted to an instrument error. With the amount of information they have to hand this is a disaster the NTSB should be able to solve with some certainty - and hopefully quickly.
Spaceship 2 is kind of similar to NASA's X-15 and to their supersonic lifting bodies - they had a long series of crashes and fatal incidents. In any aircraft / spacecraft in atmosphere at supersonic or transonic speeds its very easy to get torn apart by the aerodynamic forces. - For instance if a pilot accidently put down the undercarriage at supersonic speeds that would almost certainly be enough to rip their aircraft apart..
Oops your tin foil hat slipped.. It was the NTSB that found the pilot error. Because it was a test flight they had voluminous data collection and there is apparently video of the co-pilot pulling the switch. If that's true its pretty much end of story..
Apparently with the latch released aerodynamic forces would have/ could have been enough to extend the 'feathers' into the breaking position.. and with the position -climbing and accelerating- that would have been enough to tear the craft to pieces.
There's just one thing wrong with your idea - theoretical neurology and modern psychology are both total pseudoscience's. You'll get more effective and reliable results if you get Uri Geller to give you a tea leaf reading.
I'm not speaking as a layman here, I'm speaking as an expert in Strong AI and machine/human consciousness. If you read the scientific literature you will find theoretical neurologists arguing about whether consciousness even exists, you will also find a lot of theories about neural networks and systems that are totally unrealistic or ludicrously wrongheaded - and they still haven't even learned basic lessons that people who work with neural networks have known for decades. (for instance they haven't even figured out that the brain is primarily a synchronous sequential machine)
Modern Psychology is even worse - giving advice to people that is hopelessly erroneous or even downright dangerous. Modern Psychology seemingly hasn't yet even discovered/acknowledged the implications of humans being evolved animals - mammals, with self-evolving mammal brains. - If humans have mammalian brains then this has the implication that the psychology of not smacking and of totally withholding all physical punishments from children could cause them a type of systematic brain damage that could make them psychologically weak and or deformed for the rest of their future lives.
Now I don't believe in god as such and have to say the beliefs and behaviour of the most heavily religiously indoctrinated are pretty unpleasant. However it is still ultimately an open question and from a reductionist perspective there is insufficient data either way. God gets a lot more complex when you look inside the brain, god is literally part of the wiring of the brain, part of its core algorithm - but is it a physical god? not really, it is a logical god. Its not surprising that we invent gods and spirits and stuff.
I was talking to a Muslim just the other day , he was advocating that God commands Muslims to kill all gays. I'm sure if he wasn't a liberal Muslim he would have included Christians and Atheists as well, the beheading of women who get raped, and the death penalty for anyone who accidently insults the prophet or his 'god' in any way. Very tolerant.
BTW I'm Liberal and I vote UKIP. - As for racism at least UKIP don't have a whites only immigration policy - unlike the EU. And as for the Sun, I would rather be associated with paedophiles and child molesters than them..
"Why? Isn't it true that we've launched probes well beyond the asteroid belt without nuclear rockets? Is there a reason why we couldn't get this "equipment" out to this asteroid efficiently using a solar sail, VASIMR, or even a conventional ion thruster (all of which could be launched from Earth using a large chemical rocket)? I mean, shit, if you want to maximize efficiency, we'd launch something using pulsed nuclear propulsion, but is there a reason we can't accept lower levels of efficiency?"
The basic argument about efficiency is about whether you want to get out to that asteroid in 1 or 2 years as opposed to 10 years or more, and if you want your chunk back in 10 years rather than 30 or more years. (maybe 100 years with solar sails) If a chemical rocket needs 95% of its mass to be fuel for a given trajectory, then using nuclear roughly halves that to maybe 45%. Chemical rockets have a maximum Isp of about 450 while nuclear rockets tested in the 1970's achieved about 1100. (The even more efficient gas core nuclear might theoretically achieve over 2000, and fusion would be more efficient again.)
For larger asteroids of say 500 meters across or more pulse nuclear is actually the only method that is possible today that even looks tenable, it is also one of the few methods that looks like it could probably push rubble piles without breaking them up.
VASMIR and Ionic thrusters can achieve even higher thrust efficiencies than nuclear but to provide enough thrust for a 100 - 200 ton vehicle using high energy trajectories either would still need to be powered by high energy nuclear reactors or something similar like high performance gas turbines - solar arrays would need to be enormously huge to provide enough power. .
"... Oh, I see. Your ideas, even if the theory ends up being proven out, can't actually be implemented. How practically useful."
The UN rules make all progress in space practically impossible not just using nuclear rockets. Those treaties were written by people with less understanding of space or technology than a mollusc. Also as one of the primary impediments to humanity dealing with climate change the UN is actually a threat to the whole species and the whole world would be much better off if a nuclear bomb or an asteroid were to crush it flat. Eventually (we can only hope) the politicians will realize this and we will get the future back.
Its funny how Slashdot is such a repository of ignorance. Firstly to get the equipment out to this asteroid efficiently you are going to need nuclear rockets. Then you are going to need to mine water to use as reaction mass to move the rock - again with nuclear rockets. The most efficient method isn't electrolysis its just to make the water very hot and it cracks all by itself - the details get a bit more involved and complicated. Hydrogen is the ideal reaction mass fuel for nuclear rockets. For larger objects nuclear rockets become to weak, so we switch to pulse nuclear propulsion aka Project Orion. For even larger objects we might use the even more powerful Super Orion instead...
BTW Your already out of date on the other materials, 3D printing and other techniques are already being developed for doing this now. There are four basic main areas - high temperature materials for building smelters, metals for various, silicon materials for building solar panels, and materials for fuels. A fifth is developing organics for making plastics and resins, etc. As for t being fantasy, I expect to see working test beds on the Moon in about ten years.
The main impediments to nuclear tech in space and to a human future in space in general are not technical they are actually the nuclear over-regulators and the UN.. Most UN treaties are not worth the paper they are written on anyway.
".. Get over it. The sooner you can free up your brain to solve real problems, the better off we all are.
Walling off part of your brain so your precious childhood fantasies of Space 1999 don't get destroyed is just sad.
Grow up."
If you smash your skull open you can get some gunk out of it that's useful for greasing axles.
It's also always locally curved, for other definitions of "locally".
Yes, for wrong definitions. Curvature is a global property, not local.
Hate to break it to you but every property is 'local' in general relativity, even the speed of light. In any absolute frame GR defines the speed of light as variable or non-defined.
If you want to replace general relativity with an absolute frame physics you need three things - ... (the hardest part is designing a new mathematics that can work with non-finite contexts. .)
- An absolute frame - an FTL 3D hyperspace with an FTL Simultaneity backbone.
- To restrict the maximum size of dimensional time and 4D space time to quantum scales.
- The third thing is that you need to build a complete new FTL based physics to replace general relativity and quantum mechanics..
Easy eh
It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are; the public fears it after several high profile disasters and that isn't likely to change.
Yup. Ordinary people is stupid dumb chickens, 'panic em and keep em running'. Coal is 10,000 times more dangerous than standard nuclear but their not afraid of that. ..
The things that make a stupid mindless animal panic and run and the things that don't - now there is a fascinating science... Radiation is invisible (makes
heeby jeeby ghost noises), whereas the pollution from coal that kills is oh wait its invisible to. . Of course dying of asthma or cancer from airborne nano-scale coal dust is not as scary as dying from radiation. Even if we had 10 Chernobyl's per year nuclear would probably still be safer than coal.
Of coarse unlike coal the nuclear industry haven't secretly had Greenpeace and CND working for them for the last 40 years...