SinBad

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It does. N A Z I Gets turned into pedant when you submit.

Our entire universe and history is a lie. What we call reality is just a fleeting chance arrangement of charges distibuted in the density variations of the degenerate matter on the surface of a neutron star. One instant of order flashing through the writhing broth of chaos. We have no physical existance, no actual past and no future. Your consciencness only exists for a single slice of plank time before the soup randomly shuffles again, created by chance with a full past and stream of thought leading up to the one instance in which you will exist, contemplating a fure that is erased before it could be imagined. Oh, and apollo 13 didnt have a malfunction, it was shot with a pedant mass driver from the moon as a warning to stay away. The next two missions were actually for treaty negotiations that boiled down to "dont ever come back to the moon, and we wont drop a rock on one of your cities". Thats why we havent been back since. It seems if you try to say pedant, it replaces it with pedant?

Well, if we are going to uplift something, i vote for koalas. Imagine what two thumbs would do for a tool user. Either that or polar bears, bred for large size, intelligence and a deep seated supiriority complex coupled with a complete lack of compassion or moral compass. Eventually that could get... interesting.

I think the issue with gas driven turbo pumps is that they are difficult to throttle accuratly, especially as their throughput doesnt scale linearly with rpm due to funkeyness with fluids at pressure moving at high speeds.

Hollywood hasnt had an original thought in decades. Go look up kimba the white lion and tell me disney isnt ripping off world cinema! Japan had high frame rate full scene animation while everyone else was still fiddling around with 15fps and tring to save ink. And if you want to talk about perversion and bad writing, go watch some of the original tmnt cartoons. Absolute tripe... Wait, which thred did that notification... Damn. Got me.

Slavery = work or die (or be beaten) Minimum wage for many in developed countries = work or die (slowly of starvation, exposure or disease) Working poor The modern world still has slaves, except an owner is now an employer and they dont buy their slaves as valuable assets, they rent them by the hour from a massive pool of expendable labor, each indevidual of which firmly believes they are free. In reality, many of them only have the freedom to choose to be unemployed, just as the slave was free to choose punishment over work.

Wacky. Good description I dont think we will get to the unpredictable part of biotech any time soon. We live in the capitalist wonderland after all. GM crops cant be grown from the seeds of GM crops. Thats not a technical limitation, but a financial one : it means the company who produces it continues to make money season after season. I dont see other GM 'bio-tools' being any different. Bacteria that pull minerals out of low yield rock, or algea with enhance nutritional value or O2 production will have suicide genes that make sure that after x number of cell divisions only short lived, non-producing cells are made. If a company (and it will be a company funded effort) ever did decide to uplift an animal, they would make sure that animal would not only be sterile and un-cloneable, but also that it would have a sharply limited lifespan. Sure, the superchimp might need 2 years of training by the company, so make it live to seven years. Then the customer has to buy a new one every five years. They would spin some story about increasing intelligence had the side effect of a short life and sterility and how sad that there isnt any way around it. but you can send your superchimp slave back to us when its six years old and pay for it to enter our super relaxing fun time retirement home to live out its final year in liesure. you will be taking home a replacement slave on your way out, wont you? And yes, slave. Thats exactly how they would be treated. Because humans are kinda horrible like that. After all, thats why we are building robots (not general AI, just vaccume cleaners and factory staff for now), right? A company makes it, we buy it, so... we own it now?

How about a huge lump of ice (a few dozen kilotons) in a big ball shape with an elastic blanket stretched over the top. Put the crew in the centre, and a hot thorium reactor on the end of a long stick. Circulate some warm water (heated with a portion of the reactor heat in a tertiary loop) through veins in the blanket, which uniformaly melts the outside of the ice ball. elasticity squeezes the water into a pipe and sends it down the stick to the reactor core where hundreds of thorium pebbles do their thing and make anything from high pressure super heated steam, all the way up to "oops we broke the water, better throw in a match" and lets it out an exhaust bell. Not the best reaction mass, but it does double as a shield well. And we know where to get more. Lots more.

@PB666 thats a good article! Thanks for the link.

Starch, sugars, even fats and proteins are all full of hydrogen and mixtures of them are usually rather easy to shape and cure (bake?). Ginger bread house on the moon. Shortbread solar sailers Can't wait to see what nasa cooks up with this.

Well, if you want a social hive animal with a more complex nervous system than an insect, why not mole rats? As an alternative, what about coral? A bit (ok, a lot) of genetic tinkering and i bet we could get them to lay down PN junctions in specific patterns instead of calcium in specific patterns. Then load an AI into it. Intelligence not in the organism, thats just a convenient way of getting a huge processing substrate built. Imagine a computer the size of the great barrier reef...

Now that i think about it, Peter F Hamilton made a race with an exoskeleton in the nights dawn trilogy. Their solution was was basically a clear rubbery sack suit filled with gel. Inside that they basically wore scuba gear. So make scuba gear for an ant, then pput it intu a tiny six fingered rubber glove and charge it will goo.

If i remember, insects 'air holes' are all on the abdomen, that would be the only part needing air or (maybe?) Pressurisation. Circulating the atmosphere in a human eva suit isnt like a tube in the mouth like scuba. Its an organism respirating within a small, closed environment. I dont see the insect being any different.

David Brin would like a word with you... Also, i remember reading a short story about a squid we sent to space that got its own ideas about who was in charge. Cant remember who wrote it though...

Toll hunter, a documentary about the socioeconomic impact automated toll booths have had on the toll booth attendant workforce (troll hunter. If you havent, see it. Unintentionaly funny b grade) Meet joe back, an independant film about a coma patient who awakens and tries to track down the nurse (josephine) who cared for him for 15 years. She has met him, now its time he met her. (Meet joe black) Angled, third instalment in the finding nemo series. Theres something about may, documentary about climate change 0 first dates, drama about a socially inept young mathematician and his search for companionship. 50 fist dates, sequel to fight club Fight cub, a film about underground caged baby animal fights as told from the perspective of a young lion. Lod of the rings, an informational short released to help budding game developers understand the benefits of using low resolution models for distant object rendering.

all the light? from the entire surface? 0.5/10 it would punch through the planet so fast that there likely would only be local damage from the vaporised matter blowing out. oh, wait. how fast does the earth rotate? ok, 10/10 for slowly slicing the planet in two over 12 hours i would secretly swap out my workplaces coffee supply with decaf. the following week will be a lot of fun to watch as tempers explode as everybody dries out. but then i can change it back and watch all the 10 cup a day drinkers slam a massive dose after their tolerance has worn off.

5/10 nothing we are not already doing. I invent an automobile engine that runs on a free alternative fuel. the tears of puppies. The accelerator pedal activates an electrode implanted in the pain centre of the brain of the puppies in the fuel cage. Comes in various power levels ranging from one toy poodle puppy power all the way up to an 8 pack of week old saint bernards. Industrial engines are exclusivly powered by dalmation puppies. Hundreds of them. The engines cost less than a family dinner to buy. Ill make a loss, but its a public service. Now lets talk about that whale oil powered ftl engine in the next lab over...

i dunno, looks more like a flying saucer landed... sorry, been watching too many conspiracy videos recently. OP, if the MIB have not silenced you yet, i hope you have discovered a new one, that would be so cool!

because of idiots who are also clever.

I would like to point to the chinese room arguement here, but with a twist. Most folks take it as an arguement against the possability of strong ai. but i see it as supporting the possibility. If a program behaves as if it is conscious, does it matter if it actualy is? If it behaves as if it has human like emotions, does it matter if it doesnt feel them? If a program is so good at pretending to have a human like mind that most people interacting with it feel like its intelligent and consious, does it matter that inside the room is just a cpu executing sequential bits of code? For that matter, proove that your mind isnt a chinese room made of chemical reactions. Point to your consciousness.

Its a cleaning product made by nasa. Like windex, but for space. Right? Elon musk? Aftershave or purfume? I dont know, i dont keep up to date with those girly things.

well, green on the parts we see. may be yellow where they haven't tanned.

Try scansat.

You are right. I misplace the decimal on 1.1% when multiplying it out. Thats embarrasing.