Green Baron

I cannot judge how serious this is but to me it seems like a step towards reality: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/nasa-finally-admits-it-doesnt-have-the-funding-to-land-humans-on-mars/ tldr: NASA chief for manned spaceflight says that there is not enough money, technology and manpower for sending humans to Mars in a foreseeable future (30's/40's). A single expendable SLS launch costs a billion funds, they say. Not even the moon is within reach at that price. That is as much as the TMT or 0.7*E-ELT cost, which are planned for 50-75 years of work (upgrades in between of course).

I don't remember the old System V but on linux that is too generalized. Not all the files actually have a representation on disc, but most do. In principle everything is a file and opening a socket means passing a file descriptor (but it is some time ago that i last crashed a pc offended the kernel doing such things ...) man 7 socket man 7 fifo tty connections are definitely files. My x11 knowledge is too limited but i would be surprised if the connections were not represented through files, thinking of what nasty things one can do with them ... Edit: tcp connections are files in /proc/net/tcp, i would be astonished if other protocols would get a special handling ... but i can be wrong. I am wrong, only the queue handles are listed there ... i will probably soon be taught ... :-)

Oh, are we playing "who remembers the good old days" again ? ZX81- rubber keys and a fried out 60cm black and white tv crt. That is 1,5cm/char :-) Couldn't afford an Apple ][, but later one of the clones.

Instead of asking you could have written one ;-) I admire Epox' work and it amazes me that he caught a remarkable event of a star. I can't judge whether it's a (periodic) fluctuation or something more impressive. It seems to be a star and inside our galaxy so it is probably no nova or even supernova, but this is just a guess. I personally do not have the time for nightly telescopic activity right now and for the coming weeks so i sadly cannot contribute more than sporadic theorizing. @Epox75: i really like it. I find the picture very well done, colours, sharpness, contrast and all. I would be very content if i managed something with that quality :-)

My nephew and i finished the old lego star destroyer a few weeks ago and now i have a slight aversion against burlings. Nevertheless i started looking for more interesting stuff for long winter evenings in the future and found this: Partlist: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/announcements/pdf/ann14071b.pdf Manual: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/announcements/pdf/ann14071a.pdf Anybody interested ? I see one could order single bricks, it'll probably be relatively expensive ...

We lack definitions: sentient, intelligent, even artificial could be questioned. The whole thing whether one can kill a robot is a philosophical question right now, maybe will become a legal one in the future. Politicians will grab the problem and make it their own. Today there is no artificial intelligence, only programs that partly simulate states and processes. A good chess or go program doesn't make it "intelligent" but of course marketing of certain companies has a different view. Lack of definitions lead to a free use of these words in fiction. At least vertebrates have the potential of being "sentient" with the necessary receptors, conductors and signal processing and in many countries today it is forbidden to kill or torture an animal, though the laws aren't always enforced. With animals it goes like: if they become a menace to human property they are killed, even extinguished if the kill accidentally was the last one of its kind. That is a hint to what will happen to ai if it will be going to rise its nose too high. Ethics are probably of little concern then, as they probably won't be when ai will be built. It'll probably be a process with a lot of excitement in the beginning. Lot's of "probablies" here .... :-)

You are right, @YNM. The conditions near your place are different from those around Madagascar. The latter is surrounded by ocean crust, it is effectively a small continent of its own. Java otoh is only isolated because of a relative high stand of the sea level, otherwise it would form a connected landmass with Borneo, Sumatra and even be connected to the Asian continent; if sea level was 50m lower. Towards Australia the depth of the sea isn't more than 300m. But towards the south and east depths quickly drop to 5000m as well, just not as steep as around Madagascar. The 1000km plate might fit on and between the islands with a moderate drop of 60-70m in your area :-) "C'est pas la mer a boire" french "One doesn't have to drink the sea" meaning "it's not impossible" Well, it is practically ...

Just browsed through this week's Science issue and now that ... man, that's hard stuff ...

You can look at the chart viewer on navionics.com. Seafloor depth is a function of age, as the floor cools over time as it drifts away from a middle ocean ridge where it began towards a continent and thus becomes denser and sinks into the earths lithosphere. The oldest seafloor is near the continental shelfs. It doesn't get (much) older than 180-200my as it becomes so dense that it starts to rip off and be subducted again (**). Local anomalies not counted (trenches at subduction zones which can be deeper or lifted lithosphere over hotpsots which can be above sealevel) a seafloor of late jurassic/early cretaceous age is 4000-4500m deep. So, around Madagaskar, the floor drops quickly (tens to one hundred km off the coast) towards 4000m and deeper towards the east, less towards Africa probably because a few km of sediments from the near continent are deposited on top of the the oceanic crust. As 5000m represents roughly the maximum depth of oceans(*) on earth you'd have to swallow the whole ocean away to fit a 1000km diameter plate, center on Madagaskar, totally on dry land there. May i suggest to put the object in the Sahara desert ? You'd only have to sweep a bit of sand ... :-) (*) yeah, can be slightly deeper Edit (**): very generalized view. Mainly for oceans with an active ridge, like the Atlantic.

... when you've starved before you got a grip on the handrail.

We are trying to find more planets, don't kill them :-) You haven't given up, good news ! Are you aiming for f/10 or thereabout ? Good success !

We are talking about different things, i think. You are talking about a simulation program that runs in a machines memory and processors for a limited time, at most the uptime of the machine, i was talking about machines that could "evolve" for millions of years to repair the damage of a frozen body (had those scifi nannites thing in mind or robots that build other robots). Genetic algorithms are quite old, but they are only simulations, they are not real as the chemistry in an animals body or the principles of evolution that form organisms. They may have become more complex in the past and will do so in the future, but the stay virtual. Machines in reality do not evolve, the program inside might within the constraints of the programmers, but on power or functional fail the fun is over. Current computers with such programs last a few weeks, months at most and are then used for something else.

That is not mutation, that's simple decay. Something goes kaputt over time when not maintained and the entity ceases to function. Different thing. Mutation is a small change in the plan to form a slightly different organism over generations. Selection then judges whether that little change is a little more fit (can reproduce more easily) than the other generation. A neural network does not copy the brain, it is a technological concept that tries to model parts of the pathways as observed in a brain, but it is much more basic and simple. A brain can change the paths and learn completely new things, a program, as complex as it may be, can't. Also, evolution works over the generations and not inside a single organism, that is called modification (well, it is of course part of an evolutionary process) and allows a single organism to adapt to training, learning, food intake, etc. A good example, while the go program can only play go (i had similar discussions 20 years ago with chess), the human player can step away and play chess, or write a program, or write a poem, or paint a picture, or write things in a computer game forum, or cook and enjoy a good meal with friends. Things a computer can't and is not to be seen that it can some time soon. The respective company calls this "AI" because of the same reasons IBM once called their deep blue thought program "AI", but it is not. Or the I in AI is defined very conveniently :-) No, machines can't mutate :-) because they cannot replicate and submit their "genetic" code to little arbitrary changes (variations in this context)) that can be sorted out via the "fitness" criteria through the (changing) environment (selection). Any changes a program would simulate would follow a pattern and that's not evolution then any more. As to the machine learning, maybe in a few decades we have computers that can simulate the activity of a human brain (does someone know how that really works ?), but, like every simulation, they'd have to prove that switching 100 billion neurons really leads to something "intelligent". I doubt so, until proven wrong. :-)

A satellite shall be put into orbit that reflects sunlight and shines with an apparent magnitude of -10, as reported in science & spaceflight forum. That will render the whole night sky unusable for any kind of observation, except short wave and radio, for the time of the overflight. I find this highly annoying. I doubt they get any "data" we don't have yet and i seriously hope that no consumer article companies do similar nonsense, but i do imagine already how a few braindead marketing managers rub their hands. Hough ! gb p.s.: sorry for being so offensive, this is of course nothing personal !

This ! (posting in thread to complain now)

Very little and marginal, with a whole lot of goodwill. But maybe somebody can boost the thread by calculating possible stable configurations of such a system. Initial publications on Trappist-1 could serve as a base :-)

*lol* Learning c++. Just trying to find the causes for a segfault in my "program" ...

Oh, i perfectly understand transhumanism. It describes seasonal wanderings of semi-sessile groups. Edit, no that's translated transhumance :-). Was hijacked lately for the marginal science belief in of augmenting humans. There is no AI for example, only programs that do what the programmers told them. Reality imposes limits scifi does not have. But i admit that i am less professional in scifi ... Real machines don't mutate and replicate, they can only be programmed to do something. And they must be maintained. Anorganic material isn't even suitable for a self stabilized process of evolution. And even if, an evolution does not follow a cause (to keep a body alive), it just takes place. If you program it to follow a cause it will fail when conditions aren't favourable any more. An evolutionary process has a different fabric than nanites crawling out of a scifi book cover :-) Again, scifi is ok, but reality imposes limitations that will most probably never allow fantastic concepts that are nice to read and watch. We cannot make such machines. And we cannot freeze an animal body without badly damaging or killing it.

This is as old and frequent as (sci)fi. A perfect copy is a perfect copy is a perfect copy. Only a few scifi tv series of the last 50 years missed out on that one, a lot of authors have uttered their thoughts more or less profound. I'd kill both and resurrect one. Otherwise you had to clone the wives families a swell :-) @Steel has a good point, i like this one: modern philosophy and cognitive science indeed follows similar rules as natural science. Leading philosophers (am thinking of Sir Karl Popper) demanded the postulate of empirical falsification. That's a bit against the trend in the times of cosmology and exoplanets, but it's at least good to have it in mind. Peace :-)

"Pseudoscience" goes in the right direction :-)

On a higher abstraction level cultural implications (concept of marriage, polygamy, ...), gathered life experiences, personal expectations, etc. play a role as well. Talking of large numbers the invoking of emotions are widely used in the modern media to transport all sorts of messages. Searching "emotional biochemistry" brought quite a few links to me. I cannot judge how reliable they are, but they might calm your needs, if i may say so in this context :-)

Well, in our imagination and ignoring natural science anything can be done. I fail to see how any technology works over the mentioned time scales. Nanotechnology is not and will not be a cryptic cure-it-all. Concerning "vitrification": are there any sources that such a thing exists, i mean besides sifi and "institutes" killing poor pets of the overcredulous for money ? "artificial nutritional substances" contradict the concept of "stasis". Either the body is in "stasis" where it doesn't need such things (physically impossible above zero K) or it's not in which case it slowly (decades to a few hundred years, shorter with the help of bacteria) ages or weathers away. Anyway you turn it, without a means to constantly repair the damage any conservation of biology will fail. But that needs technology, energy, a maintenance crew ....

Yep, but this method bears the risk of disappointment, if you either accidentally hit c you go to the end so fast that you wouldn't notice it; or you stay a little bit below c then still the universe would last an infinite time(*) and flee before you ever faster. (*) current consensus ? Anyway ... subject to change without notice ...

Yeah, that's all clear, though some of these fridges weigh have a mass of several tons. What I meant, as the fridges grow older more of them can fail, producing clouds of fridge remains that could fill up the girdle or at least make the gaps smaller. Probabilities for collisions don't go down, it's not getting safer. Speed differences can still be a few hundred m/s for parts on slightly elliptical orbits, as caused by accelerating parts of a former fridge through rotation/explosion/whatever, enough to make a working fridge join the trend i think.

So, Kessler syndrome up and running ?