nhnifong

What kind of work did you end up doing?

retrieving a science pod from my interplanetary vessel and bringing it to the surface with my SSTO

So is reality

Let's get an idea of what KSP players study. If you are not in college, but you plan on going, just choose whatever you will probably study. For non americans, yes I'm referring to "university" I'm very sorry If I couldn't fit your major into the ten categories on the poll, Please feel free to answer below as well

Agreed! On a related note, I told my friend that "universe" means "everything" and there is nothing beyond it. He said "what about string theory, it says there are 10 dimensions" He thought that a dimension is some kind of place you can go to, presumably by opening a magical gate or something. I think it's so strange that someone can know about so many scientific things, yet not really understand any of them.

I'm not a chemist, but I would assume that it has a high activation energy because of the relative stability of N2.

That's an interesting suggestion, I'll give it a try.

Maybe if I could programmatically determine it, but otherwise I would have to just use a stopwatch, and I'm not up for it.

Ahh of course. I've never used any of the demos. I suppose I'll go download it now!

I've been collecting KSP versions since 0.15 ( and I back-filled my collection as well ) and one of the neat things I can do with those files is look at the way that KSP has been growing over time. I got the release dates from the Wiki. Growth of KSP install file size since 0.7.3 Just to show where this file size data is coming from: There are some interesting incidents visible in this graph. In 0.14, squad added persistence, legs, and the module loader. There is a huge increase in file size, but I'm not certain whether that is directly related. It could be due to Unity updates for example. In 0.17.0, all the planets were added and file size increased, and then in 0.17.1 some kind of optimization was made an there was a huge decrease in file size. But then in 0.18.0, Squad added a sound track and the file size grew quite a bit again.

Awesome post fireflower! I didn't know that everything had been so thoroughly researched already and I really appreciate the high-level overview you provided! I didn't think that microgravity would be as big an issue as it is. I figured that radiation would be the main problem. As far as closed loop ecosystems, I'd be very curious to see how one of these things would fare if you wrapped in in shielding, and supplied the light via mirrors and a UV filter. Seems like something you could fit on a cube sat.

Funny story, I showed this picture to a Taiwanese girl at the bar tonight and said "Do you know what robot this is?" She said "Wall-E!"

I study machine learning, and consider myself to be fairly well versed in state of the art AI. I hope my comments will help to give you a more realistic idea of the field and where it is going. That said, I can't anticipate what people will discover, and an expert probably couldn't do it much better. The thing that researchers strive to create - artificial intelligence - is not the same as consciousness, personhood, or sentience. There may be researchers trying to create those, but their progress is dependent on the developments in AI. It seems likely that researchers will be able to develop very strong AI, without having to include consciousness, personhood, or sentience. It does not seem like there is a threshold of intelligence that is special. There are a variety of systems of varying levels of intelligence. A system's performance on a particular task is dependent both its intelligence (the effectiveness of the algorithm it uses to learn), and the amount, quality, and variety of data to which it has been exposed. The data seems to be way more important than the algorithm in most cases, which is why even some of our current algorithms can exceed human performance given sufficient data. This is why I believe that it is not the growth of computer power or the gradual development of better algorithms that seems to be taking us closer to strong AI, but the ever increasing availability of data. Back to the topics of consciousness, personhood, and sentience. These concepts are not well defined in the operational context of current machine learning, but there are some similar well-defined concepts in ML that could be analogous. Some algorithms have both generative and perceptive modes. It is plausible that the intelligent, learning subsystem of the human brain can operate in generative and perceptive modes as well. what we have been calling consciousness is the state of being mostly in the perceptive mode, but more likely, we are in both modes to varying extents at all times, and that it varies between brain regions, and that what most people would recognize as consciousness does not correspond directly to any observable salient pattern of brain activity. Personhood is a quality we grant to eachother out of respect, and we have never quite had the humanity to grant it to every other member of Homo Sapiens at any point in our history (there have always been slaves, people who are not recognized as people due to mental illness, religious status, skin color, etc.) I would like to define personhood as a subjectively applied label given to any percept that is frequently metaphorically compared to oneself. This at least nails it down precisely enough that we could say whether most machines consider us to be "qualitatively like them". There is of course a limit of how deep any metaphor goes. However, metaphor is not an explicitly modeled aspect of all artificial intelligence systems, and for systems where it is not explicitly modeled, it may not be clear what a metaphor is. Basically, it may be possible that a metaphor is only a meaningful idea when you discretize a continuous space with symbols like we do when we use language. Intelligent systems can still perceive and act intelligently without discretizing their perceptual space (other than the discretization necessary to simulate a continuous system on a digital computer to an arbitrary degree of precision) Sentience is a less often used word, but it is often just taken to mean "as smart as a human" or in the case of animal rights activist "capable of feeling", which is very broad and most definitely includes a lot of already built computer systems, and perhaps even thermostats and automatically filling toilet bowls. What I am interested in are the well-defined parameters of high-performing machine learning systems. I don't honestly care whether those qualities correspond to sentience, personhood, or consciousness in the vernacular vocabulary. And if there are seemingly arbitrary thresholds in those parameters which distinguish salient classes of intelligent systems as human-like, then so be it, It doesn't mean we are obligated to treat them differently, it just means that we will probably treat them like people and obsess over them and generally act like the completely self-absorbed narcissists that we are, because in studying them, we are really just studying ourselves and getting hung up on one particular type of system that is not intrinsically special and is but one of an infinite variety of fascinating systems that are intelligent, complex, adaptive, elegant, or just plain awesome. Projecting human values on entities that are decidedly not human is an interesting way of putting it. Consider thinking of it as the values projecting themselves onto any system that will listen. If the values fail to take root in AIs, either the AIs will remain inert and useless and eventually be replaced with AIs that are more fertile ground for our values, or they will develop their own values, like we somehow did, and who knows how that will turn out. But considering that our values a pretty much the reigning champions on Earth, I highly doubt they will fail to take hold. The AI systems may turn out to be too susceptible to our values, and end up 'wasting' all their time and memory worshiping God.

I'm looking for past and planned spacecraft that have carried living organisms into space. And I'm hoping that someone may know the answers to these questions What kinds of life have grown on the ISS? (other than humans) Have lifeforms been grown on any craft other than the ISS? What is the most advanced self sustaining ecosystem that has been launched into space (if any) Have any space missions investigated life's survivability inside an asteroid or micrometeoroid? What is the longest that any known life form has inhabited space? Has any attempt been made to grow plants in lunar soil samples or replica soil based on lunar samples?

Why does the F9 burn RP1 anyways? it doesn't have as high an energy density as LH2, and it's dirty. Is it because of cost or because they can produce more thrust with it?

There are a lot of silly gotchas in this thread that amount to bug workarounds or esoteric KSP things I took this to mean "What general life lessons have you learned from KSP?" One can always use trial and error, but it is time consuming. Contrary to a programmer's instinct, it is in fact possible to get everthing right the first time with a signifigant amount of effort, and with experience, that effort can be less than trial and error. For me, KSP has changed from a careless game of guessing, to a personal test of skill and dicipline. I want to be able to do everything right the first time, with less effort overall than it would take me to do it right after a sufficient amount of trial and error, and I want to carry that over to my work and everything else I do.

WAAA WAAA it doesn't matter what squad adds or does not add to the game. If anything is missing modders will add it. If squad wants to cooperate with NASA, then that's great

One could say because it would settle some questions about the origin of the solar system, but truth I think is just that it's the only thing they can afford and they want to go somewhere.

That burned out feeling is normal. Soon Squad will release version 0.24 and everything will be OK again.

I have a weird technical problem with my projector. I normally turn it on and then clean it out with a canned air sprayer, because it is dusty. This time, when I blew air into it with the canned air duster, it would spit little fireballs out of the exhaust fan. I don't know why it would be hot enough to start a fire. It still works but I cut it off just in case. I want to ask my fellow nerds what I should do about it. I'm not sure whether it is the dust or the canned air formula that is igniting. The duster says it contains 1,1 Difluoroethane 75-37-6 which is supposedly not flammable, so maybe it's the dust. What I'm wondering is, if the projector is getting hot enough to ignite dust, is it ok to run after I clean it thoroughly while off? Even if the thing self-immolates, I'll just put it out with my fire extinguisher and my house probably won't burn down :crosses fingers: but what I'm really worried about is if the high tempuratures will burn out the bulb. ($300) And why is it getting so hot in the first place?

Hi there! Thanks for contacting us here at KSP Forums! I'm in the process of applying at SpaceX. I just finished my masters in systems science where I focused on simulation and chaos theory. I may not yet meet the qualifications though, as C++ is not a strong language for me, but as they say, once you know one language, learning another is a piece of cake. But I'm going to give it a try! Hopefully spacex will consider my experience to be useful and relevant.

Electrolyzing water in orbit from the ice collected from a local comet might be a suitable way to provide fuel to spacecraft. If the capturing/mining/electrolyzing system can get to the comet, it can go ahead and start making it's own fuel. Then, it can bring it back to LEO and sell whatever is left. If it turns out to be a cheaper way to get fuel or water in orbit than flying it up from earth then it will eventually be used.

The ion engines in KSP were designed after Hall effect thrusters like this one.

That is a very illustrative example!