Shpaget

Interesting how the main reason to destroy Cassini in the atmosphere of Saturn is to prevent contamination of Titan and Enceladus and interfere with possible life there. What about sentient cloud beings floating in Saturns atmosphere?

I'm not the author of the videos. The description, however, says it was done in Octave.

I must admit, that thing (I almost said she) is climbing the uncanny valley.

Somewhat old, but should still be relevant.

Recently I started using Obvibase. It checks all the marks you set, except the "No internet or server functionality". It requires internet connection (I'm using google drive to access it). It is free, except for sharing. There is a workaround for that, though. I use the same google account on all computers that I need to access the database on, so technically, there is no sharing since all the computers are the same user.

How are you going to attach pieces together? If only 70%+ iron is allowed, does that mean glues are out of the picture (soldering as well)? Welding such a thin foil is impossible.

How thick is that steel foil you have? If it's thin enough for a 1-1,5m wing span glider to stay below 100 g, then it must be orders of magnitude too thin to be of any structural value. Like others have said, in order for a wing to be strong enough to hold up a plane, it needs to have some thickness. Otherwise it will just flop around. Why do you have to use the steel foil? Can't you pick some other material? Take a look at F1D models. They are ultralight rubber band powered planes that are usually under 1 g and the best ones fly for more than half an hour (record is 45 minutes, IIRC).

The article is an amazing piece of journalism. It makes a vague statement in the title, then proceeds to provide absolutely no actual data to substantiate the claim, except a link to an article behind a pay wall.

10^29

Such a computer would turn into a black hole long before it grew to the size of a galaxy. As such it would not be feasible to extract any meaningfull output from it. It would be the worst supercomputer ever.

Ok, it seems there was a glitch in our coms. I thought you were suggesting the usage of lasers for sending instructions from Earth to the probes. I thought we've already established just how not feasible sending data back from probes to Earth is. Power requirements still sound a few orders of magnitude outside the "gram scale" platform capabilities.

How do you send the transmission back?

With the 20/20 hindsight, it's always easy to find ways to fix stuff and even prevent bad things, but if you are in a position where at one moment you have a full control over the satellite and the next it's not responding to your commands, but doing its own maneuvers that are pushing it deeper in the doodoo, then you can just sit back and watch it spin itself to pieces. Yes, the satellite should not have made attitude corrections without consulting multiple attitude sensors. That is Redundancy 101. However, the situation appears to be a chain of minor issues that just happened to occur at the same time, making the situation unrecoverable. If you've ever watched any "Seconds from disaster" episode or a similar documentary, you'll see striking similarities. Almost every aircraft/ship/train accident in history was a result of multiple relatively minor issues each of which could have been easily fixed and none of which would have been sufficient to cause the accident on its own. Only in combination of all of them did they lead to disaster. Finally, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. While the damage is not insignificant, it is mostly just financial - luckily no one was injured or got killed. A new satellite can be launched, new algorithms for redundancy will be written, new procedures put in place. Science is not done just by succeeding. Failing is just as important. This time around, it's computer science that is getting a level up.

You mean this?

One does not exclude the other. Still, it looks like CGI.

If you decide that a certain fundamental law of physics no longer aplies, than it is not reasonable to discuss any other aspect of physics. Wave your magic wand as you please and have the situation behave as you like.

There are multiple issues that arise from the small size. Cameras and radio antennas require certain physical size to be of practical use. The laws of physics dictate that. You can't have a telescope with a tiny lens that performs well. Diffraction limits the minimum size. The same goes for antenna. To achieve optimal performance (and that would certainly be necessary with such a small platform), the antenna needs to have the physical size that is matched to the wavelength of the radio used. But even if that was not an issue, consider this: The New Horizons probe, which recently showed us some pretty pictures of Pluto, uses a 2.1 meter dish antenna. Pluto is between 2.3 and 7.5 billion kilometers from Earth. This distance is in the ballpark of what this little interstellar probe is supposed to travel in one day. (0.2 c = 300 000 * 3600 * 24 * 0.2 = 5 billion km). So even if they launch a probe each day and use them as relays, they need at least New Horizon type radio equipment to transmit pretty pictures back home. That is, of course not considering the fact that the receiving end of the New Horizon transmissions is not a tiny probe, but an array of 14 antennas all at least 34 m in diameter.

A battery, camera, electronics, radio... no way to squeeze that into 1 gram.

Whoa! What material they propose to make the sail out of?

Sending a probe every day? So you need to accelerate to 0,2 c in less than a day. That requires acceleration of roughly 70g, which would not be a problem if you needed to do it briefly. Chemical rockets can do that, but we are talking about light sails!

I don't see how a "gram scale" probe (whatever that means) can be capable of transmitting a signal powerful enough for our ground stations to interpret, from light years away. I'd also like to see their concept for attitude control.

That's exactly what they get, should they choose to read the image description. NASA regularly publishes technical data next to their pretty pictures.

Isn't that the mechanism thought to be the major factor in the loss of Mars atmosphere?

The part where you say a programmer can only make a program as good at a certain task as the programmer himself. A programmer can make a program that will easily outperform the programmer. Well, yeah, that's what we're talking about. A human that is an average, or slightly above average chess player can write a chess software that can reliably defeat a grandmaster. I claim that same goes for any other game or task. Perhaps not in the present, but we're not talking about present, we are giving the computers (both hardware and software) unlimited development time. Recently, they developed the AI that can defeat a top level Go player, something that was not possible a decade ago, mainly because the comparable chess softwares were using brute force to find the best moves, while that approach did not work for Go, since the number of possible games is so much larger. A different approach to programming was needed, however, nobody working on the Go software could beat the guy the software eventually won against.

That is entirely wrong. I assure you I am not a programmer of any sort, but I am 100% sure I can make a program that can count much much faster and more accurately than I can, and I am quite good at counting. I've been doing it since I was a kid. In a game of counting, I stand no chance against a program written by a layman.