-Velocity-

Society is slowly evolving towards one where we care more about environmentalism and sustainability, but it's a slow process. If you don't believe me, then you have no idea with what reckless disregard people 100 years ago treated this planet with. The question is, will society evolve to the point where we are good stewards of the Earth before it's too late? Also, is society capable of evolving to the degree necessary? I think that it is, but I think the changes necessary might break forum rules about discussing religion. I guess to put it nicely, people need to start caring about Earth, life, and conservation the way they currently care about God.

Logic? Where is it? 1) So because there were plant and animal species that adapted to a warmer Earth long ago (and these species are now extinct), and the Earth is now cooler, with a new, different set of species adapted to a cooler planet, then if the Earth turned warmer again, none of these new species would go extinct? /facepalm 2) No one seriously believes that global warming will make Earth uninhabitable by itself. Even in the worst-case warming scenario, Earth remains a relatively verdant cornucopia of plants and animals. It's just that a few species around now might not be in the picture then. 3) The above assumes that Earth life does not face additional negative effects from humans. 4) The above is not a valid assumption. Global warming's real cost comes to human civilization. It could create some very expensive problems (cities swamped and even entire countries that must be relocate due to rising sea levels, for example), and reduce our ability to produce the food necessary for our overpopulated species. That in turn could lead us to take some very negative environmental actions to sustain ourselves. Humanity's reaction to global warming is likely to be more damaging to Earth's life than global warming itself.

Why would we give them "souls"? Well, it might be important for an MI to make moral decisions in some cases, whether by exigency or by designed purpose. I also think humans have a hunger to create, and a loneliness that desires contact with alien minds. We'd create sapient, sentient, and moral MIs because we want them. I'd think we'd also have MIs that were more job-focused. Kinda like slaves, except that they WANT to do their work, because they get enjoyment out of doing the best possible job of it. If we felt guilty about their rights, they could possibly be offered a programming change. In the end, how are humans a lot different? Most humans get stuck doing jobs they don't like; the lucky few who have a job they like- did they choose what they like? No- I know what I like, but I have essentially zero control over that. So a machine intelligence that could be re-programmed to like different jobs would be luckier than us, in fact. Anyway, I think it might be important to have a large number of free, moral, life-respecting machine intelligences. The machine community could thus be self-policing, and would weed out and re-program (if possible) those individuals who showed harmful tendencies. The only real counter to an evil super intelligence is a bunch of good super intelligences. I guess I must not be all optimistic-however. Of course, once you we have free super intelligent machines, we lose control of any ability to control them. We'd have to hope that they did not evolve over time into a society that did not respect life. I don't think that would be something we'd really have to worry about- biological life and machine life can survive in entirely different environments, and there's enough resources to go around for everyone in the solar system.

Sorry then, it sounds like I was reading too much into your question. It sounded to me like you were trying to open up the beginning of a (IMO) frivolous debate, which is why I responded the way I did.

What's the relevance of the last 400,000 years other than showing that Milankovitch cycles are enough to overwhelm any warming caused by a 80 PPM CO2 increase? Your charts aren't even up to date, we're now sitting at over 400 PPM CO2- 120 PPM higher than any other interglacial. So we're in uncharted territory. Heck, 400 PPM (and I'm sure it will get much, much higher) might even be too much for the Milankovitch cycles to overwhelm.

Just because you defined something in many ways doesn't mean it's hard to define- it actually means quite the opposite. There's a lot of characteristics that an intelligent agent may exhibit that makes it recognizable to us. Clearly, you're trying to make like there's some difficulty in defining what intelligence is. I don't buy this at all. Those definitions are not mutually exclusive. A true intelligence will fulfill at least some, if not all of those descriptions. Furthermore, we already have a good idea of what intelligence is by studying animals here on Earth. We can study the self-aware, tool-using, problem solving, non-human mammals and birds. Note that birds convergently evolved their intelligence and self-awareness. Their intelligence is recognizable to us, despite last having a common ancestor with us like 330 million years ago with a brain like the size of a pea. Heck, there's even fairly convincing evidence that a bird (Alex, an African grey parrot) not only learned and spoke English, but knew what the words meant. So birds are pretty close to alien minds, but we still can recognize their intelligence and even communicate with them, in rare circumstances. What is NOT intelligence is some machine that has been pre-programmed with a myriad of responses to cover just about anything. It turns out that the machine itself is not intelligent and self aware (it's the programmers who are, they did all the thinking). Such a machine would be easy to distinguish from true intelligence, even if you couldn't look inside its workings, because it would not be able to come up with suitable answers for every situation and question that a true intelligence would. The sheer amount of programming required in a machine that only has pre-programmed responses (requiring millions of years of programming and nearly infinite memory for the nearly infinite responses) would mean it would be easier to create an actual intelligence.

Click this link. Read the first paragraph of the first result.

As I said in a previous topic like this one- AIs will never be intelligent, because by definition AIs are artificial intelligences. A machine that is actually intelligent should be referred to as a machine intelligence (MI). Secondly, sentience is the ability to feel, not intelligence. So you could create a sentient MI that was as intelligent as an insect. Sapience is probably the word you guys are looking for, as it refers to intelligence on the level of a human or above. The holy grail in machine intelligence research is thus a sentient and sapient machine intelligence.

As long as physicalism holds inside the brains of animals, then sentient MIs are possible- and there is absolutely no piece of evidence to contradict the assumption that physicalism does not hold inside the brains of animals. The parts of our brains that actually make us smart may not be that big either. Look at Magpies- birds that have brains just a tiny fraction the size of ours, and yet they are self-aware and have complex social interactions including signs of empathy and grief. To me, it seems really odd that the intelligence of an animal is related to its brain-to-body mass ratio. Supposedly, more neurons are needed for bigger bodies, but why does body size (while holding brain size the same) affect a species ability to think? You could pack 20 Magpie brains into the brain of an elephant without increasing its volume and energy requirements much... so why aren't elephants super-intelligent instead of just modestly intelligent? One would expect that the ability to think a certain thought simply takes a certain amount of "neuronic" computing that is independent of the body size of the animal. A huge elephant ought to be able to easily afford the comparatively small amount of energy required to host a super human intelligence. It's like finding that the speed of a desktop computer is related to the ratio of the size of the motherboard to the size of the monitor.

For decades, we've known that the best way to move an entire planet would probably be to send asteroids on flybys. To move the planet inward, you have the flyby give the asteroid a gravitational assist from the planet. This robs a tiny bit of the planet's orbital energy and gives it to the asteroid, boosting the asteroid's orbit and moving the planet inward slightly. To move the planet outward, you have the flyby apply a gravitational brake to the asteroid, which transfers orbital energy from the asteroid to the planet, boosting the planet's orbit by a tiny bit. The problem is, it takes millions- maybe billions- of asteroid flybys. So it's a project that takes thousands or millions of years. Obviously, since the asteroids are not destroyed, you can reuse them, so the idea of moving a planet with asteroid flybys is at least theoretically possible with the materials we have on hand here in the solar system. That said, if your goal is to cool down a planet, there are A LOT cheaper ways to do it. You simply fly a large star shade directly between the planet and the star in the L1 Lagrangian point, which blocks some fraction of the star's light. There have even been papers about doing this with Earth in the near future, should climate change get bad enough. Besides the engineering challenges, supposedly there are some issues with changing the amount of sunlight that various latitudes receive, which could lead to a different set of climatological problems.. After doing a quick calculation myself a few months back though, I'm not entirely convinced that these supposed problems are valid, but it was close... That said, if it really were a problem, you could conceivably build a truly massive, partly transparent starshade (probably with carbon nanotube ropes for rigging and tension applied by a small amount of spinning). Such a star shade would be incredibly big, but not theoretically impossible, and it would block an equal amount of sunlight at all latitudes. Anyway, I don't think we'll ever move planets, it will always be cheaper to use star shades to cool down too-hot planets, and greenhouse gases to warm up too-cool planets.

What do you mean by this? They were always useful.

I think we're all in agreement about the best way to do this. However, if the world already has life of its own, then we should question if it's right to do it. If we find a habitable planet with life, and kill off all that life to make way for our own, that makes us the evil, xenocidal alien invaders of our worst science fiction nightmares. The question would be, how dead does a world have to be before we'd be justified in supplanting its life with our own? Does the world have to be completely dead? If we discovered microbes on Mars, does that morally preclude us from terraforming it?

I did a search for this and couldn't find it. Can anyone tell me why, since 0.24, I only receive a fraction of the science I'm supposed to get when I transmit an EVA or crew report? I have PLENTY of electricity (literally, thousands of units, and transmitting only uses a tiny fraction of that), and I am using the highest gain antenna. So when I do an EVA or crew report, it will say I can recover 100% of the data by transmitting. Say I'll get 60 science. However, when I transmit, most of the time I get like 14. Or 20. Or some random fraction of the amount I was supposed to get. So afterwards, I can do the same crew report or EVA again, and it will say, this time, I'll get like 6.4 science, with 100% transmit value. So, I'll transmit, and instead get like 1.3 science. It doesn't always happen either. Back when I was doing this career's round of Mun exploration, I found that if I used the monopole antenna (the straight one), I'd have this problem, but if I used the cylindrical antenna, I'd get all of the science I was supposed to get. WTH is going on? The only mod I use is Mechjeb.

Huh. Where did you find that? I actually thought that there was no "in space near" Gilly. I'd be happy to be wrong.

Similar to what I just said in another thread, I think that the public getting upset about Pluto being a planet or not shows that they are not being taught astronomy correctly. They need to learn about all the objects in the solar system, not just the few we arbitrarily call "planets". ALL the interesting and large worlds need to be covered. More time should be spent learning about Europa or Titan than is spent learning about Mercury or Uranus, for example. And yet, more people know what Mercury and Uranus are than know what Europa and Titan are. Astronomy is not being taught correctly, because of this misguided fixation on "planets".

There may be some merit in the idea of just admitting that trying to draw a line anywhere is so arbitrary as to be unscientific. Astronomers and anyone educated in astronomy understands that there is no clear line between planet and non-planet. In a very real sense, the term "planet" means more to the general public than to astronomers. I sometimes do astronomy outreach to elementary school students. Because of the curriculum in this state, I usually end up talking about the planets. When I do, I find that the students have heard more about dead, boring worlds like Mercury, or objects we know very little about (like Pluto), than about living, interesting worlds like Europa, Titan, or Enceladus. What happens is that when astronomers arbitrarily pick which worlds are "planets", then that leads to the general public being educated on those objects to the exclusion of other, more interesting objects. I usually spend most of my time talking about the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, since the kids were never really educated on them. Maybe it would make things better if we switched from focusing on planets to focusing on worlds, which would include all the planets plus the large moons, Ceres (maybe Vesta too), Pluto, Eris, Makemake, maybe Sedna, etc.

The moon exception was in the original definition I made. However, personally, I'd be perfectly fine saying that ALL objects beyond a certain mass are planets. Even if they orbit a body much more massive than them. Our own solar system proves that moons orbiting gas giants are very interesting worlds of their own; there is far more interesting stuff going on on Titan, for example, than on Mercury, even though Titan is only about 1/3 the mass of Mercury. We don't end up with simple rules because we demand that planets have to fit certain preconceptions. But mass is a single number. And, if we really wanted planetary sized moons to not be planets, then it would be simple to come up with rules about whether an object is a double planet vs. a regular planet + moon. Here's a very simple one- just use the ratio of masses. For example, if a moon was less than 1/20 the mass of the body it orbits, then it's a moon, but if more, and both objects exceed the minimum mass for planets, then you consider the system a double planet. Yes, you could theoretically end up with Neptune-mass moons orbiting Jupiter+ mass planets, but that's the price you would pay for the insistence that moons cannot be planets.

Why should its position in the solar system be relevant? I assume you are talking about the "clearing its orbit" part of the argument? Even if you want it to be relevant, how do you draw a nice clear line? If there was an Earth-mass planet orbiting out way out, perhaps in an orbit similar to Sedna but with perhaps a higher perihelion, it wouldn't encounter other bodies frequently enough to "clear its orbit". By IAU definition, it would not be a planet. The origin of the body might be relevant if we could easily determine it. How do we tell if a free-floating 8 Jupiter mass object was born in a star system and ejected, or just formed on its own out of gas? Furthermore, how do you tell if a 8 Jupiter mass object in orbit around another star formed more like a stellar companion or more like a planetary companion? Origin should not be considered because it's too hard to determine. When choosing the definition of a planet, it's important to choose defining characteristics that are easy to determine, otherwise your definition is worthless because you'll never know if an object you're seeing is a planet or not. Nothing is more simple than a single number.

There's been a lot of debate over where we should draw the line over planet and dwarf planet/minor planet. The IAU's definition of planet in 2006 left much to be desired. Determining from afar whether an object even fits the parameters set out by the IAU can be difficult, and the parameters themselves are tough to define exactly. Numerous alternative definitions have been proposed, such as any object orbiting the Sun and in hydrostatic equalibrium (round). However, the hydrostatic equilibrium definition runs into problems of its own. For example, how round is round enough? And even more troubling, there's the fact that lower strength materials, like ice, will assume a round shape at a lower mass than higher strength materials like rock and metal. For example, Vesta, the second largest body in the asteroid belt, has a mass of 2.6x10^20 kg, but is very much NOT a round body. Meanwhile, Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is very much spherical but only has a mass of 1.1x10^20 kg- less than HALF of that of Vesta! Personally, I find the hydrostatic equilibrium proposal very unsatisfying for this reason. Ever since the IAU's definition came out in 2006 and throughout the subsequent controversy, I have been perplexed- why hasn't someone simply suggested a mass range for planetary bodies? Mass is easily measured through gravitational effects, and its the most basic property of any astronomical body. Some may counter that setting a mass range is "arbitrary", but the whole debate of where to draw the line between planet and non-planet is about nothing more than where to draw an arbitrary line anyway. ANY definition of planet we come up with will be arbitrary. At least if we decide a planet is a planet based on mass, then we reduce the problem down to just a single number that is usually quite easy to measure. That single number is also the most basic of all astronomical properties. Also, our own solar system neatly allows for a clear line to be drawn between planet and non-planet based on mass. The mass of Mercury, the least massive of the current eight planets, is 3.3x10^23 kg. The next most massive known body orbiting the Sun is Eris, at 1.7X10^22 kg- about 1/20 the mass of Mercury (Pluto weighs in at about 1.3x10^22 kg, just a little less than Eris). (In contrast, Earth weighs in at 6x10^24 kg.) So, we could draw the line at 10^23 kg for the planet-vs-dwarf planet line. It is important to note that several moons weigh in excess of 10^23 kg (Titan, Ganymede, and Callisto). But since they do not orbit the Sun, they would not be considered planets. Of course, it doesn't have to be 10^23 kg, that's just one suggestion. You could try to put the dividing mass around the range where objects assume a spherical shape (10^20 kg?), but you run into the "problem" that you'd have non-round bodies that are considered planets, and round bodies that are considered non-planets, so if your goal was to segregate round and non-round bodies, you'd fail. Anyway, does anyone know what the reasons are that a simple planetary definition based on mass has not gained more traction? It seems far and away the most sensible way to define planet vs. non-planet, and I can't understand why it's not floated around more.

It takes A LOT of processing to make uranium fuel. Now you want to do that on another planet or an asteroid? That's tough. If you're going to make a fission reactor that is to be refueled by in-situ mining operations, you'd probably be A LOT smarter to utilize thorium, and a thorium reactor. In fact, there are a lot of thorium proponents out there that say in general, a thorium-based fuel cycle is vastly superior to a uranium fuel cycle (in terms of safety, lower quantities of nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, and abundancy of fuel), and that the only reason we don't have thorium reactors instead of uranium reactors is because thorium reactors cannot easily be used to breed fissile material for nuclear weapons. Creating nuclear weapons was a priority back in the 40s and 50s when we had to chose whether to develop uranium reactors or thorium reactors. I'm sure that someone out there has pointed out flaws in some or more of the arguments of the thorium reactor proponents. The only one I am aware of is that thorium reactors actually could be used to breed uranium-233 (and the fissioning of U-233 is where the majority of a thorium reactors energy output comes from), which could in fact be used as a nuclear bomb... but I don't know how easily that could be done. Regardless of how superior thorium reactors are over uranium reactors, the point remains that if you're mining asteroids for your nuclear fuel, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to mine thorium than uranium. Thorium-232 composes almost all of naturally occurring thorium, and it's your fuel in a thorium reactor. Uranium-235, the fuel required for uranium reactors comprises only like 0.7% of all naturally occurring uranium (the majority of natural uranium being uranium-238), requiring you to create massive uranium enrichment plants in order to acquire usable fuel.

Why does everyone think we're getting cargo bays? Is there some secret area where new features are announced and listed?

Fused quartz/silica only goes up to like 1500 C. For taking pictures, perhaps you could use a pinhole camera that's uncovered and recovered very quickly? But with any picture taking system, you're rapidly going to lose resolution due to refraction effects caused by thermal and pressure gradients. It would be like trying to take a picture of something through the air above a hot grill, only 100X worse. Anyway, it's silly anyway, I'm pretty sure humanity will never be able to go deep enough into Jupiter to take pictures where it's hot enough for the air itself to glow, and even if it were possible, how would the images get returned? The only way I could imagine we could ever achieve something like this would be if a special field of very high temperature electronics were to develop- electronics that functioned at 1000 C or more. We are actually slowly developing such electronics but the field is in its infancy. There is only a small demand too- and small demand means SLOW development rate. Maybe, 1000 years from now....

Yea, at some point it would have to go dark, since Jupiter does not glow in the visible spectrum, so we know that light cannot penetrate to (or escape from) the depths where Jupiter is hot enough to glow in the visible spectrum. But eventually, it would get bright again... VERY bright.

Could you have a fuel flow symmetry problem? I don't know what your rocket looks like, you simply posted a picture of the payload.

Uranium is highly chemically toxic, besides being a low-level radiological hazard. I kinda thought that the toxicity of uranium chemically was actually worse than its radiological hazards, but I could be wrong.