10 ms·

When I was a boy in the Soviet Union in the late 80's, I picked up a book on computers. It was targeted towards children, and talked about a lot of different co

• digi_owl 10y ago
  Effectively, what we need to do is to get some kind of space resource rush going. Similar to what fueled the likes of the East India Company.
  • dalke 10y ago
    Yes, if only Mars were already settled and we could exploit the people there. The question has always been what resource, with 3He and platinum being the two main contenders. Otherwise, it could be like coal mining in Antarctica, or manganese module mining from the deep seafloor - technically possible, but not profitable, and certainly not enough for a new EIC.
    • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      > what resource Ideas. That crazy nuclear experiment you want to run? Fat chance in Montana. But on the far side of Mars? Why not.
      • dalke 10y ago
        Why would that interest a potential East India Company-like organization? The best I could come up with would if be it leads to a fuel production source, like the satellite at the end of Heinlein's "Blowups Happen". But we know of no such thing, nor do the economics seem to work out.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
      • dredmorbius 10y ago
        There is no "far side" of Mars. It's not tidally locked, to either the Sun or Earth.
        • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
          "Far side" relative to Mars's principal human installations, not to the Earth.
          • dalke 10y ago
            You still haven't addressed why there are "principal human installations" on Mars in the first place, much less why they are only on one side of the planet, or why the experiments require local human involvement.
  • jeffwass 10y ago
    You mean a private company that can legally declare interplanetary war?
    • jakub_h 10y ago
      Or just tell the government there's oil on Titan. ;)
      • bewaretheirs 10y ago
        There's lots of liquified natural gas on the surface of Titan.
        • jakub_h 10y ago
          Close enough, wouldn't you say? There are slightly heavier molecules to be found there as well.
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      And create addicts of the most advanced and ancient civilisation on the planet.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    In space, if you have a rock, you're among the ... well, let's see. There's about 1,000 atoms per cm^3 of interplanetary space. Let's say you've got 1 kg of silicate rock -- SiO4. That's 4 parts oxygen (atomic weight 16) to 1 part silicon (atomic weight 14). A kilogram is about 10^30 atomic masses. So we need 10^27 cubic centimeters, which works out to about 100 million km^3. The Earth has a volume about 16,000 times larger -- which means at the average density of interstellar space, there would be about 16,000 of those rocks you have in hand, or 16 tonnes of matter. Rather than the six thousand billion billion tonnes of matter actually in the Earth. We've met the space resource rush and it is us.
• golergka 10y ago
  I have vague memories of soviet grocery stores in late 80s/early 90s, but they certainly didn't have too much items to begin with.
• jwr 10y ago
  Humans are capable of incredible achievements. But it is unlikely we will achieve interstellar travel any time soon. We are too busy fighting wars (relicts of the stone age, really), improving our advertising technology, and just generally slacking around and looking good in the process. Thinking is hard. It's easier not to think too much.
  • carleverett 10y ago
    Humans were busy fighting wars, improving its advertising technology, and just generally slacking around when the internet was being born as well. It only takes a very tiny portion of this world's 7 billion people to be smart and motivated enough to create a breakthrough for the entire planet. That said, interstellar travel is an order of magnitude more difficult, so I agree it won't be happening very soon.
    • the_duke 10y ago
      I'm surprised that the internet so often comes up in the context of humanities great technical achievements. Don't get me wrong, a seamlessly interconnected network of computers has changed society and our lives tremendously. Technically speaking, it was not that remarkable of an achievement though. We already had some forms of remote communication for quite a while (telegraph, telephone, radio). With the rise of computers, connecting them was bound to be the next step, and not that much of a challenge as far as hardware and technology goes. The actual (technical) achievement was the computer.
  • onewaystreet 10y ago
    Pretty much all of the early rocket and space development was the result of WWII and the Cold War.
    • PeterisP 10y ago
      And pretty much all space development stagnated as soon as the interests of space exploration diverged from the applications useful for military. When we/they wanted to put the first satellites in orbit, that shit was serious and got done with extreme speed, due to obvious implications of nuclear-tipped ICBMs. After that we got excessive investments in spy satellites and communications technologies, which resulted in civilian applications such as GPS and satellite TV, but practical interest (and founding) for anything beyond geostationary orbit pretty much stopped after the initial dick-measuring propaganda competition.
• wtbob 10y ago
  With apologies to Cliff Stoll and his magnificent brain, let's not forget a pretty common perspective on the Internet from 1995: http://europe.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-ni.. http://europe.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-ni.... You know, he really wasn't wrong. Online news hasn't really replaced newspapers; it's just displaced them.
  • philwelch 10y ago
    During the golden age of newspapers, when a city might have a dozen different newspapers, every single one of those newspapers was an explicitly biased propaganda rag. The newspaper boom was an era when newspapers served as easily consumable combinations of news and entertainment designed to sell advertising space. The definitive heyday of newspapers was the era of yellow journalism. The business model of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, or Breitbart would be clearly recognizable to Hearst and Pulitzer. When TV and radio shrunk the newspaper industry, this gave way to local monopolies (or duopolies) of center-left and occasionally center-right newspapers that pretended to be unbiased, and eventually an oligarchy of center-left television networks. This left a large market opportunity, and as soon as the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, right-wing talk radio emerged. CNN proved the viability of cable news but kept the same center-left, pretend-impartial bias as the networks, so Fox News erupted on the scene. The supposed integrity and ethics of journalism, so far as they even existed, were a luxury that newspapers could afford because the decline of the newspaper industry led to monopolies. Just like Bell Labs was a luxury borne from the telecommunications monopoly of the mid-20th century. If you have a monopoly on the news, you have a vested interest in marketing yourself as unbiased (in order to have the largest addressable market). You do not have a vested interest in being unbiased. Aside from the natural beliefs and biases of the journalists themselves, there is also a structural bias towards sensationalism and another structural bias in favor of the establishment (or else you lose access). Even the desire to appear unbiased introduces a bias--unbiased coverage one disagrees with looks like biased coverage, so mechanisms like bias towards the center and "he said/she said" reporting about matters of fact show up. The 20th century golden era of journalism was an illusion. For all the faults of Internet journalism, breaking the monopoly alone was a public service. It's no longer possible for a sitting President to literally expose himself to journalists when he gets annoyed at their questions as Lyndon Johnson once did.
• madaxe_again 10y ago
  There's a whole host of "impossible" things that have been achieved: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions In 1957 Lee de Forest, father of the vacuum tube, deemed all space travel impossible - six months later, Sputnik orbited Earth. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8MAAAAIBAJ&pg=3288,6595098&dq=all-that-constitutes-a-wild-dream-worthy-of-jules-verne&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8M... Steam trains were deemed impossible, because people's heads would fall off at that speed. Finally: No Wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
  • yen223 10y ago
    There's also a whole host of "impossible" things that haven't been achieved - time travel, faster-than-light travel, heck, even lunar colonization. Sometimes, you just have to wonder whether it's even possible to break our current understanding of physics.
    • peckrob 10y ago
      > lunar colonization. The other things are impossible or might as well be, at least based on our current understanding of physics. The reason lunar colonization hasn't happened is not because it is impossible but because there's just no compelling reason for us to colonize the Moon yet. Nothing is preventing us from doing it other than not having a good reason to expend the capital and do the engineering work. If we find something on the Moon that we need and can't get on Earth, we'll colonize the Moon. Really, the only somewhat good reasons I've heard for doing it at all is as a test run for more ambitious things like Mars. Otherwise, the Moon is just a dead, almost completely airless worldlet that is not really all that interesting beyond scientific exploration.
      • thatsamoon 10y ago
        The moon is extremely interesting because it is seismically dead. Its core has cooled and solidified. This means we can create with existing technology all sorts of useful industrial structures hidden away below 500 miles of basalt. From that perspective, the moon offers a relatively cheap insurance policy for humanity. The moon could house hundreds of billions of humans, immense defensive weapon systems, and in uninteresting enough resource wise to be passed over by anyone else out there
• SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  On the other hand, there are hard limits in physics and the speed of light is only the start. In general, Exponential curves of progress or growth are not unbounded, and are really just the lower part of a sigmoid curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
  • madaxe_again 10y ago
    In that vein, Newton and Kelvin both "proved" that heavier-than-air flying machines were physically impossible. That belief held for hundreds of years, and likely put many off even trying. Einstein said that nuclear fission was impossible, before Fermi promptly proved him dead wrong. I'm not saying that we're wrong about c, but we don't know what we don't know.
    • dalke 10y ago
      Which is why Stross ended with: > Anyway, the point I'd like you to take away from this is that while it's really hard to say "sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible", the smart money says that it's extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances ... You wrote: "Einstein said that nuclear fission was impossible". Do you have a reference for that? The closest account I know is described at http://www.doug-long.com/einstein.htm http://www.doug-long.com/einstein.htm : > Among those concerned were physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. But Szilard and Wigner had no influence with those in power. So in July 1939 they explained the problem to someone who did: Albert Einstein. According to Szilard, Einstein said the possibility of a chain reaction "never occurred to me", altho Einstein was quick to understand the concept (Clark, pg. 669+; Spencer Weart & Gertrud Weiss Szilard, eds., "Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts", pg. 83). but that wasn't about nuclear fission per se but of a chain reaction. Also, how was Fermi involved? Fission was "was discovered on December 17, 1938 by German Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann, and explained theoretically in January 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission .
• gutnor 10y ago
  Technology is one thing, and the article has basically assume 2 order of magnitude better than anything that is currently somewhat achievable. But really, Earth has still millions of years of habitability, so really the limitation is not spending 200 years to send a probe and a few thousands in a space ship. The key limitation here is obviously political stability, and in that area progress are counted in hundreds of years. We need something that fit within a tiny fraction of a single human life, because any plan longer than that is highly improbable, not because of physic, because of human.
  • cstross 10y ago
    Bingo. See also: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/institutional_longevity.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/institut...
  • radu_floricica 10y ago
    > We need something that fit within a tiny fraction of a single human life This can be worked on from two directions. I'd be shocked if we didn't manage to make any progress into slowing down old age. With a 120 year old lifespan and the perspective finding things even better when you come back, people may be willing to invest 50 year into this.
  • bhickey 10y ago
    > Earth has still millions of years of habitability The lower bound is probably 600m to 1bn years. By then the sun's luminosity will have increased enough to eventually boil off the oceans. To get over this hump we'd need to sequester or condense atmospheric water vapor. That'd push our planetary survival time out to about 3bn years.
    • iwwr 10y ago
      We would think that by such time people would have figured out artificial solar shading to keep the planet at a nice stable temperature for a long time. This could even be decades-away technology.
• dTal 10y ago
  Wow, there are some pretty hilarious howlers in that article. My favorite is "Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople." Be careful what you wish for, eh? He also misses the insight that while the internet as a whole is uncurated (and that's a good thing), nothing stops people from creating curated resources within that framework. For comparison, it took me ~3 seconds to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar (highlight the text "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" in the article, right-click, 'search on Google', boom direct answer straight from Google itself). Although if you'd responded to his at-the-time perfectly reasonable objections to internet publishing by informing him that, just over a decade later, we'd invent special beach-portable computers with sunlight-readable screens for the sole purpose of reading electronic books, and people would actually buy them, you'd probably come across as overoptimistic.
• Gargoyle 10y ago
  "Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." I really like that there's an ad just under that sentence to subscribe to Newsweek, which is now online-only.
• maitredusoi 10y ago
  +1