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Help needed to build the colony on Moon, Mars and the Dyson Sphere
- cryptoz 5y agoSuper cool and insane ambition, but I don't get the part about the Dyson sphere. I don't see that as a guaranteed requirement to accomplish the goals set out, and it's going to be insanely controversial. That part seems like a solution looking for a problem, to be built mostly because it's 'cool'. But I don't want to rain on the parade of long-term, crazy-ambition in space, so I think this is pretty awesome overall. But planning unilaterally to build a dyson sphere will definitely make you a lot of enemies on Earth. Otherwise, godspeed.
- grandrew 5y agoThank you very much for support!
- Animats 5y agoThis seems to be some kind of planning tool that uses Python and a database to do something logistics related.
- grandrew 5y agoYes, behind the scenes it lowers the high-level logic of Python to predicate logic, uses RETE on that predicate logic to do the fastest possible JOIN operations on the tables, and uses machine learning to extract heuristics from the task and data to enable feasible monte-carlo search for valid plans. All that means you input the rules for the "game", and it finds the way to reach the goal, no matter how complex the interactions or data are inside.
- SonOfLilit 5y agoSadly, from a lot of experience in tech, one man projects that have "build self-aware AI" as a step in their roadmap have a tendency to underdeliver.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- secondaryacct 5y agoIt s a crypto company, this increases the scam factor a tad.
- grandrew 5y agoWe are not a crypto company. Moreover, being as clean and open as possible is the only way to win the battle of the good guys vs. the bad guys in supply chain.
- SonOfLilit 5y agoCan you say more / link to more info about these "bad guys in supply chains"?
- grandrew 5y agoFirst, you can just google for "logistics is a shady business" If you want to be more specific, you can google for "carrier haulage tax evasion" - this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Supply chain is mixed with shady practices for tax evasion, bribery, laundering and all sorts of shady things at all levels that "compete" with actual process optimization. Combined with overall opposition to automation this incapacitates any effort to make the process efficient cuz it's hard, it "steals jobs" and not easy money.
- SonOfLilit 5y agoThanks. For the first query I only found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/logistics/comments/6mvptr/why_are_so_many_trucking_companies_shady/ https://www.reddit.com/r/logistics/comments/6mvptr/why_are_s... For the second query I only found this, which discusses something that to my understanding isn't happening yet? https://fiata.org/news/press-releases/2021/8-july-2021-2.html https://fiata.org/news/press-releases/2021/8-july-2021-2.htm... Gotta say, I expected to find a lot more, compared to industries I know are shady (compare to googling "vpn shady"). I don't think I have a specific model of what shady practice are common in the logistics industry.
- contingencies 5y agoFirst enhance on-earth supply chain efficiency. Then worry about space. Purchasing and sales departments really should be eviscerated and replaced with semi-autonomous systems in most cases. Get that done and you'll have more than enough money and cred to tackle space. My ideas @ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protocol/master/draft-ifex-00.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco...
- andrewjl 5y ago> First enhance on-earth supply chain efficiency. Then worry about space. These are not mutually exclusive. Moving heavy industry to automated facilities in orbit is not unrealistic in the coming decades. It does require massive investment in space tech.
- bravogamma 5y agoWhat are some supply chain inefficiencies you've identified?
- contingencies 5y agoA few... lack of standard transaction identifiers, fixed hours of business with bespoke holiday schedules, use of humans, use of telephones, physical travel to trade shows, printed literature, cold calling/emailing, manual price checks, incapacity to provide actual volume or delivery dates prior to purchase, manual pricing, non-transparent pricing, manual provisioning and re-entry of client and supplier information such as corporate identity, tax, banking and addresses; bait and switch, tedious inefficient reputation systems, lack of machine-readable digital specifications, lack of 3D models, lack of (translated) documentation, material/regulatory/supplier certificates and associated documentation that is impossible or tedious to verify... one could go on.
- cardamomo 5y agoAmong these, "use of humans" stands out.
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- colechristensen 5y agoA tad ambitious, missing a few intermediary steps. Try solving logistics problems for say… a sandwich shop… before going on about “all of e-commerce” much less a Dyson sphere. It’s not really obvious that this is at all necessary or the bottleneck. Or that running a planned economy ruled by AI is a goal to celebrate.
- grandrew 5y agoWe're starting with small Amazon sellers. And it's just what I believe is right, the technology must take over the logistics and stop the supply chain gangs from thrashing the planet with waste. We aren't getting anywhere with the status quo.
- sammalloy 5y agoInstructions unclear. I’ve converted the entire Solar System to paper clips instead.
- schappim 5y agoBut did you release the hypno drones? Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- iamcurious 5y agoOnly by reading the plan, he reminds me of an early Elon Musk. It has the first Paypal then Space X vibe. I wonder how many other people have similar dreams, but can't deliver cause their parents aren't rich. Edit: added middle sentence
- ceejayoz 5y agoJust because "reusable rockets" got laughed at by the existing space industry doesn't mean every laughable idea is secretly feasible. "My new database will make building a Dyson sphere easy" is a slightly... loftier claim than "we can probably land rockets and reuse them".
- iamcurious 5y agoI see what you mean, but I wasn't referring to Space X accomplishments but its ambitions. The "we can probably land rockets and reuse them" is what it delivered so far, the claimed ambitions (laughable or not) are about making humanity interplanetary.
- ncmncm 5y agoAmbitions are free. Capability is expensive. Achievements are valuable. Ambitions do not predict achievement.
- ceejayoz 5y agoThe number of steps between "I wrote a quirky database" and "I built a Dyson sphere" are substantially more numerous than there are between "I got reusable rocketry working cost-effectively" and "I used those rockets to put people on Mars".
- lostmsu 5y agoWhile I agree with you on the guesstimate, surely you can't exactly know the number of steps in question.
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- vorpalhex 5y agoWho knew an infinitely recursive self learning true AI was just a few python files away that haven't been updated in 5 months?
- grandrew 5y agoWe're a tiny team that so far only got the confirmation that it works. The focus right now is to make the first batch of customers happy, and continue to spend effort on the metaplanner. Btw, I advise you to take a look at the metaplanner's code. It's the definition of the planning task for the planner. So that the planner can learn to solve the planner's (it's own) task. It is leveraging the HyperC core that sits in a separate repository in the same github org. I heard the approach was circulating in the AI planning academic circles but no one had put it together as many academically-uninteresting details needed to be cared for first. That's exactly what we did.
- lostmsu 5y agoHm, actually that's exactly how I'd expect the first infinitely recursive self learning true AI to look like. Until it rewrites itself in Rust for better performance.
- LiquidPolymer 5y agoI can spare $6 for this project. What do my children get in return?
- michaelbarton 5y agoNice intro video on what may be realistically required to build a Dyson sphere: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A By Kurzgesagt, all their videos are excellent and informed by the literature.
- ncmncm 5y agoThere will of course never be a Dyson Sphere, or anything even vaguely reminiscent of it. Instead, long before anything of such a scale would be conceivable, we will have hydrogen-boron fusion for unlimited energy, and moved industrial operations out to the Kuiper Belt, where the truly valuable commodity -- cold -- is abundant. Suns and planets are for extreme rock-banging primitives.
- grandrew 5y agoAlternatively we could merge with the machines and all go virtual. But I am to believe that part of the humanity will remain explorers and will want to go beyond our star. That's where the physics kicks in. There simply isn't enough energy that can be mined and extracted from minerals.
- ncmncm 5y agoWhere do you hope to get your energy, beyond our star? This is, presumably, after you have fused all of Neptune and Uranus. I guess you could start in on Saturn, or Planet X.
- grandrew 5y agoThere are several options how to make harvested energy work for interstellar travel 1. Just beam it with a huge laser to the spacecraft (google for several proposed projects already in development and plans for launch) 2. Store it onboard the spacecraft and then use, with multiple options and different levels of today's technology feasibility like creating a small spinning black hole or creation of exotic matter for warp drive
- PaulHoule 5y agoI want to send something to a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that can extract the volatiles and turn the coal-like substances and stony substances into large plastic (Kapton!) and metal films. These could be used for solar collectors, solar sails, sunshades. It pays for itself by manufacturing space sunshades to the Earth-Sun L1 point that get their own their own power. The "something" is probably a factory that builds a factory that builds the factory, at least twice you face a situation like building a ship in a bottle except you are in the bottle. It probably imports microcontrollers by the ton from the Earth. It's an interesting question: do you send people who can interact with the system but need a place to live or do you run it all by remote control and face 60 minute or more round trip delay requiring that the thing make mistakes and recover autonomously.
- ncmncm 5y agoKapton requires a great deal of hydrogen to make. L1 sunshades would cement global catastrophe, as unrestricted accumulation of CO2 would further acidify ocean shallows eliminate the base of the ocean food chain.
- PaulHoule 5y agoMy guess is that some CC asteroids may have generous amounts of hydrogen. Any reasonable plastic has a lot of hydrogen in it, kapton is harder to make than PE and PET and requires nitrogen which is more of an unknown in terms of a availability. I think some asteroids might be rather gassy and might require devolatilization before doing anything else and that is awkward because you are going to be at your bottom in terms of equipment inventory, particularly storage tanks. As for ocean acidification it is a real problem but the severity of what we’re up against means we shouldn’t leave solar geoengineering off the table. The fact that one party could do something very dangerous in fact might break the ‘collective action’ problem. I presented on this idea at a seminar on geoengineering and I was accused of trying to build a Dyson sphere, I said "no, there is not enough mass in the asteroid belt to cover the Sun but you can build something pretty big, possibly a human habitat much "bigger" than the Earth in land area."
- devoutsalsa 5y agoImagine Asgardia building a Dyson swarm, owning it, and then becoming a greedy landlord (swarmlord?). When you can’t afford the rent, the yeet you into space with a trebuchet.
- cellis 5y agoEveryone who cannot contribute becomes polycarbonate material for the mirrors!
- aspenmayer 5y agoStack ranking escalated quickly lol
- aspenmayer 5y agoStarring Monty Python and the Flying Circus
- grandrew 5y agoHyperC is not affiliated with Asgardia aside from that one of the HyperC's founders being a long-term supporter
- galacticaactual 5y agoAppears to be a scammer scamming a scam.
- agentultra 5y agoHow about something smaller scale like food waste. We have maybe 50-ish productive farming seasons left before soil is over taxed. If you can get locally grown food to people’s tables with minimum waste for a decent price that ensures everyone is fed that would be far more impressive than failing at Dyson spheres. Maybe we can find a way to regenerate the soil while we’re at it. That’s a hard supply chain issue and would have a much greater impact on our survivability. Or good luck with building a self aware AI that can solve all of our problems or whatever.
- farmin 5y agoThat is not true about the soil. Areas in Europe have been farmed for hundreds or more years and still productive.
- NateEag 5y agoI believe OP is referring to the impacts of climate change rendering farming unsustainable.
- mod 5y ago"before the soil is over taxed"
- toss1 5y agoI'm thinking he's talking about running out of phosphate [0]. Phosphate is a critical plant nutrient and mining it has been essential in increasing yields in the last century - it's literally sustained the population growth. The known supplies are running low, and it washes out of the soil on an annual basis so needs to be replenished to keep up yields — or we need to find other sustainable sources. The 50 years correlates with other (very) rough estimates of remaining supplies available to use for the current agricultural paradigm. [0] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/phosphorus-is-vital-for-life-and-were-running-low https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/phosphorus-is-...
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- Aeolun 5y agoWell, nobody can fault them for not being ambitious enough.
- grandrew 5y agoAndrew here, the founder of HyperC. Thank you very much for your feedback, and especially for your attention and time to look at the note. Our current and today's focus is, of course, not to send the sattelites to the sun to build the Dyson sphere but rather to automate sending average commodities from China to Amazon FBA. Everything else comes after. And you're right, the supply chain mess isn't caused by the absense of tech (although this does contribute) but rather by the "dark" forces in the logistics world that would prefer to keep things messy and hard to trace. The entire logistics thing has historically always been a shady business. But big data is coming for the dark guys. So the immediate plan is to build the model of the "black box" of logistics by analyzing the data we can actually collect, then use the combination of technology and HyperC's reputation-leveraged optimal financing offers to beat the shady schemes out of the market. That itself could be overly ambitious, but this is what I believe is right.
- alasdair_ 5y ago“ Build the MVP prototype of commercially usable, no-compromise, pure A.I. engine that learns to solve any formally defined task” So, PROLOG from 30 years ago then.
- grandrew 5y agoYes, PROLOG with modern Python syntax and mostly imperative flow, commercial database experience instead of "build everything yourself", and ML-based heuristics that are learned on the fly instead of whatever hardcoded logic the particular interpreter had. This is sometimes referred to as "Automated planning and scheduling" or simply "AI Planning" in academia.
- pontifier 5y agoI feel the future is in the stars, but it needs to be a future for everyone. This doesn't feel like the right group to get behind.