Whether via spintronics or some quantum breakthrough, artificial intelligence and the bizarre idea of intellects far greater than ours will soon have to be faced.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120819153743.htm
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre87f15x-us-california-gmo/
Filthy Lucre will certainly destroy us all if we cannot even pass a law that makes food companies tell us what they are feeding us.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815131137.htm
One more step has been taken toward making whole body cryopreservation a practical reality. An understanding of the properties of water allows the temperature of the human body to be lowered without damaging cell structures.
Just as the microchip revolution was unforeseen the societal effects of suspending death have been overlooked completely.
The first successful procedure to freeze a human being and then revive that person without damage at a later date will be the most important single event in human history. When that person is revived he or she will awaken to a completely different world.
A new corporation in Alameda California is pitching space tourism and the old Alameda Naval Air Station as America’s next spaceport.
Tritonian Cruises is seeking funding for a study of tourist submarine operations under the ice of the Neptunian moon Triton.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21851-astrophile-the-o…ystem.html
Modeled after successful tourist submarine businesses in Hawaii and other Pacific locations, the excursions under Triton promise to be exciting for adventurers and profitable. When asked about the distances involved, company representatives dismissed any difficulties as trivial. “Besides,” one remarked, “the taxpayers do not understand anything about space if they think we can go to Mars, so we should get funding.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120814100302.htm
A couple months ago I was in the Seattle public library and overheard a pierced, tatooed, and quite smelly young man telling someone he was waiting for this F-d up civilization to collapse and hoping it would happen soon. The two most likely causes of such a collapse would be an asteroid or comet impact that would throw debris into the atmosphere and stop food production for several years, or a plague. A big impact or an engineered pathogen would be the extreme in this scenario and would not simply take us back to the stone age- it would render the human race extinct.
All the disenchanted Americans who look forward to surviving the collapse of the present world order might want to consider the less fortunate areas of this planet where there is no such rule of law or any agricultural or industrial infrastructure. North Korea has gone through the classic collapse cycle during recent bad winters and the government had to repeatedly deal with widespread cannibalism. It is one of those most perfect warnings where nothing could be more crystal clear to a race of intelligent and technologically advanced beings. And we ignore it.
Turn the sunlight off for a couple years in a row and everything we know would end because everything we eat would end. Think about it the next time you watch an episode of the Walking Dead or watch a movie like The Road. Not world war Z; world war C.
AI scientist Hugo de Garis has prophesied the next great historical conflict will be between those who would build gods and those who would stop them.
It seems to be happening before our eyes as the incredible pace of scientific discovery leaves our imaginations behind.
We need only flush the toilet to power the artificial mega mind coming into existence within the next few decades. I am actually not intentionally trying to write anything bizarre- it is just this strange planet we are living on.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813155525.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120813123034.htm
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-impact-crater-arctic.html
They found yet another reason to build nuclear interceptors to deflect asteroids and comet impact threats.
Sooner or later something is going to hit us. It could be like Tunguska in 1908 and destroy a city instead of a forest in Siberia- or it could be like what hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago.
Except just a little bigger and nothing larger than bacteria will survive. There is nothing written anywhere that says it will not happen tomorrow.
This essay was posted previously last year and removed and has appeared in abridged form in the European Space Safety online Magazine and can also be found on Yahoo voices.
Several dates are cited as marking the beginning of the space age. Sputnik, October 4th, 1957, Yuri’s day April 12th, 1961, and the first successful V-2 launch by the Nazis on October 3rd, 1942, to name a few. Some prefer December 21st, 1968, when human beings first escaped the Earth’s gravitational field on Apollo 8. When studying the events that allowed man to leave Earth, future historians may agree on a date not generally associated with space flight. July 16th, 1945 was Trinity, the first nuclear weapon test. Stanislaw Ulam, a 36-year-old Polish mathematician who helped build “the gadget”, visited ground zero after the test. Ulam later conceived the idea of propelling a spaceship with atomic bombs. Near the end of his life the eccentric genius stated the idea was his greatest work.
When considering nuclear propulsion, it must be understood that space is not an ocean, though often characterized as one. The distances and conditions are not comparable. While chemical energy has allowed humankind to travel across and above the surface of Earth, the energy required to travel in space is of a different order. Water, in the form of steam, was the agent of change that brought about the industrial revolution. Fossil fuel, burned and transformed by steam into mechanical work, would radically change the world in the span of a century. What is difficult for moderns to understand is not only how limited human capabilities were before steam, but how limited they are in the present in terms of space travel. The psychological limits of human beings limit space journeys to a few years. Chemical propulsion is not capable of taking human beings to the outer solar system and back within those crew limits. The solution is a reaction one million times more powerful. Nuclear energy is to the space age as steam was to the industrial age.
It’s the centennial year of the Titanic disaster, and that tragedy remains a touchstone.
The lifeboat angle is obvious. So is the ice hazard: then it was icebergs, now it’s comets.
But 100 years of expanding awareness has revealed the other threats we’re now aware of. We have to think about asteroids, nano- and genotech accidents, ill-considered high-energy experiments, economic and social collapse into oligarchy and debt peonage, and all the many others.
What a great subject for a Movie Night! Here are some great old movies about lifeboats and their discontents.
Tom Kerwick challenged my warnings by claiming that the observed longevity of white dwarfs, in spite of the constant bombardment by cosmic rays, provides a convincing safety argument regarding the currently running nuclear collisions experiment at CERN. This claim is important but, unfortunately, inconclusive as I shall try to demonstrate.
It is true that the collisions performed at CERN are relatively meager compared to cosmic-ray energies. The current, approximately 10 TeV collisions between equal-momentum particles at CERN correspond to 10.000 TeV cosmic ray protons hitting a stationary proton on earth or a white dwarf. The thousand-fold increase is a consequence of the relativistic energy-momentum law being applicable.
If 10.000 TeV (= 10 to the 16 electron volt) look like much, cosmic ray energies up to 10 to the 22 electron volt (a million times more) have been measured. However, if the latter are translated back into symmetric collisions of the CERN type, they are “only” a thousand times more energetic than CERN’s (owing to the square-root rule implicit in the mentioned law).
The fact that white dwarfs appear to be resilient to this bombardment is living proof that the cross section of CERN-generated miniature black holes (as well as their up to a thousand times more massive cosmic-ray generated analogs) must be minuscule. Specifically, their diameter must lie below that of a lepton (electron or quark). While an electron’s diameter is often supposed to be zero, neutrino absorption in solid matter yields a finite value (about ten to the negative 24 meter). In addition, the Telemach theorem guarantees a non-zero electron diameter.
Continue reading “The Cosmic-Rays-versus-White-Dwarfs Safety Argument” »
A new corporation in Alameda California is pitching space tourism and the old Alameda Naval Air Station as America’s next spaceport.
