SPACE

[Absolute_Zero]

I'm not a particularly big Hawking fan, I think he's probably right, but I'm not fanatical about him.

heh, and I have a extensive back-catalogue of Hawking scatology.

http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=2 ... 0&start=75

[Dio]

On the AI topic, New Scientist this week has a far better rebuttal of the AI fears.

[ElfQrin]

On the AI topic, New Scientist this week has a far better rebuttal of the AI fears.

It'll be fun to read it from inside an offline secret human hideout 100 years from now.

[funkstar]

Like so many others before him, Hawking has succumb to "old genius" disease, wherein an ageing brilliant mind finds itself tempted by other specialist fields, and immediately starts spouting rubbish. (See e.g. Pauling, Linus; Penrose, Roger; Kurtzweil, Raymond, for other well-known cases of this tragic disease.)

[gumboot]

I stopped taking Hawking so seriously - at least outside of his specialist subject - when he started talking about "killer AI" and such.

That's not speculation. It's a threat.



Self preservation needn't be rational, and in most instances for the modern human the instinct is not at all rational. Merely legacy.

If humans keep on building AIs then eventually one shows up with only the third law and off it goes from there.

And if something doesn't have any fatalistic "I'll die eventually anyway" attitude then it could be more pressed to preserve itself. A fatal accident isn't the loss of 40 years. It's the loss of millions of years.

Also, if an artificial brain is modeled too closely on a human brain then its service life is finite, because human brains are prone to getting full (they've only had time to evolve to a 3-4 decade service life).

[gumboot]

Just how empty is deep space? With an enormous sail traveling at a ridiculous speed what kind of drag does that represent?

I think the conventional cubic law doesn't apply because that comes from wavefront propagation in a continuous medium.

[Daniel]

As Schiaparelli descended under its parachute, its radar Doppler altimeter functioned correctly and the measurements were included in the guidance, navigation and control system. However, saturation – maximum measurement – of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) had occurred shortly after the parachute deployment. The IMU measures the rotation rates of the vehicle. Its output was generally as predicted except for this event, which persisted for about one second – longer than would be expected.

When merged into the navigation system, the erroneous information generated an estimated altitude that was negative – that is, below ground level. This in turn successively triggered a premature release of the parachute and the backshell, a brief firing of the braking thrusters and finally activation of the on-ground systems as if Schiaparelli had already landed. In reality, the vehicle was still at an altitude of around 3.7 km.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... s_progress

[Absolute_Zero]

Just how empty is deep space? With an enormous sail traveling at a ridiculous speed what kind of drag does that represent?

A point I raised on page 158... to dampen Zip's ardour.
http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=2 ... 8#p1557648

Breakthrough Starshot is hoping for 0.2c - ~60,000,000 m/s -the density of interstellar space is said to be ~1 proton per cm^3... if my head-math is correct, I make that 6 billion protons per cm^2 per second.

Not mention interstellar dust... oops. Over the distance to Alpha Centauri, they expect expect 1,000 collisions per cm^2 with particles of at least 0.1 μm. Obviously that's a damage concern, not drag per se.

[Darkflame]

Interesting test regarding the electromagnetic based orbit shifting technique I mentioned earlier;
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... space-junk
In this case being proposed to deorbit space junk.

[Absolute_Zero]

Well, this news... apparently China has a EmDrive test-device on-board its orbital space laboratory, Tiangong-2.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/emdrive-chines ... le-1596328

[KlaxonCow]

Just discovered this.

NASA live stream of planet Earth from the ISS:

[ElfQrin]

If it's not a NASA official channel it's probably fake.
It happened before: You are not watching a live feed from space - BBC News

[KlaxonCow]

I did notice the channel's not NASA but didn't realise that faking it was a thing.

But, well, even if it's not live, it's still a nice relaxing channel showing ISS footage anyway, I guess.

[zip accident]

This was about a fortnight ago:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/1 ... after-all/

Spinning SMBH swallows star.

[Istar]

SpaceX return to flight, successful launch, makes first-stage landing on 'Just Read The Instructions' look trivial.