Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Landing from relativistic speed would be a massive engineering problem, since you won't have a laser de-celerator on the other end. And landing on a planet would seem to require a rocket, which cannot be lightweight.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
Show us how to build machines, create factories, mines, chip fabs, etc., smelt steel, and so forth out of those bacteria and cells and you might have a point.
So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit for science fiction.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
It is very unlikely indeed, because we are not trying. We have a world set up so as to allow a few people to accrue wealth they couldn't possibly need, by impoverishing everyone else. Where are they going to make money out of this?
The older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.
Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America?
The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already).
Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold.
To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for about a year in the UK for posting an inflammatory anti-immigration social media post which was deemed illegal under UK law, and is currently being threatened (https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2157938/lucy-connolly-pris... ) with being returned to jail for posting social media content attacking the current UK government.
This is hardly the only example of the UK, or other Anglophone democracies, criminalizing speech with actual prison time. I'm not happy with UK laws trying to block VPNs under the pretense of blocking porn for minors either.
Can’t even incite murder anymore without being put in prison; it’s political correctness gone mad!
There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech. The UK has actual problems with free speech (particularly the Online Safety Act), but this isn't one of them.
In whatsapp:
> She said that if Ofsted were to get involved, she would tell them it was not her and that she had been the victim of doxing
Bit more crime, there (she worked in a regulated industry around kids; lying to the regulator isn't allowed).
> She went on to say that if she got arrested she would “play the mental health card”.
PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU WILL DO CRIMES.
(I'm always amazed that so many criminals end up having these incriminating conversations on WhatsApp and similar; have they never read the news or watched any crime drama? In a vacuum she'd probably have got off!)
> There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech.
Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.
What she actually said was:
> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff. Sorry, most of the world doesn’t punish angry hateful off the cuff comments with prison. You are an outlier.
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f** hotels full of the ba**s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it."
Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.
Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.
How do you justify this assertion of yours? I would contend that the most efficient method is written down and shared widely in a doc. Otherwise, everyone is relying on their memory of what was spoken. For anything non trivial, I would want it written down.
Reading is significantly faster than listening.
Writing is significantly more precise than speaking.
You're gonna have to write information down so that it's not lost anyway.
Yes however speaking allows flexibility in communication, dynamics that text does not support and, crucial if there is no alignment, nonverbal communication.
It is much much easier to build trust in person, which is important for efficient teams.
In the end, both modes have pros and cons, but there is indeed a lot of research indicating remote teamwork is much more challenging on many dimensions
To me all of this reads like gibberish but I'll admit that it's likely just me (and "my kind" of neurodivergent people). Far as dynamics go (ability to interrupt) voice chat solves the problem fully as far as I'm concerned. Non-verbal comms are lost on me to the point that I don't know what you even mean, and I simply cannot trust anyone who is close enough to me to potentially punch me...
Again, granted -- I'm an outlier, but that also means that I can just operate at my full capacity when I work with text and cannot when I work "in person".
I don't think it's possible with players like the one Mux uses (I assume is using the underlying video technology in the browser).
Some developments in this space over the past few years have been the ability to interact with the actual frames of video being rendered and to output those into a canvas tag. This is under the Web Codecs API.
For a while I was working on a video review tool for eSports teams which required the ability to have frame perfect annotations. I got around the inability to perfectly pause on the same frame by using screenshots of the video which were overlayed over the video but with the codecs API, you don't actually need this. It opens up all sorts of features like being able to play videos backwards for example.
Compared to Australia where the government attempts to plan and control every aspect of commercial business, Japan's laws are a real breath of fresh air. Melbourne's had laws so strict that they've done a bang up job of ruining the local live music scene. Minimum numbers of bouncers, licenses that don't extend past midnight. Our big dance parties have been shifting the start times earlier and earlier because of absurd curfews. Some bars have been grandfathered in because they had licenses before all this started but it's impossible to obtain new ones. Unless of course you are the casino in which case citizens can spend the weekly food money on slot machines at whatever hour of the day they choose.
In Japan I was in a city during a local jazz festival. Entire streets shut down, bars with stalls set up on the street selling drinks. Kids intermingled in the alcohol drinking area and you know what? People behaved themselves and had a great time.
Australia, lacking any real problems to solve is like a modern immune system attacking the host because it can't find the invaders it should be taking care of.
> Melbourne's had laws so strict that they've done a bang up job of ruining the local live music scene.
And Perth ... the zoning here seems to work in a way that suburbs don't get shops, restaurants and bars integrated into them at all. Daycare centres are bloody everywhere, apparently they are really big business, but there's no community pub anywhere round here. Contrast to the UK where pubs are just sorta interspersed with houses in a lot of places.
People say one of the reasons Perth has fewer pubs is because we don't have the pokies so can't support so many, but I think it's also because poor planning has made it a real effort to get to one.
These arguments give me the same vibe that the reelecting trump arguments had prior to the last election. Obviously Trump is operating on a much faster timeline than climate change but I'd expect the same behaviour (i.e. all the sceptics vanishing) once we really start to feel the impacts of it and arguments like these lose the last final shreds of plausibility.
I can't quite figure out the angle of why either. Are these the astro-turfing bots you hear so much about?
How about I try this:
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Jolo rice.
Thinking that anyone who disagrees with you isn't real sounds concerning. You should see a psychiatrist about that, in case it gets worse.
Anyway. You say skeptics will vanish when we "really start" to feel the impact of it. When? Pick a date. Man up, commit. Because everyone who picked a date in the past had their beliefs invalidated. The skeptics win, every single time.
March 2000. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
You ask why. How about, because truth matters. How about, because the mitigations climate Kool-Aid drinkers demand are economy-cripplingly expensive. Those two alone are good enough reasons for anyone.
Notice how everything I say comes with sources and facts, and every reply like yours is an ad hominem concern troll? That's how. If you want to win arguments you have to step up and respond to facts.
There are very long-term culture wars, from before the term was invented. Consider:
* Hippies. They were great in many ways, but also fucking stupid, man.
* The New Age movement of the 90s, obsessed with dolphins and crystal healing and mystic composting toilets, and anti-human except when the humans sit in drum circles. Actually these days I've come to quite appreciate the music of Enya. But this cultural movement was also fucking stupid and very enamoured of performative environmental concerns, which fed into a sort of industry of selling concerns to New Agers. There was a lot of guilt tripping involved for anybody who wouldn't recycle, or whatever. So naturally that made me highly suspicious and unreceptive.
* The climategate email scandal of 2009. This one actually swayed me in favor of climate scientists, because I got to see what the emails from inside the echo chamber looked like, and to see how badly they were behaving when motivated by their careers and status, and actually the answer was "not all that badly", and the massaged figures, though shameful, weren't all that massaged, and their attitudes, though biased, were actually fairly sincere. But they were part of a biased "us against them" sort of struggle, where they wanted belief.
So you get ongoing skepticism just because of, you know, backlashes, pushbacks, people rightfully wanting to be independent thinkers in the face of other people who apparently want them to conform mindlessly. The idea that it might all be a popular delusion is plausible because there's always been a lot of popular delusions around, so you've got to respect analytical doubters, if they truly are analytical.
I'm sure someone is about to jump in and tell you why you're doing it wrong, but I'm in a similar position to you. I spent the last few days using the AI to help me pull together evidence for our ISO audit and while it didn't do a bad job, it was rife with basic errors. Simple things like consistently formatting a markdown document would work 9/10 times with the other time having it ignore the formatting, or deciding to rewrite other bits of the document for no reason.
I'm a great lover of going to places with no real plan and just wandering the streets finding stuff. Hong Kong is a great city for this. Have a general plan, e.g. visit the memorial to the walled city, but get distracted along the way.
Also watch Ghost in the Shell which is vaguely set in Hong Kong then feel the vibe when you're there.
Glad you agree!
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