91–100 of 168 posts
I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.
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I just gave this a go. It's amazing, thank you for putting it on my radar. At first his speech impediment makes it harder to follow, but 5 minutes in you're used to it and you're just riveted by the content and the clear communication style. This is quality stuff.
I guess it’s more fun to dream about the world millions of years in the future, but wouldn’t we gain so much more if we spent all of our energy trying to optimize acquiring knowing more rapidly in the next few decades? For example, supply 9 billion humans with clean, renewable energy by 2050. Accelerate cures for cancers, heart disease, malaria, etc. Large colony on Mars within 20 years, ...
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Let's be a bit more positive on Humanity's progress eh? Humanity is on the cusp of three major technological breakthroughs that will quite literally change everything. 1) AI. Even if we don't reach ASI in the near term, we'll have ANI to help us research new technologies in months/years rather than decades. 2) Asteroid Mining. Whether it's Musk/Bezos/A. N. Other, the very first time someone brings down an asteroid. I…
> 2) Asteroid Mining. Whether it's Musk/Bezos/A. N. Other, the very first time someone brings down an asteroid. It will herald the dawn of abundance for precious metals. What will happen to prices is another topic. But this will allow researchers to develop even more exotic materials. Say what? The idea that asteroid mining will enable material science revolutions is fanciful. We're not exactly short on metals (even…
I don't know how likely this is. I imagine plenty of research has already been done on exotic alloys, however I wonder how much that research has been affected by economic constraints.
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Due to the big bang the universe is expanding... but you’d expect the expansion to be slowing down due to the drag of gravity. However, since the 1990s we’ve observed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating - the theory is that a force called “dark energy” is causing this acceleration. If the acceleration continues, there will be a point where distant galaxies will be accelerating away from each other at the sp…
The idea that humanity will ever travel even to the nearest star is pure fiction. Anyone who thinks otherwise just fails to grasp the distances involved. They are so large as to be beyond understanding.
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I guess it’s more fun to dream about the world millions of years in the future, but wouldn’t we gain so much more if we spent all of our energy trying to optimize acquiring knowing more rapidly in the next few decades? For example, supply 9 billion humans with clean, renewable energy by 2050. Accelerate cures for cancers, heart disease, malaria, etc. Large colony on Mars within 20 years, ...
And you think this is possible without art and creativity to inspire?
This goes together nicely with the Aestivation Hypothesis ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 ). If a civilisation puts itself on hold for a trillion years, just waiting around doing nothing, then when it wakes up the universe is much colder and it can do computations 10^30 times more efficiently. If the civilization consists of minds running on computers then they've increased their own lifespans by the same factor.
You might enjoy "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
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I was mostly making a point that grandiose statements can be rebutted by similar (in this case, changing 3 words) grandiose statements. To answer your question though, the main problem with space travel isn't physics (assuming you are ok with long travel times), it's economics. We have sent astronauts to the moon and probes all across the solar system. The main reason we don't do more though is because of how expensi…
> To answer your question though, the main problem with space travel isn't physics (assuming you are ok with long travel times), it's economics. I'd argue it's biology, not physics. Sending a rock to another star is easy. Sending a rock that can send back data is probably possible with our technology, but it's unlikely it would retain data transmission capabilities long enough to actually report back from another sta…
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> To answer your question though, the main problem with space travel isn't physics (assuming you are ok with long travel times), it's economics. I'd argue it's biology, not physics. Sending a rock to another star is easy. Sending a rock that can send back data is probably possible with our technology, but it's unlikely it would retain data transmission capabilities long enough to actually report back from another sta…
The 2 biggest health problems that I am aware of with spaceflight are due to weightlessness and radiation. However, both can be probably be solved with enough money (make the spaceship a rotating one with artificial gravity and add more shielding). There might be others but I am pretty confident you could engineer your way past each and every one given a large enough budget.
There is a lot of weird downvoting in these threads, can anybody explain what is going on?
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I just gave this a go. It's amazing, thank you for putting it on my radar. At first his speech impediment makes it harder to follow, but 5 minutes in you're used to it and you're just riveted by the content and the clear communication style. This is quality stuff.
I guess it’s more fun to dream about the world millions of years in the future, but wouldn’t we gain so much more if we spent all of our energy trying to optimize acquiring knowing more rapidly in the next few decades? For example, supply 9 billion humans with clean, renewable energy by 2050. Accelerate cures for cancers, heart disease, malaria, etc. Large colony on Mars within 20 years, ...
1940 Hardy labels number theory (his own area of mathematics) as useless
1977 RSA