61–70 of 138 posts
What is less far fetched but also unlikely to happen is global warming will be fixed.
We also have to be clear what the end goal is for being on Mars. Is it to have a permanent research base or an actual livable planet where you can go outside and not die without a spacesuit. They're radically different.
Yes, and 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.
If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: n…
"now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us." So we have machine learning that can do decent image recognition if you feed it massive dataset. How does that get to general AI? What, exactly, is the dataset I'm feeding a neural network to…live on Mars?
If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: n…
If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: n…
"If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better." Really? There's collaborative editing, but in the end it's still just a writing tool. It's not like Google Docs can write my progress report for me. "now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligen…
Intelligence is the only thing necessary to accomplish any task. We left the the so-called laws of Physics behind at around the turn of the 20th century. Medieval peasants would call cell phones impossible, so it logically follows that actually nothing is impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
help me wrap my head around that. If you’re in -40 in a low pressure atmosphere, it doesn’t cool you down faster because there’s less mass for your heat to transfer to? Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?
Heat transfer happens by heat conduction and heat radiation, so even in a vacuum you will radiate heat away in the form of infrared photons, at least if the vacuum is not at a higher temperature. Heat radiation is however a less efficient process then heat transfer in a sufficiently dense environment. That is also an issue for spacecrafts, they need rather large radiators to radiate away excess heat into space.
You would probably need very little thermal insulation, if any, for a space walk around Pluto as heat from sun will be quite low as well.
If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: n…
I disagree and actually think humans are very prone to overestimate how quickly certain technologies will develop. A good example is self-driving cars, which are still years – if not decades – away from being truly production-ready. I'm not even close to being an artificial intelligence expert, but I know its current capabilities are extremely limited and we are nowhere close to having a general AI; we don't even see…
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.