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Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

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Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#201

Post by voidUpdate »

kmaitreys wrote: post #18

Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal" > Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do i…

> "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart"

is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a significant achievement

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

cyberax wrote: post #103
wongarsu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?

The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators. The best yo…

> The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.

Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.

The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.

So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.

Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.

(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)

(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#203

Post by M95D »

giantrobot wrote: post #172
kibwen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn'…

First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0] While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spe…

If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#204

Post by TeMPOraL »

the_af wrote: post #181
gambiting wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid r…

Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a sentient race exists, were possible, going to war with another sentience in their home turf (which, remember, must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is groundless paranoia. Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake…

People don't get dark forest at all.

Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.

For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#205

Post by TeMPOraL »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #164
cyberax wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case. There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators. The best yo…

That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to co…

Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.

It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

the_af wrote: post #177
IncreasePosts wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to co…

> That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring. It's really a human thing, not a s…

> It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.

Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#207

Post by TeMPOraL »

y1n0 wrote: post #42
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.

I’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”

Most of us are working on problems that are boring and tedious, not hard.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

qingcharles wrote: post #178
reaperducer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules. Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?

Surprising fact I just noticed about the next Moon landing attempt -- it'll take up to 22 launches to get everything into space needed for the attempt.

That's good, actually. We need to develop the capability to stage/assemble in-orbit, as this would relax a lot of hard constraints on size and complexity of the missions.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#209

Post by eru »

indecisive_user wrote: post #189
throwaway27448 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to what, the US? I'd say the thirty wealthiest countries on the planet... except us.

How do you define wealthiest countries? Picking from top GDP per capita, I'm not sure that UAE or Qatar are countries to look up to.

You only asked about healthcare.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#210

Post by defrost »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #205
IncreasePosts wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to co…

Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena. It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.

~all is ambitious.

Dark Star is one film that directly addresses the long voyage insanity of deep space;

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)

Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.

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