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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#391

Post by rytis »

londons_explore wrote: post #384
gorgoiler wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it. Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

What about that long forgotten BTC wallet?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#392

Post by iAMkenough »

nonethewiser wrote: post #380
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.

Even if your cynical doom porn is true you’re wrong because both of those people, 1 in particular, are pushing space exploration forward.

I think you’re both right. They’re cornering a market with little competition because of the high cost barrier, with the hopes of personally owning/controlling space travel and any future colonization of other planets. I believe their primary motivation is monopolization and money, even if the science community experiences a benefit.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#393

Post by seeknotfind »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #356
seeknotfind wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1% better) than this year, and you have a computation that takes T time today, then next year, it'll take T/X time. So waiting will take 1 + T/X years if time unit is years. So the condition you want is 1+T/X Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.

> This equation has solutions for given X where X is an improvement, so as long as there is any improvement, it's always true waiting to start large enough computations will be faster. Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting to ever b…

As "If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1% better) than this year" highlights X is a constant as a simplifying assumption, I'd have expected you to say "As this assumes that X is a constant" not "Though this does assume that X is a constant". So, I'm not sure what your disagreement is.

If your disagreement is that a constant is not appropriate here, consider the interpretation in this comparison of running a program on a slower computer A and then a faster computer B. There would be a constant difference in performance between these two computers, assuming they are in working order. So, taking the model with a single constant is appropriate for this example.

If you are saying the performance improvement is bounded below by a constant, I would ask you, what is the domain of this function? Time? So we would be talking about continuously moving a computation between different computers? The only line here is a best fit line, emergent data, so I don't understand how this could be a preferred way to talk about the situation (the alternate to an assumption), because this is suggesting the emergent structure with nice continuity features is a preferred fundamental understanding of the situation, but it's not.

Then, where you are talking about hardware performance improving up to a (assuming horizontal) asymptote. I guess this means "If hardware performance increase becomes marginal[1], there is a nonzero improvement." Or in other words, "If hardware performance increase is marginal, there is a marginal [performance] increase". Performance and improvement are both rates of change, so this is tautological.

Finally, you state that waiting for such a marginal near-zero performance increase isn't worth it. I think most people would agree this is obvious if said in simpler terms. However, this is still not disagreeing with me, because I never suggested waiting was worth it.

So, what's the disagreement?

[1] which is well-established not to be the case, so I don't think this is a relevant case to the interesting factoid about waiting to start computation

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#394

Post by nextlevelwizard »

londons_explore wrote: post #384
gorgoiler wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it. Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

Pretty much. Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares? Nothing is worse than trying to go through bunch of old faded photos where no one - even the owner - can identify who is actually in the picture.

I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own pictures, why would anyone else?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#395

Post by thowawatp302 »

bmitc wrote: post #44
mongol wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We receive information that its radios are still working.

Communication is exchange of information . The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its "radio" is still working. It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even when you're right.

The Sun doesn't have a radio, it may produce RF energy, but doesn't modulate the RF energy it sends to Earth, Voyager still is.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#396

Post by dorkwood »

gzer0 wrote: post #282

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…

I was curious to see what music they included. This passage from the Wikipedia page made me smile:

> The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#397

Post by Mtinie »

rytis wrote: post #391
londons_explore wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it. Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

What about that long forgotten BTC wallet?

Without a private key that is readily accessible? Worthless,

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#398

Post by bzzzt »

zdragnar wrote: post #379
murkt wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CD drive speeds were written like 48/8/8, which stands for 48x for reading, 8x for writing CD-Rs, and 8x for re-writing CD-RWs.

I'd always assumed that was due to differences in power levels needed for reading versus writing, and because writing onto disc is more error prone at higher speeds. Not necessarily anything to do with a difference in the algorithm for encoding versus decoding the bits on the disc itself.

It's more to do with the speed of writing. While the last generations of CD writers got '48x' speeds the quality of the media is less when written at such a high speed. I remember a C!T magazine test years ago where they stated everything written at above 8x speeds would sooner develop reading errors. Maybe it's better now but I wouldn't count on it since investments in optical drives are practically zero these years.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#399

Post by mtsr »

vasco wrote: post #382
ddingus wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the simple, humble message. My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits. For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come.…

We don't even have a world government yet! It's very disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.

Human diversity being what it is, I doubt a world government is desirable at all.

But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#400

Post by k1t »

mike_d wrote: post #339
gzer0 wrote: post #282

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…

The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.

Only the recording industry could take a record that will never be played and make the licensing fees more expensive than the gold record it would be printed on.

(actually it is gold-plated copper)

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