Un-freakin-believable. What’s the saying, that people always underestimate technological progress in the short term, and overestimate it in the long term? It’s true… ten years ago I’d have said this couldn’t happen in less than twenty years.
(Oddly enough, I’ve never read any SF stories that incorporated credit cards at all, even technologically advanced ones like this. I guess SF authors thought they weren’t advanced enough, or that physical tokens like credit cards would be obsolete.)
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind children — and their parents — that Harry Potter and Hedwig are fictional characters, living in a fictional world, and that in the real world, owls do not make good pets. And if you want to sacrifice something, how about your tobacco habit? That would be good for you and the environment.
The title has a question mark in it, but the article makes it pretty clear that there’s no question about it. It sounds like the science is pretty well established, and we’re just nerving ourselves up to take the next step.
And once medical cryogenics is in common use on Earth, there’s little stopping us from using it for space travel. A trip to Mars is long and fraught with danger — why not store most of the crew in cold-sleep? Or use cold-sleep if someone gets untreatably sick, to preserve the person until he gets back to Earth? And then, of course, there’s the possibility of hugely long interstellar voyages, as predicted by hundreds of hard science fiction stories. I don’t know who might volunteer for such a voyage in reality, or why the human race might mount one, but if it’s possible, someone will do it at some point.
The hardest thing about time is doing it.
— Lord Corwin of Amber
This is a ridiculously low-tech solution to the high-tech problem of keeping your computer from going to sleep while it’s working on something for you. The incongruity somehow appeals to me.
Stranger in a Strange Land was published 49 years ago, and it included robo-cabs. Flying robo-cabs, no less. And I’m sure it wasn’t the first. Come on, science — if I can’t have a flying car yet, at least hurry up with the self-driving one! 😉
I wish I could believe this sort of thing.
I have no doubt that extraterrestrial life exists — merely from a mathematical perspective, it seems all but certain, just from what we know about life and the universe already. But that technologically advanced beings have visited Earth? I know far too well how easily humans deceive one another, both deliberately and inadvertently (there’s even a hypothesis that part of the reason for our big brains is an evolutionary arms race between liars and liar-detectors). And the whole UFO phenomenon bears all the hallmarks of widespread delusion and wishful thinking. Read Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat, and peruse the excellent Forgetomori web site; you’ll find that nearly every bit of evidence ever offered by UFO aficionados has proven to be a hoax or misinterpretation of some kind.
On the other hand, if it were true, it would be very exciting.
Excellent news for space enthusiasts!
I heard an interview with one of the lead scientists on the LCROSS mission, who said you can get almost a gallon of water out of a wheelbarrow-full of lunar dirt, at least where LCROSS struck. That’s ridiculously rich, especially compared to what we expected to find, and it will give humanity’s space programs a much-needed boost once we get that far. Literally — the water there, with solar or nuclear energy, will be turned into rocket fuel for jaunts further afield, as well as breathable air.
Why? If scientific curiosity isn’t a good enough reason for you, consider the natural resources it will make available. The asteroid belt alone contains the raw materials for an entire rocky planet that never formed, and you barely have to dig for them. Knock a couple big metallic chunks into Earth orbit every few decades, and you’ve got a ready-made and endless source of just about any heavier element you want, available for building larger spacecraft (with no extra cost for lifting it out of a gravity well!) or for shipment down to us. And once the problems with the skyhook idea are worked out, shipping it down to us would generate enough power to lift essentially anything else we want to into orbit — including us — and potentially more.
(Peter F. Hamilton’s very interesting Mindstar trilogy depicts a potential near-future that includes this sort of thing, all developed in maybe thirty or forty years. I think that speed is accurate, if we have the will to do it.)
Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch.
Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the people outside to block them much more intelligently. There’s no technical reason that computers couldn’t deal with the world in the same way, we just don’t have the software to do it yet. Or, sadly, the understanding needed to create it.
This is the kind of thing that just wasn’t possible before the Internet. No single organization had the data needed, not even the government in some cases (and in others, only the government, who could manipulate it or keep it secret if they wished). Even now, only Google and maybe a handful of others have it — but at least someone does, and Google will probably make it available to everyone eventually, in some form.
I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example:
[…] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t.
That’s not strictly true. The logical, future-thinking part of a person often wants to be doing something that has to be done for his longer-term good (like studying or exercising), but the rest of the person wants to kick back with a cold beer and watch the game on TV. Sometimes the logical part wins out, but more often it’s overpowered by the other parts.
The logical part can win out though. Resisting temptation is impossible in the long term, no matter who you are — willpower can only work for a limited time, a matter of a few weeks at best, and often just a few days. It would be great if you could use it to create the habits that would support you to reaching your goal, but habits require weeks to create or change; it’s just not that strong. The best use for it that I’ve found is to allow you to get the ball rolling, and set up your environment to support creating those habits. Want to lose weight? Using your limited store of willpower to get all the junk food out of your house will be a lot more useful than trying to stop yourself from eating it later.
The most useful trick, I’ve found, is focusing on the ultimate benefit you desire. What’s your goal? “I want to lose twenty pounds,” you might say. But while that is probably a great goal, there’s nothing there to motivate you. Why do you want to lose twenty pounds? “To feel better” is a start. “To get the amorous attention of [very attractive person A]” is even better. Focus on that, and the tasks required for it will suddenly become a lot less onerous.
(At least they should. If they don’t, then perhaps it’s not the right goal for you. Or maybe you just need to rediscover the thing that made the goal attractive in the first place.)
There’s a ton more to say on the subject — you could fill a small branch library with all the books written on how to get things done, and I’ve read a significant fraction of them — but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ve got some programming to do that I’ve been putting off for several days… 😉