Prometheus

As long as the fighters are aware of the risks and the referees and trainers primary focus is ensuring the safety of the boxers i don't see a problem. 

On 11/22/2019 at 10:02 PM, Ken Fabian said:

...but you will struggle to find elements like Lead or Thorium or Uranium at anything but very low concentrations.

That's interesting, but i thought there was a viable amount of thorium on the moon? For instance, this blog, makes a case for liquid fluoride thorium reactors.

On 11/22/2019 at 10:02 PM, Ken Fabian said:

It seems to me any colonisation of space will require a lot of advanced technology, which will depend on a wide range of materials made to exacting standards. Producing each of them tends to be an advanced specialty that is itself dependent on other advanced, specialised materials and products. Making life in space simpler looks needed. How much can be done with crude nickel-iron? It is one of the materials that exists in great abundance and could be a basic building material but I cannot imagine building a nuclear reactor or rocket motor out of it.

I imagine there would have to be significant capital investment to get things kick started. I've heard ideas of making self-replicating - but even if you have the raw materials, how much infrastructure do you need to make the micro-processors, and how much more so for the industries required in the pipeline before you can even think about making a micro-processor? 

Moving away from materials, i can imagine service industries exported services to space. For instance, the banking system would likely all be Earth based.

5 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Oh, it is questioned for sure, though much of it is within the scientific communities...

That's as it should be. 

I was referring to they lay community - but now realise i forget about anti-vaxxers and isn't there some kind of HIV/AIDs conspiracy movement? I stand corrected.

As for the trust issue - there are not many alternatives are there? If i go to a doctor, i might read a little around an illness, maybe get a second opinion, but at some point i'm just going to have to trust someone. Same when i get a car fixed, i could tinker a little, but a mechanic knows far more than me. I guess it's comes down to public engagement and showing people why scientists can be trusted.

What's the big deal?

When we see pain in another our own pain pathways can become active. Good little article here. There's variation at every level in biology so there's no surprise if some are more able to feel this than others. And given our shared evolutionary past it would also be no surprise if they could be activated by some animals (came across an article a while ago suggesting dogs specifically evolved to play on these pathways, making it more likely humans would feed them).

4 hours ago, LaurieAG said:

I have actually read a report that audits and compares the Australian ACORN 1 and 2 data sets and comes out with similar results to A. Parker above (not by a scientist). It stated that 12 data locations were removed from ACORN 2, due to them being 'heat islands', although the rising trend in ACORN 2 is severely reduced when the data from those 12 locations is included in the data set.

I think science has become too politicized to be able to provide the correct results without adequate quality assurance procedures or regular auditing by technical people who know what they are doing.

That's not an artifact of politicisation - that's just science.

I used to work in a medical research facility and auditors would come in and find discrepancies all the time. Most of the time they were small, but occasionally larger issues were found requiring data to be re-analysed and changes in practice implemented.

But strangely no one ever questions medical science to the extent they question climate science.

9 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

The first group to bring enough equipment offworld  to set up manufacturing will have a huge advantage. EVERYTHING they can make will be vastly less expensive than anything they can get from Earth.

Would you think it viable that the 'world's' first trillionaire would be that entrepreneur who first makes a successful move in this market?

11 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Once your group has machines that can make more machines, everyone else has to ask themselves whether it's cheaper to deal with you or start their own manufacturing.

But it could it be just one company? It seems that to establish a presence in space such a broad knowledge base is required that it would not be feasible to establish a monopoly. 

I don't know much about economics, but it seems that viable economies are an ecosystem requiring other agencies, perhaps with overlapping market interests, to flourish. Greater cooperation might be the only viable strategy to establish an off-earth presence.  Or is that just wishful thinking? 

26 minutes ago, swansont said:

If it's near the poles, do you want to set up shop there? Probably not. Your solar panels will be pretty inefficient.

I thought there were locations around the south poles in near permanent light making solar viable? I can't remember the source of that though.

Sure, so we could imagine one of the early industries would need would be water mining and/or manufacturing to support a growing human population in space. With the only competition being an expensive supply from earth, the financial incentive is there.

Yeah, i'm trying to get a rough idea of what a space economy might look like. Imagine space tourism, industries (manufacturing that benefits from microgravity such as zblan, printing of organs), asteroid/lunar mining (helium 3 seems the most viable for lunar industries) and commercial and government funded research missions to Mars beyond. 

42 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Replace in your question "element" by "isotope".

Or replace them with absolutely anything. But i'm interested in the other way round: rare in space, common on Earth (to the point it could be economically viable to ship it up the well to near Earth space habitats/industries).

I think there will always be a market for luxury items, because this is real meat, don't you know.

So there's no elements on Earth that would be so rare and essential in local space that it would be worth the cost of going up the well.

Biota seems viable, but perhaps that could be managed eventually with hydroponics in simulated gravity. Seems human resources, if needed for industry (not too many jobs automated), would be the most valuable resource. 

Since you're not worried about inference you could just try fitting different curves to it and seeing which has the lowest least squared error. The problem is over-fitting the data: for a high enough polynomial you'll be able to find a 'perfect' fit. Stick to simple curves.

I'm trying to imagine how a future off-world economy might interact with the Earth economy. If we imagine a few moon bases and several orbital habitats, supporting various space industries - the first wave of really commercialising/industrialising near earth space.

I can imagine luxury items, such as steak, being pretty expensive off-Earth.

But i was wondering what essential components would need to shipped up the well to support those habitats that couldn't be mined or manufactured in space (given the cost of going up the well, companies would do everything they could to source as much as possible off-Earth).

Are there any commercially and/or industrially significant (or potentially so in the near future) elements that are rare in local space but abundant on Earth? Water was the first thing that came to mind but apparently it's quite abundant and easy to make from existing elements.

8 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Climate science is based on informed guesswork, it's all about projections that go many decades into the future, when there are complete unknowns involved, like future volcanic and solar activity, among many many others.

Any science that makes projections into the future and contains complete unknowns is informed guesswork? Don't take a peek at medical science. 

Is solar activity a complete unknown? The 11 year cycle is well established isn't it - not quite completely unknown. I'm sure volcanologists would disagree that volcanic activity is completely unknown. 

It seems you have very standards of evidence - but are you consistent in this standard? We know there are completely missing between quantum and relativistic sciences as the two theories are incompatible. Then by your own reasoning we should admit that theories of gravity are informed guesswork.

Even if it is informed guesswork, what else would you base decisions on. Uninformed guesswork? If you see a car coming towards you and you can't quite gauge its speed would walk faster or slower?

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test should work as it compares the entire sample distribution against an empirical distribution of any shape. A visual check would be better though.

19 hours ago, swansont said:

How are you defining efficiency? Power or energy?

Hmm... Which is most useful when talking about environmental impact? I'd have thought power as it takes into account time spent performing operations, which is what you seem to suggest.

20 hours ago, swansont said:

If quantum computing is developed and applied to the problems it’s designed for, it’s sort of an apples vs oranges comparison. The quantum computer can solve problems a traditional computer can’t (in a reasonable time) so it must be more efficient. 

I guess then the question is a practical one of whether QCs become common enough to have a significant environmental impact. The applications i've seen involve computational chemistry and similar modelling - not exactly for the masses. But could we have apps accessing cloud quantum computing for some of its processing? Could they, for instance, be used for encryption on a messaging app, requiring banks of QCs?

I just came across this paper which was cited on several sites to suggest QCs will reduce power consumption. However, the paper is above me so i'm not sure that's what it actually says.

Apparently by 2030 21% of electricity demand will come from computers, a significant contribution to energy consumption.

My understanding of quantum computers is that because they run at near absolute zero, there is negligible electrical resistance, making them exceptionally energy efficient. However, to achieve these temperatures must require a significant amount of energy.

Overall would a quantum computing be more energy efficient than traditional computing?

I recently discovered that the Catholic and the Protestant Bible are slightly different, the Catholic version having a few extra books in the Old Testament.

31 minutes ago, mistermack said:

But agreeing doesn't make it real.

And there is no purpose, to animals or humans, except the subjective ones that we conjure up.

Being a human construct does not make things somehow less real. Things like justice and mercy exist: they are not flesh and blood although they are emergent from it. Why is 'subjective' purpose often thought inferior to 'objective' purpose? Like being given meaning is somehow better than creating meaning.

38 minutes ago, mistermack said:

It only "feels" right or wrong because of the type of brain that we've inherited through genetics, and that applies both individually and collectively. 

Memetics probably plays a larger role now than genetics. 

42 minutes ago, mistermack said:

If you killed a baby today, and ate it, we would all agree that it was horribly wrong. But agreeing doesn't make it real. In a thousand years time, it won't matter in the slightest to anyone. 

Why does being a temporary phenomena make it less real? Even atoms have finite lifetimes - so they aren't real either. What are you talking about?

9 minutes ago, mistermack said:

It's up to each individual what the word means.

Just because you have a favourite definition of the word spirituality, doesn't make it the 'right' one. I agree it can lead to confusion so it's worth stating which one your following, but to discarding all other meanings as wrong is just plain silly. Like one word can't have more than one meaning. It's like not believing in atoms, because the root Greek word means indivisible and atoms can be split. Doesn't work, does it?

4 hours ago, Curious layman said:

Can you imagine how much energy using full dive VR would need. To be continually in VR 24/7 would cost a fortune. The average person just wouldn't be able to afford it. And if you could afford it, you'd probably be wealthy and wouldn't need it. Why pretend to drive a Ferrari when you can drive your own.

You wouldn't just drive a Ferrari in VR. You could be a Ferrari, driving through space faster than the speed of light, dodging supernova for fun.

To the OP: there will always be people who would rather stay in the physical world. Many of them i would imagine.

On 9/20/2019 at 2:11 PM, mistermack said:

It's getting replaced with evolution by human selection.

Isn't it more a case of biological evolution being outpaced by memetic evolution? 

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

Just a thousand years ago, everything in existence was on the "designed" side, and nothing at all was on the other side. There was no available explanation, other than "god did it". 

There were quite a few alternatives, some of them predating Christianity. Anaximander proposed that all life began in the sea and that man was an adaptation of animals. The view of eternal creation and collapse is found in certain Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies - which is why the big bang/big crunch idea appeals to them. Even the primordial ideas that creation somehow emanated from chaos could indicate that people were comfortable saying 'don't know'.The idea that 'God did it' is the default view of humanity is only true of a limited time and location in our history. It's an unfortunately stubborn meme though.

I would speculate that developments like the theory of evolution and the big bang model made credible the claim Laplace's statement on god(s): I have no need for that hypothesis. It takes time for scientific ideas to percolate through society, hence the time lag. The rest is just letting people think about for themselves with these ideas in mind.

26 minutes ago, Ghideon said:

Example: Throw the coin 1000000000 times. What is the probability to throw exactly 1/2 of 1000000000 heads? Close to zero.

Just to emphasise this point: the probability of exactly half is close to zero, even though the expectation is 500000000 (which is half heads). With so many possible outcomes the probability of even the most likely outcome has only a tiny chance of occuring, as you can see from the PMF of 90000 flips below. Which is what you're seeing, Conjurer, as you perform more trials, the probability of getting exactly half heads is always decreasing, though it always remains the most likely of all possible outcomes. That should be clear on the other graph which is just zoomed in around the expected value.

I don't understand the question. You want to be able to stop breathing before death so as to ease some anxieties when dying?