On Tuesday, May 30, 2017 at 10:59:10 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...
Don't get me wrong, I think *eventually* we'll be mining the moon for
water to turn into LOX and LH2 (or possibly methane) to supply a fuel
depot in lunar orbit. But, needless to say, I think the supporters of
this notion are daft if they think it's going to happen in the next 20
years or so by building a freaking factory on the moon that's capable of
building mining equipment that's not JPL class "toys" that wear out
faster than you can build them.
Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
Development is non-linear and results in a technological singularity.
Growth is not
y = EXP(t), t=0 to infinity
it is
y = 1/(t-1), t = 0 to 1
Where one is the year 2035AD and 0 is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
The singularity is generally thought of as a time when machines are
smarter than people, and this is true, however, it involves more
than that. Anything it is physically possible to do, will be doable
after this date.
Yes, this b.s.: "hypothesis that the invention of artificial
superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth,
resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization".
This is a theory and it's not generally accepted because you can't prove
that it will happen, until it happens. For example, Steven Pinker
stated in 2008:
There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity.
The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not
evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities,
jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and
nuclear-powered automobiles?all staples of futuristic fantasies when
I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not
a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems. (...)
That and we're decades away from "real" artificial intelligence.
Anything approaching that today has as its input many man-years of
software development done by people like me. Hell, we're years away
from making all software products multi-threaded yet desktop machines
today rarely have less than 4 physical cores (8 with hyper-threading).
AI is a solved problem. You don't get that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Steven Pinker does! That's because Steven in 2016 says something substantially different than he did ten years ago!
He knows he lost the argument over machines ever being able to think, so he had refined his argument to the area he knows best, human psychology.
In 2016 Steven isn't arguing that machines cannot think any longer. Rather, he is arguing that when they do think, we will put safeguards in the software to protect us.
http://bigthink.com/videos/steven-pi...nce-apocalypse
This is distinctly different than his position 10 years earlier! He makes some good point though, which are well founded in human psychology;
(1) there is a tendency for alpha males to fear AI, and that is at root irrational as racism is,
(2) there is a tendency to rely on AI to solve our all problems post singularity, this is irrational is religion is,
I tend to think these impulses are likely to shape the post-singularity political and religious landscape. Of course at that time, Pinker will be the 'grand old man' and his arguments will morph into important insights into the human condition at that time!
I'm reminded of John Manyard Keynes, the famous economist, statement, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" That's what all intelligent people do, and that's what Pinker had done.
haha..
Software is falling well behind the hardware, because the hardware is
hitting a roadblock in terms of processing speed. Hardware is moving
towards multiple cores capable of parallel processing, yet there is
precious little software written from the ground up that actually takes
advantage of that.
That is changing too. What you are saying may have been current and accurate 24 months ago - but not so today.
https://qz.com/985808/your-it-job-is...-for-a-living/
The proper reading of the situation 24 months ago is that the difficulty of software development, maintenance, and support, have pressured the industry to AUTOMATE IT. Which has borne fruit!
Here's a proper analysis of the same situation in the same timeframe
https://insidehpc.com/2015/06/why-ha...ftware-behind/
And IBM four years ago predicted its AI will be used to write software for this very reason
https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/...e-development/
So, as per usual, you've got it bass ackwards.
So called artificial intelligence is the latest in a long string of
"silver bullet" solutions that sounds great, on paper, yet in practice
has yet to be demonstrated in a meaningful way.
Liar!
We're a long, long way
from true artificial intelligence that can learn on its own.
Nortorious provaricator!
What we
have now are man years of (unacknowledged) human effort leading up to
tiny demonstrations of "machine learning" that are extremely constrained
to the task at hand. In other words, demos and vaporware.
Perjurer!
The Delta launcher took 30 years and $60 billion to develop. SpaceX
took 15 years and $10 billion. RocketLab took 4 years and $100
million and its present capacity is the capacity of the original
Delta space launcher was less than the Electron (RocketLab's
launcher). The trend toward more capacity at less cost is obvious.
You're distorting the facts greatly.
No I'm not. You are.
Which Delta are you talking about?
yawn You have to ask?
As for Falcon 9, its development cost was a hell of a lot less than $10
billion.
SpaceX has spent $10 billion since its inception, and the Falcon 9 could not have been built without everything that came before it. You don't get that.
https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-f...space-company/
And Rocket Lab has yet to demonstrate it can get to orbit, so
they're quite simply not done expending development money. This is all
money paid to people (engineers, machinists, and the like) not to
artificial intelligences.
The singularity approacheth.
Bull****.
You haven't a clue and are spouting nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uIzS1uCOcE
The above paragraph written by you is you distorting the
facts
No, you're the liar here.
to fit your world view,
Liar.
which is not a given. It's greatly in
dispute.
Nope.
The discovery of water ice on the poles of Mercury, have awakened
many to the possibility that water is a lot more common on rocky
planets than previously thought. It seems protons in the solar
wind, interact with silicates in the rocky planet to create water
and if a rocky planet or moon can hang on to it, that can be
accumulated, and used as a propellant resource.
Yes, possibilities.
Good of you to admit that.
But mining and refining water on Mercury, or any
other planetary body in the solar system, hasn't even been demonstrated
yet.
My friend Robert Zubrin, whom I've collaborated with, and whom I've met at the White House during the Bush administration, has demonstrated processes that do just that.
Making methane on Mars from hydrogen brought from earth and CO2
from the atmosphere looks to be about the simplest case possible, and we
haven't even done that yet.
You read 15 year old books and think its current state of the art. lol.
Making methane from carbon dioxide and water had been demonstrated.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/c...0120016419.pdf
Solar or nuclear energy is used to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen
4 H2O + energy -- 4 H2 + 2 O2 (1)
Hydrogen is then used to react with CO2
4 H2 + CO2 -- CH4 + 2 H2O (2)
Process water is combined with fresh water ice to supply 4 H2O at step (1)
In this way
NET REACTION:
2 H2O + CO2 -- CH4 + 2 O2 (3)
MASS BALANCE
2*18 + 44 = 16 + 2*32 amu
36 44 16 64 amu
1 litre 1.22 kg = 0.44 kg + 1.78 kg
Using 15.74 MJ of energy one litre of water is converted into 440 grams of methane and 1.78 kg of oxygen.
In practical systems, 22.5 MJ are used for each litre of water processed.
The use of Earth's moon and moons in general as resource bases is
energetically very favourable.
This is where I call bull****.
HAHA - you imagine what you say means something? Only if it comports to reality.
The delta-V looks favorable,
Delta V requires energy!
but I do
not believe for a single minute that the aerospace engineers have a
freaking clue how hard it will be to mine lunar ice and then process the
rocks and muck into pure H2 and O2 to use as "rocket fuel".
Your belief is wrong.
Again, I watched a documentary not long ago talking about the next JPL
built Mars rover and the engineer they interviewed was testing new
ALUMINUM wheel designs for the rover, because the light weight was the
most important metric, of course. You simply cannot build mining
equipment worth a damn with that approach.
Liar
http://www.zdnet.com/article/deep-sp...teroid-mining/
https://www.crcpress.com/Microroboti.../9781420061956
Not only around Earth, but around Mars. Deimos and Phobos are
thought to have lots of water in them as well. Since they have
very low densities.
Again, we have not demonstrated mining of off planet rocks to make H2
and O2.
Liar - Pioneer Astronautics and a host of NASA contractors have demonstrated precisely how to process water and carbon dioxide into methane and LOX.
The engineers have no idea how hard that will be because
they're freaking aerospace engineers.
You live in a bizarro world that is opposite to the real world! Aerospace engineers now precisely how hard that will be because they're aerospace engineers.
I have that degree and I know how
blinded they are to the realities they'll face.
You should have your degree taken away then. You're a freaking liar and an idiot besides.
So, finding water is the first step.
And it's not worth a damn if you can't mine and process it in mass
quantities. We're a long damn way away from that.
Liar.
An abundance of power is the second step.
Yeah, and the engineers have a decent handle on that part of the
problem. We know how to scale existing systems that work.
I'm glad you agree. You are correct.
Advanced tooling is the third step.
And here again is another area where the aerospace engineers pushing
this vision are being overly optimistic.
Liar
3D printers only work on earth
because the feed stock provided to them is extremely pure and uniform
(whether that's metal powder in a mix to form a specific alloy or
whether that's a spool of plastic with very specific properties).
Getting that quality of feed stock from local materials will be
extremely challenging and cannot be hand-waved away.
Liar
http://www.popsci.com/feed-your-3-d-...cycled-plastic
Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.
All opinions posted by Jeff are apparently lies derived from deep seated ignorance of reality and motivated by general hatred of humanity, particularly those humans better schooled, better educated, and generally smarter than he.