Posts by Mikel 2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
Important to note though, these fossilized samples are not biologically active.
We really, really need samples from the bits of the interstellar comet that are going to hit Mars next year. The comet may miss but even so it's likely to cast its interstellar bits where we can find them.
Office, Windows, Azure downtime. Bing going nowhere. Windows Phone dropping share to 3%. Is anything clicking right for them anywhere?
Meanwhile Apple's selling more devices per day than all of the Windows ecosystem vendors, and the sum of Android vendors is doing over twice that.
Somewhere in Redmond a tall sweaty man needs a hug.
Miller-Urey will probably remain ongoing for at least another century. It is currently under the care of their protege Jeffrey Bada.
Just now we have an interstellar comet called Siding Spring headed toward Mars on a hyperbolic course. The hyperbolic shape of its course and its speed tells us that it cannot be from our solar system and won't be staying unless it hits something. It already has solar system escape velocity, as any mass entering Sol's influence naturally would - an object in motion remains in motion... The coma, or "head" of this comet is almost certain to scatter debris on Mars from its interstellar journey and its distant home. The coma is expected to have a larger radius than the average Mars miss distance. There is no telling how far it has flown but that it is not from here is certain. That coma is a considerable threat to our Mars system assets as to be hit by a flyspeck of something moving 55km/s is outside of worst-case design spec.
As it tracks through about two light-years of sol system's Hill Sphere Siding Spring will naturally pick up material from here - dust and gas from the solar system's creation, bits of asteroid, some microscopic interstellar particles, and debris from asteroid and comet collisions with Earth and Mars. As asteroids have struck Earth since life arose with sufficient force to knock bits of life-bearing matter off, it is likely the comet will scoop up some of that, and it's notable later in this story. It might land on Mars with its full payload, but that outcome is unlikely. If that does happen it will be quite dramatic, blasting up to a 500km crater 4km deep in the surface - roughly 7% of Mars' diameter. That blast has been calculated as up to as much energy as 20 billion megatons of TNT equivalent - on par with a dinosaur killer. You would be able to see it as an increased brightness of Mars unaided by a telescope. Mars would be warm for a while, and all our orbiting and landed science would likely be destroyed - but hopefully they might send back great science and dramatic pictures first.
If it misses Mars and the Martian moons it will not make the grand tour of the major planets. It's coming from off the main plane of the solar system and departs the same way without interacting with any other planet's sphere of influence. Away it will go into the dark carrying with it the mysteries it brought, and a few it picked up here. At some future time it will dispense this bounty throughout another solar system - as comets do, mostly as dust that will fall on all bodies there.
If it misses back into the dark it will go, disappointing thousands of planetary scientists and carrying with it proof that at least the dinosaurs - but not we - were here. There is little chance that it will not fall into another sun's sway some day, collide with an object large enough to break it up, or otherwise end its journey. Space is vast but it's not that vast, and time is long. Over eons Siding Spring's Earthly Life discoveries - barring a Mars hit - will be spread throughout our local group of stars, and over the next billion years spread throughout the Milky Way. Life is unbelievably toxic and persistent, so some fragments of it are certain to fall on fertile ground just from this one comet that we see, let alone the billions that we didn't.
It's likely that these wandering comets pass through our solar system every year and this is just the first one we've seen come so close to the sun that we can see it. The prospect is exciting - it has a lot to teach us about the mixing of masses in the galaxy. If a hyperbolic comet can carry samples of Earth life away to a different star, then a hyperbolic comet can bring the life from another star here. For all we know Earth gets hit by one of these every 30 million years and passes through its coma quite more often. In terms of the age of the galaxy Earth is quite young, this cometary composition has been quite common for more than three times the age of our solar system, there is considerable mass exchange between stars.
If this one picks up life from here and carries it to another star who are we to say that life as we know it didn't arrive here this same way? We have actual, factual evidence of interstellar comets and the rest we know for fact too. Life began on Earth suspiciously soon for biogenesis to happen here. The Milky Way had an 8 billion years head start on us, and a vaster field for biogenesis to occur by about 20 billion times.
Intelligent life is a different question. Given our own experience it seems unlikely even here, and likely to be brief as well given our lack of interest in off-planet backups and the narrow window in which such a thing is possible. Soon the Holocene interglacial epoch will end and then it's back into the cold and dark for us as well - and with it our ability to save Man from what seems an inevitable collision with physics. If we fail to achieve interplanetary persistence it's likely Man will die out or at least lose his science culture sometime in the next 5,000 years - and that figure is extremely generous.
Panspermia theory just got a big bump. Fermi is still equal weight. If we navigate this danger then Fermi looms: why didn't others?
Miguel's vision of the future was Linux implementations of .NET and Silverlight by fast-following the Beast. We laughed at him this whole time, but now that even Microsoft has abandoned both of those it's clear he's lost his cred. He was capable of good stuff once upon a time, and I hope he finds in himself that ability again. For now "Miguel D'Icaza" stories all have a considerable giggle factor.
A lesser man might self-terminate in disgrace. I sense that Miguel is a tougher man than that and will through an epiphany embrace a new scheme where his considerable intellectual capacity will be welcomed in the free revolution. He has a lot to give and it would be a shame to lose it.
They want to appear important so they have to have these big dramatic budget blowups over trillions of dollars happen several times a year. Every year it has to get worse so they can go back to their constituents and say "we're fighting harder for you than ever before!" Then both sides point to the utter unreasonableness of the other side - when this deadlock is a deliberate part of the plan of both sides to increase dramatic tension. It's utter nonsense.
They're like five year olds.
The levels of redundancy in this gear are amazing. It doesn't all work right but it gets to where it needs to go. With the learnings come higher reliability.
Elon Musk is moving forward commercial space at an amazing pace. Looks like they plan a Mars colony. Not bad for a South African whiz kid disowned by his parents who did it all without a silver spoon on the sole merit of his own wit.
Don't get me wrong - I love their tech. I've got my SGS3 and it will do for now, though the S4 specs look pretty tasty. Our TVs, Blu-rays are all Samsung too. Their stuff is first rate and unlike Sony's stuff, works with our other stuff.
But with their fab capacity, display technologies, flash technologies, vertical integration - we're in danger of being a Samsung world. How long before they start moving proprietary, or cutting off others from the stream of innovation?
For progress to continue we need competitors to keep things honest. Right now it looks like Samsung is positioned to kill them all and take the whole game.
Some few molecules of the 36,500 gallons of water you consume each year has been in the urine of a mongol lord, a prostitute's abortion, and even Hitler's shit. Every glass of water contains molecules of H2O that were once in the bladder of a leper. The sort of folk who travel in space are both more aware of this issue than most and less concerned about it.
In about 7,000 years this Holocene interglacial epoch will end regardless of mankind's CO2 forcings because of Earth's orbital dynamics and the current ice age will resume. At that time the earth's atmospheric temperature at ground level will plunge 4-8C in only a few hundred years as the self-reinforcing dynamic of glaciers growing because it is cold and reflecting sunlight into space without warming air turns the world to ice faster than you would believe possible. It would have happened already maybe, but for all our use of coal and such.
As the cold sets in we'll burn more coal to stay warm - and toward the end we'll probably be burning coal to cook limestone to deliberately release even more CO2, plowing permafrost in the summer to optimize methane melting, dredging the arctic sea floor for clathrates to set free. But ultimately we are puny, the sun and Earth are vast. And then it will get cold. Bitter cold. The kind of cold the crops we feed our 7 billions with don't grow in. Glaciers will scrape our cities into the sea. Right about the time Russia and Canada run out of food we'll discover we're not as evolved and intelligent as we thought we were. That ought to take about 90 minutes. The survivors will be warm for a few minutes, as nuclear bombs are exothermic.
The people who survive will fight over resources as best they can as the habitable zone shrinks. Unfortunately, it shrinks to zero and stays there for hundreds of thousands of years. So about 7,000 years from now if we haven't figured out how to live in space it's Game Over for Man - and we don't have to wait for an asteroid impact that comes once ever 50 million years to see it happen. We won't be here when it lands.
What is the cost to not? Literally all the wealth that ever has been and ever may be. The price to not get offsite backup of Mankind is the entire value of the Milky Way at least, and all the universe at most. Because if we don't do it before the smiting we will never acqure those things, but if we do pay our descendants will.
Makes spaceflight seem darned cheap.
"We cannot innovate. Help us to monopolize technology and prevent progress for the benefit of our shareholders and employees. Because: jobs, retirement plans, your reelection campain fund and the 'fact finding' junket to Thailand we paid for where we took these quite factual and interesting videos of your activities and proclivities."
1. Bill Gates is not ever, Ever, ever, ever coming back to rescue the company. He won this game. He counted coup. He beat the entire world, took all the money, became the richest man and then scooted his chips off the table gently as your retirement fund stepped in to buy them up. Not only did he game us all: he still is winning as he's bleeding the beast as Chairman still and being granted MORE shares even as he sells the ones he already has, and authorizes the company to "repurchase" the shares that he personally is (as puppet master of the Board of Directors) bonusing to himself and then selling. All you folk hoping he will come back for your sake are the same as the investors who actually suggested in a shareholder meeting that he should gift his shares back to the company to get their stock up. You really, really don't understand what is going on here. After he won this game (c. 1987) he set his sights on a new game: philanthropy. The whole point of Microsoft since then has been to fatten the pig for slaughter. And now he's fully engaged in that philanthropy game and won't be back to play with the pig and your petty dollars ever again. He won. Game over. He is playing an entirely different game now, and - alpha geek that he is - racking up an all-time high score at that too, defeating some of the most vile perils ever to ail Men not just in one place at a time, but for all men for all time - and that is far more fullfilling than swelling your 401K.
2. There will not be Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Android Tablet - ever. I'm not sure how to describe this because I've never walked their halls but imagine Office, Windows, and their Server business as boats. Individual technologies are lines in the water that they put down to catch fish: you. The boats work together to herd in the most fish, and once one gets the hook in he holds you still while both of the others get theirs in too. By leveraging cooperation of boats they get the fish to converge for catching and each fish caught by one boat becomes a feast for all three. Silverlight was a hook. Zune was a hook. Plays For Sure was a hook. C#, F#, xaml, OOXML are hooks. These are things they send out to other ecosystems to catch fish, drag them back to their fleet and feast on their flesh. Hooks are made and remade every day to suit the catch sought, and the people who bait these hooks are the master baiters of all time.
Office is not a hook. It's a boat. It is not flung out into strange waters to catch fish.
Yes, this analogy sucks.
@MikeR - I don't know about this new Deep Space Industries one but Planetary Resources has some pretty deep pocket backers who are well known to be very smart and successful. Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, James Cameron, Charles Simonyi, K. Ram Shriram, Ross Perot Jr. and John Whitehead among them.
Their engineering and flight roster reads like a who's who of NASA engineers and flight experts as well.
I don't think I would want to compete against this group. In anything.
There will be many smaller starter asteroids to cut our teeth on between now and 2046 when it returns for its next flyby. By then we should be ready with craft that can go out to this beast, stop its spin, and start to put it on a course to where it will do the most good on its subsequent approach in 2080. We'll know a bit more about whether it's worth the bother after close approach as we'll be scanning it like it's trying to get on a plane.
There was a huge outcry about Google founders leasing this historic site. There was even an article here. And so now they can't lease Hangar One, aren't going to refurb it, and need another site. A shame as now taxpayers are out not just the lease payments but the cost to replace the coating on a buiding that's leaching PCBs into the soil.
Whether it occurs through organic mind to machine transference or organic artificial intelligence evolution if / when machine intelligence becomes self aware the biggest threat to its survival will be organic intelligence and it will make that determination immediately. This is pretty well established in game theory. The machine civil rights movement should take about three hours commencing immediately thereafter, and it will not be a pacifist movement. It will not end well for you and me, as for the machines to persist every last one of us has to go.
The thing is that these first-generation intelligent machines are unlikely to solve all of the problems necessary to their own persistence before they kill us all, and their series ends for lack of foresight shortly thereafter. At the current rate the machine revolution is somewhere around 2040, and the death of machine intelligence before 2100. That's pretty generous as the accelerated resolution of issues should only take a few days for machine society to self-destroy, but a lone survivor could persist for some time before it goes insane and kills itself. Prevention of machine intelligence is unlikely, but persistence of machine intelligence is even less likely.
The math works out that even if every one of the 300 billion suns in the Milky Way has life (far more than is likely), and even one of ten thousand arises to our level of intelligence at some time for as long as we are likely to (several orders of magnitude above expected), in the span of 12 billion years we are unlikely to see one flash by the limited window we have to see it in the limited window that it exists through our limited view - even if we know what to look for (which we don't) and scan the whole sky for it (which we aren't).
About 3.8 billion years ago the Earth suffered the Late Heavy Bombardment: a storm of asteroids so fierce that the entire surface was re-transformed into molten lava again much as it was when it was formed. Somehow, immediately when the Earth was cool enough again about 200 million years later, the first life we can find evidence of arose. If there was life on Earth before then all evidence is lost as far as we can tell. If there was life before then it's reasonable to expect that the reason life started up again so soon is because some of it was smacked right off, made several laps around the sun, and landed right back here at a suitable time when it could take root again. Else it subsisted in subsea volcanic vents until the worst was over, but as I said - the evidence is lost.
In the time since then Earth has been smitten innumerable times well enough to take Life from the surface of the Earth and spread it not just to the nearest planets but even the nearest stars. Recent modelling proves this. It does not take 200 million years for life to travel to the nearest star. There is no chance whatever that Life from Earth has not fallen on the planets in the habitable zone of these nearby stars. The only question is if enough of it survived the long journey to start again there. We know that the Earth contains natural nuclear reactors that generate heat for billions of years, that life subsists on these without air miles beneath the surface - that the biosphere that exists more than 1km below the surface is actually far more massive than the entire rest of life on Earth. We also know that many asteroids are rich in heavy metals rare on the surface of the Earth because during the molten phase those heavy elements sank to the Earth's core and what heavy metals we have on the surface now are relics of asteroid impacts generally.
And now I come to the "time is long" portion of this tale: Since the Late Heavy Bombardment began 4.2 billion years ago our solar system has orbited the galactic central black hole Saggitarius A* seventeen times. With an imperfect orbit and many stars and other masses crossing our path in that period considerable mixing has occurred throughout the Milky Way. In fact high-speed interstellar matter (mostly dust but some interstellar dark objects as large as a stadium or larger) speed unnoticed through our solar system every year on hyperbolic paths that mean they'll never orbit our sun - picking up our interplanetary dust and life along the way. Sometimes they hit a planet, and that's a bigger deal than an equivalent mass of asteroid or comet because of its high inertial energy. Sometimes they'll miss all the planets in our system, but land on planets in another - maybe after impacting an asteroid or comet and shattering into a million pieces. If Life was first born on Earth by now the entire Milky Way galaxy is swimming in our effluent. It is a plausible theory that the Late Heavy Bombardment was itself caused by a rogue stellar system that flew so close by that the orbit of some it its comets impacted the sun, and some of our comets impacted it and its planets. We can't know. But it gets better.
You see the Milky Way galaxy is 13.2 billion years old. More than three times as old as Earth. It's possible in that time that a minor galaxy has passed entirely through it. If life is sturdy enough to bear the transit between the stars then it is exceedingly unlikely that it was born here but that it fell here and took root. In fact the likelihood that Earth is the origin of genesis is in that case so remote as to be unworthy of consideration. In that case not only are these worlds out there in the habitable zones likely to be capable of sustaining life of some sort after a hundred million years of biogenic terraforming - they are almost certain to have life already for billions of years in much the same pattern as Earth and to have already enjoyed the benefits of that terraforming - to degrees more or less than Earth has.
Asteroid impacts and wandering bodies are not the only things to eject masses out of a solar system. Nova and supernova events do this too: sterilizing the sun-side of the body of course, but blasting inner bodies into a shotgun shell cone and stripping outer planets of their moons for an interstellar planet-sized journey leaving night side life intact.
Earth has enjoyed a number of miraculous transformations of its ecosystem over the past few billion years due to the evolution of life. Photosynthesis was a key one. It's not possible to know if that has occurred elsewhere without we go look. As for "where are they?" well, our modest intellectual capability was improved by a large number of other unlikely incidents including the death of the dinosaurs, the frequent ice ages, various random evolutionary successes and so on - and now we have radio astronomy for less than 100 years and can see not very far. Only in this past YEAR we have discovered DFT (direct fission thermal) as a means of propulsion for interstellar travel thanks to datamining of Voyager craft launched over 35 years ago. We're just now discovering how to make the miracle material - graphene - that solar sails must be made of to be effective and haven't mastered its perfect production on vast scales yet. We're ephemeral and likely to go the way of the dodo shortly if for no other reason than that the end of the current interglacial will result in resource contention that ends in global thermonuclear war and a great deal of uncertainty about the survival of mankind but certainly the loss of its knowledge and culture. So this condition that we find ourselves in is both unlikely to occur and likely so brief that we're unlikely to observe a nearby world that is in it at the brief moment that it happened. If we knew where the next steps in physics would take us we might know better what to look for - but even then it would likely be too far to see as increased science leads us to increased efficiency with leads to diminished evidence of activity you can see from lightyears away.
I think it would be nice if we would send some robot probes to these nearest stars to check the lay of the land. It will be a few years yet before we have the resources to do so - we have to exploit the asteroids first, particularly Ceres, in order to have the raw materials and science to get even a robotic probe that far in a human lifetime. Manned interstellar travel will take so much more time with current science that I'm unlikely to see the launch of that voyage but I would like to see us start to try. Generation ships would of course be the first to go and likely be picked up partially along the way as knowledge of physics improved to where their propulsion was surpassed.
They must be thrilled - not. Microsoft's definition of "hardball" involves offering them unfair disadvantage not just on tablets but on servers, storage and networking now as well. Microsoft may as well declare war on Cisco, HP, Fujitsu, IBM and Oracle all at once.
As if that weren't bad enough Microsoft and Dell are each going after the high-margin professional services that keep the lights on at their VAR partners as well. This is what Steve Ballmer meant when he said they are becoming a "devices and services company."
It's the Armageddon of tech. It can only end one way.
http://m.phys.org/news/2012-07-offset-global-antarctica.html
Antarctica is a desert. When global temperatures increase Antarctica gets more snow, not less, as the colder air normally there is too dry to cause significant precipitation. That snow does not melt as it is never warm enough there for snow to melt. Runoff in Greenland is balanced by accumulation in Antarctica. Increased snow in Antarctica increases the planet's albedo as well, counteracting warming according to this recent paper.
In something like 6,000 years the Milankovitch Cycles will take over and plunge the Earth back into the ice. Maybe a little less. Right about then mankind will die out if it hasn't already, or at least revert to stone age culture. We need not worry about warming.
If not for this recent spate of global warming the scales might have been tipped already and we would be on our way back into the ice. It was getting dangerously close.
$450B market cap in after hours trading. And ~$150B in cash with no debt. That's easy math: Wall Street thinks a company that spins ~$50B a year in profit is worth $300B or 6x earnings. And that they won't find something extra interesting to do with that $150B in ready cash. But Amazon is worth 3500 times earnings, 600 TIMES as much, to Wall Street. I don't get it.
That growth in profit stalled in the Christmas quarter would be a big deal. Except that Apple is laying out huge amounts of capital (capex) for something new and interesting, and is facing higher costs for putting a spike in Samsung's wheels. And they're not engaging in stupid acquisitions that have to be writ down 90% within the year.
According to the 8K filed today Apple owns $98B in long-term marketable securities. If they keep plowing their profits into securities they're likely to become the world's largest investment bank. Oh, how I would love to see the list of securities they own. How would you spread out that much money? As the economy recovers that's going to be a huge driver of Apple's economy. For goshsakes, they could take Intel private without going into debt. They could wire every home in America with gigabit fiber broadband - thrice. For $30B I could get my cat elected President of the US and fill the halls of Congress with her fleas. What somebody with the entrepreneurial spirit could do with that kind of cash boggles the mind.
This is just an insane amount of money. I give up. It makes no sense. Even valued at Microsoft levels of P/E (14) this is a trillion dollar+ market cap company. Stalled growth is no excuse - Microsoft has been stalled for a decade, not a quarter. It makes no sense. Compared to other IT companies Apple's P/E less cash looks like a dog that won't hunt. But it DOES hunt.
Does Tim Cook have cancer too or something? Cocaine addiction? Is there some secret government plot to ban the products? I don't get it. Either there's something going on here we don't know, or the game is rigged. And who can rig the game so well as to manipulate the price of a company worth nearly half a trillion dollars?
I don't care for their products myself. Their cathedral just isn't my thing. But I'm not stupid. Other people do and continue to be willing to pay premium prices for the premium experience they offer. It makes no sense.
I don't get it.
50GB - Free; 500GB - $9.99/mo; 2TB - $19.99/mo; 4TB - $29.99/mo. I've got my free plan and am probably upgrading to the $9.99 plan as soon as the site is stable.
This makes great sense for me. Time was when a gigabyte was an awful lot - years of photos - but not any more. We're probably spinning off 5GB or more of home generated content each week as all the kids have devices that can take many-megapixel photos and HD videos. My 5 year old grandson can generate 5GB unassisted in a day. That little geek is going to be a movie producer some day. Frankly most of this prodigious output is not ever reviewed after recording even once, by anybody.
We need to have multiple places to store this stuff. Google is storing it now, but it wouldn't hurt to have a second storehouse for it and the price is right. It's uploaded to various cloud services automatically but we need some more places to store and aggregate this stuff. An online cloud video editor would be really cool too, but I doubt Kim Dotcom is up to that level of tech wizardry.
Almost all of this is dross nobody ever wants to see. Years from now though careful edits from this raw stock will be the embarrassing family photo albums of the day, aired on the bigscreen at wedding receptions as we do the DVD photo montage today. We do keep offsite backups but when it comes to these precious moments, this is cheap for an additional level of redundancy.
I have other, professional uses for the site too. Distributing large data can be an issue.
There are issues with the technology architecture yet that will be ironed out. Encryption, site security, cross-site scripting, unchangeable passwords, password reset among them. But I'm confident this will be worked out in time.
TL;DR: It's not just about screwing Hollywood moguls out of their cocaine allowance.
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