I visited Munich back in 2013 and recorded several surfers on the wave [0]. For reference I was standing on the bridge just above the platform in the article's second photo. It was pretty neat, and I'm sad that it might be lost.
From an email for a company ( https://desertcontrol.com ) that specializes in reducing irrigation needs and fertilizing especially sandy soil with silt and LNC Liquid Natural Clay :
- [Instream River Training],
- Microgroins,
- Control the river from the middle of it, not with the banks,
- Hyperbolic funnels aerate,
- Vacuum kills bacteria,
- Chemical free water treatment,
- Oxygenating or aerating water makes it more fertilizing
I have a use case just for this. Sometimes my internet goes down while I'm working on my desktop computer. I'll put my work in a branch and push it to my laptop, then go to a coffee shop to continue my work.
The Drake Equation is filled with assumptions, like life must appear on a planet in the Goldilocks zone of a star. The whole equation has only one datapoint to extrapolate from. Tweak the equation's parameters and it will predict universes that only have one civilization per galaxy or worse! We have no way of knowing what those parameters are because we haven't seen other examples.
A major reason we are interested in Europa is because it might have underground oceans. Hypothetically, through tidal forces with Jupiter, the moon's core is hot enough to create oceans under the ice crust. Combined with hydrothermal vents you have the possibility for deep sea life similar to our own deep oceans. The Drake Equation does not predict this possibility.
The equation itself makes no assumptions. But anyone trying to calculate something with it must.
The last five factors in the equation will be filled in by assumptions based entirely on one data point, life on Earth. From your link:
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Can you define any one of those without assumptions, in a scientifically proven way?
One approach is to give each variable a probability distribution. The greater our uncertainty about possible values, the wider the bell curve.
Drexler and colleagues did that, and found "a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
A probability distribution describes how likely different outcomes are.
It requires multiple observations or an assumed model that can represent variability.
Which is why they set very wide ranges on the things we know little about. Doing that is less unjustified than guessing specific values, as people have usually done.
It's nowhere near a precise estimate of the probability of life. What it mainly shows is that the Fermi "paradox" is no such thing. It can look that way if we guess specific parameter values, but if we fully account for our uncertainty on the various parameters, then the result is a decent chance that we are alone, given the knowledge we have so far.
I’m not saying precise. I’m saying it isn’t even an estimate.
You can’t have a distribution with one data point.
It’s similar to the arguments about 3I/Atlas being an alien spacecraft because it’s so ‘weird’.
With so few data points, everything is fundamentally ‘weird’ - or normal - we have no way to tell, so making any sort of statistical argument about it is fundamentally useless and misleading, as statistics is based on groups. And we don’t have a group yet.
We know a lot more than the simple fact that civilization exists on our planet. See section 3 for how they estimated the parameters.
One of the most uncertain parameters is the rate of abiogenesis events per planet. For that one they used a log-normal with a standard deviation of 50 orders of magnitude. They discuss specific theoretical limits from biology for both ends of the range.
Compared to this approach, the usual method is to just pick particular values out of a hat. This paper at least improves that by directly representing our vast uncertainty for some of the values.
It doesn't tell us how many alien civilizations there are. But it does tell us the range of possibilities, given what we know and don't know.
If your level of uncertainty is infinite then you're suggesting that abiogenesis could be happening every day in your back yard. I think you might admit we're a little more certain than that.
Life, once established, is about competition for niche resources. Established life would kick the polypeptides out of a protocell quite easily (with certainty > 99%).
Protocells could be evolving right now at vents in the ocean, with zero of them managing to escape their birthplace due to being outcompeted by things with fully developed organelles.
Fine, let me put it another way. Fill a test tube with simple chemical building blocks of life. Sterilize everything. If our uncertainty is infinite then we aren't willing to say whether metabolizing, reproducing life arises from scratch within five minutes every time we do it.
If you're willing to concede that in fact, that doesn't happen, then you're putting a limit on that parameter, just like the paper did.
It does assume that life must be associatable with a planet. It's a plausible assumption, but you could also hypothetically have life develop on a star itself or its remnants, comets, clouds of interstellar gas. Maybe even something more exotic than that (dark matter? some weird correlated statistical properties of the quantum foam?)
About forty years ago I read a terrific book about life forms that live on a star. Maybe Starquake was it called? Did to the abundance of energy on the surface of a star, they live their lives a million times faster than humans. Thus for both them and the humans who discover them, communication is difficult. I think the humans push these life forms to develop civilization, which from the human's perspective had them go from primitive animals into sophisticated beings of technology past their own in something like a day.
The cheela lived on the surface of a neutron star, and they lived faster because the nuclear physics that powered their metabolism are far faster than the chemical and mechanical physics that power our own.
I'm not against piracy, and I love Anna's Archive... but publicly linking directly to a pirate source for something like this seems wrong. Could've just linked the Wikipedia page and let people acquire however they prefer.
Anyway, sounds interesting, gunna add that to my list
Well I don't really have a line, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go linking directly to such sources in public - not everyone agrees with my stance on copyright. Those who do can easily go find it themselves.
Also Macbeth was written 400 years ago. Let's not pretend this is a fair comparison. This author has been dead only 20 years - it might be that their partner is still alive and needs that money, or their children.
What a strange way to phrase it, considering in your last comment you were talking about how copyright expiry is exactly for this purpose.
Anyway, what is copyright expiration in America these days? 100 years?
Also, is it simply a matter of X years after creation? I somehow doubt it's that simple anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if "copyright is extended indefinitely if the work is being actively commercially used" or some such
Which is saner eh! That way people living at the time who are protecting it (copyright and patents are both protections for things otherwise being distributed and which could be copied easily) can benefit from it eventually.
My initial reaction was the same, then I thought: "no, we need more of this".
We need more discussion about copyright in our society, and we need it most in front of those who are unaware, inattentive, or would otherwise shirk that discussion. Posting a relevant link in a relevant discussion appears as good an avenue as any to get people talking.
Promoting copyright infringement in order to initiate a conversation about copyright is about as moral as murdering civilians to initiate a conversation about human rights.
I was bothered by the nearly a-scientific-ness of PHM. The story was nicely done in general, but it feels like he pretends to be hard science fiction when he's really Star Trek-level.
How many planets are there, and what proportion of them have detectable life?
The f does not have to be structured as fl->fi->fc, although we can see why you'd assume that kind of structure. It's simple to calculate the PI(series) when the model is just a funnel. Like the Million Dollar Money Drop gameshow.
But you could imagine a more complex model of probabilities that branches and merges. There could be events on the bayesian tree that amplify downstream events. For instance, suppose there is some pathway that if reached will leave certain minerals that future civilizations could use. This has happened already on earth at least once: lignin bearing plants could not be easily digested for a long time, and that led to coal formation during the carboniferous period.
You could imagine many such potential trees, but we only have one iteration.
Thanks, I read that part before I shared it. It's pretty clear to me, these are pretty well defined quantities, just hard to measure. What is unclear is perhaps the definition of life. But at no point does it assume a planet must be in the Goldilocks zone. So perhaps you want to point out those assumptions you are talking about to me, because I don't see them.
Edit: the parent post has been edited substantially after I replied.
> these are pretty well defined quantities, just hard to measure.
They are "defined" conceptually, in words, not in physical quantities. It assumes we can assign a known value to any of that when we don't and likely never will. It's like saying "Let X answer the unanswerable question. X is the answer".
> at no point does it assume a planet must be in the Goldilocks zone
You could say it implies it with fl.
> Edit: the parent post has been edited substantially after I replied.
I can't, but the equation itself doesn't to that. The assumptions are up to the reader to make. That's why I think that the equation isn't particularly useful.
That's just your interpretation. Take the equation at its face value and it does allow for life originating around some deep sea vents, like JamesLeonis speculated.
Yes, but we should consider these linkages when setting values. If we assume that volcanic vent life is very unlikely to become spacefaring, we should either leave it out of the "life" term, or leave it in but lower the probability of the "becomes spacefaring" term.
It goes the other way around. The Goldilocks zone is a shorthand attempt at helping us guess how many planets out there are capable of supporting life.
Even if you only had a handful of civilizations, the sheer time that has passed and size of the universe should mean that life should still be alot more apparent.
With sublight velocities achievable today, I recall it would only take around a million years for a Von Newmann probe to cover the entire galaxy. Such a probe is quite conceivable, so why isn't there more evidence of such probes everywhere?
Another point I feel is that proliferation of life should be an self-reinforcing affair, for intelligent life even more so. A spacefaring nation may terraform or just seed planets, and these in time will replicate similar behaviors. At a certain point, a galaxy teeming with life should be very hard to reverse given all the activity. A life itself isn't necessarily evolved from biology, AI machine lifeforms should also well suited to proliferate, yet we don't see them anyways.
> With sublight velocities achievable today, I recall it would only take around a million years for a Von Newmann probe to cover the entire galaxy. Such a probe is quite conceivable, so why isn't there more evidence of such probes everywhere?
What are the incentives to build and deploy such a thing though? We as a civilization fail to fund things that have a ROI of more than a few years, how are you going to fund something that pays off after a million year?
Exactly. Some of the biggest explanatory factors for the Fermi paradox are likely to be economics and politics: interstellar travel is unreasonably expensive, unimaginably slow, and has negative ROI unless your time horizons are beyond anything that's ever been used on Earth.
Consider that in some countries on Earth, we can't even get consensus that obtaining energy directly from the Sun via solar panels is a good idea.
Also, people vastly underestimate how hostile space is: colonizing Mount Everest, the Antarctic or the continental plateau under sea would be far easier than colonizing Mars. And Mars is the most hospitable extraterrestrial place we know of.
I don't think we would colonizing Mars, free floating colonies akin to O'Neil Cylinders orbiting Earth would probably be the more logical option. And with increasing robotic automation capabilities, it's not improbable to see these being built in the future.
"Extremely improbable" would be a better assessment.
Even ignoring the project complexity, difficulty, and energy budget, which can't simply be handwaved away by "robotic automation", one reason is simply that such colonies don't solve any problem that we're likely to have, that can't be solved much more cheaply, safely, and effectively.
But even the idea that we'll eventually have the technology to build such structures is debatable. Will this be before or after we solve climate change, for example? Because that issue is likely to severely impact our technological capabilities over the timescales involved. And as of today, the most technologically advanced nation is doubling down on atmospheric carbon production.
Having the technology to build it isn't the hard part. The question is why you'd do that in the first place and who would fund such a colony.
First of all it's going to be massively more expensive than any housing we've ever built on earth so only a very small elite could afford living there.
But then again, space is a very hostile environment: it's super dangerous (any incident will almost certainly snowball into a dramatic accident), very unhealthy (billionaires are currently funding longevity research, so I don't think they'd like to go in a place where they would age up significantly faster than on earth…), and life is just worse up there on all respect…
At some point replicative drift will set in. How many replications is two million years? How long before the probes evolve? How long before they speciate? How long before a species turns on itself?
> Such a probe is quite conceivable, so why isn't there more evidence of such probes everywhere?
Time, not space, is your answer here.
Two reasons -
(1) civilizations might not survive long enough to do this.
(2) 13 billion years is a long time. So you have the reciprocal of that as the chances to be in the right year to see such a probe. And with results from the new telescope we now have hints that the 13 billion number is bogus, the universe is likely far older.
The fundamental problem with the Drake equation is that it's frequentist, not Bayesian
Hence why you get too high sensitivity to parameters you have no way of having an estimate with a small margin of error
We "don't care" about how many civilisations are out there, we care to the point where we can interact with them.
As mentioned, it has several assumptions. "Rate of birth of sun like stars" means nothing. You can "always" have an exception for life that will throw the data off: "star too bright but with a hot Jupiter tidally locked in front of your moon, shielding it" etc
FYI just about every outer solar system moon or planetoid has a liquid ocean somewhere underneath. Europa is neither exceptional or even that interesting anymore.
> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.
I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.
The artist still owns the copyright. Payment by itself does not transfer copyright. To do that the artist needs to explicitly sign away those rights. This happens in employment all the time. Part of the paperwork you sign is about transferring over the copyrights from yourself to the company.
I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see exactly how much this covers, since some states allow contracts that cover everything you make at any time. California has a specific law that limits these contracts to only works done on company equipment and on company time. Your state might be different.
doesn't need to explicitly, it's enough to have the understanding that it's a "work for hire" situation (at least in the US)
of course just giving someone money is not sufficient to establish this, but telling someone that "I want to hire you to make a photo for me (of me)" and they acknowledge, then that is probably enough.
The copyright office itself doesn't recognize any transfer of works-for-hire [0] unless there's (#3) a written document of the transfer, (#4) signed by the recipient, (#5) signed by the copyright holder, and finally (#6) the work was made expressly as work-for-hire. Every employment, contractor, and freelancer contract is written with all of these questions accounted for.
Even wedding photographers keep the copyright of the photos they take of your wedding too for this very reason, unless explicitly contracted to transfer those rights.
One more example demonstrating the opposite - in EU the copyright law explicitly states that transferable copyrights for software get automatically transferred from employees to the company. Which suggests that for other types of copyrightable works and author/customer relationships it doesn't happen automatically.
Do you happen to have more reading material on said law?
In Germany, you can't even transfer copyright. So yeah, anything you create that reaches the threshold of having a copyright, you own the copyright. Even as an employee.
At the same time, you might not own the usage rights (Nutzungsrechte/Verwertungsrechte).
We might have a bit of miscommunication of what exactly is referred as "copyright", "transferring" and the way its translated in various languages. Wikipedia/Google translate suggests to me that generic name for copyright in German is "Urheberrecht" derived from author not copying, is that the problem?
By "copyrights" I am referring to all rights regulated by various copyright related laws not a specific subset of rights, including both the economic rights (all the useful stuff related to copying, redistributing, selling) and author's moral rights (can't be transferred, partially defined by national laws, stuff related to being author, right to be recognized as author and few other minor things).
Was able to find the European directive which has the point corresponding to what I was thinking about. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32... Article 3, point 2 "Where a computer program is created by an employee in the execution of his duties or following the instructions given by his employer, the employer exclusively shall be entitled to exercise all economic rights in the program so created, unless otherwise provided by contract.".
Do you consider usage rights as something which isn't part of copyright? Or do you not consider act as result of which you stop owning "usage rights" but someone else gets them "transferring".
From what I understand, technically non of the European directives are laws, but each member country is supposed to make laws based on the directives.
In wedding and portrait photography, many clients think that they own copyrights to the photos but they don’t and sometimes get in trouble for violating photographers’ copyrights.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
You might consider mirroring the (legal) BitTorrent releases of your favorite Linux ISOs or something to that effect. I personally mirror several OCRemix BitTorrent releases [0] including the big 4K archive.
The group behind AI Dungeon released the Wayfarer model in 12B and 70B variants. The former is small enough to run on local hardware. 10/10 would get eaten by a giant sloth again.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW4eheoiHY4