Economical and ethical issues are the kind that would be immediately swept away if, say, China said they were going to beat us there. The cost is approximately trivial compared to the US's budget. Technical issues I don't really buy. Getting to the martian surface isn't much more complicated than going to the moon and back. Getting back into martian orbit is trickier, but not in a "Requires novel breakthroughs or undiscovered science" way.
It's perfectly reasonable to say the reason we don't currently have anybody on Mars is because we (politically) just don't really want to. If the Russians had beat us to the Moon, we probably would have made it Mars decades ago.
Most people don't realize how important is the "size" of active military for any country.
Turkey is the 2nd most powerful military in NATO after USA. It has access to all modern weapons, manufacturing abilities and above all, centuries of experience in fighting, winning and losing WARS.
Turkey's location is very very important for all kind of military operations and trade via Black Sea.
You see, those probes deal with harsh environments, yes. But they don't have to deal with antagonists. No one is out to eat or infect them. Mars won't adapt its storms, Venus won't adapts its chemistry. They obstacles that don't care about our probes, those obstacles don't adapt against the probes.
Those radically different kinds of environments give you radically different designs of probes vs rodents. So I don't think we can easily compare the intelligence of probes vs rodents.
Sure, but they have extremely limited autonomy. The vast majority of their behaviours are directly controlled, or custom programmed by us for the specific situation.
For me, as a developer, Microsoft is a company with deep roots in compilers and operating systems. All of the business empire started from these two foundations.
Since its inception till today, Microsoft has been producing some global products every decade. And then making these products unbeatable in the global marketes.
Be it Windows, Office, Exchange, Developer tools & Compilers, Web Servers, XBox, Azure, Teams etc. You just name it and Microsoft is right there in almost every field with profitable products.
A lot of people don't like the traditional Microsoft products but all of the products just work and are being used for tens of millions of customers around the globe every day.
Any Software company with ability to create profitable products every decade is a killer company. That is the secret souce Microsoft has.
As a developer just imagine about a company which gives you a developer tool to make a web application, using the company's provided compiler, which then can be deployed on a company's provided webserver and can store some data on company's provided database which is running on company's provided operating system.
The company also happens to provide end-to-end tools for running a company of a 5 people to a company of 500,000 people.
Then there's other ethical developers. This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.
They might be trying to change their image lately, still a hotbed of scumbags who learned from the best.
>This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.
This applies to literally any billion/trillion dollar big tech company ever, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell, Facebook even Apple and Google. They all abuse their market dominance at the expense of their competitors when they get there. It's literally the M.O. of any major corporation.
Microsoft was just the first major successful big tech software company to make it there.
VW, BP, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH and Nestle, would like to have a word with you.
You're making it sound like the lack of major European SW megacorps comes from some benevolent voluntary decision on our side, when the truth is that Europe is full of unscrupulous, corrupt and exploitative megacorps like the ones I listed above, except in SW, since we missed the SW bus entirely due to reasons I will go into detail below, and so the US dominates that field entirely.
Firstly, don't have the capacity to pump trillions of EUR into our stock market like the FED does and we also don't have the military capacity to invade any country that would threaten the EURO or our oil/energy markets.
But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.
And before anyone brings up ASML for the thousandth time as some silver bullet example for EU tech dominance, please note that ASML's golden goose, EUV, is a product of US Cymer wich ASML bough, and of Sandia labs research which ASML licensed, so the US has veto rights on what ASML can do with the EUV tech and who they can sell it to (spoiler alert, not to China).
>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.
And what stopped Japan from achieving what Europe couldn't?
Japan has (or at least had) several advantages that Europe still lacks. Single language, high and concentrated population, highly technological consumer markets, massive government and corporate investment in semiconductor and software.
For a while, Japan's was beating the US in semiconductor advancements. If the Japanese software scene failed, I'm not convinced of how it would have happened the way same Europe's had.
>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages
Germany alone is a big and rich enough market to scale. Add the UK and France and you're very close to the US population.
> VW, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH, would like to have a word with you.
Sure, but we're talking about tech firms (this is an article about Microsoft's place in the tech world). All the FAANGs are American. Big tech is American.
edit: I see you edited your comment (many times) to align with this part of the discussion.
Haha, nice. Though, a work colleague's brother was doing laser research in academia in Europe and got offered a 4x pay increase to continue his research in the US academia. Make of that what you will, but it seems like the US stil has no issues attracting top talent in some fields.
How did you come up with that conclusion from my statement?
I explained why I don't trust any major corporation richer than God, as they're all guilty of bad practices and why you shouldn't trust any of them either.
in their most powerful days, they didn't dictate what software could run on their OS and tax developers 30% of their revenue to allow their software to run.
They would probably be willing to parade Steve Balmer through downtown Redmond and yell "shame" at him every few steps. I think I could totally start overlooking IE6 if they did that.
> A lot of people don't like the traditional Microsoft products but all of the products just work and are being used for tens of millions of customers around the globe every day.
I have never spent a dime buying a MS product (directly) but they definitely don't "just work" based on my experience with my work computer. Windows is awfully slow, Office and Teams are sometimes just unusable because they take so much memory on my machine and keep freezing randomly. I do agree that MS used to be the company where products just worked (windows 95, 98, office 2003 and prior, hotmail etc.), but these days pretty much all MS products are awful.
One thing that may be worth considering is the quality of corporate laptops that are handed out versus, say, a top of the line custom-built PC.
Outside of any gaming rig I've built I've never used a good Windows computer for work. Not a "top of the line" laptop, not a virtual desktop client, nothing. Every single one has absolutely sucked.
People say the same thing about apple products, but both Microsoft and Apple products never 'just work' for 90% of what I'm trying to do, and if they do the process is convoluted and unintuitive from my experience
Honestly this is my experience as well, they “just work” till they just don’t work. Than getting either the Apple or Microsoft product to work is usually hours of time wasted.
I guess you could say the same about open source or systems like Linux where they also have their issues, but fixing those issues always seems to be a fraction of the time.
Apple and Microsoft products aren’t even on the same dimension when it comes to poor design decisions, cruft, stability and performance. Microsoft fell behind a while ago.
This is not freedom. As a non-technical client that just wants to make a spreadsheet and share it with the rest of the corporation, that perhaps doesn't have to matter (as long as you can afford the ecosystem). But from a technical perspective, you give away the ability to learn from and develop your own software, to compete and innovate, to combine different parts and come up with something better.
As a developer, I don't understand why a developer would side with a company like Microsoft, unless your product ties deeply into their ecosystem and you are very optimistic about your relationship and the future.
Unfortunately, that is not possible. Earth isn't a star and not big enough to provide this much data even outside of our Solar System, let alone millions of light years away.
To add some back of the napkin calculations to this:
Angular resolution of the earth at 66 million light years away would be approximately 2e-17 radians. Using the Raleigh Criterion [0] for lens size for the visible light spectrum (700nm for the best case scenario), you would need a lens with a diameter of about 4e10 meters. That's about the radius of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
If you want to see dinosaurs, say 1m resolution, that's about 1.5e-24 radians at 66M light years, needing a lens of diameter 5E17. The entire solar system has a diameter of ~3e14. So even if your lens was the size of the solar system you'd still be off by a factor of 1000 trying to resolve the dinosaurs.
At these scales you start running into some pretty fundamental engineering and physics problems with building a telescope this big.
Warning: this math may not be totally right, I'm just procrastinating some PDE homework right now, but the scales should be roughly correct.
The problem would be the amount of signal you can collect. Might be interesting to do a calculation of the number of photons that would be detectable at that distance per unit solid angle to figure out roughly how big the mirrors would have to be to capture an image in a reasonable amount of time.
> So even if your lens was the size of the solar system you'd still be off by a factor of 1000 trying to resolve the dinosaurs.
What's the effective size of a gravity lens? You know, the kind where you park a satellite out at 550 AU and image whatever's directly on the opposite side of Sol (or an equivalent distance in proportion to some remote star's gravity).
The idea of using sun's gravitational lensing effect as a telescope has been proposed seriously (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens). this has much smaller resolution then what you mention but perhaps can be used to witness other planets in ours and nearby galaxies in our cluster.
I’m imagining an advanced civilization with a telescope capable of doing observing dinosaurs, but only ones being thinks that it an interesting use of the telescope. So they work super hard and get exactly one Earth day’s worth of observing time to look at dinosaurs w/ no possible rescheduling. When the day finally comes… clouds.
This is admittedly a bit over my head, but does that mean it is technically possible that an image of earth could be captured from the distance needed to see Pangaea?
Thinking about this has sparked a bunch of questions I hadn't thought of before. For instance, does information encoded with light degrade over long distances in a vacuum? If not, it does seem like a mega-lens could potentially capture such an image right?
Under this perfect assumption you end up having a problem with the red shift caused by the expansion of the universe (which I didn't account for above) that lengthens the wavelength of the light you want to see, requiring an even larger lens.
On the lens side of things, as far as I'm aware (not a physicist, math PhD student who is just generally into this sort of thing) there isn't anything fundamental preventing you from collecting this light and building the lens, but from our current understanding of materials science I'm fairly confident it's currently impossible to construct a structure that will stay together that large.
That being said there may be ways around this problem, like I said not a physicist or engineer, but you are right that from an information theoretical perspective if you ignore dust and other things in the way then yes all the information is still there.
> Under this perfect assumption you end up having a problem with the red shift caused by the expansion of the universe (which I didn't account for above) that lengthens the wavelength of the light you want to see, requiring an even larger lens.
Redshift does not come into play at the 'small' scale of our galaxy since the Milky Way is a gravitationally bound system that does not itself expand with the Universe. Even within our local group (eg from Andromeda) it is not an issue since the local group is also gravitationally bound. Redshift only becomes an issue at much larger scales, if you are in another galaxy outside our local group.
Why not? If it can be seen from just a few miles outside the atmosphere, and the light continues to travel without obstruction through the vacuum of space, couldn't it be seen from millions of light years away as well?
Sorry, I should have clarified, that’s not at all what I meant. I’m thinking about if it’s bound by current theory, not current tech. Obviously we can’t do this today, or probably in my lifetime.
From a philosophical point of view, an event happens at the point when observed by an observer.
For us, Humans on earth, this supernova happens now and not 120 million years ago.
If a tree falls in a forest and we stumbled upon it today, I don’t think philosophy says that the tree fell today. I think it says we found a fallen tree today.
The supernova didn’t happen today, we found evidence of it today.
Minkowski spacetime confuses matters, though. From the point of view of the photon we observe, no time elapses between its emission at the location being observed and its arrival at the telescope image sensor. It's as if the photon were born in exactly the right place and time to be observed by us, at that very instant.
So what we see is arguably happening in real time, regardless of distance.
Ehh. The measurement is happening in real time but we have well-defined ways to say when the event happened, and that's 120MY ago (given the reference frame where Earth is motionless).
Depends on what you mean by "real time". If by "real time" you mean "the spacetime interval between the event 'supernova explodes' and 'explosion observed on earth' is lightlike (or null)", then we witnessed it in real time. I can't think of any other definition that is observer independent.
I also argue that it is not well-defined, as the time span depends on the observer, as you say. Did it happen 120MY ago or 1MY ago? Both can be true for different observers, and none is privileged over the other.
I think even philosophy can withstand knowing the speed of light and incorporating it into the framework of 'when things happened' so that it agrees with our understanding of the universe instead of not.
Say you were immortal and witnessed a supernova from a million light-years away. Eventually, after another million years have passed, you meet another immortal who happened to be right next to the supernova when it happened. When talking to this other immortal, would you refer to the event as happening two million years ago (when you witnessed it), or three million years ago (when the other immortal witnessed it)?
Objects move pretty fast in space, usually tens of kilometers per second.
A 20 meter of diameter object with velocity of 10000 mps is pretty deadly impact from Earth's point of view.
Not really, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor was 20 meter diameter and hit the atmosphere at about 20 km/s. While there were some ~1500 injured people, the Earth as a whole did not really notice.
I don’t know about you but I’d consider a Hiroshima-scale explosion pretty deadly. We just got lucky it didn’t hit the middle of a major population centre at a more direct angle. That could have been catastrophic.
It would suck to be in the area, yes. But the comment I was responding to said "pretty deadly impact from Earth's point of view." Hiroshima-scale explosions don't make an appreciable dent in the Earth itself, and any human population outside immediate vicinity will still be fine.
If you take away all the media hype around Alan Turning and just see his contributions, he will still stand out.
On Computable Numbers [1] is perhaps one of the top 3 papers in the history of Mathematics. One of the most remarkable thing about Turning Machine is its simplicity.
Then again, in 1950, Can Machine Think[2] is perhaps the top 3 papers in the history of Philosophy. And then again, one of the most remarkable thing about Turing Test and the Imitation Game is its simplicity.
The impact of these two papers in the academia, industry and in our lives is huge.
Alan Turning is easily one of the top 3 Mathematicians and Philosophers of all time.
If you want to group to math, you're going to have to compete with the likes of Euclid, Reiman, Bayes, Newton, Gauss, Cantor, Erdos, Fermat, Pascal, Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Cauchy, Jacobi, Hamilton, Galois, Weierstrass, Cayley, Dedekind, Klein, Hilbert, Brouwer, Godel...
So at high level its Pub/Sub and RPC combined together in a single framework.
From a developer perspective, you can create a "channel" and then start transmitting messages on that channel. Then someone else can subscribe and can listen to that channel.
In the same way, someone can "expose" a single method. And you as a developer can call that method from anywhere.
The medium of communication is WebSockets. The protocols it uses is WAMP.
Which means any programming language can implement this (on top of WebSockets) and can take advantage of "distributed application architecture".
Thanks for the suggestion. Mehrgarh is a very important archeological site. But according to wikipedia ancient history has a very specific meaning. If my interpretation is correct, ancient history starts from the beginning of writing or recorded history, which Mehrgarh predates. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history
The boundary conditions are somewhat porous here. Take a look at the related page [1] about proto-writing. I think to some extent there's a philosophical and ontological frame that you have to put at the boundary; personally, I'm more inclined to add some slack into my understanding to accommodate for new artifacts we find that push back the earliest artifacts of recorded history. Still, even now, we have evidence of proto-writing at 6600BC at least (Jiahu shells), as well as the Vinca script and Dispilio tablet around 5200BC.
Thinking about this stuff stirs the same childlike wonder I used to have as a kindergartener thinking about dinosaurs and trying to comprehend or imagine what life must have been like so many millions of years ago. I very selfishly hope (but have no proof) that we will find earlier and earlier evidence of proto-writing. What a grand mystery and story!
The Tower of Babel story comes into pretty good context when you realize that the people writing it down (most likely in the 5th-6th century BC in Babylon) were living among the ruined towers of a Babylonian empire from a millennium before them.
This is a controversial, and in my opinion (as an archaeologist), a rather incorrect definition. It's certainly the traditional one, but most archaeologists today don't use it because of all the theoretical issues it would entail, like Europeans "bringing history" in 1492 to an entire continent when nothing about the nature of our sources changes at that time.
I've worked on both sides of the "writing line" and frankly, the process is very much the same in most cases.
"ancient history starts from the beginning of writing or recorded history"
Perhaps an unconscious bias of literate cultures. In the Canadian high arctic years ago, scientists discovered evidence of "paleo-eskimo" (bad name) peoples in the soil. These included more primitive hunting tools than were used by the Inuit people who were there when Europeans arrived.
They took to the tools to the village elders excited to show what they had found. The news story reported that the elders said (paraphrase) "Yes we know. These are the Tuliit people. We have songs about them" :-0
I think some would argue that oral history counts as "recording", so this is history.
More generally, history (as a field) deals with those records, where archaeology as a field deals with the artifacts. They obviously interact and inform each other to varying extents, but are distinct in their practices and habits.
> Perhaps an unconscious bias of literate cultures
It seems like a quite conscious decision. That's how categorizing things works. You have to have a definition, however vague and exception ridden, otherwise your words don't refer to anything.
But its a dream and a wish list. And We're the only species who can have dreams as big as we want.