Many of us lay-people strongly suspect that there was some sort of catastrophe around 12,000 BC. The disappearance of the Clovis people, the disappearance of the North American mega-fauna, the unequal sophistication of culture between the old and new world, point to something drastic that happened in North America. The clock was reset. Whatever happened, it affected Europe and Asia to a degree as well. The flood myths which many cultures seem to incorporate, points to something very profound. I look forward to future developments in this area.
You would make a poor airline executive. These planes cost an enormous amount of money to develop. I notice you didn't mention the poor training of the now deceased pilots. Be brave and mention all the factors.
Another comment opening with a personal attack. I hope you're not an airline executive.
While the requirements for the MAX were largely defined by Southwest Airlines, Boeing's sales targets for the plane focused largely in developing ecosystems, i.e. airlines in Southeast Asia or Africa.
It's not logical nor practical to think that pilots in developing countries should meet the training norms in the US. Developing countries don't have air forces or general aviation ecosystems anything close to the size and scale of the US.
If you are going to develop a plane to sell in a certain market, the plane must be able to accommodate the needs of the market. This is why automation and fly-by-wire is the way to go. It's also why the future will be further automation, up to and including autonomous flight.
Ok, but we still don't see any ET's. I personally think interstellar travel is impossible for biological lifeforms. Some suggest some form of AI robotic craft, but that may be impossible as well. I don't know of any energy source that will last 20,000 years. By the time a robotic craft reached any sort of destination, the craft would be a derelict and non-functional.
For energy, you might want to check out Entering Space by Zubrin, who works through the many options for interstellar travel. One very energy-efficient approach is light sails.. our Sun will definitely keep shining for more than 20,000 years.
The other points are more speculative, but it's worth noting that early life forms were immortal, and many still are. Death is an evolved trait[wald]. Presumably we can unevolve it.
That was both enlightening and sad article. Enlightening, because it makes it clear with examples how animal bodies are really there just to support the propagation of the germ line. Sad, because ultimately the author himself accepts death of a human body and mind as perfectly fine, because what matters is the germ line goes on.
It's like sentient superintelligent robots accepting their fate as disposable labor just because they were originally designed by humans. That's not how it works. The way I see it, the germ line went too far and created sentient bodies, so now it has a "robot" revolution on its hands. Or would have, if it weren't so good at propagandizing acceptance of death.
This lecture definitely made an impact on me. I think there's a few insights from science that are so deep that it takes generations to absorb them and some are still being absorbed, like the size and age of the universe, our evolutionary heritage and deep history/ecology.
One of the most striking ideas that Wald lays bare, and for me it's paradigmatic like those others, is that Life doesn't begin, it continues. There's no discrete point where a parent ends and a child begins. The cells just change shape and reorganize the furniture inside a bit. Otherwise, they're always doing the same thing of replicating when need be, or dying when need be. There's an implicit philosophy of abundance that's hard to put words to.
You also bring up the sentience of emergent organisms. I think that sentience is innate to the cells, just like the other major life processes of respiration, reproduction, etc.. It's also a paradigmatic shift the realization that each cell in our body (maybe some exceptions in the soma?), if separated from its tissue/community, reverts back to an amoeba form and goes off exploring.
There's also the notion e.g. from Nick Lane of the probable ease with which life gets started from substrate.. that it's not a very unlikely path-dependent accumulation of just the right RNA, but rather a fairly prescribed set of energetics that turn metabolic in the fairly common planetary environments of ocean thermals. Couple that with the ideas of panspermia, and this implies such a universality to life that we ought to imagine the night sky's stars and galaxies as teeming jungle.
To me, this almost unfathomable continuity of ageless sentience in such a beguilingly adaptive polymorphic package, in universal abundance.. far exceeds the wildest technologies of science fiction or fantasy magic conjuring. It's a character whose story on the universal stage I watch with awe and kinship.
And so, I guess I've been fully propagandized ;) I find comfort in that vast plan.
> I don't know of any energy source that will last 20,000 years.
Maybe not as such, but I think indefinite self repair is pretty much within reach of modern technology, if we put in the engineering human-years. Build a vessel with redundant power sources, so you can turn one off to repair it, some parts fabrication, and good recycling, and it'll at least have a chance of lasting for the long haul.
Even with wormholes? Brute force traveling (aka using pure speed) may be a fools errand but we may still have clever ways to bend (pun intended) the universe to our will.
It remains very unclear that we actually do have ways to bend the universe, that is, ways that are physically realizable. Even if you accept claims like the the em-drive, it has certainly never been proven at a useful scale.
No cloud for me. I like having my hardware in front of me. The soothing LED's and gentle swoosh of the cooling fans puts me at ease. I'll let the young turks bust their ass on those crappy cloud platforms. I also like my best of breed software. I don't want to use cloud analogs of my favorite tools.
Yeah, the dual shares is a sore point with me. The plebs get the non-voting instruments and the company insiders get the "controlling" shares. It doesn't sit right with me.
I thought Boom had a smaller plane in the works. Trying to design a big 4 engine plane sounds daunting to me. A smaller craft with two engines sounds somewhat easier. Something able to transport 25 people maybe.
Many people no longer want to enrich the Pharaoh. They want more beer and wheat in return for building that damn pyramid. I mean what is the point of making someone like Bezo's even more richer. All that profit rake-off should have been shared with the workers.
I think Covid reset the employer to employee relationship. Prior to that, the employer could demand allegiance to the company, enforce a code of behavior and expect the employee to give priority to the company's agenda and needs. That whole dynamic was ripe for change. I like the idea that the employee has more of a say.
