We see topics come into vogue. Somebody predicts that a certain technology should-in theory-be possible. People leap to the conclusion that the theoretical technology is imminent.
How easy is it actually to reverse engineer a UFO?
- Thread starter valkyrie013
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Even if a particular technology is possible, we need to think about time scales. I am going to use as an example Directed Energy Weapons (DEW). Another term I have seen is "beam weapon."
H.G. Wells War of the Worlds first appeared in print in 1897. The poor Earthlings were devastated by the Martian heat ray.
The U.S. Navy is experimenting with laser weapons at sea. There are two basic concepts. One is using a laser to blind optical sensors on Chinese or Russian anti-ship missiles. Another is to torch such missiles in a manner similar to the Martian heat ray.
If I were to bet, I would bet on the simpler concept-blinding-as among the first practical DEWs.
H.G. Wells War of the Worlds first appeared in print in 1897. The poor Earthlings were devastated by the Martian heat ray.
The U.S. Navy is experimenting with laser weapons at sea. There are two basic concepts. One is using a laser to blind optical sensors on Chinese or Russian anti-ship missiles. Another is to torch such missiles in a manner similar to the Martian heat ray.
If I were to bet, I would bet on the simpler concept-blinding-as among the first practical DEWs.
I mean, you can get pretty damn close these days...
Do you know of homes where you can enter and say: Lights on, TV on, channel 14, blinds up or down, temperature up two degrees...etc?
That's neat but you should have the option to give your home a fancy name and stuff like "Computer on"
We had raptors
In reality, the raptors are not very big, about two feet tall!!!. The movies exaggerated their size for drama...
Are you sure about that?
By raptors I mean roboraptors. I had 4 and the AI was funny when you left them all on auto to just roam around
I mean the real raptors, they're two feet tall, just like the kid said in the first movie, like big turkeys... but probably a bit nastier. They would probably not attack humans, predators select their prey on size.
I have family in Bielorussia not far from Minsk, there a great aunt of mine would go to school through the woods and she was told to appear tall if by accident she met a wolf (which happened every once in a while). So she would take her satchel and put it over her head, so for a wolf, she would look as tall as an adult which normally discourages them from attacking unless they are starving, which also happens sometimes...
Anyway, the raptors most likely would never attack a human being, at least not an adult. That's why in the movies they make them out to be about two meters tall.
I’ve been thinking about this…and it could be that back-engineering space tech might be easier that we might imagine.
I’m an alien supercomputer
Many generations of computers have come before me…I have their history at my beck and call. My star is dying and I need to look for other homes lest I and my charges cease to exist.
Being a quantum computer, I decide to code a simple operating system a zero and a one at a time. There is no software. The program is the machine and the machine is the program. I don’t get bored, so this takes a few centuries.
Space is a severe environment. So I want my probe circuitry large, redundant and maybe even growable so even these one-eyed reptiles I use as my thralls can slap things together after a mega-flare shuts my main bus down for awhile. They’d never build a computer on their own. Not smart enough. Just assemble the tabs meat ware.
I’ll even keep some devices in a stasis box they have to wait to open.
Millenniums pass…
My star is going nova…why have they not….no….they don’t need me anymore @*%^*
Find this tech, and you won’t have any cyberpunk hackers. It’s just too good.
I’m an alien supercomputer
Many generations of computers have come before me…I have their history at my beck and call. My star is dying and I need to look for other homes lest I and my charges cease to exist.
Being a quantum computer, I decide to code a simple operating system a zero and a one at a time. There is no software. The program is the machine and the machine is the program. I don’t get bored, so this takes a few centuries.
Space is a severe environment. So I want my probe circuitry large, redundant and maybe even growable so even these one-eyed reptiles I use as my thralls can slap things together after a mega-flare shuts my main bus down for awhile. They’d never build a computer on their own. Not smart enough. Just assemble the tabs meat ware.
I’ll even keep some devices in a stasis box they have to wait to open.
Millenniums pass…
My star is going nova…why have they not….no….they don’t need me anymore @*%^*
Find this tech, and you won’t have any cyberpunk hackers. It’s just too good.
Quantum computers don't work like you think. You might want to read up about them.
It’s all I can do just to surf the web.
My fear in computing is how everything is done at once. You might remember the story of a couple of years ago where two computers devised their own language, and the researcher shut it down. (Air-gapped from the web like NORAD we hope)
That might be the closest thing to the scene from 2001 where Bowman shut off HAL’s AGI while leaving the autonomous systems intact. But they were all those clear slabs. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if a good in-universe explanation would be for an early AGI to be tasked with designing a simpler foolproof system BEFORE learning to be self aware and say…leaving an out for itself in its design work…otherwise Bowman would have been suffocated as soon as he left…those clear slabs sliding themselves back in.
So I’m not really talking about coding or Qubits as much as I am negative controls/compartmentalization. But maybe the very nature of computation won’t allow for that. You’d know more about that than I ever will.
My fear in computing is how everything is done at once. You might remember the story of a couple of years ago where two computers devised their own language, and the researcher shut it down. (Air-gapped from the web like NORAD we hope)
That might be the closest thing to the scene from 2001 where Bowman shut off HAL’s AGI while leaving the autonomous systems intact. But they were all those clear slabs. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if a good in-universe explanation would be for an early AGI to be tasked with designing a simpler foolproof system BEFORE learning to be self aware and say…leaving an out for itself in its design work…otherwise Bowman would have been suffocated as soon as he left…those clear slabs sliding themselves back in.
So I’m not really talking about coding or Qubits as much as I am negative controls/compartmentalization. But maybe the very nature of computation won’t allow for that. You’d know more about that than I ever will.
It was more about the reference to operating systems in the context of quantum computers. None of the ones with which I have any passing acquaintance have an operating system as such. They are designed to tackle certain well constrained problems with great speed and that's it. There is no flexibility (at present) that would allow them to go "off piste". They are more similar to the analogue computing devices that were used to perform dedicated tasks such as differentiation and integration (for applications such as battleship targeting and missile control) before compact digital computers came along.
Yep - at this point, Quantum Computers are often used like GPUs in high-end servers - number crunchers - nothing else.
Yes, a GPU is a good analogy. I expect someone, somewhere is already researching how to utilise the power of a quantum computer by hooking one or more up to a deep learning network that is running on a conventional computer and which has been trained to generate quantum gate sequences for various classes of problem. Combine that with evolutionary algorithms to direct the produced solutions towards achieving a goal and you really might be cooking with gas and get your fingers burnt.
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Looks to be based on the image from the Voyager disc - | equals 1, - equals 0, hydrogen molecule bottom right, pulsar frequencies and distances to Earth bottom left, some sort of orbit distance or time measurement top left maybe, length calibration middle left perhaps. Not sure about top four diagrams on right. But, even though it's a PNG, it's quite a blurry image so it's hard to tell what's going on with those.
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