Huh, the way I say Persephone (per-seh-fuh-knee), Saxophone would be pronounced sax-aw-fuh-knee or maybe sax-oh-phony (the way I say saxophone normally in my accent is sacks-uh-phone)
I donāt think anyone in that conversation is advocating against āscience.ā Theyāre advocating to (or maybe just lamenting the fact that we canāt for political reasons) do more to save real bees (and the environment in general) rather than replace bees with something robotic. And theyāre commenting on how starkly this article highlights how much weāre fucking the planet.
Second, building robot bees isnāt really science. It solidly qualifies as engineering, but not science. The reason I bring this up is that while itās arguable that thereās no science that shouldnāt be pursued (though certainly science ought to be done ethically), thereās definitely engineering that would best be not done at all. We keep engineering new and ingenious ways to extract more oil from mostly-not-oil, but thatās destroying the planet. Elonās Hyperloop was never a good idea, and itās fortunate it was never actually built and probably will never be built. A lot of geoengineering proposals that have been put forward are risky on the basis that we donāt understand the ecosystems involved well enough to know what the side effects might be (and thatās likely not something science will be able to solve any time soon.)
Some engineering is beneficial. But some isnāt. And you can imagine Elon or the oil industry or some reckless geoengineering startup railing against detractors calling them āanti-scienceā just as a PR stunt to sway public opinion in favor of their fucked-up money-making scheme.
Comparing building robot bees to measuring fly genitalia further illustrates how the poster is conflating science and engineering.
The thing about āless strain on beesā seems directly out of someoneās ass. I canāt guess their line of reasoning.
Now, being realistic, weāre so fucked that I doubt we can save the bees. And I donāt think itās necessarily a bad thing to make robot bees. But itās pretty fucked that we have to. Which is all they were saying in that conversation.
We keep engineering new and ingenious ways to extract more oil from mostly-not-oil, but thatās destroying the planet.
Before we were doing that we were destroying the planet by killing whales and burning coal. We havenāt quit burning coal though, but we have managed to cut back on killing whales.
Elonās Hyperloop was never a good idea, and itās fortunate it was never actually built and probably will never be built.
I noticed that for the most part, the things they claim it advanced, are advanced regardless and itās only BECAUSE they reached the level that they are now that this can even be done. It wasnāt the other way around. We arenāt working to make robotic bees and THAT tech is what furthers everything else.
The āless strain on bees due to monoculture cropsā thing is doubly silly. Monoculture has a lot of real problems, no need to make any up. Increasing crop diversity reduces the need for fertilizers, poisons, and reduces risk of plant diseases running rampant. Reducing our usage of chemicals for agriculture would help save the actual bees!
That was my biggest gripe of the text, ābees do poorlyā translates directly to āitās unnatural because itās unbalancedā.
People: we can have progress, and a beautiful world of living companions on this blue spaceship as well. There is no other place like it! I say that as an engineer who enjoys the hell out of his job!
At the same time. This is a clear āwhy not both?ā situation.
Letās care for bees. Of course. But engineering even for itās own sake is beneficial.
Some AI problems (or really NN problems) are stupidly difficult. Recognizing individual flower parts from a remotely driven camera on a small copter for one has applicability to about every journal even adjacent to aerospace, control systems, and probably distributed control and consensus. That shit drives science too. Physics informed loss function reduction (for PINNs) are super cutting edge and is at the intersection of science and engineering.
My aero research lab that worked on military systems and airports precipitated a cool as hell line of research into the spread of feline diseases using overlapping principles.
Itās all good stuff. As long as those copters donāt run on ground up bees, I think itās cool someone is getting 6 or 7 figures for a group to research it.
Well, we donāt tend to do well with a āWhy not both?ā situation. We tend to select for the bare minimum, egoistic solution. Not having the egoistic solution available could genuinely help us, i.e. force us, to be less stupid about thisā¦
i hope someday we construct a collider that spans the entire circumference of the earth. But weād probably have to build one that spans the circumference of the moon first, and then maybe mars, since the oceans are going to be a bit of a doozie to work around that we donāt have the technology for, whereas the interior of a collider is supposed to be evacuated, so, the moon almost kinda already handles that for us. heat might be an issue of course, but if we can figure out thermal radiator panels that can dump the heat straight into space, maybe we could pull it offā¦
mars would address the heat issues, but those dust storms are no joke and the dust itself is microscopic toxic/caustic razors and itāll try to get in everywhere and ruin fine instruments it touches. Moon dust is also really bad but thereās no wind to kick it up on the moon obviouslyā¦
but damn. DAMN. imagine the fucking science we could get done with a LUNAR-SCALE PARTICLE COLLIDER!!!
Hear me out okay. hits blunt Dyson ring. Maybe we start building it out between earth and Mars. We dig a big ass hole into Mars core and use some kind of laser technology to focus radiation into it perhaps ājump startingā the core. Or maybe we use some kind of cable and gymbal system to run a hard wire into it. hits bluntThen meanwhile weāre crashing comets and shit into it to get us some oceans and atmosphere, badabing badaboom we got earth 2.0
Well check this out: if itās big enough and can collect enough solar energy, it can be a self-powered gargantuan electromagnet and CREATE a magnetosphere for Mars itself. And the moon has a higher silver content than earth, which a) wonāt tarnish in the vacuum of space and b) is more conductive than copper or gold!
Aluminum alloy structures, silver circuitry, we could build this thing without sending ANY of itās raw materials from earth. Itās all already up there waiting for usā¦ ā¦ Some assembly required :p
Thereās probably opportunity to do some really large colliders in space, for much cheaper than on any celestial body.
But then, people are having a really hard time imagining the fucking science we could get done with a lunar-scale particle collider. Thatās why the merely 100km one isnāt getting any money.
The Moonās daytime is half a month long and can reach 120 C so weād need some pretty powerful heat shielding. And thereās no ozone layer to protect the electronics from radiation, and Iām pretty sure the Moon orbits outside of Earthās magnetosphere. And the shielding used for such a project could also be used to fix climate change here (and terraform Venus later) with orbital parasols. And whatever unimaginable technology weād need for such an ambitious project may as well be used to run a grid of electromagnets and power lines across Mars to give it a magnetic field
Most proposals for moon colonies are either built underground or covered up with a thick layer of regolith for both of the reasons you mentioned. Itās very likely a collider would also be built underground for the same reasons. Digging a many-miles-long tunnel on the moon with the awful properties of moon regolith to deal with would have its own set of challenges though.
Yeah. I hear NASA and India are planning to send 3d-printer robots to lava caves to seal them off, cover/get rid of all moon dust and build permanent bases there (but as of now the priority seems to be researching the polar water-ice and using moon rocks to study what the early solar systemās geology was like)
Now Iām imagining placing a ring of gigantic dyson-sphere powered magnets in an intergalactic void to create the final and ultimate supercollider, the size of a galactic supercluster
that would legitimately be so fucking cool, but I think at those scales weāre actually encroaching on things that truly are physically impossible. If it takes light entire geological eras to move through such a system, any hope of maintaining physical integrity throughout its length is ā¦ exceedingly unlikely. Like, at ranges THAT vast, pretty sure the expansion of spacetime itself would rip it openā¦
Does it actually have to maintain physical integrity as a single structure? If itās not got a vacuum chamber due to relying on the ambient vacuum, then each section of magnets need not physically touch, so the individual components need only use some of the energy from their power source to actively steer themselves into formation rather than rely on material strength to hold together.
At the energies involved, itās akin to a bacteria interfering with a supersonic goods train. The only bit that needs shielding is the detector systems, and thatās not THAT hard to do in space. At least if youāre at the point of building a space based accelerator.
āobserving changes the resultā doesnāt mean conciousness attempting to look at it changes the result, there is nothing special about conciousness (in quantum mechanics)
āobserving changes the resultā means we try to measure atoms and fields but unfortunately our measurement tools are also made out of atoms and fields which interact with the atoms and fields we are trying to measure, giving us a different result than if we donāt attempt to measure it
It does bring up interesting questions about what the ārealā behavior of reality is tho, since anything we observe is technically different than what it would be if left alone. We can only ever know what a slightly altered state of reality is
Then you are measuring something with matter still and it then affects it. Literally causing interactions to measure means altering itās state even at a nonchalant glance.
hmm, I can get how that might cause the measured item to say, change its velocity, but not how that would cause a wave to collapse into a single point.
Measuring is a loaded misnomer. Interacting with a particle changes what the particle is doing. There is no such thing as nondestructive testing in quantum physics.
Measuring just happens to be something we do a lot which necessarily causes particle interactions.
Right but how do you measure the things around what you are trying to measure and get any data from it unless you expect them to also interact with the things you are measuring.
You have to have an interaction to measure even if you are measuring the outcome and steps away from the original interaction.
Itās like measuring dark matter where the easiest way to prove itās existence was to wait and capture the decay of it but not the particle itself. But that means the particle was already gone when we got the measurements to prove it was there.
You can use a tennis ball machine to measure how far away a house is by firing the tennis ball at a constant velocity, timing how long it takes the tennis ball to come back to you, multiplying that time by the velocity, and dividing by 2 (since you measured the distance for a round trip). This works pretty darn well for measuring the distance to houses.
But now try this same trick to measure the distance to another ball. When your measuring ball hits the ball you want to measure, it doesnāt stay resolutely planted in the ground like that nice friendly house. The energy from your measuring ball bounces the ball being measured off into the distance. Even if you could get your measuring ball to return, the ball you measured isnāt in the place you measured it.
Replace that tennis ball with a photon, and you have the basic picture. Thereās no such thing as passive observation. Measuring something interacts with that thing. Conventional measurement is like in the case with the house, the thing being measured is so much bigger and more stable than the thing weāre measuring with that the effect is negligible. But once you start trying to measure something on the same scale as your measuring tool, the ensuing chaos makes it basically impossible to get useful measurements.
This analogy is really well thought out. It really helps my brain understand the weirdness that goes on with measurements on the quantum scale. Thanks for taking the time to type it out.
Not quite - observability in quantum mechanics is about the event producing an interaction that could potentially be measured, regardless of whether we actually attempt to measure it. By interacting with other things the superposition is collapsed and we can determine itās current properties, but itās still the ārealā behaviour of things, because we can only determine things behaviours from their interactions with other things - not knowing what they do when left alone isnāt just about there not being a human around to interacts with them, but about there not being any other particles - no atoms, no electrons, no quarks - for them to interact with either.
If you ask a scientist what pi is, they will tell you it equals 3.14159. If you ask a mathematician, they will tell you pi equals the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. If you ask an engineer, they will say āabout 3, but letās round it up to 5 to be safe.ā
Iād replace scientist to something more precise like physicist because usually people consider mathematicians as scientists even if it depends on definitions.
Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now weāre just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
Alas, I donāt think he will much care to build a subway-but-shitty between one farm outside Waxahachie, TX, to another farm outside of Waxahachie, TX. Not enough density of mouthbreathing Elon stans there.
Thanks for clearing that up, I thought I was finished or near completion. Glad they decided to stop production when they did but sucks that we didnāt get it.
Zounds, a collider over 3000 miles wide would have been quite the achievement! Hereās hoping they get back to it; thatās gotta be worth a ton of science points.
As a geologist who works in the Appalachiansā¦ Theyāre cool af.
Nothing is more surreal than being a geologist. Just today I was standing on a dirt road in the middle of farmers field. Looking at the ground is an innocuous little outcrop of boring looking rocks. But those rocks erupted at the bottom of a back arc basin off the coast of Laurentia, was buried by ocean sediment for ages, had an entire ISLAND of rock thrust onto it, and then buried 10s of kilometers deep. The history one rock can tell is amazing.
As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.
I have a standard reply for when Iām asked why we chose to move to this ātreeless wastelandā. āI look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination.ā I donāt know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.
(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)
I have started daydreaming of a career change to geology. There are just so many unanswered questions and its not like space or physics were these questions are tinyor super far away. You can just walk upto a geologic puzzle and hit it with a hammer.
That is not exactly true. My dad was a geology professor. About half his students ended up in oil and gas. The other half were employed as city planners, teachers, consulting geologists, and in , civil engineering firms, environmental services firms, mining and others.
Not sure if my username gave it away or not, but Iām really into applied mathematics. Iām a physics major right now, & while I donāt immediately see myself studying this in grad school, I think that the physics of Volcanism/Plate Tectonics is extremely fascinating. It certainly looks at the history of the world through a very different lens, but I wouldnāt write it off completely!! The physics of our Earth is a beautiful, beautiful thing. :)
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