A Permutator, NMRI Style

Currently, the best (N)MRI technologies have a resolution close to one nanometer.  Which is about 10 atoms wide.

It is important to remember, that NMRI is not just a camera. Every atom detected, is an atom influenced or moved. Peripheral Nerve Stimulation is already a standard medical procedure, using this two way street – seeing is moving. And this has no limit, except for the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle, which is relevant only beyond/bellow the point where atoms are being taken from one and placed into another molecule. Just like with some old-fashioned nanotechnology, atomic precision manufacturing is possible. What is more, with NMRI manufacturing, you will need no nanomachines!

The most important limitation of the future NMRI Permutator is heat dissipation. Just as in today’s NMRI tunnel the patient is being warmed up while being scanned, the future objects of permutations will heat up as well. So it will be necessary to permutate the atoms of a corpse  slowly, if you want to resurrect it inside a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging Permutator Machine, without cooking the cadaver. A cool cooling device will be most handy.

But there is no principle that would prevent you from doing it, it’s just your rock axe; not precise enough to repair a Swiss watch. Yet.

The Ulimate Technology – Permutators

Since the God lost much of his grip in the secularized West, the Mother Nature quietly and effectively inherited God’s power and status. It’s an unquestionable authority, you should admire, respect and obey. Only a small  disobedience now and then is tolerated or is forgiven, like mauling your lawn or throwing a small pebble into a river. But even those two examples are increasingly discouraged. You should leave the lawn in its natural form for the sake of some insects, which they have families there.

In his later centuries of power, God become more friendly to sinners. A mistake Mother Nature is not going to repeat according to her high Green priests.

But this is not what is going to happen. I must admit, that the Nature has it’s moment, but living in a concentration camp or gulag, had such moments, too. Just another excuse to escape in a somewhat better world outside.

Sooner or later,  we will need all the atoms, to create a much better world where currently lies this provisionally scrapped-together one. The current permutation of all the atoms (maybe even the current permutation of all the smaller particles)  is incredibly low on the inhabitants satisfaction index ladder. Could be billions of times better.

A permutator is a machine which can transform a physical object into another physical object, by a permutation of its elements. We all know how to permutate a pile of Lego bricks to a fancy house or better, a robot. It is just the same principle, when it comes to atoms, sometimes even to molecules. It takes only a permutation of atoms to convert an ill man to a healthy one.  A miserable to a happy, an old to an of his prime years – and so on and on. Only the thermodynamics has to be obeyed and everything inside of that perimeter is possible, if you know how. If you have the know-how, or at least a permutator machine.

Tell me, which nature lover wouldn’t feed a particular hungry bird, despite the warning tables which encourage you to let them all die of hunger?

And which nature lower equipped with a permutator machine wouldn’t permutate a tick infested moose to a clean one?

It is a self fueling process. Every permutator machine owner would improve himself in every way imaginable to him. Some of them would kill you, just as they want to do it now. Some would permutate your permutator to something less  practical, like a statue of Zeus.

This would quickly escalate to a war, like no war before, if everybody had one such a machine.

But nobody with a permutator would want to sell you one, for you have nothing worth it. Even several billion dollar cash isn’t enough for a transaction. Therefore a small group of those, who will be able to construct it, will shape the whole world with it, pretty quickly . They will be the ultimate transformers of the world. Whoever they will be, I doubt the Serengeti national park will still inhabit lions, crocodiles and other fauna. I doubt that the Sun itself in the present hot form will survive. I think all the fires in the Galaxy will be put down, all the action will go near the absolute zero, where it is the most economic.

I have reasons to believe, that those permutators will come even sooner than the full nano naturally  would. The mature nanotechnology may look something like a permutator, only that there is a probable shortcut to the matter permutation.

Next: How to build one (at least in principle)?

Dialogue I

Once upon the time it really happened.

Me: What do you think, Mr. Everett’s follower, when  are your teachings going to be taught in most schools?

Him: Later in this century, I am sure.

Me: In which Everett branch will this be, sear?

Him: In the averaged majority of them all!

Me: Really? In the averaged majority? Won’t this average mainly be shaped by the most radioactive post nuclear war branches, since they so quickly reproduce?

Him, already branched away.

You can use this handy logical entrapment for those people just about every time you meet one of them. Have fun!

Actually, your job will usually already be done after the second question. Not everyone of them will try to escape through the “averaged whatever”, but branch away from the debate right there. They preach the splitting of the whole Universe every time something quantum occurs. Which is about many times every nano second. They say the Universe divides like a bacteria, only much, much faster. They call the “petri dish” Multiverse and every bacteria an “Everett branch”, dividing further. No branch is special, all are of an equal status.  In some of the branches the Roman Empire is still alive and well. In most, there are no humans. And so on and on.

Still, they hope to teach this in every school inside THIS world, later in the 21st century. They already do it in some.

Another myth …

… that life around hot vents, deep under the ocean is autonomous, independent of the Sun’s light, is enormously successful. But in fact, if there were no green plants under the sea and on land providing oxygen by photosynthesis, those crabs and fish and so on around those vents would suffocate soon. What would remain, would be some anaerobic bacteria.

The multicellular life down there also needs oxygen, and only green plants under the Sun are a big enough provider.

Which brings us to the next well guarded myth, with the opposite flavor. That if all insect  suddenly died, we would also follow them soon thereafter. Especially since Einstein said so.

In fact he didn’t say it. In fact not even all flowering plants would perish if the insects were gone. It would be a considerable economic problem for us, the price of tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as many fruits would go up, but that’s about all. We can pollinate every commercially interesting plant artificially.

We are also often systematically led to believe many other myths: how biodiversity is automatically something good, that non-native species are automatically something bad, and many more. Who is responsible for this?

Nobody. We are just witnessing the information stampede through our heads and computers. With the recent global increase of bandwidth the pace of this stampede significantly increased as well. Both, the truth and all the lies about something travel even faster in all directions. Just like in the case of an enormously big heard of cows, you can’t really tell where it will go and where it will stop, if  anywhere.

The question is, can this whirling be influenced? We shall see.

 

 

 

The Tesla Myth …

… is everywhere these days. It is a kind of a religion, a strange mix of technology and New Age zealotry.

What the man, a great man no doubt, has done, was a magnificent hack, a patch, which enables humanity to produce and use electricity without the need of geographical proximity of the producer to the consumer. Which proved to be essential.

The hack was called AC – alternate current.

Today this brilliant hack is becoming more and more obsolete. The conversion of AC to DC which is the only type of a current that computers and most other appliances can use, is not without a  price. Some big power plants, like Itaipu are quite Edisonian and they have been producing HVDC electric power for a long time. Slowly the AC is loosing it’s battle against the DC.

Yes, Nikola Tesla was a technological genius of his time and we owe him a lot, but he was not a big scientist, let alone a semi-god like creature that many believe him to be.

Move on, give the man some well deserved peace!

Is P ~= NP?

At least sometimes it is. For example, when we succeed in constructing an  evolutionary algorithm which approximately solves a particular NP hard problem and stumbles upon an optimal solution, we have built a royal shortcut between those two worlds. The NP and the P. However fragile and sporadic the bridge was, it lasted long enough for us to get the solution we wanted, even if the solution wasn’t perfect. We were after an approximation and we found a better one, than we could have hoped for using the brute force approach.

Imagine, that we are able to tackle every NP problem with this strategy! By translating it first to some evolutionary process yielding ever better results and then wait until an acceptably good solution occurs “naturally” in this process.

The packing problems are famous and most probably NP. We have managed to install some of them inside an emulation of evolution and got a lot of results. Some are world records, some have been surpassed by others since, many have just been fine-tuned by humans, many are waiting to be published. Unfortunately, we are so CPU hungry, that this low priority process is all but dead at the moment. Fortunately we use all the computing we get, for other more practical evolutions. Like scheduling — another NP problem that we routinely leave to evolution.

The greatest achievement of this stupid evolutionary algorithm is that it turns out to be very innovative. Thus, not stupid at all, but  actually very intelligent by any sensible definition! The biggest irony here is that some humans grab the original, unexpected, evolved idea and then fine tune it, when it should be the other way around! The innovative brilliant human should invent a new solution, the computer should just polish it.

The traditional roles have changed here.

Here is an original computer creation. Almost all circles are violet, which means that they don’t even touch each other. What utter sloppiness!  Still it’s the best known  (July 17. 2013) packing of 249 circles inside a square.

Sooner or later a human will fine tune and publish it under his/her name. It’s okay, the Internet will preserve the whole history.

The Menace that is Dark Energy

It’s been more than a decade now, since we realized that this Universe is probably doomed to be ripped apart by a powerful force, named dark energy.

We don’t know exactly when, but it will most probably happen in the span of the next trillion years. The anti-gravity of dark energy will destroy even black holes and atoms, which would otherwise stay around for many orders of magnitude longer. Now this scenario will unfold  suddenly, our Universe will die in its early infancy, even before all the stars will have exhausted their fuel.

Well, not so fast! There is a way to convert dark energy into ordinary matter-energy. In principle, there is nothing that would prevent us from converting nearly all of it thereby creating twenty times as many galaxies, stars and planets that we currently have. Okay, maybe in some other form of mass-energy, but that’s secondary.

There is little to no dispute about using a rope from here to a distant redshift galaxy and using the resulting force to do some work – a tiny amount, but still.

And we can do it better, much better: instead of a trans-galactic rope, we could use two distant black holes, falling toward each other. Thanks to dark energy, new space is constantly being created between the two. So there is virtually no limit to at how close to the speed of light they will eventually crash. Not exactly at the speed of light, but arbitrarily close.

This means, that their relativistic speeds will give them an arbitrarily large mass, therefore  relativistically multiplying their masses a million times. They could, if there was an unlimited supply of dark energy around. But there isn’t, because we used it and converted it to ordinary mass-energy in the form of a massive black hole.

Perhaps we don’t even need two black holes and a long linear particle accelerator would do. Perhaps we could use dark energy induced space inflation to make a proton to travel at 0.999 of the speed of light – instead of only 0.99 with the same energy input. The difference could only have come from the conversion from dark energy to ordinary mass-energy.

All the above only holds true in the case of the law of Energy Conservation being extended to dark mass and dark energy in the future Quantum Gravity Theory, and that some crucial aspects of General Relativity remain valid.

In that case we will be able to change the fate of the Universe, to make a closed one, from an open one.

It is possible, that some converting processes are already under way naturally. This wild acceleration only begun 5 billion years ago. It started naturally, it may end the same way.

Even if it is us who stop it, it will still be all natural.

Why Goddard was right and the NYT was wrong?

In other words, why rockets do accelerate in empty space?

Because of Newton’s Third Law? Yes, but this is not a very understandable way of putting it.

Instead, imagine a hollow cube made of 6 square steel plates, one square meter each, a few millimeters tick, well welded together, full of nitrogen gas heated to 300 K, so that the internal pressure is 1 bar. The cube is floating freely somewhere in interstellar space.

The pressure exerts the force of 100,000 N on the front plate, and 100,000 N on the rear plate. The forces are in  equilibrium.  We will dismiss the other four plates since the same goes for them.

Now we make a 1 square centimeter hole in the rear plate, so that the gas induced force is acting upon it with the force of only 99,990 N.  Therefore there is no equilibrium anymore, but the resulting force of 10 N starts to push the cube, until all the gas leaks out.

This is how a rocket works. This is why Goddard was right.

Why the New York Times was wrong? That is another story,  they had no clue, regardless of details.

Planet rotation, extreme case

Imagine a complicated system of mirrors concentrating  all the sunlight that is now falling on the Moon, onto a hotspot around the Moon-Sun nadir point (the point under the Sun), with an area of 100 square miles.

The hotspot would have almost the same temperature as the Sun’s surface and would relay the same amount of energy from the Sun that the entire Moon’s surface does today.

The average temperature of the Moon would be just around 3 Kelvins that only one percent of what it is now.

The same energy flow traveling from the Sun to the empty space, via the Moon, at an average Moon temperature that would be much, much lower than it is today.

This is the previous post on rotation, taken to an extreme, for everybody to understand.

One must disperse a given energy flow evenly, to achieve the maximal possible average temperature on the planet surface. For this, very large rotational velocities around all three axis are recommended, so as to warm both the north and the south pole.

The Earth has never spun this way,  but it has spun faster before and during the good old days of the tropical dinosaur infested paradise.

Due to the faster rotation, the snow had no big presence, not even in the polar areas.

At least the planetary scientists should know this!

Faster is Hotter in Planetary Rotation, Really!

Let’s say that we have five territories of equal size on a planet far, far away.

With temperatures of 84, 49, 22, 16 and 8 K. It’s the warmest in the early afternoon area and the coldest around the early morning area. 84 and 8 respectively. The average temperature is 35.8 K.

Now, we spin the planet a bit faster, so that the maximal temperature is only 2 K lower, because it can’t warm that much during the shorter day.

We now have 82, 51, 38, 34, 26 Kelvins. As you can see, the lowest temperature is higher, since the night is shorter as well. The average temperature is now 46.2 – more than 10 Kelvins more.

The beauty of this is that the sum of all five temperatures to the power of 4 is 55,855,825 in both cases. Just as Stefan’s law demands it be if we want to have the same energy output, that is to say if you want to satisfy the energy conservation law.

The numbers here are just an example to help you understand the situation. It would make no difference if we had to calculate with a billion areas instead of 5. The same principle applies; when you lower the maximal temperature, you have to increase the other temperatures by more than that, so as to preserve the energy flow. By doing so, the global average temperature goes up, the average is linear but the radiation isn’t.

It’s quite elementary, in fact.