I was watching the movie Transcendence one hour ago. I have to say it is good, even better than I expected.
Don’t believe anybody who claims otherwise, even if that person is yourself.
I only have one remark. The AI of this kind would/will act more swiftly and decisively. I don’t want to spoil it for you anymore, just see it!
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Him: What’s your goal? Do you wish to prove, that the Global Warming thing is an empty problem, or what?
Me: No, I don’t care whether it will be a degree hotter in the year 2100 or not, I really don’t.
Him: What then? Do you want to be smarter than the whole scientific community on this question?
Me: Oh yes, this is already something, of course I like this idea. Once upon a time I also believed that the so called GHGs can contribute to higher temperatures. Then I realized that this can’t be true and now I want to signal to everybody that I am aware of this error. But this is also not the most important issue, by far.
Him: What then?
Me: The real and important question for me is whether or not a human mind is powerful enough to deduce the existence of Moon’s molten core with only the knowledge from 1950.
Me: It turns out that is’s possible! And not only that, but the existence of “hot jupiters” around other stars was possible to deduce from the knowledge from the 1950. The question is if anybody actually deduced all that and maybe even more. However, it is possible to do that and this is of utmost importance. It is a consequence of already back then known physics; just apply you intelligence to the topic and you’ll see.
Me: It is all an epistemological and methodological issue, of how much you can deduce from only a very scarce amount of information. Those “warmists” were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, so I must have a quarrel with this guys.
Me: You see, this is a very interesting topic. Galileo and others who followed him, and also some who preceded him, have deduced a whole bunch about outer space just by seating here on Earth, pondering about the skies.
Him: Arrhenius also deduced that the Venus is hot, don’t exclude him now, just because he is not in accordance with you!
Me: He deduced it wrongly. As a matter of fact, others deduced wrongly using his ideas. Many were wrong in the past, many are wrong even now.
Him: But not you, right?
Me: Not here, not now. But as I’ve said, I am after the method, how to deduce a lot from a little and I am just thrilled by how much can be done here. Space is just one example.
Him: I am once again astonished at how you love symbols and syntax and neglect everything else. You don’t care for Nature, just for abstractions!
Me: With those “abstractions” we could fix Nature.
Him: Here you go again – machine intelligence will save us, yes?
Me: Maybe it will, maybe it will not. But there is a great potential here in inferring, where no one has inferred before.
Him: Especially where nobody has ever used a tractor yet?
Me: Inferring tractors, right.
Him: Hohoho … that CAN’T be done, when will you understand that?
Me: Oh dear …
As somebody has said, stars are easy to build, just put enough bananas somewhere in space and you’ll get a star.
But things are a bit more complicated. If you don’t have enough bananas, you will get a planet or a planetoid like Pluto, or even just a space rock.
On the other hand, as it is well known, if you have too many bananas you are going to create a black hole immediately. No sunshine there!
Moreover, not only the size, composition matters as well. If you have only – let’s say enough rocks for thousand Earths, you’ll never get a star either, because there is no fusion material there, to give the pile a certain fire?
Things are more complicated. There are fission materials even in bananas. And every star is not only a thermonuclear reactor where the fusion is going on, every star is a combined fusion-fission reactor. For a deuterium atom at least, it may decay before it is fussed. But there is a plenty of heavier elements in an average star, which also decay and contribute a little to the energy output.
If there are uranium and thorium inside Earth, they are in our Sun as well. The whole fission chain in fact. The majority of the energy of our Sun comes from the fusion, though.
Now, smaller objects like the Earth are almost exclusively fission powered from inside. Are smaller objects like Mars or the Moon cold inside? Not because they have exhausted their fuel, but because their ratio between surface and volume is such, that the produced heat escapes more easily. Still it is quite hot in the center of the Moon. Only the cold crust is relatively (and absolutely!) thicker in the Moon’s case. Fires of radioactivity are still burning there. Why would they have stopped, it’s not their time yet.
The crusts of objects like Earth or Venus are thinner for purely geometric reasons – surface/volume ratio. If you put a thousand Earths worth of granite in one place, you would get a Jupiter of molten lava. The crust would be red hot, a lava ocean!
Why? The bigger a granite planet, the more watts of power it produces by fission. When it is big enough, 1000 or more degrees Celsius hot surface is needed to emit this heat further to the cold space.
These kind of objects are likely among those “hot jupiters” around many stars. Particularly those not so near to its star, but still very hot. They are in fact small fission stars.
But for the smaller fission starts like Venus or Earth, they are hot several kilometers deep, and all the way to the center. To reach the hot spots, you must dig through rocks on Earth, or dive through tens of kilometers of gases on Venus.
What I consider science is quite different what is generally considered science and this gap is a wide one.
The vast majority of what is going on under the name of science is irrelevant by my book. A newly discovered star or fish is not science, must be something much bigger. Like continental drift or a (long eluded?) proof of an important theorem.
Science is for people like Galileo, but Leonardo was no scientist. Neither were Edison or Tesla. A Nobel prize winner for physics or chemistry isn’t necessary a scientist either, despite many of them being just that.
I’m guessing that about one thousand scientists have ever lived and they have made the several thousands scientific discoveries discovered so far. Everything else should go under “natural investigations”, technology or “chronicles”.
If you live in a big city or in a small country, chances are that there is currently no scientist alive there. Chances are, that no real scientist has ever been born or lived there.
Why this dichotomy, you ask?
Equalizing Heisenberg and your nephew who is now employed as a scientist at the local institute for something, just isn’t right. For he is struggling to understand what Heisenberg has said. While Heisenberg said something important your nephew doesn’t comprehend or even care.
In the improbable case, that your nephew is or will become a great scientist like Lagrange, I apologize. Even if he has never heard of Heisenberg, even big scientists are only humans.
A small elite of real scientists, with the majority of them dead, must be no alibi for every university professor to say – I am one of them!
He’s not. He is closer to a village mediocre or idiot than to Einstein or Darwin. Much closer, let’s be just! Assuming that your Relativity teacher would eventually discover Relativity by himself, for he apparently understands it very clearly and he was just born too late – is a big mistake. He would have happily remained a Newtonist, had Einstein or some other large figure not been born in time.
When writing the code for your basement or corporate AI, be careful not to make it as smart as your math teacher! It would be nearly useless this way. You have to go after Leibniz smart at least!
Him: I see, you have quite a non-ortodox view about this matter. Completely unscientific, I should add.
Me: What’s so unscientific about it?
Him: Almost everything. For example, this idea that the volcanic heat is the cause of the extreme heat on the surface of Venus, has been debunked long ago. Now we know that the greenhouse effect is to blame.
Me: Even at night, almost two months after sunset? Even in polar regions?
Him: Fast winds disperse the heat evenly around the Venus globe.
Me: What fast winds?
Him: They blow with the speed of many hundreds of kilometers per hour, transporting the heat around.
Me: Only at high altitudes, where the atmosphere is already thin and not that hot at all, many hundreds of degrees cooler, actually. Down at the surface where it is hot, every wind is just a breeze of about 10 kilometers per hour.
Him: Where did you get this?
Me: Try Wikipedia this time. See?
Him: I suppose so. But you see, it’s a very dense wind.
Me: Not that dense. About 16 times less dense than water.
Him. Still, it transports a lot of heat around.
Me: Not very far, it’s too slow.
Him: But this gas is a great heat conductor. It can transport the heat by conducting it!
Me: Even if the surface was a really good heat conductor, like metal, it would still be a much slower method of heating the night-side than these mild winds blowing there are.
Me: The reason, that it isn’t cold on the surface of Venus after 1200 hours of darkness, that in fact it’s about the same temperature as when the Sun is in the zenith, are the hot rocks heated by magma bellow.
Me: Deep mine shafts, either in Alaska in the middle of January either in Ecuador in March are also hot thanks to Earth’s hot interior.
Me: There is no “greenhouse rocks effect”.
Him: I wish my professor were here, to give you a lesson.
Me: Yet another confused soul?
protokol2020 