It's very possible we never break the factoring problem. Since we have no properly unified theory of physics (e.g., one that models the observer in QFT), there are outstanding unknowns with quantum computing that may make it so that Shor's algorithm is not practically useful.
We have no good evidence or accepted model for how life started, besides "randomness" in a primordial soup, which is as good as "no idea". As such, it seems like a reasonable assumption to explore.
The Mars panspermia theory mentioned in the original article simply moves the "randomness" to a primordial soup 83 million km away during the same time frame, and adds the exceptionally strong claim that Mars was so much more conducive to spontaneous formation of organisms capable of surviving on earth that it is more probable life emerged there and made an unexplained interplanetary journey than it emerged on the planet it currently [exclusively] lives on.
Considering the best evidence of Mars being conducive to earthly life formation is the likelihood of it more closely resembling earth's conditions in the past, it doesn't seem like the sort of claim likely to resolve issues with earthly primordial soup hypotheses...
An earthlike planet is require for earthlike life.
It is fallacious to assume other life couldn't be different -- we can't prove or disprove that. Likewise, we still don't know exactly how life started here; we simply have a few good theories.
I don't think we have "good" theories about how life started here. In particular, the complexity gap from abiotic chemicals to the smallest known organism capable of independent reproduction (about 4 billion atoms!) is extremely large, and no theory has done more than handwave about how that gap is to be crossed.
this is what has always annoyed me about basically every space movie ever made. even life a star away, let alone another galaxy away, is likely to be startlingly different from the oxygen-absorbing, ossified calcium-braced, protein-enriched, atp-powered water blobs with heads, legs, and feet we have on earth. and that's just the the biochemical stuff we're familiar with.
i think in the end it's going to come down to what you really consider "life" to be.
there is an implicit part of our definition that includes timescales and size, and this puts some limits on the type of chemistry that can be involved in order to qualify.
if you open up the definition to be things that work on totally different timescales and sizes than we consider, then i think its fair to say that the chemistry doesn't need to be similar at all.
but for things that form blobs of life on the rough range of scales found on earth, and that "do stuff" in the range of timescales that we see on earth, there are not too many choices. silicon often gets touted as an alternative because of its ability to form branched structures. do you know of any other ideas?
sure, chemistry has a somewhat limited palette to work with, but life happens in the gap between potential and kinetic, between hot and cold, between proton and electron. that's a tiny space but a huge gap.
dna is mostly a 4-note tune, and computers, the potential precursor to artificial life, 2. i'm sure something as vast as the universe can come up with a little more variation than skin type in those tiny little gaps.
I think GTP-powered file is possible, even the glucose metabolism produce one GTP (and many ATP). (Perhaps I'm missing something, Chemistry is not my main specialty). Perhaps it is even possible to have NADH-powered life, but it is more different so it may be impossible.
> ossified calcium-braced
Diatoms use silica, insects have a protein exoskeleton, and octopus are weird.
> oxygen-absorbing, [...] protein-enriched, [...] water blobs
I guess these three are safe bets (with a little different selection of amino acids).
Oxygen absorbing isn't necessary, of course. Life on earth got along without it for a while until those darned cyanobacteria starting poisoning everyone else.
Due to convergent evolution [1], I'm not sure life that originated on an Earth-like planet would look completely different from Earth life, at least on a macroscopic level.
My point is that I think convergent evolution would be likely to produce “water blobs with heads, legs, and feet” on other Earth-like planets, i.e. planets with lots of liquid water and lots of solid land.
If you’re thinking of planets that are not similar to Earth, of course all bets are off.
Fermi can blast out "Hi" with a 100GW of power and he is unlikely to be heard in Andromeda, which for all we know could be teeming with life and host to something like an Iain Banks Culture series space opera.
We know that fewer than about 1 in 100,000 galaxies has a Kardashev Type III civilization. So the Fermi argument has some bite even at cosmological distances.
But anyway, this was about SF movies where our heroes visit Arglebarg IV and have adventures with the natives. It's like Victorian adventure stories transplanted into space without bothering to think things through. Let's kill our dysfunctional tropes.
A K3 civilization is one that has diverted a significant fraction of the stellar output of a galaxy to its own uses. They have to dump their waste heat somehow, and that's visible in the far to mid infrared. So we can compare the IR emission of galaxies to look for oddballs with a lot of IR.
“Our results mean that, out of the 100,000 galaxies that WISE could see in sufficient detail, none of them is widely populated by an alien civilization using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes. That’s interesting because these galaxies are billions of years old, which should have been plenty of time for them to have been filled with alien civilizations, if they exist. Either they don’t exist, or they don’t yet use enough energy for us to recognize them.”
When we assume K3 capabilities, why don't we assume they dump their waste emissions away into something like (artificial even?) black holes? Maybe they are shy and afraid of the intergalactic "Dark Forest"? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest )
The basic problem with that idea is black holes are too small. The amount of low temperature radiation that one could dump into them would be insufficient.
I think the point is that if a large number of galaxies had Type III civilizations, we would notice, because the definition is that they use most of the available energy in their galaxy making the galaxy radiate more infrared than visible light. But that doesn’t mean life isn’t common, it may just mean that a Type III civilization is either physically impossible or very unlikely.
That's also discussed in the article. The author states that Mars may have qualified before Earth did.
Edit: Also, the article you linked specifically states "Scientists debate a range of ideas about how life on earth began", undermining your first point.
I think the opposite conclusion is true: we know nothing about how life gets started, we know life exists on Earth, we have seen no evidence of life anywhere else, so the reasonable assumption is that life started on Earth.
One thing we know (almost) for sure is that no new forms of life have emerged on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. So we should expect that the conditions required are quite special indeed, or the event is extraordinarily unlikely. As such, it is silly to assume that any other planet is "similar to Earth" in the ways that matter for life appearing based on simplistic observations (temperature, distance from the sun, existence of the most basic required elements).
I am referring to abiogenesis - life arising from non-life matter. Cacti have not appeared out of simple chemicals, they have evolved from other plant-based lifeforms (in fact, there is no "first cactus").
My point is that, despite the huge abundance of life on Earth today, it is all based on a very old abiogenesis event, with all indications that it was more or less a singular event.
All life on earth seems to be part of the same philogenetic tree, so it seems that life appeared once and then kept evolving from that initial life-form. Of course, there is a good chance that there was some variety of initial organisms that either merged together in symbiotic relationships, such as mitochondria with the rest of the cell, or got out-competed by the one type of organism that we are all descended from. This still indicates that life arose in a single place and only over a relatively short amount of time.
>Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −143 °C (−225 °F) at the winter polar caps[14] to highs of up to 35 °C (95 °F) in equatorial summer.
That’s today without atmosphere, liquid water and with a solidified core I’m not sure were close to estimating when the core has solidified as far as I know we also have no method for dating anything on mars.
When mars was wet, geologically a GI d and still had an atmosphere the temperatures would’ve been much closer to earth today.
Only technology can save us from global warming and only private enterprises like Tesla and others can develop and - more importantly - cheaply scale that technology. There are billions of Chinese and Indians who will become the equivalent of American middle class in the coming decade and no amount of conservation or carbon tax is going to prevent the acceleration of global temperatures that would cause.
I'm both a programmer and a mathematician. Mathematics is written in English (or another human language) plus added symbols. The symbols are what we refer to as the notation. It's not comparable to programming language. Here the words are equal to the symbols.
Also, no better notation could help you understand most modern mathematics. There's no better choice of symbols or names that will help you understand Galois theory. You simply need to understand high-school algebra, then group theory, then Galois theory.
> There's no better choice of symbols or names that will help you understand Galois theory. You simply need to understand high-school algebra, then group theory, then Galois theory.
This probably isn't completely true—as will be clear to anyone, even a subject expert, who tries to go back and read the original papers. At least part of this is due to fads in notation—in my field, I can easily read the papers of people who do similar work to mine, and struggle with the papers of those who don't, even when they're talking about exactly the same thing—but some of it must be due to genuine improvement.
Yes, you're right. I should have said, there's no better choice of symbols that will remove the huge set of prerequisites you need to first understand. There isn't as large of a tower of abstractions to understand most codebases.
The primary transmission route in inhalation in close proximity to an infected person. Yes, it can persist on surfaces, but this hand-washing meme is mostly a result of (1) it costs nothing and may help, so we should try and (2) masks are supply limited and the healthcare industry doesn't have enough. In reality, if we had an abundance of masks, masks would be more important than hand washing. As it stands, we reserve them for HC workers and infected persons. The point being, subways are worse.
If you take the hand washing and not touching your face, then you're at almost zero risk from using shared bicycles. Even if someone gets some rona on the handlebars, if you don't transfer it to an orifice in your face you won't catch it. It's not gonna re-aerosolize off the handlebars.
"Not touching your face" is not a viable solution for most people. It's subconscious. If anyone could master this kind of self-control within a week, everyone would be an arahat.
It's pretty easy to not touch your face when your hands are physically on the handlebars. As long as you are able to wash your hands immediately after getting off the bike, I think you are reasonably safe.
Face touching is literally unconscious in many cases. It's entirely possible you've been touching your face and not noticing it, but have just become more conscious of the times you attempt to stop yourself from touching your face.
If you aren’t aware of this those ML apps that beep when you touch your face are pretty surprising.
Also there’s the whole psychological thing about telling someone not to do something when it was previously largely automatic, making people do it more. Like having an itch or imagining insect bites.
I read N95 masks were basically useless when walking outside, they only mattered indoors and in confined spaces (like public transit). I’d imagine biking is even less transmission and wearing a mask with that is pretty unrealistic.
It’s hard to find what is right on the internet though.
There is definitely a higher risk you inhale enough virus progeny indoors than outdoors, yes. We know from the flu that indoors the virus can stay suspended for many hours. Regular talking can project enough virus from an infected person for the air to become sufficiently contaminated, though shedding varies by individual. The more (longer) you breathe that air, the greater your chance of becoming infected. This might also explain why indoors is a greater risk than outdoors, you spend less time in the air that's contaminated, in addition to the greater diffusion/dispersion outdoors, of course.
Are you saying I could breathe in some, conveying a small amount of the virus, and not get infected? That seems to be the opposite of what highly contagious means.
Whether an aerosol hits your face, or you breathe air with suspended particles containing the virus, the virus has several challenges it needs to overcome (described in the link above). Its success is not guaranteed. An increase in virus particles improves its chance while a decrease improves your chance.
In theory, a single virus particle could achieve its goal.
I biked in an N95 in Vancouver during forest fire season in 2018. Not fun, but doable and it definitely helped -- without the mask I felt absolutely awful.
That's for a different situation, though. The smoke particulates are very small and are omnipresent, so a mask definitely helps. Coronavirus, by contrast, is only airborne for a short while, so unless you're close to someone who's infected you're not going to be breathing it in anyway. That's why they're saying the masks have limited effectiveness outside.
Oh, when the GP said it's unrealistic to bike in a mask, I thought they meant it would be too difficult. Maybe they just meant unnecessary, in which case I agree.
Yeah, I'm thinking that's what they must mean. An N95 mask doesn't cut down your breathing that much, and you can simply down-moderate your effort a little bit so that you never hit a pant. It's no gas mask.
Do you have a citation for this? I don't want to blindly trust that fomites aren't a major risk.
If true, that changes how I want to get food to my elders. (I've already gotten them several months worth, but I don't see an end to this and would feel safer if they had more runway.)
The system is absolutely AI based today. There is no hardcoding like this. Hardware 3 in Tesla cars is an ASIC meant to run neural nets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3). Why are you so confidently stating things you don't know about?
At this level, the car can act autonomously but requires the driver to be prepared to take control at a moment's notice.[103][104] HW1 is suitable only on limited-access highways, and sometimes will fail to detect lane markings and disengage itself. In urban driving the system will not read traffic signals or obey stop signs. This system also does not detect pedestrians or cyclists,[105] and while AP1 detects motorcycles,[106] there has been two instances of AP rear-ending motorcycles.[107]
Because each individual car is not truly autonomous when it comes to learning and improving diving based on it's specific geo location. I am not talking specifically about Tesla, this goes for all automated cars...
We have to be able to admit that we aren't ready to launch thousands of these cars out on streets at this point. They have NOT been perfect.
There are tons of issues beyond just the quality of the AI. Software development and updates, vehicle maintenance, planned obsolescence of models, Legality, ethics, ownership... tons of other issues not hashed out. The combination of all of those issues makes autonomous vehicles near impossible any time soon, unless we ALL want to give up our right to own personal property and submit our safety to being test subjects. I'm not willing to do that at this point as a development manager myself.
I'm not really sure what the hardware link you provided has to do with anything but plenty of rule-based heuristics are used in state of the art autonomous driving systems. Machine learning systems have taken over the image processing and classification parts, semantic segmentation, object recognition and so on but traffic rules or emergency behaviour or hard speed limits are not learned.
the OP is wrong though in somehow classifying this as 'not AI'. Just because ML has become an important part of the equation doesn't mean we have thrown control theory and logical constraints out of the window.
The current AI is running rudimentary calculations based on what is truly required for flawless operation... The type of processing that is necessary to operate like a GOOD human driver is nowhere near what currently exists... Sure there are bad drivers out there, and that's why autonomous vehicles would need to be EXCEPTIONALLY good... Not just good enough for a few demos on youtube.
If a company's test cycles were good enough to warrant reliability and safety promises, the window on the CyberTruck would have never broken.... This is how companies work, they over promise and under-deliver, this time it affects everyone's safety, including safety of those who don't buy them.
I'm not saying the strides aren't impressive, I'm saying I wouldn't feel safe having this experimental technology forced upon me knowing the potential for historically complex human factors.
Leetcode premium doesn't mean you'll see the problem. I suspect the probability of that is low, given these problems are constantly changing (there's a banned problem list at Google) and the interviewer pool is as well.
I 100% would be able to solve this problem without seeing it before. Yes, this is because I've practiced a lot of algorithm problems (and I enjoy them, frankly).
Yes, this is hackable, but relying on resumes like every other industry (which is implicitly relying on hoop-jumping and college prestige and GPA) is a much worse form of hackable. This levels the playing field and is a signal for (1) how smart someone is and (2) how much they prepared for the interview, both of which are weakly related to the job. Further, people who excel at algorithm are very unlikely to be bad at the kind of work at big tech.
It's not perfect, but finding something better at scale is hard.
Some analyst at Morgan Stanley made up that $100B number. It has ZERO meaning and no one should take it seriously. The market cap of a company is what investors are willing to pay for it. Given that Alphabet wholly owns Waymo, there is no way the market is implicitly valuing Waymo at $100B given the present value of Google's advertising business and Alphabet's market cap.
