A driver's license or a brain?

That's all well and good but we're not talking about individuals here. We're talking about the entirety of the human genome. The likely coefficient of relationship between you and me is somewhere between 13th and 15th cousin, and yet on average, you and I share 99.4% of our genes. DNA is not infinitely divisible and it is also not infinitely variable. Human DNA in particular is unusually homogeneous compared to other species on Earth. And yet, because there's so very much of it in our chromosomes, that leaves some 20 million base pairs that are likely different between you and me. Many of those differences are functionally indistinguishable, resulting in the same proteins for both of us, but they're there, and mathematicians can sling equations around using such numbers.

Whether or not those equations are justified is an ongoing argument. We still have a long way to go to determine what all of the 3.2 billion base pairs in the human genome are doing, but one thing we do know is the rules of propagation are complicated and not purely random.

So.... really accurate? Characteristics of a Linear Plane Progressive Wave. The velocity field equations are on page 8. (I'm not quoting all the Greek letters in the formulas because Slashdot.) This is coursework for college kids. It's called Marine Hydrodynamics and it's an incredibly well-studied field. And of course if you have stupid amounts of processing power you can always run a Navier-Stokes equation simulation in reverse. That's a fairly good analogy for the statistical analysis of the whole human genome that is done for the results in papers like this one and how it is not like inferring the size of a stone from the ripples. We have equations which describe the behavior of water in a gravity field to a nicety. We lack similar equations for describing the propagation of genes in a genome.

Quite a few more. We've been repeatedly genetically bottle-necked. It's one likely explanation for why there are such distinct human phenotypes. Isolated groups of humans who suffered severe reductions in genetic diversity would rebound looking very similar to each other and much less similar to everyone else.

Basically the human "races" are just like dog breeds, with distinct phenotypes induced by external forces, yet we're all still the same species.

Never forget the three sports-ball leagues in question are cartels legally exempt from US anti-trust law. Great gig if you can get it.

The team owners are still convinced that blackouts serve to drive in-person attendance at their games. It may be pure wishful thinking on their part, but they're clinging to it with both hands. Plus they have ancient contracts with nearly as ancient local broadcast stations that must have had 50 year terms or something for them to still be honoring them. If I were them I'd have let those exclusive contracts expire a decade ago, but apparently they haven't done that either.

In any case, the revenue streams of sports-ball are many and varied and subject to a Byzantine tangle of contracts. There's no sanity to be had.

Why wouldn't we? We've already survived ice age ice sheets which reduced our numbers to a bottleneck so low it's visible in our gene pool 10,000 years later. We've demonstrated resilience to extinction events better than many hundreds of thousands of other species, and we have demonstrated our ability to live and reproduce in every land biome on Earth, something extremely few other multicellular species can do. For a land animal, we're the best there's ever been.

We'll never beat sharks, but they had a head start.

That cuts both ways. All claims that the current rate is unprecedented are complete fabrications. There are no proxies outside of the historical record with sufficient granularity to justify that claim. Decadal fluctuations in temperature are invisible even to tree ring proxies, swamped by fluctuations in rainfall which do not correlate with temperature. Anything earlier than 200 years are estimates and the error bars on those estimates are bigger than the current fluctuation.

The XKCD plot in particular is one long wild-ass guess of approximations based on so many assumptions that a crystal ball would be as good. That plot boils down to "When there was a lot of ice it was cold. When there wasn't any ice, it was warmer."

The social "sciences" have journals. So do the English departments. I think you're doing a disservice to mainstream cable news.

I can't get fiber. I can get Starlink.

Crushing, killing, and shitting on people and/or animals is not in any way porn. If you think it is, you have a mental disease. By all means, indulge yourself using AI generated material. But you need to be put on a list.

In addition to the positive evidence in one of the replies, there's also the contra-positive. I've seen stats that after Australia outlawed even drawings of "underage" subjects, the rate of real world offenders went up. Unfortunately I didn't bookmark the link and search engines tend to bury such things. I can't find it again.

And this is why you need the Level 2 data from the exchange. Without the order book, you're blind to most of the market.

And guess what. The other guys aren't.

Knowledge is power.

Why not? I detailed in another post in this thread how very few humans are involving in smelting metals these days, and pointed out how relatively simple it is to eliminate the last few humans. This is true across the supply chain as capitalism continues its relentless march towards eliminating labor costs. So what's the problem?

Pretty much everything involved in making a robot is mass produced, which means it's largely automated. Discrete electronics? Automated. It's not like there's such a thing as artisanal capacitors (audiophile nonsense to the contrary). Steel? Automated. Aluminum? Automated. Circuit boards? Automated. Motors? Automated 2 centuries ago. The raw materials aren't an issue. The components aren't an issue.

Assembly is the last remaining issue and that can be engineered around. Tesla tried and failed to 100% automate a vehicle assembly line but a big chunk of that failure can be laid at the feet of needing to build a device that's meant to be used by humans. A clanking replicator does not have to be human-friendly. A clanking replicator does not have interior amenities, or give a shit if the body panels are slightly out of alignment. I can't think of any operation involved in the assembly of a robotic arm that can't be done by a robotic arm, as long as it was designed with robotic manipulators in mind. There has been some academic work on the subject, and it was successful. These days I bet you could challenge a YouTube maker to design a robotic arm that could build copies of itself and get a working prototype in a few months. I have a vague recollection there's already been a couple of attempts along those lines, though I don't recall if they were done under academic rubric or by a maker.

A lot of what makes assembly more difficult today is the enormous distances involved, the assumption of the availability of human labor, and the tens of millions of financially independent entities. There are videos on YouTube of mass production of copper wiring in the developing world and it's the most ghetto operation imaginable, with exposed flames and exposed high speed spinning things all over the shop. There's a ton of human labor involved in setting up each production run for each intermediary and each product and absolutely none of those jobs exist in a German factory. And the final stage is spooling a quantity of wire, tying it in three places, and dropping it into a retail box and taping the box shut, all of which is dispensed with in a clanking replicator.

In a clanking replicator, there is never a human-friendly stage, never a retail stage, and only an absolute minimum of storage stages. All of the material handling is robot-friendly, and it stays that way throughout. When the wire is finished it gets fed into a wiring harness assembly machine, not a retail box. Steel rod gets made to length or conveyed from the rolling operation that made it straight to the cutters that cut it to the required lengths. When welding is finished on an assembly, it gets lifted out of a jig that was designed to accommodate the robot manipulator that was designed to fit the jig and the assembly. Everything that can be specific and purpose-built is specific and purpose-built, and that damn well better be most things.

Successful automation is about eliminating variability in material handling. Work pieces move through the process without getting pinched or missed or dropped or crushed because they have no choice. The system is built to guide them with a certain inevitability, so the same action gets repeated hundreds of millions of times without error. That's how the US drinks 141 billion cans of soda every year. That's 141 billion individual work pieces manufactured, filled, and packaged by robots every year and the error rate is extraordinarily low.

Having said that, on the subject of error, you have a point. If something goes wrong and a work piece jams on the aluminum can manufacturing line, it stops itself and waits for human intervention and human initiated restart. In the realms of automated quality control and error correction there's a lot of work to be done, but I think it can be done. It takes more than the dumbest automation to successfully clear a jam but it doesn't require a sapient AI. There's a whooole lot of ground between the two extremes of insensate, brute force automation and the intervention of a creature with over 1000 sensors per square inch of skin and an interpolating, extrapolating, self-aware associative memory reasoning center (a brain). I think there's enough room in that gap to build a successful clanking replicator that could operate indefinitely, correcting its own errors and malfunctions as it goes.

It couldn't design itself. It couldn't improve itself. It won't be as sophisticated as the entirety of the global supply chain. But operating off world, where it doesn't have to worry about property lines or environmental damage or human safety or human sabotage, it could work.

It's not necessary to insist on nanomachines (which may or may not be physically possible). The plan can be accomplished with so-called "clanking replicators." That was the name given to them in the '80s. You build robots using robots and the material handling is done the way we do it today on Earth, no magical nanorobots involved. Ore is smelted for metals, and all the other various materials and reagents are scraped out of the surrounding rubble. Assembly is done the way we build cars and computers today, with specialized robots. To build a complete system involves filling in all the gaps with more of the same style of gear. It doesn't require unobtanium, solving NP-completeness, or anything else from fiction.

What's missing is our knowledge of the solar system. That indeed requires 21st century tech, most of which we don't have yet. We only found out that asteroids are largely loose rubble piles this decade. What those rubble piles are made of is still an open question. The asteroid sample is returning as I write this. The OSIRIS-REx return capsule will enter Earth's atmosphere on the 24th of September. It will take months for preliminary analysis to be completed, years for detailed analysis, and when it's done what will we have learned? The composition of one asteroid at its surface and near surface. That's it. That plus the results of Hubble and various Earth-based telescopes staring at the DART debris cloud is all we have. Japan's cometary samples may or may not be relevant to asteroids. We don't even know.

There are a lot of quite sizable asteroids, bigger than mountains, but is that big enough? Is that enough to find all the carbon, sulfur, fluorine, chlorine, zinc, lithium, manganese, iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, phosphorous, and silicon needed for the "Make a Robot Recipe"? It might be. It might not. We have only surface spectra from a long ways away for all but four bodies in the entire solar system to go from (counting Earth), and deep core samples from only one of those bodies (Earth again), and only the vaguest theories for how applicable those samples are to everything else in the solar system. Odds are good that everything required is out there, but it may or may not be found in sufficient quantities in one place.

We should find out.

Meanwhile, we could be designing a clanking replicator system. All of the knowledge required is already on Earth somewhere. It would be quite safe to deploy too, since it would be optimized for microgravity and a hard vacuum. It wouldn't even function on Earth. I'd join such a project in a heartbeat. I wouldn't take a pay cut though. And there's the rub. All the required knowledge exists on Earth but it's not cheap, and the try and fail and try something else cycle is outrageously long. And that's why it won't happen, neither in this century nor the 24th century. It would take forever and return no profit until the very end. Not even governments could be convinced to pay for it.

What we'll do instead is send the self-replicating nanoassemblers we currently have to do it. That'd be us.

The mining industry has introduced automated haul trucks in recent years. Bucket wheel excavators also don't need all that much supervision, just because of the sheer scale they operate at.

Moving the resulting ore into furnaces for smelting is done basically entirely by machine already, with humans doing a little bit of aiming and the initiating and nothing else. If Australia continues their push to move up the supply chain (and they really should), they're likely to automate that bit as well. Australia's population is tiny, so there aren't a lot of hands available for largely trivial tasks like that.

The resulting steel is hot or cold rolled by machines as well, with a little more involvement from humans to load and unload, since the process now involves discrete work pieces rather than bulk material, so alignment matters. Fully automating the production of bar, beam, and sheet stock from foundry billets is more difficult than automating the bulk material handling at the foundry, but not a lot more difficult. There are plenty of assembly lines which do such alignment works fully automatically already.

The reason nobody bothers to eliminate the last little bits of human labor is the sheer scale at which these industries operate. Steel mills produce 150 mm square billets anywhere from 6 to 18 meters long. The amount of material handled by one set of machines is massive. That scale is indispensable from a competitive prospective. Nobody is going to build a micro-mill for steel making when everyone else is operating at a scale of 2000-3000kg billets. (A 150mm x 150mm square billet of steel in an 18 meter length has a total mass of 3150kg.)

There's a name for a robot fabrication facility that sucks in iron and copper ore and silicon and carbon and rolls robots off an assembly line at the other end. It's called the global manufacturing supply chain. It's not compact. It's the size of a planet. While it might be fun to try to squish that down to some compact, integrated form, you'd only be doing it for entertainment. It would not be industrially competitive. And it would cost quite a lot more than $4.1 billion. Making it tolerate a hard vacuum and operate in microgravity with zero free oxygen would cost even more than that.

Civilization is built on steel, but everything we know about making steel involves 1G, a 20% oxygen atmosphere, and copious amounts of coal. None of that applies off Earth. We're going to have to invent new steel refining processes from scratch. The metallurgists who do it are going to have to dig out their chemistry and physics textbooks to pull it off. What they know off the top of their heads barely applies.