If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.

Python isn't a bad first language. It has all the important advanced concepts - objects, dictionaries, closures, and threads. The syntax is reasonable. Some people are bothered by the forced indentation, but for new programmers, it will seem natural.

Most of the problems with Python are performance related. They come from obscure features of the language, such as the ability to do "getattr" and "setattr" on almost anything, including objects running in another thread. So everything has to be a dictionary. (This is sometimes called the Guido von Rossum Memorial Boat Anchor.) PyPy is struggling hard to overcome that, with some success. (The optimization approach is "oh, no, program did Obscure Awful Thing which could invalidate running code" - abandon compiled JIT code, shift to backup interpreter, flush JIT code cache, execute Obscure Awful Thing, wait for control to leave area of Obscure Awful Thing while in backup interpreter, rerun JIT compiler, resume running compiled code.)

It can be argued that an OS really isn't much more than a kernel and init with everything else as userspace.

Not any current conventional one just like conventional fixed wing aircraft can't get up to the same altitude as the U2. I think it's more impractical than impossible, although generating that much lift from huge rotors may require materials that we don't or may never have.
Besides, this copter was just a platform for a vision system instead of a serious lander design.

What's wrong with Aphrodite?

Doesn't work well with Apples.

Which is why this is so interesting.

Viruses and prions don't fit everything in your list either, as do other things that reproduce without sex. Aliens could be alien enough to be scaled up things on those lines - which of course is also from the land of make-believe but so is all speculation about aliens when you get down to it.
Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate.

Besides, willaien was discussing how to communicate with truly alien beings and I just supplied two examples from fiction. I really don't get why you jumped in to be so critical of me when they are not even my ideas.

No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.

Space is so damned interesting because we don't even know what most of it is, just that the unknown stuff has mass and can't otherwise be observed with what we have now. It's a blank spot on the map that may as well have "here be dragons" on it. For all we know there could be asexual non-carbon based critters out there with intelligence that would just not get a lot of the concepts we see as important. Communicating with such a creature "from the land of make-believe" is unlikely to be trivial. So I gave two examples above -
1/ find a point of commonality and build a bridge (Egan)
2/ a story where the effort to find a point of commonality is still ongoing (Lem).
In Egan's novel, Diaspora, most of the human derived intelligences are quite alien to our viewpoint from fairly early in the novel as well, moreso later when some never had physical form, so a major theme is communication between different mindsets.

You could buy discrete ICs that modelled neurons in the 1990s

Only at a very dumbed down 1990 level of understanding based on a theoretical model. I was there and got to play with the things. They were more like using digital computing techniques to simulate some operations of analog computers than anything resembling a nervous system.

What don't we understand about individual "nerves"?

Quite a lot considering what is being published now and making it into the mainstream science press. Preconceptions are being overturned and new questions are arising. Getting to the point where nerve cells can be "printed" has taken a lot of hard work and shown we knew very little about them in the past and still have a bit to learn about them now.

the fact that you've never worked in AI

Yet I've identified issues you appear to be unaware of - so what's your excuse?

subject to the known laws of physics.

Doesn't help much when there's still a lot of unknown biochemistry to sort out.

If you disagree then I think the burden is on you to prove otherwise.

That's not how it works - it's up to the people making extraordinary claims about building machines that think to do so instead of the people who say we don't have much of a model of thinking yet. It's probably coming but we need more insight into the process of thought before it can be implemented in a machine. We can build an increasing range of rules based devices but that's no more thought than the 1800s mechanical turk.

True. Removing the fog is very expensive. It can be done, though. Watch Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of (FIDO)

exist in the land of make-believe

Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.

Look up Azusa Street Revival - the weird science denial end of Pentacostalism we see today grew rapidly on the premise that God was doing a Sodom and Gommorah on San Francisco. It's mentioned in a lot of places including a couple of pages near the end of Simon Winchesters book on the 1906 earthquake "The Crack at the Edge of the World."
For added irony Islam had a similar movement come out of a reaction to Krakatoa and these paticular "Christian" fundamentalists resemble that far more than they do other branches of Christianity.

Climate science recognised El Nino/La Nina before the current bunch of "fundamentalists" got popular by blaming the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Gods will instead of geology. The latest batch of science denialism is just the latest recruiting drive for that bunch of merchants in the temple - all you have to do is deny reality and fill the collection box with cash and a dumbed down cardboard God of an unchanging world will make it all better.

Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, birth, death, success, failure, discovery, hunger, etc

Not necessarily. Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.

it can't produce incomprehensible ones.

Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.


Anyway, that wasn't the only example from fiction I put up, it's just one extreme that has been thought of. It's a good book but since a lot of it is a series of descriptions of academic papers that never existed I'm amazed that it was turned into a movie, let alone two. It's almost as if it was declared unfilmable and was taken up as a bet.

Everyone who deals with financial statements professionally does that.

Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now

There was a war to pay for and NASA was turned into a machine to produce jobs in areas where that could influence elections.