This is curious, given that UV is so strongly scattered by the atmosphere that it would have almost no range. Even blue light has comparatively little range. They must have used hellaciously bright UV lights and/or just communicated over very short distances in clear air. One wouldn't expect even people with artificial lenses or corneas to have much sensitivity in the UV, as well.

Rayleigh scattering of UV light of (say) 300 nm wavelength is over 16 times stronger than the scattering of red light. It's one reason that runway lights intended to be seen by planes only after they've landed are typically blue, while markers intended to be seen from far away are typically red.

rgb

The tipping point was around the Gregorian revolution in the late 11th century (1050-1150 or thereabouts.) That was the point when Eastern civilizations were starting to stagnate and Western Europe was starting to get its act together. So the Renaissance was less of a "tremendous leap forward" than the bursting in to flower of a plant that had been growing for several centuries.

With regard to concerns about autonomous weapons, the things that people are pointing out as dangers are features from the point of view of the kind of person who thinks that mass organized violence is a useful way to address human problems (because it always works so well?)

Deniability and muddied legal responsibility are just what killers are looking for. They'll claim with every software release that civilian deaths are decreasing, and that might even be true, but the important thing is it will give idiots the ability to kill without accountability.

How stupid is war? Hitler wanted to secure German food supplies by using war to create an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe. This resulted in the utter destruction of Germany. If instead he had used Germany's expertise in phosphate and nitrate chemistry to investigate fertilizers instead of high explosives, the Green Revolution would have come decades early and he'd be remembered as a great man. This is not an isolated example: war almost never produces the outcome it's instigators intend, to the extent that if your name is not Bismark you're better off not starting one. There are always cheaper, more reliable means of achieving any end.

Unfortunately the news report carefully leaves out any numbers from the new study. It notes that over the past 200 years the average pH of the oceans have increased from 8.25 to 8.14, but makes no mention of the size of the increase studied in the report, so there is no way to tell if the headline is sensationalist nonsense or not.

Given the quality of scientific journalism, however, my prior is pretty heavily biased toward sensationalist nonsense.

While there are a few, no leading environmental organization is pro-nuclear. Greenpeace in particular is adamantly opposed to nuclear, even though they treat the IPCC reports as Biblically certain when it supports their anti-capitalist political agenda, and the IPCC clearly states that nuclear is one way to address CO2 pollution (particularly from base-load coal, which is very hard to replace otherwise).

So let's not kid ourselves: the environmental left wants to treat CO2 pollution as a moral and social problem, and they react to any suggestion that we treat it as a technological problem in the same way conservative Christians react to the suggestion that we treat teen pregnancy as a technological problem, and fix it via education and easily-available contraception. For the environmental left, smashing global capitalism, not saving the planet is the goal, and they strongly oppose anything that will save the latter without destroying the former (see Naiomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" for a textbook example of this position, all laid out in black and white.)

So here I am, building my death drone fleet, thinking "Gee, I'll be sure to leave in the transponder and radar reflectors. After all, even though there are no government regulations requiring them, I want my victims to see them coming."

As for 911, a) the economic impact of air travel and freight is difficult to equate to the net productivity of a small-payload drone fleet at any level; b) the "solution" to the problem turned out to be literally locking the pilots into the front of the plane so passengers would have to cut through a solid bulkhead in order to reach the cockpit, which would at the very least require time and make the enterprise not worth the risk. There might be more measures we don't know about as well. This is possible because airplanes are an enormous capital investment in addition to being a core feature of our economy in ever so many ways. Adding security features to an airplane doesn't double its cost or halve its productivity.

With a drone, that is not the case. Security measures added to a drone do significantly increase its cost and lower its productivity (which is probably marginal anyway, given its small payload). And there is no way that I can imagine to add security features that somebody can't just turn off or remove or trivially suborn without massive government intervention.

It's sort of like the various assault rifles being sold that can have a single part or two removed or replaced and they are magically transformed from being "semi" to "full" automatic. Marvelously effective at preventing honest citizens from owning fully automatic assault rifles, not so good at preventing full automatic assault weapons from showing up all over the place in the hands of the less honest or fringe militias.

But hey, now the fringe militias will be able to add another weapon to their repertoire! Full automatic rifles, vans full of homemade TNT and an explosives-laden drone fleet. I can't wait!

And yes, we'll get this in spite of the government trying to slow it down. I'm betting we'll first see it in drones built and delivered by personality disordered borderline high school students who by some means manage to lay their hands on real explosives. That sounds like so much fun I'm tempted myself...

rgb

It's also perfectly reasonable to assert "That is never, ever, going to be legal, so why bother to permit then to develop something we aren't going to allow." Admitting that this isn't quite what has been said, it is probably at the heart of the denial.

As you suggest, there will probably be little we can do about preventing people from doing this with drones already and/or in the near future -- the barn door already done been opened and the horses are long gone -- but at least we can arrange a world where ANY drone, autonomous or not, is illegal and hence a candidate for defensive measures.

It is, sadly, yet another case of the tragedy of the commons. Drones could be everything from fun to enormously useful, but once they are in "the commons" and available to everyone, it only takes a few butt-holes to make them a liability that exceeds any possible benefit. At the same time, it is virtually impossible to put techno-genies back into the bottle. I can hardly wait for the day somebody figures out how to make a compact 20 kt+ nuclear device out of commonly available materials and using nothing but garage-shop tools. There have been a very few SF stories written about such things, and none of them have happy endings.

Maybe this is the answer to the "Where are they?" paradox. Any time a civilization rises above a certain technological threshold, it becomes possible for anybody to destroy it, and there is always somebody that does. Maybe it becomes possible to build a fusion device that doesn't require a fission trigger, for example, or maybe it becomes possible to bio-engineer a doomsday virus with a "perfect" epidemiological profile and nearly 100% mortality in your basement.

Fully anonymous drone-delivered murder and mayhem may not qualify as doomsday, but it will certainly create some serious challenges to the concept of personal freedom vs public safety and the abuse of the commons.

rgb

And who knows, maybe they'd add a radical "new" idea or two to Windows (just to enable playing games). Like, I dunno, multiple desktops. So you can have your Excel spreadsheet up on desktop 1 and WoW up in desktop 2 and switch with a keystroke when the boss comes in.

And this central mystery is still with us: why can't we? Decoherence people sometimes claim to have the answer, but they don't: they can explain why we don't see interference, not why interference is the only way we can be aware that particles are in indeterminate (classical) states.

Reality is very strange.

...it will shoot back.

Personally I think it is a bad idea to shoot at asteroids. The last thing we need is a bunch of kilometer-sized rocks gunning for us. Sending them flowers and candy might be a better idea.

rgb

The difference between the Internet on April Fool's Day and on other days is on the one it is packed with false stories full of pandering nonsense written by charlatans to gain page views, and on the other it is the first day of April.

Props to the io9 link, but don't forget to read Oath of Fealty, by Niven and Pournelle, as well. It already describes, in detail, an arkology in conflict with its surrounding community -- and its vulnerability to terrorist action. The punch line of the book is "Think of it as evolution in action", and there is going to have to be a whole lot of "evolution" happening real soon now, because our technology is on a track that will make it simple for any human to kill any other specific human on the planet, anonymously, well within the next decade. We could end up having to make things like 3d printers completely illegal for private parties to own, once it becomes clear that they can be used to enable anonymous, untraceable murder and untraceable terrorist acts (mass murder) at will.

At some point, our only defense against that kind of thing is going to be the evolution of human sanity or the embracing of the police state at a level we cannot even imagine properly at this time. In Oath of Fealty, the arkology was a kind of police state, but (naturally) a benign one. In context, believable, but in general? Not in a zillion years.

We always live in interesting times, do we not? I vaguely recall a SF story I read a long, long time ago in which the world developed the means for any human with the will to completely destroy the world. If just one person was so unhappy as to want to take their own life, they had the free choice to take the entire human species along with them. If such a choice were available today, how long would the world survive? News events of the last week clearly answer that question, don't they! News events every week answer that question. Our "freedom" to live in a stable, safe society governed by equitable laws is itself at perpetual risk, and that risk is going to increase as consequence-free murder great and small is increasingly enabled by technology. Both murder in the name of one or another political-religious mythology and murder just to get the old man's money, or murder because one happens to be a sociopath.

Interesting times.

rgb

You forgot about the ease of delivering that 5 pound block of C4 plus detonator to pretty much anybody that ordered it. It isn't even "just" the Amazon drones. Anybody can capture an Amazon drone (or build their own copy and paint it accordingly) and use it to make a "special delivery" to, well, pretty much anyone. "Special Delivery, Mr. President! It's those "books" you ordered from Amazon!"

You can pack a whole lot of evil into 2 kg of C4 (or whatever the latest/greatest compact explosive is) plus detonator. You can saturate any reasonable defensive system by having 100+ drones attempt a delivery at the same time. You can carpet bomb crowded marketplaces - the drone itself will conveniently supply the shrapnel, or you can fly the drones under cars or into glass-front buildings before detonating. And best of all, you can do it in complete anonymity and safety! The drones will be impossible to track back to a point of origin, flying literally under the radar and in numbers too great to track anyway. You can rent a barn or warehouse, ship in as many amazon-a-likes as you can, load them with Sarin, with Anthrax, with weaponized Ebola or with powdered radioactive waste, or -- what the heck -- with all of these at once, to saturate and overwhelm even emergency response systems with multiple distinct threat vectors, and after launching them with a program that directs them to converge on a given target from all directions after initially moving on "delivery" trajectories to a spread of locations, you can just drive away and be "coming downstairs" from your supposedly occupied room in a Days Inn three states away, having your complementary breakfast, before anybody even figures out what might have happened. Me? I was nowhere near Washington at the time, officer. I was upstairs in my motel room in North Carolina, as the records clearly show!

Mind you, all of this is coming anyway. We're a few years away from self-driving cars, which will take the suicide out of suicide bombing by vehicle. It is possible to build anything from a lightweight delivery drone to an actual cruise missile with a 50 or 100 kg payload and built in GPS already, it's just that they are still rare enough that they would stand out and attract notice, at least during the day (at night, would ANYBODY even notice if you painted it flat black and didn't hang any lights on it? I doubt it). I have little doubt that similar devices aren't already in play as vectors for smuggling through our comparatively porous borders, with more coming. Like most techno-genies, this one cannot easily be put back in its bottle once its time arrives, it can only be delayed a bit, perhaps, maybe. Or we can wait until a small fleet of them are used to kill ten thousand or more people all at once the next time the mall in Washington is filled with people for a protest march or an inauguration, or at the superbowl next year. Then we can choose between putting automated chain guns in turrets all around the big sports arenas and downtown DC (and what can go wrong with that, he asks) or making the damn things illegal to own, purchase, manufacture, possess, deploy or talk about loudly in public, which may not stop their use for evil but might slow it down, at least a bit.

rgb

Full sentences harder. They verbs.
That why liberal arts and humanities important, otherwise sentences would no verbs.

-

Hmmm, makes no sense as a means of generating electricity. But what can a government do with gigawatt masers in orbit, hmmmm...

Makes great sense if one wishes to rule the world. Thus spake Brainithustra.

rgb

And since air disasters necessarily depend on extremely low-probability events, this is not an argument for the proposition "therefore this was most likely not the cause".

We know that whatever happened it had an outrageously low probability. This makes speculation in advance of data useless, because there are an almost unlimited number of highly improbable things that could have happened, and anyone who thinks they can imagine their way to the correct one is innumerate: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...