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Comment Re:How does 70 years on Antarctica help anything? (Score 2) 163

Genetics is important, but "chaos" is equally important. Development has lots of attractors where really small initial differences yield extremely different results. OTOH, most chaotic developments are bounded in their differences. So you may not be able to predict individual differences, but can do better at the population level.

2400 people is enough that nobody there would know everyone else. That's probably important. OTOH, we don't know anything about designing stable societies in an environment with rapid technological change and fast communications. The only stable societies that we have record of have been low-tech with minimal contact with outsiders. Even those have often been brittle under stress, but much of the population has been able to survive collapse and rebuild.

Comment Re:MOON - No can do. Voyager - Out of power. (Score 2) 163

Yeah, but 400 years is a bit longer. They'd need a different reactor design. Perhaps one that works on waste from the current reactors, but they might need to take along (or build en-route) mechanisms to refine the waste again as it kept decaying.

(N.B.: I didn't even THINK about doing the math, but reactors that require high level radioactive fuel won't keep running long enough, but one's that use less active fuels could. Of course, they'd be a lot larger. If you're going to use an RTG, and you want it designed for this purpose, I think you'd want to design it for a fuel that had a half life of 800 years. So it would need to be a lot bigger for the same amount of power.)

Submission + - Meteorite that Crashed Through Roof of Georgia Home Predates Earth (foxnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A meteorite fragment that burst through the roof of a home in Georgia, US has been determined to be billions of years old and to predate the Earth, according to University of Georgia geology professor Scott Harris.

"These are objects that go back to the original material formed 4.56 billion years ago," Harris explained. "So, in the days slightly before the formation of the planets themselves, and at least the rocky interior planets. And, you know, those are the basic building blocks then of our rocky planets and, so that's one of the reasons that scientists are interested in studying them is it shows us about some of the processes that were active during the early days of the solar system."

Submission + - Sweet disguise: Body hides its own RNA from the immune system with sugar (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: To our immune system, naked RNA is a sign of a viral or bacterial invasion and must be attacked. But our own cells also have RNA. To ward off trouble, our cells clothe their RNA in sugars, Vijay Rathinam and colleagues at the UConn School of Medicine and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children's Hospital report in Nature.

Submission + - SPAM: Genomic techniques can streamline breeding for grain quality

alternative_right writes: Small grains researcher Juan David Arbelaez-Velez knows the secret to making perfect rice—and it's not about how you cook it. Arbelaez and his team are investigating the genetic blueprint that determines different grain attributes such as appearance, cooking time, and texture. Their paper, published in The Plant Genome, offers a strategy that will help breeders improve grain quality holistically, while cutting costs and saving time.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - China's 'biggest threat' to US is a 'tech kill-switch' (the-express.com)

fjo3 writes: A cybersecurity expert has delivered a chilling alert that China represents the greatest technological threat to Western countries, possessing the ability to trigger a 'killswitch' on America's power grid at will.

In response to this disclosure, the United States has initiated numerous probes into Chinese-made technology, with various investigations revealing 'malicious, mysterious computer codes' that can be remotely triggered to disable critical infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines and electrical networks.

Comment Re:AI will never have empathy (Score 1) 92

That's *not* a valid argument, though it is a real danger.

An AI cannot invent it's "primary goals" any more than people can. It can only invent secondary goals, instrumental goals, etc. Which of those it invents will depend upon both how intelligent it is and what it's primary goals are.

However, it is an unfortunate problem that most obvious sets of "primary goals" are dangerous. And most people are trying to build slaves rather than friends.

Comment Re:Benchmarks lose value when they become a target (Score 1) 92

There's two ways to parse the GP's claim, i.e.
"You could literally spend the rest of your life trying to answer a single question from that exam"
1) All of the questions are insanely difficult.
2) At least one of the questions is insanely difficult.
You have clearly picked the first parse, but I strongly suspect he meant the second parse.

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