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Radical Abundance, with Eric Drexler

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Tue, 2013-05-14 10:45

Maskin

Radical Abundance, with Eric Drexler

Very excited to hear K. Eric Drexler, the founding father of nanotechnology, speak at the London Futurists meeting 30th of May. Anyone else here based in London who might go? If we're lucky EP legend Anders Sandberg might be there as well, but that is pure speculation on my part. [url=http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/119302602/]Radical Abundance, with Eric Drexler, the founding father of nanotechnology[/url]

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Transhuman Mind

Sat, 2013-05-25 14:34

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Sorry, I will miss the

Sorry, I will miss the meeting - I am off to Sweden this week. (I am a bit worried that Eric and me are now just two offices away - we are pretty good at distracting each other. This week we have been discussing stealth for spacecraft, and I now think I have a knock-down argument why his approach doesn't work... ahem, work. As I said, I need to remember to do that :-) ) I haven't got hold of a physical copy yet, but the book looks really promising.

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Sun, 2013-05-26 10:14

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Arenamontanus wrote:Sorry, I

Arenamontanus wrote:
Sorry, I will miss the meeting - I am off to Sweden this week. (I am a bit worried that Eric and me are now just two offices away - we are pretty good at distracting each other. This week we have been discussing stealth for spacecraft, and I now think I have a knock-down argument why his approach doesn't work... ahem, work. As I said, I need to remember to do that :-) )

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php

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+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Sun, 2013-05-26 11:02

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Yes, I know the atomic rocket

Yes, I know the atomic rocket arguments. This is a bit more theoretical: Eric argued that with the right parabolic mirror you could reflect your radiation into a very narrow cone (the angle is essentially set by wavelength divided by diameter), and the outside could be reflective polygons. So unless you were really unlucky you would look like empty space from nearly all directions. However, by sending a lot of radiation in one direction you become more detectable further away. So the question is whether the total volume where you can be found is decreased by the above scheme (or anything like it). It turns out that the detection distance of something radiating P Watts is proportional to sqrt(P). So if you send all your radiation into a fraction f of all directions, in those directions you will be detectable at distance sqrt(P/f). The total volume where you can be found divided by the original one is (volume of spherical cone)/(volume sphere) = (4pi*f*sqrt(P/f)^3 / 3) / (4pi*sqrt(P)^3/3) = 1/sqrt(f). So the smaller f is, the *more* detectable you will become! If you know your enemy is somewhere, then you are fine of course. But unknown enemies having sensors randomly scattered are hard to avoid.

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Sun, 2013-05-26 19:38

Zombieneighbours Zombieneighbours's picture

I am going to try going, but

I am going to try going, but my other half got made redundant recently, so I am not sure I can afford the train ticket.

Tue, 2013-05-28 14:56

NewtonPulsifer NewtonPulsifer's picture

Arenamontanus wrote:Yes, I

Arenamontanus wrote:
Yes, I know the atomic rocket arguments. This is a bit more theoretical: Eric argued that with the right parabolic mirror you could reflect your radiation into a very narrow cone (the angle is essentially set by wavelength divided by diameter), and the outside could be reflective polygons. So unless you were really unlucky you would look like empty space from nearly all directions. However, by sending a lot of radiation in one direction you become more detectable further away. So the question is whether the total volume where you can be found is decreased by the above scheme (or anything like it). It turns out that the detection distance of something radiating P Watts is proportional to sqrt(P). So if you send all your radiation into a fraction f of all directions, in those directions you will be detectable at distance sqrt(P/f). The total volume where you can be found divided by the original one is (volume of spherical cone)/(volume sphere) = (4pi*f*sqrt(P/f)^3 / 3) / (4pi*sqrt(P)^3/3) = 1/sqrt(f). So the smaller f is, the *more* detectable you will become! If you know your enemy is somewhere, then you are fine of course. But unknown enemies having sensors randomly scattered are hard to avoid.

But if you're moving, you've swept the area behind recently with your own sensors, right? So unless you're in center of the lion's den already, Eric's method seems to be superior. And if you *are* in the lion's den, well, you're probably screwed anyway unless you have inside info on their sensor web or brought a *lot* of screamer drones (and have given up on passive stealth in that case anyway).

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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto

Wed, 2013-05-29 04:29

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

NewtonPulsifer wrote:But if

NewtonPulsifer wrote:
But if you're moving, you've swept the area behind recently with your own sensors, right?

Note that a parabolic reflector means that you will transmit the light much further back than you ever were, so enemies you couldn't see could easily see you and can now accelerate towards you. And active sensor sweeps will of course give your position away really well. The irony is that if stealth is effective and used, then in this scenario you are very vulnerable to stealthed enemies sneaking up behind you. And even if stealth is pretty lousy in general for the reasons I gave above, it still makes sense against a known target - so unless you have a large sensor cloud you are likely to be hit by something hard to see from your angle. To try to bend this towards radical abundance: one of the interesting consequences of really good manufacturing is that you can make *lots* of everything. So it would be stupid not to have lots of sensors, lots of flares, lots of dispersed weapons, lots of dummies. In space warfare the main countervailing issue is the huge cost of accelerating matter (in terms of time, energy and reaction mass), so you will also want to make your stuff very small, and since accelerating stuff seems to have economies of scale (at least for traditional spacecraft, just wait till you see Eric's and my more exotic one) you would want to package all your stuff into the ship doing the acceleration and once that is over disperse it into a wide cloud until it needs to be deaccelerated.

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Thu, 2013-06-06 09:06

Smokeskin

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
(I am a bit worried that Eric and me are now just two offices away - we are pretty good at distracting each other. This week we have been discussing stealth for spacecraft, and I now think I have a knock-down argument why his approach doesn't work... ahem, work.

Two offices away? There's a woman who has two dogs, like me. We mostly discussed the subtle differences between dominance games and aggression in dogs during lunch break today. I bet you're really jealous of my non-distracting work environment.

Thu, 2013-06-06 13:43

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Smokeskin wrote:I bet you're

Smokeskin wrote:
I bet you're really jealous of my non-distracting work environment.

Ha! I can get distracted in *any* work environment! (Dog dominance behaviors - I wonder how they map onto primate dominance behaviors. Finding the differences and unique properties might be useful for my project about moral enhancement...)

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Thu, 2013-06-06 19:25

#10

Decivre

Arenamontanus wrote:Ha! I can

Arenamontanus wrote:
Ha! I can get distracted in *any* work environment!

This is a statement I can relate to. "Non-distracting environment" assumes that the environment is the impetus for distraction. I argue it's the brain itself.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Fri, 2013-06-07 04:18

#11

Smokeskin

Arenamontanus wrote:Smokeskin

Arenamontanus wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
I bet you're really jealous of my non-distracting work environment.
Ha! I can get distracted in *any* work environment! (Dog dominance behaviors - I wonder how they map onto primate dominance behaviors. Finding the differences and unique properties might be useful for my project about moral enhancement...)

I am sure that the topic can be interesting, but this was mostly anecdotes with hardly any reflection. It is one of the big downsides of doing business, the people who can think are few and far between. On the other hand, they tend to have better social skills and are more savvy.

Fri, 2013-06-07 05:34

#12

Maskin

I'd love to be distracted

I'd love to be distracted with subjects like stealth for spacecraft, but at least I'm in a fairly geeky work environment where talking about computers, gadgets and code is the norm. For a creative mind being distracted and spur of the moment tangents is all part of being inquisitive and open minded - at least that is what I tell myself! The Drexler talk was excellent by the way and I think he will be publishing some of the more radical ideas in about a years time. In his book it is my understanding he wanted to focus on the fundamentals and make sure they did not get overshadowed by the more extreme implications and wonders the future of nanotech might bring. David Wood shared some of his introduction slides on Tranhumanity (aka H+) versus humanity 1.0 (H-) online: [url]http://www.slideshare.net/DeltaWisdom/dw-intro-lonfut-radical-abundance[...

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Transhuman Mind

Fri, 2013-06-07 21:41

#13

King Shere King Shere's picture

Vortex conceling

Perhaps its possible to further reduce the visibility (to outsiders) by sending the radiation in a peculiar vortex encoding. Inspiration is from the concept of "Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity" http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/3/033001/article

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i] Plutarch