Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

The very first "robot" story is a very thinly veiled slave rebellion story.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I imagine a big part of the galactic/interstellar gray goo scenario is partly cause they're kinda left loose with unlikely further human supervision. Also some organic projection of DNA accumulating errors and resulting into cancer, ignoring that another possible result is, well, plain cell death.

Secret Signature

The overwhelmingly likely result of autonomous, self-replicating robots developing coding errors (mutations) is that they fail. Sci-fi writers make their living on the "what-if", million-to-one scenarios, but it's a mistake to assume that's what would happen in reality.

Also, we don't need general AI for a Von Neumann-style construction project. We just need expert systems that are capable of performing their tasks under a variety of situations and the ability to remotely update them if needed.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 13th 2022 at 11:31:08 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Especially since it would make more sense to set it up as a bunch of individual systems with an oversight system.

Like, if the mining system breaks down, the overarching monitoring system can point that out and only the one section needs repair. But if it's one system, a fault could be ''anywhere' in it.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Plus, disassembling Mercury to make a Dyson swarm (for example) is not exactly the sort of project that you want to put on "set it and forget it" mode.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

At that scale, you'd want some level of automation, though. Having fully automated, unmanned factories seems pretty much inevitable in such a situation.

Optimism is a duty.

My point is that you'd want to do granular automation. One giant system controlling everything on Mercury is a really great way to have all of it fail because some random back-up checker had a bug. If you break it up into individual tasks automated separately and an overall monitoring system, it splits up the points of failure into much smaller discrete groups and makes it much easier to find and fix them. Especially if there's multiple construction lines. A singular system failing means everything goes down. A granular system failing means that one line goes down, maybe, and you might be able to double a different line up temporarily.

Doing it that way also makes it much easier to replicate. Like, say you have a factory on Mercury making mirrors and a factory on Titan bottling up nitrogen. The actual factories would operate differently and wouldn't be able to use the same system. But the facilities launching the end result into space would be nearly identical and could just be tweaked to account for different gravity and stuff. Sorting facilities, quality checking facilities, the transfer networks, they could all run off nearly identical systems. And the overall monitoring system wouldn't need to be different at all, because all it's doing is making sure everything else is reporting back that it's working fine.

A singular system per planet/moon would need to be wholly unique for each planet/moon. If you break it down into independent systems for each part of the process, it makes it significantly cheaper and easier to design in the long run.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2022 at 3:18:53 PM

Not Three Laws compliant.

There's also the question of whether we should terraform Mars in this utterly destructive manner to begin with. It would utterly destroy pretty much all archaeological and geological feature on the entire surface.

Optimism is a duty.

Not, really actually. The lasers can be targeted and you don't need to blanket the entire surface of the planet. The video specifically points out Olympus Mons and the Valles Marinaris as things to leave out and together they take up a huge amount of the land. Presumably there'd be a push to leave Cydonia alone as well.

Part of the problem though is that the Valles Marinaris? There's literally no way to terraform Mars without seriously altering it, given that it's a gigantic valley system that would almost certainly be at least partially filled with water.

The other element is just that setting everything up would take ages. That's decades of time putting a ton of infrastructure in orbit around Mars.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 14th 2022 at 4:32:29 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

Surprise, another video! This time, featuring the largest stars that may ever exist, Black Hole Stars, or Population 3 stars.

Secret Signature

Kurzgesagt had a video on our skewed views on what dinosaurs really looked like, and I found a book about it that may also be interesting: All Yesterdays, which has lots of illustrations of what dinosaurs may have looked like (and how modern animals would look in the traditional way of drawing dinosaurs). It also delves deeper into the problem along the way.

Optimism is a duty.

Kurzgesagt turns to the hypothetical of one of the most amazing objects ever to exist in the universe: a black hole star, a possible explanation for the existence of supermassive black holes.

Even more awesomely, the newly launched James Webb space telescope just might reveal the existence of these gargantuan stars.

Optimism is a duty.

Please look two posts back. From 5 days ago.

SoundCloud

Oops, sorry.

Optimism is a duty.

Adding on to the AI discussion from earlier, the comparison I like is to corporations. Most corporations are designed around profit maximization, and this tends to lead to bad labor and environmental policies. Attempts to rein those in lead to outsourcing to countries with lower standards and political lobbying against those regulations.

That reminds me of something I heard from an A.I expert. One of the biggest potential dangers of A.I is less the A.I itself and more how corporations and the like would use it.

New video today, about how dead proteins can make living cells.

Secret Signature

A video explaining that immunology is more complicated than "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger".

Edited by Redmess on Feb 28th 2023 at 12:23:43 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Cancer and how the body defends against it

SoundCloud

A new video on quasars:

Optimism is a duty.

They've been making shorts lately as well, gotta feed that algorithm day and night.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

A video that uses a city as analogy for explaining how Cancer works.

New vid:

Our knowledge and mastery of biotechnology is growing faster and faster, and it's easier to access than ever before. As this video describes, this has its dangers, though we do have ways of mitigating it.

Been a while since we got a good helping of existential dread.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jul 2nd 2023 at 8:58:19 AM

Kinda more fearmongering than I like for the channel tbh. Especially even humoring the "Covid escaped from labs!" is kinda groan inducing.

Secret Signature

I think it's supposed to debunk the fearmongering.

Optimism is a duty.