Apparently not. But that is a most awesome video if you think asbout it.

To the Hawkins debate... Michio Kaku was just on Daily Show with John Stewart, and says "If you look at his glasses, near the top right corner, there is a chip which picks up radio waves from his mind, and transfers it to a laptop so he can type mentally."

Apparently most who have this ability have the chip on the top of their head, and it's about the size of a dime.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...g_1388171c.jpg

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His mind generates RF?

Yeah I saw the segment, and wish to repeat Donger's question. And also, I used to like Michio Kaku, but did he sound a little bug**** crazy talking about people living forever and downloading our minds into robots to anyone else?

Capturing our consciousnesses is something that has been popping up a lot recently in science shows and the occasional article. It might not be possible but it's the secret to living for ever.

There's even a movie coming out that explores this (Transcendence).

I'm not saying it won't be possible in the future, maybe even very near future. But should we? It sounds like mad scientist shit to me.

I think that it's our best shot at expanding out from Earth. There's no need to find a way around the faster than light travel issue when you can load a ship with "bots" that are carrying the consciousnesses of experienced people that can be turned on (or awoken) a predetermined date. It also simplifies the actual ship, no life support.

How would that help us expand beyond Earth, if we don't physically leave?

Your mind leaves. They would be the perfect initial settlers.

Sounds like it's all rainbows and unicorns. Nothing could possibly go terribly wrong downloading and uploading our brains.

Honestly not sure how they would go wrong... Corrupted data? Not sure how that affects anyone.

I would image that it's a long way off if it's even possible.

I did like how he mentioned uploading knowledge. 5 minutes later you're a math whiz.

That's the ideal place for science... right on that border between amazing advancement and things going terribly wrong...

You must not watch much sci-fi. :D

Yeah the dude has off the chart smarts. He has went down a kind of off the beaten path lately. Smart guys do that occasionally.

Thank the FSM for that. The world needs millions more of those types.

Maybe, but you can make that same argument for any tech advance.

If we can hands free type on a computer using our brains, it doesn't seem to big a leap in imagination that if we can already get information out of the brain, we can put info in.

Yep, Agreed, essential to propel scientific research forward.

I agree that the world needs a few crazy smart people to challenge the status quo, but scientific progress at any and all costs probably isn't a good idea.

You could take fertilised eggs / embryos with a device to bring them to term at the other end. Or just DNA strands

Has anyone, anywhere on earth ever suggested that? If so then please link

So do these digitized and downloaded brains have rights? Can they vote? Can they hook up their brain to an apache helicopter and mow people down? Can I reach over and turn them off if they are bothering me? Can they decide that our meat bag bodies are inferior and wipe the rest of us out? Can they have a billion copies of themselves downloaded into separate robot bodies and be everywhere at once? Can they be hacked? Would we really be improving the human race or ensuring its destruction?

No, really, sounds like a great idea.

Who said there is no moral or ethical line?

Are you interested in science? Some of your posts are making we wonder why you are posting in here?

I'm a pretty big fan of science. I'm just not sure I'm comfortable with the ethics of some of the people practicing it. And I'm not sure it's a great idea to go messing about with trying to "improve" the species artificially.

So what is your definition of "improving"?
Eye glasses and hearing aids are artificially improving the species.

So no mind/nerve controlled prosthetics for people missing a limb?

No RF communication device for people with ALS?

No hearing aids?

I can keep going.

You might not see the value in this now and that's totally cool. I don't foresee this type of thing becoming a reality in our lifetimes. Others will get to decide whether or not they want grandpa running kids off the lawn in his new cyborg body.

(CNN) -- Our galactic neighborhood just got a lot bigger. NASA on Wednesday announced the discovery of 715 new planets, by far the biggest batch of planets ever unveiled at once.

By way of comparison, about 1,000 planets total had been identified in our galaxy before Wednesday.

Four of those planets are in what NASA calls the "habitable zone," meaning they have the makeup to potentially support life.

The planets, which orbit 305 different stars, were discovered by the Kepler space telescope and were verified using a new technique that scientists expect to make new planetary discoveries more frequent and more detailed.

"We've been able to open the bottleneck to access the mother lode and deliver to you more than 20 times as many planets as has ever been found and announced at once," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

Launched in March 2009, the Kepler space observatory was the first NASA mission to find planets similar to Earth that are in, or near, habitable zones -- defined as planets that are the right distance from a star for a moderate temperature that might sustain liquid water.

Tuesday's planets all were verified using data from the first two years of Kepler's voyage, meaning there may be many more to come.

"Kepler has really been a game-changer for our understanding of the incredible diversity of planets and planetary systems in our galaxy," said Douglas Hudgins, a scientist with NASA's astrophysics division.

The new technique is called "verification by multiplicity," and relies in part on the logic of probability. Instead of searching blindly, the team focused on stars that the technique suggests are likely to have more than one planet in their orbit.

NASA says 95% of the planets discovered by Kepler are smaller than Neptune, which is four times as big as Earth.

One of them is about twice the size of Earth and orbits a star half the size of Earth's sun in a 30-day cycle.

The other three planets in habitable zones also are all roughly twice the size of Earth. Scientists said the multiplicity technique is biased toward first discovering planets close to their star and that, when further data comes in, they expect to find a higher percentage of new planets that could potentially have a life-supporting climate like Earth's.

"The more we explore the more we find familiar traces of ourselves amongst the stars that remind us of home," said Jason Rowe, a research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and co-leader of the research team.

Well, since an embryo isn't life, it wouldn't need any life support, I suppose...

:bolt:

Come on, dude. Do eye glasses have rights? Can they vote? Can they make complex inferences and decisions? Answer some of my questions and maybe I'll get to answering this ridiculous nonsense.

You mean like nuclear energy/weapons, GMO food, and biological warfare?...

You have a right to believe what you want. This is a science thread. You want to bring politics/religion into the discussion start a thread in the DC forum.

A discussion such as this might be better off in the DC section, but don't pretend like it's all about me and my viewpoint. You jumped right in asking me questions and jumping my ass for not being all excited about a subject that has serious ethical implications.

I would argue that there's a very large difference between using a tool to correct a physical disability (eye glasses and hearing aids) and the ability to download the contents of a human mind into another non-human machine.

Your views on scientific ethics are pretty wacky, dude. It's not all mad science with ethics be damned, like you've tried to make it sound in this and other threads.

No, it isn't all like that. But there are always outliers. There are always people willing to forgo ethics in the name of progress. I'm sure Hitler's human test subjects would agree with me, if they were alive.

Well that's fine and dandy, but like everything else in the world, there's always gonna be some bad apples. And just like everything else, we don't let the fear of a few bad apple prohibit forward progress as a whole. I think Hitler's human test subject would agree with me too, if they were alive.

I think it's a totally legitimate question to ask if brains that have been digitized and downloaded have rights or can vote. If you transfer your brain to a robot right before you die, does the robot get to carry on in our society just like it was you?

This isn't fear of some bad apple like Hitler. It's a serious question that society will have to address if we go down this road.

And I would agree.

No, robots will never = humans.

Yeah, and again, nobody is saying we shouldn't or wouldn't do that when the time comes. It's a long ways off, so you can relax a little...

Then why the **** did you ask the question? Did you think I wouldn't? Or were you just trying to make an argument against my position by implying that this was my position?

I'm not sure I'd take that bet, if offered.

OK, no rights for the robots. So the new you, freshly digitized and downloaded into your new robot body, is put on shit shoveling duty for eternity or until your parts wear out, whichever comes first. You still think you're you. Still the same guy beneath that hard metallic skin, but now you get to shovel shit with no breaks, forever.

:D

Like he said in the interview, they have already implanted memories in mice.

Also think they have successfully watched people's dreams.

Most of these problems will have already been encountered by AI long before we have the computing power to mimic the human brain...

From what I gather, they want to plug the AI into people's brains and become a hybrid superhuman. I think we'll be dealing with these issues at, or close to, the same time.

We already use very simple AI.

With what we have now.

Duplicating the human brain is a long way off...

Also of note.. I can't remember if it's been posted here, but I recently read about a similar technology in which they've found a way to erase bad memories from a brain, while leaving the good ones. A'la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind movie. Intended for PTSD treatment and such.

Between that and the ability to already implant memories in mice, I can see some good medical advances happening from this tech. But **** me if everyone can't see a little danger here.

I can see the danger, but after one treatment I won't any more.

Science SUCKS

http://www.livescience.com/43465-bab...probiotic.html

screw payin them scientific types!

Ill just go straight to the source! My 18 month old is gonna feed us for the rest of the year!

Mmmmmmm..... baby poop sausage...........

So the answer is no. Just some insane tactics.

Why don't you pray about this at your church? No danger there of anyone ever getting carried away with taking human lives.

God damn you are a dislikable ****wad. We get it. You're an atheist and you can't shut up about it.

I don't go to a church. Just because I am a creationist, doesn't mean I am a member of any Christian denomination. It doesn't mean I am anti-science.

And it doesn't surprise me at all that you don't give a **** about being ethical. Not because you're an atheist, but because you're a dick.

Projection can be a very bad thing. Now this is the science is cool thread why don't you just move along and post your fears elsewhere.

I'm free to post in this thread, same as you. You just have a hard-on for me because I schooled your ass about the science that was supposedly right in your wheelhouse in that thread where we discussed dark matter. So I understand your knee-jerk reaction to be a douchebag any time I post. But you can't just send me on my way.

Ha thats a absolute joke of a statement. Now run off and play somewhere before the evil scientists get you.

You want me to bump that thread?

Yes please do and then you can vacate this thread and I'll crush you there.

I'm just going to throw this out there.

At no time does a creationist get to talk to me about science without being laughed at.

So for the love of science~

Take the shit to DC.

Don't bring that petty shit into an otherwise cool, informative thread.

Moving along now....

The discussion was pretty civil and informative, had nothing at all to do with religion, and we were all pretty much done with it, until Dave Lane brought it back with his personal vendetta against religion. And I'm not even religious.

And you can laugh as much as you want.

Ohh dear ****....

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Researchers Are Making A 3D Printer That Can Build A House In 24 Hours

At The University of Southern California, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has built a colossal 3D printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

Khoshnevis’s robot comes equipped with a nozzle that spews out concrete and can build a home based on a set computer pattern.

We first saw this on MSN.com. The technology, known as Contour Crafting, could completely revolutionise the construction industry. Discover Magazine’s Brad Lemley explains that workers would lay down two rails for the robot to operate on.

From there, the Contour Crafting system would glide along the rails and lay down cement. Once that part of the process is finished, humans would do the rest of essential tasks like hanging doors and installing windows.

Contour Crafting could also reduce the total cost of owning a home. It could also make it easier to repair homes damaged by devastating weather events.

While this project is still being tested, Khoshnevis asserts that this won’t eliminate jobs in this sector, but actually create more. Check out the video below to learn how this process works.

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Auroras on Saturn. Cool......

http://imageshack.com/a/img89/9641/e319.jpg

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=880

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there is precedent. No one wants this thread to devolve into politics or religion. If you want to discuss those parts of science that go into politics and religion, take it to DC.

It wasn't a political or religious discussion. It was a discussion about ethics. And I let it die yesterday, but you ****ers keep bringing it back.

I just got through judging a multiple high school Mars colonization contest at the college. Some neat ideas, some neat presentations, but very few of both. My favorite was the kid who had the idea of bringing along kittens, dogs, and rabbits for protein instead of typical farm animals due to their high reproduction rate.

That makes great sense. Rats and Mice would probably be better than cats and dogs. Their reproduction rates are insane.

Hubble captures photo of supernova at its brightest

http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploa...ig-590x398.jpg

Not much to do on Mars. Play with your food for entertainment?

Are you predicting that people are going to die in this thread?






























Sorry, couldn't resist.

SUPERMAN MEMORY CRYSTAL: 5D NANO-GLASS TO PRESERVE DATA FOR MILLION YEARS

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A research group in Britain has recorded data into a crystal of nanostructured glass. This future storage with practically unlimited lifetime and capacity exceeding Blu-Ray’s by 2,800 times might save civilization’s data for aliens if humankind is gone.

A group of scientists from University of Southampton has developed a ‘five-dimensional’ optical memory, having experimentally proven a possibility of recording data into nanostructured glass using a high speed (femtosecond) laser, which creates self-assembled nanostructures in fused quartz.

The creators of 5D memory has dubbed their invention ‘Superman memory crystal’, following the ‘memory crystals’ used in a number of movies featuring the superhero.

The method is called 5D because in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures their refraction and polarization characteristics work as two additional parameters.

The newly-developed storage promises unprecedented data capacity of 360 Terabyte for a DVD-sized disc. The maximum capacity of a latest generation quad-layer Blu-Ray DVD is “only” 128 Gigabytes. The largest heat-assisted magnetic recording hard drive (HAMR), yet to be commercially produced, will have about 20 terabytes per disc.

Glass storage could preserve data for millions of years whereas a DVD guarantees only about seven years of faultless playback.

The nanostructured glass remains stable if exposed to temperatures up to 1,000°C.

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organizations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” said the head of the project Jingyu Zhang, pointing out that museums and national archives with their huge numbers of documents are going to be the first to benefit.

A joint project of University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and Eindhoven University of Technology has presented ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass’ report at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose, California.

Technology similar to polarized sunglasses

Technically speaking, the process appears as follows. A femtosecond laser that produces extremely short (280 femtoseconds – or 280 quadrillionths of a second) and intense pulses of light encrypts data file into layers of nanostructured dots inside a quartz glass. The layers are placed very close, with mere five micrometers (one millionth of a meter) between them.

These light impulses modify polarization and refraction of self-assembled dots as the light travels through the glass, somehow similar to the principle used in polarized sunglasses. Later the information encoded in dots’ 5D parameters can be read using an laser scanning device similar to the one used to read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs and an optical microscope capable of untangling the polarized light reflected by the three-bit spots.

So far there is no talk about re-writing glass discs so they are going to be write-once-read-many (WORM).

Unlike modern DVD and Blu-Ray disks which record data on up to four layers, the 5D data storage will have hundreds of layers (around 400 layers for standard 1.2 mm CD), but will be made of glass instead of plastic encasing metal spraying with data.

So far the developers reported of a successful recording and reading of a 300kb text file on three layers of glass, but this is regarded only as a technological demonstration of this ground-breaking new technology with a very bright future