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A Science Minute


Is Science the Only Standard for Truth?


  • Total voters
    55
Star Trek Tech Made Real - Transparent Aluminum


Ok honestly.. its is not about transparent metal aluminium. You know that aluminium oxide is the stuff that is used in for example you garden variety fuse, yes? Nothing magic, in fact aluminiun is of the most common substances in the earth.

Scientific fact: transparency and conductivity are opposite, for some reason. There are some interesting materials that are used in the very screen you are looking this post like indium tin oxide, but they are not metals as you think of metal. They are more like rust, brittle and fragile.´Metals (and metal alloys) are malleable, strong - and for shining!

So far science does not know a substance that behaves like a metal, but is transparent.

I'm not saying its not possible, but it would be worth a Nobel at this point.
 
Well, I suppose its as much about belief as anything.

Like time travel. Is is possible or not? Many physics theories do not forbid it.

Myself, I prefer the multiverse theories. That means that you cannot kill your grandfather - in some realities you did that and in some you did not.
What this means is that there is no time-travel causality... I'd suggest you to read David Deutch: The Fabric of Reality. I'm on same lines with him on these matters..
 
Well, I suppose its as much about belief as anything.

Like time travel. Is is possible or not? Many physics theories do not forbid it.

Myself, I prefer the multiverse theories. That means that you cannot kill your grandfather - in some realities you did that and in some you did not.
What this means is that there is no time-travel causality... I'd suggest you to read David Deutch: The Fabric of Reality. I'm on same lines with him on these matters..
I'm one of those who don't believe that time travel as we normally think of it in sci-fi is possible. I understand how mathematical models can make it seem possible, but switching variables around on paper or in a simulation is very different than undoing a physical sequence of events. This gets quite involved, but there's a logic to the impossibility. I just doubt most people have reflected on it long enough to grasp it.
 
Did you all notice, that there is a huge flying wing US military drone going about?
Its really huge, over 50 meters (140 ft??) wingspan.

Its replacing the Global Hawk thing, that explains its numbers going down.

It was for really short time in the press, they are redacting it as we speak!

One 2c, is that there is really a huge black military budget, and it actually goes to military projects, based on normal aerospace research...

Just that _one_ drone program eats easily a billion usd!
 
Deep Fakes - None Of These Are Real People

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There are a whole range of legal & ethical issues associated with using an AI generated image. How do we know if the actual person is the person in the video? Will famous people have to renegotiate their contracts to include special licencing for AI generated likenesses? Is it really such a great idea to create a computer so powerful it can trick us into thinking it's not what it really is?

 
BreakthroughStarshot-01b.pngThe story of humanity is a story of great leaps – out of Africa, across oceans, to the skies and into space. Since Apollo 11’s ‘moonshot’, we have been sending our machines ahead of us – to planets, comets, even interstellar space.

But with current rocket propulsion technology, it would take tens or hundreds of millennia to reach our neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri. The stars, it seems, have set strict bounds on human destiny. Until now.

In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed. This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature space probes attached to lightsails – to speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour. Such a system would allow a flyby mission to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years from launch, beaming home images of its recently-discovered planet Proxima b, and any other planets that may lie in the system, as well as collecting other scientific data such as analysis of magnetic fields.



Breakthrough Starshot

 
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