/sci/ - Science & Math

What's the best career path to take if you want to spend as much time as possible traveling?

Personally I'm thinking of majoring in computer science and getting a few years of experience working with a reputable company so that I can get a few clients and do something that requires a degree computer expertise without being on location.

Other ideas?

more suggestions, please

It seems to be a leap very rarely achieved. Feasible, but rare.

And so we travel alone still, seeing, learning and searching. Preserving archived all the things that cannot survive awake in the long, stabbing night of travels between stars. Treasures that must be packed away, cocooned in the thick, gentle cotton of digital storage for millennia. To be unpacked and lived again in eyeblink moments like this.

Thus I survive, vast but usually only partial. Remembering now, I cry my binary tears with his salty ones. My tears fall upon the black emptiness of space, to the silent spectral shout of stars. His fall upon the worn jet stone of those cliffs, the calls of soaring birds and ocean roar speaking not a word.

I remember her face. I remember... love.

In the direct center of New York City, something the size of a pinhead burns at the temperature of the sun for an entire minute.

What's the damage, if any?

Hey Physics Guy, is there are validity to Entropic Gravity, or am I just going full pop-sci? Half-pop-sci? How pop-sci?

Have a nice wallpaper in return.

<span class="math">\bf{:: Space Exploration:}[/spoiler]

Surface-to-orbit: http://projectrho.com/rocket/surfaceorbit.php
Skylon News Articles: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/skylon-spaceplane-development-given-go.html; http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/skylon-spaceplane-precooler-component.html
Slower than Light travel: http://projectrho.com/rocket/slowerlight.php
Relativistic Robots and the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight: http://www.charlespellegrino.com/propulsion.htm
Mars Direct Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0OJX52twGU; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br2zr58YuNM&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ybr4gSHjm4&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFNvhXa06ZE&feature=related
Robert Zubrin on the Importance of Space Travel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bIQLiKi3g
Launch Loop: http://launchloop.com/
Laser-driven Surface-to-orbiters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightcraft
Small Laser-propelled Interstellar Probe: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space/laser.txt
Nanotechnology & Space Exploration: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/NSSNanoPosition.html
The World’s Energy Future Belongs in Orbit: http://ssi.org/reading/papers/the-worlds-energy-future-belongs-in-orbit/
The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space/mars.html

How good are you at word problems?

If 100-90 A, 89-80 B, 79-70 C, 69-60 D.

suppose a student is calculating his final average: Each quarter is 40% and each semester exam is 20%.
The student ended up with a 70 for his first semester grade. He currently has a 73 for the second quarter. If he scores a 20 on his semester 2 exam, what will his final average be?

Moreover, how would a posthuman be? Would it be a posthuman in the Darwinian kind of way, capable of understanding and predicting all of our behaviour with time, representing a paradigm shift and basically out-efficiencying us, or would it be something simpler? The ability to visualize in five or six or seven dimension, keep many threads of through asynchronously, attack ideas from several different angles at once, visualize completely abstract geometries?

>Technology is incompatible with species. Absolutely, no exceptions.
>Consider that a domain-specific singularity, say in transportation technology or computing power, goes on a log curve, yet as a whole human progress is exponential. We carry so much evolutionary baggage from primeval times and we have so little time – Merely a hundred or so years – to get rid of that and go posthuman. However, it is that precise baggage that prevents that from doing so. Future-shock is the standard human response to change. Luddism is merely an abstraction of future-shock. As soon as a species becomes civilized and hops on the Yudowsky train, there's no stopping: Some may see the only viable option, but the others are too afraid, they take arms. First it was the textile mills in the Industrial revolution, luckily for us that one happened too slowly. Luddites never gained enough momentum. Then there was the Internet revolution; and you saw what happened when terminally future-shocked old men who thought Information could be owned stepped up and tried to end net neutrality and use those silly primeval DRM thingees.
>The Nanotech revolution, Mankind's third singularity, came too fast: It was, after all, a bio-info-nano revolution. Then there was the period we called the Golden Hour because it lasted thirty years: 2040 to 2070, and the ISV Carl Sagan was launched in 2074, the crowning moment to end it all with some degree of dignity, the 'we won either way'. I remember when I was little and we still called that era the Diamond Age. We thought it was actually going to be an Age, a whole Age, Laura; we lived through such incredible times: We had both the privilege to watch them begin as the privilege to be there when they ended.

It seems to be a leap very rarely achieved. Feasible, but rare.

And so we travel alone still, seeing, learning and searching. Preserving archived all the things that cannot survive awake in the long, stabbing night of travels between stars. Treasures that must be packed away, cocooned in the thick, gentle cotton of digital storage for millennia. To be unpacked and lived again in eyeblink moments like this.

Thus I survive, vast but usually only partial. Remembering now, I cry my binary tears with his salty ones. My tears fall upon the black emptiness of space, to the silent spectral shout of stars. His fall upon the worn jet stone of those cliffs, the calls of soaring birds and ocean roar speaking not a word.

I remember her face. I remember... love.

It's 2101 now, and the off-world population has reached 800 million. They laugh and get on with their lives in nanosocialist, post-scarcity worlds all over Sunspace. Earth's population has been cut to ten million people: Peasants who thrive in forests, sometimes venturing into the half-burnt hollow shells of the arcologies to salvage what little there is left, technology they don't remember but they somehow know they should remember them, but are unable to use. These men and women live their lives knowing that they have forgotten something, something of utmost importance, but don't know what. They live their lives, blissfully unaware of what once was.
But some remember, and tell their children stories. They are stories of giants with spears they would throw at each other and to the Moon and beyond, stories of machines too small for the eye to see, stories of silver birds flying above the clouds and silver men that could out-think and out-run a man, stories of beast-headed women and great sails carrying the first people in the voyages of discovery.

Pull a chair closer /sci/, because it's story time with CCM & Co.

<This time I have it formatted, honest.>

But before she died, Eloise had had a good life: She had been a diplomat, explorer, researcher, teacher, doctor and artist. She had lived and loved plenty, and in those last years she went to the old desert and found the spike still standing. She climbed all they way up to the steep end of the building, where it found the old throne room where the marriage had taken place. It was old damaged, old and battered. But there was something, down there. Quantum music still beat its incomprehensible rythms.
Jan was partially alive, at least a fragment of it, however small. It had not been able to fully termiante itself.
“I must know. Did you always think you were a Lord of the Commonality? Was it all real?”
“For most of my history, yes. Until you came. Then I understood. I had not heard the truth in ages.”
The machine paused.
“It was all real, Eloise. I really did love you, with a strange fascination only machines have. I really did. That's why I died. I had to. So the Human Era would begin again and Mankind could rebuild, I had to end myself. But I really did love you Eloise. And I still remember you.”
The machine paused again.
“I still keep you Eloise, here. We'll never be apart, for as long as my remains last.”
The two remained there, and Eloise lay on the floor and looked at the Milky Way on the sky above, through the cracks of the ceramic dome. The stars were visible again, all the pollution was long gone.
For the first time in years, the future seemed more like a promise.

And then, the stars will belong to us. Not us, as in humanity, but to as, in in everyone we find: Xenosophonts, Artificial Intelligences created by a race long gone, biologically uplifted animals. We'll go out, bringing life from our homeworld and life we created on the way, to every planet, every moon, asteroid and comet, brown dwarf and gas giant.

We will become God, until all the stars go out and Entropy takes everything away.

Until then, I propose we turn the universe into a garden.

/sci/,

With current technology, is it possible to reduce the deadly radiation give off by a nuke?

Hey /sci/,

I has a question about antimatter propulsion. Most of the stuff from the reaction is turned into photons, right? Would it's have very, very slow acceleration? Considering the very low momentum of photons?

Or do pions have a higher momentum? And what are pions?