U.S. military supercomputer sets computing record
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ToddHileHoffer wrote:
Awesome, the most powerful computer ever built won't be used to cure cancer
What's worse, decrease the world's population by drastic measures, or allow the population to soar higher at an even faster rate by curing diseases that help govern our explosive over-population problem? The more people on Earth, the more nasty diseases will crop up to eliminate us. Pick your evil.
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] All of life is just a big rambling blog post.
Are you suggesting that we use nuclear weapons for population control? Curing cancer will not increase the world population all that much... Its not like poor people in countries with high population growth will be able to afford new medicines.
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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ToddHileHoffer wrote:
What a species we are...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, is that none of it has attempted to contact us.
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLDouglas Troy wrote:
ToddHileHoffer wrote: What a species we are... The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, is that none of it has attempted to contact us.
So true...
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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Are you suggesting that we use nuclear weapons for population control? Curing cancer will not increase the world population all that much... Its not like poor people in countries with high population growth will be able to afford new medicines.
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
ToddHileHoffer wrote:
Are you suggesting that we use nuclear weapons for population control?
No, I didn't suggest anything even remotely similar to that. I was simply making the point that even a seemingly beneficial, altruistic use of technology does not necessarily lead to an overall improvement of the human condition.
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] All of life is just a big rambling blog post.
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Lazy overeating couch potatoes are unlikely to breed and will die younger freeing up more resources for the fitter, healthier types who do not eat 57000 calories a day!
------------------------------------ "I want you to imagine I have a blaster in my hand" - Zaphod Beeblebrox. "You DO have a blaster in your hand" - Freighter Pilot "Yeah, so you don't have to tax your imagination too hard" - Zaphod Beeblebrox
unfortunately such types are funded by our tax bucks and thus have all day to spend finding as many breeding partners as possible and breeding with them. It's as though Darwinism has been turned on its head.
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"An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second." U.S. military supercomputer sets computing record[^]
Jeffrey Walton wrote:
assembled from components originally designed for video game machines
What amazes me is how people can take one phrase and focus on it, and pull it out of proportions. I have done similar proposals to this one. What exactly do they mean "technology designed for video game machines"? http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html[^] It means GPGPU (General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units). http://www.gpgpu.org/[^] One of the earliest solutions on a 64 node supercomputer failed to meet expectations for solving the fluid dynamics of air-flow of a "gas release" in the New York metropolitan area. Given the budget of the university, they could not have doubled or tripled the processing power easily using CPU's. Someone suggested GPU programming, shader programming developed for games, to solve fluid dynamic problems. Adding 32 high end nVidia GPU's quadroupled the floating point output of their routines with a little more delay (and a lot of help from nVidia) for the manpower learning in order to solve the problem. shading language programming is even easier now, with CUDA and ATI's equivalent floating point capability, you can solve incredible problems, as long as the solution requires only single precision floating point numbers. En mass numbers is irrelevant, precision is limited on the GPU still, but with mass numerical distribution, you simply add more GPU's and computers to the cluster to solve the problem, until it is solveable. THAT is what they mean about technology designed for video games. :-D The same technology used in Doom3 and Far-Cry to bring realistic environments and high resolution detail, and high dynamic range graphics, also happens to solve floating point numerical problems. After all, what is the environment made up of in games? physics? environmental lighting? refraction? reflection? These are numerical problems that are solved through mass numerical calculations across pixels. Those pixels can represent your screen and a simulated world, or a real world with real-world coordinated environmental descriptions. :-D The PS3 built upon that capability directly into the Cell processor, combining the GPU and CPU into one unit capable of lar
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ToddHileHoffer wrote:
What a species we are...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, is that none of it has attempted to contact us.
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLDouglas Troy wrote:
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, is that none of it has attempted to contact us.
no truer words have ever been posted. If intellignet life exists, and they found us, they would most assuredly put up a beacon at the edge of the solar system with a very stern warning: "extremely dangerous life-forms present!"
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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Douglas Troy wrote:
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, is that none of it has attempted to contact us.
no truer words have ever been posted. If intellignet life exists, and they found us, they would most assuredly put up a beacon at the edge of the solar system with a very stern warning: "extremely dangerous life-forms present!"
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
Who is to say that other intelligent life is necessarily more intelligent than us. OK, they find us, not us them, but that would only indicate their hving progressed more technology wise, which doesn't really require much intelligence. Then there is the possibility that they have not even developed their own technology, but appropriated it from some other, possibly more intelligent civilisation.
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Who is to say that other intelligent life is necessarily more intelligent than us. OK, they find us, not us them, but that would only indicate their hving progressed more technology wise, which doesn't really require much intelligence. Then there is the possibility that they have not even developed their own technology, but appropriated it from some other, possibly more intelligent civilisation.
Brady Kelly wrote:
Then there is the possibility that they have not even developed their own technology
That theory has been proposed, it assumes we are mayap the oldest of civilizations, pretty unlikely given we are a young sun. No, it comes down to a couple of huge ifs. A) is intelligent life so rare that it happened only once B) is there a technological way of interstellar travel. If B) can never be overcome, if the speed of light holds civilizations to their own neck of the woods. Then it is unlikely two intelligent civilizations would ever meet each other, because it would be so rare and dispersed that the physical travel to meet/contact would be impossible to overcome. :) If intelligent life exists, more than likely some are more advanced, some less simply by law of averages and our age as a species being so young.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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What a world we live in... The new supercomputer "will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion." Awesome, the most powerful computer ever built won't be used to cure cancer or anything worthwhile but rather to make sure our nukes are deadly enough. The technology was originally designed for playing "video games". We use all our greatest technology for simulated killing "video games" and real killing with nukes. What a species we are...
I didn't get any requirements for the signature
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Brady Kelly wrote:
Then there is the possibility that they have not even developed their own technology
That theory has been proposed, it assumes we are mayap the oldest of civilizations, pretty unlikely given we are a young sun. No, it comes down to a couple of huge ifs. A) is intelligent life so rare that it happened only once B) is there a technological way of interstellar travel. If B) can never be overcome, if the speed of light holds civilizations to their own neck of the woods. Then it is unlikely two intelligent civilizations would ever meet each other, because it would be so rare and dispersed that the physical travel to meet/contact would be impossible to overcome. :) If intelligent life exists, more than likely some are more advanced, some less simply by law of averages and our age as a species being so young.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
El Corazon wrote:
if the speed of light holds civilizations to their own neck of the woods
You have told it: IF... Some centuries ago we knew that the earth was the center of the universe... A pair of centuries ago, we knew that the earth was flat... 100 years ago we knew that it was impossible to go to space... Today we know that interstellar travels are impossible... What is going to be known tomorrow?
Regards. -------- M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you “The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet.” - Michael A. Jackson Rating helpfull answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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El Corazon wrote:
if the speed of light holds civilizations to their own neck of the woods
You have told it: IF... Some centuries ago we knew that the earth was the center of the universe... A pair of centuries ago, we knew that the earth was flat... 100 years ago we knew that it was impossible to go to space... Today we know that interstellar travels are impossible... What is going to be known tomorrow?
Regards. -------- M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you “The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet.” - Michael A. Jackson Rating helpfull answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
Nelek wrote:
What is going to be known tomorrow?
that's the clincher. We hope there is a solution, something we don't know yet. But there is still the distinct possibility that there remains one immutable inescapable limit of life. Where that limit is? we don't know. We used to believe it at the speed of sound, now it is at the speed of light. We may find the solution, others may have, but there remains the distinct possibility that there is no answer. I hope not. Because if the speed of light is an immuteable inescable limit on civilization, none of us have hope of finding each other, or escaping our own destruction. For can we create terraforming prior to our own destruction? a limit like speed would put infinite pressure on that destruct button. :) I have hope that the light barrier is no less constricting than the sound barrier.... but that is hope, it has nothing to do with physics. :-)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."