And it also makes Apple's Private Compute to process all the pictures taken by all the iphones. Can we trust their privacy preservation against a court order?
> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
Space is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or human habitation, but when you're just passing through, the odds of getting punctured are probably still reasonable, at least for unmanned spacecraft. Keep in mind that the ISS maneuvers out of the way when there are several miles to a potential impactor, just in case. We have all our eggs in one basket right now, so everybody is really careful with that one basket.
LEO is relatively simple to destroy simply because it's already so populated with mass, and that population is growing rapidly, and because they all come pretty close to crossing each other's orbits. Collisions with even very small pieces of debris typically generate secondary debris, growing the population.
A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.
Low earth orbit isn't that much space though right ? It is effectively a stack of practical orbital shells. A rogue nation state can make satellite launches financially unfeasible.
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
High performance polars dataFrame processing library [0] is written in Rust with Python bindings via PyO3/maturin. It exposes huge dataframes to python and successfully solved the interface boundayr problems described in the article.
Ed Zitron is providing his assessment and prognosis strictly on financial basis. But AI has national security and geopolitical dimensions as well. US government is fully committed to keep the AI lead for as long as possible. And they use all sorts of tricks to affect the market in AI's favor. Financial analysis alone is not enough. The government will do anything to prevent AI bubble from bursting.
long gone in the sense of media coverage perhaps? the virus hasn't gone anywhere and it's not like we have vaccines that give permanent/longterm immunity
Measles has a vaccine, ebola isn't found in the wild in the West. The chances of catching either from a random person at a meetup are basically zero.
It is no longer a pandemic which is killing tens of thousands of people, but covid is very much still around, and there's no true long-term vaccine for it. A lot of people with it are going to be more-or-less asymptomatic.
However, for a small bunch of immunocompromised people it is still very much life-altering or even deadly. For them catching it is just Not An Option, so if you want them at a large-scale meetup like this you'll have to ask all attendants to make the offer of spending a few seconds taking the $2 test.
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