I wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to be able to send their own private interstellar space missions. America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
My guess is that the average population of car drivers is aging. With age comes worse eyesight and and the ability to see in the dark. So a lot of people are probably more comfortable with having brighter headlights.
I feel like this begs another question. If there are proven approaches and well established practices of professionals how good would chatgpt be in that profession? After all chstgpt has a vast knowledge base and probably knows a good amount of textbooks on psychology. Then again actually performing the profession probably takes skil and experience chatgpt can't learn.
I think a well trained LLM could be amazing at being a therapist. But general purpose LLMs like ChatGPT have a problem: They’re trained to be far too user led. They don’t challenge you enough. Or steer conversations appropriately.
I think there’s a huge opportunity if someone could get hold of really top tier therapy conversations and trained a specialised LLM using them. No idea how you’d get those transcripts but that would be a wonderfully valuable thing to make if you could pull it off.
> They’re trained to be far too user led. They don’t challenge you enough.
An anecdote here: I recently had a conversation with Claude that could be considered therapy or at least therapy-adjacent. To Anthropic's credit, Claude challenged me to take action (in the right direction), not just wallow in my regrets. Still, it may be true that general-purpose LLMs don't do this consistently enough.
you wouldn't. what you're describing as a wonderfully valuable thing would be a monstrous violation of patient confidentiality. I actually can't believe you're so positive about this idea I suspect you might be trolling
I'm serious. You would have to do it with the patient's consent of course. And of course anonymize any transcripts you use - changing names and whatnot.
Honestly I suspect many people would be willing to have their therapy sessions used to help others in similar situations.
Knowing the theory is a small part of it. Dealing with irrational patients is the main part. For example, you could go to therapy and be successful. Five years later something could happen and you face a reoccurrence of the issue. It is very difficult to just apply the theory that you already know again. You're probably irrational. A therapist prodding you in the right direction and encouraging you in the right way is just as important as the theory.
Yeah I had a few servers look up on me without any clear way to recovery because some app was eating up ram. I am ok with the server coming to a crawl as soon as the swap has to be used but at least it won't stop responding all together.
You only need to defend the easy to reach parts. So the base and the cargo pod. To hit the upper parts you need advanced rockets and targeting systems.
Why advanced? It's a stationary target that's 35,000 km long. I don't think it would be that hard to hit.
Not to mention, securing the cargo would be an extremely difficult task in itself, especially when one of the main thinga you'd like to raise through the space elevators is rocket fuel.
In general, the more tensile strength you want in a cable made of a given material, the thicker you need to make that cable. Now sure, we can imagine whatever magical properties we want of our space elevator cable material, since no known material that could do this exists anyway. But it's far more likely that you'd need a cable that's a kilometer or more in diameter to achieve the tensile strength needed to support its weight at 35000 km of length, than it is to be a few inches wide.
The issue of the line falling back to earth is solved by putting the base of the elevator on water. If the top part of the elevator was cut of you could even detonate charges along the line to make sure all pieces fall into water.
Are we to assume they would be falling straight down? Because I'm pretty sure that's wrong. I'm not a physicist, though, and am happy to be corrected because every time the Space Elevator comes up, I want to know what happens when catastrophic failure occurs and how we'd mitigate that.
> Above GEO, the centrifugal force is stronger than gravity, causing objects attached to the cable there to pull upward on it. [...] On the cable below geostationary orbit, downward gravity would be greater than the upward centrifugal force, so the apparent gravity would pull objects attached to the cable downward.
So, without defensive countermeasures, the Space Elevator would indeed whip around the Earth.
But honestly, if I were designing such a thing, it would have break points, and maybe even a whinch at the base, to pull the line in. I'd also build it over water, and not over a population centre.
But I'm only a software engineer– it's likely a lot more challenging than this.
If you blow the cable apart at a few important points the mass that falls either hits fairly near downrange from the tether, or does not hit at all. Have a group of range safety officers for the charges and a law that when on duty they are expected to shoot any politician that contacts them. (I'm thinking of Fukushima. We need to vent the reactor or it will blow! You can't vent until the city has been evacuated. The reactor didn't listen to the politicians.)
Let's say the cable gets detached really close to the geosynchronous tether point (that's the worst case, right?). How much of the cable will burn up in the atmosphere? What is the density of the carbon nano-tube / graphene ribbons? And what is their terminal velocity? Has anyone proposed dimension of a graphene ribbon tether? Like it is 300 mm wide by 0.01 mm thick?
At first I was confused by this because the Kármán line is less than a percent of Earth's circumference up, but then I realised we're probably talking a geostationary anchor or something, which is very nearly a circumference up.
Could you make it over double the length needed, so if it ever broke it would be pulled away from Earth and float into space and not crash into the Earth?
No. You'd need an even more magical material that can witstand at least double the tensile strength (since the parts that go above and below the GEO anchor would be pulling with about the same force in opposite directions). And if you destroyed the GEO point anchor, the cable would just split in two - everything that's below GEO would fall, everything that's above would float away.
I don't understand why you think that where you put the base of a 35000km cable makes a difference for where the rest of it would fall. I also don't understand why you think that a 35000 km long cable falling in the ocean from space would cause any less damage to the planet than it falling down on solid ground, or at least why the difference would be significant.
> why you think that a 35000 km long cable falling in the ocean from space would cause any less damage to the planet than it falling down on solid ground
They’re not obviously wrong.
A lot of the cable is moving at escape and orbital velocities. Tensile strength is all that holds it together.
If, as the cable fails, you sever the parts above from below around escape velocity, you’ll significantly reduce the length of cable that will ever hit the surface.
Orbital and escape velocities??? The elevator is sitting over a stationary spot... it's moving at earth's rotational velocity. Only the portion above the GEO anchor is moving at orbital velocity.
But it has altitude. The stuff that's low down doesn't have a lot of orbital velocity, blow the cable and it falls nearby. And the stuff far away has enough velocity that it goes into a very eccentric orbit rather than hitting the atmosphere.
Just because it's moving below circular orbital speed doesn't mean the periapsis is in the atmosphere.
What would be the wnergy delivered by 35k km of ultra strong thick cable falling down with possibly supersonic speed? A small bit not much, but such length adds up.
There's also the issue of the vehicle on the space elevator falling back to Earth if it detaches from the space elevator (accidentally or deliberately in case of malfunction that stops it from moving up). This means each vehicle will need rockets on it. At low altitude, the rockets are fired to keep the vehicle from reentering the atmosphere too fast at a steep angle, killing the passengers. At high altitude, the rockets fire to raise the perigee enough that the vehicle misses the atmosphere entirely (or enters at a very shallow survivable angle). There's a cross over point that dictates the delta V the rocket must be able to deliver. which if I vaguely recall correctly is greater than 4 km/s.
Pure payload capsules with no passengers wouldn't need this.
The argument for space elevators is that there's a pretty strong limit on how much payload can be launched by rockets due to injection of water into the upper atmosphere. Starship could arguably reach this limit with plausible projected growth rates in traffic.
In the stratosphere it both contributes to IR opacity, increasing global warming, and can provide ice surfaces on which ozone destruction is amplified. The stratosphere is normally extremely dry, so even small inputs can have an effect that would be invisible in the much moister troposphere.
The page takes about two different programs. The first section only talks about benefits like LAN parties and tournaments as part of your 'Ausbildung' or training. The scholarship can apply if you work for them part time. Looks like it's primarily a recruitment tactic.
Yes. German car makers have been very dependent on the Chinese market to sell their cars too. Now that China is pushing for domestic electric vehicles, German car makers are falling behind.
