Drew mentions this and points out that it’s a new OS design and will therefore take a long time. He argues that an OS based on the linux design would be much easier.

I’m late to this, but I’d like to bring up something I haven’t seen anyone else mention. But first, some more details regarding what has been discussed:

In most situations, it’s correct to say that EM waves basically don’t interact with one another. You can cross two laser beams, and they’ll just continue on their way without caring that the other one was present. A mathematically equivalent scenario is waves on a string: the propagation of a wave isn’t affected by the propagation of another, even when they overlap. Another way to put this is that they obey the principle of superposition: the total amplitude at any given point on the string is just the sum of the amplitudes of the individual waves at that point. You may want to argue that the waves do interact because there are interference effects, but interference is exactly what you get when they don’t interact, i.e. when the principle of superposition holds.

However, this is only true for so-called linear systems. I won’t go delve too deep into the math of what this means, but I think looking at the wave on a string example can give you some intuition. The behavior of waves on a string can be explained mathematically by treating the string as a large number of tiny points connected by springs. If the force on a given point by a neighboring spring is directly proportional (i.e. linear) to the spring displacement (Hooke’s law), then you find that the entire system obeys the wave equation, which is a linear equation. This is the idealized model of a string, and the principle of superposition holds for it perfectly. If, however, the forces acting on points within the string have a non-linear dependence on displacement, then the equation describing the overall motion of the string will be non-linear and the principle of superposition will no longer hold perfectly. In such a case, two propagating waves could interact with one another as the properties of the wave medium (the “stretchiness” of the string) would be influenced by the presence of a wave. In other words, the stretchiness of the string would change depending on how much it’s stretched (e.g. if a wave is propagating on it), and the stretchiness influences the propagation of waves.

Something analogous can happen with EM waves, and has been mentioned by others. In so-called non-linear media, the electromagnetic wave equation becomes non-linear and two beams of light (propagating EM waves) can influence one another through the medium. This makes sense when you consider that the optical properties of a material can be changed, even just temporarily*, when enough light is passed through it (for example, by influencing the state of the electrons in the material). It makes sense then that this modification to the optical properties of the material would influence the propagation of other waves through it. In the string example, this is analogous to the string itself being modified by the presence of a wave (even just temporarily) and thereby influencing the propagation of other waves. Such effects require sufficiently large wave amplitudes to be noticeable, i.e. the intensity of the light needs to be high enough to appreciably modify the medium.

What about the case of light propagating in a vacuum? If the vacuum itself is the medium, surely it can’t be altered and no non-linear effects could arise, right? In classical electromagnetism (Maxwell’s equations), this is true. But within quantum electrodynamics (QED), it is possible for the vacuum itself to become non-linear when the strength of the electromagnetic field is great enough. This is known as the Schwinger limit, and reaching it requires extremely high field strengths, orders of magnitude higher than what we can currently achieve with any laser.

*I want to emphasize that we’re not necessarily talking about permanent changes to the medium. In the case of waves on a string for example, the string doesn’t need to be stretched to the point of permanent deformation; non-permanent changes to its stretchiness are sufficient.

They do lol

A Dyson swarm is basically just a huge number solar collectors orbiting the sun. Humanity could put some individual collectors in space if we wanted to, but we don’t have anywhere near enough resources to make a full swarm.

Near-relativistic spacecraft are conceivably possible and are not too far beyond what’s possible with current technology (though would still require significant advancements). The catch is that they would be very tiny and we would have to send a stream of them to their destination.

Retinal projectors are currently under development, and advanced ones could in principle be higher quality than current VR headsets while having a very small form-factor. Optical metamaterials such as metalenses would be very useful for this, particularly if they could be designed to work at all three RGB wavelengths simultaneously (not easy).

Putting aside the issue that it requires a negative energy density, there’s still the issue that it will necessarily violate causality, which is the reason FTL travel is considered problematic in the first place. Maybe it’s ultimately okay, but it may also mean that warp drives are fundamentally impossible.

Depends on what you consider reasonable. If you’re a researcher, Thorlabs has a couple for <$30k. You could also build your own, but you probably wouldn’t be asking if you had the experience necessary to do this.

If you’re a hobbyist, building your own would be an impressive project that would teach you a lot (look up spontaneous parametric down-conversion, a common way to create entangled pairs). It would also be pricey, as you would need an appropriate laser source (probably a nanosecond pulsed laser), a non-linear crystal like BBO, and a lot of miscellaneous optical components, etc. You can get this stuff second hand online for a lot cheaper than new, but it would still cost a lot for an individual. You would also need to characterize your output to ensure you’re actually getting correlated pairs, which is outside of my expertise.

[email protected] or [email protected]?

I never posted my pens on r/fountainpens before, but I maybe I should here.

In principle, you could have a system designed to image your surroundings (using cameras, LIDAR, etc) and perhaps some kind of machine learning algorithm to predict what kind of sound would be expected if the events around you were occurring in atmosphere. I imagine this could work well for simple things like a tool hitting a piece of metal, but would be probably run into issues when the events are affected by the lack of atmosphere or give little or no visual indication that they are occurring. And, of course, you wouldn’t be able to “hear” anything outside of the view of your imaging system.

Heat can transfer through conduction (basically thermal diffusion through physical contact), convection (bulk motion of matter, like gas or water flow), and radiation. For a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, the pressure is considered ultra-high vacuum, so you basically only have radiation to dissipate heat. Near room temperature, this would be mid-infrared light. The energy in everyday sound waves is very small, so body heat, on-board instruments, sunlight, and perhaps even IR emission from the Earth would be much more important contributors to heat build-up. However, regardless of the heat sources involved, there will always be some equilibrium temperature where the energy going into the system equals the energy radiating away.

To keep things comfortable for the crew on the ISS, there are passive and active systems to regulate the temperature [1]. For dissipating excess heat, large radiators are used. These are basically panels with a large surface area in order to maximize emission of thermal radiation. A closed-loop system is used to circulate fluid, which collects and transfers heat to these radiators. Water is used for some parts, but others have pipes on the outside that use ammonia to prevent freezing. The radiators themselves can be retracted or deployed as needed.

[1] Memi, E. G. “Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) Overview.” (2006): 19.

Any composite particle can have an antiparticle counterpart if you replace all of its constituent particles with antiparticles (e.g. anti- up and down quarks in the case of protons and neutrons).

Yes, sound is the collective motion of particles in the form of a compression wave. As these waves propagate through a material and scatter off boundaries and inhomogeneities in general, they become less ordered and eventually indistinguishable from random atomic motion (i.e. thermal energy). However, in addition to this, sound waves can radiate away when in atmosphere. In the case of spacecraft, they can only dissipate into thermal energy and can therefore persist much longer. This is actually a problem engineers have to deal with, as unwanted vibrations can cause issues. There’s research looking into addressing this by using materials specifically designed to be highly absorbent to sound waves at particular frequencies (i.e. the collective motion of atoms at particular frequencies rapidly decays into random thermal motion).

No, they don’t annihilate. The electron will scatter off the other particle, though any differences in charge will of course affect the scattering. For example, an electron and a proton could become bound to make a hydrogen atom, but this couldn’t happen with an anti-proton. Any nuclear reactions (specifically electron capture) would be affected too.

In the case of free anti-neutrons, there’s a chance the anti-neutron could decay into an anti-proton and a positron. If this were to happen during the collision with an electron, the electron could potentially annihilate with the positron.

I feel like it’s best to ease people into illusionism rather than hit them with a statement like “consciousness isn’t real”, which they will almost certainly misunderstand and reject if they aren’t versed in the philosophy of mind (hence why it works well for this thread). As a teaser, I like the statement, “You are conscious, but not in the way you think you are”, i.e. their consciousness is not phenomenal in character. What that means exactly is a lengthy discussion, but it gives an opportunity to emphasize the aspects of consciousness that actually matter and to potentially offset things like moral status over to them. For most people, morality hinges on phenomenality, so you have to replace it with something before they can accept illusionism (in my opinion).

Looks pretty good, but are you sure it’s open source? I don’t see the source linked anywhere on their website, and the “Description of Other Rights and Limitations” section of their terms of service suggests that it’s proprietary.