The article uses the word "organic" in a highly technical manner, meaning chemical compounds that contain carbon, and of course we already know that space is filled with that sort of thing. It does NOT mean "organic" in the casual sense of originating from something alive.
I’m not an organic chemist or a chemist of any sorts, and the headline didn’t phase me at all or stick out as clickbait. I knew exactly what it meant though to be fair “o chem” was a common course among my friends majoring in things like bio-*.
It really is that empty. Science fiction movies mess up our perception, but reality is way more mind-boggling that we realize.
Check this out: if you want to build a model galaxy to scale and you start with the Sun as a two-foot-diameter exercise ball, how far away do you have to travel before you can set down a smaller ball that represents Alpha Centauri, our nearest(-ish) stellar neighbor?
Although to be fair, dust is definitely a problem if you want to see into the center of the galaxy which is why most of the observations of Sagittarius A* are done in the infrared or near-infrared spectrum, which can penetrate dust. It's also why we can't see clear across our galaxy to make out what's beyond it, so we don't know what the Great Attractor is.
The problem is that most people just cannot conceptualize really, really, really large numbers, but journalists and authors try to make them more relatable anyway, and end up just making it worse.
I think what they meant to say was that it could make a typical globular cluster satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, containing about 225000 butter-stars with the same mass as our sun.
> I think what they meant to say was that it could make a typical globular cluster satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, containing about 225000 butter-stars with the same mass as our sun.
I don't think it was anything near that complex: 40 trillion trillion trillion is just the number of tubs of butter it takes to get 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes if you assume each tub is 250 grams.
10^3 = thousand
10^6 = million
10^9 = billion
10^12 = trillion
10^15 = quadrillion, or thousand trillion
10^18 = quintillion, or million trillion
10^21 = sextillion, or billion trillion
10^24 = heptillion, or trillion trillion
10^27 = octillion, or thousand trillion trillion
10^30 = nonillion, or million trillion trillion
10^33 = decillion, or billion trillion trillion
10^36 = undecillion, or trillion trillion trillion
One of those numbering conventions is not tremendously useful, and the other is very very very stupid. It compounds with the knowledge that some people call 10^9 "a milliard" rather than "a billion". This is why we have SI unit prefixes, and write numbers ending with an exponent of 10.
And here I was, assuming each "pack of butter" was one of those 10g single-serving packs (although some are only 7.65g). I didn't check it against the "tonnes" number in the article. In the US, a "pack of butter" could also be a box containing 4 sticks 113 g each, totaling 454 grams, because butter in the US is sold by the pound. Apparently, they are 250g elsewhere.
And a (metric) tonne is already 1000 kg, or 1 Mg. There is also the long ton, which is 1016 kg, and the short ton, which is 907 kg.
The obfuscated number is therefore 1x10^40 g, which is even larger than standard metric prefixes can express, so we'd probably write it as 1x10^37 kg, for some reason.
So my previous math was wrong. That's 5 million butter-stars the size of our sun, or enough butter to form a slippery, spreadable black hole as massive as the one at the heart of our galaxy. I guess from this, we can calculate the size of Audthumbla the giant space-cow?
The "lump of labor fallacy" isn't really relevant here because we're not talking about work going away. We're talking about the usefulness of human labor as a means of production going away. No, not entirely, but enough that our economic system as it currently exists will fail and we'll need a new one of some sort.
You know the old illustration about the buggy-whip makers complaining that automobiles were destroying their jobs and putting them out of work, and how could anyone possibly survive that? Then, oh look, there were tons of new jobs created in automobile factories and everyone was better off than before.
Well, in that story, we're not the buggy-whip makers any more; we're the horses. Horses didn't move on to better and more productive forms of transportation employment. They simply became useless except in a few remaining highly-specialized working roles, or as pets. Or glue.
The word "job" as used here is a technical term. It doesn't mean "anything that needs doing". It doesn't mean "anything I find enjoyable or worthwhile". It actually means "activities that someone will pay me money to do because I can do it better, faster, or cheaper than anyone or anything else, including machines." (For the purpose of this discussion there's also an implied meaning of "someone will pay me enough money for those activities that I can purchase adequate food, shelter, and discretionary items so as to have a reasonably comfortable existence.") That set of activities appears to have peaked in per-capita terms and is probably on a decline which will accelerate rapidly in the future.
So yeah, you're right that this problem is inherently an economic problem, not an "I don't know what to do with all my free time" problem. That doesn't make the problem any less urgent or less difficult to solve. It's actually incredibly difficult to solve because it'll involve rejiggering our social contracts, which will probably take several generations to complete.
Actually, a lot of California is going to turn into some sort of desert. There are several borderline ecosystems that used to support mature trees but once we lost them to disease or fire no trees of any kind appear to be growing back; just chaparral.
Yes, Life (capital L) moves on, but perhaps not the kind of life that we'd prefer. We can just shrug and say, "Oh well" or we can take a moment to reflect on what, if anything, we might do to steer natural selection in directions we find more pleasant.
No, he's saying that "merit" is an incredibly easily-gamed metric. We can measure results all right, and we can measure ability rather less so, but "merit" implies a casual link between ability and results that is very hard to unambiguously prove and shockingly easy to fake (even if just by disregarding beneficial external factors).
More importantly: creating a scalar metric of "merit" is always an exercise in power, because it simplifies a hugely multidimensional space to a scale, and in collapsing all those dimensions expresses in a hidden way the preferences of the definer of that metric.
This happens even in notionally quantifiable domains like finance. What asset gives the best return? Should be easy, right? Well, what about volatility? Oops, turns out the naive rank ordering of assets by expected return contains an implicit value judgment about volatility.
See upthread for a mention of eBay seller scores being unadjusted for transaction size for another example.
Um - in this case we're saving the internet (well, really radio spectrum that people use to access the internet) from private corporations, not the government. A totally free market sucks because there will never be a properly-maintained commons. If it weren't for the government, maybe I'd bolt my router to a 10-kilowatt transmitter so I can get my home wifi signal while I'm grocery shopping. So what if it sucks for everyone else! The government quite rightly regulates me in that area and says I can't do that.
If the internet as we know it today ever dies, I'm 80% sure it will be due to private corporations screwing everyone to make an extra buck, not due to government over-regulation.
I understand your point in general, but in this case you could probably solve it by building a faraday home, and/or use a frequency that decays rapidly, combined with repeaters around your home to counter your signal suffering decay.
It's the same problem for software devs, postdocs, research assistants, adjunct professors - basically everyone except tenured university professors. We're not rewarding the right things.
You are missing the career bureaucrats in universities. They have won. The vice chancellor at our university get more than AUD 600 000. Not bad for a small university in the middle of nowhere.
That's the point. It's likely that at the time, she honestly didn't know the difference (or didn't understand the difference well enough to realize that it would be obvious to other people). She did a Ted Talk where she bragged about how she didn't know anything about engineering when she started uBeam.
