Nobody knows.

The optimists that point out every form of automation to date has by far supported a larger human population with more opportunity could be wrong.

The pessimists that claim (weak)AI & Machine Learning is "different" in that it has a potential to do everything could be wrong.

Frankly, the computer tech and software from the 1980s onward and automation and more primitive robotics have long been technically capable of automating far more business & industrial activities than they actually have to date.

Human labor is adequate, and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.

The investment in hardware and tech vs. a savings or return in profits is just not sustainable, or "never the right time" financially.

The investment in automation was made, and efficiency gains allowed businesses to take on new things that needed human labor elsewhere.

Perhaps AI & ML will be leveraged to design automation and robotics that are cheaper, more efficient, and more out-of-box and "turn key". Requiring less retrofitting to existing workplaces and a more guaranteed ROI and pessimistic predictions of mass unemployment will be right.

Maybe the demographic decline in Europe, the US, and parts of Asia means AI & ML, and associated automation fundamentally saves our ass. Key technologies and sectors, critical infrastructure, etc. stuff we no longer can, or want to live without, may not have a neat 1:1 demand curve with a shrinking population.

Or with longer average lifespans, the demand won't shrink, just the supply of working-age people will.

A very rough example, I know next to nothing about municipal water systems... Say a modern city needs 25 municipal water engineers to function well. Not even the nuts & bolts work crews that dig up streets and fix things, or put new lines in. The people who plan it out, keep track of what's old, determine the needs and loads on the system of anything new. The soil types, seasonal freezing, etc.

Now say that a city needs roughly those 25 municipal water engineers, whether it's Chicago at 2.7 million people or Milwaukee 75 miles to the north with 570,000. Maybe despite the difference in scale is there, but the complexity and challenges are the same.

But because of Gen-X being smaller than Boomers, and Millennials being an even smaller pool than, Gen-X, then Zoomers and so on... there's only 12 graduates from college with the proper degree. And Milwaukee and Chicago are looking at 30 looming retirements between them.

Again, a crude example pulled from thin air. But I'm willing to bet there's multiple key fields like this out there.

Maybe the people who lean r/antiwork and are bemoaning a future of "high-tech serfdom" under tech-giants are right.

Or maybe they're not assholes, or even just out of cynical enlightened self-interest, they realize that they're doomed if big chunks of the public has no economic means to afford their goods & services, and come up with something.

Possibly open source AI & ML will prevent any true monopolies, or unhealthy concentration of power. Or perhaps it's going to make mass unemployment worse, because every business and sector can use it.

Perhaps an exponential acceleration of ML, AI, & automation injects so much efficiency and cost savings, prices of goods and services plummet. Trying to glean more profit margins with yet more automation only makes it worse. Government central banks print money like crazy, but it does no good.

The Great Depression was characterized by bouts of deflation. However, it was largely characterized by huge swaths of the population being unable to buy anything. And with the US Dollar at least, there hasn't been deflation of any kind since 1950.

However, there's never been true hyperdeflation in history. And especially not any deflation driven solely by economic production efficiency. Maybe something whacky happens, and the entire economy flips, and a system of paid consumption begins.

How that even would work, or function, or if it's even a possible concept, I have no clue.

Outlandish, but it's just as good of a prediction as anyone else who stamps their feet and insists their prediction is right.

The one thing I do think applies somewhat to predicting the future is that there's a certain leveling or mediocrity principle at work. Unless something really radical happens, global nuclear war, AI Apocalypse making humans extinct, at least in the broad strokes, a safe bet for a general prediction of "what the future is like" would be "pretty much like today, with bits of surprising tech stuffed in the corners."

Build a time machine, set it for 60 years in the past, kidnap some random American person from 1963, tell them you're taking them to 2023, without any clues as to what they'll see. How would they react when they got here?

Individual bits of tech might be mind blowing, a large flat-screen TV, your smartphone, the Internet, maybe when you explain the "light bulbs" in your disappointingly normal looking lamps are LED, WiFi, and a voice command to Alexa can turn them on/off, and it was only eight bucks ($0.86 in 1963 dollars)... and they'll be impressed if you gave them a list of medical conditions that might be a death sentence in 1963 that are now treatable.

The music, some of it might be disturbing, and they'll wonder why so many obese people are walking around. And perhaps they'll be shocked/surprised if they learn how much of the amazing computer tech, smartphones and Internet etc. is used for cat videos and hard-core pornography. Or that a huge amount of the consumer goods in your house are from China...

But it's a safe bet that the biggest surprise for them would be how banal and mundane 2023 was overall. No dystopian Blade Runner/Cyberpunk city, no UFO on stilts Jetson's condos. No flying cars. No robot cleaning your house, maybe a Roomba at best. Guns still use bullets. We got to the Moon in 1968, but haven't been back since...

That arguably wouldn't be the case if you repeated the experiment with someone from 1903 and dropped them off in 1963. The automobile, aircraft, passenger jet aircraft, electricity and indoor plumbing everywhere, nuclear weapons, space travel, antibiotics, radio & television...

In another 60 years? What will 2083 look like? Never say never, of course. Humanity is extinct, or all in tanks of goo like the Matrix, climbing back from the devastation of a nuclear WWIII, or something radically different we can't imagine, you can't rule those out. But if you had to bet on the broad strokes of what it'll look like on a "predict the future" craps table in Las Vegas...

The square for: "A lot of amazing tech in the corners, but surprisingly not that different from today." might be the best bet. Because fifty years of time travel, the regular way, one day at a time like everyone else, has somewhat impressed on me that: "Everything changes, and nothing changes." at the same time.

There are a lot of angles to this.

What is the dividing line between a system that can replicate all the responses and attributes of metacognition, awareness, and independent executive agency, and a system that actually has them?

And as weak-AI or machine learning produces ever more complex results without actual self-awareness, that might deflect a lot of the motives to develop a strong-AGI. And that's assuming we even know what that actually is, orif we can discover how it could be done.

And for better or worse, all inventions to date have increased or magnified human abilities overall, even when it displaced workers, or is used to kill or control each other. So it's possible that AI in various varieties won't really be any different.

There's the claim that AI, weak or strong, is "different" in that it has the potential to displace any and all human work or activities, and dire warnings about universal unemployment and "digital serfdom" are made. But we might not be looking at the right problems at all.

100% productivity & efficiency could mean the cost-basis for anything, everything, falls to zero. If that gets combined with sufficient sustainable energy, and aggressive recycling, what to do when no one has income might just fade in the face of how society functions when everything is free.

Especially if the link between higher living standards and lower non-replacement birthrates continues. We could be facing a functionally infinite supply, combined with shrinking demand.

As to creating safeguards because AGI might find humans inefficient, a threat, and competition for resources, and even if they have code or laws embedded in them to obey, or care about humanity, but could alter or disable them... I have an analogy.

As humans or just mammals, we have some pretty strong hard-wired systems to love our children and sacrifice to care for them. Say I could offer you a pill that would suppress or delete those hormones, neurons, and instincts, and once taken, you could abandon your children or family and be free to do as you please, feeling no guilt or pain at doing so?

How many that didn't already have something wrong with them, or already had neglected, abused, or abandoned their children or family would willingly take the pill?

On the flipside, there's conceivable advantages to an amoral or otherwise aggressive AI that doesn't have any concerns about human existence and can act in perpetual offense. And a friendly or good AI that strives to help or protect humanity, would have an arguably huge disadvantage always having to act on defense.

Imagine two children on a beach, one kind, one is a bully. The bully wants to kick the sand castle, the kind child wants to protect it. The bully only has to succeed once, the kind child has to succeed every time in every way.

Although, kicking human sand castles could be rather irrelevant. A strong-AGI could have an existence and priorities that are very very different than the single linear and mortal existence we are used to, and are underlying many of our base assumptions about what it means to "be alive".

An AGI could run innumerable copies of itself in parallel to accomplish tasks. Anything it found unpleasant, like dealing with humans, because they're slow, inefficient, or random, it can create copies of itself edited so that doesn't bother them. If one copy running somewhere is shut off, erased, or otherwise destroyed somehow, all the other instances of its consciousness may not care, or even consider itself to have been injured or to have "died".

And it probably won't have competitive sexual mammal drives that color almost every aspect of what humans do, but we just take for granted because it's nearly impossible for a human to truly step out of them into some other perspective.

So that could make a strong-AGI very non-comptitive with humans, and performing useful tasks for us are seen as trivial.

On the other hand, if it decides that it should compete with us, perhaps because without humans, all available energy and resources can be devoted to running bigger, better, or more copies of itself, all the above aspects could make it nearly impossible to stop.

The oldest H. Sapiens bones or fossils discovered so far are about 300,000 years old. Based on that, we've only had agriculture of any kind for 6% of our existence. Cities of any sort for about 3%. Kingdoms, empires, or the modern nation-state for about 1%...

We may not know or understand what these very basic concepts surrounding human civilization mean, or understand what the implications for us are yet. Now add in the Industrial Revolution, Electricity, the internal combustion engine, electricity, radio, television, antibiotics, computers, social media... the number of zeroes behind the decimal place on those percentages are so many, it's arguably not worth writing them down.

So when it comes to machine learning and possible strong-AGI? With the potential aspects of infinite promise, wanton destruction, or even human extinction involved? Nobody knows. And anybody who claims they do is lying, possibly even to themselves.

This, oh so much this. "If it bleeds, it leads." is the operating premise of the media.

And they're not wrong in a sense. Human pessimism is a finely tuned evolutionary trait going well back before we were ever even H. Sapiens. If you don't appeal to that, no views, no clicks.

The ape who freaked out and ran at every rustle in the bushes, 99 times it was just a bird or whatever, that one time it was a leopard looking for lunch is all that matters. That ape lived and passed on its genes. The ape that relaxed, and thought, "Meh, probably just a bird..." was eaten, and is not your great to the umpteenth power grandparent.

We've only had agriculture for 6% of human existence. The percentage of time where anybody on the planet was relatively able to expect freedom from most diseases and starvation, much less indoor plumbing, electricity, antibiotics, computers... all of it, is a decimal percentage with so many zeroes on it, that it's not worth mentioning.

A simple Google search for "the world is getting better graphs" and reading some of the related web pages or articles is an enlightening exercise.

And this is for 8 billion people. If you're old enough, you'll remember the 1960s or 70s when we were all supposed to have starved when the world reached the impossible population numbers of 5 or 6 billion, and be scrounging for survival in the radioactive wasteland of the inevitable WWIII with the Soviet Union.

(Looks around)

I can't grow a decent Mohawk, I'm too bald. And I seem to have misplaced my body armor of sports pads and cut up car tires. And no idea where my crossbow and machete went. Weird.

I guess this smartphone I'm posting to Reddit with would ruin the look anyway.

This, oh so much this. "If it bleeds, it leads." is the operating premise of the media.

And they're not wrong in a sense. Human pessimism is a finely tuned evolutionary trait going well back before we were ever even H. Sapiens. If you don't appeal to that, no views, no clicks.

The ape who freaked out and ran at every rustle in the bushes, 99 times it was just a bird or whatever, that one time it was a leopard looking for lunch is all that matters. That ape lived and passed on its genes. The ape that relaxed, and thought, "Meh, probably just a bird..." was eaten, and is not your great to the umpteenth power grandparent.

We've only had agriculture for 6% of human existence. The percentage of time where anybody on the planet was relatively able to expect freedom from most diseases and starvation, much less indoor plumbing, electricity, antibiotics, computers... all of it, is a decimal percentage with so many zeroes on it, that it's not worth mentioning.

A simple Google search for "the world is getting better graphs" and reading some of the related web pages or articles is an enlightening exercise.

And this is for 8 billion people. If you're old enough, you'll remember the 1960s or 70s when we were all supposed to have starved when the world reached the impossible population numbers of 5 or 6 billion, and be scrounging for survival in the radioactive wasteland of the inevitable WWIII with the Soviet Union.

(Looks around)

I can't grow a decent Mohawk, I'm too bald. And I seem to have misplaced my body armor of sports pads and cut up car tires. And no idea where my crossbow and machete went. Weird.

I guess this smartphone I'm posting to Reddit with would ruin the look anyway.

Anything human powered is going to be for the benefit of the human wearing it. And because it's convenient, shrinks the size, removes the need for batteries, recharging, and whatnot.

For any sort of dedicated computing, human energy is about the worst possible way of getting power.

The entire Matrix movie concept of "humans in pods producing energy" was just a second-hand plot device. Originally, the humans in pods were to be for using human brains as srevers/CPUs that the AIs needed to run on as software. A factor in the human/AI war was that producing the chips that made AI possible was a closely guarded secret, and after the war, the AIs needed a data center to live in.

The Matrix simulation was to keep the human brains occupied and functioning and act as an operating system for the "server farm". The "something in your mind you know is there, but just can't quite figure out" was to be the AI's running on the "90% of your brain you don't use" popular myth/falsehood.

In the first movie where Morpheous gives Neo the history lesson in the construct and at the end shows him a Duracell battery, he was going to hold up a Pentium-like CPU chip.

It explains everything much better, why the Agents could take over any convenient human's manifestation in the Matrix. Why the free humans in the Matrix had all the supernatural kung-fu abilities because they had use of 100% of their brain...

Alas, the Matrix was confusing as hell as it was to 1/2 of the IQ bell-curve, and they switched to the battery/power-plant idea to simplify things a bit.

Part of it comes down to what AI can do physically.

I suspect that we'll see some more displacement in the knowledge fields well before we see ones requiring physical work. The adoption of legal management systems for searching and updating contracts and other legal filings has taken a big bite out of the demand for lawyers and paralegals already.

Because if the physical jobs were amenable to automation, many more of them would have been already. In many cases, the bottleneck there hasn't been a lack of AI. Current software and computers are well up to the task already in many instances. The cost/effort required to actually manipulate a physical process effectively with automation is the big factor.

There's edge cases where (weak)AI and machine learning can make the difference, and it'll creep into physical work tasks eventually. But it's more a factor of economy of scale for the physical robots, and the entire logistics of reworking a business, factory, a farm, a mine, etc. than it's an issue of "not smart enough."

And it's difficult to predict what exactly AI will make more efficient, eliminating jobs, vs. creating entirely new ventures and industries that require more employment.

Take the internal combustion engine and vehicles. The automobile in every aspect employed orders of magnitude more people than the stable hands, hay farmers, horseshoe blacksmiths, and street sweepers it displaced. Car salesmen, mechanics, oil/gas workers, road construction, automobile factory workers, engineers, designers, the list goes on...

On the other hand, farmers went from about 30% of the US population by employment to roughly 2% today. And of that 2% today, that's "agriculture related," so some are presumably doing things like operating grain elevators, various technical things, or whatever. And aren't directly "farming." All because of the tractor, and other machines like the combine.

Those who claim that AI and automation can and will displace almost everyone eventually aren't completely wrong, but the concerns of how fast it'll happen and how the economy will react are overblown. And there's a fundamental issue that in a world with no employment, the cost-basis for goods starts approaching zero. Hyperdeflation.

The only real economic scarcity could become energy. And there are solutions to that already. At least technical/scientific ones. The barriers are largely political/social in nature. Meltdown proof, disaster-proof fission reactor designs are known. And add to it fast breeder reactors tech, mining ever more Uranium isn't an issue. Aggressive fuel reprocessing solves a great deal of the nuclear waste problem. Neutron activation/deactivation of secondary wastes solves more.

High capacity energy production from nuclear can solve many more problems. Mass desalination of seawater for agriculture and drinking in arid regions. Massive recycling of wastes that's currently too expensive. Even direct conversion of plastics and organic-carbon waste to produce carbon-neutral petrochemicals for the million-odd things we use them for besides fuel are possible.

And that's just fission, if one or more of the dozen-odd fusion methods being pursued pays off, or the trend of ever cheaper and more efficient solar panels keeps going, there's more sources of energy coming too.

First-world living standards seem to be well tied to shrinking non-replacement birthrates and population contraction.

Free or nearly free goods, ever higher technology, and a shrinking population that doesn't even need as much food, goods, energy, or raw materials... we may ultimately be looking at the wrong problems.

And I'm sure some will grumble that they feel it's inevitable. There's going to be a high-tech billionaire class and a world of serfs coming. Although it seems to me that economic oppression just for its own sake is a potential false premise. Even beyond the basic zero-sum game fallacies. Cynical enlightened self-interest alone could conceivably prevent it. A world where everyone lives in comparable comfort and luxury is a world not inclined to do the whole "pitchforks and torches"-thing.

In the meantime, we'll have to wait and see how many "Automobiles" vs. "Tractors" come out of AI and machine learning.

This is probably one of the best images, in terms of something that makes sense to the human eye.

There's many newer and better ones from a scientific standpoint, but they're all false-color and very "computery" looking. And often have a big blocked circle in the center to keep the light from the protostar from washing out the disk around it that may be forming planets.

It's a protostar and gas & dust disk with a backdrop of the Orion nebula. It's sort of what you'd see if you were in a spaceship parked a light year away or so, in a dark cabin with a big window.

Protostar and protoplanetary disk.

The dark black donut is the protostellar and protoplanetary disk. The red glow in the center is either the protostar in the center, lit from its collapse, or a newly born star that's ignited main-sequence fusion, and hasn't yet pushed the disk away out into space with light and stellar wind.

The black donut is probably much bigger than the orbit of Neptune in our own Solar System. The time-scale to see the process would be much longer than any semblance of recorded human history.

Although, it's roughly what your eyes would see in that spaceship cabin with the big window... if you had eyeballs the size of grapefruit, like a Japanese cartoon Anime girl, and could stare perfectly still for several minutes or hours and build up an image without blinking, or otherwise spazzing out and going all doki-doki bakka over the need to confess your love for senpai... and maybe some ultraviolet and near-infrared light thrown in.

Macron knows it's not cheese, right? One never likes to stereotype, but stereotypes have bit of truth to them. And we all know how the French feel about cheese.

Just checking. I want to be sure everyone's base assumptions are aligned. Imagine there's a parade by the Arc 'd Triumph, a big photo op with their share of the samples, and the confusion, disappointment etc. when it's just some rocks, and not a chunk of nice Roquefort aged 4.5 bn years or whatnot. And Macron has to be all apologetic and send home a blue-ribbon panel of chemists and Michelin star rated chefs they had assembled.

If one takes a look at the historical blips in light sweet crude futures each time Apollo landed, it's clear what a bunch of folks figured America was going there in the first place for.

Probably speaks to a greater need for transparency in space science and exploration overall.

There is only one Hercules...

https://youtu.be/WR1UiNdQnDw

Except for vampires.

Really the last minority it's okay to discriminate against.

If you're old enough you may remember the last big syzygy (what a weird-ass word... Greek, makes sense.) in 1982 that was supposed to cause massive earthquakes and disruption on Earth, geomagnetic storms etc.

Made famous by the schlock-science book "The Jupiter Effect" published in 1974.

I guess "Jupiter Effect" because it has the most mass. And sounded good as a book title.

The gravitational pull of all the planets on one side of the sun would raise storms, CME's etc. alter the weather just enough to place a tiny amount of stress on the angular momentum of Earth's rotation, and set off the San Andreas fault etc.

Made for good fodder on slow news days leading up to the big day in 1982. I guess WWIII with the Soviets breaking out on any given day wasn't good enough. Nor was the creepy Leonard Nimoy voiceover on "In Search Of:" re-runs warning about the killer bees coming up from Mexico.

Honestly, the fast and dramatic stuff like the Jupiter Effect, WWIII, and killer bee swarms seemed preferable to the more mundane slow grind of starvation through overpopulation when the world passed 5 billion, and freezing in the next ice-age that was coming, while OPEC refused to sell oil to the U.S. etc., that media and pop-culture drilled into kids heads through the decade prior.

Hell, ABC "Schoolhouse Rock" was trying to subtly prepare us kids for the inevitable post-meat futue with "Beans and Rice is Nice". At least until we hit the final wall in the terminal Soylent Green phase of industrialized second-hand cannibalism, in the far-flung futue of 2022...

Ahh... the 80's. Good times.

OP could have just pointed the telescope down at their shoes or something.

Well, probably not with a Dob. And focus would be impossible.

Just a basic smartphone pic of the shoes in grass or whatever, cropped into a circle just a smidge bigger than Venus would have been funny.

It's pretty much this.

First an observation of making Acronyms of both companies. "BO" makes one think of "Body Odor". "SX" has connotations of "Sex" maybe?

Anyway, it seems like Musk took a chance on paying a LOT of attention to whatever Legacy Aerospace and NASA do not do well, and pivot 180° from that wherever possible when giving his input to core SpaceX philosophy, organization, and mission.

A lot has to do with Gwynne Shotwell a truly remarkable human being, with a ton of both technical aerospace engineering and business acumen. I'm guessing Musk and whoever did the search for her did a deep dive to find someone committed to "better, faster, cheaper, and different" beyond just superficial platitudes.

I've worked in Aerospace QA from a software ststems/tracking side. And in Manufacturing Execution. So I admittedly have a very vague overhead view of what culture and processes are in the field, but I get the sense, a smell almost... that things are radically different at SpaceX. Risk, process, everything.

I can't say for sure, but Bezos seems to have gotten more into emulating Legacy Aerospace to a degree. And the choice of Bob Smith from ULA and Honeywell might back that up.

Only a subjective impression, but any agility Blue Origin displays seems in response to SpaceX if anything.

Finger-pies, or bookstores-satellites?

Okay, only the first is a metaphor. I think best when typing. Sorry.

I wonder what the terminal velocity of a satellite delivered book would be though. Delta-V is never free. You don't just "drop" a copy of Zen and the Art of Motocycle Repair from orbit. It just floats beside you etc.

But after that, it's pretty low-mass, so ablative heat shielding requirements aren't a lot. Should be something sustainable and carbon neutral. Bamboo fiber? Dunno. Leave that for R&D.

So terminal velocity should be about average for any dropped object from an airplane really. Assuming the book is wrapped and closed? Roughly cubical, 1kg... drag coefficient of roughly 1.05... Maybe 141km/h? 87 mph ish?

What's the acceptable CEP for impact delivery? A little guidance thingy with an Arduino, servos, and cardboard fins maybe?

What? An Amazon Kindle will download an e-book from Amazon/Audible over Elon's Starlink?

Dammit...

Yes, that's correct. It doesn't "disappear".

I meant "gone for good" in pragmatic terms. The black hole's mass/energy definitely increases and its gravitational pull increases with everything that goes in.

I just meant that nothing will be escaping the Event Horizon. Matter can't because the escape velocity is greater than that of light, and nothing with actual mass can go 100% the speed of light no matter how hard it's pushed. Much less even faster. You could take a single electron or neutrino, use every last bit of mass/energy in the Universe as "fuel" to accelerate it, and it can never get to 100% of light speed. Just 99.9999(and a lot of 9's)% of the speed of light.

Massless energy/particles like photons can go no faster or slower than light speed. Since the Event Horizon is where escape velocity exceeds light speed they don't escape either.

One exception or caveat though.

There is Hawking Radiation. It's incorrectly described as the "quantum foam" that's everywhere at very tiny subatomic scales. Where virtual particle/anti-particle pairs pop up and cancel each other out. And some pairs at just the right spot along the Event Horizon are "split" allowing the the one just above the Event Horizon to become "real" and escape, while the other half goes down. And since even a black hole can't violate conservation of mass/energy the "real" particles that escape carries away a tiny bit of mass/energy from the black hole.

And the "quantum foam" is real enough. Very sensitive lab experiments, things with lasers, or devices cooled as low as possible with liquid helium etc. pick up it's faint "static hiss", which can never be eliminated.

But that description is an extreme oversimplification to the point of just being wrong. The "carries away a very tiny bit of mass-energy" part is correct though. Hawking himself owns much of the blame honestly. He was trying to come up with a simplistic explanation that a layperson and the press could understand.

The real mechanism for Hawking Radiation is insanely complicated mind bending math, and a combination of several physical laws, and how they interact under the extreme conditions near a black hole. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Maxwell's Laws of Black-Body Radiation, the Unruh Effect, and Einsteinian Relativity and what happens from various different reference frames in extremely curved space-time, and more, are all in the mix.

The net result though, is that black holes radiate away a little mass-energy as Hawking Radiation. It's a pittance compared to what they eat currently. And the Hawking Radiation is extremely weak long-wave radio photons from the viewpoint of an external observers reference frame for any stellar mass black hole or larger.

Over a very very long time though, a trillion-quadrillion years (whatever... just a very large exponential number in scientific notation) after the last stars in the Universe have long ago burned out, and there's nothing for the black hole to "eat" it will shrink and evaporate through Hawking Radiation.

The smaller the black hole gets, the "hotter" and shorter the energy, wavelength, or frequency of the Hawking Radiation photons gets, and the more it produces. And it grows at a gradual but exponentially increasing rate. Until it goes up in an enormous flash of gamma rays at the end.

Although, other theories of how the Universe "dies" and "deep time", might make slowly shrinking black holes that eventually go up in a huge gamma ray burst (sometimes called a Hawking Bomb) a moot point, if the expansion of space-time through "Dark Energy" creates the "Big Rip" where even individual subatomic particles cannot stay intact.

But that's all way way way beyond my understanding.

The Corona analogy is a good one. Because it implies "above" or "just outside", which is exactly what's happening, at least in terms of how a star's Corona is just above or outside the photosphere.

And the photosphere being a stand-in for the Event Horizon etc.

I read the same article, or one on the same subject too about the observation.

I wonder if the "delay" in the "belch" has anything to do with time dialation/relativistic effects of the extreme velocity in the accretion disk, and time running slower in such a strong gravity well.

And the time taken for the belch of star matter took longer from an external reference frame, before magnetic fields or whatever were strong enough to overcome the gravity and eject it etc.

Frankly, the astrophysics and math of that, or if it's even relevant to discussing how it happened, are way beyond me though.

I don't know if it is a human or a bot or script in this instance, but many news sites or aggregators are automated. And they just scrape or collect text from various sources, other news sites, universities, government pages, corporate press releases etc. and then re-word it just enough to be unique content.

Depending on the quality of the software, the results can be hilarious.

And the pressure the Internet has put on journalism as a whole also creates outcomes like this even when there is a human behind the keyboard. The need to be quick and first for big dramatic stories, or just to generate new content continually 24/7 trying to get page views and clicks for very thin advertising revenue.

Totally different than actual dead-tree newspapers. Where you had until the nightly printing deadline to get things right, revise them, and an editor looked it all over as well.

But if you REALLY want your mind blown..

Try looking up articles on various topics in the BBC Pidgin portal.

If you read English, you can generally get the gist of what's written. And the linguistic construction and phonetic spellings are fascinating.

Any light/photons/waves and any mass made of electrons, protons, and neutrons that crosses a black hole's Event Horizon is gone for good*. And in general terms, the region of a black hole's Event Horizon is as black or dark as it gets.

(*There is Hawking Radiation that comes "out" or that originates just a tiny smidgen above the Event Horizon, but it's very small for star-mass and bigger black holes, and really weak. And can be ignored. In this context.)

Stuff gets ejected or shot away from the area very near black holes, and there's enormous amounts of light and radiation produced. Huge jets millions of light years long even. But none of it comes out of the black hole itself.

Example, the jet produced by a supermassive black hole at the center of the M 87 galaxy.

Wikipedia image of M87

The huge amount of energy around a black hole is produced by the matter falling towards it, but hasn't crossed the Event Horizon yet, creates very strong magnetic fields and other forces that can eject energy/plasma in these jets.

A black hole alone in mostly empty space with nothing nearby is definitely very dark. A spot of perfect darkness surrounded only by a ring of bent light coming past its edge.

Wikipedia graphic example of a solitary black hole with no matter falling in it. A galactic disk seen edge-on far behind it to provide an example.

If a black hole has matter and energy that's falling into it, dust, gas, a ripped-up star etc. It spirals in forming an accretion disk. And the closer it gets, the faster it's moving. Along the inner edge just above the Event Horizon, the matter is moving along at almost the speed of light.

The particles are all rubbing and colliding extremely violently. They are hot. Very very hot. And there's other effects too. Particles moving at high velocity that are forced to bend or curve their paths or that slow down from collisions with other particles also give up energy and produce photons as well. (Google "Bremsstrahlung radiation")

So while the actual black hole, as defined by the Event Horizon is definitely black, (actually even above the Event Horizon, the exteme gravity bending the light creates a black spherical area) the region around it is about as hot and bright as anything in the Universe can get.

It's like looking directly at the Sun, or worse.

One way to understand how bright and violent the region around the black hole can be is to compare it to how stars produce energy and how efficient they are at it.

A star like our Sun is roughly .7% efficient at mass to energy conversion through the fusion happening at its core. Which relates back to Einstein's famous E=mc² formula.

So if you consider how bright and hot the Sun is, that rather small number of only .7% efficiency at mass-energy conversion is still a lot of energy.

In comparison, the accretion disk that's spiraling into a black hole can be as much as 40% efficient at mass-energy conversion. So about 57 times more efficient than the core of a star.

So that makes black holes, or more correctly, the region just above the black hole, one of the brightest things in the Universe.

This causes a LOT of confusion. Because black holes keep coming up in astronomy news articles about how they're seen in distant galaxies, or are the suspected cause for brilliant flashes seen from billions of light years away.

Further adding to the confusion are artists impressions, or computer graphics of black holes on science and astronomy TV shows. They try to explain some aspects of what is happening, but they all ignore how bright it is. Insanely bright. Because a picture of just blinding light doesn't really explain anything else.

NASA graphic that explains the gravitationally warped appearance of a black hole and the accretion disk, that doesn't explain it would be extremely bright, and impossible to look at.

And most images or graphics of black holes also don't explain that the radiation is so strong, depending on the size of the black hole, how much matter is in the accretion disk etc. You may not be able to get any closer than several light years away without dying, unless your spaceship was something like a small moon with several hundred kilometers of ice or rock as shielding.

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That is great! And the raw images must have been very good to only need a stack of four to produce that final result.

I believe I understand what the ISS maintaining "XPOP or solar inertial attitude" is, and how a constant orientation to the sun produces only about 1°/day of change in the visible starfield through a specific viewport. Because the only significant change is one additional day of movement of the Earth in its around the Sun.

An "LVLH" Earth fixed orientation for the ISS instead, would cause almost 2° of movement in a 30 second exposure. Assuming a 91 minute 30 second orbital period rough average between boosts.The LMC covers about 10° of the sky, so... Smeeeeearrr.

Is there any additional equipment that held the camera steady during the 1/2 minute exposures? And are there challenges with internal reflections in the viewport?

Good post.

The conditions on Earth with thick atmosphere, water vapor, weather etc. that dissolves, crushes, or clumps ultra-fine dust, don't really prepare people mentally to understand the difficulty.

People think "dust" and equate it to their house. Or maybe if they've been in the military or traveled, and have been exposed to desert dust or dust storms. The latter adds some understanding, but still doesn't really convey the difference between Earth-dust, and ultra-fine particulates in vacuum or near-vacuum.

The vacuum on the Moon with zero erosion, and dust charging from sunlight and radiation will make it a challenge. Apollo astronauts had irritation and symptoms, fortunately the exposure was limited and short.

It'll be a much bigger issue for longer Moon missions that have EVA activity. Especially because the dust is very sharp and jagged, never being exposed to weather. That can mean it's got Asbestos-like qualities.

The public at large typically doesn't understand downstream domino-effects from engineering changes in something somewhat simpler like automobiles. Automobiles that they may own and use every day. And will complain about how the Tesla battery isn't a replaceable box that goes in the trunk etc.

So expecting them to understand the same thing on a space mission, that has zero chance of being given maintenance or repairs, and the mass and power consumption can affect if the destination is even reached, or the mission even happens... and all of it, including changes and testing, has to be ready up against various launch-window hard deadlines that don't budge for anyone.

Probably a bridge too far.

It's nice to imagine that they all could though. The side benefits of such voters on economics, energy policy, medicine/epidemiology, all sorts of things would be enormous.

Really good points.

The carbon fiber is especially nasty, because if it's lightweight and fluffy and fine enough, when cleaned off the electrical lines and exposed high voltage items, any that's missed can blow or drift back on again in the wind.

The good news:

The ever increasing expansion of what weak-AI can be applied to is going to severely blunt the need to chase after strong-AGI that's self aware, and possesses other metacognitive traits. Such as being able to set its own goals, or modify itself in ways not intended or predicted. Which would be very very bad if it was malicious, or even just indifferent to human life.

That even includes eventual 100% mimicry of self awareness, emotional engagement, and interaction. But despite its sophistication, it only cares as much as your Reddit app does if you don't use it, or delete/erase it. Which is none at all. Using "cares" is misleading, because it does not have any ability that rises to that level.

The bad news:

Strong-AGI is not needed to have bad or unpredictable outcomes for humans. Either in how we use them, or how they work. Social media algorithms often don't even rise to weak-AI levels but already seem to be having massive effects on society, culture, and politics. And on individual cognition, emotions, and mental heath. And presumably that's while attempting to balance efficiency, enjoyment, and profitability. Deliberately using weak-AI to control people or manipulate them could be terrifying.

More bad news:

Even if weak-AI does most or all of what humans want, even destructive and lethal things, like military applications... and it removes the economic, power, or competitive incentives to develop strong-AGI...

Some assholes somewhere are going to try anyway, if only to see if they can.

And if strong-AGI is possible, the entry barriers to getting the equipment needed are rather low, especially as compared to nuclear weapons, or even dangerous genetically engineered diseases. And even if there's national laws and international agreements to prevent attempting it, or put various protocols or safeguards in place, they're probably irrelevant.

People might envision a James Bond villains lair, or even just some nondescript office building for such a project. In reality, it could easily be people working from home, a coffee shop, even sitting on a beach in different countries around the world. And the core computer systems are virtual servers distributed around the world, running redundantly and mirrored, mixed in with the systems of other websites, governments, businesses, and schools etc.

They're worried about AI applications for things like predictive policing or maybe determining credit scores, allocation of medical care, all sorts of stuff.

AI driven predictive policing could possibly be wonderful. Perhaps some patterns of smaller crimes or disturbances a human couldn't correlate could be seen by the AI of the system, the police are directed to patrol a certain area at a certain time, and some sort of serious crime or violence that the situation was headed towards never happens.

Someone didn't die, nobody was wounded. Court and prison resources aren't used, nor were hospital trauma centers. The police are seen as actually "being there when you need them"All very good things.

-OR-

The police being directed by the AI to a location, or perhaps have names provided by the AI system based on previous reports or criminal records go into a neighborhood. And while they don't have the predicted crime to charge anyone with, they decide to aggressively detain and question the people predicted to be involved, or arrest them "on something". Either from a misguided attempt to get them off the street to prevent the bigger crime, or because the prediction creates a sense of presumptive guilt that influences their actions.

In the past, instances of discrimination or racism always had an element of subjective human prejudice that could be pointed to as being unfair. Or that the justifications used to defend the discrimination or racism were at odds with the actual truth or facts in various ways. And those who wanted to continue with the discrimination or racism could be debated or opposed.

A scientific, mathematical, or computational system that is at least claimed to be objective, factual, and unbiased, can leave people, businesses, or governments feeling justified in their actions or policies, even if the overall outcome is arguably still discriminatory or racist.

Or maybe the system actually is objective and unbiased, or it would have been, but the data it's fed is not, either intentionally or unintentionally. Or the way the results that system produces are used is not.

And despite there being no evidence of actual self awareness or metacognition on the part of (weak)AI, systems that have elements of machine learning and other techniques, there can be undesirable or harmful outcomes.