Then down the line the smart people from those firms can disrupt the existing players at their own game or a new game when the current-elite get lazy or can't innovate. That's how the market's supposed to work.
Summary: Author hopes we don't find life on Mars because if it's dead that provides an ill omen for the human race. He thinks if life on Mars wasn't sustainable then he repeats the whole argument that there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to and that's why we haven't seen any other intelligent life.
Nick Bostrom's reasoning is more complex, but yes, you nailed the summary perfectly. Even shorter: The more complex life on Mars we are going to find, the more we as human race are doomed, says Bostrom. Because as Bostrom wrote in TimGebhardt words: "there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to" and if there is life on Mars, it could be everywhere in the universe. Nick Bostrom's reasoning: If life could start everywhere else, why haven't we detected it, yet. I think Nick Bostrom should have focused more on the time and randomness factor. Maybe there was life in our galaxy, but they visited us before humans have lived. Or we have been visited (think peruvian desert drawings), but before we as human race were as advanced as we are today and they left our boring planet to visit another galaxy. There are probably more than 170 billion (1.7 × 1011) galaxies...
If the Orion project in the 1960s hadn't been stopped, we might have viable interplanetary colonies already. Also, if NASA hadn't poured most money into the shuttle (and hence had a reason to kill competing projects, for job security) the space exploration/colonization would be much further along.
Even now, we might be less than 50 years from independent colonies, if lower costs for space launch finally "take off" with Musk.
This implies that if there is some common reason (e.g. a physics experiment with unexpected outcome) that exterminates budding civilizations, it ought to have already happened (and we were lucky) -- or it is something big enough to blast a whole solar system.
Edit: It would be interesting with percentage chance evaluation of the possibility that the Shuttle project doomed humanity to extinction...?
Which in itself is a bit weird. Mars and Earth formed in the same solar system, from an orbital disk around the same sun. Similar conditions and building blocks.
Surely whatever improbability would be diminished because of this?
The probabilistic evidence is a bit more indirect, and depends on anthropics:
Since we don't see galaxy-spanning, highly advanced civilizations, there seems to be some combination of factors that prevents planet-bound dirt from turning into them. If those factors are primarily after our stage of development between dirt and galactic civilization, that's Very Bad News, because we shouldn't expect to get extraordinarily lucky. If those factors are primarily before our stage of development, that's reasonably good news, because we've already made it past the hard part.
Seeing bacteria isn't as bad as seeing the ruins of a civilization just past our stage of development. But it does move the probability-mass forward more than if we just found dirt.
There's so many things that can go wrong, during the period needed for advanced intelligent life to evolve. Add to that the inherent difficulty of moving between solar systems. Space is vast, and we're not really making that much noise. I don't see a big paradox here?
I think OOP really took off in industry because it was easy to sell third-party modules. You could "plug in" this module that you purchased and it was easy to hook up. Markets have a way of doing that: the solution that wins isn't necessarily the "best" solution but the one that's easiest to sell.
I don't think the component revolution has happened. We got frameworks to be sure, we even got...gasp...libraries with our languages. Maybe for that reason, OO languages (Java/Python/Smalltalk) were more likely to come without their batteries included. I'm guessing inheritance helped out a bit with that.
But I don't think objects are really especially about third-party reuse or even any reuse at all, but they are more about enabling easy problem decomposition (i.e. break up your problem into a bunch of interacting objects).
OOP definitely has something about it that favors reuse of code.
I think you got it backwards, it's decomposition that it has a problem with - it's not easy to point fingers for exactly why that is (it's probably because of all the mutable state, which leads to entanglement, where components only seem independent of each other, when in fact they aren't), but you can find anecdotal evidence of this happening in the wild ... look at frameworks like Django and Rails, with tons of reusable plugins available and yet a humongous effort went into Rails for making it modular (e.g. such that you can import parts of it, like ActiveRecord, in other non-Rails projects, or for easily replacing ActiveRecord with something else), while Django never achieved it.
>Maybe for that reason, OO languages (Java/Python/Smalltalk) were more likely to come without their batteries included.
Surely you mean "WITH their batteries included"?
For this is the very situation in Python (and it's slogan in fact), and of course Java has the most extensive "included batteries" in the form of the JDK API than any other language.
The classic name for the "Keep moving the extremes so people's opinion converge on the gradually moving middle" is called the Overton window and politicians try to employ it all the time:
Well don't forget that they were doing tablets all the way back in 2002. They just didn't have the foresight or guts to revamp the ecosystem around it. So the tablets didn't work because they needed to take advantage of the existing mouse-based Windows ecosystem of software, most of which was just too cumbersome to use on a tablet with a stylus.
It took the internet about 10 years to really take off too and there were a lot of visionaries in the early 90s that just couldn't survive until the hockey stick growth really started to take off and validate their assessments.
For a while it was because they had pre-purchased all of their fuel at 2000ish oil prices using long-term futures contracts. The bet turned out to be extremely lucrative for them. However, most of their contracts are either expired or set to expire soon so I expect their prices to revert to the mean.
They do a couple of other clever things, like only fly a single type of plane to take advantage of economies of scale, and only fly out of airports that have cheaper gate licensing fees. But the futures contracts really helped them through the industry's rough patch so that they could expand and aggressively grow while their competitors were declaring bankruptcy.
So... the takeaway is to stop adding bugs to programs you write? Heh, I've been trying to do that since day 1.
Seriously, now, it appears that experts are more akin to taking the scientific method approach to debugging: isolate and bisect down to the point of the bug. Novices just haphazardly change stuff until stuff appears to work.
I think a lot of us can think of friends and co-workers who fit these profiles.
Is it a 'dick move' that Apple releases their products at a time calculated to get maximum media exposure? Or that every other smart company in the World also times bad news?
There are many things one might accurately criticize Zynga for, but this is not one of them. If they hadn't done it this way investors would have yet another reason to sell the stock, it would be evidence the company is run by idiots.
