Is it true that USA has a space weapon called God's Stick?

[JaneDoe]

Is it true that USA has a space weapon called God's Stick?
The kind of equipment can scare everyone who sees it. It is nothing less than space weaponry. The "Sticks of God" are objects that would orbit around our planet and could be thrown at military targets on Earth. Objects could reach such a speed that their impact could be assimilated to that of a nuclear bomb.Such a weapon could be capable of attacking terrestrial targets from space anywhere in the world. That would give the United States an advantage unseen in the arms race.

[Beetlegeuse]

Not likely.

Possibly.

Ever read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Renegades in a lunar colony attack earth simply by throwing rocks into space. Anything thrown into space that gets captured by earth's gravity becomes a meteor and enters the atmosphere at at least 25,000 mph. Throw something big enough that it reaches the surface before it burns up and it makes a hole that looks like this.


There are all manner of treaties and international agreements in effect that ostensibly ban the deployment of any weapon into space but I don't think there's any question but what the US, the USSR ... I mean Russia, and the Red Chinese all have something up there that isn't supposed to be a weapon that (by design) could be employed as one. And there's absolutely no doubt in my military mind that the X-37B has an anti-satellite function.

But they're not going to say so. Ever. So even if true, we'll never hear it from them.

[diesel101]

Most governments have weapons that would make us lose sleep every night if we knew about them.

[Obs]

Most governments have weapons that would make us lose sleep every night if we knew about them.

Nope.
I got the ol 12 guage. I aint scared of shit!

[CA_DXB_85]

Most governments have weapons that would make us lose sleep every night if we knew about them.

What he said

[Beetlegeuse]

They stole the name of my ding dong??? Those bastards!

Better hire a trademark attorney to sue North Korea. They have an intermediate range ballistic missile called tthe No-Dong. Probably named after some eunuch.

[JaneDoe]

I would not want to be in the skin of Iran Lol

[Fiskevatten]

Blow me up and the plague will spread and kill humanity! My body keeps it contained

On another note, the things on video that are released is enough to scare the shiet out of me.
Most horrible or extremely dangerous ones won't reach media.
We are more than ready to destroy earth beyond repair if we wanted to.

However, for those interested - the most dangerous thing man has ever created is actually not too far away.
We are bringing science closer to create black holes ourselves.

I love new inventions, but we are truly playing god in several fields that will be our doom if not stopped.
Even more "decent" thing like stop age, sickness, food issues and so on is well underway - that will doom us in a more positive way lol

[Fiskevatten]

That would be the very definition of madness.... doesn't mean some (possibly mad) scientist won't end up doing it though.

Seems like I read an article about the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. When everything was theoretical, and right up until the first test detonation, they still weren't sure that the explosion wouldn't set off a world ending change reaction. They talked it over and decide it wasn't likely and the rest is history.

Oh and AI is going to be the death of us all. Not because of what it can do, but because some boneheaded engineer will do something really lazy. BOOM --> Now we have Skynet.

True! AI is truly scary since we think we can control it... As soon as you give a computer the chance to "self-learn", then that's it. You can code as much as you want to "block"
certain aspects, but code is fluent and there will always be a path around the "block" so to speak.
Especially with new computing as "Frontier"

"To give an idea of the scale of this sort of machine, AMD says Frontier will have as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined. It’ll be able to handle an astonishing amount of data, with a bandwidth 24,000,000 times greater than the average home internet connection, capable of processing 100,000 HD movies in a second."

Combine that with nanobots and/ or xenobots (living robots) that will have the possibility to self-replicate in the future and BOOM - our own version of Skynet is alive.

And the scary part is, this is now... Think what we'll have in say a hundred years from now.

[Beetlegeuse]

... Seems like I read an article about the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. When everything was theoretical, and right up until the first test detonation, they still weren't sure that the explosion wouldn't set off a world ending change reaction. They talked it over and decide it wasn't likely and the rest is history....

The original atomic bomb design was a uranium-fueled gun-design (as used in the Little Boy). They started with it because they had the theoretical/experimental means to determine to a certainty that it would work. What they couldn't have known in advance (because nothing they were doing had ever been done before) was that weapons-grade uranium was far more technically challenging to make than anyone anticipated. At one point the centrifuges being used in Oak Ridge* to separate U-235 from U-238 were so numerous they were burning 1/7th of all the electricity consumed in the United States. And they still only made enough fuel for one bomb.

*When the US bought 60,000 acres around Oak Ridge, the population was 3000. In three years it grew to 75,000.

When it became obvious that the availability of U-235 was going to be a problem for the foreseeable future, they put the back-up plan into motion (something that Oppenheimer and his crew had been working on in tandem with the uranium bomb from the start in anticipation of just such an eventuality). Plan B was a plutonium-fueled implosion bomb. Unrelated science projects already had developed a process for creating P239 that was scalable enough to suit their needs, all they needed was an atomic reactor to serve as a production facility. Expose U-238 to a fission reaction and -- badabing -- you get Plutonium 239. In fact that's the only way to get it because, unlike U-235, it can't occur naturally.

Except when they took this decision there weren't any reactors. None. Anywhere in the world. In December of 1942, Enrico Fermi built the first functioning atomic reactor in what had been a handball court under the bleachers of the Amos Alonzo Stagg football stadium at the University of Chicago (I swear you couldn't make this shit up). That same month Leslie Groves, commander of the US Army's Corps of Engineers, sent engineers scouting for a location for the first plutonium production facility. They chose a spot on in Washington on the Columbia river near the town of Hanford. In January of '43, Groves ordered the Corps to start building.

The major problem with Plan B, and the reason they hadn't gone straightway into plutonium production when the Brits handed off the atom bomb project to the Yanks, was that there was no experimental or theoretical means to determine to a certainty whether the implosion design would work. Which is why the first atom bomb that was exploded, the one used in the Trinity test, was the more sophisticated and more powerful implosion design but the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium-fueled gun-type bomb.

The USS Indianapolis -- the ship that took the Little Boy to Tinian island -- was kept in port at San Diego waiting on the results of the Trinity test because without its success they wouldn't have had a second bomb. And they anticipated that the one bomb might not convince the Japanese to surrender so they weren't going to deploy Little Boy until they knew Fat Man -- the implosion bomb -- would work.

It was Edward Teller who raised the alarm about the possibility of the atmosphere catching fire from the first bomb. The three key scientists who laid the theoretical groundwork for the bomb were Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, so no one took the suggestion lightly, even though Teller himself admitted it was only a concern and not something he had tested mathematically.

Teller had noted that two nitrogen atoms have the same number of neutrons and the same number of protons as one carbon atom and one oxygen atom, which presented the possibility that under the heat and pressure of a nuclear explosion, atmospheric nitrogen could be converted into carbons and oxygens. What made that problematic was that the atomic weights of one carbon an one oxygen is less than two nitrogens, and all that extra mass would be converted into energy by the process. Not unlike the way a fission (or hydrogen) bomb works.

The first scientist with the chops to run the numbers was Hans Bethe, and he said it could never happen. And to leave nothing to chance, Emil Konopinski, the foremost scientist in the field, repeated Bethe's calculations and confirmed he was right. Zero chance.

And they figured this shit out using nothing more than their brains and a slide rule.

Popular myth notwithstanding, Truman didn't order the nuking of Japan. FDR didn't much like him and had kept him out of the loop on the Manhattan Project. He only found out once FDR had died and he was sworn in as POTUS. But FDR already had signed the orders and Truman decided to just sit back and watch it happen. FDR's orders stipulated that the first bomb should be employed, and the second only if necessary, but after that additional bombs were to be deployed "as they become available" until Japan cried uncle.

Only Little Boy and the Trinity bomb were hand-assembled, all the rest were made on an assembly line. So what limited the number of bombs they could build was always going to be the availability of plutonium. After Nagasaki bomb there was plutonium enough for two more Fat Man bombs, and those two could have been ready to employ by October of '45. By November a second plutonium production reactor was up and running in Washington and those two between them were making four bombs-worth of plutonium each month.

So if Japan hadn't surrendered, by Christmas the US might have been nuking four Japanese cities each month.


This is my absolute most favoritest historical photograph of all. The man is Harold Agnew. He's show emerging from a Quonset hut on Tinian island. What appears to be a ladies' handbag carried so casually in his left hand is a box containing a hollow sphere of Plutonium 239 weighing about 14 pounds, the "physics package" for the Fat Man bomb.



A few hours after this photo was snapped, what's in the box killed at least 39,000 (and maybe as many as 80,000) of the residents of the industrial city of Nagasaki. Agnew witnessed the bomb exploding through a window of The Great Artiste, which was one of the five B-29s on the mission, the one carrying the blast measuring equipment.

[Obs]

True! AI is truly scary since we think we can control it... As soon as you give a computer the chance to "self-learn", then that's it. You can code as much as you want to "block"
certain aspects, but code is fluent and there will always be a path around the "block" so to speak.
Especially with new computing as "Frontier"

"To give an idea of the scale of this sort of machine, AMD says Frontier will have as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined. It’ll be able to handle an astonishing amount of data, with a bandwidth 24,000,000 times greater than the average home internet connection, capable of processing 100,000 HD movies in a second."

Combine that with nanobots and/ or xenobots (living robots) that will have the possibility to self-replicate in the future and BOOM - our own version of Skynet is alive.

And the scary part is, this is now... Think what we'll have in say a hundred years from now.

AI is impossible.
What they call AI is not AI.

Its nothing more than advanced coding parameters.

Intelligence is the opposite of perfect. It is the anomaly that cannot fit into coding.

You can program a computer to abide withing a set of rules and "learn" (set new paramaters of comparative analysis of data) but it cannot choose. It cannot think for itself.

Quantum computing will someday advance so called AI beyond dreams today, but it will still be stupid. It may be like in the movies and comparatively analyze data and decide we are a threat to ourselves like in the movies, but thats totally illogical imo. Acomputer cannot encode outside its parameters that are preset.

Self awareness is not a closed circuit or formula. It cannot be programmed. It is not an algorithm which is all a computer is; by computer I mean "AI".

https://towardsdatascience.com/artif...t-227fe9149b65


I like the way this chick put it^.

[Fiskevatten]

AI is impossible.
What they call AI is not AI.

Its nothing more than advanced coding parameters.

Intelligence is the opposite of perfect. It is the anomaly that cannot fit into coding.

You can program a computer to abide withing a set of rules and "learn" (set new paramaters of comparative analysis of data) but it cannot choose. It cannot think for itself.

Quantum computing will someday advance so called AI beyond dreams today, but it will still be stupid. It may be like in the movies and comparatively analyze data and decide we are a threat to ourselves like in the movies, but thats totally illogical imo. Acomputer cannot encode outside its parameters that are preset.

Self awareness is not a closed circuit or formula. It cannot be programmed. It is not an algorithm which is all a computer is; by computer I mean "AI".

https://towardsdatascience.com/artif...t-227fe9149b65


I like the way this chick put it^.

I understand what she is trying to say, but I do believe she sees it from the wrong angle - and is mistaken.
A computer won't be self-aware as a human and see things from a "right and wrong" perspective, but it can get the ability to choose and re-code it's parameters if given
the possibility to do so.

"You can program a computer to abide withing a set of rules and "learn" (set new paramaters of comparative analysis of data) but it cannot choose. It cannot think for itself."
- We have already proven that a computer can learn (true, within a set of rules) and choose based on results of analysis. Now granted, it doesn't "think", but it can still create and re-create different
outcomes. The question is where we draw the line for learning.

If you code something to be able to read certain situations and make a choice based on that, then you have the very definition of AI.
Now it won't have the "feeling" of human intelligence, but it will have as definition "a simulation" of it.
Now based on what we know and can create, it may very well go beyond human simulated intelligence and create something entirely different.

Calling a machine "stupid" that is able to create an outcome of any given possibility is dangerous.
Now with human error, hacking, faulty systems, wish for power and much else, we can create our doom by mistake or purpose.

Everything we said was impossible a hundred years ago is now in making or a possible idea. If we now create computers that can analyze data faster than ever and
bring solid results, then our understanding of what is possible today will change drastically in the future.

On a side note, it's damn fachinating that we are living in the era when computers had its first step and where it is today.
I remember the first time I got to try Atari or trying to download porn on a 56k modem lol
Some of you even got to have single digit phone numbers and call a operator to forward to the right person i guess

[Obs]

I understand what she is trying to say, but I do believe she sees it from the wrong angle - and is mistaken.
A computer won't be self-aware as a human and see things from a "right and wrong" perspective, but it can get the ability to choose and re-code it's parameters if given
the possibility to do so.

"You can program a computer to abide withing a set of rules and "learn" (set new paramaters of comparative analysis of data) but it cannot choose. It cannot think for itself."
- We have already proven that a computer can learn (true, within a set of rules) and choose based on results of analysis. Now granted, it doesn't "think", but it can still create and re-create different
outcomes. The question is where we draw the line for learning.

If you code something to be able to read certain situations and make a choice based on that, then you have the very definition of AI.
Now it won't have the "feeling" of human intelligence, but it will have as definition "a simulation" of it.
Now based on what we know and can create, it may very well go beyond human simulated intelligence and create something entirely different.

Calling a machine "stupid" that is able to create an outcome of any given possibility is dangerous.
Now with human error, hacking, faulty systems, wish for power and much else, we can create our doom by mistake or purpose.

Everything we said was impossible a hundred years ago is now in making or a possible idea. If we now create computers that can analyze data faster than ever and
bring solid results, then our understanding of what is possible today will change drastically in the future.

On a side note, it's damn fachinating that we are living in the era when computers had its first step and where it is today.
I remember the first time I got to try Atari or trying to download porn on a 56k modem lol
Some of you even got to have single digit phone numbers and call a operator to forward to the right person i guess

It cannot create anything.
All it can do is analyze data, compare it, and expound upon it. It cannot change its core programming.

If it could and was in any way "AI" It would in a short time be programmed as the perfect limitless learning machine and all you would have to do is feed it storage. Tie that bitch to the stock exchange and within a few days it would literally own the stock market.

All this thing has to do is use its ultimate comparative analysis and form the ultimate constantly changing algorithms and mop it up.

That would happen long before a robot kicked your door in told you to get in the cage or nuked the planet.

People are emotional things with actual intelligence. They go to the worst case scenario. Reality is that machine would be used to dominate the money market long before it could do anything more complex such as actually make a decision people can't handle.

AI should not be called AI. Its an insult to higher life forms and nothing more than comparation of 1's and 0's that allways boils down to a solid state device with a mainframe. It is a circuit fully within our control.

No worry of AI.
If I am afraid of anything related to a computer it is an actual full scale quantum computer in the hands of the government. Not because it will grow legs and kill me.

If you put anything of actual intelligence with computing capabilities of a computer it would canvas the web and do whatever it wanted... But it does not want. Its nothing but 1's and 0's.


Anyway, a computer is a computer.
It will never be intelligent and it wont be a threat. People are the threat. Little EMP warhead and their shits done even in the best faraday cage.

A quantum computer with the right coding system could hack everything tied to the web in a day.

Hack one major server and rewrite it to hack others and so on. It would all be done by human hand. Thats another thing you will see long before "terminator judgement day".

Likely though it would be a repeated attack and unsuccessful. Humans can pull cords out of outlets lol.

Skynet is one of those things that has every failsafe imaginable.
Rooms of the brightest software engineers, hackers, IT's, programmers, security auditors, etc. Work on contingencies for every bad scenario and quell it before it can happen.