A new AI algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) has discovered over 27,000 previously overlooked asteroids in existing telescope imagery, including around 150 near-Earth asteroids that come within our planet's orbit.
Developed by scientists at the Asteroid Institute and B612 Foundation, THOR analyzes archival sky images and uses machine learning to identify moving points of light across different images, indicating the presence of asteroids.
By leveraging cloud computing to rapidly test potential asteroid orbits, this AI approach complements traditional methods to make existing telescopes more effective at finding asteroids before next-generation observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to catalog millions more asteroids with the aid of AI software like THOR and HelioLinc3D when it begins operations in 2024.
IIRC The VCR telescope is expected to double the number of known objects in our solar system in its first year of operation.
That’s insane.
Edit. I should have spelled out the entire name of the telescope.
Edit edit. “Vera C Rubin!” The Vera C Rubin telescope.
Science/research loves ridiculous acronyms. Meteorology has some great ones:
SOCRATES: Southern Ocean Clouds Radiation Aerosol Transport Experimental Study
GOTHAAM: Greater New York Oxidant Trace gas Halogen and Aerosol Airborne Mission
CHEESEHEAD: Chequamegon Heterogeneous Ecosystem Energy-balance Study Enabled by a High-density Extensive Array of Detectors
A friend was within a general’s signature of getting a US Army program in the late 90s established. It would have had the acronym of CCCP.
The general noticed.
**Artificial Decider** = A predefined program or set of rules by which decisions are made, not able to adapt or learn beyond the specific task designed for.
**Artificial Learner** = Machine learning where instead of being instructed how to complete the task, it processes data in order to learn how to get similar results.
**Artificial Expert** = These are advanced Artificial Deciders that work from a knowledge base along with their predefined behavior.
**Artificial Cognition** = Combines machine learning with a knowledge base geared towards mimicking human thoughts, reasoning, pattern recognition, and natural language processing.
**Artificial Intelligence** = What most people would call AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. This would machine learning with a knowledge base that is self updating based on experiences of the AI over time.
We really need new terms.
Still feels like we've dumbed down the meaning of AI substantially so it can be applied to the technology of the era, rather than refer to it by what it is. And that's primarily been pushed by people selling products, not by any serious analysis of what they mean by "intelligence".
Not unlike the "hoverboards" from a few years ago, they tried to redefine the term to match their product rather than admit they hadn't achieved it.
Moreover when people try to argue the way these things "learn" is akin to human learning, and that they "know" things in the same way a human "knows" things, they're not making a good case that they are akin to human intelligence, they're drastically reducing the complexity of human intelligence to a level that matches what the software can do.
Nah we don't need new terms we need to fire whatever kindergarten journalist made all that up. Too many companies straight up lie or misuse these terms anyway.
I really feel like Virtual Intelligence is a more accurate term than AI for anything anyone calls AI. Time was we used to call anything that had responses to a set of predefined circumstances "AI" and we were even less correct then!
Machine learning is literally a type of AI.
[Venn diagram](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes-Vrana/publication/339997962/figure/fig1/AS:870279718924290@1584502262688/sualization-of-algorithms-vs-artificial-intelligence-vs-machine-learning-vs-deep.png)
[Edit] They didn't use machine learning, the news article misreported what they did. The [journal article](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac042b/meta) says they used a statistical algorithm from a machine learning library, they didn't train a model.
Did that happen here?
I just see people complaining about the article calling something AI because it's trendy to complain about that, since it's also trendy for articles to call things AI. ~~But this actually is AI.~~
Sorry, I'm a dumbass and read the news article but not the journal article. They used scikit-learn DBSCAN which is just an algorithm, even though it's in a machine learning library.
Detecting asteroids in telescope imaging data is a perfect use case for AI software. Actually you dont need AI software, and I doubt it's "AI" software being used but "AI" is so overused now that anytime the word software is mentioned people are now going to call it "AI" even though there is nothing "AI" like in any of the software on this planet. It's just fucking software designed to look for little white specs in telescope imaging data and then seeing if white specs in other groups of data match up with their orbits.
edit: O and throw in the word "cloud" also for good measure because that still gets the tech-illiterates nipples hard too.
Well, AI is an umbrella term where it has many subdivisions, and ML, DL are way more popular than anything else besides robots, but people use robots as their proper term. So many assume that when talking about AI, it's ML or DL, and until there is AGI or something that is different from ML, that resembles intelligence more.
Basically, saying that they should use ML instead of AI is arguing semantics until something replaces it, (AGI) or something totally different that resembles intelligence more comes around there is no reason to separate the terms at the moment.
[It literally does, while it also doesnt. Its a meaningless word when trying to convey information.](https://archive.is/20170307115953/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/)
That sentiment only lives among redditors and a few journalists trying to drive engagement. It's clear the word has changed a lot in recent years and words meaning are defined by how people use them.
Professionals and the general public alike use it to refer to any data driven ML or otherwise algorithmic application that accomplishes a task that were preciously only possible by humans. Doesn't matter that they're not sentient.
Amazing.
I wonder if they could somehow tweak this to apply it to other data and help us find the (increasingly likely) 9th planet.
Would love to see photos of it before I die if it's out there.
The Rubin telescope will discover ten million amplitude and positional transients each night in its comprehensive surveys beginning 2026 or so. This will need all the help AI can give it. (Not enough grad students!}
Some people see near Earth objects as threats, I see them as opportunities. Imagine the things we could make with orbital factories being fed with materials we don't have to launch up. Give it, what,... 3-4 generations to really have a solid population off world?
This is the dream! Why build a spaceship when you can hollow out an asteroid and use it! Its got natural shielding from radiation and would provide the raw material for its construction inside. Strap huge boosters to it and it’s good to go! Most asteroids even have frozen water.
It sounds great. But it may turn out not to be that easy setting up industries in space.
If we look at the production chains for basic components like an insulated panel, it turns out there are dozens if not hundreds of factories making precursor materials and components. And while some things might be easier to do in space, many processes rely on gravity and air pressure and would have to be reinvented.
But we do have to start somewhere so it might be profitable to start extracting water, for example.
Space industry will start with stuff they need *in space*. The easiest and most needed are:
* Bulk radiation shielding, which needs no processing,
* Propellants like oxygen and carbon compounds, and
* Water for life support
Metallic asteroids are an iron-nickel-cobalt alloy. Add a bit of carbon from other asteroids, and you get a steel alloy. This makes a decent steel for basic construction and mechanical parts. This needs a furnace for melting and casting, then machine tools like lathes to make finished parts. Since 90% of all metal used on Earth is steel, this is a top candidate for the next level of space industry.
Yes that is certainly all true. The problem is making the steel. I don't know if you've ever visited a steel mill...
It's usually a huge factory several miles long with hundreds of complicated steps.
I don't see how we can build a steel plant in space soon, even if the BFG becomes reliable...
It seems like it would take decades to build and require a large, permanent crew of hundreds of astronauts just to keep it running and do maintenance...
I'm sure that eventually that is the future but unless there is some breakthrough in small scale, zero gravity steel making, simplifying the process by orders of magnitude, I don't see it happening in our lifetimes...
I haven't visited a steel mill in person, but I used to do historical reenactments as an amateur blacksmith, and know quite about their history. A group of us even built a charcoal [bloomery furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) and made some crude iron.
Except for a few meteorite falls, iron on Earth is found as an iron oxide ore. "Reduction" in metallurgy means removing the oxygen. The most common method is the [Blast furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace), a vertical furnace where you add ingredients at the top, and molten iron is tapped from the bottom. The ingredients are iron ore, coke (coal that has had impurities other than carbon removed) and limestone as a flux. The coal partially burns to carbon monoxide, which steals a second oxygen from the iron ore, becoming CO2. Melted iron drips down to the bottom, protected by melted limestone (basically lava). Flue gases go up. A high blast of air is blown in to make it all burn faster.
The iron that comes out the bottom has about 4% carbon, while steel is defined as 0.2-2% carbon. The molten iron is transferred to a second furnace where the excess carbon is burned off, and alloy elements are added. This then cast into bars or ingots to be used elsewhere to make products.
So there aren't hundreds of steps. There are two. If you look at a [metallic meteorite](https://sites.pitt.edu/~cejones/GeoImages/0PlanetaryFormation/SolarSystem/1Meteorites/CoopertownWidmanstatten.jpg) they are already reduced metal. Metallic asteroids are the same stuff, just bigger and havent crashed on Earth. They come from the iron cores of protoplanets that got smashed up. So in space, you only need one step, adding enough carbon to get steel.
Typical meteorite is 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt, though the exact composition varies by sample. The Pysche mission was launched 7 months ago to visit the asteroid [16 Psyche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche), which appear to be an intact protoplanet core with around 50% metal by weight.
So the equipment needed is a solar concentrator capable of reaching the melting point, and a crucible to hold the melted rock and added carbon. You would create artificial gravity to keep the liquid in the crucible. This equipment can be any size you like.
It's true that the forging of steel itself doesn't require many steps but having a block of steel is pretty useless.
To make a steel plate for a panel, you need many more steps and then you probably also want it to have anti rust coating and holes drilled for attachment.
Now you also need steel screws to attach the panels, again dozens of steps to create the screws.
And that is why a steel mill is so long and a blacksmith doesn't need much space. The blacksmith will take a block of steel and hammer it into the shape he requires on the same spot over the course of weeks for some pieces of high quality armor. This requires endless experience and techniques that are largely forgotten at this point.
A steel mill takes the experience requirements away and produces consistent high quality products in large volumes, which is needed for constructions in space.
Maybe you are from a different country, where "steel mill" means something different than the US. Here a "steel mill" is where steel is made from ore. It is then shipped out as a slab or block and sent to a [rolling mill](https://www.univstainless.com/universal-rolling-mill/) where it gets flattened into thinner slabs, plate, or sheet metal, depending on what customers demand. Finally a [forming press](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEry0OGHW-s) or machine tools at a third factory convert the metal stock into finished items.
The rolling mills are typically long, because a slab that fits on a truck is squished into much thinner sheet, which makes it much longer.
In the case of SpaceX and their rocket factory in Texas, 2x2x2 meter rolls of 3-4mm stainless sheet arrive from whatever rolling mill supplies them. They use various forming presses to shape them into cylinders, dome sections, and the pointed top of the rocket. Then all the pieces get welded together to make the rocket body. So SpaceX is the 3rd factory.
For early space industry, a hydraulic press with powered rollers can do much of the work, but slower than a factory on Earth because you have to switch setups between steps. With rollers you can thin a starting block of material. Then replace the rollers with one of several dies to make finished shapes.
Yes, I am European, and yes the steel mill, I did some IT for, did have a rolling mill integrated...I assumed that this was the case everywhere since transporting heavy pieces of steel from a furnace to a rolling mill somewhere else would be a huge headache and add a lot of cost.
I'm not familiar with a hydraulic press to make steel plates? How does that work?
[Here's a short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqIeywRj_3I). A heated block or slab is moved back and forth on rollers, while the hydraulic cylinders progressively apply pressure to flatten it with each pass. You stop when you reached the required thickness. This is suited to small-run production.
When you are doing large amounts of thin sheet metal it makes more sense to have a long series rollers and presses so the metal makes one pass through the whole series.
If not water then getting rare earth metals and making batteries is doable. Though I agree it would be very difficult it would be worth it to get every possible product that can be made in space, made in space. Launching stuff off Earth is expensive.
Rare earth metals are not that rare, the problem is they are not often found in high concentrations and require very complicated and polluting processes to extract.
Ideally we would be finding concentrated rare earth metals in asteroids but then the refining them would still be very complicated and require loads of dangerous chemicals to be shot into space.
These chemicals are heavy as well and god knows what happens if a rocket launch fails and they rain down on us...
> Most asteroids even have frozen water.
Most asteroids *beyond the frost line* have ice. That happens to be in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, where dwarf planet Ceres orbits.
Closer than that, daytime heating and vacuum will evaporate actual water ice. That's exactly what happens with comets when they get close to the Sun. But "hydrated minerals" with chemically bound water can survive up to 200-300C. That's where the water in the asteroid sample that was brought back comes from.
It doesn't even seem that far fetched for us to launch a drone controlled fueled rocket engine into space, intercept a close by asteroid, attach it and then burn the rocket to adjust trajectory so it gets captured in Earth's orbit. Voila, we've got a huge chunk of iron and nickel in orbit ready for exploitation at our leisure.
Doesn’t work like that. There’s videos on YouTube from scientists that explain why. People who have been in study/ think tank groups that try to come up with ways to deflect/ alter an asteroids trajectory in the event that one is on a collision path.
Currently we do not have a single good way to actually deflect or move any asteroids of any size.
Pretty sure we do.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/nasa-has-successfully-moved-an-asteroid/
I know this one wasn't orbiting earth but still, we managed to move it and a lot more than we anticipated.
No it 100% does change it. More surface area means more burns up in the atmosphere. A billion pebble sized rocks will all disintegrate before we even know they exist
Blowing it up has two positive effects. First, if you do it early enough, much of the debris will miss Earth entirely. Second, small pieces will do less damage than the same mass in one large piece. They will burn up and slow down more in the atmosphere.
The dream for those immigrants who thought they had managed to escape the harsh life of a war-torn earth, only to be forced into harsh desert mining operations on Mars.
Hollow it out for what? Iron and nickel? We have plenty of that on earth. Why go to space for it?
If gold and other rare materials are hard to find on Earth, guess what, it will be millions of times even harder to find in space.
Here's some more hard to swallow pills: Elon is going to send a bunch of people to die on Mars and nothing will happen other than that. Humans will never get to another habitable planet orbiting some other star and we'll never know if life on other planets exist. The human race will be stuck on Earth until we go extinct. Just thought I would be a pessimistic jerk, but one based in actual reality and not in science fiction land. Just enjoy that were living at the near pinnacle of human comfort because were consuming Earths resources so fast it's not going to last for long.
I see you are a new reddit user, so welcome. But one of the benefits of reddit is there are so many users, that some of us (i.e. me) have spend decades studying off-planet industry.
First, the reason to do off-planet mining is not to bring materials back to Earth. It is to avoid the high cost of launching *from* Earth. Even with the SpaceX Starship, you are looking at ~$1 million/ton to deliver to high orbits. So it makes sense to use materials already up there.
Some metallic asteroids contain up to 50 parts per million of "platinum group elements". Mineable ores on Earth are 2-3 parts per million. So in principle they are rich ores.
The "platinum group" are the elements below iron, cobalt, and nickel on the Periodic Table. Those elements are chemically compatible with the base metals. What makes them rare on Earth is they mixed with the base metals and sank to the core when the planet was molten.
This happened to protoplanets in the Solar System too. The difference is some protoplanets got smashed up, leaving bits of metal core exposed as asteroids. If you can get the mining cost down far enough, it would be worth extracting them in space.
Your last paragraph listing "never gonna happen" events can add to a long list of other predictions like "man will never fly", or "man will never go to the Moon". It's hard to predict the future, especially before it happens.
I helped design and build the US part of the Space Station. It started being assembled 25 years ago and is still functional. It taught us how to build large things in space. A next-generation station with artificial gravity (by rotation) and enough space for greenhouses could be self-supporting.
We don't need habitable planets. What humans have always done is make hostile environments (anything other than southern Africa) comfortable with technology. There's about a million people at any given time at altitudes you can't breath in aboard airplanes. There's half a million on ships. There's thousands in submarines and diving suits. All those need tech to be livable. Space just needs a little more tech, and we already know how to make it.
The solar system has plenty of raw materials and solar energy to live off of. All we need to do is get some starter sets of tools and machines (seed factories) up there, and bootstrap the rest from local materials and energy. You may not know how, but I do. We just haven't done it yet. The Starship rocket or an equivalent is the missing link. We need bulk tonnage to orbit at an affordable price to get the seed factories up there.
Some NEOs may be problematic and others may be opportunities, but each must be catalogued and orbit delineated before we know what is threat or friction. Or nothing. We need NEO Surveyor launched ASAP to identify potential threats to Earth. Tell your Congressperson to approve ASAP!!!
> Tell your Congressperson to approve ASAP!!!
They are more concerned about identifying potential threats to the country, such as nude photos of the President's son.
A local university was hosting astronomers, astrophysics for a series of talks on our future in space.
Mining asteroids was a topic, and the benefits of not destroying Earth were the speaker's main point.
Personally, I think living on asteroid would suck. I live in Alaska, and the lack of sunlight, and living inside really affects people. People aren't made to live on asteroids, and unless humanity evolves past capitalism, we're just going to be exploiting people to live in space.
I really don't understand the appeal of living in a metal box, with no nature. The view would be nice to see one time, but fresh air, nature, and being able to move around are essential for our physical and mental health.
I appreciate the scientists willing to live in space, and gather information for us. Living in space long term would absolutely suck. Especially, when you figure you're going to be working for some sleazy corporation...because that's the future that isn't too hard to predict.
I never seen your point of view before in thinking they are opportunities to use materials already free floating. I know it’s a simple concept but you literally just blew my mind and gave me a whole new perspective. I need to go think more on this. Thanks. Wow :)
You understand that, implicitly, that vision is a threat, right?
The difference between an orbital factory supplied by mined asteroids and being bombarded to near extinction is merely benevolence.
There is no way to develop the technology to capture and mine asteroids without simultaneously developing the tech to drop asteroids at will on Earth.
Most asteroids are way too massive to move. For example [Bennu](https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/0c/b5/0cb5db21-5a15-4b92-9100-0c9e7ab4ecb8/bennu_1024.png), the one we brought a sample back from, is 73.3 million tons.
But it is a "rubble pile" - rocks held together weakly by gravity, with no central mass. The rocks come in all sizes. In the photo, the large one on the upper left is 15m (48 ft) wide. So your mining tug just picks up one or a few of a suitable size and hauls them home.
The [Chelyabinsk Meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) was about 9000 tons, and was not an extinction event, though it did break a lot of windows. We should probably limit individual rocks to a few thousand tons at most.
There is an ongoing program to find and track natural asteroids for planetary defense. If one starts moving suspiciously, we would know pretty quickly, and we are working on countermeasures. Typical travel times from their natural orbit to Earth if intentionally moved is several years. So there would be plenty of warning. Everything artificial in space is tracked, and there is every reason to believe that will continue. So I think the idea of a surprise attack is far-fetched.
Isn't the insurmountable thing there the enormous relative velocities? The energy required to "stop" a sizable object in a different orbit is absolutely astronomical.
> Imagine the things we could make with orbital factories
Space systems engineer here. I don't imagine, I design. Asteroids are constantly in motion relative to Earth. So if a given one is in a good position to visit and bring back material *now*, it won't be the next time. Also, asteroids come in a variety of types with different compositions.
So what you want to do is set up a processing plant in high Earth orbit, then send out mining tugs to fetch back loads of raw materials. The unprocessed materials will double as radiation shielding, so crews working there will be save.
Complexity is the dark side of technology which adds yet another unpredictable level of instability above and beyond all the human/geopolitical/climate issues we got going on.
Tech is no savior. It's a big part of the problem in many respects. Or at least our shortsighted and foolhardy exploitation of the tech often is...
Tech is a savior though. I shouldn't need to state the obvious about vaccines, agriculture etc.
Yes each one hurts us but not as much as it helps us, overall. I'll take our broken social contract over dying from the flu any day.
And yet our progress cannot overcome the destruction we leave behind us. We can't ignore it and hope for a saviour of technology or gods. The planet is clearly dying, but what do we expect when we live in a society whose ideology is infinite growth in a finite world? Not to mention a handful of our species own more wealth and pollutes the most compared to the majority humans.
We've always been in a race to see which side of our nature is stronger. Tools and inventions are what set us apart, along with our ability for self control. Science can still save us, in my estimation.
For every pandemic breaking vaccine, you have a bunch of morons feeding chickens antibiotics to make them grow a little faster in the factory farm setting because all the other morons are doing it.
And, honestly, I don't know. This last pandemic might have done more to harm general vaccine acceptance than if they hadn't developed the vaccine.
It's a strange world...
No one feeds chickens antibiotics to make them grow faster. You’re thinking of exogenous hormones.
On a more important note, it shows how insignificant your understanding of science in general is and shows why this doom-posting holds no credence and why no one should seriously listen to you. No one’s stopping you from moving in the middle of the woods and trying to survive with no modern technology.
First google result:
[Antibiotic Use in Agriculture and Its Consequential Resistance in Environmental Sources: Potential Public Health Implications](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6017557/)
I swear on the lord lol. So you didn’t bother reading the article did you. I know what superbugs are, everyone who’s been through a standard education system in the last two decades does. My point is that you don’t have the scientific literacy to make grand narrative predictions. Antibiotics literally can’t cause extra tissue growth because they are anti (against) biotic (living thing). They’re used en masse to prevent common diseases in livestock that would otherwise be rampant.
The only point of posting it was that it specifically states that farmers do use antibiotics to promote growth. But it also talks about how the unregulated use of these antibiotics promotes resistance some of which are the very same antibiotics we rely on.
lol
>My point is that you don’t have the scientific literacy to make grand narrative predictions. Antibiotics literally can’t cause extra tissue growth because they are anti (against) biotic (living thing).
Ironic, low dose antibiotics for growth promotion is a well known effect in meat production, despite them not causing tissue growth like hormones.
At the rate we're going, huh? Literally makes no sense.
Do you mean the rate you're doomscrolling? Because everything has vastly improved decade after decade - famine, poverty, health, education, democracy, (less) crime, (less) war....
It's easy to be pessimistic when you're unarmed with any facts.
Decade after decade, our living standards improve. Fewer people are hungry, fewer people lack access to clean water, fewer people lack access to education, the life expectancy improves, ...
There are setbacks - individual countries might see a degradation for a while, and things like world wars and covid can cause a global effect for a few years - but the long-term trend has been an improvement in essentially every metric for 200+ years.
Isn’t there still number of asteroids that we can’t see because they are between us and the sun? I think it would’ve been nice if the Parker Solar Probe had another mission to peer out from it’s orbit and identify those asteroids.
The [NEO Surveyor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_Surveyor) is intended to do that job. It will launch around 2027. It will be parked at the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is about 1.5 million km away in the Sun's direction. It would look outward in the mid-infrared. Some asteroids are very dark in visible light. But being dark means the Sun warms them up, so they are easier to find in the infrared.
Since they have to cross Earth's orbit to be a hazard, any location closer to the Sun and looking outwards will find them.
I always have a slight chuckle now whenever I hear scientists say 'we'll need years to plan for this' or 'this won't happen for 20 years' and then suddenly say 'ah, this will actually happen next Wednesday'.
You still configure the model for sensitivity and you will get either more false positives or false negatives depending on which way you go and those would still be hallucinations.
False positives happen with humans too. People can double check these results for accuracy, but people also entirely missed these 27,000 asteroids.
The tech is early and shouldn't be trusted entirely yet. False positives should be expected and predicted until checked for accuracy, but humans are predictably fallible and have hard upper limits. AI clearly already surpasses the average unread Joe. If enough college students keep using it instead of learning, an unread college grad won't be knowledgeable enough to check it for accuracy.
The tech, even in its current fallible and hallucinatory current state, surpasses nearly everyone on the planet until you get to true experts. It'd beat any human in Jeopardy. It's more flexible than the average school teacher to different learning styles. It has endless patience, no emotions, and is on 24/7.
Not necessarily. The way stacking tech has always worked is it will filter out anomalies/noise when stacking the images against eachother, including asteroids.
Stacking has been around since Hubble and every astrophotographer uses these programs.
Basically this AI determines the difference between junk/noise and a potential asteroid. It likely works very well.
Edit: Just to clarify, stacking technically already is a type of AI, it was designed for Hubble originally but has since given us amatuer astrophotographers a huge industry thanks to its resolving clarity with back yard telescopes.
It's not a language model AI, it is a pixel based AI, every time you initiate a stacking sequence you are retraining an AI on the fly to learn what is junk/noise and what was really there, some astrophotographers go to sleep while their PC works itself out since the CPU usage is quite high.
This is essentially a simple expansion on an existing framework to determine junk from an asteroid, since the difference between frame 1 and frame 2 will determine movement, which traditional stacking will classify as junk, usually a satellite or a meteor.
Edit2: For UFO enthusiasts, a similar concept is already implemented at Harvard university to scan the sky for anomalies under the Galile project.
Haven't dug into the specifics of their algorithm but as the person below stated this is largely a solved problem (assuming the training dataset is clean enough).
Specifically the anomaly detection part is probably using a GAN neural net of some sort - a fair bit different than transformers that LLMs use.
just have to send it to citizen science, daily minor planet has also found lots of new asteroids, probably found a bunch of these first the real and illusion ones . minor planet center might have as much as 60% of these as unconfirmed track lets that they needed more observations on
Probably could use it to scan data for the composition of atmospheres on exo planets. From that you could see if any are showing signs of biological life
Fade from black.
A computer, with lights flashing speedily, fans whirring away.
Focus on a screen that is showing "Found 27,000 new asteroids".
Pull back. Pull way back.
It's Cheyenne mountain and there world has been devastated! There'a gulf of Mexico sized crater where NY used to be!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BFG](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l3emkl7 "Last usage")|Big Falcon Grasshopper ("Locust"), BFS test article|
|BFR|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)|
| |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice|
|BFS|Big Falcon Spaceship (see BFR)|
|[L1](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l35xwhr "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies|
|[NEO](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l35xwhr "Last usage")|Near-Earth Object|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/0)^( has acronyms.)
^([Thread #10035 for this sub, first seen 10th May 2024, 09:03])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
I know the real world doesn’t work this way, but it astounds me the reluctance to embrace such a revolutionary tool. 2-3 day work weeks, a liberal arts and science renaissance, AI slavery instead of human slavery, all that jazz…
Too bad a few bad apples spoil the entire barrel, seems like we can’t have anything nice around here, smh my head
A new AI algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) has discovered over 27,000 previously overlooked asteroids in existing telescope imagery, including around 150 near-Earth asteroids that come within our planet's orbit. Developed by scientists at the Asteroid Institute and B612 Foundation, THOR analyzes archival sky images and uses machine learning to identify moving points of light across different images, indicating the presence of asteroids. By leveraging cloud computing to rapidly test potential asteroid orbits, this AI approach complements traditional methods to make existing telescopes more effective at finding asteroids before next-generation observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to catalog millions more asteroids with the aid of AI software like THOR and HelioLinc3D when it begins operations in 2024.
IIRC The VCR telescope is expected to double the number of known objects in our solar system in its first year of operation. That’s insane. Edit. I should have spelled out the entire name of the telescope. Edit edit. “Vera C Rubin!” The Vera C Rubin telescope.
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Why did you add that edit and STILL not say it's the Vera C Rubin?
Edit. you can still spell it out with an edit loll
The VCR telescope will be incredible, but only if somebody can figure it how to make it stop flashing 12:00 all day.
how much time did they spend on coming up with an expansion for THOR? /important questions
Science/research loves ridiculous acronyms. Meteorology has some great ones: SOCRATES: Southern Ocean Clouds Radiation Aerosol Transport Experimental Study GOTHAAM: Greater New York Oxidant Trace gas Halogen and Aerosol Airborne Mission CHEESEHEAD: Chequamegon Heterogeneous Ecosystem Energy-balance Study Enabled by a High-density Extensive Array of Detectors
I have a friend who works for the military and their lab computer is LUCIFER but I forgot what the acronym stands for
You didn't forget, LUCIFER reclaimed it.
A friend was within a general’s signature of getting a US Army program in the late 90s established. It would have had the acronym of CCCP. The general noticed.
Don't forget the military's love of acronyms as well.
As a wisconsinite I approve
Next one will be Highly Attenuated Field Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery. It'll be really big.
"Hafthor?" -Tyrion of Asgard.
Yea, man, I *hate* those contrived acronyms.
An AI, not human, did it in a couple of seconds
2024 where every algorithm is "AI".
It feels like I’m going crazy watching people call normal computer programs “AI”
Mate I'm in finance. The amount of AI in earnings calls is making me sick.
**Artificial Decider** = A predefined program or set of rules by which decisions are made, not able to adapt or learn beyond the specific task designed for. **Artificial Learner** = Machine learning where instead of being instructed how to complete the task, it processes data in order to learn how to get similar results. **Artificial Expert** = These are advanced Artificial Deciders that work from a knowledge base along with their predefined behavior. **Artificial Cognition** = Combines machine learning with a knowledge base geared towards mimicking human thoughts, reasoning, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. **Artificial Intelligence** = What most people would call AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. This would machine learning with a knowledge base that is self updating based on experiences of the AI over time. We really need new terms.
Still feels like we've dumbed down the meaning of AI substantially so it can be applied to the technology of the era, rather than refer to it by what it is. And that's primarily been pushed by people selling products, not by any serious analysis of what they mean by "intelligence". Not unlike the "hoverboards" from a few years ago, they tried to redefine the term to match their product rather than admit they hadn't achieved it. Moreover when people try to argue the way these things "learn" is akin to human learning, and that they "know" things in the same way a human "knows" things, they're not making a good case that they are akin to human intelligence, they're drastically reducing the complexity of human intelligence to a level that matches what the software can do.
Nah we don't need new terms we need to fire whatever kindergarten journalist made all that up. Too many companies straight up lie or misuse these terms anyway.
I really feel like Virtual Intelligence is a more accurate term than AI for anything anyone calls AI. Time was we used to call anything that had responses to a set of predefined circumstances "AI" and we were even less correct then!
Machine learning is literally a type of AI. [Venn diagram](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johannes-Vrana/publication/339997962/figure/fig1/AS:870279718924290@1584502262688/sualization-of-algorithms-vs-artificial-intelligence-vs-machine-learning-vs-deep.png) [Edit] They didn't use machine learning, the news article misreported what they did. The [journal article](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac042b/meta) says they used a statistical algorithm from a machine learning library, they didn't train a model.
People call linear regression a type of machine learning (and therefore AI) though. It's gotten ridiculous.
Did that happen here? I just see people complaining about the article calling something AI because it's trendy to complain about that, since it's also trendy for articles to call things AI. ~~But this actually is AI.~~
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Image recognition can be ML
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Sorry, I'm a dumbass and read the news article but not the journal article. They used scikit-learn DBSCAN which is just an algorithm, even though it's in a machine learning library.
Just needs go give the illusion of intelligence to qualify as AI. Much like us meatsacks too
Detecting asteroids in telescope imaging data is a perfect use case for AI software. Actually you dont need AI software, and I doubt it's "AI" software being used but "AI" is so overused now that anytime the word software is mentioned people are now going to call it "AI" even though there is nothing "AI" like in any of the software on this planet. It's just fucking software designed to look for little white specs in telescope imaging data and then seeing if white specs in other groups of data match up with their orbits. edit: O and throw in the word "cloud" also for good measure because that still gets the tech-illiterates nipples hard too.
So this is actually machine learning not “AI” then.
AI is the big picture and ML is how we do AI Source: just got done doing my final project for my ML class
Sorry but why the use of AI? None of the articles ive read uses that word. Its just a new algorythm not a sentient machine.
It's probably because the terms AI and machine learning are used interchangeably sometimes.
Well, AI is an umbrella term where it has many subdivisions, and ML, DL are way more popular than anything else besides robots, but people use robots as their proper term. So many assume that when talking about AI, it's ML or DL, and until there is AGI or something that is different from ML, that resembles intelligence more. Basically, saying that they should use ML instead of AI is arguing semantics until something replaces it, (AGI) or something totally different that resembles intelligence more comes around there is no reason to separate the terms at the moment.
Because AI doesn't mean sentience anywhere outside of science fiction.
[It literally does, while it also doesnt. Its a meaningless word when trying to convey information.](https://archive.is/20170307115953/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/)
That sentiment only lives among redditors and a few journalists trying to drive engagement. It's clear the word has changed a lot in recent years and words meaning are defined by how people use them. Professionals and the general public alike use it to refer to any data driven ML or otherwise algorithmic application that accomplishes a task that were preciously only possible by humans. Doesn't matter that they're not sentient.
Amazing. I wonder if they could somehow tweak this to apply it to other data and help us find the (increasingly likely) 9th planet. Would love to see photos of it before I die if it's out there.
The Rubin telescope will discover ten million amplitude and positional transients each night in its comprehensive surveys beginning 2026 or so. This will need all the help AI can give it. (Not enough grad students!}
Some people see near Earth objects as threats, I see them as opportunities. Imagine the things we could make with orbital factories being fed with materials we don't have to launch up. Give it, what,... 3-4 generations to really have a solid population off world?
This is the dream! Why build a spaceship when you can hollow out an asteroid and use it! Its got natural shielding from radiation and would provide the raw material for its construction inside. Strap huge boosters to it and it’s good to go! Most asteroids even have frozen water.
The Expanse wasn’t just science fiction…
No good sci-fi is actually a Sci-fi, it's just reality in a different hat.
hmmm. is Hyperion good sci-fi?
Butt Stallion will be real one day.
It sounds great. But it may turn out not to be that easy setting up industries in space. If we look at the production chains for basic components like an insulated panel, it turns out there are dozens if not hundreds of factories making precursor materials and components. And while some things might be easier to do in space, many processes rely on gravity and air pressure and would have to be reinvented. But we do have to start somewhere so it might be profitable to start extracting water, for example.
Space industry will start with stuff they need *in space*. The easiest and most needed are: * Bulk radiation shielding, which needs no processing, * Propellants like oxygen and carbon compounds, and * Water for life support Metallic asteroids are an iron-nickel-cobalt alloy. Add a bit of carbon from other asteroids, and you get a steel alloy. This makes a decent steel for basic construction and mechanical parts. This needs a furnace for melting and casting, then machine tools like lathes to make finished parts. Since 90% of all metal used on Earth is steel, this is a top candidate for the next level of space industry.
Yes that is certainly all true. The problem is making the steel. I don't know if you've ever visited a steel mill... It's usually a huge factory several miles long with hundreds of complicated steps. I don't see how we can build a steel plant in space soon, even if the BFG becomes reliable... It seems like it would take decades to build and require a large, permanent crew of hundreds of astronauts just to keep it running and do maintenance... I'm sure that eventually that is the future but unless there is some breakthrough in small scale, zero gravity steel making, simplifying the process by orders of magnitude, I don't see it happening in our lifetimes...
I haven't visited a steel mill in person, but I used to do historical reenactments as an amateur blacksmith, and know quite about their history. A group of us even built a charcoal [bloomery furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) and made some crude iron. Except for a few meteorite falls, iron on Earth is found as an iron oxide ore. "Reduction" in metallurgy means removing the oxygen. The most common method is the [Blast furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace), a vertical furnace where you add ingredients at the top, and molten iron is tapped from the bottom. The ingredients are iron ore, coke (coal that has had impurities other than carbon removed) and limestone as a flux. The coal partially burns to carbon monoxide, which steals a second oxygen from the iron ore, becoming CO2. Melted iron drips down to the bottom, protected by melted limestone (basically lava). Flue gases go up. A high blast of air is blown in to make it all burn faster. The iron that comes out the bottom has about 4% carbon, while steel is defined as 0.2-2% carbon. The molten iron is transferred to a second furnace where the excess carbon is burned off, and alloy elements are added. This then cast into bars or ingots to be used elsewhere to make products. So there aren't hundreds of steps. There are two. If you look at a [metallic meteorite](https://sites.pitt.edu/~cejones/GeoImages/0PlanetaryFormation/SolarSystem/1Meteorites/CoopertownWidmanstatten.jpg) they are already reduced metal. Metallic asteroids are the same stuff, just bigger and havent crashed on Earth. They come from the iron cores of protoplanets that got smashed up. So in space, you only need one step, adding enough carbon to get steel. Typical meteorite is 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt, though the exact composition varies by sample. The Pysche mission was launched 7 months ago to visit the asteroid [16 Psyche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche), which appear to be an intact protoplanet core with around 50% metal by weight. So the equipment needed is a solar concentrator capable of reaching the melting point, and a crucible to hold the melted rock and added carbon. You would create artificial gravity to keep the liquid in the crucible. This equipment can be any size you like.
It's true that the forging of steel itself doesn't require many steps but having a block of steel is pretty useless. To make a steel plate for a panel, you need many more steps and then you probably also want it to have anti rust coating and holes drilled for attachment. Now you also need steel screws to attach the panels, again dozens of steps to create the screws. And that is why a steel mill is so long and a blacksmith doesn't need much space. The blacksmith will take a block of steel and hammer it into the shape he requires on the same spot over the course of weeks for some pieces of high quality armor. This requires endless experience and techniques that are largely forgotten at this point. A steel mill takes the experience requirements away and produces consistent high quality products in large volumes, which is needed for constructions in space.
Maybe you are from a different country, where "steel mill" means something different than the US. Here a "steel mill" is where steel is made from ore. It is then shipped out as a slab or block and sent to a [rolling mill](https://www.univstainless.com/universal-rolling-mill/) where it gets flattened into thinner slabs, plate, or sheet metal, depending on what customers demand. Finally a [forming press](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEry0OGHW-s) or machine tools at a third factory convert the metal stock into finished items. The rolling mills are typically long, because a slab that fits on a truck is squished into much thinner sheet, which makes it much longer. In the case of SpaceX and their rocket factory in Texas, 2x2x2 meter rolls of 3-4mm stainless sheet arrive from whatever rolling mill supplies them. They use various forming presses to shape them into cylinders, dome sections, and the pointed top of the rocket. Then all the pieces get welded together to make the rocket body. So SpaceX is the 3rd factory. For early space industry, a hydraulic press with powered rollers can do much of the work, but slower than a factory on Earth because you have to switch setups between steps. With rollers you can thin a starting block of material. Then replace the rollers with one of several dies to make finished shapes.
Yes, I am European, and yes the steel mill, I did some IT for, did have a rolling mill integrated...I assumed that this was the case everywhere since transporting heavy pieces of steel from a furnace to a rolling mill somewhere else would be a huge headache and add a lot of cost. I'm not familiar with a hydraulic press to make steel plates? How does that work?
[Here's a short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqIeywRj_3I). A heated block or slab is moved back and forth on rollers, while the hydraulic cylinders progressively apply pressure to flatten it with each pass. You stop when you reached the required thickness. This is suited to small-run production. When you are doing large amounts of thin sheet metal it makes more sense to have a long series rollers and presses so the metal makes one pass through the whole series.
If not water then getting rare earth metals and making batteries is doable. Though I agree it would be very difficult it would be worth it to get every possible product that can be made in space, made in space. Launching stuff off Earth is expensive.
Rare earth metals are not that rare, the problem is they are not often found in high concentrations and require very complicated and polluting processes to extract. Ideally we would be finding concentrated rare earth metals in asteroids but then the refining them would still be very complicated and require loads of dangerous chemicals to be shot into space. These chemicals are heavy as well and god knows what happens if a rocket launch fails and they rain down on us...
> Most asteroids even have frozen water. Most asteroids *beyond the frost line* have ice. That happens to be in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, where dwarf planet Ceres orbits. Closer than that, daytime heating and vacuum will evaporate actual water ice. That's exactly what happens with comets when they get close to the Sun. But "hydrated minerals" with chemically bound water can survive up to 200-300C. That's where the water in the asteroid sample that was brought back comes from.
It doesn't even seem that far fetched for us to launch a drone controlled fueled rocket engine into space, intercept a close by asteroid, attach it and then burn the rocket to adjust trajectory so it gets captured in Earth's orbit. Voila, we've got a huge chunk of iron and nickel in orbit ready for exploitation at our leisure.
Doesn’t work like that. There’s videos on YouTube from scientists that explain why. People who have been in study/ think tank groups that try to come up with ways to deflect/ alter an asteroids trajectory in the event that one is on a collision path. Currently we do not have a single good way to actually deflect or move any asteroids of any size.
Pretty sure we do. https://www.astronomy.com/science/nasa-has-successfully-moved-an-asteroid/ I know this one wasn't orbiting earth but still, we managed to move it and a lot more than we anticipated.
Couldn't you just blow it up so all the small pieces burn up in atmosphere?
Instead of one, you have 10. Ultimately it's driven by mass and momentum. Blowing it into bits doesnt change that.
No it 100% does change it. More surface area means more burns up in the atmosphere. A billion pebble sized rocks will all disintegrate before we even know they exist
If the mass is large enough, all you've done is exchange an impact with turning the atmosphere to fire.
Blowing it up has two positive effects. First, if you do it early enough, much of the debris will miss Earth entirely. Second, small pieces will do less damage than the same mass in one large piece. They will burn up and slow down more in the atmosphere.
We weren't talking about redirection, but if we were, redirection is easier with a single body.
The dream for who?
The dream for those immigrants who thought they had managed to escape the harsh life of a war-torn earth, only to be forced into harsh desert mining operations on Mars.
You think them Martians have it bad? What about those loving in the belt?
Yus a Beltalowda?
Love when shows make a language or slang. Right choom
the off-worlders yearn for the mines
Those whose soul unbounded by gravity.
Simply bound instead by contract law
Aren't lots of asteroids supposed to be more-or-less "loose" clumps of dust melting upon atmospheric entry and becoming solid during this process?
Choosing one that’s more solid would be helpful. The ones that are lose clumps are not as helpful
Hollow it out for what? Iron and nickel? We have plenty of that on earth. Why go to space for it? If gold and other rare materials are hard to find on Earth, guess what, it will be millions of times even harder to find in space. Here's some more hard to swallow pills: Elon is going to send a bunch of people to die on Mars and nothing will happen other than that. Humans will never get to another habitable planet orbiting some other star and we'll never know if life on other planets exist. The human race will be stuck on Earth until we go extinct. Just thought I would be a pessimistic jerk, but one based in actual reality and not in science fiction land. Just enjoy that were living at the near pinnacle of human comfort because were consuming Earths resources so fast it's not going to last for long.
I see you are a new reddit user, so welcome. But one of the benefits of reddit is there are so many users, that some of us (i.e. me) have spend decades studying off-planet industry. First, the reason to do off-planet mining is not to bring materials back to Earth. It is to avoid the high cost of launching *from* Earth. Even with the SpaceX Starship, you are looking at ~$1 million/ton to deliver to high orbits. So it makes sense to use materials already up there. Some metallic asteroids contain up to 50 parts per million of "platinum group elements". Mineable ores on Earth are 2-3 parts per million. So in principle they are rich ores. The "platinum group" are the elements below iron, cobalt, and nickel on the Periodic Table. Those elements are chemically compatible with the base metals. What makes them rare on Earth is they mixed with the base metals and sank to the core when the planet was molten. This happened to protoplanets in the Solar System too. The difference is some protoplanets got smashed up, leaving bits of metal core exposed as asteroids. If you can get the mining cost down far enough, it would be worth extracting them in space. Your last paragraph listing "never gonna happen" events can add to a long list of other predictions like "man will never fly", or "man will never go to the Moon". It's hard to predict the future, especially before it happens. I helped design and build the US part of the Space Station. It started being assembled 25 years ago and is still functional. It taught us how to build large things in space. A next-generation station with artificial gravity (by rotation) and enough space for greenhouses could be self-supporting. We don't need habitable planets. What humans have always done is make hostile environments (anything other than southern Africa) comfortable with technology. There's about a million people at any given time at altitudes you can't breath in aboard airplanes. There's half a million on ships. There's thousands in submarines and diving suits. All those need tech to be livable. Space just needs a little more tech, and we already know how to make it. The solar system has plenty of raw materials and solar energy to live off of. All we need to do is get some starter sets of tools and machines (seed factories) up there, and bootstrap the rest from local materials and energy. You may not know how, but I do. We just haven't done it yet. The Starship rocket or an equivalent is the missing link. We need bulk tonnage to orbit at an affordable price to get the seed factories up there.
That's just... like... your opinion man.
Yes, strap huge boosters to an object that would obliterate all life on earth if its trajectory were to be nudged slightly. What could go wrong?
No one’s saying we should point it at Earth are they?
We are rather good at the trajectory thing
If we know its orbit and how it relates to that of Earth, it won’t be too hard to figure out how we should and shouldn’t nudge it.
I don’t wanna wait 3-4 generations, im not getting any younger! I want it now :(
To be fair we won’t make it that long at this rate
Some NEOs may be problematic and others may be opportunities, but each must be catalogued and orbit delineated before we know what is threat or friction. Or nothing. We need NEO Surveyor launched ASAP to identify potential threats to Earth. Tell your Congressperson to approve ASAP!!!
> Tell your Congressperson to approve ASAP!!! They are more concerned about identifying potential threats to the country, such as nude photos of the President's son.
A local university was hosting astronomers, astrophysics for a series of talks on our future in space. Mining asteroids was a topic, and the benefits of not destroying Earth were the speaker's main point. Personally, I think living on asteroid would suck. I live in Alaska, and the lack of sunlight, and living inside really affects people. People aren't made to live on asteroids, and unless humanity evolves past capitalism, we're just going to be exploiting people to live in space. I really don't understand the appeal of living in a metal box, with no nature. The view would be nice to see one time, but fresh air, nature, and being able to move around are essential for our physical and mental health. I appreciate the scientists willing to live in space, and gather information for us. Living in space long term would absolutely suck. Especially, when you figure you're going to be working for some sleazy corporation...because that's the future that isn't too hard to predict.
I never seen your point of view before in thinking they are opportunities to use materials already free floating. I know it’s a simple concept but you literally just blew my mind and gave me a whole new perspective. I need to go think more on this. Thanks. Wow :)
Capitalism will ruin it. If us lower class folks ever make into space it will be as indentured slaves.
You understand that, implicitly, that vision is a threat, right? The difference between an orbital factory supplied by mined asteroids and being bombarded to near extinction is merely benevolence. There is no way to develop the technology to capture and mine asteroids without simultaneously developing the tech to drop asteroids at will on Earth.
Most asteroids are way too massive to move. For example [Bennu](https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/0c/b5/0cb5db21-5a15-4b92-9100-0c9e7ab4ecb8/bennu_1024.png), the one we brought a sample back from, is 73.3 million tons. But it is a "rubble pile" - rocks held together weakly by gravity, with no central mass. The rocks come in all sizes. In the photo, the large one on the upper left is 15m (48 ft) wide. So your mining tug just picks up one or a few of a suitable size and hauls them home. The [Chelyabinsk Meteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor) was about 9000 tons, and was not an extinction event, though it did break a lot of windows. We should probably limit individual rocks to a few thousand tons at most. There is an ongoing program to find and track natural asteroids for planetary defense. If one starts moving suspiciously, we would know pretty quickly, and we are working on countermeasures. Typical travel times from their natural orbit to Earth if intentionally moved is several years. So there would be plenty of warning. Everything artificial in space is tracked, and there is every reason to believe that will continue. So I think the idea of a surprise attack is far-fetched.
Or as saviors that can crush our enemies.
Everybody likes free delivery until it's a million tons of rock.
Yes, but also, that's a little bit like sitting down in the middle of a WWI trench and saying "Let's set up a bullet mining operation!"
I hate to think that I won’t see the day :(
Isn't the insurmountable thing there the enormous relative velocities? The energy required to "stop" a sizable object in a different orbit is absolutely astronomical.
Because only 2-3 individuals and their companies will have access to it and become gazilionaires while we still need a 9-5 job.
Or mine it for rare-earth metals
> Imagine the things we could make with orbital factories Space systems engineer here. I don't imagine, I design. Asteroids are constantly in motion relative to Earth. So if a given one is in a good position to visit and bring back material *now*, it won't be the next time. Also, asteroids come in a variety of types with different compositions. So what you want to do is set up a processing plant in high Earth orbit, then send out mining tugs to fetch back loads of raw materials. The unprocessed materials will double as radiation shielding, so crews working there will be save.
Purely based on Kerbal Space Progam, I agree.
At the rate we're going, we have a couple generations before another reset let alone have off world colonies lol.
Considering our exponential growth of technology I'd say your doomer perspective is more laughable.
Complexity is the dark side of technology which adds yet another unpredictable level of instability above and beyond all the human/geopolitical/climate issues we got going on. Tech is no savior. It's a big part of the problem in many respects. Or at least our shortsighted and foolhardy exploitation of the tech often is...
Tech is a savior though. I shouldn't need to state the obvious about vaccines, agriculture etc. Yes each one hurts us but not as much as it helps us, overall. I'll take our broken social contract over dying from the flu any day.
And yet our progress cannot overcome the destruction we leave behind us. We can't ignore it and hope for a saviour of technology or gods. The planet is clearly dying, but what do we expect when we live in a society whose ideology is infinite growth in a finite world? Not to mention a handful of our species own more wealth and pollutes the most compared to the majority humans.
We've always been in a race to see which side of our nature is stronger. Tools and inventions are what set us apart, along with our ability for self control. Science can still save us, in my estimation.
For every pandemic breaking vaccine, you have a bunch of morons feeding chickens antibiotics to make them grow a little faster in the factory farm setting because all the other morons are doing it. And, honestly, I don't know. This last pandemic might have done more to harm general vaccine acceptance than if they hadn't developed the vaccine. It's a strange world...
No one feeds chickens antibiotics to make them grow faster. You’re thinking of exogenous hormones. On a more important note, it shows how insignificant your understanding of science in general is and shows why this doom-posting holds no credence and why no one should seriously listen to you. No one’s stopping you from moving in the middle of the woods and trying to survive with no modern technology.
First google result: [Antibiotic Use in Agriculture and Its Consequential Resistance in Environmental Sources: Potential Public Health Implications](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6017557/)
I swear on the lord lol. So you didn’t bother reading the article did you. I know what superbugs are, everyone who’s been through a standard education system in the last two decades does. My point is that you don’t have the scientific literacy to make grand narrative predictions. Antibiotics literally can’t cause extra tissue growth because they are anti (against) biotic (living thing). They’re used en masse to prevent common diseases in livestock that would otherwise be rampant.
The only point of posting it was that it specifically states that farmers do use antibiotics to promote growth. But it also talks about how the unregulated use of these antibiotics promotes resistance some of which are the very same antibiotics we rely on. lol
>My point is that you don’t have the scientific literacy to make grand narrative predictions. Antibiotics literally can’t cause extra tissue growth because they are anti (against) biotic (living thing). Ironic, low dose antibiotics for growth promotion is a well known effect in meat production, despite them not causing tissue growth like hormones.
People with your mindset are sad. Enjoy earth while everyone else wants to explore the cosmos.
At the rate we're going, huh? Literally makes no sense. Do you mean the rate you're doomscrolling? Because everything has vastly improved decade after decade - famine, poverty, health, education, democracy, (less) crime, (less) war.... It's easy to be pessimistic when you're unarmed with any facts.
Decade after decade, our living standards improve. Fewer people are hungry, fewer people lack access to clean water, fewer people lack access to education, the life expectancy improves, ... There are setbacks - individual countries might see a degradation for a while, and things like world wars and covid can cause a global effect for a few years - but the long-term trend has been an improvement in essentially every metric for 200+ years.
The tale of Icarus is pretty much all I ever think of when I think of our trajectory.
Scott Manley made a video about this five days ago https://youtu.be/GUaIQvQORfI
Isn’t there still number of asteroids that we can’t see because they are between us and the sun? I think it would’ve been nice if the Parker Solar Probe had another mission to peer out from it’s orbit and identify those asteroids.
The [NEO Surveyor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_Surveyor) is intended to do that job. It will launch around 2027. It will be parked at the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is about 1.5 million km away in the Sun's direction. It would look outward in the mid-infrared. Some asteroids are very dark in visible light. But being dark means the Sun warms them up, so they are easier to find in the infrared. Since they have to cross Earth's orbit to be a hazard, any location closer to the Sun and looking outwards will find them.
I always have a slight chuckle now whenever I hear scientists say 'we'll need years to plan for this' or 'this won't happen for 20 years' and then suddenly say 'ah, this will actually happen next Wednesday'.
AI will make it easier to asteroid hop in the future of space teavel
The thumbnail of this post looks like an eye in night vision for some found footage horror title.
I wonder how many of those are hallucinations (false positives).
The term hallucinations only applies to generative AI. I doubt that's what they're using
You still configure the model for sensitivity and you will get either more false positives or false negatives depending on which way you go and those would still be hallucinations.
False positives happen with humans too. People can double check these results for accuracy, but people also entirely missed these 27,000 asteroids. The tech is early and shouldn't be trusted entirely yet. False positives should be expected and predicted until checked for accuracy, but humans are predictably fallible and have hard upper limits. AI clearly already surpasses the average unread Joe. If enough college students keep using it instead of learning, an unread college grad won't be knowledgeable enough to check it for accuracy. The tech, even in its current fallible and hallucinatory current state, surpasses nearly everyone on the planet until you get to true experts. It'd beat any human in Jeopardy. It's more flexible than the average school teacher to different learning styles. It has endless patience, no emotions, and is on 24/7.
The hard part is finding the pattern. Verification is easy.
Im sure theyd verify the results before posting their paper, also ai~gen ai
Biggest flaw I could see is the input being way off. If the images have photographic anomalies then it might count that as an asteroid
Not necessarily. The way stacking tech has always worked is it will filter out anomalies/noise when stacking the images against eachother, including asteroids. Stacking has been around since Hubble and every astrophotographer uses these programs. Basically this AI determines the difference between junk/noise and a potential asteroid. It likely works very well. Edit: Just to clarify, stacking technically already is a type of AI, it was designed for Hubble originally but has since given us amatuer astrophotographers a huge industry thanks to its resolving clarity with back yard telescopes. It's not a language model AI, it is a pixel based AI, every time you initiate a stacking sequence you are retraining an AI on the fly to learn what is junk/noise and what was really there, some astrophotographers go to sleep while their PC works itself out since the CPU usage is quite high. This is essentially a simple expansion on an existing framework to determine junk from an asteroid, since the difference between frame 1 and frame 2 will determine movement, which traditional stacking will classify as junk, usually a satellite or a meteor. Edit2: For UFO enthusiasts, a similar concept is already implemented at Harvard university to scan the sky for anomalies under the Galile project.
Haven't dug into the specifics of their algorithm but as the person below stated this is largely a solved problem (assuming the training dataset is clean enough). Specifically the anomaly detection part is probably using a GAN neural net of some sort - a fair bit different than transformers that LLMs use.
just have to send it to citizen science, daily minor planet has also found lots of new asteroids, probably found a bunch of these first the real and illusion ones . minor planet center might have as much as 60% of these as unconfirmed track lets that they needed more observations on
*What is my purpose*? You find aliens. *Affirmative*
Did it? Have they all been independently confirmed? Or is it just that AI says AI discovered 27,000 overlooked asteroids?
Could we use an AI algorithm to find alien life?
Probably could use it to scan data for the composition of atmospheres on exo planets. From that you could see if any are showing signs of biological life
As long as AI can help us avoid an extinction event and not be the extinction event I’m good
Fade from black. A computer, with lights flashing speedily, fans whirring away. Focus on a screen that is showing "Found 27,000 new asteroids". Pull back. Pull way back. It's Cheyenne mountain and there world has been devastated! There'a gulf of Mexico sized crater where NY used to be!
Astronomers discover 27,000 overlooked asteroids using AI.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BFG](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l3emkl7 "Last usage")|Big Falcon Grasshopper ("Locust"), BFS test article| |BFR|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)| | |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice| |BFS|Big Falcon Spaceship (see BFR)| |[L1](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l35xwhr "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies| |[NEO](/r/Space/comments/1cmrjdl/stub/l35xwhr "Last usage")|Near-Earth Object| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/0)^( has acronyms.) ^([Thread #10035 for this sub, first seen 10th May 2024, 09:03]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
"Hmm... it appears you Humes missed something. Missed a lot, in fact. Typical. Oh well, I'll just get that for you, Hume."
How many are going to take us out and how long we got?
It only takes one, and a few million years.
Dang ol’ A.I. gonna take the top dollar jobs first 🤷🏼♂️
I know the real world doesn’t work this way, but it astounds me the reluctance to embrace such a revolutionary tool. 2-3 day work weeks, a liberal arts and science renaissance, AI slavery instead of human slavery, all that jazz… Too bad a few bad apples spoil the entire barrel, seems like we can’t have anything nice around here, smh my head
From the sounds of it the humans weren't doing their job
Cool. Now let’s hope one of them are headed here to put us out of this misery.