The Topics:

• Happy 8th anniversary to Phil and Suraya.

• The guys all enjoyed the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Its not as strong as Casino Royale, but its a decent sequel.

• Then we got into "Astounding Science Facts."
  • We got news this week that the Woolly Mammoth genome has been sequenced.

    "There have been several Russian attempts to cultivate eggs from frozen mammoths that look so perfectly preserved in ice. But the perfection is deceiving since the DNA is always degraded and no viable cells remain. Even a genome-based approach would have been judged entirely impossible a few years ago and is far from reality even now.

    Still, several technical barriers have fallen in surprising ways. One barrier was that ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze. But a new generation of DNA decoding machines use tiny pieces as their starting point. Dr. Schuster's laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000."

  • Massive Subsurface Glaciers Discovered on Mars

    "data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris, much closer to the equator.

    The findings, published today in Science, come from the spacecraft's shallow radar, or SHARAD, which is able to penetrate the surface and examine what lies beneath. In this case, SHARAD indicated that two long-visible mid-latitude features, one of which is roughly three times the size of Los Angeles, are almost completely composed of water ice."

• We started by defining "possible." Possible means "not precluded by the physical laws of the universe as we understand them."

  According to our definition, the words possible and impossible get misused in conversation: "I would come to your party, but its just not possible." Our point - not too many things that we can imagine are impossible. That said, there are things that are impractical.

  To answer whether we will ever see something accomplished we ask three questions:

  • Is it possible?

  • Is it reasonable to expect that humanity will ever achieve this result?

  • Is it reasoable to expect that humanity will accomplish this in our lifetime?

• Lord Kelvin famously said in 1895 "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

• Cloning Neaderthal would probably not be any more difficult than cloning a mammoth. It's certainly possible. It would be precluded, however, by huge ethical issues.

  This is probably not how Neaderthal would adapt to the modern world:

  But hey... its possible.

• From the chatroom OKDavidRay came up with an impossibility: faster-than-light travel. Stephen added another Star Trek technology to the impossible list: the transporter. Based on what we understand about the laws of the universe today, neither technology is possible.

• Stephen asked "is it possible that we will achieve a paperless world - a place where paper files are unnecessary and printed books are antiques?"

  Phil and Stephen agreed that not only is it possible, its probable. We'll all have Quantum of Solace level surface computing.

  

• Phil and Stephen believe that an indefinite lifespan is possible. Whether we will "live to see it" is the big question. Certainly Stephen is hopeful. He still believes that the first generation of life extension treatments will arrive within a decade. Read much more at MFoundation.

  Brian Wang blogged about the Resveratrol follow-up drug here.

• Phil and Stephen even believe that personal flight - Superman style - is strictly speaking... possible. We're just not likely to see it soon. The guys think its a post-Singularity technology.

• Matt Duing said that hypercomputers are impossible. Phil, Stephen, and Michael were all fuzzy on the hypercomputer concept. From Wikipedia's:

  "Hypercomputation refers to various hypothetical methods for the computation of non-Turing-computable functions (see also supertask). The term was first introduced in 1999 by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot[1]. A similar term is super-Turing computation, was previously introduced and demonstrated by Hava Siegelmann...

  A Turing machine that can complete infinitely many steps. Simply being able to run for an unbounded number of steps forever, (i.e. potential infinity) does not suffice. One proposed example uses time dilation to allow a computer to spend an infinite amount of time performing a computation while a finite amount of time passes for an observer (it would require an infinite amount of energy to perform this calculation..."

• Phil asked whether retrieval of all extinct species is possible. Stephen answered that, based on what we know today, DNA has a shelf-life of 50,000 years.

  According to this article DNA might last 100,000 years:

  "Setting aside the particulars of this new study, the fact that it was possible to recover Neandertal DNA is a breakthrough itself and opens many possibilities for similar investigations. Mammoth remains preserved in the Siberian permafrost have yielded DNA from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, but preservation of DNA more than 100,000 years old is thought to be unlikely. While DNA from a pre-Neandertal form, like the Homo heidelbergensis from Atapuerca, will probably never be recovered, it would be interesting to compare DNA from early Homo sapiens and Neandertals from Southwest Asia where the two coexisted for such a long period. Another intriguing possibility would be to compare later Homo sapiens and the last of the Neandertals, those from 30,000 years ago, found at western European sites like Zafarraya Cave in southern Spain."

  Still, barring the use of a time machine to the past (another impossibility on par with faster-than-light travel), Jurassic Park appears to be fantasy.

• Will we build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean? Well its possible. The reason we probably won't see such a thing in the foreseeable future is that there are other more feasible ways of crossing the ocean.

• Lastly Phil asked if we'll ever be able to allieviate hunger throughout the world. Certainly there's no law of physics requiring starvation. Most famines are the product of political failure.

  And science will continue to provide us with greater quantities of higher quality food:

The Music:

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Nelo. The song is "You Don't Know."

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