http://www.kurzweilai.net/techcrunch-googles-new-director-of-engineering-ray-kurzweil-is-building-your-cybernetic-friend Accelerating Intelligence Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:57:31 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/techcrunch-googles-new-director-of-engineering-ray-kurzweil-is-building-your-cybernetic-friend/comment-page-1#comment-84700 Gorden Russell Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:04:43 +0000 http://www.kurzweilai.net/?p=176059#comment-84700 It would be very nice to have a cybernetic friend that could find things that I've lost. On New Year's day I found a NASA list of all the candidate stars for exoplanet hosts found by the Kepler mission. I spent all afternoon until evening just getting through the first 500 of the list. But there are over 2,000 and now when I go back to the NASA site, all I can find is the list of exoplanet hosts that have been confirmed by other telescopes. Sure, it's factual, but just not as interesting. The stars most likely to be confirmed as hosts to planets are the ones with gas giants orbiting in close where they can make the star wobble on its axis, or again, gas giants that transit in front of the star where a telescope with a sensitive photo-detector can spot the minuscule dip in brightness as the planet occults its host star. It's often easier to spot a gas giant passing in front of a red dwarf star, so those have been confirmed more often. But Kepler has "claimed" to have spotted Earth-sized worlds orbiting about stars of spectral class G (like our Sun). Those are the sexiest stars of all --- for they could become mothers. It would be very nice to have a cybernetic friend that could find things that I’ve lost. On New Year’s day I found a NASA list of all the candidate stars for exoplanet hosts found by the Kepler mission. I spent all afternoon until evening just getting through the first 500 of the list. But there are over 2,000 and now when I go back to the NASA site, all I can find is the list of exoplanet hosts that have been confirmed by other telescopes. Sure, it’s factual, but just not as interesting. The stars most likely to be confirmed as hosts to planets are the ones with gas giants orbiting in close where they can make the star wobble on its axis, or again, gas giants that transit in front of the star where a telescope with a sensitive photo-detector can spot the minuscule dip in brightness as the planet occults its host star. It’s often easier to spot a gas giant passing in front of a red dwarf star, so those have been confirmed more often. But Kepler has “claimed” to have spotted Earth-sized worlds orbiting about stars of spectral class G (like our Sun). Those are the sexiest stars of all — for they could become mothers.

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