News on China's scientific and technological development.

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Combined, the EU territories have more than enough size and scale to make rail a suitable alternative to road.

To say trucks are little different then trains with individual drive carriages is to miss the point of the economy of scale savings involved. Each train carriage can carry many times what could be carried in a road capable truck. By that logic, you can use a dozen family cars to transport the goods in 1 truck.

Sure you can do that, and in some instances, that could even make more commercial and economic sense. But for long haul transport, bulk carriage offers significant advantages.

You cut down on the labour requirements, needing only 1 train driver instead of dozens of truck drivers; fuel costs, pollution and congestion are all eased, and transport times cut.

I think there is great potential for this sort of rail technology revolution with China's OROB initiative. Because it's a clean slate programme, covering vast distances, which falls under the control of a single lead country.

Once set up and the enormous benefits demonstrated, I believe the concept and technology could easily be adopted back home in China, and then become the new gold standard for the future of world freight rail.

The highlighted sentence is the key point. Which is also where our different thinking come from. Yes, combined EU will be in the same game park as the other continental sized countries that I mentioned. My thought is exactly that EU is NOT really combined yet as much as the others.

If you go to a local shop in Europe, you will see products mostly from neighboring countries, Scandinavia being a cluster, Germany, Austria, Czech being another cluster, in Greece one see mostly things from Italy and France or maybe Spain. My feeling is that for the moment and in the near future, this situation remains, that translates to the longest non-stop transportation within EU is much shorter than in China or US, less than half. That is where I think the difference of truck and train is made, let alone China has OBOR, EU doesn't. Example is Hebei's apple to Beijing is served better by a lorry, while Shenzhen's air-conditioner is better to travel to Urumqi (or further to Astana) by train.

I am not saying EU will never reach the kind of close integration (therefor warrant a more economical advantage by cargo train), but it is just not there yet. So this kind of truck tech has a good chance in Europe, but would be less attractive as you said to China's domestic and OBOR.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Now this is one technology that China lead. Beyond boasting it has practical technology like un -hackable satellite communication which would be a boon for the military

China Leads The Quantum Race While The West Plays Catch Up
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China’s quantum satellite–nicknamed Micius after a 5th century BC Chinese scientist–blasts off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in China’s northwest Gansu province on August 16, 2016. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Now that China has launched the
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, the question is will it deliver on its promise.

Named Micius after a famous ancient Chinese philosopher-scientist, everyone knows the purpose of the satellite is to help China develop
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And no one disputes that the outcome of the space-based experiments can advance relative capabilities in cryptography as well as cybersecurity, surveillance and communications, tilting the strategic and military balance in favor of China.

Some scientists, policymakers and space engineers I queried were either unsure about or remained unconvinced of Micius’ prospects. To be sure there are technical challenges, and informational and resource bottlenecks. But I am skeptical of the skepticism.

China is already ahead of its competitors

Though it may be hard for Western and more established competitors to swallow, China has an unquestionable lead at this stage and may gain from first-mover advantages. If you look around, many
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in space-based quantumdom but from what we can see in the public domain they have some ways to go.

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The National University of Singapore is cooperating with the University of Strathclyde in the UK to carry out quantum experiments using cubesats. Canada is aiming to generate and send pairs of entangled photons from the ground to a microsatellite in space.

This is also true of the more advanced space powers, which certainly have research and programs on point. A leading physicist in Austria tried to persuade the European Space Agency (ESA) for a long time about satellite-based experiments to enable a truly global quantum network. With an eye on moving closer to free-space quantum cryptography, Japan’s
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did a laser communication demonstration between a low earth orbit satellite and an optical ground station back in 2006.

In the United States, there have been feasibility analyses of
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that came out of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999. DARPA, whose mandate is to create breakthrough technologies for U.S. national security, had grants in 2008 for a
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And the U.S.
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to spur innovations in quantum information science, and to help engineer a secure quantum communication system on a chip that serves national needs.

The man leading the charge

Also, China has been involved in an impressive academic track record beyond its borders. One man’s long intellectual march stands out.

Long before he won accolades and was inducted as the youngest ever researcher into the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s Jian-Wei Pan was onto something. His Ph.D. thesis in 1999 at Vienna University’s Institute for Experimental Physics was a clue to where he might be headed:
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While still a doctoral student, Pan worked with a set of coauthors to further the
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, meaning the transmission and reconstruction of the state of a quantum system across any distance. With his coauthors, Pan also claimed an experimental first in communicating quantum information in the process of quantum teleportation.

So Pan is not laboring behind some Chinese curtain as many observers might mistakenly think. From his education to his experimentation, Pan’s work builds on the traditions of academic research, and draws in leading researchers around the world. There are the
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that have defused some concerns about the complications that entangled photons, critical to the experiments, must face as they separate and travel vast and unfriendly distances. There are also
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that bolster the promise of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

Pan’s
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, another renowned physicist in this area, is now also collaborating with him on the Micius mission.

And as a leading center for quantum-based research, China hosted the
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in Hefei in 2014.
 
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Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
(cont)
How the West is involved

Micius’ experiments are under international scientific scrutiny. As they are a work in progress, it is also simply too early to blow up their worth or write them off.

Micius is designed to carry out experiments on quantum key distributions with ground stations and quantum teleportation across two continents. Some results are trickling in publicly, involving locations in China. At least
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202 MB of data in “good quality” to the Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station in Miyun outside Beijing. The data were transferred to China’s National Space Science Center, and presumably we will get more detailed explanations. Additional tests have been planned at different ground locations in northwestern and southern China (Kashgar and Sanya, respectively).

Micius’ experiments also involve a foreign Western collaborator in a very concrete way. The
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of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is cooperating with China. This is where Zeilinger has a research group. IQOQI (Vienna) is contributing optical ground stations in Europe to receive Micius’ quantum signals. The purpose of this inter-continental enterprise is to generate an unconditional secure quantum cryptographic key between a ground station in Asia and one in Europe. So we can also guess we’ll hear something about the fate of Micius’ experiments from sources other than those in China.

Beijing’s full force

China’s leadership is behind the quantum enterprise in a big and credible way. Pan got lucky at an opportune time in China’s rise—not to discount the importance of his research. Step by ferocious step, Pan has indeed made the quantum frontier a real possibility for China. But a man with a scientific mission is not enough.

Behind Pan’s tenacity are China’s great power ambitions, and it would be a mistake to divorce China’s quantum saga from the country’s political and military drive. You have to look beyond the headlines and the Micius moment to where China is headed.

Chinese leadership is pretty clear on this issue, as conveyed by President Xi Jinping at the end of May:
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are the Chinese peoples’ platform for national prosperity and power. So, understandably, getting ahead in quantumdom is part and parcel of China’s relative positioning in the pecking order of great nations. At this stage, China is forging on with its dedicated leadership, institutional backup and
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Given the high stakes for China’s military security and standing in the world, this money pot is likely to grow.

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China can’t rest on its laurels, despite the head start

So this is where we are: China has
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In 2011, China embarked on its quantum quest to launch a satellite by 2016; it did that. And Pan himself announced to the international conference audience in Hefei that China aims to achieve the Asia-Europe inter-continental quantum key distribution by 2020, and build a quantum communication network by 2030.

There is no question that China has openly changed expectations of what quantumdom can do for national and international security, military power balances and great power status. Even if Micius does not live up to its hype, it is a game-changer.

China has a commendable head start, but it is anyone’s guess who will come out on top in the space-based quantum competition in the long run. China cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

For now though the West, along with the rest, should get set to play catch up with China.
 

delft

Brigadier
On electric road vehicles:
Overhead wires are more efficient than batteries or wireless. The last two are similarly efficient, so wireless has the weight advantage, batteries have the advantage of lower investment.
Wireless has the advantage of using the same road antennae to guide the vehicle which is much easier than the google way.
Antennae are powered only when a vehicle is directly above them and they send their power directly upwards, and with the vehicle antenna covering its underside little radiation will escape.
Another disadvantage for overhead wires is that they are occasionally destroyed by high vehicles, crane vehicles &c. Antennae in the road are likely to make road repair more expensive.
I prefer maximal use of rail transport for the obvious reasons: steel wheels on steel rails have much less resistance than rubber tires on roads, rail transport has a higher labour productivity.
 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Something new. China is to launch the first experimental X-Ray Pulsar based navigation satellite in November. I did not post this news until I found it on CAST's official site below.
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The strange thing is that this article from CAST is quoting the source from Xinhua where I was not able to find. I quote the texts from the CAST article.
记者从中国空间技术研究院获悉,中国将于11月择机发射首颗脉冲星导航试验卫星(XPNAV-1)According to information that journalist acquired from CAST, China plans to launch the first ......
Anyways, I don't doubt its authenticity as CAST posted it on its own site.

Here is the NASA counterpart.
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The possible launch date according to NASA post
Anticipated launch of NICER is in early 2017.

Intentionally or not, it looks like a race.

A teasing word, are people going to admit everybody else "copying" China this time if we do see XPNAV-1 launched in 2016?o_O BTW, I won't use that word "copy" either way:cool:, but many people here seem to insist using it on China when China made something later than other countries and doing the same job.:rolleyes: So mark my words, this kind of reversion will come more and more.
 

Ultra

Junior Member
Well, Please allow me...

With all the AI research, China will hasten the arrival of singularity, which spells the end of mankind and the rise of the machine... We will soon meet T-800... And it's all China's fault...:D:p:eek:


I think it will be more like that novel-turned-computer-game called "
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" :


"The story takes place 109 years after the complete destruction of human civilization. The
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had escalated into a
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, fought mainly between
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,
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, and the
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. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans.



The machines are each referred to as "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator". Finally, "AM" stands for "Aggressive Menace". One day, one of the three computers becomes
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, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass
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, killing off all but four men and one woman.


The survivors live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left. The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment
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them. AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually
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."


This fictional story is sounding more and more like a non-fiction by the day. With Obama annoucing strategic investments into AI for military use and China also spending massive amount into AI for its own military research, I just hope the last 5 surviving human who get tortured for eternality won't be me.
 
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