Since the spring of 2006 I have been teaching English Speaking, Writing and Computer Science courses in Mainland China. Later on, I will a write about a few of my experiences, both good and bad, so as to help anyone who desires to go to the Mainland and teach.
Within the last week, I came to
Hong Kong with the intention of getting an L Visa (a tourist visa) so I could visit friends, travel to Tibet and fix a few of the Windows computers that always seem to be having one kind of problem or another. Unfortunately, being in
Hong Kong is a disadvantage for
foreigners. The current PRC rules are if you are American (and I must assume it is the same for people from other countries) China will only issue a double entry visa that is valid for six (6) months at a cost of
HK $1100 (about $140 US.) This rate is much higher than any other country on the list I saw. Further, it makes no difference if you choose and single entry visa as it is the same price as a double entry visa. An L visa issued in the United States, however, is good for one year and it is a mulitiple entry visa. So, get your visa for the Mainland before arriving in Hong Kong. It's the same price, but you get a much better deal for you money if you do this before you leave.
Labels: Visa Surprises
N = R * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L(or Why do we seem to be alone?)
I've often wondered whether intelligent life survives long enough to make much of a difference in the large-scale structure of galaxies. Large engineering projects, like the hypothetical possible Dyson spheres or high bandwidth communications, likely to be lasers or something similar, should be visible at significant fractions of our galaxy's diameter and yet we see nothing. There must be a reason for this. Either the basic assumption of continual technological expansion is incorrect, the galaxy is populated with a small number of stealthy aggressive species who exterminate newcomers upon detection or there isn't anybody out there.
We have one example of technological life forms developing, us, but for reasons I will get into later, we are probably near the bottom in survival times for intelligent life. I think the first idea, that massive technological civilizations have short lifetimes, is likely as the data available from our situation points to exactly this fate, and as such would lead irreversibly to the present data of no evidence for technological civilization flourishing. To match the current data the lifetime of such civilizations would likely be on the order of four hundred years after first radio transmission.
Since radio is the first stage of change to the large scale structure of the galaxy, and it requires both a sender and a receiver, an upper limit can be placed on the average (assuming what we have is an average situation, which is reasonable) distribution of such combinations.
The actual lifetime of a technological civilization would at least give us a best guess of our extinction date. We have enough data to do this now, so I will cover this first. Later, I will explore some possibilities for increasing the last term of Drake's famous equation and this is the most interesting thing our species could be involved in right now as it is our most pressing problem. Buying time is the name of the game right now...we just have to figure out how.
