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Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus
astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
The gas mines.... of Uranus.
Please tell me that this story is a joke.
I would expect gas to be fairly prevalent around anyone's anus.
Nonaggression works!
I say live and let DIE !!
that title is just begging for jokes...
-- derby
Gas in Uranus? Surely nobody would make a joke about that.
As your Uranus blowing up is not a good thing.
This is not a joke post.
this research doesn't pass the smell test.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
There's some around, well, you know...
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Nope, you're not!
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
this is actually an interesting article. Certainly more thought-provoking than the latest smart-phone malware.
Just sayin'.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Rather than shipping factories to outer planets and extracting helium-3 from a dilute mixture, why not use technology that already exists? Irradiate lithium in a fission reactor, get tritium as a result, and let it decay to helium-3.
"It does seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to those worlds than it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species...
Just now, there are a great many matters pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first or are they a reason for going?"
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Insert Tibana gas mines of Bespin joke, complete with reference to Lando Calrissian.
I felt a great disturbance in the 'net... as if a million voices suddenly cried out in bad jokes, and were suddenly posted on Slashdot.
This story should be fun.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I would have thought it would be full of methane.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an operating fusion reactor before we talk about mining Helium-3? No one has yet proven fusion is a viable source of energy and yet everyone is assuming it'll all work out in the end. You might as well base it on cold fusion. I'd love to see fusion proven as a source of clean energy but I've been following it since the 70s and we aren't any closer now than we were back then.
Why travel a gigameters or even petameters when we can travel less than a megameter to get our fuel?
Mansur rocks!
Sorry, no Hynerians here. Just humans. All we produce is methane.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How many space-based projects have we seen just this year called "Project Icarus"? It's as though there's no other popularly recognisable legend/myth with a reference to flight, let alone one that represents overreach & hubris as a spectacular failure at the point of apparent success.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
i think i had enough to stay disconnected for a few good weeks.
It's never ever ever ever ever going to happen. It takes more energy to go to another planet and get the fuel than you would ever get from the fuel. To simply accelerate the mass of the helium itself to a decent speed takes such a huge portion of the energy it contains, possibly more actually, that it would be more expensive than any other energy source ever invented. You could launch coal into space from earth for cheaper and run a steam powered spaceship for cheaper than dragging gas back from a distant planet.
I have a theory about this. Hmmm, energy is a hot topic right now. Getting lots of energy gets attention from the media and government. NASA is getting de-funded. I think this entire thing is an exaggeration to get more space travel funded.
Any project failures and Slashdot will be full of references of how Icarus flew too close to the black hole sun....
would this be the first time a goatse link would likely be modded informative?
Someone beat me to the fart joke. :(
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
It seems that someone tries to bring democracy to Uranus -- Flock
it might be smelly but they are not going mine my anus
I'm pretty certain that NASA won't consider a project named ICARUS for the obvious connotations.
No-one has a working (energy-positive) controlled fusion design. Icarus in theory has an advantage in that it's powered by thermonuclear device detonation, but the technological and engineering challenges are still immense, and AFAIK no-one is anywhere close to solving them. Let alone how you'd solve the political problems inherent in building a 54000 tonne nuclear-engined missile. It strikes me as putting the cart before the horse in a big way to be worrying about fuel at this stage of the project. You might as well have started the article "When considering sources of gold to feed your dragon..."
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
So where is the best place to start? At the pole?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
With both Polywell and Andrea Rossi fusion projects we still need Helium 3?
I think this become sort of urban legend thanks to movies like "Moon" but is far from being true today.
I would have thought such a title more fitting for an operation near Mercury.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Enough said?
It's more likely than you think.
No, this isn't another "youranus" joke. It's obviously a bad investment in time, energy and money to drive all the way to Uranus and back with gas just for the relatively small amount of energy we'd get out of it back here. For a much smaller investment we could get enough to power the Earth back from deuterium mining on the Moon as the summary notes. Or, even better, we could put solar collectors across Lunar surface, then beam the energy back to the Earth through a small network of lunar/solar/Earth orbital satellites to floating sea platforms. The lunar energy projects would pay off within a decade, and replace practically all energy (and emissions, and mining, and their territorial conflicts) here on Earth.
But Uranus' gas "mines" are still an excellent resource. Once Earth's energy needs are satisfied, lunar/solar power would still provide enough to push human exploitation through the other planets. Lunar/solar power is an excellent way to get to Uranus, especially if we set a trail of collectors and transmitters along the way. But once there, solar energy density is so low that even very large collectors left to concentrate solar energy beamed to the Uranus neighborhood will be very low. To get beyond Uranus, and even around in the Jupiter-Saturn neighborhood, pulling energy from Uranus' gas would be a good way to go. Or rather from each gas giant.
By the time we get Earth's energy hooked up to lunar/solar and get out to the outer planets, I expect we'll have gas->radiation fusion tech that works well in the uninhabited vacuum of interplanetary space. Dropping fusion plants into gas giants' atmospheres to pump a network of "solar" transfer stations orbiting planets, moons and the Sun would complete a Solar System power network delivering energy throughout the system along the paths our machines, and perhaps eventually longterm colonizing humans, travel. Power from Uranus, and then Neptune, would be the best way to push our travel outwards from our planets into really distant places, and eventually to other stars.
Let's not turn "Uranus gas mining" into just a joke. We'll get to it. But let's get serious about lunar/solar power systems, and the satellite infrastructure to support it. We've had the tech to do it for over a decade, and the dire need to replace our sugenocidal legacy energy systems with it for even longer. Back to the moon for solar power; Uranus can wait.
--
make install -not war
Flatus is brought to the rectum by the same process which causes feces to descend from the large intestine (see peristaltic movement), and may cause a similar feeling of urgency and discomfort. Researchers investigating the role of sensory nerve endings in the anal canal did not find them to be essential for retaining fluids in the anus, and instead speculate that their role may be to distinguish between flatus and feces, thereby helping detect a need to defecate or to signal the end of defecation.[5]
The sound varies depending on the tightness of the sphincter muscle and velocity of the gas being propelled, as well as other factors, such as water and body fat. The auditory pitch (sound) of the flatulence outburst can also be affected by the anal embouchure. Among humans, flatulence occasionally happens accidentally, such as incidentally to coughing or sneezing or during orgasm; on other occasions, flatulence can be voluntarily elicited by tensing the rectum or "bearing down" on stomach or bowel muscles and subsequently relaxing the anal sphincter, resulting in the expulsion of flatus.
We don't even have fusion working yet, and He-3 isn't the easiest fuel to fuse, so it won't be burned by first-generation reactors. So stop talking about it as a primary reason to go to the moon, already! Let's get some kind of fusion working first.
That being said, getting some kind of a ship to Uranus that could collect it would be enough of a technological challenge that we would probably have fusion working by then.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That poor planet really needs to be renamed.
Hope is the currency of fools
More interested in the fact they named the project "Icarus".
Its like...they WANT the mining craft getting their wings wet and crash....as opposed on mining on Mercury.
See...jokes DONT HAVE TO BE SHALLOW!
*somewhere a Jaffa is laughing*
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
This would be a great reason to build the cloud city of Bespin - just as long as the appointed administrator doesn't use it as a wager in a card game.
When you can just make the helium-3 on Earth.
http://www.marxist.com/
Don't they know what happened to Icarus?
please don't mine 'my anus'
I've never had my anus described as a gas mine, although when others have proclaimed themselves to be a star, I've often thought of them as a gas giant.
If you're going to find gas anywhere, it would be out of Uranus. Jupiter would be stupider.
This is not a question:
"Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
Question marks mark questions.
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