Slashdot Mirror
An Up-Close Look At the Parker Solar Probe -- the Spacecraft That Will Skim the Sun's Surface (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, offering an up-close look at the Parker Solar Probe: This summer, NASA will launch the Parker Solar Probe, an impressively heat-resistant spacecraft destined to glide closer to the surface of the Sun than any spacecraft before it. It will fly within about 6 million kilometers of the searing surface, more than seven times closer than earlier craft. If all goes to plan, the craft will be hurtling at 724,205 km per hour and have its one-of-a-kind heat shield perfectly facing the surface as it makes those closest approaches. In about seven years, it will complete 24 orbits around the Sun and pass by Venus seven times. All the while, the Parker probe will collect a constellation of data to help answer scientists' burning questions -- and solve some sizzling mysteries -- about the orb of hot plasma that lights up our Solar System. Namely, it will try to help us finally understand why the Sun's atmosphere is 300 times hotter than its surface, which itself is a balmy 5,727C. This fact defies basic physics and to this day is unexplained. One of the leading hypotheses to account for the heat shift comes from famed physicist Eugene Parker, after whom the probe is named. In the mid-1950s, Parker theorized that the Sun's super-heated corona could be explained by a complex system of plasma, magnetic fields, and energetic particles that spark solar explosions called "nanoflares." Scientists are thirsty for close-up data on those potential explosions as well as the cascade of energy called solar wind. With that data, they can put their hypotheses to the test. And in addition to helping us understand coronal heat, data on these sunny phenomena could help clear up poorly understood space weather, which can wreak havoc on satellites and power lines here on Earth.
The plasma increases in density and temperature gradient until some arbitrarily defined point of human definition. If this thing is warping through there 7e5 km / hr then it's obviously nowhere near any surface.
I hope they plan on only going there at night!
#DeleteFacebook
All the while, the Parker probe will collect a constellation of data to help answer scientists' burning questions....
Pun intended I hope
The mystery is a lot simpler, just read up on https://www.thunderbolts.info/... and other Electric Universe research. Our sun is basically a gigantic electric arc lamp.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
...inside the probe, can they just open a window or something?
A group of North Korean scientists caused quite a stir when they attended a convention of astrophysicists, and proclaimed boldly that they were going to land a manned space probe on the sun. There was silence in the auditorium for about five seconds, before uproarious laughter burst out. One of the distinguished scientists from England stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "Why this is QUITE preposterous! You'll never get a manned craft within a million miles of the sun before it burns up! No one would survive! How do you expect to accomplish such a feat?"
The lead North Korean scientist stood up and glared at the upstart. He boldly proclaimed, "Our Great Leader, Kim Jong Eun, is a MASTER SCIENTIST! He has given us the plan for success in this mission!"
The English scientist smirked, "And what is that exactly?"
The North Korean scientist smirked back and replied, "We're going AT NIGHT!"
Don't do that. You're not trying to win a creative writing contest in high school.
At its closest the probe will be 1/10 the distance Sun-Mercury
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Thats a feat in itself as the fastest we ever launched was roughly Juno with a gravity assist got to 265,000 KPH, and these guys are gonna go almost 3 times as fast, is this correct?! Anyone?
What," said Trillian in a small quiet voice, "does 'sundive' mean?"
"It means," said Marvin, "that the ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun. Dive. It's very simple to understand."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Unfortunately Parker didn't appear in the Sun Probe episode.
Bullshit. Stupid fucking bullshit. Your EU is nothing more than crap, which requires things we've observed, and experimental results from the past 99 years to be completely wrong. Either Relativity is right, or EU is right.. can't be both... and EVERY experiment done has shown Relativity is correct, and on the EU side, they've all shown EU doesn't explain anything experimentally.
Seriously.. what the fuck is wrong with you EU cultists?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It's always fun whenever physics gets a good shake-up.
I'll just leave this excerpt from Robitaille's 2007 paper here.
There have been multiple public presentations about the software on this mission.
http://flightsoftware.jhuapl.e...
http://flightsoftware.jhuapl.e...
Goddard also has the interesting framework Core Flight System (cFE/cFS) which is available as open source. Again multiple presentations on it but a nice presentation by Dave McComas on it is here:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/...
Re: "Either Relativity is right, or EU is right.. can't be both... and EVERY experiment done has shown Relativity is correct"
You could swap out "EU" with "quantum mechanics", and we'd be in the same exact situation.
Re: "EU doesn't explain anything experimentally"
Just to give an example, it can explain why the ionosphere is layered. There is a very simple experiment which involves charge-loading a metal sphere in a vacuum. This very simple experiment produces a layering of charge, and experimentally, that would appear to suggest that our planet Earth is a charged body in space. There are many other examples -- but realize that they are not going to just pop into your science journalism newsfeed; you have to actually seek these arguments out.
...lost. Get over it.
Hm, I have reservations about this probe-- sounds familiar
Sun Probe
I loved that show when I was a kid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
nt.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Somebody please tell me what the fuck "EU" means in this context?
Cool, so you have a web page that dates back to 1996, and it shows. Dude, update it; It's an embarrassment!
It's on my to-do list. Somewhere around item number seventy or eighty, I have other things to do. Besides, the nice thing about vanilla html is that it works even if you have an old browser that doesn't support the latest doodads and geegaws.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What kind of materials are used that can take that kind of heat, even a fraction of the heat destroys most electrical component.
Carbon. Sublimates around 3825C or so.
Most of the spacecraft hides behind the carbon shadow shield-- almost all the instruments don't need to look toward the sun (the main interest is plasma and fields). The exception is the solar array (my part of the project!)-- this doesn't work unless it is in the sunlight :). But the sunlight is intense enough that we only need a tiny bit of the array to be illuminated, so we retract most of it into the shadow, tilt the part that does see the sun, and use concentrator solar cells that are actively cooled to keep temperatures reasonable.
Honestly, it is people like you that keep me coming back to /. , I have yet to find a single site to replace it.(sure there is hacknews and reddit...)
Thanks.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
EU === Electric Universe, but also EU == electrical cosmology. Its central thesis is that cosmic plasmas behave as laboratory plasmas -- an important claim in light of the realization, since 1958, that most of the matter that we can see with telescopes is matter in the plasma state (>99%).
One thing to know is that in the EU, there is no dark matter problem: Since we clearly observe plasma to conduct in the laboratory, what is being claimed is that the cosmic plasma is conducting across vast distances of space over plasma filaments -- much like what is already observed with a novelty plasma globe. These filaments are referred to by mainstream astrophysicists as "interstellar clouds", but in fact, "clouds" like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are highly filamentary. They are hardly the only ones; in fact, hydrogen filaments are ubiquitous in space, and have been shown to precede the formation of stars.
What seems to confuse a lot of people about the debate is that mainstream astrophysicists are arguing against the idea that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. But, this is indeed the case. They have been using fluids models to model cosmic plasmas, and this creates the extraordinary situation that when astronomical observations exhibit the features of laboratory plasmas, even professional astrophysicists and cosmologists will commonly fail to recognize very common forms observed in the laboratory for electricity over gas. When these failures are pointed out, the debate can become extremely emotional -- and we have a situation where stating "the obvious" creates a very acrimonious situation.
There is a lot of talk about scientists and very little talk about physical theory. As far as I can tell, EU is some conspiracy theory about scientists as opposed to a science theory. Maybe it would be more attractive and approachable if they drop the antisocial, whiny cruft and stuck to business.
Came for the Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun references, was disappointed.
and play all of our favorite Disaster Area tunes in the way in!
To the sun:
I will prove it, here is the transmission from the Parker probe already on Youtube:
Cool, so you have a web page that dates back to 1996, and it shows. Dude, update it; It's an embarrassment!
It's on my to-do list. Somewhere around item number seventy or eighty, I have other things to do. Besides, the nice thing about vanilla html is that it works even if you have an old browser that doesn't support the latest doodads and geegaws.
But we live in the post-content age. It's all about artsy-fartsy bling, not content. You think content makes up for the lack of Animoji? Get with the times.
{satire-tag-so-I-don't-haveta-explain-it}
What seems to confuse a lot of people about the debate is that mainstream astrophysicists are arguing against the idea that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas.
This is flat out wrong considering the number of lab experiments that exist solely as astrophysical models. Additionally, many basic and fusion plasma experiments get part of their funding to do astrophysical experiments (20% on the last fusion project I worked on). We presented this data without any conflict at astrophysics conferences. And at plasma physics conferences we were constantly approached by theoretical astrophysicists looking for labs that could test new things.
They have been using fluids models to model cosmic plasmas,
Uh, the vast majority of models I've seen are at least resistive, and often gyrokinetic or flat out kinetic instead of fluid. PIC is really popular for astrophysical plasmas, and a lot of the work on relativistic plasmas can't be fluid model at all.
When these failures are pointed out, the debate can become extremely emotional
I'm sorry, but how do you expect people to react when you tell them they are wrong but present such a blatant strawman? If you walked up to a painter doing a portrait of a person, and complained how it is a bad horse and that painters are ignorant for not knowing that a horse has four legs, what do you expect? Short of finding a saint, don't expect rational debate for long when arguing using what appears to be delusions about the other party is doing. Scientists get approached constantly (a couple cold emails a week for me) by people who didn't read an intro level textbook, and it is extremely time consuming and unfruitful to argue with most of them (or worse, leads to legal problems occasionally). It is fine to say something in that textbook is wrong (I have several colleagues that published papers with possible criticism of basic concepts), but you better know what you are arguing against. The vitriol is for the strawman aspect, not the criticism aspect usually.
Re: "There is a lot of talk about scientists and very little talk about physical theory. As far as I can tell, EU is some conspiracy theory about scientists as opposed to a science theory. Maybe it would be more attractive and approachable if they drop the antisocial, whiny cruft and stuck to business."
It's probably unfair to judge an entire cosmology through Internet comments. Since a lot of the efforts here are focused upon correcting misconceptions, these efforts may come off to some as "whiny". For a more thoughtful introduction, you might consider, instead, reading The Electric Sky by Don Scott, which goes into great length about how we can explain astronomical observations with ordinary laboratory plasma physics observations.
If you'd prefer to avoid purchasing their book, then consider their technical introduction, The Essential Guide -- which is actually geared towards those with an EE background. It is quite technical.
Alternatively, if you come from the world of plasma physics, you'd want to also supplement these works with the second edition of Physics of the Plasma Universe And in that case, there are also a couple of papers you should read here and here, which both review critiques of MHD in good detail.
Personally, I also recommend focusing upon the historical arguments, whose importance are greatly under-appreciated ... e.g., the mistaken assumption of empty space, the story of Kristian Birkeland, the history of the Birkeland current concept, the electron theory as a worldview, the story of Halton Arp, the Big Bang's big redshift assumption, and this discussion of the debate over uniformitarianism vs catastrophism, for starters.
For those that just want a very basic and quick introduction, then watch these two Youtube videos.
There is really no shortage of high-quality resources, pitched at all of the various levels. If you aren't seeing them, then that definitely says more about your own efforts to find these resources than anything else.
Re: "Uh, the vast majority of models I've seen are at least resistive, and often gyrokinetic or flat out kinetic instead of fluid. PIC is really popular for astrophysical plasmas, and a lot of the work on relativistic plasmas can't be fluid model at all."
There's an overt disconnect between what you are saying and the relentless onslaught of fluids concepts that appears within the analysis of astronomical plasmas. Whether or not the models in use are technically referred to as "fluids models", what is happening with them is that the plasmas are being modeled as fluids, without reference to electrodynamic plasma concepts observed within the laboratory.
There are by now numerous laboratory plasma physics concepts which generally don't appear in astrophysics papers -- including double layers, plasma instabilities (aka Peratt intabilities), z-pinches, critical ionization velocities, Marklund convection, and of course the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current.
Let's take an example from just this week. If you go to the original paper, it states:
But, anybody who has spent time working with electrodynamic plasmas in the plasma laboratory should already be very familiar with the ring of vortices morphology, because this exact type of filamentation is what happens for the highest charge-density state of a conducting plasma, known as the z-pinch. In fact, plasma physicists have been imprinting electron beams onto a variety of materials for many decades now, producing this same form in the laboratory.
When people point out the obvious problem of failing to mention the correspondence between the astronomical and laboratory forms, people who honestly should know better tend to totally lose it, and it honestly creates a very anti-science situation where the exactly correct conversations are apparently out-of-bounds.
Personally, I believe that you understand where the disconnect is happening, and are just adopting a defensive posture. Why not be honest with us, and help us to better understand, in your own words, why objects like KSN 2015K and sn1987a cannot be considered the cosmic version of laboratory z-pinches? What physical features -- not just assumptions -- actually precludes such an analysis? An honest assessment would really help to advance the conversation.
Stands for Electric Universe.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
surface.
Hot plasma is held tightly together by the Suns magnetic field. The rising/falling fields adds to the heated plasma.
I bet the probe will prove that.
Let us how you really feel. No need to pull your punches.
oh, crap. I downmodded a different comment as "offtopic" because it made a jab at EU. I wondered why it was bringing politics into the conversation. Meps.
I followed a link to a site talking about EU. It said "The usual demonstration using heavy steel balls on a rubber sheet to represent ‘gravity wells’ relies on gravity as its own explanation!" in it's first paragraph. I said to myself, "Well, since that whole business is a simplified 2D representation of a 4D phenomenon meant to *illustrate* the effect of gravity, I don't see an issue". I'm not sure it's worth reading the rest of it besides its entertainment value.
Of course, the link was from rationalwiki, so of course they're going to go find the most ridiculous examples out there. Having said that, I will take a look at some of your links to get a more lucid explanation from a proponents view.
sr
WTF? EU at +3 on /.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
We live in very interesting times, where things -- like electricity -- which are extraordinarily mundane down here on Earth are apparently just completely preposterous in the context of space.
It's real plain and simple:
Relativity -
* Einstein saw a problem with the existing science (he wasn't alone in that)
* he formed his hypothesis (with actual math, apparently it's a thing in physics to use real math)
* a bunch of predictions are made using his hypothesis
* from 1919 to present day, every experiment done to verified those predictions has a positive outcome.
Electric Universe - wow, i mean just wow (talk about crackpot dipshtis on this list)
* was it Velikovsky thinking Earth was a moon of Saturn until just a couple thousand years ago until *BOOM* electricity!, or was it the new earth creationists who saw it as a way to explain the Grand Canyon without the long term effects of water erosion? Everyone had some problem (other than the mental one) that *BOOM electricity! could solve
* all sorts of ideas floated... but no math, none at all...cause pseudo-science cultists can't do math it appears. Besides, using basic math would show that basic physics also say's the whole EU thing is bullshit
* a few predictions are made, some predictions required already observed things to not actually have happened, and a whole bunch of experimentally verified physics (including Relativity) to be completely wrong.
* experimental predictions verified to date = 0 (even Alfven couldn't find the radio emissions he predicted)
Your problem is you got to the point where actual scientists would discard a hypothesis that is wrong, but decided you could con people out of a bunch of money by keeping at it.
Every time an actual astronomy thread pops up, some dipshits from the EU cult starts talking about things that a 9th grader would know is bullshit. I place people like you as nothing more than liars and conspiracy theorists. Your certainly not a scientist, and what you say is simply a lie...actually, it's more like a con job given how the leeches who run the EU crap support themselves selling t-shirts and convention tickets.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Electric Universe - it's actual central thesis is:
* Einstein's postulates are wrong.
* General relativity (GR) is wrong.
* The Universe is not expanding.
* The electric force travels faster than the speed of light with near-infinite velocity.
* Gravity has two poles like a bar magnet; dipole gravity.
* A plenum of neutrinos forms an all-pervasive aether.
* Planets give birth to comets.
* Stars do not shine because of internal nuclear fusion caused by gravitational collapse. Rather, they are anodes for galactic discharge currents.
* Impact craters on Venus, Mars and the Moon are not caused by impacts, but by electrical discharges. The same applies to the Valles Marineris (a massive canyon on Mars) and the Grand Canyon on Earth.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
for a longer read: https://briankoberlein.com/201...
EU is pseudo-science with a cult following. Why? It doesn't take any actual work to be a brain-dead follower (that's my guess).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Submit your name and it will be included in a memory card that will fly aboard Parker Solar Probe spacecraft.
Submissions will be accepted through April 27, 2018.
http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl...
Sorry, I meant ELECTRIC UNIVERSE®, of course....
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What have you got against the European Union???
Looks like they are sending a v1.0 Darlek to the sun.
I had read that sound waves were the cause of the corona being hotter than the surface.
Not your conventional sound waves, yet a likeness caused by the roiling surface creating audio frequency waves through the plasma.
Also, how can anything survive millions of degrees of heat?!
I cannot think of anything that doen't melt at even the 5000C surface temperature of the Sun.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Setting aside the fact that the existence of mathematics does not somehow make it correct, it is absolutely misleading to assert that there is no mathematics associated with either electrical cosmology (for example here) or the Electric Universe (for example here). In fact, understanding both require a deep appreciation for the Lorentz Force and Maxwell's Equations. Mathematics has been a part of electrical cosmology from its inception (for example here).
Math is crucial for understanding the critical ionization velocity effect; it has been used to show how Marklund convection can replace gravitational accretion as a system for forming stars (and unlike the idea of stars accreting gravitationally, the geometry matches observations of actual stars forming all at once in a burst). Don Scott could not have accurately predicted the structure of AGN jets without significant amounts of mathematics. He's a retired EE professor, so he has spent his life immersed in these mathematics which you claim the EU does not include.
Attempts to model space without electrodynamic plasma physics concepts are destined to fail. We know this because it's already been tried, and the approach has failed to explain the nature of the many cosmic plasma structures we observe.
Think about it this way: What is the first plasma we encounter as we leave the Earth? It's the ionosphere. You may not know a whole lot about the ionosphere, but if you've been paying attention at all, you will at least understand that it is layered. You might spend some time thinking about why that is. Why should differing concentrations of charge exist in layers at all? Why not just a smooth gradient of charge that tapers off as one leaves Earth? Why should differing, adjacent regions of charge not neutralize one another?
The math here explains why.
In a 1992 paper titled, "Double Layers Do Accelerate Particles in the Auroral Zone," the authors plainly state:
Observations of laboratory plasmas have shown that double layers are what lend plasmas their structure. When you see a plasma filament in a novelty plasma globe, you should be asking: Why is charge confined to this thin filament? Laboratory plasma physicists point to the double layer as the source of this structure.
You should also be asking these same types of questions about the Van Allen Radiation belts: How can it be that these belts have all of this
Carl Sagan:
Koberlein admits 4 years later that he was wrong to claim that the Electric Universe predicts no neutrinos, but take a look at the link you posted: He has left the claim there in his personal blog, without any mention of the mistake. Not only does he refuse to have his critiques reviewed, but when he is informed of obvious mistakes, he also refuses to retract those mistaken claims. This is the process which you are supporting by passing along his links. I'm always amused that people who claim to believe so strongly in the value of peer review will gladly point to unreviewed critiques so long as they personally agree with the claims being made.
Re: "The electric force travels faster than the speed of light with near-infinite velocity."
You've completely misstated this point, to the point of causing confusion. What Wal has suggested is that electrons have subparticles (he calls them "subtrons"). It is the subtrons which are interacting at near-infinite velocity and which confer quantum physics' mysterious attributes (absolutely not the electric force, which of course results from electrons -- not subtrons). Using this approach, it also becomes possible to explain gravity as a form of electron dipole distortion, much like what we already know about how the Van der Waals force works. This approach offers us a possible way to reconcile the quantum and gravity domains -- a problem which you of course fail to mention in your attempt here to discredit the EU. Their only crime here is to try to solve the problem that you fail to mention -- a problem which you will still be stuck with if you remove the EU from the conversation.
But, it's also incorrect to state that this constitutes their "central thesis". The central thesis is the conversation which we've been having here about how to model cosmic plasmas. When engaging these topics, its crucial to start there, because if you talk to people who consider themselves to be adherents, they will not place a whole lot of importance on subtrons, and you may also run into people who engage the EU topics, but who do not necessarily agree that all aspects of Relativity are wrong. Just like in mainstream physics, to the extent that people are thinking for themselves, you're going to observe a full spectrum of beliefs -- some better put together than others, of course.
... circle-jerking filter bubbles and bandwagons that always go to dog piles?
So something that does not allow any kind of voting without explaining yourself (like Reddit) in human words _and_ facing the backlash... plus not having one centralized authority that might deem itself more equal and keep things aligned with their personal bias (like Wikipedia)?
So a decentralized P2P protocol on top of TCP (and NOT HTTP or some other Web inner-platform effect cancer), with federated message storage, similar to IRC, XMMP and push message servers, preferably with a server that you can run with just a $(emerge $NewsServer && rc-service $NewsServer start) or equivalent.
You're right... EU has no central thesis because it's a mashed up bunch of shit. The few predictions it can make have been shown to be wrong, and it still requires relativity wrong.... but relativity has always had positive experimental conclusions. EU is a shithole of a con, and the people who still adhere to it are idiots who refuse to accept reality for some unknown reason.
Relativity works. There has been no experiment where it has had a negative outcome. Until you can explain why we need to throw away a working, tested, verifiable theory (relativity) for a mixed up pile of shit that has no math, and who's predictions can't be experimentally verified (and in actuality, are experimentally disproven), then you're peddling bullshit... nothing more. You're not a scientist, you're a crackpot. I don't have to discredit EU because it has no credit except with a handful of idiots and conmen who want you to buy their t-shirts. Do yourself a favor, quit being a fucking idiot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Re: "The few predictions it can make have been shown to be wrong"
As I've stated in another thread here, you are blocking the best explanation we currently have for the observed layering of cosmic plasmas. A person need only go to the first nearest plasma to Earth -- its ionosphere -- and you will immediately run into the unavoidable problem of explaining how it can be that the different regions exist as layers which do not recombine or mix. In other words, why do plasmas exhibit structure with well-defined edges, where plus and minus charge can coexist without apparently recombining to form neutral matter? Your insistence that the cosmic plasmas are not behaving as laboratory plasmas blocks the most scientific explanation we have for layering in plasmas: the double layer.
Your insistence that Relativity must be right ignores the conflict which existed long before the Electric Universe ever came onto the scene -- one of the problems which the EU actually tries to solve -- that quantum mechanics is irreconcilable with Relativity. One or the other (or both) will need to undergo significant changes in order to create an internally consistent modern physics worldview. The treatment of theorists who are attempting to find such novel solutions (without rigid adherence to the existing theories) as somehow heretical would seem to entrench modern science into this irreconcilable state forever. There can come a point where defense of scientific theories becomes defense against innovation in the sciences.
Re: "Relativity works. There has been no experiment where it has had a negative outcome."
Entire books have been written on this topic, but the most important reason why your statement misleads is because you are referring to the accuracy and precision of the equations, whereas the actual debate on these matters has always been over the physical inference.
Complete bullshit... that's all you have. You're not doing science, you're not learning science... EU is a quasi-religious cult trying to gain some acceptance as science, and is nothing more than trash for imbeciles. You want it to be 1918, before the first (of many) experiments corroborated Einsteins predictions.... it's not. You put forth trash, and wonder why people with a decent education call you on your bullshit. You really shouldn't, because what you're really doing is trying to sell Piltdown Man; air, earth, fire, and water are not the four elements that make up everything.... and the electric universe bullshit is on the same level as both those.
I get it, you come to forums like this because you're stupid fucking arguments get shredded when you talk to anyone who actually has a high school level education in physics. Get used to it, because you're not doing anything useful by intentionally being a fucking idiot.
GPS works. Old television sets worked. Particle accelerators work. Radar guns work. Supercomputers work. Telecommunication satellite work. THAT is Relativity. Your worthless shit electric universe does nothing, period; it predicts nothing, it explains nothing.... and along the way we'd have to abandon the past 50+ years of technology that actually DOES work. That is fucking stupid.
You are a cultist. You're either one of the conmen, or one of the sheep, but intentionally being stupid isn't the way to go. EU isn't science, and defending Relativity is pretty fucking easy with 99 years of positive experimental confirmations, as well as a pretty fucking significant array of technology that requires it.... technology that actually works. EU isn't innovation... it's a backwards step into the steaming pile of shit of intentional ignorance.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
None of these people are adherents of the Electric Universe, yet they are all saying the same thing.
What about the power system? Do you use the heat gradient with peltier elements, photovoltaics or is there a separate power source on board?
We looked at using a thermoelectric, but turned out a better solution was using concentrator photovoltaics, hiding most of the photovoltaics behind the shadow shield at closest approach, and then cooling the photovoltaics.
How do you make the power electronics work? Is everything including logic silicone carbide? What kind of core materials for inductors? Must be super fun to work on such a project :)
In fact we do a lot of silicon carbide electronic device research for high temperature applications at Glenn, but for this particular application, most of the electronics were hidden behind the shadow shield, and don't operate at high temperature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Thunderbolts Project has decided to cover Slashdot readers' rejection of the mainstream astrophysical acknowledgement of electricity in space in their ongoing Space News Youtube series.
Is the David Brin's "Sundiver" design (with lasers dissipating the heat away from the ship) any realistic?
Unfortunately not. In oversimplified terms, waste heat radiators "really" get rid of excess entropy. Laser beams are low entropy, so they don't radiate waste heat, they radiate usable energy. Waste heat is defined as everything that is not useable energy. If lasers could radiate waste heat, you could make a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
In less technical terms: the laser would need a waste-heat radiator.https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11923383&cid=56369001#
http://www.geoffreylandis.com