The energy to send a description of an object to another star is roughly a million times less than the energy to send the object itself. So the right answer is to send a small nanotech factory which builds a receiving station at your destination. Then you scan a person at an atomic level here, transmit the data, and build a copy at the other end. Besides being frugal from an energy standpoint, it allows you to travel at the highest possible speed (that of light), and the trip time from the traveler's point of view is zero. The nanotech factory still is limited to some sublight speed, but it is likely to be much smaller than a starship carrying humans.
As to when will we be able to do stuff on an atomic scale, Intel announced their 22 nm chip process today. That's roughly 64 atoms across. At the rate things are going, they should be down to single atoms in about 20 years.
Oops, not any more. (My heart goes out to all the people that lost lives and homes, but sometimes humor is a way to cope with disasters).
The tornado spawning supercell that devastated Tuscaloosa and Birmingham did in fact go right over my house. But I am an hour NE of Birmingham, so by that time it was down to winds strong enough to break 1 inch branches off the trees, the occasional roof shingle, and "your entire yard is underwater" strength rain.
An *average* thunderstorm releases as much energy as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A supercell, like the one that went through Alabama releases a lot more. It would laugh at your missiles.
Musk has a physics degree (as do I by the way), so an argument from that standpoint might work with him. And he certainly has enough money. When I was young and idealistic, I thought Boeing would work on projects like this. In reality, Boeing does very little that a customer is not asking for. They do not start a new airplane project until they have enough orders lined up, and all their government contracts it's the government agency telling them what to build. That is not to belittle their technical skill, which is enormous, but they don't set out on wild and crazy ideas on their own.
So my plan would be to work out the technical details, show how you can make lots of money with the first part of it, then find an investor or several. Unfortunately a retired engineer's savings are not sufficient. Think building the world's most powerful gun would attract the NRA's interest?
I think we can rely on the police to be lazy in general, and likely the search warrant would be for computer equipment. If you keep your naughty data in a spare small PC in a dusty box in the attic which you access wirelessly, and don't give them any special reason to think you have one up there, they could easily miss it.
If you have an old style rear projection TV you can easily fit an entire PC inside it, and transmit data via the coax cable.
At last a use for the cloud: register under a fake account name, say, that of your local prosecutor, and store your naughty files encrypted on there.
[Note: by "naughty" I don't mean sexual necessarily, I mean anything the powerful don't want you to have]
Elon is cutting the fat out of conventional rocket costs, and I applaud him for that, but that only takes the cost per kg down from it's weight in gold (for the Space Shuttle), to three times its weight in silver (for the Falcon 9). The actual energy cost of getting to orbit (8.7 kWh/kg) runs about $1/kg at typical retail electric rates. An efficient transportation system would run something like 4 times the bare energy cost, which works out to about the cost of UPS shipping or ground beef. So long as launch costs are measured in their weight in precious metals, rather than ordinary day to day items, space will be stupidly expensive and limited to a very few people. It should also be a hint you are doing it wrong if you are so far above what physics says the cost could be.
I used to work for Boeing on launch vehicles, advanced propulsion, and the Space Station. Now that I'm retired I am writing up my ideas on a better way: http://lunar.tiriondesigns.co.cc/ It is a work in progress, but the key idea is that there is no magic bullet (or magic rocket) that can solve the cost problem by itself. You need to:
* Leverage multiple good ideas to get cost savings that multiply together. Apply these ideas in several projects and systems that build on each other * Use less of or eliminate conventional rockets, because they are inefficient and expensive * Design for re-use and recycling in orbit to lower hardware and supply cost * Use materials and energy in space to cut down how much you need to bring from earth * Build infrastructure to make things cheaper over time instead of exactly as hard and expensive as the last time.
Get sturdier doors for your house, so you have time to tell the SWAT team they have the wrong house.
We have become a divided society. There are the powerful, who make the rules to suit themselves (corporate executives, politicians, and those who work for them), and the rest of us, who are kept powerless and increasingly treated like cattle. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is part of a federal agency, so if you pay federal taxes, you are helping to pay these goons. Find ways to reduce your taxable income, and stop feeding them. Otherwise it's just going to get worse.
For example, place the hard drive in the shell of a real but non functional printer. If it doesn't need to be connected, alternately hollow out a book and hide it in there, etc.
Mars currently loses about 100 tons of atmosphere per day. So dropping a 100 meter comet on it every 13 years is enough to make up the loss. On the scale you need to do things to terraform a planet, that is piddly.
The previous poster left out "drag iron-nickel asteroids into orbit and magnetize the heck out of them" to make a magnetosphere. That has fewer failure modes than a superconducting cable. Alternately extract a lot of iron from all that iron oxide on mars, make magnets, and place them all over the planet (all pointing the same way of course). Lastly, make a greenhouse dome to cover increasing areas of the planet until you cover the whole thing. At one earth atmosphere pressure, that can support 10 meters thick quartz, which should be plenty rugged. Thinner domes would need to be held *down* lest they float away. Then the leak rate will be zero aside from accidents.
In manufacturing, there is something called the "learning curve". As you run a production line and optimize how you do things, you learn to do it faster and cheaper. But one thing Boeing learned is production below 2 units a month did not produce a learning curve. People were not doing the tasks often enough, and *forgot* between repetitions when they were more than two weeks apart.
For a conventional rocket that climbs from the ground, they all have the same amount of atmosphere to push through. The drag is produced per square meter of frontal area, so you want a certain amount of mass of rocket per unit area to keep the drag losses within reason. That's why most rockets are around 50-100m tall. Once drag is taken care of, you get more efficient by going closer to spherical tanks. So rockets tend to get fatter once they are tall enough.
So at the lower payload limit you are bound by efficient shape for the rocket, and at the upper limit you want to launch often enough to learn from experience. In between will be the optimal size for lowest launch cost.
There are 35 banks in just the United States with more assets than Facebook's stock valuation (50 billion). The three largest US banks have assets of around 2 trillion each. Total *revenue* for Facebook is estimated at $2 billion. Since banks have to hold around 12% capital (their own money, not deposits), at most FB could host $16B per year, even if all revenue were profits (which it's not). They have a long way to go to even be noticed in the banking industry. Hell, I don't even leave money in Paypal longer than a few hours. It goes to my real bank where there is some oversight and regulations. I would trust Facebook with my money even less.
A full Earth surface to GEO space elevator is not possible with current materials. But you can certainly build a partial one with what we have now. And a partial one is still highly useful. For example, one that reaches 30% of the way down from orbit, and 30% of the way up from orbit can be done with current materials. That would make the job of any vehicle coming up from the ground much easier. At the other end, 30% above orbit velocity is nearly to Earth escape (41% is escape).
A 30% space elevator works out to a cable stress of 300 G-km. In other words the same as hanging a 300 km long cable at one gee under it's own weight. For carbon fiber, that works out to 5.3 GPa, which strength is available. In a real system you would taper it somewhat from center to tips, which lets you use lower stress and get realistic safety factors.
The argument that he started with is correct. Reaching earth orbit requires twice as much energy (30 MJ/kg ) as contained in good rocket fuel ( 15 MJ/kg ), therefore it is hard to get off the planet with conventional chemical rockets. There are plenty of ways to get off the planet besides conventional chemical rockets, however.
A simple example is using jet fuel in an air-breathing engine. That provides around 43 MJ/kg because you are getting the oxygen from the airflow, rather than a huge tank of oxygen like most rockets have. It's more than enough energy to get to orbit if you could use air-breathing engines all the way to space. You can't do that for obvious reasons, but if you can use air-breathing engines for *enough* of the trip, and ordinary rocket for the rest, you can have a workable system.
As far as the VASIMR plasma rocket, it has plenty of performance, but lacks enough thrust to get off the ground. You can, however combine it with a partial space elevator. A full one that goes all the way from the ground to space needs stronger materials than we have right now. But a partial one in the form of a vertical cable in orbit gives you a landing platform at the bottom that is sub-orbital. So whatever vehicle you fly up to the platform can use less propulsion. You elevator up the rest of the way. Hauling the cargo up will result in dragging the cable down, so you run your plasma rocket on a continuous basis to make that up. In effect the cable lets you concentrate the high efficiency, low thrust plasma rocket push into short term lift of cargoes.
People have already "crowd-sourced the cloud" to a near approximation of every book, CD, and DVD of note. Between Bit Torrent and one-click file hosting sites, the data is out there already. And anything you particularly want to keep, you can save one or more local copies. The only problem with this system is it's not legal. A reasonably priced rental system (see Netflix) can do it legally.
Me personally, I will never put only copy of my work products in the cloud. Using it as offsite backup is fine. Paper books I am working on cutting back on. I accumulated nearly 4000, and half of them I have not read yet (packrat librarian syndrome). At this point I have more than I can read for the rest of my life, so I am donating them to charity as I finish reading most of them. I will keep some favorites, but most of it doesn't need to stick around as it's "read once entertainment".
Don't put anything you want to keep private on a third party server. If you must use email, find one with encryption. Microsoft Outlook has had it since at least version 2003, and there are lots of other programs available.
They have tried twice now to plug the crack - first with a load of concrete, and then with an expanding polymer. Both failed, which makes me suspect the crack is a lot deeper than they think it is. Deep cracks in the ground are not terribly surprising after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. They may have to cofferdam the water upstream of the crack, and then dig it out the surface concrete, and fill it before patching it again. A cofferdam is a temporary barrier to keep water out of a construction site.
Britannica and other reputable paper-era encyclopedias had a system: they got experts in the field to write the articles. Scientific journals have experts in the field as editors and reviewers to look over the papers submitted. Those methods are not perfect, but they do filter out most of the junk. The way Wikipedia works now, where any random idiot can undo your educated input, you are better off making your own website or pdf, and just pointing to it. Then at worst they can delete the link, but they cannot go in and trash your article.
If they created a layer of "reviewed articles", where once approved it takes more than a random admin or user to undo it, they would get more interest by experts.
If it turns out Microsoft used any pirated software internally for development (its a big company, with a lot of computers, odds are somewhere someone did), then they could in turn be sued under the same law.
"Marvelous Designer" is a cloth simulation program. You drape the fabric over an object (human avatar, or anything else you want). Then it simulates how the fabric will drape in more or less real time (a fast PC helps in that). It takes into account stretch, stiffness, etc. Then you can export the model to other 3D programs, or to sewing software to produce actual clothing from it.
I used it to make this dress and bedspread for a virtual world:
(1) I have enough music already (~3000 tracks). I don't need to get much more, from any source, legal or not. I expect a lot of people are in this situation now.
(2) One click file hosting sites are among the most popular on the planet for a reason. I think a lot of people have simply shifted to them from P2P services.
How many of the people who used to play Solitaire and Minesweeper are now playing Angry Birds? In other words, casual games are just more visible now that they are being marketed separately.
The developer of this system, Roger Angel, is also in charge of the "Mirror Lab" at the University of Arizona, where they have produced many of the world's largest telescope mirrors. In other words, a respectable technologist, and not a scammer. Here is the company he set up to commercialize the research:
I have Thunderbird set to open my Gmail inbox by default, and then any mail I want to save gets dragged to a local folder (which I have lots of folders by topic). About 80% of incoming mail gets deleted. The rest I now have two copies, the original on Gmail, and my local copy. I figure the chances of *both* getting trashed is pretty low.
The way to level the playing field against large corporations is for citizens to form their own corporations. For example a "Buyer's Cooperative" which would use the buying power of it's members to negotiate better deals.
Slashdot Mirror
The energy to send a description of an object to another star is roughly a million times less than the energy to send the object itself. So the right answer is to send a small nanotech factory which builds a receiving station at your destination. Then you scan a person at an atomic level here, transmit the data, and build a copy at the other end. Besides being frugal from an energy standpoint, it allows you to travel at the highest possible speed (that of light), and the trip time from the traveler's point of view is zero. The nanotech factory still is limited to some sublight speed, but it is likely to be much smaller than a starship carrying humans.
As to when will we be able to do stuff on an atomic scale, Intel announced their 22 nm chip process today. That's roughly 64 atoms across. At the rate things are going, they should be down to single atoms in about 20 years.
Oops, not any more. (My heart goes out to all the people that lost lives and homes, but sometimes humor is a way to cope with disasters).
The tornado spawning supercell that devastated Tuscaloosa and Birmingham did in fact go right over my house. But I am an hour NE of Birmingham, so by that time it was down to winds strong enough to break 1 inch branches off the trees, the occasional roof shingle, and "your entire yard is underwater" strength rain.
An *average* thunderstorm releases as much energy as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A supercell, like the one that went through Alabama releases a lot more. It would laugh at your missiles.
Musk has a physics degree (as do I by the way), so an argument from that standpoint might work with him. And he certainly has enough money. When I was young and idealistic, I thought Boeing would work on projects like this. In reality, Boeing does very little that a customer is not asking for. They do not start a new airplane project until they have enough orders lined up, and all their government contracts it's the government agency telling them what to build. That is not to belittle their technical skill, which is enormous, but they don't set out on wild and crazy ideas on their own.
So my plan would be to work out the technical details, show how you can make lots of money with the first part of it, then find an investor or several. Unfortunately a retired engineer's savings are not sufficient. Think building the world's most powerful gun would attract the NRA's interest?
I think we can rely on the police to be lazy in general, and likely the search warrant would be for computer equipment. If you keep your naughty data in a spare small PC in a dusty box in the attic which you access wirelessly, and don't give them any special reason to think you have one up there, they could easily miss it.
If you have an old style rear projection TV you can easily fit an entire PC inside it, and transmit data via the coax cable.
At last a use for the cloud: register under a fake account name, say, that of your local prosecutor, and store your naughty files encrypted on there.
[Note: by "naughty" I don't mean sexual necessarily, I mean anything the powerful don't want you to have]
Elon is cutting the fat out of conventional rocket costs, and I applaud him for that, but that only takes the cost per kg down from it's weight in gold (for the Space Shuttle), to three times its weight in silver (for the Falcon 9). The actual energy cost of getting to orbit (8.7 kWh/kg) runs about $1/kg at typical retail electric rates. An efficient transportation system would run something like 4 times the bare energy cost, which works out to about the cost of UPS shipping or ground beef. So long as launch costs are measured in their weight in precious metals, rather than ordinary day to day items, space will be stupidly expensive and limited to a very few people. It should also be a hint you are doing it wrong if you are so far above what physics says the cost could be.
I used to work for Boeing on launch vehicles, advanced propulsion, and the Space Station. Now that I'm retired I am writing up my ideas on a better way:
http://lunar.tiriondesigns.co.cc/ It is a work in progress, but the key idea is that there is no magic bullet (or magic rocket) that can solve the cost problem by itself. You need to:
* Leverage multiple good ideas to get cost savings that multiply together. Apply these ideas in several projects and systems that build on each other
* Use less of or eliminate conventional rockets, because they are inefficient and expensive
* Design for re-use and recycling in orbit to lower hardware and supply cost
* Use materials and energy in space to cut down how much you need to bring from earth
* Build infrastructure to make things cheaper over time instead of exactly as hard and expensive as the last time.
Get sturdier doors for your house, so you have time to tell the SWAT team they have the wrong house.
We have become a divided society. There are the powerful, who make the rules to suit themselves (corporate executives, politicians, and those who work for them), and the rest of us, who are kept powerless and increasingly treated like cattle. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is part of a federal agency, so if you pay federal taxes, you are helping to pay these goons. Find ways to reduce your taxable income, and stop feeding them. Otherwise it's just going to get worse.
For example, place the hard drive in the shell of a real but non functional printer. If it doesn't need to be connected, alternately hollow out a book and hide it in there, etc.
Mars currently loses about 100 tons of atmosphere per day. So dropping a 100 meter comet on it every 13 years is enough to make up the loss. On the scale you need to do things to terraform a planet, that is piddly.
The previous poster left out "drag iron-nickel asteroids into orbit and magnetize the heck out of them" to make a magnetosphere. That has fewer failure modes than a superconducting cable. Alternately extract a lot of iron from all that iron oxide on mars, make magnets, and place them all over the planet (all pointing the same way of course). Lastly, make a greenhouse dome to cover increasing areas of the planet until you cover the whole thing. At one earth atmosphere pressure, that can support 10 meters thick quartz, which should be plenty rugged. Thinner domes would need to be held *down* lest they float away. Then the leak rate will be zero aside from accidents.
In manufacturing, there is something called the "learning curve". As you run a production line and optimize how you do things, you learn to do it faster and cheaper. But one thing Boeing learned is production below 2 units a month did not produce a learning curve. People were not doing the tasks often enough, and *forgot* between repetitions when they were more than two weeks apart.
For a conventional rocket that climbs from the ground, they all have the same amount of atmosphere to push through. The drag is produced per square meter of frontal area, so you want a certain amount of mass of rocket per unit area to keep the drag losses within reason. That's why most rockets are around 50-100m tall. Once drag is taken care of, you get more efficient by going closer to spherical tanks. So rockets tend to get fatter once they are tall enough.
So at the lower payload limit you are bound by efficient shape for the rocket, and at the upper limit you want to launch often enough to learn from experience. In between will be the optimal size for lowest launch cost.
There are 35 banks in just the United States with more assets than Facebook's stock valuation (50 billion). The three largest US banks have assets of around 2 trillion each. Total *revenue* for Facebook is estimated at $2 billion. Since banks have to hold around 12% capital (their own money, not deposits), at most FB could host $16B per year, even if all revenue were profits (which it's not). They have a long way to go to even be noticed in the banking industry. Hell, I don't even leave money in Paypal longer than a few hours. It goes to my real bank where there is some oversight and regulations. I would trust Facebook with my money even less.
A full Earth surface to GEO space elevator is not possible with current materials. But you can certainly build a partial one with what we have now. And a partial one is still highly useful. For example, one that reaches 30% of the way down from orbit, and 30% of the way up from orbit can be done with current materials. That would make the job of any vehicle coming up from the ground much easier. At the other end, 30% above orbit velocity is nearly to Earth escape (41% is escape).
A 30% space elevator works out to a cable stress of 300 G-km. In other words the same as hanging a 300 km long cable at one gee under it's own weight. For carbon fiber, that works out to 5.3 GPa, which strength is available. In a real system you would taper it somewhat from center to tips, which lets you use lower stress and get realistic safety factors.
The argument that he started with is correct. Reaching earth orbit requires twice as much energy (30 MJ/kg ) as contained in good rocket fuel ( 15 MJ/kg ), therefore it is hard to get off the planet with conventional chemical rockets. There are plenty of ways to get off the planet besides conventional chemical rockets, however.
A simple example is using jet fuel in an air-breathing engine. That provides around 43 MJ/kg because you are getting the oxygen from the airflow, rather than a huge tank of oxygen like most rockets have. It's more than enough energy to get to orbit if you could use air-breathing engines all the way to space. You can't do that for obvious reasons, but if you can use air-breathing engines for *enough* of the trip, and ordinary rocket for the rest, you can have a workable system.
As far as the VASIMR plasma rocket, it has plenty of performance, but lacks enough thrust to get off the ground. You can, however combine it with a partial space elevator. A full one that goes all the way from the ground to space needs stronger materials than we have right now. But a partial one in the form of a vertical cable in orbit gives you a landing platform at the bottom that is sub-orbital. So whatever vehicle you fly up to the platform can use less propulsion. You elevator up the rest of the way. Hauling the cargo up will result in dragging the cable down, so you run your plasma rocket on a continuous basis to make that up. In effect the cable lets you concentrate the high efficiency, low thrust plasma rocket push into short term lift of cargoes.
People have already "crowd-sourced the cloud" to a near approximation of every book, CD, and DVD of note. Between Bit Torrent and one-click file hosting sites, the data is out there already. And anything you particularly want to keep, you can save one or more local copies. The only problem with this system is it's not legal. A reasonably priced rental system (see Netflix) can do it legally.
Me personally, I will never put only copy of my work products in the cloud. Using it as offsite backup is fine. Paper books I am working on cutting back on. I accumulated nearly 4000, and half of them I have not read yet (packrat librarian syndrome). At this point I have more than I can read for the rest of my life, so I am donating them to charity as I finish reading most of them. I will keep some favorites, but most of it doesn't need to stick around as it's "read once entertainment".
Don't put anything you want to keep private on a third party server. If you must use email, find one with encryption. Microsoft Outlook has had it since at least version 2003, and there are lots of other programs available.
They have tried twice now to plug the crack - first with a load of concrete, and then with an expanding polymer. Both failed, which makes me suspect the crack is a lot deeper than they think it is. Deep cracks in the ground are not terribly surprising after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. They may have to cofferdam the water upstream of the crack, and then dig it out the surface concrete, and fill it before patching it again. A cofferdam is a temporary barrier to keep water out of a construction site.
It's always Sunday on Mercury
Britannica and other reputable paper-era encyclopedias had a system: they got experts in the field to write the articles. Scientific journals have experts in the field as editors and reviewers to look over the papers submitted. Those methods are not perfect, but they do filter out most of the junk. The way Wikipedia works now, where any random idiot can undo your educated input, you are better off making your own website or pdf, and just pointing to it. Then at worst they can delete the link, but they cannot go in and trash your article.
If they created a layer of "reviewed articles", where once approved it takes more than a random admin or user to undo it, they would get more interest by experts.
If it turns out Microsoft used any pirated software internally for development (its a big company, with a lot of computers, odds are somewhere someone did), then they could in turn be sued under the same law.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xrkMhKwII
"Marvelous Designer" is a cloth simulation program. You drape the fabric over an object (human avatar, or anything else you want). Then it simulates how the fabric will drape in more or less real time (a fast PC helps in that). It takes into account stretch, stiffness, etc. Then you can export the model to other 3D programs, or to sewing software to produce actual clothing from it.
I used it to make this dress and bedspread for a virtual world:
http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_N3W3ksl-Xiw/TQAn5sYpwsI/AAAAAAAACK0/UHGXI2NKyNI/s800/HalterMiniPrint.JPG
http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_N3W3ksl-Xiw/TPhfR7ZPHJI/AAAAAAAACKc/vMBut9JE2BQ/s1152/QueenBedWithCover.JPG
(1) I have enough music already (~3000 tracks). I don't need to get much more, from any source, legal or not. I expect a lot of people are in this situation now.
(2) One click file hosting sites are among the most popular on the planet for a reason. I think a lot of people have simply shifted to them from P2P services.
How many of the people who used to play Solitaire and Minesweeper are now playing Angry Birds? In other words, casual games are just more visible now that they are being marketed separately.
The developer of this system, Roger Angel, is also in charge of the "Mirror Lab" at the University of Arizona, where they have produced many of the world's largest telescope mirrors. In other words, a respectable technologist, and not a scammer. Here is the company he set up to commercialize the research:
http://www.rehnu.com/
I have Thunderbird set to open my Gmail inbox by default, and then any mail I want to save gets dragged to a local folder (which I have lots of folders by topic). About 80% of incoming mail gets deleted. The rest I now have two copies, the original on Gmail, and my local copy. I figure the chances of *both* getting trashed is pretty low.
The way to level the playing field against large corporations is for citizens to form their own corporations. For example a "Buyer's Cooperative" which would use the buying power of it's members to negotiate better deals.