"The world needs to employ existing fixes for climate change rather than looking for a technological silver bullet that will prove to be too expensive for commercial energy production anyway"
Actually, the world really ought to be doing both. I'm not implying the existence of a "silver bullet" but any renewable energy source (especially one as fundamental as solar fusion) is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Just because it isn't immediately commercially viable doesn't mean we can't still benefit from it.
Mod parent up. This is EXACTLY the problem with studies like these. They seem to always make an astounding leap of logic from something sane (like the analogy above) to "therefore the government clearly needs to regulate our lives more."
Strictly speaking the "largest telescopes" will always be the radio telescopes, spanning several square kilometers in some cases. I know a professor at CMU who is currently designing what he hopes will be the largest radio telescope in the world. If they intended to call it the largest *optical* telescope, they really should have said that. "Largest telescope" is quite the claim.
The only reason anything stays in orbit is because it's being acted on by a gravitational force (always pulling toward the center, thereby creating the sensation of "falling"). He's trying to find a time and place when forces cancel out. This does seem odd to me, however, because there's a mention of "absolute" force, which has little or no meaning in physics. Lacking an absolute frame of reference, everything has to be relative. It seems that he is counting on the cancellation of the known major contributing forces (somehow omitting the Earth's gravity) to make the experiment accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
"The world needs to employ existing fixes for climate change rather than looking for a technological silver bullet that will prove to be too expensive for commercial energy production anyway"
Actually, the world really ought to be doing both. I'm not implying the existence of a "silver bullet" but any renewable energy source (especially one as fundamental as solar fusion) is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Just because it isn't immediately commercially viable doesn't mean we can't still benefit from it.
Why should you need the government to pass a law before you can tell your own daughter she's not allowed to have something?
Mod parent up. This is EXACTLY the problem with studies like these. They seem to always make an astounding leap of logic from something sane (like the analogy above) to "therefore the government clearly needs to regulate our lives more."
Strictly speaking the "largest telescopes" will always be the radio telescopes, spanning several square kilometers in some cases. I know a professor at CMU who is currently designing what he hopes will be the largest radio telescope in the world. If they intended to call it the largest *optical* telescope, they really should have said that. "Largest telescope" is quite the claim.
The only reason anything stays in orbit is because it's being acted on by a gravitational force (always pulling toward the center, thereby creating the sensation of "falling"). He's trying to find a time and place when forces cancel out. This does seem odd to me, however, because there's a mention of "absolute" force, which has little or no meaning in physics. Lacking an absolute frame of reference, everything has to be relative. It seems that he is counting on the cancellation of the known major contributing forces (somehow omitting the Earth's gravity) to make the experiment accurate.