This is currently what I'm struggling to find. The main thing I've established is FreeCAD just isn't ready yet - very buggy and I can not get it to work, but parametric modelling is an interesting concept.
What else are people using for dimensioning parts which need to fit together? (i.e. part design, rather then modelling I guess?)
Except this isn't the case: you're paying for bandwidth. Which implies, ok, maybe an average over time - but they don't have the ability to drive an ADSL connection to be suddenly faster. No-one would care if downloading a whole movie did nothing and then came down in 1-second - that's easy to work around.
The reality is they're not supplying you with the bandwidth you paid for, and trying to double-bill you for it.
The point was more along the lines of the fact that virtually no attainable level of individual wealth can really sufficiently protect you, in a pleasant fashion, from local environmental and atmospheric pollution.
Seriously: they're big enough for it, launch costs are basically 0 from them, a lot of them have water and we have not explored them nearly as much as we should have. It'd kill a whole lot of birds in one go - we'd get to do some geology on the leftover materials from the early solar system and pin down planet formation more, we'd get to the mining geology for resources from asteroids, we'd get to test a whole lot of technology for rendeavouz, exploration, sampling and redirect missions.
You don't need to slash the military budget to fund NASA. What you need to do is give NASA a budget of the amount they currently have, and let NASA choose how to allocate it. Let them pick the research, technology and contractors, and just give them a general mandate of scientific exploration of the solar system, and maybe a secondary one of "advance manned space flight".
Currently they have the ridiculous situation where congressmen pick the projects, and somehow wind up picking the technologies (solid fuel boosters are *clearly* the best choice, because they're made in my district you see!).
The idea that China is opposed to environmental protection espoused by so many people is pretty badly informed. China's policy is and always has been that it won't needlessly set itself back - but it'll glad do what it can, because it's not like their air pollution is just CO2 and harmless to their environment.
So chances are, the whole "China is building X many coal plants per week!" is a very short-lived trend, and when they can go nuclear + renewables, they're going to do it in a big way very quickly, since the benefits aren't represented in a model, they'll be represented in breathable air. Money doesn't much help you avoid 2.5um particulates no matter where you live. Not on any sensible scale.
Conversely Microsoft's RDP implementation is pretty much a top of its game remote desktop system.
Look the reality here is VNC sucked because we don't have fast compression libraries to use with it. That's changed - a lot. We're in an age where mobile devices have H.264 ASICs, and TigerVNC/TurboVNC exist.
What we're desperately lacking is a desktop UI which lets us seamlessly bring those components together - I want to be able to teleport my app windows across to other desktops and bring them back locally, or send them to other machines. X can't do that - not remotely efficiently.
And what Dr. should be insisting one way or the other that someone should used contraception? That is a personal choice....things don't get much more personal than that.
The one who is treating a patient for an STD and discovers they don't understand how they got it?
Or all of them and you who should realize that pregnancy is one of the greatest health hazards a woman can be exposed to, bar modern medicine which has removed a lot of the risk (at great expense in the US).
A doctor would be sued for malpractice if they discovered someone was sexually active, didn't want to get pregnant, and yet didn't inform a patient of the severe inadequacies of non-barrier and non-chemical birth control methods.
Well that is more or less your exact fault. Your entire generation voted repeatedly to keep letting congress raid social security to fund a whole bunch of wars and military hardware. Then you voted to privatize prisons, stratify wealth, defund social outreach to try and lift people out of poverty and get them into being tax payers. Voted to defund schools, give yourselves a tax break, not reform capital gains tax to actually collect income or properly fund the IRS so it can catch tax cheats (did you know it has a 7 to 1 payback at the moment? There's basically a ton of tax fraud out there and they don't have the ability to investigate enough to recover revenue). You wound back banking regulation, cut funding to basic science programs and you might think the tech boom is the future but let's face it there's only so many social networking apps anyone needs before reality kicks in and we realize we kind of do need to be able to safely drive over bridges because that's how food gets to cities.
So why aren't you going to collect on social security? Because you voted for it every time. Because you're still voting for the people who are going to do that to you now.
At the end of the day robots can't self-diagnose or self-repair, and are not smart enough to be left to their own devices. All our robots are basically very advanced remote control cars.
People are still much better - we heal ourselves, we can problem solve, and we're faster moving and more capable with basic tools.
But the problem is to sides of the same coin - moving 100 people to Mars requires the same advancements as sending 10 Curiousitys.
That engine is an enabler. Methane/oxygen works incredibly well in gas-gas cycle. It's unbeatable for that.
One thing I didn't understand from the article, and maybe I just missed it; why haven't other people tried the methane/oxygen yet, if it's so good?
Possibly cost? Kerosene is mostly longer chain elements which are the major component of what you get out of an oil refinery. Methane is much more special order, and harder to transport since you have to keep it liquid (so you're back to needing dual cryostat tanks).
Of course all this changes if you're going somewhere where a planet spanning oil infrastructure is not, but lightweight hydrocarbons are easy to get.
Bottom line: why would anyone live in a place that's drier and colder than the Atacama, has much less atmosphere, and is a minimum of 34M miles from everyone else? (Because of the distance and gravity, "Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason.)
Well for one thing, there's a heck of a lot of geologists and biologists who would love to be able to detailed analysis of as much of Mars as they want, whenever they want.
A long term habitation mission which was focused on answering whether there was previously life on mars, and is life today, would be a huge scientific boon.
There are other questions we can tackle too: for one thing, where all the alien civilizations? Exploring the solar system's body's is one way to try and answer that - we've lived on Earth long enough to possibly have wiped out incidental probes or debris that landed, but relatively stable geological surfaces elsewhere could have preserved things.
Not to mention, determining what the requirements and experiences of off-world human habitation are is pretty important - depending on your perspective. Strictly speaking there's no reason for us to figure out how to live underwater, but we've conducted a number of scientific missions involving long term pressurization doing exactly that (the important lesson learned: don't give the scientists carte blanche to demand whatever tests they want, whenever they want. Biopsy's aren't fun at the best of times).
There's also biosphere questions that are worth answering: missions that demand we improve our ability to manage artificial environments mean we can improve the way we do it on Earth well ahead of any immediate need, and hopefully with enough lead time to bring the costs down. At the end of the day though, fundamental science is well - fundamental. Technology is not a straight line, nor is the path even obvious and the only way you make progress is by advancing as many fields as you can all at the same time.
It also implies expanding the box of our thinking about survivability.
You don't just take humans to other worlds - you take fauna and flora of all shapes and sizes as well.
It also implies a lot of other very useful advancements in our industrial base - for one thing, anything which encourages a stable off-world resource and industrial operation is a huge advancement for the biosphere here on Earth, since it means we can think about permanently moving polluting or risky processes off the planet entirely (not to mention, potentially bootstrap through to a resource environment much richer then the one we're currently in).
It all depends on how technology advances. But one issue is that the first AI, the first system that shows learning potential, is going to get upgraded heavily. There will be no reason for whichever host government or entity creates it not to throw as much hardware at it as possible. It'll be the target machine of every semiconductor company on the planet.
So even if we start out slower then a human chemical process...it seems likely that situation won't persist for long.
No the problem is the wealthy are constantly arguing visibly and publicly that the poor are stealing from them, and that they should be allowed to opt out of supporting anyone. For things like food and medicine. Because it the super-wealthy are just so upset at looking at that big tax number on paper (they are not affected in any literal fashion whatsoever - if they were, they'd be middle class...who also are frequently on the list of "people who should pay more" from the super-wealthy).
No it won't. Hate to say it but had Jurassic Park actually been staffed by the large group of people which would've been required to a run a facility of that size, then we'd have obliterated all the dinosaurs in that movie inside of 30 minutes with regular small and not so small arms.
Humans are the ultimate apex predator on this planet - there's nothing old we're going to bring back that could possibly be of any threat to us.
Interestingly the current thinking seems to be that they probably went extinct when some climate change meant they couldn't find a few varieties of herbs they needed to complement their diet, and they basically went down due to malnutrition.
It seems like at least one option would've been to unseal the helmet and open it just enough to suck the air out of the suit - which hopefully would dislodge the water, or freeze it, which would give some time to fix the ice build up.
If someone starts threatening you you start recording. Because if they steal from you, or strike you, they've committed assault and you'll have iron clad evidence of it.
So here's something this makes me wonder about: without the necessity of crew life support, why not turn them into shallow cruising submarines?
Not deep water at all - no more then 10 meters or so below the surface, but deep enough that they can cruise under the waves and weather, towing some breathing gear to feed the engines from the top.
You'd have no risk of crew life support failure or drowning, since they're not on board. It'd be impossible for pirates to get to. It would be completely safe around other ships. The part I can't figure is the cost of enclosing a freighter like this compared to now. Presumably considerable, but the idea would be that it's not a deep-diving vessel, it's just avoiding the part of the ocean which gives the most buffeting and random mechanical stress for something more predictable.
Scuttling a super-tanker is hardly trivial. Unless the pirates know what they're doing and have some high-end explosives, it's unlikely they'd even be able to breach the hull.
Pirates don't hit more then a fraction of container ships per year. So even if they tried to do this, it's not damage for the company - ship owners insure, cargo movers insure, and the insurer reliably knows that only something like 42 out of 30,000 ships are going to be hijacked/destroyed.
If the situation gets appreciably bad enough, then it's common enough that military operations will have an easy time killing pirates since they'd be easy to find and pirates are not well armed.
No hostages is really a game changer there. I mean you can just pipe in narcotic gas from containers already onboard. Best case, the pirates wake up in prison. Worst case, not at all.
And no control over the contents that specific ship may have, or whether they can find a market for the booty...I don't buy it either.
I was under the impression that the whole point of the piracy was the payoff on the hostages, and really had nothing to do with the ship's cargo. (generalization, not 100% accurate)
And no control over the ship either. The remote crew could just sail it to the nearest friendly warship.
Also no need for the ship to look like a regular ship to start with. No need for fixed railings or entrance ways at sea-level - good luck grappling to that.
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This is currently what I'm struggling to find. The main thing I've established is FreeCAD just isn't ready yet - very buggy and I can not get it to work, but parametric modelling is an interesting concept.
What else are people using for dimensioning parts which need to fit together? (i.e. part design, rather then modelling I guess?)
Except this isn't the case: you're paying for bandwidth. Which implies, ok, maybe an average over time - but they don't have the ability to drive an ADSL connection to be suddenly faster. No-one would care if downloading a whole movie did nothing and then came down in 1-second - that's easy to work around.
The reality is they're not supplying you with the bandwidth you paid for, and trying to double-bill you for it.
The point was more along the lines of the fact that virtually no attainable level of individual wealth can really sufficiently protect you, in a pleasant fashion, from local environmental and atmospheric pollution.
Build an asteroid base instead.
Seriously: they're big enough for it, launch costs are basically 0 from them, a lot of them have water and we have not explored them nearly as much as we should have. It'd kill a whole lot of birds in one go - we'd get to do some geology on the leftover materials from the early solar system and pin down planet formation more, we'd get to the mining geology for resources from asteroids, we'd get to test a whole lot of technology for rendeavouz, exploration, sampling and redirect missions.
You don't need to slash the military budget to fund NASA. What you need to do is give NASA a budget of the amount they currently have, and let NASA choose how to allocate it. Let them pick the research, technology and contractors, and just give them a general mandate of scientific exploration of the solar system, and maybe a secondary one of "advance manned space flight".
Currently they have the ridiculous situation where congressmen pick the projects, and somehow wind up picking the technologies (solid fuel boosters are *clearly* the best choice, because they're made in my district you see!).
The idea that China is opposed to environmental protection espoused by so many people is pretty badly informed. China's policy is and always has been that it won't needlessly set itself back - but it'll glad do what it can, because it's not like their air pollution is just CO2 and harmless to their environment.
So chances are, the whole "China is building X many coal plants per week!" is a very short-lived trend, and when they can go nuclear + renewables, they're going to do it in a big way very quickly, since the benefits aren't represented in a model, they'll be represented in breathable air. Money doesn't much help you avoid 2.5um particulates no matter where you live. Not on any sensible scale.
Conversely Microsoft's RDP implementation is pretty much a top of its game remote desktop system.
Look the reality here is VNC sucked because we don't have fast compression libraries to use with it. That's changed - a lot. We're in an age where mobile devices have H.264 ASICs, and TigerVNC/TurboVNC exist.
What we're desperately lacking is a desktop UI which lets us seamlessly bring those components together - I want to be able to teleport my app windows across to other desktops and bring them back locally, or send them to other machines. X can't do that - not remotely efficiently.
And what Dr. should be insisting one way or the other that someone should used contraception? That is a personal choice....things don't get much more personal than that.
The one who is treating a patient for an STD and discovers they don't understand how they got it?
Or all of them and you who should realize that pregnancy is one of the greatest health hazards a woman can be exposed to, bar modern medicine which has removed a lot of the risk (at great expense in the US).
A doctor would be sued for malpractice if they discovered someone was sexually active, didn't want to get pregnant, and yet didn't inform a patient of the severe inadequacies of non-barrier and non-chemical birth control methods.
Well that is more or less your exact fault. Your entire generation voted repeatedly to keep letting congress raid social security to fund a whole bunch of wars and military hardware. Then you voted to privatize prisons, stratify wealth, defund social outreach to try and lift people out of poverty and get them into being tax payers. Voted to defund schools, give yourselves a tax break, not reform capital gains tax to actually collect income or properly fund the IRS so it can catch tax cheats (did you know it has a 7 to 1 payback at the moment? There's basically a ton of tax fraud out there and they don't have the ability to investigate enough to recover revenue). You wound back banking regulation, cut funding to basic science programs and you might think the tech boom is the future but let's face it there's only so many social networking apps anyone needs before reality kicks in and we realize we kind of do need to be able to safely drive over bridges because that's how food gets to cities.
So why aren't you going to collect on social security? Because you voted for it every time. Because you're still voting for the people who are going to do that to you now.
Curiousity is about a ton or 2. 100 people are about 10 Curiousity's, give or take mass for life support etc.
At the end of the day robots can't self-diagnose or self-repair, and are not smart enough to be left to their own devices. All our robots are basically very advanced remote control cars.
People are still much better - we heal ourselves, we can problem solve, and we're faster moving and more capable with basic tools.
But the problem is to sides of the same coin - moving 100 people to Mars requires the same advancements as sending 10 Curiousitys.
Good job writing the article, nice and detailed.
That engine is an enabler. Methane/oxygen works incredibly well in gas-gas cycle. It's unbeatable for that.
One thing I didn't understand from the article, and maybe I just missed it; why haven't other people tried the methane/oxygen yet, if it's so good?
Possibly cost? Kerosene is mostly longer chain elements which are the major component of what you get out of an oil refinery. Methane is much more special order, and harder to transport since you have to keep it liquid (so you're back to needing dual cryostat tanks).
Of course all this changes if you're going somewhere where a planet spanning oil infrastructure is not, but lightweight hydrocarbons are easy to get.
Bottom line: why would anyone live in a place that's drier and colder than the Atacama, has much less atmosphere, and is a minimum of 34M miles from everyone else? (Because of the distance and gravity, "Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason.)
Well for one thing, there's a heck of a lot of geologists and biologists who would love to be able to detailed analysis of as much of Mars as they want, whenever they want.
A long term habitation mission which was focused on answering whether there was previously life on mars, and is life today, would be a huge scientific boon.
There are other questions we can tackle too: for one thing, where all the alien civilizations? Exploring the solar system's body's is one way to try and answer that - we've lived on Earth long enough to possibly have wiped out incidental probes or debris that landed, but relatively stable geological surfaces elsewhere could have preserved things.
Not to mention, determining what the requirements and experiences of off-world human habitation are is pretty important - depending on your perspective. Strictly speaking there's no reason for us to figure out how to live underwater, but we've conducted a number of scientific missions involving long term pressurization doing exactly that (the important lesson learned: don't give the scientists carte blanche to demand whatever tests they want, whenever they want. Biopsy's aren't fun at the best of times).
There's also biosphere questions that are worth answering: missions that demand we improve our ability to manage artificial environments mean we can improve the way we do it on Earth well ahead of any immediate need, and hopefully with enough lead time to bring the costs down. At the end of the day though, fundamental science is well - fundamental. Technology is not a straight line, nor is the path even obvious and the only way you make progress is by advancing as many fields as you can all at the same time.
It also implies expanding the box of our thinking about survivability.
You don't just take humans to other worlds - you take fauna and flora of all shapes and sizes as well.
It also implies a lot of other very useful advancements in our industrial base - for one thing, anything which encourages a stable off-world resource and industrial operation is a huge advancement for the biosphere here on Earth, since it means we can think about permanently moving polluting or risky processes off the planet entirely (not to mention, potentially bootstrap through to a resource environment much richer then the one we're currently in).
It all depends on how technology advances. But one issue is that the first AI, the first system that shows learning potential, is going to get upgraded heavily. There will be no reason for whichever host government or entity creates it not to throw as much hardware at it as possible. It'll be the target machine of every semiconductor company on the planet.
So even if we start out slower then a human chemical process...it seems likely that situation won't persist for long.
No the problem is the wealthy are constantly arguing visibly and publicly that the poor are stealing from them, and that they should be allowed to opt out of supporting anyone. For things like food and medicine. Because it the super-wealthy are just so upset at looking at that big tax number on paper (they are not affected in any literal fashion whatsoever - if they were, they'd be middle class...who also are frequently on the list of "people who should pay more" from the super-wealthy).
No it won't. Hate to say it but had Jurassic Park actually been staffed by the large group of people which would've been required to a run a facility of that size, then we'd have obliterated all the dinosaurs in that movie inside of 30 minutes with regular small and not so small arms.
Humans are the ultimate apex predator on this planet - there's nothing old we're going to bring back that could possibly be of any threat to us.
Interestingly the current thinking seems to be that they probably went extinct when some climate change meant they couldn't find a few varieties of herbs they needed to complement their diet, and they basically went down due to malnutrition.
Which is a problem we could fix.
It seems like at least one option would've been to unseal the helmet and open it just enough to suck the air out of the suit - which hopefully would dislodge the water, or freeze it, which would give some time to fix the ice build up.
If someone starts threatening you you start recording. Because if they steal from you, or strike you, they've committed assault and you'll have iron clad evidence of it.
So here's something this makes me wonder about: without the necessity of crew life support, why not turn them into shallow cruising submarines?
Not deep water at all - no more then 10 meters or so below the surface, but deep enough that they can cruise under the waves and weather, towing some breathing gear to feed the engines from the top.
You'd have no risk of crew life support failure or drowning, since they're not on board. It'd be impossible for pirates to get to. It would be completely safe around other ships. The part I can't figure is the cost of enclosing a freighter like this compared to now. Presumably considerable, but the idea would be that it's not a deep-diving vessel, it's just avoiding the part of the ocean which gives the most buffeting and random mechanical stress for something more predictable.
Scuttling a super-tanker is hardly trivial. Unless the pirates know what they're doing and have some high-end explosives, it's unlikely they'd even be able to breach the hull.
Insurance.
Pirates don't hit more then a fraction of container ships per year. So even if they tried to do this, it's not damage for the company - ship owners insure, cargo movers insure, and the insurer reliably knows that only something like 42 out of 30,000 ships are going to be hijacked/destroyed.
If the situation gets appreciably bad enough, then it's common enough that military operations will have an easy time killing pirates since they'd be easy to find and pirates are not well armed.
No hostages is really a game changer there. I mean you can just pipe in narcotic gas from containers already onboard. Best case, the pirates wake up in prison. Worst case, not at all.
And no control over the contents that specific ship may have, or whether they can find a market for the booty...I don't buy it either.
I was under the impression that the whole point of the piracy was the payoff on the hostages, and really had nothing to do with the ship's cargo. (generalization, not 100% accurate)
And no control over the ship either. The remote crew could just sail it to the nearest friendly warship.
Also no need for the ship to look like a regular ship to start with. No need for fixed railings or entrance ways at sea-level - good luck grappling to that.