This space shuttle = prototype stuff that has become popular in recent weeks escapes me. At what point is a system "operational" and not "experimental"?
When you've been through several design revisions to address problems found in the prototype craft, and have streamlined the design to make it more reliable and less expensive ("streamlined", not "redesigned from scratch", before anyone gripes at me).
In equivalent software terms, the best you could call the shuttle now is "second beta". Columbia, after the engine and tile-shedding problems were addressed, was pre-beta (not quite an alpha because it could actually work). First beta came with the improved airframe and increased cargo capacity of the shuttles built post-Columbia. Second beta came after the SRB seals were redesigned following the Challenger incident, and various other modifications applied that were not necessarily related to the accident.
Bugs remaining are the fact that the tiles are all unique _and_ very time-consuming/picky/expensive to apply, the fact that there's still a problem with foam being shed from the LH2 tank, the fact that the shuttle main engine is still running right at the edge of material tolerances, and the fact that the shuttle design is still complex enough to make post-flight verification and refit a horrid screaming nightmare.
Make an attempt at solving these, and you're in beta-3. Address the engine component reliability problem and the refit problem and you're at rc-1.
Disclaimer: This reflects my personal opinion/assessment of the shuttle's status. Yours will likely differ.
Absolute rubbish. That article is the most well reasoned piece of analysis I've seen on the space business in a long time. His data is pretty strong, and his arguments logical. It all even seems obvious, with hindsight.
It's a pretty one-sided analysis. He hinges his argument on two assumptions that I frankly don't think are valid:
That NASA will never seriously consider a capsule design.
That the Space Shuttle will continue to be used for station supply missions.
The first point is questionable from two fronts - first, the "winged craft aren't worth it" idea has enough mindshare that a capsule design is one of the ones proposed, and second, they need the new craft to actually work. The shuttle fleet _will_ be retired from service by NASA or by nature by around 2010+, so they can't afford another dead-end project for crew transport. This will lead to a more conservative, proven design - probably a capsule.
The second point is silly. The whole reason a new crew vehicle is being developed is so that the shuttle can be dropped like the white elephant it turned out to be. Cargo can much more cheaply be sent up by unmanned expendable boosters. The only change needed will be to either redesign new/proposed station structural components to fit in a 10-20T payload range, or to design a heavier ELV that can carry a payload comparable to the shuttle's in one shot.
Without these points, and especially without the second point, his argument falls apart.
Because the shuttle is the only vehicle in the world with the heavy lift capability it has.
These things carry 10 tonnes of cargo. As long as module weight isn't much more than that, there are plenty of options to choose from for existing heavy-lift boosters.
The dual-booster configurations discussed in the linked articles provide more than 20T cargo capacity to LEO.
Lifting Bodies - X-33 was a spectacular failure - only because when confronted with adversity, WE GAVE UP. Part of that was the failure of the guys who set the budget unrealistically low in the first place, and let it overrun past the point of credibility. But if you want weight-savings in not sending wings up vertically, that's the way to do it. There's one real technicall challenge - an oddly-shaped fuel tank able to repeatedly deal with the pressurization cycle. And we just rolled over and quit when the first few attempts failed. I think that's sad.
Actually, my understanding is that the X-33 failed because it assumed magical composites would be able to give it a craft weight low enough for SSTO to work. This was mainly a problem in regards to the fuel tank (as that's where most of your non-craft mass is going to be). As more material kept being needed due to revised strength estimates, mass went up, which meant more fuel and a bigger craft and more strengthening needed, and so forth.
A lifting body as an upper stage might be a good idea, but I don't see why the craft needs to be able to glide at all.
Horizontal Take-off - Pegasus has been a spectacular success. If you're going to put wings on your craft, you may as well Horizontal Take-Off. Most of the launch fuel of getting a vehicle into space is used up in the first 5 miles.
That's because the craft spends much of its launch time in the first 5 miles. It's a relatively short distance because it hasn't picked up speed yet - same reason a dropped object will spend most of its time relatively close to the point of release (distance/time relation is quadratic for fixed acceleration).
The real advantage to the Pegasus and other upper-atmosphere launch schemes is that you can use a smaller craft. A craft has to be large enough for drag to be relatively insignificant during launch (otherwise it eats horribly large amounts of delta-v). But, a large craft is harder to build and requires more structural mass per unit craft mass (materials strength goes up as the square of dimension while weight goes up as the cube). Launching higher up means you can build a smaller craft, and spend more of the dry weight on payload and less on structure.
Flying horizontally would not be a great idea, as it means you're punching through more of the atmosphere and so suffer more drag in total.
From 40,000 ft, scramjets can get this plane to 80,000 ft and Mach 8-12. (another technology we would need to develop, but it will save the weight of carrying oxidizer).
While in theory scramjets are a good idea, in practice I'm not sure they'll ever be practical. Unless you can get all the way up to orbital speed, you need to carry rockets as well. This makes scramjets extra weight in your craft (unlike turbojets, they can't share parts with the rocket engines). This reduces cargo mass. To lift the same amount of cargo, you have to increase the size of the rest of the craft, which starts to offset the savings you get from carrying less oxidizer.
Scramjets also only work with hydrogen as a fuel, which means your fuel tanks have to be *big* (it's stored at low density), which causes structure problems as described above.
In summary I have doubts about scramjets ever being useful for ground-to-orbit craft.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high. [...] Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
It works fine for communication satellites and other objects that are worth spending lots of money to put up there.
*Cheap* space travel won't be possible without chemical fuels, but this is by no means a reason to abandon space.
The various launch proposals that don't require you to carry fuel with the craft turn out to have infrastructure costs large enough to be very expensive as well. This includes the Space Elevator. Being in a deep gravity well tends to suck that way.
The Italian built (US owned) Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules, that fly on the space shuttle, and can be docked to any ISS port for an extended stay can carry up to 10 tons of cargo in 16 standard space station equipment racks. They can carry self-contained experiments or equipment upgrades in these racks and just float them into the ISS and plug them in. They are also capable of carrying refrigerated storage compartments to carry fresh food to the ISS.
Great. So why don't we launch them on a heavy-lift expendable booster instead of on the shuttle? If they're carrying cargo, they don't need a man-rated launch vehicle, and boosters are much cheaper.
X-prize rockets are *nowhere near* orbit capable, delta-v around 1400ms-1 compared to 10000ms-1 (just 2% of the kinetic energy!)
Actually, I calculate it as about 8 km/sec for orbit and about 1.8 km/sec for 100 mile altitude, and about 30 vs. 1.6 MJ/kg (about 5% of the kinetic energy).
It's still negligeable. Gravitational potential energy is proportional to distance travelled vertically, so falling a few hundred metres gives very little kinetic energy compared to the kinetic energy required to travel up 100 miles.
A model doesn't "exist", a model is made up by a thinking being. Therefore, an alien being with a way of thinking very different from ours could come up with a very different model.
A model will not be accepted if it does not agree with observations. This reduces the set of models that are acceptable. You have yet to show that an acceptable model exists that does not include a sense of space and time.
You're trying to claim that a different model is better,
I've never claimed such a thing.
You claimed that aliens would use it, despite the fact that the simplest model - one based on direct observation of the local environment - would incorporate space and time. If it's not better, why would they use it at *all*?
Aliens would by default be hard-wired to understand their environments. For reasons explained two posts ago, this naturally incorporates concepts of space and time (as well as euclidean geometry and Newton's laws of motion). For aliens to have a world-view that did not involve concepts of space and time, they'd have to have deliberately and with great effort overridden the more simplistic world-view. This would only be done with a very good reason.
I can't. My brain, like that of every human being, cannot avoid to think in categories of space and time. But that merely shows the limitations of the human brain, it doesn't prove that space and time are real.
Given that you have no example of a model that does not include space and time, how do you know that such a model exists, let alone is a better representation of the universe than one that involves space and time, as you are claiming?
You're trying to claim that a different model is better, not only without proof, but without the model itself. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Unless they do some sort of drop first, or an initially oblique launch, I don't see how the Israeli effort can help but do the same. If they drop first, then they have to launch at negative velocity, which negates part of the benefit.
Not much. The main benefit of a balloon launch is that you're above most of the atmosphere, and so have less drag to worry about. Dropping a few hundred metres won't impact that much, and the downwards velocity you gain while falling is truly negligeable compared to the delta-v an orbit-capable rocket needs.
This is the point I disagree about. Our human brains work in such a way that we think in terms of space and time, and therefore we apply these concepts when we model reality. But space and time are not inherent properties of reality.
To illustrate this point, please provide a model of reality that does not involve space and time.
Until we get Hubble II up there to take independent readings which can be independently analysed, this is a theory awaiting review. An exciting theory, but a theory. If you want to believe it, go ahead and believe it, but I'm in no hurry to pencil it in to my Big Book of the Universe.
At those distances, detecting wobble is the only way to determine the presence of the planet. You're not going to be able to directly image it without an interferometric array substantially larger than Earth.
Have an independent group verify the wobble patterns detected? Sure. But if you're going to propose other means of verification, I'd definitely like to hear what they are.
I mean, we humans already know (from quantum mechanics) that the concepts of space and time are of limited value as models of reality, although we cannot escape the way our brains are hardwired. Extraterrestrials will probably think in completely different categories, which are as much beyond our imagination as space and time are to them.
On the contrary, space and time (along with Newtonian mechanics) serves as a simple and very accurate model of reality for day to day life (i.e. under any but the most extreme conditions). As most aliens would spend the vast majority of their time dealing with this environment where they were the best first-order approximations, they'd be intimately familiar with them and tend to think using them.
Space and time themselves are much more fundamental, as they together limit the ability of information to propagate and time defines the direction of entropy increase, which is important no matter what your environment is.
In summary, I find it extremely unlikely that aliens would not be intimately familiar with space and time.
What struck me the most from reading about it is that enough heavy elements (Fe, Si, etc) were around at the time to form the planet. That was one of the main reasons it was thought that planets couldn't have formed that early - you only had light gases around.
Jupiter was able to accrete despite being mostly hydrogen - I don't see why you couldn't get a planet forming out of the primordial elements. Spectroscopic analysis of this planet would be interesting, as it should mostly lack the hydrocarbons that we find in Jupiter. Unfortunately, unless we can observe transits, we won't be able to do spectroscopy without a much better telescope.
There would also be enough lithium present after the big bang nucleosynthesis to create solid bodies, though of course there was still vastly more hydrogen and helium.
Lastly, early in the universe's life there would have been many very massive stars produced as galaxies first formed. These would have gone supernova within tens to hundreds of millions of years, seeding the universe with heavy elements quite early. For estimates of exact numbers involved, ask an astrophysicist.
Firstly: In the real world, you will almost never have time to do things the correct and proper way. Perhaps some day programming projects won't have unrealistic scheduling demands, but they do today. So, the question is not whether you're going to have to do it the quick and dirty way, but how you can implement a quick and dirty project without shooting yourself in the foot when it's refactoring time. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Secondly: These managers knew of and approved your plan to do things the quick and dirty way to meet schedule. They then turned around to bark at you for making that choice. Solution: Paper trail. Explain the facts of scheduling life very clearly on paper, and get all important people involved to sign off on any instructions to skip policy-dictated steps. No possible way to complain then, as long as the wording of such documents is crystal clear.
In the absence of a signed document to the contrary, take your pick, but make sure that your written estimates of how long things will take are signed no matter what.
The reason, as far as I can figure out - shipping costs, and paying appropriate taxes.
Even between the US and Canada, anything being shipped across the border gets taxes and a brokerage fee tacked on, and extra postage. Handling all of that for a wide range of countries, automatically, would be a logistical nightmare.
A simpler approach would be to set up a branch office in the target country and sell locally.
And so why not coat the extremely delicate heat tiles the shuttle currently uses with a more durable coating of this plastic substance? It seems to me that you don't need to solve the problem of insulation, you only need to get an extra layer on top of it so it doesn't break apart when you toss foam and ice on it, and that won't vaporize in the heat of re-entry itself.
Tossing foam and ice at 850 mph will go through just about any coating. If they wanted something more durable, they could use the same tungsten carbide-coated carbon composites they use for high-temperature areas.
The best thing to do is to alter and/or coat the insulation itself such that it doesn't break off as easily, and do more aggressive de-icing prior to launch.
Regardless of how heat-resistant the coating was, the whole egg would have heated up during that demo. Playing a torch on it would boil the egg material, resulting in a nice microwave-style "eggs"-plosion.
What you need for heat shielding is both high temperature resistance and good insulating properties. A very thin layer could have the first, but definitely won't have the second.
A study was recently done where the speed of light was actually reduced. I am not sure the degree to which this was done, but the mear fact that this can be accomplished is something to raise at least an eyebrow over.
The propagation speed of light in a medium has been reduced in the lab - not the speed of light in vacuum, which is the important number.
There are hints that the speed of light has varied slowly over the age of the universe, but this doesn't help us build space drives.
Re:Some perspective on SARS.
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SARS Contained
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· Score: 1
I like how you went from talking down one over-hyped "sickness" to talking up another.
I don't consider West Nile to be a serious threat. It is, however, still the one we should be worrying about this time of year (mosquito season), and taking steps to reduce (draining stagnant ponds in our yards, and so forth).
The government was just gearing up the annual "please don't provide mosquito breeding grounds in-city" ad blitz, when SARS hit and everyone went loopy. I find this irritating, so I mentioned it.
Re:Some perspective on SARS.
on
SARS Contained
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· Score: 1
and we're a city [Toronto] not known for its violence.
Speaking from Montreal, you are...
This seems odd, as googling for homicide rates puts both Montreal and Vancouver at about double our rate, with the prarie provinces even worse (as of 1990, which was the first listing I found). The big US cities had rates about 10 times worse than _that_.
Source cited was Statistics Canada for the Canadian cities, so you can probably dig up more recent figures if you feel like it (I don't).
Re:Some perspective on SARS.
on
SARS Contained
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· Score: 1
Were there really ~26,000+ people quarantined?
Yes, according to the article linked to this story. That's probably a running total over the course of the entire outbreak, as opposed to there being that number quarantined all at once.
Some perspective on SARS.
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SARS Contained
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This cartoon nicely sums up my opinion of the whole SARS thing:
First outbreak: People were edgy for about two weeks, and a few wore masks. Anyone with a cold got nervous looks when they coughed. Then the novelty wore off and it was business as usual.
Second outbreak: Nil.
The number of people quarantined was about 1% of the city's population. The number of people who were actually sick was far lower. The number of people _dead_ was lower than the number of people murdered here in an average year, and we're a city not known for its violence.
Take is seriously? Sure. Panic? Not justified.
The real harm is that the attention on SARS has drawn attention away from things like West Nile Virus.
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This space shuttle = prototype stuff that has become popular in recent weeks escapes me. At what point is a system "operational" and not "experimental"?
When you've been through several design revisions to address problems found in the prototype craft, and have streamlined the design to make it more reliable and less expensive ("streamlined", not "redesigned from scratch", before anyone gripes at me).
In equivalent software terms, the best you could call the shuttle now is "second beta". Columbia, after the engine and tile-shedding problems were addressed, was pre-beta (not quite an alpha because it could actually work). First beta came with the improved airframe and increased cargo capacity of the shuttles built post-Columbia. Second beta came after the SRB seals were redesigned following the Challenger incident, and various other modifications applied that were not necessarily related to the accident.
Bugs remaining are the fact that the tiles are all unique _and_ very time-consuming/picky/expensive to apply, the fact that there's still a problem with foam being shed from the LH2 tank, the fact that the shuttle main engine is still running right at the edge of material tolerances, and the fact that the shuttle design is still complex enough to make post-flight verification and refit a horrid screaming nightmare.
Make an attempt at solving these, and you're in beta-3. Address the engine component reliability problem and the refit problem and you're at rc-1.
Disclaimer: This reflects my personal opinion/assessment of the shuttle's status. Yours will likely differ.
It's a pretty one-sided analysis. He hinges his argument on two assumptions that I frankly don't think are valid:
The first point is questionable from two fronts - first, the "winged craft aren't worth it" idea has enough mindshare that a capsule design is one of the ones proposed, and second, they need the new craft to actually work. The shuttle fleet _will_ be retired from service by NASA or by nature by around 2010+, so they can't afford another dead-end project for crew transport. This will lead to a more conservative, proven design - probably a capsule.
The second point is silly. The whole reason a new crew vehicle is being developed is so that the shuttle can be dropped like the white elephant it turned out to be. Cargo can much more cheaply be sent up by unmanned expendable boosters. The only change needed will be to either redesign new/proposed station structural components to fit in a 10-20T payload range, or to design a heavier ELV that can carry a payload comparable to the shuttle's in one shot.
Without these points, and especially without the second point, his argument falls apart.
Because the shuttle is the only vehicle in the world with the heavy lift capability it has.
These things carry 10 tonnes of cargo. As long as module weight isn't much more than that, there are plenty of options to choose from for existing heavy-lift boosters.
The dual-booster configurations discussed in the linked articles provide more than 20T cargo capacity to LEO.
Lifting Bodies - X-33 was a spectacular failure - only because when confronted with adversity, WE GAVE UP. Part of that was the failure of the guys who set the budget unrealistically low in the first place, and let it overrun past the point of credibility. But if you want weight-savings in not sending wings up vertically, that's the way to do it. There's one real technicall challenge - an oddly-shaped fuel tank able to repeatedly deal with the pressurization cycle. And we just rolled over and quit when the first few attempts failed. I think that's sad.
Actually, my understanding is that the X-33 failed because it assumed magical composites would be able to give it a craft weight low enough for SSTO to work. This was mainly a problem in regards to the fuel tank (as that's where most of your non-craft mass is going to be). As more material kept being needed due to revised strength estimates, mass went up, which meant more fuel and a bigger craft and more strengthening needed, and so forth.
A lifting body as an upper stage might be a good idea, but I don't see why the craft needs to be able to glide at all.
Horizontal Take-off - Pegasus has been a spectacular success. If you're going to put wings on your craft, you may as well Horizontal Take-Off. Most of the launch fuel of getting a vehicle into space is used up in the first 5 miles.
That's because the craft spends much of its launch time in the first 5 miles. It's a relatively short distance because it hasn't picked up speed yet - same reason a dropped object will spend most of its time relatively close to the point of release (distance/time relation is quadratic for fixed acceleration).
The real advantage to the Pegasus and other upper-atmosphere launch schemes is that you can use a smaller craft. A craft has to be large enough for drag to be relatively insignificant during launch (otherwise it eats horribly large amounts of delta-v). But, a large craft is harder to build and requires more structural mass per unit craft mass (materials strength goes up as the square of dimension while weight goes up as the cube). Launching higher up means you can build a smaller craft, and spend more of the dry weight on payload and less on structure.
Flying horizontally would not be a great idea, as it means you're punching through more of the atmosphere and so suffer more drag in total.
From 40,000 ft, scramjets can get this plane to 80,000 ft and Mach 8-12. (another technology we would need to develop, but it will save the weight of carrying oxidizer).
While in theory scramjets are a good idea, in practice I'm not sure they'll ever be practical. Unless you can get all the way up to orbital speed, you need to carry rockets as well. This makes scramjets extra weight in your craft (unlike turbojets, they can't share parts with the rocket engines). This reduces cargo mass. To lift the same amount of cargo, you have to increase the size of the rest of the craft, which starts to offset the savings you get from carrying less oxidizer.
Scramjets also only work with hydrogen as a fuel, which means your fuel tanks have to be *big* (it's stored at low density), which causes structure problems as described above.
In summary I have doubts about scramjets ever being useful for ground-to-orbit craft.
*Cheap* space travel won't be possible without chemical fuels
s/without/with/. Brain fault.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
[...]
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
It works fine for communication satellites and other objects that are worth spending lots of money to put up there.
*Cheap* space travel won't be possible without chemical fuels, but this is by no means a reason to abandon space.
The various launch proposals that don't require you to carry fuel with the craft turn out to have infrastructure costs large enough to be very expensive as well. This includes the Space Elevator. Being in a deep gravity well tends to suck that way.
The Italian built (US owned) Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules, that fly on the space shuttle, and can be docked to any ISS port for an extended stay can carry up to 10 tons of cargo in 16 standard space station equipment racks. They can carry self-contained experiments or equipment upgrades in these racks and just float them into the ISS and plug them in. They are also capable of carrying refrigerated storage compartments to carry fresh food to the ISS.
Great. So why don't we launch them on a heavy-lift expendable booster instead of on the shuttle? If they're carrying cargo, they don't need a man-rated launch vehicle, and boosters are much cheaper.
Drugs were something that only low born gutter scum used
Are we talking about the same '70s?
X-prize rockets are *nowhere near* orbit capable, delta-v around 1400ms-1 compared to 10000ms-1 (just 2% of the kinetic energy!)
Actually, I calculate it as about 8 km/sec for orbit and about 1.8 km/sec for 100 mile altitude, and about 30 vs. 1.6 MJ/kg (about 5% of the kinetic energy).
It's still negligeable. Gravitational potential energy is proportional to distance travelled vertically, so falling a few hundred metres gives very little kinetic energy compared to the kinetic energy required to travel up 100 miles.
A model doesn't "exist", a model is made up by a thinking being. Therefore, an alien being with a way of thinking very different from ours could come up with a very different model.
A model will not be accepted if it does not agree with observations. This reduces the set of models that are acceptable. You have yet to show that an acceptable model exists that does not include a sense of space and time.
You're trying to claim that a different model is better,
I've never claimed such a thing.
You claimed that aliens would use it, despite the fact that the simplest model - one based on direct observation of the local environment - would incorporate space and time. If it's not better, why would they use it at *all*?
Aliens would by default be hard-wired to understand their environments. For reasons explained two posts ago, this naturally incorporates concepts of space and time (as well as euclidean geometry and Newton's laws of motion). For aliens to have a world-view that did not involve concepts of space and time, they'd have to have deliberately and with great effort overridden the more simplistic world-view. This would only be done with a very good reason.
I can't. My brain, like that of every human being, cannot avoid to think in categories of space and time. But that merely shows the limitations of the human brain, it doesn't prove that space and time are real.
Given that you have no example of a model that does not include space and time, how do you know that such a model exists, let alone is a better representation of the universe than one that involves space and time, as you are claiming?
You're trying to claim that a different model is better, not only without proof, but without the model itself. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Unless they do some sort of drop first, or an initially oblique launch, I don't see how the Israeli effort can help but do the same. If they drop first, then they have to launch at negative velocity, which negates part of the benefit.
Not much. The main benefit of a balloon launch is that you're above most of the atmosphere, and so have less drag to worry about. Dropping a few hundred metres won't impact that much, and the downwards velocity you gain while falling is truly negligeable compared to the delta-v an orbit-capable rocket needs.
This is the point I disagree about. Our human brains work in such a way that we think in terms of space and time, and therefore we apply these concepts when we model reality. But space and time are not inherent properties of reality.
To illustrate this point, please provide a model of reality that does not involve space and time.
Until we get Hubble II up there to take independent readings which can be independently analysed, this is a theory awaiting review. An exciting theory, but a theory. If you want to believe it, go ahead and believe it, but I'm in no hurry to pencil it in to my Big Book of the Universe.
At those distances, detecting wobble is the only way to determine the presence of the planet. You're not going to be able to directly image it without an interferometric array substantially larger than Earth.
Have an independent group verify the wobble patterns detected? Sure. But if you're going to propose other means of verification, I'd definitely like to hear what they are.
I mean, we humans already know (from quantum mechanics) that the concepts of space and time are of limited value as models of reality, although we cannot escape the way our brains are hardwired. Extraterrestrials will probably think in completely different categories, which are as much beyond our imagination as space and time are to them.
On the contrary, space and time (along with Newtonian mechanics) serves as a simple and very accurate model of reality for day to day life (i.e. under any but the most extreme conditions). As most aliens would spend the vast majority of their time dealing with this environment where they were the best first-order approximations, they'd be intimately familiar with them and tend to think using them.
Space and time themselves are much more fundamental, as they together limit the ability of information to propagate and time defines the direction of entropy increase, which is important no matter what your environment is.
In summary, I find it extremely unlikely that aliens would not be intimately familiar with space and time.
What struck me the most from reading about it is that enough heavy elements (Fe, Si, etc) were around at the time to form the planet. That was one of the main reasons it was thought that planets couldn't have formed that early - you only had light gases around.
Jupiter was able to accrete despite being mostly hydrogen - I don't see why you couldn't get a planet forming out of the primordial elements. Spectroscopic analysis of this planet would be interesting, as it should mostly lack the hydrocarbons that we find in Jupiter. Unfortunately, unless we can observe transits, we won't be able to do spectroscopy without a much better telescope.
There would also be enough lithium present after the big bang nucleosynthesis to create solid bodies, though of course there was still vastly more hydrogen and helium.
Lastly, early in the universe's life there would have been many very massive stars produced as galaxies first formed. These would have gone supernova within tens to hundreds of millions of years, seeding the universe with heavy elements quite early. For estimates of exact numbers involved, ask an astrophysicist.
Firstly: In the real world, you will almost never have time to do things the correct and proper way. Perhaps some day programming projects won't have unrealistic scheduling demands, but they do today. So, the question is not whether you're going to have to do it the quick and dirty way, but how you can implement a quick and dirty project without shooting yourself in the foot when it's refactoring time. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Secondly: These managers knew of and approved your plan to do things the quick and dirty way to meet schedule. They then turned around to bark at you for making that choice. Solution: Paper trail. Explain the facts of scheduling life very clearly on paper, and get all important people involved to sign off on any instructions to skip policy-dictated steps. No possible way to complain then, as long as the wording of such documents is crystal clear.
In the absence of a signed document to the contrary, take your pick, but make sure that your written estimates of how long things will take are signed no matter what.
Good luck.
The reason, as far as I can figure out - shipping costs, and paying appropriate taxes.
Even between the US and Canada, anything being shipped across the border gets taxes and a brokerage fee tacked on, and extra postage. Handling all of that for a wide range of countries, automatically, would be a logistical nightmare.
A simpler approach would be to set up a branch office in the target country and sell locally.
And so why not coat the extremely delicate heat tiles the shuttle currently uses with a more durable coating of this plastic substance? It seems to me that you don't need to solve the problem of insulation, you only need to get an extra layer on top of it so it doesn't break apart when you toss foam and ice on it, and that won't vaporize in the heat of re-entry itself.
Tossing foam and ice at 850 mph will go through just about any coating. If they wanted something more durable, they could use the same tungsten carbide-coated carbon composites they use for high-temperature areas.
The best thing to do is to alter and/or coat the insulation itself such that it doesn't break off as easily, and do more aggressive de-icing prior to launch.
We'll see what they end up doing in a few months.
This article sounds suspicious.
Regardless of how heat-resistant the coating was, the whole egg would have heated up during that demo. Playing a torch on it would boil the egg material, resulting in a nice microwave-style "eggs"-plosion.
What you need for heat shielding is both high temperature resistance and good insulating properties. A very thin layer could have the first, but definitely won't have the second.
A study was recently done where the speed of light was actually reduced. I am not sure the degree to which this was done, but the mear fact that this can be accomplished is something to raise at least an eyebrow over.
The propagation speed of light in a medium has been reduced in the lab - not the speed of light in vacuum, which is the important number.
There are hints that the speed of light has varied slowly over the age of the universe, but this doesn't help us build space drives.
I like how you went from talking down one over-hyped "sickness" to talking up another.
I don't consider West Nile to be a serious threat. It is, however, still the one we should be worrying about this time of year (mosquito season), and taking steps to reduce (draining stagnant ponds in our yards, and so forth).
The government was just gearing up the annual "please don't provide mosquito breeding grounds in-city" ad blitz, when SARS hit and everyone went loopy. I find this irritating, so I mentioned it.
and we're a city [Toronto] not known for its violence.
Speaking from Montreal, you are...
This seems odd, as googling for homicide rates puts both Montreal and Vancouver at about double our rate, with the prarie provinces even worse (as of 1990, which was the first listing I found). The big US cities had rates about 10 times worse than _that_.
Source cited was Statistics Canada for the Canadian cities, so you can probably dig up more recent figures if you feel like it (I don't).
Were there really ~26,000+ people quarantined?
Yes, according to the article linked to this story. That's probably a running total over the course of the entire outbreak, as opposed to there being that number quarantined all at once.
This cartoon nicely sums up my opinion of the whole SARS thing:
http://www.vgcats.com/vgc_comics/?strip_id=62
Practical effect here in Toronto:
First outbreak: People were edgy for about two weeks, and a few wore masks. Anyone with a cold got nervous looks when they coughed. Then the novelty wore off and it was business as usual.
Second outbreak: Nil.
The number of people quarantined was about 1% of the city's population. The number of people who were actually sick was far lower. The number of people _dead_ was lower than the number of people murdered here in an average year, and we're a city not known for its violence.
Take is seriously? Sure. Panic? Not justified.
The real harm is that the attention on SARS has drawn attention away from things like West Nile Virus.