"It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out"
Is the funniest fucking thing I've heard all day. Do you have any idea how well thought out this mission was? FFS look at the trajectory it took 10 YEARS(!) to get to the comet. And you think they overlooked the fact that the comet is craggly?
And Philae bounced twice, finally settling in two hours after first touching the comet, which is enough time for the comet to rotate almost 60 degrees. The two systems meant to prevent bouncing - the thruster and the harpoons - failed, so it ended up some kilometer away from the carefully chosen site. That we are getting any science at all after that potentially mission-killing news is just fantastic.
I'm hoping they make some last-ditch effort to have Philae try to jump over to another part of the comet to get more sunlight, though I'm not sure what kind of resources they have to try it. Can they command the drill and/or the legs to jab downward relatively quickly? Command the harpoons to fire? I don't know, but you can bet this will be part of the design on future missions. I actually did some work on this, which made hopping around a key part of the mission.
Of course, since the President has a pen, I'm sure this won't even be submitted to the Senate, and he'll attempt to enforce it through the EPA, or some other anti-American Federal agency.
You know what's anti-American? Calling other Americans anti-American because they disagree with you.
Here's a funny little factoid for you: the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist.
My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology.
If we were actually committed to the technology, we would never have to go ourselves. Sending human bodies implies a zealous commitment to a low tech solution frozen in time, like steam power in the age of electric cars. If we had the technology to make Mars comfortable we would have no need to do so, since martian robots will outstrip the utility of the human body by a country light year.
This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.
Some parts of our bodies are easier to replace than others. We have been replacing skin, blood, and bone (albeit imperfectly) for a long time. We are becoming better and better at replacing or removing parts of organs like kidneys, lungs, and even the heart. We are not even close to doing the same with our brains. We are starting to learn to do some awesome stuff with it, like control other people's limbs, and we may have even found the on-off switch for consciousness, but we can't replicate or replace the brain. We tried removing parts of it before, but even ignoring the horrid ethical violations, lobotomies had disastrous results and are no longer practiced.
Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely. I'll give you the idea that much of the human body is low tech, but our brains, though far from perfect, are more advanced than anything we've got.
Infrastructure is a lot more complicated some pressure capsules and solar panels. Infrastructure to make a colony viable would mean agriculture and industry (including ways to deal with their negative externalities). Everything about both of those would need to be bootstrapped from Earth.
Even at SpaceX's best rates for the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules at maximum capacity it would take over 14,000 launches to put those 100,000 colonists into orbit. That alone would cost a trillion dollars (assuming awesome rates from SpaceX and no failures). Just the structures and resources to keep those people alive for the first year would cost several tens of trillions of dollars more. The infrastructure to make an actual colony...well hopefully you get the picture. To put the numbers in better perspective we've only launched a little over 300 manned orbital missions in history. Ever.
A solid outline of the challenges, but a simplistic understanding of the proposed solutions. You don't put 100,000 colonists in orbit as fast as possible and put them to work building a metropolis on Mars. You put a few fertile and healthy couples on Mars at a time, over and over, and you grow the colony over hundreds of years. In fact, you grow several independent ones simultaneously, so one can evacuate to others in the event of an emergency. An additional 300 launches spread out over, say, six Earth-Mars launch windows (about 10 years) could mean 1200-1800 colonists, not counting any children they may have, and the infrastructure, agriculture, and industry involved in supporting those people would grow with the population. It would be heavily reliant on Earth for a long time, but that reliance could slowly disappear over time as Martian humans make do with what they can produce themselves, which could end up being a lot more than we can imagine with today's technology.
Of course, also on those timescales (centuries), the ability to recolonize Earth is questionable. Even the first human that grows up on Mars would have a great deal of trouble adapting to Earth, which would have three times his or her native gravity! They could probably do it with some fancy exoskeleton technology that might not exist yet, but their bones wouldn't be used to the stress at all, and they could easily have some crippling agoraphobia. But who knows what other adaptations the human body will undergo, given enough time. If anything, colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to a mostly space-faring civilization, but that's far, far into the future.
They certainly are if you want them to, you know, ACTUALLY EXIST. Just saying things isn't enough, making glib oversimplifications and appeals to emotion either, you have to actually BUILD IT.
Apple can't build an iPhone with a 5.05 inch screen. Haha! You Apple Nutters think they can do anything. If you think they can do it, where's the part number for the screen? Where's the schedule? Sorry, nobody in the world makes 5.05 inch screens, the technology just isn't there.
Am I doing it right?
You have *NOTHING*.
Ah ha! I know you! You're the software patent examiner that rubber stamps everything that's In The Cloud(TM) or On A Smartphone(TM). We have inflatable habitats in space, but inflatable habitats On The Moon(TM) is entirely new and unproven technology!
Good job ignoring all the parts that countered your main point and focusing on the bit about future technology. Go back and read the tl;dr section and tell me, what technology is missing there? No, part numbers and schedules are not technology, and note the "earth-dependent" prefix on colony. I'll grant you one thing: a heavy lift vehicle that would make the whole thing much easier. But we had one in the past and with Falcon Heavy and/or SLS, we'll have one in a few years. It'll take longer than that to build and test the habitat and train the "colonists" anyway. The technology to maintain a permanent and self-sustaining presence can come later.
Although the star is much smaller than the Sun, the disc around HL Tauri stretches out to almost three times as far from the star as Neptune is from the Sun.
That's the caption on an approximate side-by-side comparison image. Neptune is 30.1 AU, so, 80 AU or so? In the image, the disk looks closer to two times the size, but I'm going with the words.
This impacts Drake equation and might shed light as to why we have not detected any other sentient life in the universe.
No, it does not impact the Drake equation at all. The drake equation is based on R* and f(p) which are the the "rate of star formation" and the "fraction of those stars that have planets" (from your link on wikipedia). Both of these numbers are not affected by this finding.
Really it doesn't matter much since proposed numbers for the various factors vary so wildly, but it could change the Drake equation if you wanted (there are other factors listed on the Wikipedia page that could change it as well). In this case, the first three multipliers, R* x fp x ne, estimate the rate at which habitable planets form, but since those terms focus entirely on planets around stars, it ignores habitable homeless planets. So you might replace that with (R* x fp x ne + Rh x fhh), where Rh = rate at which homeless planets form, and fhh = fraction of homeless planets that are habitable. Granted, fhh is probably extremely small (civilization would have to develop deep underground near a molten core), but if we can imagine it, we can't rule it out. There's a bit of a weird crossover when it comes to planets that are flung from other systems (e.g. if it was too close to its star to be habitable, but now its in near-absolute zero interstellar space...), but I'm ignoring that for now. It's all just interesting conjecture anyway.
That could've been accomplished without messing with my private insurance.
I know this is a personal anecdote, but since I work for large aerospace corporations, this is a personal anecdote for a significant number of people. Before the provisions of Obamacare went into effect, my healthcare premiums rose 20% to 33% per year since 2008. From 2013 to 2014, when all the major provisions went into effect, my deductible went up 20%, but my premium stayed the same (and I never hit the old deductible limit anyway). I changed jobs this year, and in 2015, my premiums and coverage are both staying the same.
I have no idea if Obamacare is responsible for this state of affairs or if it's just coincidence, but it's a damn sight better than what was happening before it came along.
Go compare what is costs in most cities to put a veggie loaded salad with some white meat chicken on the table ($20-25 in my experience)
Where are you paying this much?? I mean, chicken breasts in the meat dept on sale are about $1.99/lb....whole chickens often are $0.89/lb...so a veggie and chicken dinner to feed a family of 4 isn't $25?!?!
Where in the US do you live where food is so expensive?
It's almost certainly the veggies that are the problem. In Colorado, the thinnest state in the nation (though even 1 in 5 adults there are obese), I could get all manner of cheap but high-quality fruits and vegetables all year round from Sprouts (a chain grocery store that calls itself a farmer's market). Bell peppers were almost always on sale for $0.25 - $0.50 apiece, and that's including orange ones, which are generally more expensive. Where I live now, 1 in 3 adults are obese, and I'm lucky to find green bell peppers, which are usually the cheapest, for $1.00 apiece. The parking lot farmer's markets (they also had those in CO, by the way, but prices were rarely better there than at Sprouts) are all over now, and their prices weren't much better anyway, so crappy grocery store produce is once again my only option.
As a result, we often end up buying frozen veggies, which don't taste nearly as good, so we don't do it as often. We ate a lot more rice and veggie dishes and salads in CO, but we eat more pasta and meat dishes here.
Over the course of making this post, I found out that Sprouts is coming to my city in 2015. I am very excited about this.
Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
True, even with those kinds of numbers, I very much doubt it will be profitable to bring it back to Earth. It does, however, enable a leap forward for human spaceflight. It's tremendously expensive to lift stuff from Earth's surface, and water is far and away the most useful resource for astronauts, well beyond simply drinking or bathing with it. Surround a spacecraft with it and you've got a radiation barrier. Electrolyze it for rocket fuel (and potentially other types of fuel for backup power) and components of breathable air. Grow crops for food and natural carbon dioxide scrubbing. If you're on an asteroid, moon, or planet, mix it with regolith to help create surface structures.
A bit of Google-fu reveals that osage, the name of the submitter, is also the name a layout/rendering tool associated with GraphViz. It's likely old enough to fit the "over 20 years" comment and was the de facto standard until a bunch of javascript graph visualization libraries popped up and made it easier to create prettier, interactive graphs. The latter explains why younger developers might shy away from it: it's written in C instead of javascript. And it was started by AT&T Labs Research to fulfill the corporate aegis bit. And there is a banner on the Graphviz homepage trying to attract developers.
So unless this is all coincidence, we may have a winner, which would be sad since I use it on occasion.
Easy path for her to achieve her dream: legally change her name to Jayne, then get all the Whedon fans to pay her way into space. Jerrie is too obviously a female name, anyway.
That will just encourage people to have no assets at all and go into debt.
You're right, everyone would absolutely hate money. Just imagine all those hapless, unintentionally rich folk, begging people to take their money and their property.
Game shows would become horror reality shows:
Announcer: "And behind door number 3...a new car!"
Contestant: "Noooooooooooo!"
There would be a whole new way to punish unruly employees:
Employer: "I heard you set another sales record this month."
Employee: "I'm sorry, sir, I tried not to. I really tried..."
Employer: "That was your third mistake this year, Bob. You know what this means."
Employee: "Please, sir, no, you can't do this...I've already been promoted once. I have a family!"
Employer: "I'm sorry, I really am, but the rules are clear on this matter."
Employee: "Wait, please, I'll only come in for one hour a day, I swear!"
Employer: "It's too late for that...sir."
New Employer: "Nooooo!"
It's convenient to back up and/or share unimportant files, for example I use it to pass ebooks between my reading devices and back up my NaNoWriMo novel as I'm writing it. They have two-factor authentication nowadays, so with encryption it could be fairly well private and secure.
But Latin sounds awesome, as compared to the angry, smashed together words that Germans use. Seriously, their language is terrible to look at and to listen to, so I'm feeling a touch of schadenfreude over the whole thing.
What "science and technology" are behind Mars One?
I know you're trolling, but it's really a pretty impressive list. The technology for the communications system, for example, already exists and is in use around Earth and Mars, though they plan to bolster that. We have spacesuits that would work on Mars as-is, though they'll probably want to create Mars-specific ones that reduce the bulkiness and make it more flexible (we're already doing this, by the way, look up NASA's Z-2 suit and Dava Newman's Bio-Suit). We have done lots In-Situ Resource Utilization tests in simulated environments on Earth, and one that extracts oxygen from the atmosphere is likely heading to Mars on the next lander or rover. They'll need to make sure that technology scales up and they have enough easily accessible source material, but that's what the unmanned launch is meant to do. It calls for the as-yet un-launched Falcon Heavy and modified, human-rated Dragon crafts, but SpaceX is on their way to developing their own versions of it. Bigelow Aerospace has created expandable space habitats including one attached to the ISS, I don't see why they couldn't do so for the Mars One food production habitats. I don't think Mars One had a lot of info on how they might grow food, but if you check out the report, it has a pretty fascinating proposal for that aspect, i.e. what crops to grow, how it might fit in the proposed space, and how it affects resource usage. And we're growing lettuce on the ISS using hydroponics right now. And so on.
Sure, the reality TV funding plan is something of a joke and there are plenty of technological hurdles to overcome, but what's important is that Mars One has a starting point and is apparently paying people to execute it and independent researchers are looking at them seriously, pointing out issues, refining the plan, and suggesting improvements. This report might have found lots of problems, but it is nevertheless a very strong step toward fixing them or creating something better.
What I don't understand is how to burn through 578 million dollars in 10 months.
Bankruptcy does NOT mean you have $0 in your checking account. It simply means that your liabilities exceed your assets, your business prospects are unlikely to change that, and your creditors are unwilling to take a voluntary haircut.
Thank you, geez these comments are preposterous. It's a pretty simple situation: they took a huge pre-payment and it became a short term loan. I just read that they were starting to build up production capacity, probably using that pre-payment, that they will no longer need. But even if they didn't, that big of a liability plus a big hit in stock price (35% drop even before they declared bankrupcy) when everyone found out Apple dropped them...that's a pretty massive hit to the balance sheet. They'd hit almost $20/share earlier this year, now they're trading at just around $1. If I wasn't poor...
You forgot: "and was the most technically difficult proposal and submitted by the contractor with the least experience of any kind". Sierra Nevada has no substantial grounds for complaint, their solution may have been competitive on price, but contrary to popular belief these types of contracts are NOT awarded solely on the basis of costs. Technical factors also play a huge role.
I agree that it's not as obviously gamed as everyone says. Sierra Nevada might not have much experience as a prime on big contracts like this, but their Dream Chaser proposal had Lockheed Martin and Aerojet and other heavy hitters as subs, and I guarantee you they put their own political connections to as much use as Boeing did. I'm as cynical as the next guy when it comes to politics, but there is certainly more to it here.
And the only way to completely eliminate the "threat" of someone making their own guns is to then ban making anything at home, or even in a workplace without government supervision. Is that what you want?
I didn't imply that we needed to eliminate the threat at all, only that it gives them more time to think about it after a completely benign situation. Consider this alternative scenario: a psychopath murders a bunch of children with a rifle modified with a huge, 3D-printed ammo clip before lawmakers realized that could even happen. Situations like that are how far more restrictive laws get put into place, regardless of how poorly they work, how invasive they are to our privacy, etc.
Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons.
I honestly don't mean this insultingly, but that response shows that you have completely missed the point. The law won't work with 3D printers, or even just cheap CNC machines - Not now, not ever.
For the law to patch this "loophole" requires nothing less than a complete ban on 3D printers, while artificially keeping the price of CNCs and similar technology much too high for the average Joe's garage workshop.
You and the previous response (and many other responses) say the same thing, but it is not really a given that a law won't work, and that is not the only way to address it. I am personally not smart enough to think of a great way for the law to work, but that's not to say there isn't one. In fact, the "answer" may be far milder than you and many other people fear, like just making it illegal to manufacture parts for assault rifles, just like it's illegal to make drugs or bombs. Of course it doesn't and it won't stop a sufficiently motivated person from doing it, but that is true of any unlawful activity. Just because most drivers drive too fast doesn't mean we shouldn't have speed limits.
Yes, the law absolutely needs to come to terms what it means to live in a world where anyone can manufacture any sufficiently small physical object on a whim. "Shut... Down... EVERYTHING!" ain't it.
Agreed, and neither is, "Anything Goes." We may not agree where it is, but there is a reasonable meeting point in the center. Admittedly, lawmakers will probably go too draconian at first. I'm cynical enough to imagine a situation where they demand 3D printers have an NSA backdoor or something. Still, I'm also optimistic enough to claim we'll eventually end up with something better.
Otherwise, Earth's gravity would be pulling it away.
Orbital mechanics is fun. Pretend you're in a spacecraft in the exact same orbit as the ISS, except offset such that it is always 100 meters in front of you. What happens when you apply an instantaneous delta-v directly toward it? Answer: you will now be orbiting slower than the ISS, and after you get a little closer, the ISS will pull away from you.
What we're probably looking at here (I don't know, I haven't checked) is more like a slow gravity assist maneuver. The Earth's gravity is changing the angular momentum of the asteroid's orbit relative to the Sun ever so slightly that it will eventually pull away from Earth.
More importantly, he does what he does to point out absurdity.
He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws. Objectively, though, he's pointing out pretty valuable information regarding future illegal weapons manufacturing. Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons. He's the gray hat hacker of gun control.
The kind that doesn't give legitimate world-changers a free pass when they start with the crazy talk.
Let me emphasize the relevant portion of the summary:
How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved.
The question was not how fast will we do it, he's answering how fast could we do it. We could put people on Mars in four years if we had the political will to do it. We don't, so we won't do it until China either threatens to do it or actually goes through with it first. As for launching a hundred thousand missions, that is impossible as long as we can't reuse spacecraft, which is mostly addressed by the last point (assuming the reusability problem is solved very thoroughly, e.g. only easily-replaceable fuel made of very common elements is not reused, and the used components are very easily refurbished).
...what corners they cut without compromising reliability...
The trouble with that claim is it takes a bunch of launches to measure reliability. Orbital Sciences' Taurus XL had five successful missions right out of the gate before it dropped a billion dollars worth of satellites in the ocean when it failed three of the next four. Every successful launch is something to be celebrated, to be sure, but it'll take many more successes before they can claim their launch system is reliable.
Secondly, cheap wages are only a small part of lauch costs. This is not some software they are building. I am not an expert, but I would imagine that most of the cost (most of the 75 million dollars) went into engineering, materials, and high tech parts. And material cost, especially for high end exotic stuff that goes into rockets - costs the same worldwide, including India.
Engineering, materials, and high tech parts = paying people to do or create these things. The vast majority of space and military programs go to people all up and down the supply chain. A $200,000 rad-hardened flight computer (i.e. the RAD750 on the Curiosity rover) doesn't cost $200,000 in parts: they're paying that company for the development and testing that went into it.
Slashdot Mirror
"It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out"
Is the funniest fucking thing I've heard all day. Do you have any idea how well thought out this mission was? FFS look at the trajectory it took 10 YEARS(!) to get to the comet. And you think they overlooked the fact that the comet is craggly?
Jesus-Dunning-Kruger-Christ.
http://www.esa.int/esatv/Video...
And Philae bounced twice, finally settling in two hours after first touching the comet, which is enough time for the comet to rotate almost 60 degrees. The two systems meant to prevent bouncing - the thruster and the harpoons - failed, so it ended up some kilometer away from the carefully chosen site. That we are getting any science at all after that potentially mission-killing news is just fantastic.
I'm hoping they make some last-ditch effort to have Philae try to jump over to another part of the comet to get more sunlight, though I'm not sure what kind of resources they have to try it. Can they command the drill and/or the legs to jab downward relatively quickly? Command the harpoons to fire? I don't know, but you can bet this will be part of the design on future missions. I actually did some work on this, which made hopping around a key part of the mission.
Of course, since the President has a pen, I'm sure this won't even be submitted to the Senate, and he'll attempt to enforce it through the EPA, or some other anti-American Federal agency.
You know what's anti-American? Calling other Americans anti-American because they disagree with you.
Here's a funny little factoid for you: the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist.
My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology.
If we were actually committed to the technology, we would never have to go ourselves. Sending human bodies implies a zealous commitment to a low tech solution frozen in time, like steam power in the age of electric cars. If we had the technology to make Mars comfortable we would have no need to do so, since martian robots will outstrip the utility of the human body by a country light year.
This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.
Some parts of our bodies are easier to replace than others. We have been replacing skin, blood, and bone (albeit imperfectly) for a long time. We are becoming better and better at replacing or removing parts of organs like kidneys, lungs, and even the heart. We are not even close to doing the same with our brains. We are starting to learn to do some awesome stuff with it, like control other people's limbs, and we may have even found the on-off switch for consciousness, but we can't replicate or replace the brain. We tried removing parts of it before, but even ignoring the horrid ethical violations, lobotomies had disastrous results and are no longer practiced.
Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely. I'll give you the idea that much of the human body is low tech, but our brains, though far from perfect, are more advanced than anything we've got.
Infrastructure is a lot more complicated some pressure capsules and solar panels. Infrastructure to make a colony viable would mean agriculture and industry (including ways to deal with their negative externalities). Everything about both of those would need to be bootstrapped from Earth.
Even at SpaceX's best rates for the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules at maximum capacity it would take over 14,000 launches to put those 100,000 colonists into orbit. That alone would cost a trillion dollars (assuming awesome rates from SpaceX and no failures). Just the structures and resources to keep those people alive for the first year would cost several tens of trillions of dollars more. The infrastructure to make an actual colony...well hopefully you get the picture. To put the numbers in better perspective we've only launched a little over 300 manned orbital missions in history. Ever.
A solid outline of the challenges, but a simplistic understanding of the proposed solutions. You don't put 100,000 colonists in orbit as fast as possible and put them to work building a metropolis on Mars. You put a few fertile and healthy couples on Mars at a time, over and over, and you grow the colony over hundreds of years. In fact, you grow several independent ones simultaneously, so one can evacuate to others in the event of an emergency. An additional 300 launches spread out over, say, six Earth-Mars launch windows (about 10 years) could mean 1200-1800 colonists, not counting any children they may have, and the infrastructure, agriculture, and industry involved in supporting those people would grow with the population. It would be heavily reliant on Earth for a long time, but that reliance could slowly disappear over time as Martian humans make do with what they can produce themselves, which could end up being a lot more than we can imagine with today's technology.
Of course, also on those timescales (centuries), the ability to recolonize Earth is questionable. Even the first human that grows up on Mars would have a great deal of trouble adapting to Earth, which would have three times his or her native gravity! They could probably do it with some fancy exoskeleton technology that might not exist yet, but their bones wouldn't be used to the stress at all, and they could easily have some crippling agoraphobia. But who knows what other adaptations the human body will undergo, given enough time. If anything, colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to a mostly space-faring civilization, but that's far, far into the future.
They certainly are if you want them to, you know, ACTUALLY EXIST. Just saying things isn't enough, making glib oversimplifications and appeals to emotion either, you have to actually BUILD IT.
Apple can't build an iPhone with a 5.05 inch screen. Haha! You Apple Nutters think they can do anything. If you think they can do it, where's the part number for the screen? Where's the schedule? Sorry, nobody in the world makes 5.05 inch screens, the technology just isn't there.
Am I doing it right?
You have *NOTHING*.
Ah ha! I know you! You're the software patent examiner that rubber stamps everything that's In The Cloud(TM) or On A Smartphone(TM). We have inflatable habitats in space, but inflatable habitats On The Moon(TM) is entirely new and unproven technology!
Good job ignoring all the parts that countered your main point and focusing on the bit about future technology. Go back and read the tl;dr section and tell me, what technology is missing there? No, part numbers and schedules are not technology, and note the "earth-dependent" prefix on colony. I'll grant you one thing: a heavy lift vehicle that would make the whole thing much easier. But we had one in the past and with Falcon Heavy and/or SLS, we'll have one in a few years. It'll take longer than that to build and test the habitat and train the "colonists" anyway. The technology to maintain a permanent and self-sustaining presence can come later.
Although the star is much smaller than the Sun, the disc around HL Tauri stretches out to almost three times as far from the star as Neptune is from the Sun.
That's the caption on an approximate side-by-side comparison image. Neptune is 30.1 AU, so, 80 AU or so? In the image, the disk looks closer to two times the size, but I'm going with the words.
This impacts Drake equation and might shed light as to why we have not detected any other sentient life in the universe.
No, it does not impact the Drake equation at all. The drake equation is based on R* and f(p) which are the the "rate of star formation" and the "fraction of those stars that have planets" (from your link on wikipedia). Both of these numbers are not affected by this finding.
Really it doesn't matter much since proposed numbers for the various factors vary so wildly, but it could change the Drake equation if you wanted (there are other factors listed on the Wikipedia page that could change it as well). In this case, the first three multipliers, R* x fp x ne, estimate the rate at which habitable planets form, but since those terms focus entirely on planets around stars, it ignores habitable homeless planets. So you might replace that with (R* x fp x ne + Rh x fhh), where Rh = rate at which homeless planets form, and fhh = fraction of homeless planets that are habitable. Granted, fhh is probably extremely small (civilization would have to develop deep underground near a molten core), but if we can imagine it, we can't rule it out. There's a bit of a weird crossover when it comes to planets that are flung from other systems (e.g. if it was too close to its star to be habitable, but now its in near-absolute zero interstellar space...), but I'm ignoring that for now. It's all just interesting conjecture anyway.
That could've been accomplished without messing with my private insurance.
I know this is a personal anecdote, but since I work for large aerospace corporations, this is a personal anecdote for a significant number of people. Before the provisions of Obamacare went into effect, my healthcare premiums rose 20% to 33% per year since 2008. From 2013 to 2014, when all the major provisions went into effect, my deductible went up 20%, but my premium stayed the same (and I never hit the old deductible limit anyway). I changed jobs this year, and in 2015, my premiums and coverage are both staying the same.
I have no idea if Obamacare is responsible for this state of affairs or if it's just coincidence, but it's a damn sight better than what was happening before it came along.
Where are you paying this much?? I mean, chicken breasts in the meat dept on sale are about $1.99/lb....whole chickens often are $0.89/lb...so a veggie and chicken dinner to feed a family of 4 isn't $25?!?!
Where in the US do you live where food is so expensive?
It's almost certainly the veggies that are the problem. In Colorado, the thinnest state in the nation (though even 1 in 5 adults there are obese), I could get all manner of cheap but high-quality fruits and vegetables all year round from Sprouts (a chain grocery store that calls itself a farmer's market). Bell peppers were almost always on sale for $0.25 - $0.50 apiece, and that's including orange ones, which are generally more expensive. Where I live now, 1 in 3 adults are obese, and I'm lucky to find green bell peppers, which are usually the cheapest, for $1.00 apiece. The parking lot farmer's markets (they also had those in CO, by the way, but prices were rarely better there than at Sprouts) are all over now, and their prices weren't much better anyway, so crappy grocery store produce is once again my only option.
As a result, we often end up buying frozen veggies, which don't taste nearly as good, so we don't do it as often. We ate a lot more rice and veggie dishes and salads in CO, but we eat more pasta and meat dishes here.
Over the course of making this post, I found out that Sprouts is coming to my city in 2015. I am very excited about this.
Tell me how you intend to make a *profit* by going into space with massive amounts of technology and resources???
To get the same things we already have here?
True, even with those kinds of numbers, I very much doubt it will be profitable to bring it back to Earth. It does, however, enable a leap forward for human spaceflight. It's tremendously expensive to lift stuff from Earth's surface, and water is far and away the most useful resource for astronauts, well beyond simply drinking or bathing with it. Surround a spacecraft with it and you've got a radiation barrier. Electrolyze it for rocket fuel (and potentially other types of fuel for backup power) and components of breathable air. Grow crops for food and natural carbon dioxide scrubbing. If you're on an asteroid, moon, or planet, mix it with regolith to help create surface structures.
A bit of Google-fu reveals that osage, the name of the submitter, is also the name a layout/rendering tool associated with GraphViz. It's likely old enough to fit the "over 20 years" comment and was the de facto standard until a bunch of javascript graph visualization libraries popped up and made it easier to create prettier, interactive graphs. The latter explains why younger developers might shy away from it: it's written in C instead of javascript. And it was started by AT&T Labs Research to fulfill the corporate aegis bit. And there is a banner on the Graphviz homepage trying to attract developers.
So unless this is all coincidence, we may have a winner, which would be sad since I use it on occasion.
Easy path for her to achieve her dream: legally change her name to Jayne, then get all the Whedon fans to pay her way into space. Jerrie is too obviously a female name, anyway.
A better idea is to tax wealth.
That will just encourage people to have no assets at all and go into debt.
You're right, everyone would absolutely hate money. Just imagine all those hapless, unintentionally rich folk, begging people to take their money and their property.
Game shows would become horror reality shows:
Announcer: "And behind door number 3...a new car!"
Contestant: "Noooooooooooo!"
There would be a whole new way to punish unruly employees:
Employer: "I heard you set another sales record this month."
Employee: "I'm sorry, sir, I tried not to. I really tried..."
Employer: "That was your third mistake this year, Bob. You know what this means."
Employee: "Please, sir, no, you can't do this...I've already been promoted once. I have a family!"
Employer: "I'm sorry, I really am, but the rules are clear on this matter."
Employee: "Wait, please, I'll only come in for one hour a day, I swear!"
Employer: "It's too late for that...sir."
New Employer: "Nooooo!"
It's convenient to back up and/or share unimportant files, for example I use it to pass ebooks between my reading devices and back up my NaNoWriMo novel as I'm writing it. They have two-factor authentication nowadays, so with encryption it could be fairly well private and secure.
But Latin sounds awesome, as compared to the angry, smashed together words that Germans use. Seriously, their language is terrible to look at and to listen to, so I'm feeling a touch of schadenfreude over the whole thing.
What "science and technology" are behind Mars One?
I know you're trolling, but it's really a pretty impressive list. The technology for the communications system, for example, already exists and is in use around Earth and Mars, though they plan to bolster that. We have spacesuits that would work on Mars as-is, though they'll probably want to create Mars-specific ones that reduce the bulkiness and make it more flexible (we're already doing this, by the way, look up NASA's Z-2 suit and Dava Newman's Bio-Suit). We have done lots In-Situ Resource Utilization tests in simulated environments on Earth, and one that extracts oxygen from the atmosphere is likely heading to Mars on the next lander or rover. They'll need to make sure that technology scales up and they have enough easily accessible source material, but that's what the unmanned launch is meant to do. It calls for the as-yet un-launched Falcon Heavy and modified, human-rated Dragon crafts, but SpaceX is on their way to developing their own versions of it. Bigelow Aerospace has created expandable space habitats including one attached to the ISS, I don't see why they couldn't do so for the Mars One food production habitats. I don't think Mars One had a lot of info on how they might grow food, but if you check out the report, it has a pretty fascinating proposal for that aspect, i.e. what crops to grow, how it might fit in the proposed space, and how it affects resource usage. And we're growing lettuce on the ISS using hydroponics right now. And so on.
Sure, the reality TV funding plan is something of a joke and there are plenty of technological hurdles to overcome, but what's important is that Mars One has a starting point and is apparently paying people to execute it and independent researchers are looking at them seriously, pointing out issues, refining the plan, and suggesting improvements. This report might have found lots of problems, but it is nevertheless a very strong step toward fixing them or creating something better.
What I don't understand is how to burn through 578 million dollars in 10 months.
Bankruptcy does NOT mean you have $0 in your checking account. It simply means that your liabilities exceed your assets, your business prospects are unlikely to change that, and your creditors are unwilling to take a voluntary haircut.
Thank you, geez these comments are preposterous. It's a pretty simple situation: they took a huge pre-payment and it became a short term loan. I just read that they were starting to build up production capacity, probably using that pre-payment, that they will no longer need. But even if they didn't, that big of a liability plus a big hit in stock price (35% drop even before they declared bankrupcy) when everyone found out Apple dropped them...that's a pretty massive hit to the balance sheet. They'd hit almost $20/share earlier this year, now they're trading at just around $1. If I wasn't poor...
You forgot: "and was the most technically difficult proposal and submitted by the contractor with the least experience of any kind". Sierra Nevada has no substantial grounds for complaint, their solution may have been competitive on price, but contrary to popular belief these types of contracts are NOT awarded solely on the basis of costs. Technical factors also play a huge role.
I agree that it's not as obviously gamed as everyone says. Sierra Nevada might not have much experience as a prime on big contracts like this, but their Dream Chaser proposal had Lockheed Martin and Aerojet and other heavy hitters as subs, and I guarantee you they put their own political connections to as much use as Boeing did. I'm as cynical as the next guy when it comes to politics, but there is certainly more to it here.
And the only way to completely eliminate the "threat" of someone making their own guns is to then ban making anything at home, or even in a workplace without government supervision. Is that what you want?
I didn't imply that we needed to eliminate the threat at all, only that it gives them more time to think about it after a completely benign situation. Consider this alternative scenario: a psychopath murders a bunch of children with a rifle modified with a huge, 3D-printed ammo clip before lawmakers realized that could even happen. Situations like that are how far more restrictive laws get put into place, regardless of how poorly they work, how invasive they are to our privacy, etc.
Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons.
I honestly don't mean this insultingly, but that response shows that you have completely missed the point. The law won't work with 3D printers, or even just cheap CNC machines - Not now, not ever.
For the law to patch this "loophole" requires nothing less than a complete ban on 3D printers, while artificially keeping the price of CNCs and similar technology much too high for the average Joe's garage workshop.
You and the previous response (and many other responses) say the same thing, but it is not really a given that a law won't work, and that is not the only way to address it. I am personally not smart enough to think of a great way for the law to work, but that's not to say there isn't one. In fact, the "answer" may be far milder than you and many other people fear, like just making it illegal to manufacture parts for assault rifles, just like it's illegal to make drugs or bombs. Of course it doesn't and it won't stop a sufficiently motivated person from doing it, but that is true of any unlawful activity. Just because most drivers drive too fast doesn't mean we shouldn't have speed limits.
Yes, the law absolutely needs to come to terms what it means to live in a world where anyone can manufacture any sufficiently small physical object on a whim. "Shut... Down... EVERYTHING!" ain't it.
Agreed, and neither is, "Anything Goes." We may not agree where it is, but there is a reasonable meeting point in the center. Admittedly, lawmakers will probably go too draconian at first. I'm cynical enough to imagine a situation where they demand 3D printers have an NSA backdoor or something. Still, I'm also optimistic enough to claim we'll eventually end up with something better.
Otherwise, Earth's gravity would be pulling it away.
Orbital mechanics is fun. Pretend you're in a spacecraft in the exact same orbit as the ISS, except offset such that it is always 100 meters in front of you. What happens when you apply an instantaneous delta-v directly toward it? Answer: you will now be orbiting slower than the ISS, and after you get a little closer, the ISS will pull away from you.
What we're probably looking at here (I don't know, I haven't checked) is more like a slow gravity assist maneuver. The Earth's gravity is changing the angular momentum of the asteroid's orbit relative to the Sun ever so slightly that it will eventually pull away from Earth.
More importantly, he does what he does to point out absurdity.
He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws. Objectively, though, he's pointing out pretty valuable information regarding future illegal weapons manufacturing. Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons. He's the gray hat hacker of gun control.
The kind that doesn't give legitimate world-changers a free pass when they start with the crazy talk.
Let me emphasize the relevant portion of the summary:
How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved.
The question was not how fast will we do it, he's answering how fast could we do it. We could put people on Mars in four years if we had the political will to do it. We don't, so we won't do it until China either threatens to do it or actually goes through with it first. As for launching a hundred thousand missions, that is impossible as long as we can't reuse spacecraft, which is mostly addressed by the last point (assuming the reusability problem is solved very thoroughly, e.g. only easily-replaceable fuel made of very common elements is not reused, and the used components are very easily refurbished).
...what corners they cut without compromising reliability...
The trouble with that claim is it takes a bunch of launches to measure reliability. Orbital Sciences' Taurus XL had five successful missions right out of the gate before it dropped a billion dollars worth of satellites in the ocean when it failed three of the next four. Every successful launch is something to be celebrated, to be sure, but it'll take many more successes before they can claim their launch system is reliable.
Secondly, cheap wages are only a small part of lauch costs. This is not some software they are building. I am not an expert, but I would imagine that most of the cost (most of the 75 million dollars) went into engineering, materials, and high tech parts. And material cost, especially for high end exotic stuff that goes into rockets - costs the same worldwide, including India.
Engineering, materials, and high tech parts = paying people to do or create these things. The vast majority of space and military programs go to people all up and down the supply chain. A $200,000 rad-hardened flight computer (i.e. the RAD750 on the Curiosity rover) doesn't cost $200,000 in parts: they're paying that company for the development and testing that went into it.