Oh wait someone invented a thing called a submarine and developed the means to heat, pressurize and provide oxygen and fresh water to people living inside of it.
And submarines are about as far from self-sufficient as possible, relying entirely on their shore support infrastructure to supply everything except oxygen and water. Every last part onboard the ship, every last meal they eat, comes from shore. You know, just like it will be with a Martian colony. Oh sure, fantasists in the early days of submarines dreamed of them being like underwater colonies and raising their own food and having their own internal industry to make all their replacement parts and so forth, just like people do today about Martian colonies. The reality turned out to be... well, less fantastical.
(I love how you can just gloss over something as complex as an O2-and-water-producing Mars-environment-operating nuclear reactor as if it's just some trivial thing to design, make, launch, and keep operating;) )
I'd be willing to bet that the unicode library they were using was UTF-16 . Either that or they were handling unicode in a straight binary string with something homebrewed. Both are horribly dangerous - the latter for obvious reasons, but the former in particular because it makes it easy to code something that "just works" for 99,99% of cases, but those rare 0,01% side cases involving 32-bit unicode characters slip through testing and come back and bite you down the road. It's amazing how many apps have incorrect behavior with 4-byte unicode characters, on a wide range of platforms.
Both should be considered bad practice and programming languages evolved to standardize on UTF-8 for any string format that is to handle unicode. C++ for example needs to introduce something along the lines of "std::ustring" that makes unicode string ops "just work" with a UTF-8 backend, at the cost of some memory and performance vs. std::string, which should be seen as exclusively for ascii and binary string operations. std::wstring should be obsoleted.
Nowhere did I say that it exists today. I didn't even say it'd be the best option - my post was about how even that "simpler" approach is still incredibly expensive and complex.
Please aim your rage in the correct direction.
(and FYI, even NASA uses the word "hab" - for example, their X-Hab competition.)
Re:Terraforming potential?
on
How To Die On Mars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My favorite approach is to build floating solar towers on Venus or the gas giants - big chunks of greenhouse material shaped like an inverted funnel reaching out into space. Unable to radiate its IR radiation back to space, the air under the funnel would become hotter than the surrounding atmosphere and rise (imparting lift to the funnel without even requiring a lifting gas). Due to the size, drag against the funnel surface would be irrelevantly small. As the funnel narrows, the gas velocity would increase - with a large enough funnel, to well over escape velocity. The funnel could be moved and aimed to some degree by directing part of the flow out through adjustable side jets. If the funnel was shaped so as to cause the gases to spiral and then flare out at the end, you could centrifugally sort the gases out by atomic mass, and thus for example rob light gases (such as water and nitrogen) of escape velocity while allowing heavy gases like CO2 the energy to escape.
Venus could send CO2 on a Mars intercept trajectory to raise its temperature and pressure. Jupiter could send hydrogen on Venus and Mars intercept trajectories, for Bosch water generation. Large moons and dwarf planets could be similarly seeded.
Of course, the obvious question: will this, or any other form of terraforming begin any time in the next many-hundred years?
Nope.
Re:Radiation not a problem, an opportunity
on
How To Die On Mars
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· Score: 1
The sad fact is, the first colonies will probably be build right out in the open on flat land with nothing around for dozens of kilometers, because it's safer to land there. Which is why we haven't landed any Mars probes in deep canyons or the like, despite all of the interesting geological formations that would be exposed on the walls.
I love how these things are all "you simply have to do..." Like one goes out and collects the atmosphere with a butterfly net and splits it with a butcher's knife. Or like just goes and "gets a smelter and a foundry going".
Do these people have any clue how complex these sorts of industrial systems are? They have hundreds of thousands of components, all of which can break, and some of which are massive. The more you scale it down, the less efficient it becomes. And systems engineered on Earth don't just magically work on Mars too. You can't just dump heat into a river or the air, your gravity is significantly lower, and you've got electrostatic dust that clings to everything. And everyone output feedstock you want requires half a dozen or so input feedstocks, not counting all of the parts that can break - and they will break. And not all of these feedstocks can be gotten from the same location.
Let's just pick one little part of what you just wrote. "pass the CO over iron oxide dust" (we'll ignore everything leading up to getting and transporting that CO2). First off, if you literally do just that, you'll get nothing. The reaction needs to be done *hot*. And it can't be just "passing it over", it has to be thoroughly mixed. But then you get ready-to-use steel right? Wrong. Because you don't have "iron oxide dust". First off, you don't have any fine "dust" in mineable quanties, the blowing surface dust is spread over overthing, not accumulated in big pits ready for you to dig up.You at best have sand; at worst, solid rock. Most sands are not going to made of a majority iron oxide (if they have any sizeable quantities at all). Iron ore deposits are places where iron has been *concentrated* by geological processes, it doesn't make up the majority of basalts. And even cementations of iron-rich clay concentrates aren't 100% iron oxide. Whatever you mine (which means mining equipment, which means big, expensive, complex devices), you need to break it up, which means rock crushers, (which mean big, expensive, high wear devices), transport (haulers - more expensive devices), etc. At the mill it's going to go through a range of hoppers, conveyors, etc, all of which will wear and break. In addition to your ore and CO, you need a wide range of fluxing agents to separate out the stuff you don't want and to produce a usable product. The most critical of your fluxing agents is limestone, which on Earth mainly comes from deposits of marine microorganisms. Fat lot of luck finding that on Mars. So you need to mine less common calcium carbonate sources like travertine. More mining equipment. Hey, do you expect to find your travertine ten feet from your iron ore? Yeah, best of luck finding that, you've got to drive! Just hope you don't have to drive hundreds of kilometers, eh? Of course that's just one of a variety of fluxing agents you'll be wanting to add, there are many, for varying purposes. Anyway, once you've got your big molten mess (consuming ridiculous amounts of energy, orders of magnitude more than we've ever fielded offworld), you need to do something with it as you stream it out. Okay, then of course you have your slag skimmers. Hey, how long do you think that parts dripped in a stream of molten iron last? And you need to do something with your slag, so get your equipment to haul it away (after you've cooled it) ready as well. Speaking of cooling, normally we'd use water for that and just let it boil off for cooling, but on Mars it's a precious commodity, so go add more complexity for recapture and cooling! So now we've got a stream of mostly pure steel, but we're not even CLOSE to having usable parts.... (I'll stop here, as I don't want to spend all day on this).
I get it, you have a basic understanding of the chemical formulas for making a couple products. Well, here in the real world, a simple chemical formula is not enough. Real world processes are far more expensive and complex. They don't just pop together by waving a magic wan
Indeed, it's far easier to build a hab on Earth that you know will work and launch it. We're about as close to being able to build complex structures on Mars out of local materials as we are to being able to send a probe to alpha centauri: vague, general ideas with little real-world engineering and no practical experience.
Even the simplest "local materials" concept - building a hab on Earth with the structural strength to bear a thick layer of regolith, launching it, then dumping the regolith on top - requires engineering, launching and landing a "martian excavator", which would be a multi-billion dollar program. Certainly more expensive than say the Curiosity rover. I'd wager in the 5-10 billion range, after all is said and done (not counting the hab itself).
Or were they picturing people spending half a year outside in space suits working with picks and shovels and burning the caloric equivalent of many tonnes of food and other consumables and wearing through their space suits, all while being exposed to a high radiation flux?
I counted four lanes, but you're right, it's actually only two lanes, the other half is a rail line. So half of what I accounted for being rail rather than road totally justifies $60k per square meter!
And bridges! Wow, no road has ever included bridges before! We're not talking the Danyang–Kunshan here, they're little bridges over a little river. And the terrain of the valley bottom would be considered "flat" by the standards of many countries, such as Japan. I drive on roads with more elevation change than that every time I go to my land.
There's absolutely zero reason for a 28 mile road through the countryside to cost 9.4 billion dollars. None. The longest road tunnel in the world is over 15 miles long and cost a grand total of $113 million. In Sweden, where wages are tenfold what they are in Russia.
(Lastly, I have no clue what you mean by "original source video". )
That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price
$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.
Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?
This is, after all, the same country whose 28 mile road to the Olympics cost more than if they'd covered the whole road with gold medals two layers thick.;)
Concerning this privatization, the only question that remains is, which friend of Putin is going to get to "buy" the space agency at a " fair market value";)
Its not that simple. You can't just recover it from nuclear reactor waste because it's mixed in with other isotopes of plutonium, and isn't in that great of quantities to begin with. So first off you have to reprocess nuclear waste to extract the neptunium - which again, itself isn't in very great quantities, it takes a lot of waste, and most places don't want to do waste reprocessing to begin with due to cost and liability issues. You then have to make neptunium targets and expose them to a neutron flux - that is, using neutronicity that could otherwise be used for power generation or other valuable purposes (it takes a lot of neutrons to make a tiny bit of Pu238). Pu238 should be more thought of as a manufactured product than as a byproduct of particular types of nuclear reactors.
There are a few other candidates for use as space power sources that actually are waste products, but they're all significantly worse performers. There are two other alternatives. One is to make a Sterling RTG, which was in development, but funding has been cut off (it's also kind of tricky because you have to ensure that something with moving parts will operate for decades in the harsh environment of space). The other is to make an actual nuclear reactor. This means almost limitless power, but it comes at the expense of not only massive development costs and public opposition, but a large minimum size and massive radiator requirements, as well as the same reliability challenges of sterling generators.
There's no easy solutions. Except, of course, to stop bloody wasting plutonium once we have it.
Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.
"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?
And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.
I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.
Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.
You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.
The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.
Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?
Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.
And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.
The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:
That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.
Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.
A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.
And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.
And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.
Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?
Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.
Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.
Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.
LEDs have lifespans of what, 50-100k hours? So maybe a couple decades. And some will significantly outlive their design life, as is always the case with failure curves. The solar cells should be good for decades, until the contacts corrode.
One *could* design devices to last for thousands of years. But that's not usually a design constraint;)
There's no guarantee that ECCS are independent and can operate in the vent of station blackout. The HPCI used in Fukishima, for example, is a steam turbine-driven pump but not a generator, and it has electrical components that require operation. Which is why it didn't prevent meltdown.
The primary turbines are not designed to operate on the amount of power generated from decay heat alone.
Large upgrades, by phasing out old units and building new ones. The complex as a whole remains.
Taking down an old unit is BTW a very large task ("decommissioning"), can take decades and comes at extreme expense. Which is part of why plant operators try to keep their old units going as long as possible, even when they've become expensive to operate.
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And submarines are about as far from self-sufficient as possible, relying entirely on their shore support infrastructure to supply everything except oxygen and water. Every last part onboard the ship, every last meal they eat, comes from shore. You know, just like it will be with a Martian colony. Oh sure, fantasists in the early days of submarines dreamed of them being like underwater colonies and raising their own food and having their own internal industry to make all their replacement parts and so forth, just like people do today about Martian colonies. The reality turned out to be... well, less fantastical.
(I love how you can just gloss over something as complex as an O2-and-water-producing Mars-environment-operating nuclear reactor as if it's just some trivial thing to design, make, launch, and keep operating ;) )
I'd be willing to bet that the unicode library they were using was UTF-16 . Either that or they were handling unicode in a straight binary string with something homebrewed. Both are horribly dangerous - the latter for obvious reasons, but the former in particular because it makes it easy to code something that "just works" for 99,99% of cases, but those rare 0,01% side cases involving 32-bit unicode characters slip through testing and come back and bite you down the road. It's amazing how many apps have incorrect behavior with 4-byte unicode characters, on a wide range of platforms.
Both should be considered bad practice and programming languages evolved to standardize on UTF-8 for any string format that is to handle unicode. C++ for example needs to introduce something along the lines of "std::ustring" that makes unicode string ops "just work" with a UTF-8 backend, at the cost of some memory and performance vs. std::string, which should be seen as exclusively for ascii and binary string operations. std::wstring should be obsoleted.
Let go of your anger, young padawan.
Nowhere did I say that it exists today. I didn't even say it'd be the best option - my post was about how even that "simpler" approach is still incredibly expensive and complex.
Please aim your rage in the correct direction.
(and FYI, even NASA uses the word "hab" - for example, their X-Hab competition.)
My favorite approach is to build floating solar towers on Venus or the gas giants - big chunks of greenhouse material shaped like an inverted funnel reaching out into space. Unable to radiate its IR radiation back to space, the air under the funnel would become hotter than the surrounding atmosphere and rise (imparting lift to the funnel without even requiring a lifting gas). Due to the size, drag against the funnel surface would be irrelevantly small. As the funnel narrows, the gas velocity would increase - with a large enough funnel, to well over escape velocity. The funnel could be moved and aimed to some degree by directing part of the flow out through adjustable side jets. If the funnel was shaped so as to cause the gases to spiral and then flare out at the end, you could centrifugally sort the gases out by atomic mass, and thus for example rob light gases (such as water and nitrogen) of escape velocity while allowing heavy gases like CO2 the energy to escape.
Venus could send CO2 on a Mars intercept trajectory to raise its temperature and pressure. Jupiter could send hydrogen on Venus and Mars intercept trajectories, for Bosch water generation. Large moons and dwarf planets could be similarly seeded.
Of course, the obvious question: will this, or any other form of terraforming begin any time in the next many-hundred years?
Nope.
The sad fact is, the first colonies will probably be build right out in the open on flat land with nothing around for dozens of kilometers, because it's safer to land there. Which is why we haven't landed any Mars probes in deep canyons or the like, despite all of the interesting geological formations that would be exposed on the walls.
I love how these things are all "you simply have to do..." Like one goes out and collects the atmosphere with a butterfly net and splits it with a butcher's knife. Or like just goes and "gets a smelter and a foundry going".
Do these people have any clue how complex these sorts of industrial systems are? They have hundreds of thousands of components, all of which can break, and some of which are massive. The more you scale it down, the less efficient it becomes. And systems engineered on Earth don't just magically work on Mars too. You can't just dump heat into a river or the air, your gravity is significantly lower, and you've got electrostatic dust that clings to everything. And everyone output feedstock you want requires half a dozen or so input feedstocks, not counting all of the parts that can break - and they will break. And not all of these feedstocks can be gotten from the same location.
Let's just pick one little part of what you just wrote. "pass the CO over iron oxide dust" (we'll ignore everything leading up to getting and transporting that CO2). First off, if you literally do just that, you'll get nothing. The reaction needs to be done *hot*. And it can't be just "passing it over", it has to be thoroughly mixed. But then you get ready-to-use steel right? Wrong. Because you don't have "iron oxide dust". First off, you don't have any fine "dust" in mineable quanties, the blowing surface dust is spread over overthing, not accumulated in big pits ready for you to dig up.You at best have sand; at worst, solid rock. Most sands are not going to made of a majority iron oxide (if they have any sizeable quantities at all). Iron ore deposits are places where iron has been *concentrated* by geological processes, it doesn't make up the majority of basalts. And even cementations of iron-rich clay concentrates aren't 100% iron oxide. Whatever you mine (which means mining equipment, which means big, expensive, complex devices), you need to break it up, which means rock crushers, (which mean big, expensive, high wear devices), transport (haulers - more expensive devices), etc. At the mill it's going to go through a range of hoppers, conveyors, etc, all of which will wear and break. In addition to your ore and CO, you need a wide range of fluxing agents to separate out the stuff you don't want and to produce a usable product. The most critical of your fluxing agents is limestone, which on Earth mainly comes from deposits of marine microorganisms. Fat lot of luck finding that on Mars. So you need to mine less common calcium carbonate sources like travertine. More mining equipment. Hey, do you expect to find your travertine ten feet from your iron ore? Yeah, best of luck finding that, you've got to drive! Just hope you don't have to drive hundreds of kilometers, eh? Of course that's just one of a variety of fluxing agents you'll be wanting to add, there are many, for varying purposes. Anyway, once you've got your big molten mess (consuming ridiculous amounts of energy, orders of magnitude more than we've ever fielded offworld), you need to do something with it as you stream it out. Okay, then of course you have your slag skimmers. Hey, how long do you think that parts dripped in a stream of molten iron last? And you need to do something with your slag, so get your equipment to haul it away (after you've cooled it) ready as well. Speaking of cooling, normally we'd use water for that and just let it boil off for cooling, but on Mars it's a precious commodity, so go add more complexity for recapture and cooling! So now we've got a stream of mostly pure steel, but we're not even CLOSE to having usable parts.... (I'll stop here, as I don't want to spend all day on this).
I get it, you have a basic understanding of the chemical formulas for making a couple products. Well, here in the real world, a simple chemical formula is not enough. Real world processes are far more expensive and complex. They don't just pop together by waving a magic wan
Indeed, it's far easier to build a hab on Earth that you know will work and launch it. We're about as close to being able to build complex structures on Mars out of local materials as we are to being able to send a probe to alpha centauri: vague, general ideas with little real-world engineering and no practical experience.
Even the simplest "local materials" concept - building a hab on Earth with the structural strength to bear a thick layer of regolith, launching it, then dumping the regolith on top - requires engineering, launching and landing a "martian excavator", which would be a multi-billion dollar program. Certainly more expensive than say the Curiosity rover. I'd wager in the 5-10 billion range, after all is said and done (not counting the hab itself).
Or were they picturing people spending half a year outside in space suits working with picks and shovels and burning the caloric equivalent of many tonnes of food and other consumables and wearing through their space suits, all while being exposed to a high radiation flux?
Oops, sorry, in Norway. Where wages are even more expensive than they are in Sweden ;)
I counted four lanes, but you're right, it's actually only two lanes, the other half is a rail line. So half of what I accounted for being rail rather than road totally justifies $60k per square meter!
And bridges! Wow, no road has ever included bridges before! We're not talking the Danyang–Kunshan here, they're little bridges over a little river. And the terrain of the valley bottom would be considered "flat" by the standards of many countries, such as Japan. I drive on roads with more elevation change than that every time I go to my land.
There's absolutely zero reason for a 28 mile road through the countryside to cost 9.4 billion dollars. None. The longest road tunnel in the world is over 15 miles long and cost a grand total of $113 million. In Sweden, where wages are tenfold what they are in Russia.
(Lastly, I have no clue what you mean by "original source video". )
That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price
$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.
Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?
This is, after all, the same country whose 28 mile road to the Olympics cost more than if they'd covered the whole road with gold medals two layers thick. ;)
Concerning this privatization, the only question that remains is, which friend of Putin is going to get to "buy" the space agency at a " fair market value" ;)
Its not that simple. You can't just recover it from nuclear reactor waste because it's mixed in with other isotopes of plutonium, and isn't in that great of quantities to begin with. So first off you have to reprocess nuclear waste to extract the neptunium - which again, itself isn't in very great quantities, it takes a lot of waste, and most places don't want to do waste reprocessing to begin with due to cost and liability issues. You then have to make neptunium targets and expose them to a neutron flux - that is, using neutronicity that could otherwise be used for power generation or other valuable purposes (it takes a lot of neutrons to make a tiny bit of Pu238). Pu238 should be more thought of as a manufactured product than as a byproduct of particular types of nuclear reactors.
There are a few other candidates for use as space power sources that actually are waste products, but they're all significantly worse performers. There are two other alternatives. One is to make a Sterling RTG, which was in development, but funding has been cut off (it's also kind of tricky because you have to ensure that something with moving parts will operate for decades in the harsh environment of space). The other is to make an actual nuclear reactor. This means almost limitless power, but it comes at the expense of not only massive development costs and public opposition, but a large minimum size and massive radiator requirements, as well as the same reliability challenges of sterling generators.
There's no easy solutions. Except, of course, to stop bloody wasting plutonium once we have it.
Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.
"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?
And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.
Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.
You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.
The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.
Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?
Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.
And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.
The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:
Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.
A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.
And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.
And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.
Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?
Just a lot of really bad arguments.
Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.
Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.
LEDs have lifespans of what, 50-100k hours? So maybe a couple decades. And some will significantly outlive their design life, as is always the case with failure curves. The solar cells should be good for decades, until the contacts corrode.
One *could* design devices to last for thousands of years. But that's not usually a design constraint ;)
There's no guarantee that ECCS are independent and can operate in the vent of station blackout. The HPCI used in Fukishima, for example, is a steam turbine-driven pump but not a generator, and it has electrical components that require operation. Which is why it didn't prevent meltdown.
The primary turbines are not designed to operate on the amount of power generated from decay heat alone.
Small upgrades, this already happens.
Large upgrades, by phasing out old units and building new ones. The complex as a whole remains.
Taking down an old unit is BTW a very large task ("decommissioning"), can take decades and comes at extreme expense. Which is part of why plant operators try to keep their old units going as long as possible, even when they've become expensive to operate.
Could you, so that we know where you're coming from, elaborate on where renewables "dont cut it"?