The difference between an object hitting Earth and one that just barely misses might be a few tens of metres per second, if you catch it early enough. But the difference between the orbit of the best suitable asteroid and a successful impact (or capture) could be anything up to kilometres per second.
Worse, any miss is a good miss. Whether it scrapes the atmosphere, or swings wide of the moon, it's all good. A hit, otoh, requires aching levels of accuracy. If a million states are called a "miss" but just one is a "hit", then the two situations are not symmetrical.
Even if the white paint scheme could provide enough delta-v to bring a useful asteroid near enough to Earth, I doubt it could be used with enough precision to actually steer it to crash or capture.
So you're saying there were mass shootings regularly, and that abruptly stopped when they banned those firearms?
Approximately 1 every 18 months over the two decades before the new restrictions. Reduced to just 1 in the 16 years since the change (using matched criteria for classification. Although it was at the bottom limit of the classification.) A ten-fold reduction in the number of mass shootings so far, and a greater than ten-fold reduction in the number of people killed in mass shootings. Realistically, 16 years isn't long enough to work out the true post-reform rate, it's too low to measure.
We have the same media, movies, TV, music, video games, as the US. We didn't improve our mental health system, we didn't improve our economy, we didn't change our law enforcement systems. Other crime rates followed their prior trends, some small differences that may be attributable to the change (reduction in murder rate (ditto suicide), increase in some other categories) but they're all around the 10% variation, too small to show causation. None as sharp and dramatic as the immediate near cessation of mass shootings. Hell, even the number of firearms returned to the previous level within a couple of years. So it's not even a matter of weapon numbers.
We restricted certain weapon types, and magazine capacities, we had a buy-back of newly banned weapons and accessories from law abiding gun owners (at market value + 10%, IIRC)... and the number of mass shootings dropped by an order of magnitude. And there was no increase in other forms of mass killing; bombs and poisonings, mass-knifings, mass cricket-battings, etc.
The myth that the mass-killers will just find other ways to mass-kill is demonstrably false. They don't. Regular criminals, yes, nutters, no. There's something about certain types of firearms that is deeply empowering to paranoid delusional freaks.
And I don't know why.
Seriously, I didn't see it working. Although I'm okay with reasonable gun control, I could not see the new laws having any impact on mass killings. I remember saying as much online at the time. Outliers are notoriously immune to systematic changes, and this change just screamed "knee-jerk politics" (just like this NYPD story)...
Of course both are just copypasta from the Forbes article, which was probably just a rewrite of an AP story, which itself was just a rewrite of the press release.
"Taiwan-headquartered electronics manufacturer Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.), purchased an 8.88% stake in Woodman Labs for $200 million, valuing the San Mateo, Calif. company at $2.25 billion."
The summary pulled that straight from the article. The later $1.15b figure is the Nicholas Woodman's 51% share, which is why both article and summary call him billionaire. (A paper-billionaire at least.)
The purpose of the program is to appear to be Doing Something. This doesn't require that the program does something, but it is vital that it appears to do so. Hence the announcement that "We are Doing Something" is the core of the program requirements.
That's what I've been saying since columbine. I could kill more people without a gun than with, and stealthier.
But you don't.
The same arguments were made when Australia banned many types of firearms after a mass-shooting in 1996. And while mass shootings virtually stopped, there was no corresponding increase in non-firearm mass killings. No bombings, no mass poisonings.
That's to give a potential impactor enough delta-v to miss the planet.
Both Frosty and asm2750's proposals require taking a non-impactor and giving it enough delta-v to hit Earth or go into HEO. That would likely require a lot more delta-v, and vastly more control, than the impact-avoidance scenarios.
Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
Impact modelling apparently says rubble-pile asteroids are harder to break up than solids.
But they will also have a large amount of their mass as dust/sand/gravel. If you can spread it out, it will burn up above 50km, only the large solid masses will impact. But we need to do proper asteroid missions on members of multiple asteroid families. Too many unknowns.
It's about being hit by bird-shot rather than a deer-slug. Both are bad, but only one is survivable. Reducing a resurfacing event to a mere extinction event, or an extinction event to a civilisation killer, or a civilisation killer to a large natural disaster.
If we can reduce the severity, there's a greater chance we can take measures to preserve the species, and the knowledge of our civilisation. One week in a suburban bunker vs six months. Or a year in a large government nuclear shelter, vs... no chance survival at all.
In the case of a small object like 2011AG5, breaking it up at sufficient distance would render most of its mass harmless. Not breaking it up would be like setting off multiple Tsar Bombs at the impact site.
5km isn't enough to "significantly slow down (and disperse)" such a large volume of material. The impact area is still too localised, even though the object is shattered. More than that, the range of conventional "high velocity" firearms isn't enough to reach the asteroid at 5km. And even if it was, your 1 million shooters would all have to be directly under the "dispersal" zone. They'd be vaporised.
If you could shatter it fine enough at a sufficient distance - multiple Earth-moon distances - so that the spread was at least planet-wide, you might reduce any local damage to tolerable levels. You still get all the energy dumped into the atmosphere, but in this case, that's not enough to worry about compared to the effect of a single impact site.
Most asteroids seem to be pre-shattered anyway. Loosely held piles of smashed rock, gravel and dust. Unless you can cause it to spread significantly apart, breaking it up isn't doing much to change its nature, it will still impact would the same force it would have anyway. It will also be able to take a massive amount of damage without breaking apart, by shifting internally to absorb the energy. Compare the impact of smashing a wrecking ball into a solid boulder, verses dropping it on a pile of sand and gravel.
I realize there has been a mass shooting and people are worried now.
Except that this zero-tolerance crap has been ballooning since Columbine. And yet the rate of mass shootings has not gone down. Shockingly, publicly humiliating and ostracising troubled teenagers doesn't reduce their likelihood of going on a murderous rampage. Who would have imagined?
Computers on space probes barely qualify as computers, by modern standards. They're limited to slow old hardware that has been proven against radiation, and can run at achingly low power levels. Raspberry-Pi is probably faster.
If someone could come up with a modern-speed chip that was equally radiation proof, it would revolutionise space-probes and rovers.
The supercomputer is intended to calculate all the possible names of God. After which the purpose of the universe is ended, and God can sort of wind things up.
It's the repetitive stimulation of the prostate gland that gives pleasure to the receiver. It's likely that women who enjoy anal sex have some kind of vestigial nerve cluster in the same area. "Squirters", I believe, have such a pseudo-prostate.
These aren't intended for launch/reentry, hence they won't be used in manned capsules. They'll still use the standard recovery suits for that. [This applies to the comments about Dragon, above. It's likely that SpaceX would use a fairly conventional International Orange ACES-style recovery suit. As will all the other Commercial Crew developers.]
These new suits are intended for long duration space vessels, such as the SEV or potentially the ISS if you launch a suitable adapter module for the external "docking" of these suits. I'm surprised that they haven't put out a RFP for a suit-dock module for ISS, it'd be a perfect place to test the new design over a long period. And it'd be another good project for fixed-cost multi-vendor development to increase the supplier base and better control project costs. And, seriously, what it the damn point of ISS if you're not using it to test long-duration mission hardware?
Personally I think they didn't go far enough. I'd have liked to see them use a "tabbed work space" metaphor. Ie, when you change tabs, you change how the document is viewed and worked, instead of having a single wysiwyg system for every task that never quite works. Separate content creation/edit vs design and formatting vs publication/print/web vs file view and meta-data vs code-view vs help/settings... So not only the toolbar, but also the visual metaphors of the document, the colours and shapes, would reflect the task.
Does the LS3 work after being shot up? Silly comparison.
The kinds of animals that locals use can be used locally, by definition. It would make the US troops seem more human, and caring for actual animals may reduce the dehumanisation/PTSD of those troops after a decade+ at war.
And troops can periodically donate animals to villages. Good for hearts'n'minds. (Particularly if the US breeding program selects only the most combat-trainable animals, leaving you with some excess each year, but also as the animal age too much for heavily loaded mountain patrols but are still okay for farm-work on flatter ground.)
But, the key is that if there was a need for LS3, then the US would already be using pack animals. They aren't, so there probably isn't.
Pack animals have been used by the military for millennia. Including the US military. The first cannon were drawn by horses. If they can be trained to handle cannon fire, they can be trained to ignore AK.
But then he'll get a bigger stronger branch. And you'll respond by attaching sharpened flint to your branch. Then he invents a system where he can make others fight you while he is protected. So you invent a system where you personify the sun or a volcano and convince others that it's the personification that wants them to fight his defenders...
But convincing women to have sex with you requires not being a pathetic drooling moron, which means having a way of bleeding off the excess horniness during sexless courtship. Low horniness means you don't try and drop out of the gene pool, high unrelieved horniness means you don't succeed and drop out of the gene pool. Horniness + ability to masturbate means you can select your level of horniness to fit the situation. Win.
But there was a side effect: When women breast-feed, it lowers their sex drive on average. A normal horny animal would just go off and find another mate. This limits the resources available for the child, so the species evolves young that are independent early, which limits intelligence. However, because masturbating human males could relieve their horniness, it reduced their need to constantly find other mates. This increased the resources for children, allowing the minor evolutionary pressure for greater intelligence to finally overcome the greater evolutionary pressure to reduce resource use. Thus modern humans evolved.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between an object hitting Earth and one that just barely misses might be a few tens of metres per second, if you catch it early enough. But the difference between the orbit of the best suitable asteroid and a successful impact (or capture) could be anything up to kilometres per second.
Worse, any miss is a good miss. Whether it scrapes the atmosphere, or swings wide of the moon, it's all good. A hit, otoh, requires aching levels of accuracy. If a million states are called a "miss" but just one is a "hit", then the two situations are not symmetrical.
Even if the white paint scheme could provide enough delta-v to bring a useful asteroid near enough to Earth, I doubt it could be used with enough precision to actually steer it to crash or capture.
So you're saying there were mass shootings regularly, and that abruptly stopped when they banned those firearms?
Approximately 1 every 18 months over the two decades before the new restrictions. Reduced to just 1 in the 16 years since the change (using matched criteria for classification. Although it was at the bottom limit of the classification.) A ten-fold reduction in the number of mass shootings so far, and a greater than ten-fold reduction in the number of people killed in mass shootings. Realistically, 16 years isn't long enough to work out the true post-reform rate, it's too low to measure.
We have the same media, movies, TV, music, video games, as the US. We didn't improve our mental health system, we didn't improve our economy, we didn't change our law enforcement systems. Other crime rates followed their prior trends, some small differences that may be attributable to the change (reduction in murder rate (ditto suicide), increase in some other categories) but they're all around the 10% variation, too small to show causation. None as sharp and dramatic as the immediate near cessation of mass shootings. Hell, even the number of firearms returned to the previous level within a couple of years. So it's not even a matter of weapon numbers.
We restricted certain weapon types, and magazine capacities, we had a buy-back of newly banned weapons and accessories from law abiding gun owners (at market value + 10%, IIRC)... and the number of mass shootings dropped by an order of magnitude. And there was no increase in other forms of mass killing; bombs and poisonings, mass-knifings, mass cricket-battings, etc.
The myth that the mass-killers will just find other ways to mass-kill is demonstrably false. They don't. Regular criminals, yes, nutters, no. There's something about certain types of firearms that is deeply empowering to paranoid delusional freaks.
And I don't know why.
Seriously, I didn't see it working. Although I'm okay with reasonable gun control, I could not see the new laws having any impact on mass killings. I remember saying as much online at the time. Outliers are notoriously immune to systematic changes, and this change just screamed "knee-jerk politics" (just like this NYPD story)...
And yet... the numbers are there.
Of course both are just copypasta from the Forbes article, which was probably just a rewrite of an AP story, which itself was just a rewrite of the press release.
FTFA:
The summary pulled that straight from the article. The later $1.15b figure is the Nicholas Woodman's 51% share, which is why both article and summary call him billionaire. (A paper-billionaire at least.)
Foxconn buys $2.25b worth of IP for just 8.88c on the dollar.
The purpose of the program is to appear to be Doing Something. This doesn't require that the program does something, but it is vital that it appears to do so. Hence the announcement that "We are Doing Something" is the core of the program requirements.
That's what I've been saying since columbine. I could kill more people without a gun than with, and stealthier.
But you don't.
The same arguments were made when Australia banned many types of firearms after a mass-shooting in 1996. And while mass shootings virtually stopped, there was no corresponding increase in non-firearm mass killings. No bombings, no mass poisonings.
That's to give a potential impactor enough delta-v to miss the planet.
Both Frosty and asm2750's proposals require taking a non-impactor and giving it enough delta-v to hit Earth or go into HEO. That would likely require a lot more delta-v, and vastly more control, than the impact-avoidance scenarios.
Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
Impact modelling apparently says rubble-pile asteroids are harder to break up than solids.
But they will also have a large amount of their mass as dust/sand/gravel. If you can spread it out, it will burn up above 50km, only the large solid masses will impact. But we need to do proper asteroid missions on members of multiple asteroid families. Too many unknowns.
It's about being hit by bird-shot rather than a deer-slug. Both are bad, but only one is survivable. Reducing a resurfacing event to a mere extinction event, or an extinction event to a civilisation killer, or a civilisation killer to a large natural disaster.
If we can reduce the severity, there's a greater chance we can take measures to preserve the species, and the knowledge of our civilisation. One week in a suburban bunker vs six months. Or a year in a large government nuclear shelter, vs... no chance survival at all.
In the case of a small object like 2011AG5, breaking it up at sufficient distance would render most of its mass harmless. Not breaking it up would be like setting off multiple Tsar Bombs at the impact site.
5km isn't enough to "significantly slow down (and disperse)" such a large volume of material. The impact area is still too localised, even though the object is shattered. More than that, the range of conventional "high velocity" firearms isn't enough to reach the asteroid at 5km. And even if it was, your 1 million shooters would all have to be directly under the "dispersal" zone. They'd be vaporised.
If you could shatter it fine enough at a sufficient distance - multiple Earth-moon distances - so that the spread was at least planet-wide, you might reduce any local damage to tolerable levels. You still get all the energy dumped into the atmosphere, but in this case, that's not enough to worry about compared to the effect of a single impact site.
Most asteroids seem to be pre-shattered anyway. Loosely held piles of smashed rock, gravel and dust. Unless you can cause it to spread significantly apart, breaking it up isn't doing much to change its nature, it will still impact would the same force it would have anyway. It will also be able to take a massive amount of damage without breaking apart, by shifting internally to absorb the energy. Compare the impact of smashing a wrecking ball into a solid boulder, verses dropping it on a pile of sand and gravel.
I realize there has been a mass shooting and people are worried now.
Except that this zero-tolerance crap has been ballooning since Columbine. And yet the rate of mass shootings has not gone down. Shockingly, publicly humiliating and ostracising troubled teenagers doesn't reduce their likelihood of going on a murderous rampage. Who would have imagined?
Computers on space probes barely qualify as computers, by modern standards. They're limited to slow old hardware that has been proven against radiation, and can run at achingly low power levels. Raspberry-Pi is probably faster.
If someone could come up with a modern-speed chip that was equally radiation proof, it would revolutionise space-probes and rovers.
The supercomputer is intended to calculate all the possible names of God. After which the purpose of the universe is ended, and God can sort of wind things up.
As the Mayans predicted.
It's the repetitive stimulation of the prostate gland that gives pleasure to the receiver. It's likely that women who enjoy anal sex have some kind of vestigial nerve cluster in the same area. "Squirters", I believe, have such a pseudo-prostate.
The rest is psychological, obviously.
These aren't intended for launch/reentry, hence they won't be used in manned capsules. They'll still use the standard recovery suits for that. [This applies to the comments about Dragon, above. It's likely that SpaceX would use a fairly conventional International Orange ACES-style recovery suit. As will all the other Commercial Crew developers.]
These new suits are intended for long duration space vessels, such as the SEV or potentially the ISS if you launch a suitable adapter module for the external "docking" of these suits. I'm surprised that they haven't put out a RFP for a suit-dock module for ISS, it'd be a perfect place to test the new design over a long period. And it'd be another good project for fixed-cost multi-vendor development to increase the supplier base and better control project costs. And, seriously, what it the damn point of ISS if you're not using it to test long-duration mission hardware?
Personally I think they didn't go far enough. I'd have liked to see them use a "tabbed work space" metaphor. Ie, when you change tabs, you change how the document is viewed and worked, instead of having a single wysiwyg system for every task that never quite works. Separate content creation/edit vs design and formatting vs publication/print/web vs file view and meta-data vs code-view vs help/settings... So not only the toolbar, but also the visual metaphors of the document, the colours and shapes, would reflect the task.
[Correction: I'd like to see them do that well.]
This guy sounds like a techie Lewis Black. :)
I kept getting Gilbert Gottfried.
Does the LS3 work after being shot up? Silly comparison.
The kinds of animals that locals use can be used locally, by definition. It would make the US troops seem more human, and caring for actual animals may reduce the dehumanisation/PTSD of those troops after a decade+ at war.
And troops can periodically donate animals to villages. Good for hearts'n'minds. (Particularly if the US breeding program selects only the most combat-trainable animals, leaving you with some excess each year, but also as the animal age too much for heavily loaded mountain patrols but are still okay for farm-work on flatter ground.)
But, the key is that if there was a need for LS3, then the US would already be using pack animals. They aren't, so there probably isn't.
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/dms/lowres/dmsn47l.jpg
I google-imaged "caveman sex". I expected Raquel Welch. I didn't get Raquel Welch. TIL.
Pack animals have been used by the military for millennia. Including the US military. The first cannon were drawn by horses. If they can be trained to handle cannon fire, they can be trained to ignore AK.
Do you recall what primitive people do to witches?
--
Aside:
"Stupidity common more hydrogen than. It you combat. Not try! Hard think, or not think!" - Sensei Yoda
That's not even close to Yoda-speak. "More common than hydrogen, stupidity is. Combat it, you must. Think, or think not, there is no 'try'."
But then he'll get a bigger stronger branch. And you'll respond by attaching sharpened flint to your branch. Then he invents a system where he can make others fight you while he is protected. So you invent a system where you personify the sun or a volcano and convince others that it's the personification that wants them to fight his defenders...
Where does it all end?
But convincing women to have sex with you requires not being a pathetic drooling moron, which means having a way of bleeding off the excess horniness during sexless courtship. Low horniness means you don't try and drop out of the gene pool, high unrelieved horniness means you don't succeed and drop out of the gene pool. Horniness + ability to masturbate means you can select your level of horniness to fit the situation. Win.
But there was a side effect: When women breast-feed, it lowers their sex drive on average. A normal horny animal would just go off and find another mate. This limits the resources available for the child, so the species evolves young that are independent early, which limits intelligence. However, because masturbating human males could relieve their horniness, it reduced their need to constantly find other mates. This increased the resources for children, allowing the minor evolutionary pressure for greater intelligence to finally overcome the greater evolutionary pressure to reduce resource use. Thus modern humans evolved.
Right click, rotate image, rotate 180 degrees.
Puts the rings in the orientation your brain expects, then the shadow makes more sense.