Re-entry at Saturn orbital speed should completely evaporate the probe, no chance of anything surviving. It took real heroics on the Galileo probe to survive Jupiter re-entry
Nuclear thermal is a nice technology for some missions (but probably not Mars where the delta-V isn't all that high). The problem is that I don't see it as political realistic. There are political issues with radioisotope generators on deep space probes - for example the proposed Europa lander will have a very limited lifetime because it will only have chemical batteries.
I think a NTR could be launched safely if it hasn't been turned on yet, but I also think that there is not a snowballs chance in hell of it being politically acceptable.
Its also not all that useful. You can do Mars and Venus without nuclear propulsion. The outer planets are probably better served with electrical propulsion since the travel time is so long that multi-year acceleration isn't out of the question. As long as that acceleration is not too far from the sun, solar will work.
I'm personally a big fan of developing space nuclear technology, I just don't think its likely to happen.
I think its too late. There are so many forms of surveillance that adding another really won't change things. At this point I think its better to lobby for strong laws to protect how the data is *used*. Trying to control what is collected is a lost cause .
You won't always be able to enforce them but if, for example, home DNA hacking is seen as a major threat you could probably restrict and track technologies the way it is done for nuclear technology. (if there were no restrictions, a homemade nuclear bomb is not impossible).
You can also arrest and imprison people when they are caught doing illegal mods.
It may not be necessary. The technology to effectively modify humans may require a large infrastracture. Or maybe not?
I agree with your general point though that we need to think about enforcement as well.
(Of course large bio-med companies will argue that only large bio-med companies should have access to this technology....)
Technological and scientific advances have the potential to drastically change the world. That's why they are valuable. That's why they are dangerous.
I don't want to stop or even slow genetic research BUT, I would like to see real work put into developing rules to try to prevent some of the possible nightmare futures it could create.
It might make sense to have rules that prohibit anyone from serving who requires medical care or medication above some defined threshold and with some level of incapacitation if it isn't received. Don't need to mention being trans at all, just a limit that is based on practicalities and which is applied to everyone equally.
I surprised that women on average being shorter doesn't provide an advantage for women. Maybe G-suits make the difference, but for aerobatic flying I start to go grey before there are strength issues and I'm not in particularly good physical shape. I assume fighter plane controls are arranged so that you don't need to support your arms under high G-loads. Even if you have the strength, the sudden changes in Gs can make it difficult to reach the control you want if you need to be able to hold your arm out.
Do you have data on G-tolerance for women and men? It would be interesting to see.
Sigh. I'd hoped for more for the hundreds of billions spent on the plane. Don't they extensively test ejection seats with dummies? Then there is the oxygen system issues.
I wonder if they are having problems due to trying to save weight over previous generation planes - which ties back to the original discussion.
3d orientation is on part of piloting, but just one of many. I haven't seen studies of how women and men differ in things like multi-tasking, susceptibility to distractions / over-focusing, integrating multiple inputs, reaction times etc.
If there are substantial differences that could be relevant.
Seriously though I think you are correct - and that most future warfare will be fought with drones / robots of various sorts, and cyber weapons. The conventional military may not have much use a few decades from now.
Depth perception isn't important for flying aircraft - things are too far away for depth perception to matter.
I doubt fighter pilots even carry weapons because the military value of being able to fight after your $200M airplane has been downed is pretty minor.
Action movies aside, hand-to-hand combat is not likely to be a really useful tactic considering that Chinese army is likely equipped with guns, helicopters, and whatever just shot down the $200M airplane.
btw, 7.5% of the Peoples Liberation Army of china are women. Not that that matters here.
I don't know of studies that show gender differences in the skills required to fly a plane (for conventional planes this seems to be largely an ability to multi-task and prioritize a variety of very complex tasks and deal with a wide range of data inputs). I know female acrobatics pilots and astronauts so there are some women who are both skilled pilots and who are willing to take large risks.
Are women's necks weaker relative to the mass of their heads and helmets? An ejection system that requires a very strong neck to avoid death seems like a poor design and one that would limit the number of qualified pilots.
If you look at aerial photos, the campus looks very similar in size and shape to a synchrotron light source facility. See for example http://www.esrf.eu/
Now if Apple really is building a synchrotron, I'm impressed. Sadly though I think its just cargo cult - spending billions on a building that looks like something cool, but doesn't really do anything interesting.
You would have to train more pilots, but we don't have that many ultra-expensive planes like the F35, B1, F22. The cost of training more women is probably small compared to the multi-hundred billion cost of the development programs. There is no reason I know of that it would cost more to train female pilots than male ones.
Development of these planes takes many years, plenty of time to fill the pipeline with new pilots.
The performance advantage is small, but these planes operate very near the technology limit, so even small improvements can represent a significant savings. (remember its not just the pilot, but most of the systems required to support the pilot that would shrink).
Its an interesting question. Women are on average not as strong as men and they are on average smaller. so fighter planes designed for women pilots would be more efficient. Should our next generation military aircraft and other roles that don't require physical strength be optimized for women, while roles that require physical strength are optimized for men.
Probably right, but there seems to be some disagreement on the analysis. The key seems to be getting the ion temperature high wihtout heating up the electrons (the colliding plasma rings do this), and then the neutral beam injection can continue to heat ions. There seems to be some disagreement on how to calculate the time for the electrons to reach equilibrium.
I'd agree at least as far as "unlikely".
To some extent its a matter of scale. With a sufficiently large plasma I think a variety of configuration will work. (tokomaks, stelerators etc). The question is which will work at the most practical scale. At a sufficiently large scale gravitational confinement works just great...
Fusors are a reasonable way to produce neutrons but so far there doesn't seem to be a way to scale them to net energy production.
There are a variety of ways to do nuclear fusion. What is not known is how to produce net energy with fusion. ITER will probably work, but may never be economical. Other ideas (like the tri-alpha scheme) might end up being more practical but I don't think tri-alpha has released enough information to know.
Tri-Alpha isn't doing inertial confinement fusion. They use a plasma based design with an unusual field configuration (termed "reversed field". The machine does collide two plasmas but it is still magnetic confinement, not inertial.
Laser driven inertial has little chance of being practical without a huge breakthrough in lasers. Heavy ion driven inertial could potentially work since accelerators can be quite efficient, but there are a number of huge hurdles.
I thought sexual harassment was illegal, and I presume a non-disparagement clause can't prevent an employee from disclosing illegal activity. If it can, then it seems the law needs re-writing.
Just my thought, I don't know anything about the actual legality.
For me losing a few hours of work worth of cash is a small risk relative to losing my ID, phone etc, and that is a very small risk relative to being injured / killed.
If I'm held up and hand the thief the few hundred $ in my wallet, he may take it and leave. To me that is a very good outcome. I got to an ATM and get on with my life.
If he wants my wallet and phone as well, then I'm pissed, but I'll sort if out.
If he gets angry because I don't have cash and stabs me with a screwdriver, then I'm at least in the hospital - a far worse situation.
The convenience of having enough cash to deal with minor emergencies is great too.
Are blue collar workers less able to control their impulses, or less able to treat others fairly? That feels sort of like a Victorian idea that the lesser classes don't have the sort of mental control that upper class workers have. I know this idea is out there (not blaming the previous poster) but it seems a rather elitist idea.
We also aren't really white collar. There is a lot of big hardware - people moving multi-ton magnets, installing megawatt AC power lines, plumbing etc. Its not a factory, but its not a bunch of guys sitting at desks. We do have a lot more white collar guys than a typical factory and I think a much older workforce so that might make a difference.
They co-mingle just fine where I am. Very few problems, nothing like what is reported in this article. We have female managers, employees, scientists, engineers, technicians etc. I'm not claiming we've never had a problem, but problems are rare and harassment is not tolerated at all.
There are the usual and difficult issues with unconscious bias, matching pay to jobs etc but I haven't seen blatant harassment in the 25 years I've been here.
Its not that hard. When you are work, act like a professional.
I'm also a pilot and user fees will make things personally very difficult - possibly forcing me to give up flying after 30 years.
I see the argument - from a pure efficiency point of view, light GA is a waste. An "efficient" world will have airlines and corporate jets, with flight training done in empty parts of the country.
The highway example isn't really right - the majority of highway traffic (in numbers and economic value) is personal automobiles. They remain an efficient mode of transportation for many people. While there are some people, the above poster probably one of them, who make efficient use of their planes, for most it is just a hobby.
I wish I had a good argument against it, other than it takes away one of the things that I personally thought was great about America.
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Re-entry at Saturn orbital speed should completely evaporate the probe, no chance of anything surviving. It took real heroics on the Galileo probe to survive Jupiter re-entry
Nuclear thermal is a nice technology for some missions (but probably not Mars where the delta-V isn't all that high). The problem is that I don't see it as political realistic. There are political issues with radioisotope generators on deep space probes - for example the proposed Europa lander will have a very limited lifetime because it will only have chemical batteries.
I think a NTR could be launched safely if it hasn't been turned on yet, but I also think that there is not a snowballs chance in hell of it being politically acceptable.
Its also not all that useful. You can do Mars and Venus without nuclear propulsion. The outer planets are probably better served with electrical propulsion since the travel time is so long that multi-year acceleration isn't out of the question. As long as that acceleration is not too far from the sun, solar will work.
I'm personally a big fan of developing space nuclear technology, I just don't think its likely to happen.
I think its too late. There are so many forms of surveillance that adding another really won't change things. At this point I think its better to lobby for strong laws to protect how the data is *used*. Trying to control what is collected is a lost cause .
You won't always be able to enforce them but if, for example, home DNA hacking is seen as a major threat you could probably restrict and track technologies the way it is done for nuclear technology. (if there were no restrictions, a homemade nuclear bomb is not impossible).
You can also arrest and imprison people when they are caught doing illegal mods.
It may not be necessary. The technology to effectively modify humans may require a large infrastracture. Or maybe not?
I agree with your general point though that we need to think about enforcement as well.
(Of course large bio-med companies will argue that only large bio-med companies should have access to this technology....)
Technological and scientific advances have the potential to drastically change the world. That's why they are valuable. That's why they are dangerous.
I don't want to stop or even slow genetic research BUT, I would like to see real work put into developing rules to try to prevent some of the possible nightmare futures it could create.
It might make sense to have rules that prohibit anyone from serving who requires medical care or medication above some defined threshold and with some level of incapacitation if it isn't received. Don't need to mention being trans at all, just a limit that is based on practicalities and which is applied to everyone equally.
There may well be such rules in place already.
I surprised that women on average being shorter doesn't provide an advantage for women. Maybe G-suits make the difference, but for aerobatic flying I start to go grey before there are strength issues and I'm not in particularly good physical shape. I assume fighter plane controls are arranged so that you don't need to support your arms under high G-loads. Even if you have the strength, the sudden changes in Gs can make it difficult to reach the control you want if you need to be able to hold your arm out.
Do you have data on G-tolerance for women and men? It would be interesting to see.
Sigh. I'd hoped for more for the hundreds of billions spent on the plane. Don't they extensively test ejection seats with dummies? Then there is the oxygen system issues.
I wonder if they are having problems due to trying to save weight over previous generation planes - which ties back to the original discussion.
3d orientation is on part of piloting, but just one of many. I haven't seen studies of how women and men differ in things like multi-tasking, susceptibility to distractions / over-focusing, integrating multiple inputs, reaction times etc.
If there are substantial differences that could be relevant.
True - but flying planes is so much fun.
Seriously though I think you are correct - and that most future warfare will be fought with drones / robots of various sorts, and cyber weapons. The conventional military may not have much use a few decades from now.
Depth perception isn't important for flying aircraft - things are too far away for depth perception to matter.
I doubt fighter pilots even carry weapons because the military value of being able to fight after your $200M airplane has been downed is pretty minor.
Action movies aside, hand-to-hand combat is not likely to be a really useful tactic considering that Chinese army is likely equipped with guns, helicopters, and whatever just shot down the $200M airplane.
btw, 7.5% of the Peoples Liberation Army of china are women. Not that that matters here.
That seems possible given their on average shorter build. Do you happen to have a reference?
I don't know of studies that show gender differences in the skills required to fly a plane (for conventional planes this seems to be largely an ability to multi-task and prioritize a variety of very complex tasks and deal with a wide range of data inputs). I know female acrobatics pilots and astronauts so there are some women who are both skilled pilots and who are willing to take large risks.
Are women's necks weaker relative to the mass of their heads and helmets? An ejection system that requires a very strong neck to avoid death seems like a poor design and one that would limit the number of qualified pilots.
If you look at aerial photos, the campus looks very similar in size and shape to a synchrotron light source facility. See for example
http://www.esrf.eu/
Now if Apple really is building a synchrotron, I'm impressed. Sadly though I think its just cargo cult - spending billions on a building that looks like something cool, but doesn't really do anything interesting.
You would have to train more pilots, but we don't have that many ultra-expensive planes like the F35, B1, F22. The cost of training more women is probably small compared to the multi-hundred billion cost of the development programs. There is no reason I know of that it would cost more to train female pilots than male ones.
Development of these planes takes many years, plenty of time to fill the pipeline with new pilots.
The performance advantage is small, but these planes operate very near the technology limit, so even small improvements can represent a significant savings. (remember its not just the pilot, but most of the systems required to support the pilot that would shrink).
Its an interesting question. Women are on average not as strong as men and they are on average smaller. so fighter planes designed for women pilots would be more efficient. Should our next generation military aircraft and other roles that don't require physical strength be optimized for women, while roles that require physical strength are optimized for men.
Probably right, but there seems to be some disagreement on the analysis. The key seems to be getting the ion temperature high wihtout heating up the electrons (the colliding plasma rings do this), and then the neutral beam injection can continue to heat ions. There seems to be some disagreement on how to calculate the time for the electrons to reach equilibrium.
I'd agree at least as far as "unlikely".
To some extent its a matter of scale. With a sufficiently large plasma I think a variety of configuration will work. (tokomaks, stelerators etc). The question is which will work at the most practical scale. At a sufficiently large scale gravitational confinement works just great...
Fusors are a reasonable way to produce neutrons but so far there doesn't seem to be a way to scale them to net energy production.
There are a variety of ways to do nuclear fusion. What is not known is how to produce net energy with fusion. ITER will probably work, but may never be economical. Other ideas (like the tri-alpha scheme) might end up being more practical but I don't think tri-alpha has released enough information to know.
Tri-Alpha isn't doing inertial confinement fusion. They use a plasma based design with an unusual field configuration (termed "reversed field". The machine does collide two plasmas but it is still magnetic confinement, not inertial.
Laser driven inertial has little chance of being practical without a huge breakthrough in lasers. Heavy ion driven inertial could potentially work since accelerators can be quite efficient, but there are a number of huge hurdles.
I thought sexual harassment was illegal, and I presume a non-disparagement clause can't prevent an employee from disclosing illegal activity. If it can, then it seems the law needs re-writing.
Just my thought, I don't know anything about the actual legality.
For me losing a few hours of work worth of cash is a small risk relative to losing my ID, phone etc, and that is a very small risk relative to being injured / killed.
If I'm held up and hand the thief the few hundred $ in my wallet, he may take it and leave. To me that is a very good outcome. I got to an ATM and get on with my life.
If he wants my wallet and phone as well, then I'm pissed, but I'll sort if out.
If he gets angry because I don't have cash and stabs me with a screwdriver, then I'm at least in the hospital - a far worse situation.
The convenience of having enough cash to deal with minor emergencies is great too.
Are blue collar workers less able to control their impulses, or less able to treat others fairly? That feels sort of like a Victorian idea that the lesser classes don't have the sort of mental control that upper class workers have. I know this idea is out there (not blaming the previous poster) but it seems a rather elitist idea.
We also aren't really white collar. There is a lot of big hardware - people moving multi-ton magnets, installing megawatt AC power lines, plumbing etc. Its not a factory, but its not a bunch of guys sitting at desks. We do have a lot more white collar guys than a typical factory and I think a much older workforce so that might make a difference.
They co-mingle just fine where I am. Very few problems, nothing like what is reported in this article. We have female managers, employees, scientists, engineers, technicians etc. I'm not claiming we've never had a problem, but problems are rare and harassment is not tolerated at all.
There are the usual and difficult issues with unconscious bias, matching pay to jobs etc but I haven't seen blatant harassment in the 25 years I've been here.
Its not that hard. When you are work, act like a professional.
I'm also a pilot and user fees will make things personally very difficult - possibly forcing me to give up flying after 30 years.
I see the argument - from a pure efficiency point of view, light GA is a waste. An "efficient" world will have airlines and corporate jets, with flight training done in empty parts of the country.
The highway example isn't really right - the majority of highway traffic (in numbers and economic value) is personal automobiles. They remain an efficient mode of transportation for many people. While there are some people, the above poster probably one of them, who make efficient use of their planes, for most it is just a hobby.
I wish I had a good argument against it, other than it takes away one of the things that I personally thought was great about America.