The martian biodome does not need to be closed, in the explicit sense.
There is plenty of whispy CO2 on the surface of mars. This is an external source of both carbon and oxygen.
The real issue would be the hydrogen component, needed to increase water supplies. The hydrogen would likely have to come from mineral sources.
The issue with closed system biodomes is the absurd amounts of carbon and water needed in them before they reach homeostasis. (And no, the earth's soil is not in any natural danger. It is in danger of being carbon depleted by chemical fertilizer use, but chemical fertilizer is not natural. The earth can sustain life for many millions more years assuming humans don't wreck it before then. The earth wouldn't be "used up", it would be "sterilized". Very important difference.)
Here's a thought experiment for you.
We send 500 colonists to mars, to a site that has been robotically constructed in advance, per existing plans.
Enroute, the humans eat, and make sewerage. This sewerage is sequestered during the 6 month sojourn, and possibly run through a reclimation system, since water is both heavy and essential.
When the humans land, they have 6 months worth of poo and used toilet paper to use as an asset. Urine contains high levels of ammonium ion, and poo contains large quantities of organic sponge, and microbial forms. Once processed by the water reclimation system, you have very concentrated orgaic fertilizer. 90% of it should be heated to kill the microbes, for health reasons. The remaining 10% is added sparingly to mixed potting soil mixtures (washed martian soil mixed with the heated septic solids) to provide microbial flora at sensble levels. Plants are grown in it.
As the plants are grown, martian atmosphere is collected using air compressors, and delivered to the growing rooms. This provides additional carbon, which the growing plants incorporate into cellulose, sugars, and proteins. Humans eat this material, producing more poo. The poo is treated, and mixed with more washed martian dirt, and more plants are planted.
The raw martian dirt is contaminated with a "toxic" salt, called perchlorate. (A cation of chlorine and 4 oxygen, bound to a metal anion.) This mineral is very useful as an oxygen source. Simply heating it up liberates elemental oxygen, reducing the perchlorate salt to a standard chloride. Collection of the perchlorates could supply a considerale portion of the habitat's oxygen supply. (Again, an external source.) The removal of the perchlorate is required to use the soil fr horticulture, so the biproducts of collection and seperation are both directly useful to the colony. Dirt mining would be a regular staple of colony operation.
Clay minerals, and (if present, such as in the sulfur complexes like gypsum which were detected by the other rovers) hydrate minerals would provide the missing hydrogen component.
That just leaves nitrogen as the remaining "must have!" Dependency. Sending it to mars as liquified gas as part of the colony loadout is a no brainer, but 100% self sufficency would require a local (martian) source.
So far, I have not heard of any discoveries of ammonium salts, and atmospheric levels are laughable. However, there are such nitrate salts found in arrid regions of earth as natural soil minerals, so I hold out hope that mars would have them as well.
Really? What is the ground made of? You realize that "soil" is predominantly just ground up and weathered silicate mineral, right?
A useful soil for container gardening could be derived from martian soil, and human excrement. The excrement provides both the organic sponge, and the microbiotic floriculture.
True, you couldn't just poke seeds in the ground and expect magic to happen, since the martian surface is nonbiotic, and microbes are needed for plants to grow, but humans carry the required micrbes in copious supply inside their bowels.
I would think you could have container gardens running using washed martian soil and human dookie in just 2 weeks after building the greenhouse structures.
(You have to wash the mineral powder soils before use, because they contain high levels of perchlorate salts. Those would be useful fo atmosphere generation anyway, so removing them would be worthwhile regardless.)
One of the interesting things that the curiosity rover recently reported was the presence of clays on mars. If there are clays, and sand, then all you need is organic sponge. Eg- sewerage.
Waterbears can survive extended periods in hard vacuum, and direct solar irradiation. (As in, no atmosphere. Raw, direct cosmic rays.)
They are little microscopic soft bodied animal organisms with 6 legs. Keep them moist, with plently of algae to eat, and they will flourish. Grow enough of them, and cook them into paste, and you have a very hardy food supply.
They can withstand 1,000 times the radiation you can. The ALGAE would probably die before they would.
If you take the pro-life stance, you could send millions of people in a single trip, at lower levels of life support than you need to keep a container of mice alive!
(Course, turning them into productive colonists when they arrive is a problematic 18 year process, minimum...)
He might also decide to send midgets instead of full sized people, or any number of other shennanigans to cut the price.
Recording calls requires either permanent storage, or sacrifice of a fair chunk of its very minimal ram compliment for a block device, unless you want to set it up to save calls to an SMB share or something.
I mean, there *is* pure enjoyment from digging into the inner workings of the beast, I'll grant that, but ultimarely, what is his major goal with hacking this voip phone?
It surely doesn't have very much NVRAM, or other permanent storage, so using it as a cleverly disguised file server is out of the question... it probably has a purpose built SoC processor, so using it for some processor intensive function is a whimiscally silly idea...
Short of unlocking it for use with arbitrary voip systems, or as a spybug for cubicle drones, I don't see the utility in hacking a voip phone... even as a passive network sniffer, the lack of large internal storage makes it less than useful.
He might shred it apart to see if there is a gpio serial header that he could attach an sdcard to (bitbash mode), which would make it a little more interesting, since it does internet radio, so this would let it have an internal cache of mp3 files to play, as well as enable weak function for some of the other possible uses I mentioned..
But really, this seems like a lot of work, over an end of life phone...
This is more like what happens when you take a small paper boat, and rub one end of it liberally with bar soap.
when you float it on the meniscus of the water, the soap (negative mass energy) alters the surface tension (spacial curvature) which propels the ship forward.
In this case, we also place a heavy normal gravitational wake in front of the ship, (something that would contract the surface of the water, rather than spread it), causing the ship to be also "falling" forward at the same time.
The net result is that a whole "chunk" of spacetime gets "loosened", and glides along without friction. the entire reference frame of the vehicle gets moved around.
Understanding the higgs field will simply allow us to better understand how we could create effective anti-mass to push the ship with. (instead of a gravity "well", it creates a gravity "bump")
Agreed, both counts. Massed particles would require infinite energy to attain C. Infinite energy does not exist in our universe in any useful form. It was a theoretical "If you COULD attain C", then you would never be able to flick the switch, because you would experience zero seconds of time internally, and infinite time externally.
The lightbulb would appear to radiate normally to the onboard observer who flicks the switch. The person outside the accelleration frame caught in the headlights would be roasted. (Then destroyed in an unbelievable nuclear explosion when they hit the windshield a few nanoseconds later.)
That's what a tachyon is! (Well.. more or less...)
A tachyon is a "particle", forced to always travel at FTL velocity, because it has "imaginary" mass.
The alcubierre metric makes use of "negative mass energy" to negate 100% of the vehicle's effective mass, and a little more, causing the "vehicle + engine" composite to become essentially an enormous tachyon. (More or less...)
This poses the problem of how to escape the bubble once created; theoretically speaking, doing so would not be possible! However, interaction with the hawking radiation might provide the solution. As the particles intersect the field, they steal energy from the field, by making the pair real. (One of the particles gets glued to the front, the other gets lost to space.) This loss of energy depletes the field, forcing its collapse. When that happens, the ship returns to being causally connected.
(This however, makes the effect useless for anything but *really* distant objects, or with very very powerful fields.)
I believe that is exactly what I said, when I mentioned that it was a caveat not addressed by the article. "Football sized" had no bearing on the verbiage of the article, and was instead meant to be taken as-is. Eg, an effective warp bubble big enough to barely hold a football is not practical in any sense at the energy cost listed.
In order to determine how far the ship could travel at 10xC with 500kg raw mass energy, we need to know how long (dialated ship time) that energy takes to be released, and how long (external observer time) the bubble will remain stable.
If going 99.9999% C, it would take you an outrageous amount of (outside) time to flick the switch. The universe could end before then!
Still, assuming you did indeed flick the switch, it would be the same as with sound propogation. An ambulance travelling at 99% speed of sound with sirens blaring will emit a higher frequency sound, until after it passes, and then the tone will be dialated the other way.
The light won't move faster. Instead, the frequency will be insanely high. Your infrared emitting tungsten filament bulb will be emitting gamma ray photons.
If you are going 100% speed of light, you will *never* succeed in toggling the switch.
Here is where the whole FTL thing becomes unnecessary:
If you are taveling 50% of C, the degree of seperation between internal and external clocks will be sufficient that even though it takes you 400 years to reach that star 200 light years away, a considerably shorter time will be recorded by the ship's onboard clock.
The closer to C you travel, the less "time" you experience. So, FTL is not necessary. The crew will be alive and well, and feel only a few months have passed on their 400 year journey. Everyone they left back home will be dead and buried, but for them, only a few months will have passed.
If all you care about is *your* lifetime, FTL is not needed to explore the universe.
I am reminded of various tougne-in-cheek jests by physicists about the universe hating the LHC.
Perhaps if you activated the alcubierre drive, you could only ever travel outside the vehicle's light cone, but never return back to It, because "mysterious, seemingly random events" will always, without fail, prevent you from pressing the button?
Now there would be a funny thing to put in science fiction!
Other important caveats not listed are things like, duration of field perturbation, and effective field size.
If it takes 500kg of raw mass energy equiv, to send something the size of a football on an ftl hop for 1 sec, it is still very very impractical.
If we are talking something the size of manhattan island being shot at FTL for over a year for 500kg mass energy, things are difficult, but interesting.
This still doesn't sole several other noteworthy problems with the alcubiere metric though. Things like hawking radiation snowplowing on the event shock of the warp field, nuking the ship and everything around it when the field drops as the ship leaves FTL.
(Basically, the spacetime bubble the ship occupies behaves the same as the event horizon of a black hole, as far as virtual particle interactions are concerned. The pocket tearing past at ftl speed forces the particle pairs to become real, robbing energy from the warp field, and plastering radioative exotics all over the shock front. When the bubble collapses, that radiation gets released.)
If they can pull it off, alcubierre's metric would only be useful for short jumps, not continual cruising, making it impractical for visiting very distant objects. It would also be an energy hungy monster.
I am curious what kind of radiation they produce now.
Are they alpha emitters? Gamma emitters? Beta emitters?
Either alpha or beta emitters in a clear crystalline matrix could have interesting applications when coupled to rare-earth oxide layers, for instance.
Not something you would wear around your neck, but something you CVD a layer of silicon onto, and etch a photocell on.
If they are radioactive enough to be harmful, they are radioactive enough for passive power generation; assuming beta or alpha decay at least. Gamma decay would make them basically useless, except as reference signal sources for density meters.
Where can I get more information on these diamonds?
I treat cookbooks as a collection of reference implementations. Good enough for use, but lacking distinction. The equivalent of algorithm implementations you come across in CS coursework.
They are not gospel, they are not explicit. To me, they beg to be used in new ways; they are the instructions for a blank canvas, and you supply the art.
Looking through a good collection of cook books is like looking through a good selection of reference implementations. You can see some really clever ideas in what other people have made, and become better at making new things as a result.
It is true that not everyone approaches cookery this way, which is a pity. Many people are afraid of such experimentation, because they dont have the drive or attention to what they are making to really think about their spices, or the natures and characters of different food items, or how they work together in creating delicious food.
A reference implementation of a function is just that, a reference implementation of a function. Just like a reference implementation for "Cake" will be for white or yellow cake, when what you really need is chocolate, many reference algorithms are super vanilla. The programmer provides the "Flavor", because the desired outcome very rarely is the vanilla reference implementation.
Need to get 2 different databases to talk to each other? congratulations, you just made chocolate cake with a recipe for white.
I love cookery. I find cookbooks fascinating, and often thumb through them in book stores to see if there is anything lovely in them. I dont really own any though. Collections of reference implementations have thier uses, regardless of type, for those that know how to use them.
I believe that the parent confused "cooking", with "Gastronomy".
Being a good cook, has several potential paths: 1) you are REALLY good at following directions, 2) You can consistently reproduce the results of others from directions, and 3) you can spot when an error has been made.
Being good at gastronomy is different. You can look at a recipe, and see glaring problems. You can look at a recipe, and make arbitrary modifications to improve some characteristic of the finished product. (Fluffier muffins, tangier sauces, whatever.) You can find novel ways to combine foods for novel arrangements of flavors and textures.
The former requires you to follow directions, to produce something that other people consider tasty. The latter requires you to know what your ingredients actually taste LIKE, and imagine how they will taste together, and how they will behave together.
Programming is not like cooking, unless you are doing the most boring of code-grinding tasks. Programming is more like the latter. You can spot areas that clearly could be improved, and suggest ways to improve them, without throwing off the finished product. You can understand the finished product sufficiently to know what you need to get there, and how different parts of that product work with each other sufficiently to know how to change or improve those components without bringing the whole thing down. (An example, would be knowing and understanding how the ingredients in puff pastry interact, and why you have to use the proscribed method, and if it needs to be modified, that deep understanding allows you to make successful modifications, and not sugary glueballs.)
A person who creates brand new foods, and modifies existing ones in new and novel ways is a gastronomist. A person with a book of cookery and is good at following directions is a cook.
For clarity, I *can* program, but I am not a programmer, and do not claim to be. I could possibly become a decent programmer if I had the incentive to code for more than personal pleasure and one-off problem resolution, but I dont. Not like I have drive for cookery.:D I can look at a recipie for cake, and suggest a laundry list of modifications for different textures and flavors without ruining the base, and it is easy and fun for me. Not everyone can do that, nor should they. The same is true for programming, and I can clearly see that.
If you are proposing that the scientists should use humans instead, because humans can consent, and animals cannot, then by all means! Drive yourself down there and fill in the forms before the public notary, and get into the hospital gown.
If, however, you are just creaming out your ass because scientists are doing science, and it makes you feel 'ow swo bwad fwor de widdle monkwies', and would rather that humans live in the stone age than experiment on other lieforms to larn how living things work, and in so doing, push the boundries of scentific knowledge and medical technologies, then kind find a fire, pour gasoline all over yourself, and step into it.
Glasses are amorphous solids, with no crystal structure. Normal metals (there are exceptional varieties, more in a bit) have discrete crystal structures called "grains". The boundries between these grains are where the helium escapes, much like water or oil through fractured bedrock.
Metallic glasses are much harder than normal metal materials, even of identical formulation, conduct electricity better, and being amorphous, would better serve as a container for gasses like helium, like silicate glasses do.
The problem is that they re absurdly difficult to produce in large yields, and thus, very expensive.
Your typical HDD enclosure is not going to be made of metallic glass.
Pressure in a sealed container is not constant, and gas does not pressurize uniformly.
This means localized pressure fronts caused by the rotating platters will push molecules out, as will thermal expansion from drive activity.
Over time, the pressure inside the drive will drop below that of ambient pressure. This will cause "air bearing" failure, and drive failure.
(To better imagine this, imagine the spinning platter as a slingshot, pushing on the helium, and shoving it against the walls of the sealed enclosure. If this local pressure is greater than outside pressure, then the helium will be forced outside the enclosure. The energy of the plater displaces the equilibrium.)
Good question. Helium atoms are so small that they can escape through tiny cracks between metal grain boundries in metals. Normal air does not. The only thing I can think is that they used some kind of penetrating sealant.
He gets access to an endless stream of ewaste from his employers, who are a city govt. He... had PSUs to spare. This one was a 700W, and was free. We spent 10$ on some adaptors.
The plan is to replace the old PSU with a good rosewill 1000w some time later, and actually make use of the board's PCIe16x slots with a real video card in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You have 6 months waiting in space to get to mars.
How long do you need? --or, do you expect colonists to hold it until they get there?
The martian biodome does not need to be closed, in the explicit sense.
There is plenty of whispy CO2 on the surface of mars. This is an external source of both carbon and oxygen.
The real issue would be the hydrogen component, needed to increase water supplies. The hydrogen would likely have to come from mineral sources.
The issue with closed system biodomes is the absurd amounts of carbon and water needed in them before they reach homeostasis. (And no, the earth's soil is not in any natural danger. It is in danger of being carbon depleted by chemical fertilizer use, but chemical fertilizer is not natural. The earth can sustain life for many millions more years assuming humans don't wreck it before then. The earth wouldn't be "used up", it would be "sterilized". Very important difference.)
Here's a thought experiment for you.
We send 500 colonists to mars, to a site that has been robotically constructed in advance, per existing plans.
Enroute, the humans eat, and make sewerage. This sewerage is sequestered during the 6 month sojourn, and possibly run through a reclimation system, since water is both heavy and essential.
When the humans land, they have 6 months worth of poo and used toilet paper to use as an asset. Urine contains high levels of ammonium ion, and poo contains large quantities of organic sponge, and microbial forms. Once processed by the water reclimation system, you have very concentrated orgaic fertilizer. 90% of it should be heated to kill the microbes, for health reasons. The remaining 10% is added sparingly to mixed potting soil mixtures (washed martian soil mixed with the heated septic solids) to provide microbial flora at sensble levels. Plants are grown in it.
As the plants are grown, martian atmosphere is collected using air compressors, and delivered to the growing rooms. This provides additional carbon, which the growing plants incorporate into cellulose, sugars, and proteins. Humans eat this material, producing more poo. The poo is treated, and mixed with more washed martian dirt, and more plants are planted.
The raw martian dirt is contaminated with a "toxic" salt, called perchlorate. (A cation of chlorine and 4 oxygen, bound to a metal anion.) This mineral is very useful as an oxygen source. Simply heating it up liberates elemental oxygen, reducing the perchlorate salt to a standard chloride. Collection of the perchlorates could supply a considerale portion of the habitat's oxygen supply. (Again, an external source.) The removal of the perchlorate is required to use the soil fr horticulture, so the biproducts of collection and seperation are both directly useful to the colony. Dirt mining would be a regular staple of colony operation.
Clay minerals, and (if present, such as in the sulfur complexes like gypsum which were detected by the other rovers) hydrate minerals would provide the missing hydrogen component.
That just leaves nitrogen as the remaining "must have!" Dependency. Sending it to mars as liquified gas as part of the colony loadout is a no brainer, but 100% self sufficency would require a local (martian) source.
So far, I have not heard of any discoveries of ammonium salts, and atmospheric levels are laughable. However, there are such nitrate salts found in arrid regions of earth as natural soil minerals, so I hold out hope that mars would have them as well.
....no...SOIL on mars?
Really? What is the ground made of? You realize that "soil" is predominantly just ground up and weathered silicate mineral, right?
A useful soil for container gardening could be derived from martian soil, and human excrement. The excrement provides both the organic sponge, and the microbiotic floriculture.
True, you couldn't just poke seeds in the ground and expect magic to happen, since the martian surface is nonbiotic, and microbes are needed for plants to grow, but humans carry the required micrbes in copious supply inside their bowels.
I would think you could have container gardens running using washed martian soil and human dookie in just 2 weeks after building the greenhouse structures.
(You have to wash the mineral powder soils before use, because they contain high levels of perchlorate salts. Those would be useful fo atmosphere generation anyway, so removing them would be worthwhile regardless.)
One of the interesting things that the curiosity rover recently reported was the presence of clays on mars. If there are clays, and sand, then all you need is organic sponge. Eg- sewerage.
Waterbears can survive extended periods in hard vacuum, and direct solar irradiation. (As in, no atmosphere. Raw, direct cosmic rays.)
They are little microscopic soft bodied animal organisms with 6 legs. Keep them moist, with plently of algae to eat, and they will flourish. Grow enough of them, and cook them into paste, and you have a very hardy food supply.
They can withstand 1,000 times the radiation you can. The ALGAE would probably die before they would.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#section_2
Algae?
Waterbears grown in a vat exposed to raw solar radiation in transit, collected and baked into a protein paste?
As long as you get rid of the notion of bigmacs and fries, and are willing to settle for "nutritious", things aren't so bad.
Don't be silly!
It all depends on how you define "person"!
If you take the pro-life stance, you could send millions of people in a single trip, at lower levels of life support than you need to keep a container of mice alive!
(Course, turning them into productive colonists when they arrive is a problematic 18 year process, minimum...)
He might also decide to send midgets instead of full sized people, or any number of other shennanigans to cut the price.
Stop thinking inside the box over there!
That is only because apple painted themselves into a corner.
"No, only GENUINE apple products can run iOS or MacOS!"
Well, there you have it. Artificialy limiting your platform availability to a limited set of devices, by design, paints you into that corner.
By contrast, I ca get an android device from almost any handset maker. Soon to be true for windows RT flavor as well.
Apple? "No! Only APPLE products!"
Ok, fine. But when you get trapped in that corner, don't come whining about it ok?
Recording calls requires either permanent storage, or sacrifice of a fair chunk of its very minimal ram compliment for a block device, unless you want to set it up to save calls to an SMB share or something.
That's why I was asking.
I mean, there *is* pure enjoyment from digging into the inner workings of the beast, I'll grant that, but ultimarely, what is his major goal with hacking this voip phone?
It surely doesn't have very much NVRAM, or other permanent storage, so using it as a cleverly disguised file server is out of the question... it probably has a purpose built SoC processor, so using it for some processor intensive function is a whimiscally silly idea...
Short of unlocking it for use with arbitrary voip systems, or as a spybug for cubicle drones, I don't see the utility in hacking a voip phone... even as a passive network sniffer, the lack of large internal storage makes it less than useful.
He might shred it apart to see if there is a gpio serial header that he could attach an sdcard to (bitbash mode), which would make it a little more interesting, since it does internet radio, so this would let it have an internal cache of mp3 files to play, as well as enable weak function for some of the other possible uses I mentioned..
But really, this seems like a lot of work, over an end of life phone...
This is more like what happens when you take a small paper boat, and rub one end of it liberally with bar soap.
when you float it on the meniscus of the water, the soap (negative mass energy) alters the surface tension (spacial curvature) which propels the ship forward.
In this case, we also place a heavy normal gravitational wake in front of the ship, (something that would contract the surface of the water, rather than spread it), causing the ship to be also "falling" forward at the same time.
The net result is that a whole "chunk" of spacetime gets "loosened", and glides along without friction. the entire reference frame of the vehicle gets moved around.
Understanding the higgs field will simply allow us to better understand how we could create effective anti-mass to push the ship with. (instead of a gravity "well", it creates a gravity "bump")
Agreed, both counts. Massed particles would require infinite energy to attain C. Infinite energy does not exist in our universe in any useful form. It was a theoretical "If you COULD attain C", then you would never be able to flick the switch, because you would experience zero seconds of time internally, and infinite time externally.
The lightbulb would appear to radiate normally to the onboard observer who flicks the switch. The person outside the accelleration frame caught in the headlights would be roasted. (Then destroyed in an unbelievable nuclear explosion when they hit the windshield a few nanoseconds later.)
That's what a tachyon is! (Well.. more or less...)
A tachyon is a "particle", forced to always travel at FTL velocity, because it has "imaginary" mass.
The alcubierre metric makes use of "negative mass energy" to negate 100% of the vehicle's effective mass, and a little more, causing the "vehicle + engine" composite to become essentially an enormous tachyon. (More or less...)
This poses the problem of how to escape the bubble once created; theoretically speaking, doing so would not be possible! However, interaction with the hawking radiation might provide the solution. As the particles intersect the field, they steal energy from the field, by making the pair real. (One of the particles gets glued to the front, the other gets lost to space.) This loss of energy depletes the field, forcing its collapse. When that happens, the ship returns to being causally connected.
(This however, makes the effect useless for anything but *really* distant objects, or with very very powerful fields.)
I believe that is exactly what I said, when I mentioned that it was a caveat not addressed by the article. "Football sized" had no bearing on the verbiage of the article, and was instead meant to be taken as-is. Eg, an effective warp bubble big enough to barely hold a football is not practical in any sense at the energy cost listed.
In order to determine how far the ship could travel at 10xC with 500kg raw mass energy, we need to know how long (dialated ship time) that energy takes to be released, and how long (external observer time) the bubble will remain stable.
That information was not provided.
If going 99.9999% C, it would take you an outrageous amount of (outside) time to flick the switch. The universe could end before then!
Still, assuming you did indeed flick the switch, it would be the same as with sound propogation. An ambulance travelling at 99% speed of sound with sirens blaring will emit a higher frequency sound, until after it passes, and then the tone will be dialated the other way.
The light won't move faster. Instead, the frequency will be insanely high. Your infrared emitting tungsten filament bulb will be emitting gamma ray photons.
If you are going 100% speed of light, you will *never* succeed in toggling the switch.
Here is where the whole FTL thing becomes unnecessary:
If you are taveling 50% of C, the degree of seperation between internal and external clocks will be sufficient that even though it takes you 400 years to reach that star 200 light years away, a considerably shorter time will be recorded by the ship's onboard clock.
The closer to C you travel, the less "time" you experience. So, FTL is not necessary. The crew will be alive and well, and feel only a few months have passed on their 400 year journey. Everyone they left back home will be dead and buried, but for them, only a few months will have passed.
If all you care about is *your* lifetime, FTL is not needed to explore the universe.
(Gigglesnort)
I am reminded of various tougne-in-cheek jests by physicists about the universe hating the LHC.
Perhaps if you activated the alcubierre drive, you could only ever travel outside the vehicle's light cone, but never return back to It, because "mysterious, seemingly random events" will always, without fail, prevent you from pressing the button?
Now there would be a funny thing to put in science fiction!
Agreed.
Other important caveats not listed are things like, duration of field perturbation, and effective field size.
If it takes 500kg of raw mass energy equiv, to send something the size of a football on an ftl hop for 1 sec, it is still very very impractical.
If we are talking something the size of manhattan island being shot at FTL for over a year for 500kg mass energy, things are difficult, but interesting.
This still doesn't sole several other noteworthy problems with the alcubiere metric though. Things like hawking radiation snowplowing on the event shock of the warp field, nuking the ship and everything around it when the field drops as the ship leaves FTL.
(Basically, the spacetime bubble the ship occupies behaves the same as the event horizon of a black hole, as far as virtual particle interactions are concerned. The pocket tearing past at ftl speed forces the particle pairs to become real, robbing energy from the warp field, and plastering radioative exotics all over the shock front. When the bubble collapses, that radiation gets released.)
If they can pull it off, alcubierre's metric would only be useful for short jumps, not continual cruising, making it impractical for visiting very distant objects. It would also be an energy hungy monster.
I am curious what kind of radiation they produce now.
Are they alpha emitters? Gamma emitters? Beta emitters?
Either alpha or beta emitters in a clear crystalline matrix could have interesting applications when coupled to rare-earth oxide layers, for instance.
Not something you would wear around your neck, but something you CVD a layer of silicon onto, and etch a photocell on.
If they are radioactive enough to be harmful, they are radioactive enough for passive power generation; assuming beta or alpha decay at least. Gamma decay would make them basically useless, except as reference signal sources for density meters.
Where can I get more information on these diamonds?
I treat cookbooks as a collection of reference implementations. Good enough for use, but lacking distinction. The equivalent of algorithm implementations you come across in CS coursework.
They are not gospel, they are not explicit. To me, they beg to be used in new ways; they are the instructions for a blank canvas, and you supply the art.
Looking through a good collection of cook books is like looking through a good selection of reference implementations. You can see some really clever ideas in what other people have made, and become better at making new things as a result.
It is true that not everyone approaches cookery this way, which is a pity. Many people are afraid of such experimentation, because they dont have the drive or attention to what they are making to really think about their spices, or the natures and characters of different food items, or how they work together in creating delicious food.
A reference implementation of a function is just that, a reference implementation of a function. Just like a reference implementation for "Cake" will be for white or yellow cake, when what you really need is chocolate, many reference algorithms are super vanilla. The programmer provides the "Flavor", because the desired outcome very rarely is the vanilla reference implementation.
Need to get 2 different databases to talk to each other? congratulations, you just made chocolate cake with a recipe for white.
I love cookery. I find cookbooks fascinating, and often thumb through them in book stores to see if there is anything lovely in them. I dont really own any though. Collections of reference implementations have thier uses, regardless of type, for those that know how to use them.
I believe that the parent confused "cooking", with "Gastronomy".
Being a good cook, has several potential paths: 1) you are REALLY good at following directions, 2) You can consistently reproduce the results of others from directions, and 3) you can spot when an error has been made.
Being good at gastronomy is different. You can look at a recipe, and see glaring problems. You can look at a recipe, and make arbitrary modifications to improve some characteristic of the finished product. (Fluffier muffins, tangier sauces, whatever.) You can find novel ways to combine foods for novel arrangements of flavors and textures.
The former requires you to follow directions, to produce something that other people consider tasty. The latter requires you to know what your ingredients actually taste LIKE, and imagine how they will taste together, and how they will behave together.
Programming is not like cooking, unless you are doing the most boring of code-grinding tasks. Programming is more like the latter. You can spot areas that clearly could be improved, and suggest ways to improve them, without throwing off the finished product. You can understand the finished product sufficiently to know what you need to get there, and how different parts of that product work with each other sufficiently to know how to change or improve those components without bringing the whole thing down. (An example, would be knowing and understanding how the ingredients in puff pastry interact, and why you have to use the proscribed method, and if it needs to be modified, that deep understanding allows you to make successful modifications, and not sugary glueballs.)
A person who creates brand new foods, and modifies existing ones in new and novel ways is a gastronomist. A person with a book of cookery and is good at following directions is a cook.
For clarity, I *can* program, but I am not a programmer, and do not claim to be. I could possibly become a decent programmer if I had the incentive to code for more than personal pleasure and one-off problem resolution, but I dont. Not like I have drive for cookery. :D I can look at a recipie for cake, and suggest a laundry list of modifications for different textures and flavors without ruining the base, and it is easy and fun for me. Not everyone can do that, nor should they. The same is true for programming, and I can clearly see that.
I can program, but I am not a programmer.
If you are proposing that the scientists should use humans instead, because humans can consent, and animals cannot, then by all means! Drive yourself down there and fill in the forms before the public notary, and get into the hospital gown.
If, however, you are just creaming out your ass because scientists are doing science, and it makes you feel 'ow swo bwad fwor de widdle monkwies', and would rather that humans live in the stone age than experiment on other lieforms to larn how living things work, and in so doing, push the boundries of scentific knowledge and medical technologies, then kind find a fire, pour gasoline all over yourself, and step into it.
Except they are using helium, and not hydrogen.
They are on opposite ends of the periodic table for a reason.
Note: GLASS container.
Glasses are amorphous solids, with no crystal structure.
Normal metals (there are exceptional varieties, more in a bit) have discrete crystal structures called "grains". The boundries between these grains are where the helium escapes, much like water or oil through fractured bedrock.
There exists a very very expensive subclass of metal material known as "metallic glass". http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_metal
Metallic glasses are much harder than normal metal materials, even of identical formulation, conduct electricity better, and being amorphous, would better serve as a container for gasses like helium, like silicate glasses do.
The problem is that they re absurdly difficult to produce in large yields, and thus, very expensive.
Your typical HDD enclosure is not going to be made of metallic glass.
Pressure in a sealed container is not constant, and gas does not pressurize uniformly.
This means localized pressure fronts caused by the rotating platters will push molecules out, as will thermal expansion from drive activity.
Over time, the pressure inside the drive will drop below that of ambient pressure. This will cause "air bearing" failure, and drive failure.
(To better imagine this, imagine the spinning platter as a slingshot, pushing on the helium, and shoving it against the walls of the sealed enclosure. If this local pressure is greater than outside pressure, then the helium will be forced outside the enclosure. The energy of the plater displaces the equilibrium.)
Good question. Helium atoms are so small that they can escape through tiny cracks between metal grain boundries in metals. Normal air does not. The only thing I can think is that they used some kind of penetrating sealant.
He gets access to an endless stream of ewaste from his employers, who are a city govt. He... had PSUs to spare. This one was a 700W, and was free. We spent 10$ on some adaptors.
The plan is to replace the old PSU with a good rosewill 1000w some time later, and actually make use of the board's PCIe16x slots with a real video card in the future.