A reasonable attitude, but poor politics. Better would be to point out that the warming climate is spreading tropical diseases away from the equator, so that you can already get Dengue fever and malaria in the US. (Don't point out that this may really be due to increased population mobility.)
The real problem is that one can never forsee all possible problems. All decisions are made with a lack of certainty in the results. But when those who pay for the lack of foresight have no control over the descision made, it seems like either reckless abuse of power or worse. And sometimes it is.
If people with the power to make decisions could be trusted to make the best decision, a lot of the second-guessing would go away. Unfortunately, there is a very long track record of people in power making decisions based on benefit to them and costs to them, and ignoring the benefits/costs to everyone else. So there's a certain lack of trust.
To me this decision looks like a good one. I could be wrong. I'm not making it, and I expect to receive neither the benefits nor the costs.
It (or things quite similar) has been tested before on small islands with no problems. This isn't proof, but real proof is unlikely to be possible for that kind of question. On small islands it has successfully wiped mosquitoes totally out. This isn't expected to happen in a large country like Brazil, which has land connections to even larger areas. But nothing besides the mosquitoes was damaged on the islands (as far as was noticed).
You can never be really sure, but this strikes me more like the way the US eliminated screwflies than like anything else. I'd be surprised if there were any problems.
As for the "killer bees", IIUC they are becoming less viscious over time, as they inbreed with the local populations. Which causes me to wonder, "Do they suffer from the colony collapse disease?", if not, they may be a net benefit after being a short term disaster.
Actually, there are a few genes roughly like that that do spread. IIRC there's one bug that has contracted a gene that sabotages male offspring. It spreads because it allows unfertilized eggs to hatch into female offspring. So you need to watch the details. (Something similar probably happened to aphids back before we were noticing. Most [all?] aphids are now members of a clone.)
Not to worry. The Amazon rainforest is already dying due to climate change. The additional warmth is drying it out too fast, the jungle is becoming too dry, and so fires are difficult to control. (Used to be they wouldn't spread because everything was so wet.)
So this development won't have any effect on the rainforest. It's too slow.
You may have a point. I've been mainly considering other skyhooks that are more reasonable to build.
Admittedly, the skyhooks that are easier to build don't drop the cost to orbit quite as much...but building them is a *lot* more plausible. We still don't have a cable strong enough to build a space elevator even without any cargo going up and down. A pin-wheel, however, could actually be built now. But, as with all unanchored sky-hooks, the time averaged mass up needs to equal the time averaged mass down.
Well, it's only 7.2 lightyears away, so you don't need an FTL drive, you just need a LOT of patience. But what you really need is some way to cheaply get the mass away from a star's gravitational field. True, it's quite a small star, but at 3-10 times Jupiter's mass, it will take 9-90 times as much energy to extract it. (That's an estimate, not a calculated answer...but escape velocity goes up faster than the mass, or you'd almost never get a black hole.)
It's not the only choice, but most of their choices are speculative. Tide motors, e.g.
I don't know how well solar cells would work in Japan. Southern Japan gets a lot of sunshine, but Japan extends a long way to the North. Hokkaido is rather chilly, and might be like Maine as far as solar cells were concerned. Which would mean no power during snow stormes.
Moon mining isn't the only option. Currently there are groups planning on capturing an asteroid. And there are other possibilities. But it doesn't look too good with a straightforward approach.
The article states that what they are transmitting down is microwaves. (If it were light, I'd believe it was intended as a weapon.)
FWIW, what I often imagine is using a sterling heat engine, but I believe that the cooling cycle would be too slow to make that practical...still, if you could make it work, perhaps at a high enough temperature (and a different working fluid...sodium?) then heating it with mirrors would be plausible.
Well, it's not just a different wavelength, it's also much more directed. (Not THAT directed, as you don't want a wavelength that gets absorbed by water, and longer wavelengths aren't as directional, but still a lot more directional than just shining a light.) IIRC there's a corner reflector on the moon, placed there by one of the Apollo missions, that people have repeatedly bounced microwaves off of and caught the reflection that bounced back. So it's fairly directional.
The problem with space elevators (and other sky-hooks) is that if the tonnage down doesn't, over time, match the tonnage up, the orbit decays.
OTOH, Why would a SPSS need to be built all at one go? And why only use it to power things on Earth? It would be great for powering ion rockets, etc., that are flying too far out to rely on solar power. And possibly one could design an electric rocket that was air-breathing at it's lower stages, so that after the first pieces of the SPSS were in place, it could power it's own construction.
That said, I'm still not sure it's viable. But it would certainly be interesting if it were.
In addition to the other answers, you would need to choose a wavelength that wasn't absorbed by clouds, fog, rain, or snow anyway, so you'd probably choose wavelength that wouldn't be absorbed by anything small. Most proposals I've seen call for antennas a mile or more in diameter. As such, small things like animals or airplanes shouldn't receive any noticible amount of power.
Reasonable? Depends. Who benefits, who pays. It's probably more effective. And people don't notice how they've been targeted as hostages, so they may not object. And it lets you plan to kill not only the target, but all his friends and relatives too, so you don't plan on making enemies.
OTOH, if they worried about those factors, they wouldn't engage in the indiscriminate drone attacks. So they probably don't care about how many people they make hate them, at least judging by their actions.
Perhaps the best argument is that it isn't currently a recognized war crime. Not that the US is renowned for paying attention to that, either. (Others are worse, but that's a separate matter.) Cynically my feeling is that they are doing this as a test to see how useful this kind of information is when they need to suppress a population.
You are assuming that old age is inherently progressive. Some experiments with mice, however, suggest that if you had a transfusion from a younger clone, your entire body would become more youthful. (Genetically standardized strains of mice are sufficiently similar that their blood streams can be joined together without problems. Don't try this with people.)
It's actually a quite plausible and valid concern. Perhaps not what should be the dominant concern, but still a plausible and valid one. It's commonly observed that most people are most idealistic before the age of 30 (approx.) and grow increasingly "pragmatic" from then on. "Pragmatic" is difficult to pin down, as it's not necessarily selfish, though it often is. But it's a narrowing of focus, and a lessening of idealism and a more cynical calculation of the costs. It is also often a strong narrowing of concerns to one's immediate friends and relatives.
Please note that this is just a statistical abstraction. You can find young individuals who are even more narrowly focused. And you can find elderly individuals who are socially concerned as their prime focus with a wide spectrum of concerns. And, in fact, the early teens are often even more "pragmatic" (in this sense) than are the seniors. The widening of focus seems to happen in the late teens through the mid-twenties.
OTOH, perhaps this current(?) pattern is because of various social pressures. The people I tend to hear about (tended to hear about) were basically college students, or their close associates. Still, various historical notes (often propaganda to recruit soldiers for war) seem to bear out this observation in a wider context. (That the propaganda was lies doesn't deminish the fact that it was chosen to attract a particular age group.)
Pardon me, but I've never flashed firmware, but... "Always have a reasonably quick way to revert if stuff like this happens."? How is this possible on a firmware upgrade?
This is true, but the term he was looking for was Roche's limit. I suspect, however, that it doesn't apply to black holes. More precisely, I suspect that the Roche limit is within the Schwarzchild limit. This might, possibly, depend upon the speed with which the two holes revolve around each other...but I doubt it. Still, the math to solve that is way over my head.
An additional factor, of course, would be the rotational speed of each black hole. Things get a lot more complicated than I can solve *very* quickly. But I *suspect* that the event horizon doesn't become very permeable. (Does the rate at which the black hole emits Hawking radiation depend on how fast it is rotating? On the presence of an external gravitational field? Yiii!)
Probably the Roche limit is within the Schwartzhild limit, so none of this applies. If it does, then the black hole would probably need to disintegrate via Hawking radiation. OTOH, the problems of spinning black holes, and of charged and spinning black holes, even in isolation are so complex that I don't believe that anyone has yet solved them. (It's been decades since I looked at the question, so I may be wrong.) When you add in a rotating external gravitational field.... well, I don't trust simple assertions that work in most cases. This could well be an edge case that would yield a different result.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely BatMan would save us from that problem.
A reasonable attitude, but poor politics. Better would be to point out that the warming climate is spreading tropical diseases away from the equator, so that you can already get Dengue fever and malaria in the US. (Don't point out that this may really be due to increased population mobility.)
FWIW, in a few places mosquitoes have been eliminated. It has not been noticed that any problems were caused. Not even for bats and swallows.
The real problem is that one can never forsee all possible problems. All decisions are made with a lack of certainty in the results. But when those who pay for the lack of foresight have no control over the descision made, it seems like either reckless abuse of power or worse. And sometimes it is.
If people with the power to make decisions could be trusted to make the best decision, a lot of the second-guessing would go away. Unfortunately, there is a very long track record of people in power making decisions based on benefit to them and costs to them, and ignoring the benefits/costs to everyone else. So there's a certain lack of trust.
To me this decision looks like a good one. I could be wrong. I'm not making it, and I expect to receive neither the benefits nor the costs.
It (or things quite similar) has been tested before on small islands with no problems. This isn't proof, but real proof is unlikely to be possible for that kind of question. On small islands it has successfully wiped mosquitoes totally out. This isn't expected to happen in a large country like Brazil, which has land connections to even larger areas. But nothing besides the mosquitoes was damaged on the islands (as far as was noticed).
You can never be really sure, but this strikes me more like the way the US eliminated screwflies than like anything else. I'd be surprised if there were any problems.
As for the "killer bees", IIUC they are becoming less viscious over time, as they inbreed with the local populations. Which causes me to wonder, "Do they suffer from the colony collapse disease?", if not, they may be a net benefit after being a short term disaster.
Actually, there are a few genes roughly like that that do spread. IIRC there's one bug that has contracted a gene that sabotages male offspring. It spreads because it allows unfertilized eggs to hatch into female offspring. So you need to watch the details. (Something similar probably happened to aphids back before we were noticing. Most [all?] aphids are now members of a clone.)
Not to worry. The Amazon rainforest is already dying due to climate change. The additional warmth is drying it out too fast, the jungle is becoming too dry, and so fires are difficult to control. (Used to be they wouldn't spread because everything was so wet.)
So this development won't have any effect on the rainforest. It's too slow.
You may have a point. I've been mainly considering other skyhooks that are more reasonable to build.
Admittedly, the skyhooks that are easier to build don't drop the cost to orbit quite as much...but building them is a *lot* more plausible. We still don't have a cable strong enough to build a space elevator even without any cargo going up and down. A pin-wheel, however, could actually be built now. But, as with all unanchored sky-hooks, the time averaged mass up needs to equal the time averaged mass down.
Well, it's only 7.2 lightyears away, so you don't need an FTL drive, you just need a LOT of patience. But what you really need is some way to cheaply get the mass away from a star's gravitational field. True, it's quite a small star, but at 3-10 times Jupiter's mass, it will take 9-90 times as much energy to extract it. (That's an estimate, not a calculated answer...but escape velocity goes up faster than the mass, or you'd almost never get a black hole.)
True, but that's not what I was talking about. What I'm talking about is more like getting too tired to care anymore.
No, a bustard is a kind of bird. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
It's not the only choice, but most of their choices are speculative. Tide motors, e.g.
I don't know how well solar cells would work in Japan. Southern Japan gets a lot of sunshine, but Japan extends a long way to the North. Hokkaido is rather chilly, and might be like Maine as far as solar cells were concerned. Which would mean no power during snow stormes.
Moon mining isn't the only option. Currently there are groups planning on capturing an asteroid. And there are other possibilities. But it doesn't look too good with a straightforward approach.
The article states that what they are transmitting down is microwaves. (If it were light, I'd believe it was intended as a weapon.)
FWIW, what I often imagine is using a sterling heat engine, but I believe that the cooling cycle would be too slow to make that practical...still, if you could make it work, perhaps at a high enough temperature (and a different working fluid...sodium?) then heating it with mirrors would be plausible.
Well, it's not just a different wavelength, it's also much more directed. (Not THAT directed, as you don't want a wavelength that gets absorbed by water, and longer wavelengths aren't as directional, but still a lot more directional than just shining a light.) IIRC there's a corner reflector on the moon, placed there by one of the Apollo missions, that people have repeatedly bounced microwaves off of and caught the reflection that bounced back. So it's fairly directional.
The problem with space elevators (and other sky-hooks) is that if the tonnage down doesn't, over time, match the tonnage up, the orbit decays.
OTOH, Why would a SPSS need to be built all at one go? And why only use it to power things on Earth? It would be great for powering ion rockets, etc., that are flying too far out to rely on solar power. And possibly one could design an electric rocket that was air-breathing at it's lower stages, so that after the first pieces of the SPSS were in place, it could power it's own construction.
That said, I'm still not sure it's viable. But it would certainly be interesting if it were.
In addition to the other answers, you would need to choose a wavelength that wasn't absorbed by clouds, fog, rain, or snow anyway, so you'd probably choose wavelength that wouldn't be absorbed by anything small. Most proposals I've seen call for antennas a mile or more in diameter. As such, small things like animals or airplanes shouldn't receive any noticible amount of power.
Reasonable? Depends. Who benefits, who pays. It's probably more effective. And people don't notice how they've been targeted as hostages, so they may not object. And it lets you plan to kill not only the target, but all his friends and relatives too, so you don't plan on making enemies.
OTOH, if they worried about those factors, they wouldn't engage in the indiscriminate drone attacks. So they probably don't care about how many people they make hate them, at least judging by their actions.
Perhaps the best argument is that it isn't currently a recognized war crime. Not that the US is renowned for paying attention to that, either. (Others are worse, but that's a separate matter.) Cynically my feeling is that they are doing this as a test to see how useful this kind of information is when they need to suppress a population.
That's not a fix, as the grandparent was also correct.
Just because the US govt. has no apparent morals, don't presume that other governments do. Some of them may.
You are assuming that old age is inherently progressive. Some experiments with mice, however, suggest that if you had a transfusion from a younger clone, your entire body would become more youthful. (Genetically standardized strains of mice are sufficiently similar that their blood streams can be joined together without problems. Don't try this with people.)
It's actually a quite plausible and valid concern. Perhaps not what should be the dominant concern, but still a plausible and valid one. It's commonly observed that most people are most idealistic before the age of 30 (approx.) and grow increasingly "pragmatic" from then on. "Pragmatic" is difficult to pin down, as it's not necessarily selfish, though it often is. But it's a narrowing of focus, and a lessening of idealism and a more cynical calculation of the costs. It is also often a strong narrowing of concerns to one's immediate friends and relatives.
Please note that this is just a statistical abstraction. You can find young individuals who are even more narrowly focused. And you can find elderly individuals who are socially concerned as their prime focus with a wide spectrum of concerns. And, in fact, the early teens are often even more "pragmatic" (in this sense) than are the seniors. The widening of focus seems to happen in the late teens through the mid-twenties.
OTOH, perhaps this current(?) pattern is because of various social pressures. The people I tend to hear about (tended to hear about) were basically college students, or their close associates. Still, various historical notes (often propaganda to recruit soldiers for war) seem to bear out this observation in a wider context. (That the propaganda was lies doesn't deminish the fact that it was chosen to attract a particular age group.)
I think that experimental evidence shows that if you eat other people's brains you get kuru. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
Pardon me, but I've never flashed firmware, but ... "Always have a reasonably quick way to revert if stuff like this happens."? How is this possible on a firmware upgrade?
This is true, but the term he was looking for was Roche's limit. I suspect, however, that it doesn't apply to black holes. More precisely, I suspect that the Roche limit is within the Schwarzchild limit. This might, possibly, depend upon the speed with which the two holes revolve around each other...but I doubt it. Still, the math to solve that is way over my head.
An additional factor, of course, would be the rotational speed of each black hole. Things get a lot more complicated than I can solve *very* quickly. But I *suspect* that the event horizon doesn't become very permeable. (Does the rate at which the black hole emits Hawking radiation depend on how fast it is rotating? On the presence of an external gravitational field? Yiii!)
Probably the Roche limit is within the Schwartzhild limit, so none of this applies. If it does, then the black hole would probably need to disintegrate via Hawking radiation. OTOH, the problems of spinning black holes, and of charged and spinning black holes, even in isolation are so complex that I don't believe that anyone has yet solved them. (It's been decades since I looked at the question, so I may be wrong.) When you add in a rotating external gravitational field.... well, I don't trust simple assertions that work in most cases. This could well be an edge case that would yield a different result.
"Roche's limit" is what you are looking for, but I don't know that it applies to balck holes.