The missions being envisioned here are for small robots that can be accelerated and decelerated with reasonably foreseeable technologies
No. The only forces being modelled for deceleration in the target systems are those of light pressure and gravity - which we can calculate from the light flux (observed at Earth), the range (parallax), and orbital mechanics.
Once someone has a design for a probe (mass, sail area, reflectivity) then the analysis can be re-done to calculate the travel times (and important things, like how much ahead of the proper motion of the target object you have to aim. to hit the target) with your actual device. This analysis compared travel times for otherwise identical probes dispatched to different targets, and an optimal course strategy for getting there quickest and slowing down to orbital speeds at the far end. There are a few other constraints (e.g., a maximum probe temperature of 100C / 373K, to allow plausible electronics to survive) which could be revisited with an actual "release to manufacturing" design, but this paper provides a road map for how to optimise the trajectory once you get to that point.
the time frame isn't useful, the data wouldn't be obtained in our lifetime, and then what?
Coincidentally, I was out walking today through a forest that was originally planted in the 1300s, in order to provide timber for the anticipated navy of the 1600s. Even though the people who planted the trees wouldn't see them grow to a usable size.
Lordy! - they must have been superhumans, those Mediaeval foresters. Able to think centuries ahead, where modern people just cannot do that any more.
we aren't going to travel between the stars until we figure out something a whole lot better than chemical rockets and probably FTL drive...
And just where did anyone involved with this make any suggestion that it involved any human - or even any mammal - ever reaching another star system? I as sure as hell didn't see that, and I did read the fucking paper.
It is a moot point (cue grammar Nazis who think that it's "mute") whether a VonNeumann robot with the pinnacle of 22nd century software counts as a human descendent. But that's potentially enough for "human-sourced machines" to distribute themselves across the galaxy before the Earth becomes uninhabitable. But that may not involve actual humans.
As for it being a planning optimisation study - well, yeah, it is. There are no designs for even getting any data back from this sort of mission. But for any mission that is powered from the Solar System by projected beams, the same considerations of travel time will apply, even if the actual mission takes 3 centuries rather than their theoretical 75+46 years.
There's a stream in the Scottish Highlands which has done this several times in recorded history (i.e., since the first maps were made of the area in sufficient detail, about 1830). I forget the Gaelic spelling of the originating name, but the anglicisation is "corrom," and the translation given is usually "balance", because the direction of travel of the stream in question flips from one side of the watershed (6 miles to the sea) to the other side (~30 miles to the sea) like a balance with equal weights on each pan.
Ah, there's the little bugger : "Allt a' Chothruim", the "stream of the balance" ; it's hard to see how to get from that name to the "popular" term, but that's Gaelic for you.
More recently the term "delta watershed" has replaced "corrom" - and the situation is fairly common, with a stream coming from a narrow mountain valley into wider one and building a delta (including steep ones, often termed "alluvial cones"), which happens to sit on a watershed in the larger valley. So, a relatively small change in the delta has a large consequence in the direction of water flow.
It's hardly a new phenomenon (I've seen at least one other example, in Scotland), but this sounds like a fine example.
Any ratings from those addresses should just get an error message saying "this IP address has been the source of abuse and can no longer submit votes".
s/address/"range of addresses"/
And I'm sure you know that, so lets move on.
I was working in Turkey two years ago. If I were the sort to watch movies in my hotel room on my laptop (can Fedora play DVD movies yet? I've never been minded to find out, and don't have a DVD movie to find out), you would ban me from voting on the movie I've just watched? Obviously, yes.
It's hard to design such systems so that they're actually fair.
I just realised, I wasn't aware until that IMDB actually had a "star" or "ratings" system. Show how little interest I have in people's opinions, compared to things like plot summaries.
The experimental evidence comes from multiple independent sources spanning decades.
Not only independent sources - in the simple sense of "coming from many scientists or groups of scientists" - but also using multiple different distinct techniques from fundamental geometry on different scales (which is behind Doppler measurements of velocities) to sophisticated radiometry leading to the maps of the CMB temperature variations. The data is far wider than just having many different groups using similar techniques.
No, that's movement of the galaxies within the universe, not expansion of the universe.
An analogy : you're in bed, and the wife rolls over and pulls the duvet off you. This is movement of the duvet within the existing place. Ripping the wall off, building walls and a new piece of roof to extend the bedroom is expanding the space within which your duvet can move, but doesn't make the duvet itself change size.
Well, Britain did th same a couple of years ago, disbanding the Police's Forensic Science Service and farming it out to private companies - with the predicted loss of evidence, mis-handling of evidence, lost cases and miscarriages of justice (in both directions).
So, once again America follows a furrow already ploughed open by Britain's Incompetents-in-Chief.
Asps can only carry 7LY worth of Qurium for their witchspace engines like every other craft in the Ooniverse. Put more Qurium in one container, and you're going to get a big, big bang.
In about 5 billion years, the sun will be a red giant with a diameter about the size of Earth's orbit.
True. But irrelevant.
In another billion years, the Sun will be some 5% brighter than presently (something it has done every billion years for the last 4 billion years). Some time about then, the amount of water vapour that puts into the atmosphere will reach a point of feedback that will boil the oceans in a few million years. Because the largest part of the greenhouse effect that makes the Earth habitable is due to water vapour, and only a fairly small amount to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
On the other hand, very few people are attracted to living in Siberia,
I can put some numbers on that.
The price that my wife was paid to move to work in Siberia was a 50% pay increase (compared to the same job in European Russia), and the possibility to retire on 3x normal pension at 50, to anywhere else in Russia. Both her mother and several friends had followed precisely that track. It's a price (for central government) to pay to get people to live there, but not exactly a massive price.
I've been wondering if you could just push a bunch of mass from the asteroid belt to it and start one up.
There is a limit to how fast you can deliver mass to the planet. The arriving mass heats the atmosphere and removes appreciable amounts of it. Between deliveries (impacts larger than the Chixulub impact), you need time for the heat to dissipate.
Which blows, if you'll pardon the pun, Mr Angel's couple of centuries time scale out of the water. The time to collect a large proportion of the asteroids and get them onto courses that would intersect with Mars' is non-trivial too.
We'll colonise the asteroids dozens to hundreds of human generations before the first "human" walks 100m on the surface of Mars in their bare skin, before collapsing into the arms of pressure-suited paramedics.
If you'd deigned to read section 2.1 of the paper (yes, I know it's Slashdot, but you do know how to red don't you - or are you one of those new millennia things who clicks but cant read?), you'd know that the reporting scientists
discovered a fast X-ray transient midway through one of the observations starting at 2014 October 01 07:04:37 UT.
Science paper have this terrible habit of containing things called "details" which casual (or even professional) readers might care to know about the event or topic under discussion. This revolutionary concept has only been in use for 350-odd years (some damned peculiar years!), so the jury is still out on the idea, but I personally find it useful, if I actually read the published details.
(Your reading will of course allow you to be more precise. Since the observations lasted some 50ks, there is still some lack of clarity in that statement.)
With the tiniest of hands. And the greatest of sesitivity about comment on the size of his really really small... hands. It's as if the smallness of his minuscule hands was conflated in his tiny tiny brain with the smallness of some other part of his anatomy.
I wonder if Angela Merkel greets him as Herr President Kleinehanden? And has the translator get the meeting off on the right foot.
The old school version of a circular runway is a triangle of 3 crossing runways. Somewhat common at military bases.
Pretty much my reaction on first hearing the idea. The next step up in elaboration would be to a pentagram layout (I can just imagine the outcry from the Christians and other demon-believing idiots), when you could have 2 non-crossing runways (in two different directions) operating simultaneously with a man of 18 of crosswind offset between them. But, to be honest, if the military planners of WW2 who built literally hundreds of "triangular" layout airfields when planning consent and obstreperous landowners were little problem, found the 30$deg; crosswinds manageable, then why bother?
Unless, of course, it cost more to move the aggregate (gravel/ sand mix, for mixing with cement to make concrete) to it's destination than the stuff is worth. And there are a *lot* of aggregate deposits in Norway, thanks to all those glaciers and their nice efficient water flows for sorting the aggregate by size. Blasting debris typically has a very wide range of grain sizes - from boulders to dust - which hinders it's use for making concrete.
Police see an online ad but can't find the location of the "trafficked girl"...when all they'd need to do is call and ask...
for her to be delivered to $Address$ with a 10cm butt-plug, a litre of vodka, and a tube of cherry-flavoured lube.
(The latter items being sufficiently unique that the specific combination itself is identifying information and you can arrest everyone in the parking lot.)
it doesn't make sense to be reducing seat sizes year on year.
Why on Earth do you think that "making sense" has any part in the decision process? The only thing that counts - the ONLY thing - is making more profit.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The only forces being modelled for deceleration in the target systems are those of light pressure and gravity - which we can calculate from the light flux (observed at Earth), the range (parallax), and orbital mechanics.
Once someone has a design for a probe (mass, sail area, reflectivity) then the analysis can be re-done to calculate the travel times (and important things, like how much ahead of the proper motion of the target object you have to aim. to hit the target) with your actual device. This analysis compared travel times for otherwise identical probes dispatched to different targets, and an optimal course strategy for getting there quickest and slowing down to orbital speeds at the far end. There are a few other constraints (e.g., a maximum probe temperature of 100C / 373K, to allow plausible electronics to survive) which could be revisited with an actual "release to manufacturing" design, but this paper provides a road map for how to optimise the trajectory once you get to that point.
Coincidentally, I was out walking today through a forest that was originally planted in the 1300s, in order to provide timber for the anticipated navy of the 1600s. Even though the people who planted the trees wouldn't see them grow to a usable size.
Lordy! - they must have been superhumans, those Mediaeval foresters. Able to think centuries ahead, where modern people just cannot do that any more.
And just where did anyone involved with this make any suggestion that it involved any human - or even any mammal - ever reaching another star system? I as sure as hell didn't see that, and I did read the fucking paper.
It is a moot point (cue grammar Nazis who think that it's "mute") whether a VonNeumann robot with the pinnacle of 22nd century software counts as a human descendent. But that's potentially enough for "human-sourced machines" to distribute themselves across the galaxy before the Earth becomes uninhabitable. But that may not involve actual humans.
As for it being a planning optimisation study - well, yeah, it is. There are no designs for even getting any data back from this sort of mission. But for any mission that is powered from the Solar System by projected beams, the same considerations of travel time will apply, even if the actual mission takes 3 centuries rather than their theoretical 75+46 years.
Ah, there's the little bugger : "Allt a' Chothruim", the "stream of the balance" ; it's hard to see how to get from that name to the "popular" term, but that's Gaelic for you.
More recently the term "delta watershed" has replaced "corrom" - and the situation is fairly common, with a stream coming from a narrow mountain valley into wider one and building a delta (including steep ones, often termed "alluvial cones"), which happens to sit on a watershed in the larger valley. So, a relatively small change in the delta has a large consequence in the direction of water flow.
It's hardly a new phenomenon (I've seen at least one other example, in Scotland), but this sounds like a fine example.
They ain't no Vikings. They're the Normans now.
s/address/"range of addresses"/
And I'm sure you know that, so lets move on.
I was working in Turkey two years ago. If I were the sort to watch movies in my hotel room on my laptop (can Fedora play DVD movies yet? I've never been minded to find out, and don't have a DVD movie to find out), you would ban me from voting on the movie I've just watched? Obviously, yes.
It's hard to design such systems so that they're actually fair.
I just realised, I wasn't aware until that IMDB actually had a "star" or "ratings" system. Show how little interest I have in people's opinions, compared to things like plot summaries.
Not only independent sources - in the simple sense of "coming from many scientists or groups of scientists" - but also using multiple different distinct techniques from fundamental geometry on different scales (which is behind Doppler measurements of velocities) to sophisticated radiometry leading to the maps of the CMB temperature variations. The data is far wider than just having many different groups using similar techniques.
An analogy : you're in bed, and the wife rolls over and pulls the duvet off you. This is movement of the duvet within the existing place. Ripping the wall off, building walls and a new piece of roof to extend the bedroom is expanding the space within which your duvet can move, but doesn't make the duvet itself change size.
So, once again America follows a furrow already ploughed open by Britain's Incompetents-in-Chief.
So Babu Yaga is now the gold standard of forensics in the USA. Great.
Asps can only carry 7LY worth of Qurium for their witchspace engines like every other craft in the Ooniverse. Put more Qurium in one container, and you're going to get a big, big bang.
True. But irrelevant.
In another billion years, the Sun will be some 5% brighter than presently (something it has done every billion years for the last 4 billion years). Some time about then, the amount of water vapour that puts into the atmosphere will reach a point of feedback that will boil the oceans in a few million years. Because the largest part of the greenhouse effect that makes the Earth habitable is due to water vapour, and only a fairly small amount to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I can put some numbers on that.
The price that my wife was paid to move to work in Siberia was a 50% pay increase (compared to the same job in European Russia), and the possibility to retire on 3x normal pension at 50, to anywhere else in Russia. Both her mother and several friends had followed precisely that track. It's a price (for central government) to pay to get people to live there, but not exactly a massive price.
There is a limit to how fast you can deliver mass to the planet. The arriving mass heats the atmosphere and removes appreciable amounts of it. Between deliveries (impacts larger than the Chixulub impact), you need time for the heat to dissipate.
Which blows, if you'll pardon the pun, Mr Angel's couple of centuries time scale out of the water. The time to collect a large proportion of the asteroids and get them onto courses that would intersect with Mars' is non-trivial too.
We'll colonise the asteroids dozens to hundreds of human generations before the first "human" walks 100m on the surface of Mars in their bare skin, before collapsing into the arms of pressure-suited paramedics.
... and people (outside the original AC's environment, it seems) have known that since approximately 1962. do try to keep up, ACs.
Science paper have this terrible habit of containing things called "details" which casual (or even professional) readers might care to know about the event or topic under discussion. This revolutionary concept has only been in use for 350-odd years (some damned peculiar years!), so the jury is still out on the idea, but I personally find it useful, if I actually read the published details.
(Your reading will of course allow you to be more precise. Since the observations lasted some 50ks, there is still some lack of clarity in that statement.)
Tough.
Rearrange.
Or, if you're running the home network service, put the blocks in at the router.
I wonder if Angela Merkel greets him as Herr President Kleinehanden? And has the translator get the meeting off on the right foot.
Pretty much my reaction on first hearing the idea. The next step up in elaboration would be to a pentagram layout (I can just imagine the outcry from the Christians and other demon-believing idiots), when you could have 2 non-crossing runways (in two different directions) operating simultaneously with a man of 18 of crosswind offset between them. But, to be honest, if the military planners of WW2 who built literally hundreds of "triangular" layout airfields when planning consent and obstreperous landowners were little problem, found the 30$deg; crosswinds manageable, then why bother?
That's a storyline that has been being re-hashed for ... around 4000 years, if not longer.
The Boston big dig has to avoid collapsing buildings above and beside the dig. That is somewhat less of a problem on any random hillside in Norway.
Is that dig still going on? I remember it being a thorough-going row last time I was in America - '90 or '91.
Unless, of course, it cost more to move the aggregate (gravel/ sand mix, for mixing with cement to make concrete) to it's destination than the stuff is worth. And there are a *lot* of aggregate deposits in Norway, thanks to all those glaciers and their nice efficient water flows for sorting the aggregate by size. Blasting debris typically has a very wide range of grain sizes - from boulders to dust - which hinders it's use for making concrete.
Shouldn't you be teaching advanced Haskell Agile Buzzwording to the first-trimester ftus to get that competitive advantage in the workplace of 2025?
for her to be delivered to $Address$ with a 10cm butt-plug, a litre of vodka, and a tube of cherry-flavoured lube.
(The latter items being sufficiently unique that the specific combination itself is identifying information and you can arrest everyone in the parking lot.)
Why on Earth do you think that "making sense" has any part in the decision process? The only thing that counts - the ONLY thing - is making more profit.