Congress, the Senate, whatever... They've been announcing their "bold 'new' vision" to go to Mars virtually every year or two since we landed on the moon. What has been done so far during the 45 years they've kept up this bullshit? Absolutely nothing! For decades they have been spending billions and billions of dollars on programs that are ALWAYS canceled. ALWAYS!
This is a complete waste of time and money. NASA is not simply completely useless at achieving any sort of bold vision, it is actively harmful. They deliberately sabotage efforts that are not subservient to their bureaucracy. Government subsidized launches directly compete with private launch systems that do not have the luxury of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and thereby retard if not utterly stymie their development. That SpaceX has managed to succeed has nothing to do with NASA and everything in spite of them. (Without government launches, the private satellite industry would have had loads more money to contract with private launchers like SpaceX.)
If we get to Mars, it will be because of people like Elon Musk, doing it his way. If NASA has any part of it, it will be simply to go along for the ride, solely to grease the palms of the bureaucrats sufficiently that the government doesn't actively oppose Elon Musk's efforts.
Mr. Khan is not saying that IQ does not exist or that it isn't important or useful. He is saying that to 'praise' a child for something innate is not simply unhelpful, it is actually harmful. Praising them for effort on the other hand does not at all 'lower' their IQ, but builds up self discipline and will power which when combined with whatever IQ they have, will generate far better results.
I know this first hand. I was born with a genius IQ. I taught myself to read at the age of four. It took me two weeks to learn enough to read comic books out loud to my little brother while he looked at the pictures. Everyone around me praised me for how smart I was. I was never praised for making an effort.
The end result is while it has always been really easy for me to learn stuff, to understand things, the hardest thing for me to do is to make an effort.
I did nothing to deserve being praised for my IQ. I did nothing to earn my IQ. My IQ was an accident of birth, as much as my hair colour. Should I be praised for being blond?
Making an effort on the other hand is something people do, it is something that can be learned, it is something that is praiseworthy. By making that the source of a person's validation, you can help a person evolve into someone who has the ability to make effort. Praising a person's IQ however gains them nothing other than to potentially give them a false sense of ego.
You are just flat out wrong. While IQ alone is not a guarantee of success, other qualities like work ethic, goal orientation, etc., are every bit as important, all other things being equal, high IQ DOES correlate to greater success. It is possible that one study that you saw did not show this, but this has been studied a lot, and ALL the studies I have seen show a correlation.
You missed my point entirely. My point is that the price mechanism ensures that resource consumption is always sustainable. As resources get scarce and harder to extract, the price rises. The rise in price can be HUGE. Right now we burn coal and oil for instance, for energy because it is cheaper than the alternatives. If demand increases outstripping production sufficient to cause a price rise of only a factor of three, oil and coal will no longer be burned for energy, as the alternatives will be cheaper. This price point would be reached LONG before there is 'no more' coal and oil. The same principle applies to all other resources.
We never get to the point where were run out of things that get scarce. Instead we find alternatives. The price of the alternatives might well be high, but they will be cheaper than the original resource. The higher prices in turn serve as a break on consumption. A free market ensures that the system is sustainable. Only to the degree that states attempt to intervene in the price mechanism, or societies that simply never had such to begin with, can you wind up with a situation in which resources get completely used up.
A climatologist, likely with a political agenda, a math grad student, and a political science BA, put together a model that shows that if growth trends continue in a finite system, the system breaks. No shit sherlock! Except that such growth trends do NOT continue. Any increase in resource consumption results in an increase in price. Any increase in production results in a reduction of price. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.
Any such models that are built without the input of an economist should be automatically discarded as being total BS.
There are 2500 tons of gold mined each year on earth with a total supply of 165,000 tons already mined. It will be quite a while before asteroid mining will make any appreciable dent in this supply, and until it does, it won't have much of an effect on it's price.
Meanwhile, the most money to be made from asteroidal material won't be their importation to Earth. It currently costs $10,000. a pound to put material into orbit. I expect virtually everything mined off planet will actually be used for off planet construction and manufacturing, including gold.
It was a few decades ago, but in my teens I had occasion to spend a weekend at a fireman's weekend where a great many and varied workshops were being given on any number of esoteric aspects of firefighting, and some of the more mundane. I took some of the mundane workshops on forest fire fighting and such. But I made my weekend more of a relaxed affair so I would have time to wander and see what everyone else was up to.
One group was busy creating fire tornadoes, and putting them out. But what I am referring to here, is nothing at all like what is featured in this video, or anything at all like Hollywood has ever dared venture.
The group was training in how to assault oil fires and extinguish them with a water hose, which is no mean trick. To make matters more complicated for them, dead center of the oil fire was a husk of tanker truck tank. This sat in the middle of a concrete pool ~10 meters square (30' x 30'). The pool was filled with six inches of water. The instructors would dump a full oil drum of oil into the pool, creating an oil slick that covered the entire surface. The training crew ready, they would toss in a match.
Now THAT is a fire tornado!
The result was a literal tornado of fire, a veritable solid pillar of flame that would do Moses proud! Thirty feet in diameter, this vortex roared so loud you could barely hear the shouted commands of the fireman as they assaulted the monster. It ripped and twisted, the spiraling cylinder reaching easily a hundred feet or more, straight up. The flame was dense red, and so intense there was nothing opaque about it. Pure fire, at it most intense.
I sat there for hours watching as they put it out, and lit up another, over and over.
We largely canceled our space program back in 1967, when budgets started being scaled down. What we do nowadays is a pale shadow of what was once dreamed about by space enthusiasts, myself included.
If a space program had been kept up at Apollo levels of funding, we would have landed on Mars in the eighties. We would already have a permanently manned moon base and we would right now be mining asteroids, building solar power satellites with extra-terrestrial resources and likely too, building O'Neil colonies.
Once you've got an O'Neil colony, it is not overly difficult to give it some locomotion. It doesn't have to be a lot, a solar sail would be sufficient to, over the course of years, put it into an orbit that doesn't interact too closely with other earth business. Indeed, it makes some sense to perhaps build one's O'Neil colony affixed to a comet and hitch a ride out into the Oort cloud. From there, it is a short hop to building another O'Neil colony on another comet, perhaps one belonging to the Oort cloud of another star, and so the diaspora begins.
My point is simply this. We have had the wherewithal to escape most currently envisioned existential risks for thirty years. We have chosen not to because the 'ignorant masses' have not had the vision to give their politicians the political will to spend ten percent of what they spend now on the military on securing the future through space expansion. However the mere fact that the potential has existed for that long would increase the likelihood that any technological civilization has at least a decent chance at making that crucial leap.
Back in the late seventies, early eighties, when we were locked into a nuclear stalemate, I and much of the world were reasonably quite concerned. Back then, I read literally dozens of text books on the subject of nuclear deterrence and war fighting strategies. I was 'extremely' well informed. I am nowadays, much more concerned about other things. I would be the first to admit that a terrorist use of a nuke is a high probability, but there is virtually zero chance that such an event would lead to a global nuclear war.
From the article: "This simplified analysis... assumes that the experience of the first 50 years of deterrence can be extended into the future."
The experience of the first 50 years CANNOT be extended into the future. Those first 50 years were very different animals. We were poised in a 'mexican standoff' with a superpower enemy possessing a vast nuclear arsenal that feared and hated us. We no longer have such a superpower enemy. Even if Russia started to hate us the way the Soviet Union used to, they are no longer a superpower, they are a pale shadow of what the Soviet Union once was. Their existing arsenal is so old and unmaintained, most of their missiles wouldn't launch and the warheads wouldn't detonate. Most of their weapons are no longer in service. They maintain enough to serve as a deterrent against a nuclear attack by an opposing nation, but that is it. They cannot wage nuclear war.
There is only one nuclear war fighting capable nation on earth right now and that is the US. The US is not about to fight a nuclear war with itself. No other nation will use nukes against the US, unless their very existence was at stake and the US knows to not attack nations that could ship a bomb to us in a shipping crate. Global nuclear war requires two opponents both possessing a nuclear war fighting capacity. Deterrent forces alone are not sufficient for anything other than deterring the other guy from attacking. In order to strike first, you need a 'first strike' capacity, the idea that you have sufficient weapons to knock out with your first strike, the other guy's ability to strike back. Only the US has this capacity.
From the article: "Because this estimate is based on a simplified, time invariant model, it does not apply to the current point in time when relations between the U.S. and Russia are significantly better than they were, on average, during the last 50 years. However that does not invalidate its conclusions."
Er, yes it does invalidate its conclusions. Obviously. The author suggests that the time may come when US/Russian relations deteriorate and asserts that this would then recreate the old situation. However Russia is no longer a superpower and could never again challenge the US in this regard. The Chinese could in theory build up to challenge the US in a new nuclear stalemate however and if China ever starts to build up it's nuclear forces, we would then have cause to worry. However we would likely see evidence of that sort of a buildup long before the threat matured and hopefully could take diplomatic action to change the situation.
Note also that China does not need to challenge the US with nukes. They hold a very effective deterrent against US aggression by the quantity of US dollars they hold in their reserve. If they were to ever dump those dollars into the global finance system, it would create a domino effect on the US dollar that would utterly crash the US economy. Both China and the US authorities know this.
As a total aside; a missile shield in the hands of the US could invalidate the deterrent forces of those nations possessing them. The US in theory could launch a disarming first strike against a nation and then use it's missile shield to shoot down the few missiles the disarming strike missed. This would result in the US being able to initiate a nuclear strike with impunity, even against a nation possessing a nuclear deterrent force. This is why a missile shield is opposed by most nations. In reality of course, such a disarming first strike could not be sure of stopping the shipping crate nukes that likely would be coming in retaliation.
I strongly suspect that the tensile strength quoted is actually a typo by the reporter. Either that or he got his facts seriously wrong. It is unfathomable to me how a sheet of carbon nanotubes would be LESS strong than an equivalent sheet of aluminum. And any company that created such a wimpy sheet of nanotubes sure wouldn't be boasting about it.
In the online porn business, an industry the gov likes to target much more than the game industry, it is clearly established that possession of a credit card is indicative of adult status. It may be a minor who holds the card, but it is an adult who signed for it and who entrusted adult responsibility to that child. Ultimately it is the adult signatory of the card that is responsible for any abuse of that card.
I stopped watching Enterprise in the middle of the second episode I saw. They had a super advanced technology, female alien feeding 'rocks' to the much lower tech human engineer whose help was needed fixing their ship (sure). The engineer says something like, "They melt in your mouth." To which the alien replies, "We can't do water."
We can't do water?!
They can't find hydrogen and oxygen and combine? They can't find a comet and distill?
At that point I switched channels. Voyager suffered the same fate when they pulled a similar bit of nonsense Any program that is so blatantly ignorant of even high school science and so utterly disrespectful of it's audience as to exhibit such disregard is not deserving of my time or my support. It is also most emphatically also not deserving of the term 'science fiction'. It is space fantasy, nothing more.
I give it five years before this 'toy' evolves through annual improvements into something that can fetch a cold beer from the fridge for you. A robot priced in the high end toy range that could actually do household chores, is that still a toy?
My girlfriend is terrified of robots, a true phobia. She better get over it soon.
1 - For the artistic beauty of the achievement. What greater artistry has the human race ever accomplished than landing human beings on the moon?
2 - To create a long term focus to technological research and development efforts, without which most R&D would be driven by quarterly profit margins.
3 - We cannot know in advance what extraordinary benefits basic research in outer space may bring, but benefits will surely come and they may be enormous indeed.
4 - The economic benefit to the human race of satellite technology is incalculable and would never have been achieved were it not for aggressive investment in early exploratory missions. Who knows what other economic fallout will accrue from other explorations?
5 - Who controls the high ground, controls all. Shall we believe that no hostile power would ever invest in space? If we would have peace, those who want peace must hold the high ground.
6 - There is going to be a LOT of money to be made in space. Once the gold rush starts, it's going to make terrestrial investments look awfully, well, terrestrial.
7 - The one thing 'every' space traveler brings back to earth is the greater awareness of our sharing one planet, a small place where we must all flourish or perish together.
8 - To get some of our eggs out of our single basket. The dinosaurs were wiped out, it's happened many times, it WILL happen again.
9 - To rid ourselves of limits to our growth. It is raining soup out there. We can either drown in our own waste or turn Terra into a garden. Up and out is the only way to grow.
10 - For the vision of hope it inspires in our youth, without which many would neither believe in the future nor strive to achieve a better future.
Good advice given to new novelists is, of course, "keep writing'. While your first novel is making the rounds of getting rejected by the various publishers (a process that can take a couple of years), write your second and third novels. Start them on their rejection rounds and keep writing.
Most writers do not sell their first novel (or even their second and third). What they finally do sell is the novel that they have grown into by the practice of writing their previous works. Those previous novels are not up to par with what they finally do sell. Better advice then given to new novelists is "burn your trunk". 'Trunk' refers to all the writing you've done before you finally sell something. It is not up to the standards of what you are now able to produce and publishing it will lower the public's perception of your current talent.
I strongly suspect that this 'new' Heinlein novel is Heinlein's trunk. Likely he never had it published because he himself subscribed to the advice that one's trunk should be burned.
I will buy the book none the less, because Heinlein was by far the novelist who was the most influential on me in my youth. I will consciously remember while reading it though that this is his very first novel, something written in the thirties and not a book that he wanted published because he felt it to be inferior to what he was subsequently capable of.
This fool is preaching the same sort of idiocy as those who wanted to destroy steam engines because they took away jobs. Carried to it's logical conclusion, we should all be carrying sticks and wearing skins because that way there would be lots for us to do. Eliminating tedious, soul destroying work does not harm humanity, it frees us to pursue better goals.
This sort of pseudo intellectual garbage really gets me angry, as it is just this sort of thing that give the naysayers and doom preachers the ammunition they need to impede progress. With a growing world population, we are not going to 'regress' into a peaceful, prosperous planet, we can only move forward with vision and industry.
My letter to the publishing paper.
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
It is quite clear that a lot more thought needs to be given to this problem. The problem is not just of a civilization ending impact happening every million years, there is an impact every few hundred years on average that would generate a tidal wave powerful enough to devastate every city on the coast of a given ocean if the impact hit in water. We need to be able to stop them too.
Solutions like rockets and massdrivers miss the fact that asteroids and comets do not just rotate, they tumble. You cannot simply get up against such a rock/snowball and 'push'. You will wind up pushing in all sorts of different directions as it tumbles, creating little effect. Lasers simply could not add enough energy even over time to have sufficient effect.
Surface or subsurface nuclear detonations are 'probably' not a good idea. Breaking up a mile wide asteroid or comet into several pieces would not help, unless those resulting pieces were moving at sufficiently deflected vectors. However if a large number of such nuclear devices were available, and after each crackup, new measurements were taken so that any chunks still on a collision vector could get hit again, and we repeated that measure and repeat process again and again, we might after several hundred nukes, disperse the threat sufficiently to avoid the end of the world. We would still get hit with several thousand house sized rocks, but civilization would survive.
Most of the press talks about the threat from asteroids and there is such a threat. However the threat from comets is equally large and we cannot easily detect such comets with tens of years of warning. We might get as little as a few months (and if we are unlucky enough for the comet to be 'coming out of the sun' we might have as little as days). Against comets, we might well have no other option but to try to fragment the object with hundreds of nukes as we will not likely have the time necessary to deflect it.
The only way that I can see to effectively protect from asteroids is to use nukes, but not to plan on surface or subsurface detonations. That should be kept as an option for last ditch defenses from comets. The notion that a non surface, near proximity detonation of a nuclear device would simply 'be absorbed' is nonsense. Asteroids cannot violate the principles of physics. If energy is imparted, the energy has effect. The only question is, how much energy can be delivered with a near proximity nuclear detonation?
The answer is, a lot. When that is combined with not just a few but hundreds of successive planned detonations, that rock is going to be moving on a different vector. Remember that given sufficient warning, the vector change does not need to be much in order to generate a miss.
The trick is to build in advance, several hundred solid fuel rockets using technology similar to ICBMs. They should be roughly the size of the Titan2, not the current smaller Minuteman, this so they can have a third stage 'deep space' maneuvering package. They would each carry a single 50 megaton thermonuclear hydrogen device. Their function would be to deliver that device to a precise point one or two diameters away from the rock and detonate. There would be little to no 'shock wave' from the detonation as there is no atmosphere within which such a shock wave could propagate. The thermal flash from the device would explosively vaporize the regolith at the very surface of one side of the rock imparting a small vector change. Rinse and repeat.
Because the regolith is explosively vaporizing along the entire exposed surface of the rock, the pressure on any given section of the rock is even and relatively small, making it very unlikely we would fracture even a loose snowball. While a single such detonation would impart only a small velocity change, repeated detonations would do the job. The only real question is if we could hit it often enough.
In the case of a rock 20 years away, we could easily build tens of thousands of such devices and barely notice the cost of doing so. We would not likely need more than a few hundred. In the case of us having a few months warning of an approaching comet, we had better have already built those rockets with their warheads.
Unfortunately now out of print, Arkham Horror by Chaosium was a board game in which all the players had to cooperate against the game, if they cooperated insufficiently, the game would win and all players would loose. That said there was also a point score such that one person would be declared 'first citizen of Arkham'. This ment that it contained a competitive as well as cooperative element, it really was the best of all worlds.
The point has been made repeatedly here that role playing games are non-zero sum and that is very true. They may be the perfect non-zero sum game. However they are not for everyone, given the investment in time and resources necessary to play.
Hasbro recently released a board game based upon roleplay principles called 'Lord of the Rings'. In it you cooperate as a group to defeat the game. There are no winners per say, but everyone can loose. Sink or swim together, pretty much like the boat we find ourselves in on this planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress, the Senate, whatever... They've been announcing their "bold 'new' vision" to go to Mars virtually every year or two since we landed on the moon. What has been done so far during the 45 years they've kept up this bullshit? Absolutely nothing! For decades they have been spending billions and billions of dollars on programs that are ALWAYS canceled. ALWAYS!
This is a complete waste of time and money. NASA is not simply completely useless at achieving any sort of bold vision, it is actively harmful. They deliberately sabotage efforts that are not subservient to their bureaucracy. Government subsidized launches directly compete with private launch systems that do not have the luxury of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and thereby retard if not utterly stymie their development. That SpaceX has managed to succeed has nothing to do with NASA and everything in spite of them. (Without government launches, the private satellite industry would have had loads more money to contract with private launchers like SpaceX.)
If we get to Mars, it will be because of people like Elon Musk, doing it his way. If NASA has any part of it, it will be simply to go along for the ride, solely to grease the palms of the bureaucrats sufficiently that the government doesn't actively oppose Elon Musk's efforts.
Mr. Khan is not saying that IQ does not exist or that it isn't important or useful. He is saying that to 'praise' a child for something innate is not simply unhelpful, it is actually harmful. Praising them for effort on the other hand does not at all 'lower' their IQ, but builds up self discipline and will power which when combined with whatever IQ they have, will generate far better results.
I know this first hand. I was born with a genius IQ. I taught myself to read at the age of four. It took me two weeks to learn enough to read comic books out loud to my little brother while he looked at the pictures. Everyone around me praised me for how smart I was. I was never praised for making an effort.
The end result is while it has always been really easy for me to learn stuff, to understand things, the hardest thing for me to do is to make an effort.
I did nothing to deserve being praised for my IQ. I did nothing to earn my IQ. My IQ was an accident of birth, as much as my hair colour. Should I be praised for being blond?
Making an effort on the other hand is something people do, it is something that can be learned, it is something that is praiseworthy. By making that the source of a person's validation, you can help a person evolve into someone who has the ability to make effort. Praising a person's IQ however gains them nothing other than to potentially give them a false sense of ego.
You are just flat out wrong. While IQ alone is not a guarantee of success, other qualities like work ethic, goal orientation, etc., are every bit as important, all other things being equal, high IQ DOES correlate to greater success. It is possible that one study that you saw did not show this, but this has been studied a lot, and ALL the studies I have seen show a correlation.
You missed my point entirely. My point is that the price mechanism ensures that resource consumption is always sustainable. As resources get scarce and harder to extract, the price rises. The rise in price can be HUGE. Right now we burn coal and oil for instance, for energy because it is cheaper than the alternatives. If demand increases outstripping production sufficient to cause a price rise of only a factor of three, oil and coal will no longer be burned for energy, as the alternatives will be cheaper. This price point would be reached LONG before there is 'no more' coal and oil. The same principle applies to all other resources.
We never get to the point where were run out of things that get scarce. Instead we find alternatives. The price of the alternatives might well be high, but they will be cheaper than the original resource. The higher prices in turn serve as a break on consumption. A free market ensures that the system is sustainable. Only to the degree that states attempt to intervene in the price mechanism, or societies that simply never had such to begin with, can you wind up with a situation in which resources get completely used up.
A climatologist, likely with a political agenda, a math grad student, and a political science BA, put together a model that shows that if growth trends continue in a finite system, the system breaks. No shit sherlock! Except that such growth trends do NOT continue. Any increase in resource consumption results in an increase in price. Any increase in production results in a reduction of price. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.
Any such models that are built without the input of an economist should be automatically discarded as being total BS.
There are 2500 tons of gold mined each year on earth with a total supply of 165,000 tons already mined. It will be quite a while before asteroid mining will make any appreciable dent in this supply, and until it does, it won't have much of an effect on it's price.
Meanwhile, the most money to be made from asteroidal material won't be their importation to Earth. It currently costs $10,000. a pound to put material into orbit. I expect virtually everything mined off planet will actually be used for off planet construction and manufacturing, including gold.
It was a few decades ago, but in my teens I had occasion to spend a weekend at a fireman's weekend where a great many and varied workshops were being given on any number of esoteric aspects of firefighting, and some of the more mundane. I took some of the mundane workshops on forest fire fighting and such. But I made my weekend more of a relaxed affair so I would have time to wander and see what everyone else was up to.
One group was busy creating fire tornadoes, and putting them out. But what I am referring to here, is nothing at all like what is featured in this video, or anything at all like Hollywood has ever dared venture.
The group was training in how to assault oil fires and extinguish them with a water hose, which is no mean trick. To make matters more complicated for them, dead center of the oil fire was a husk of tanker truck tank. This sat in the middle of a concrete pool ~10 meters square (30' x 30'). The pool was filled with six inches of water. The instructors would dump a full oil drum of oil into the pool, creating an oil slick that covered the entire surface. The training crew ready, they would toss in a match.
Now THAT is a fire tornado!
The result was a literal tornado of fire, a veritable solid pillar of flame that would do Moses proud! Thirty feet in diameter, this vortex roared so loud you could barely hear the shouted commands of the fireman as they assaulted the monster. It ripped and twisted, the spiraling cylinder reaching easily a hundred feet or more, straight up. The flame was dense red, and so intense there was nothing opaque about it. Pure fire, at it most intense.
I sat there for hours watching as they put it out, and lit up another, over and over.
We largely canceled our space program back in 1967, when budgets started being scaled down. What we do nowadays is a pale shadow of what was once dreamed about by space enthusiasts, myself included.
If a space program had been kept up at Apollo levels of funding, we would have landed on Mars in the eighties. We would already have a permanently manned moon base and we would right now be mining asteroids, building solar power satellites with extra-terrestrial resources and likely too, building O'Neil colonies.
Once you've got an O'Neil colony, it is not overly difficult to give it some locomotion. It doesn't have to be a lot, a solar sail would be sufficient to, over the course of years, put it into an orbit that doesn't interact too closely with other earth business. Indeed, it makes some sense to perhaps build one's O'Neil colony affixed to a comet and hitch a ride out into the Oort cloud. From there, it is a short hop to building another O'Neil colony on another comet, perhaps one belonging to the Oort cloud of another star, and so the diaspora begins.
My point is simply this. We have had the wherewithal to escape most currently envisioned existential risks for thirty years. We have chosen not to because the 'ignorant masses' have not had the vision to give their politicians the political will to spend ten percent of what they spend now on the military on securing the future through space expansion. However the mere fact that the potential has existed for that long would increase the likelihood that any technological civilization has at least a decent chance at making that crucial leap.
Back in the late seventies, early eighties, when we were locked into a nuclear stalemate, I and much of the world were reasonably quite concerned. Back then, I read literally dozens of text books on the subject of nuclear deterrence and war fighting strategies. I was 'extremely' well informed. I am nowadays, much more concerned about other things. I would be the first to admit that a terrorist use of a nuke is a high probability, but there is virtually zero chance that such an event would lead to a global nuclear war.
... assumes that the experience of the first 50 years of deterrence can be extended into the future."
From the article:
"This simplified analysis
The experience of the first 50 years CANNOT be extended into the future. Those first 50 years were very different animals. We were poised in a 'mexican standoff' with a superpower enemy possessing a vast nuclear arsenal that feared and hated us. We no longer have such a superpower enemy. Even if Russia started to hate us the way the Soviet Union used to, they are no longer a superpower, they are a pale shadow of what the Soviet Union once was. Their existing arsenal is so old and unmaintained, most of their missiles wouldn't launch and the warheads wouldn't detonate. Most of their weapons are no longer in service. They maintain enough to serve as a deterrent against a nuclear attack by an opposing nation, but that is it. They cannot wage nuclear war.
There is only one nuclear war fighting capable nation on earth right now and that is the US. The US is not about to fight a nuclear war with itself. No other nation will use nukes against the US, unless their very existence was at stake and the US knows to not attack nations that could ship a bomb to us in a shipping crate. Global nuclear war requires two opponents both possessing a nuclear war fighting capacity. Deterrent forces alone are not sufficient for anything other than deterring the other guy from attacking. In order to strike first, you need a 'first strike' capacity, the idea that you have sufficient weapons to knock out with your first strike, the other guy's ability to strike back. Only the US has this capacity.
From the article:
"Because this estimate is based on a simplified, time invariant model, it does not apply to the current point in time when relations between the U.S. and Russia are significantly better than they were, on average, during the last 50 years. However that does not invalidate its conclusions."
Er, yes it does invalidate its conclusions. Obviously. The author suggests that the time may come when US/Russian relations deteriorate and asserts that this would then recreate the old situation. However Russia is no longer a superpower and could never again challenge the US in this regard. The Chinese could in theory build up to challenge the US in a new nuclear stalemate however and if China ever starts to build up it's nuclear forces, we would then have cause to worry. However we would likely see evidence of that sort of a buildup long before the threat matured and hopefully could take diplomatic action to change the situation.
Note also that China does not need to challenge the US with nukes. They hold a very effective deterrent against US aggression by the quantity of US dollars they hold in their reserve. If they were to ever dump those dollars into the global finance system, it would create a domino effect on the US dollar that would utterly crash the US economy. Both China and the US authorities know this.
As a total aside; a missile shield in the hands of the US could invalidate the deterrent forces of those nations possessing them. The US in theory could launch a disarming first strike against a nation and then use it's missile shield to shoot down the few missiles the disarming strike missed. This would result in the US being able to initiate a nuclear strike with impunity, even against a nation possessing a nuclear deterrent force. This is why a missile shield is opposed by most nations. In reality of course, such a disarming first strike could not be sure of stopping the shipping crate nukes that likely would be coming in retaliation.
I strongly suspect that the tensile strength quoted is actually a typo by the reporter. Either that or he got his facts seriously wrong. It is unfathomable to me how a sheet of carbon nanotubes would be LESS strong than an equivalent sheet of aluminum. And any company that created such a wimpy sheet of nanotubes sure wouldn't be boasting about it.
I am thinking that this chart could be extremely useful for someone planning the layout for a university campus.
In the online porn business, an industry the gov likes to target much more than the game industry, it is clearly established that possession of a credit card is indicative of adult status. It may be a minor who holds the card, but it is an adult who signed for it and who entrusted adult responsibility to that child. Ultimately it is the adult signatory of the card that is responsible for any abuse of that card.
I stopped watching Enterprise in the middle of the second episode I saw. They had a super advanced technology, female alien feeding 'rocks' to the much lower tech human engineer whose help was needed fixing their ship (sure). The engineer says something like, "They melt in your mouth." To which the alien replies, "We can't do water."
We can't do water?!
They can't find hydrogen and oxygen and combine? They can't find a comet and distill?
At that point I switched channels. Voyager suffered the same fate when they pulled a similar bit of nonsense Any program that is so blatantly ignorant of even high school science and so utterly disrespectful of it's audience as to exhibit such disregard is not deserving of my time or my support. It is also most emphatically also not deserving of the term 'science fiction'. It is space fantasy, nothing more.
I give it five years before this 'toy' evolves through annual improvements into something that can fetch a cold beer from the fridge for you. A robot priced in the high end toy range that could actually do household chores, is that still a toy?
My girlfriend is terrified of robots, a true phobia. She better get over it soon.
1 - For the artistic beauty of the achievement. What greater artistry has the human race ever accomplished than landing human beings on the moon?
2 - To create a long term focus to technological research and development efforts, without which most R&D would be driven by quarterly profit margins.
3 - We cannot know in advance what extraordinary benefits basic research in outer space may bring, but benefits will surely come and they may be enormous indeed.
4 - The economic benefit to the human race of satellite technology is incalculable and would never have been achieved were it not for aggressive investment in early exploratory missions. Who knows what other economic fallout will accrue from other explorations?
5 - Who controls the high ground, controls all. Shall we believe that no hostile power would ever invest in space? If we would have peace, those who want peace must hold the high ground.
6 - There is going to be a LOT of money to be made in space. Once the gold rush starts, it's going to make terrestrial investments look awfully, well, terrestrial.
7 - The one thing 'every' space traveler brings back to earth is the greater awareness of our sharing one planet, a small place where we must all flourish or perish together.
8 - To get some of our eggs out of our single basket. The dinosaurs were wiped out, it's happened many times, it WILL happen again.
9 - To rid ourselves of limits to our growth. It is raining soup out there. We can either drown in our own waste or turn Terra into a garden. Up and out is the only way to grow.
10 - For the vision of hope it inspires in our youth, without which many would neither believe in the future nor strive to achieve a better future.
Good advice given to new novelists is, of course, "keep writing'. While your first novel is making the rounds of getting rejected by the various publishers (a process that can take a couple of years), write your second and third novels. Start them on their rejection rounds and keep writing.
Most writers do not sell their first novel (or even their second and third). What they finally do sell is the novel that they have grown into by the practice of writing their previous works. Those previous novels are not up to par with what they finally do sell. Better advice then given to new novelists is "burn your trunk". 'Trunk' refers to all the writing you've done before you finally sell something. It is not up to the standards of what you are now able to produce and publishing it will lower the public's perception of your current talent.
I strongly suspect that this 'new' Heinlein novel is Heinlein's trunk. Likely he never had it published because he himself subscribed to the advice that one's trunk should be burned.
I will buy the book none the less, because Heinlein was by far the novelist who was the most influential on me in my youth. I will consciously remember while reading it though that this is his very first novel, something written in the thirties and not a book that he wanted published because he felt it to be inferior to what he was subsequently capable of.
This fool is preaching the same sort of idiocy as those who wanted to destroy steam engines because they took away jobs. Carried to it's logical conclusion, we should all be carrying sticks and wearing skins because that way there would be lots for us to do. Eliminating tedious, soul destroying work does not harm humanity, it frees us to pursue better goals.
This sort of pseudo intellectual garbage really gets me angry, as it is just this sort of thing that give the naysayers and doom preachers the ammunition they need to impede progress. With a growing world population, we are not going to 'regress' into a peaceful, prosperous planet, we can only move forward with vision and industry.
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
This was tawdry reporting.
It is quite clear that a lot more thought needs to be given to this problem. The problem is not just of a civilization ending impact happening every million years, there is an impact every few hundred years on average that would generate a tidal wave powerful enough to devastate every city on the coast of a given ocean if the impact hit in water. We need to be able to stop them too.
Solutions like rockets and massdrivers miss the fact that asteroids and comets do not just rotate, they tumble. You cannot simply get up against such a rock/snowball and 'push'. You will wind up pushing in all sorts of different directions as it tumbles, creating little effect. Lasers simply could not add enough energy even over time to have sufficient effect.
Surface or subsurface nuclear detonations are 'probably' not a good idea. Breaking up a mile wide asteroid or comet into several pieces would not help, unless those resulting pieces were moving at sufficiently deflected vectors. However if a large number of such nuclear devices were available, and after each crackup, new measurements were taken so that any chunks still on a collision vector could get hit again, and we repeated that measure and repeat process again and again, we might after several hundred nukes, disperse the threat sufficiently to avoid the end of the world. We would still get hit with several thousand house sized rocks, but civilization would survive.
Most of the press talks about the threat from asteroids and there is such a threat. However the threat from comets is equally large and we cannot easily detect such comets with tens of years of warning. We might get as little as a few months (and if we are unlucky enough for the comet to be 'coming out of the sun' we might have as little as days). Against comets, we might well have no other option but to try to fragment the object with hundreds of nukes as we will not likely have the time necessary to deflect it.
The only way that I can see to effectively protect from asteroids is to use nukes, but not to plan on surface or subsurface detonations. That should be kept as an option for last ditch defenses from comets. The notion that a non surface, near proximity detonation of a nuclear device would simply 'be absorbed' is nonsense. Asteroids cannot violate the principles of physics. If energy is imparted, the energy has effect. The only question is, how much energy can be delivered with a near proximity nuclear detonation?
The answer is, a lot. When that is combined with not just a few but hundreds of successive planned detonations, that rock is going to be moving on a different vector. Remember that given sufficient warning, the vector change does not need to be much in order to generate a miss.
The trick is to build in advance, several hundred solid fuel rockets using technology similar to ICBMs. They should be roughly the size of the Titan2, not the current smaller Minuteman, this so they can have a third stage 'deep space' maneuvering package. They would each carry a single 50 megaton thermonuclear hydrogen device. Their function would be to deliver that device to a precise point one or two diameters away from the rock and detonate. There would be little to no 'shock wave' from the detonation as there is no atmosphere within which such a shock wave could propagate. The thermal flash from the device would explosively vaporize the regolith at the very surface of one side of the rock imparting a small vector change. Rinse and repeat.
Because the regolith is explosively vaporizing along the entire exposed surface of the rock, the pressure on any given section of the rock is even and relatively small, making it very unlikely we would fracture even a loose snowball. While a single such detonation would impart only a small velocity change, repeated detonations would do the job. The only real question is if we could hit it often enough.
In the case of a rock 20 years away, we could easily build tens of thousands of such devices and barely notice the cost of doing so. We would not likely need more than a few hundred. In the case of us having a few months warning of an approaching comet, we had better have already built those rockets with their warheads.
Unfortunately now out of print, Arkham Horror by Chaosium was a board game in which all the players had to cooperate against the game, if they cooperated insufficiently, the game would win and all players would loose. That said there was also a point score such that one person would be declared 'first citizen of Arkham'. This ment that it contained a competitive as well as cooperative element, it really was the best of all worlds.
The point has been made repeatedly here that role playing games are non-zero sum and that is very true. They may be the perfect non-zero sum game. However they are not for everyone, given the investment in time and resources necessary to play.
Hasbro recently released a board game based upon roleplay principles called 'Lord of the Rings'. In it you cooperate as a group to defeat the game. There are no winners per say, but everyone can loose. Sink or swim together, pretty much like the boat we find ourselves in on this planet.