Solar systems have been detected with up to 7 stars (3 is not all that uncommon), like this one: Nu Scorpii. Depending on how the stars run around, you could have a lot of planets in the habitable zone or closer. There are also globular clusters with tons of stars in them, however, planets would likely be unstable there.
In 30 years, wind will be the sole source of energy in the united states at current growth rates. This will scale up. Solar is falling in cost at 9% per year and still growing. Both together will scale up. EV's are shipping, and are going to be charged by the wind.
It happened with wood, it happened with whale oil, it happened with metals, and it happened with food. But we're still here. I know that those are past events, but they are events where similar lines of thinking occurred. In all cases, technologies that were denounced as fantasies that could not exist, be economical or scale up fast enough saved us. Today, those fantasy technologies are all around us, improving every day. We don't see much of the growth, but it's happening, and those who search for it can see it.
Notice how you said that none of the alternatives could scale up fast enough? A few years ago, you would have said that none of the alternatives were economical. Years before that, you would have said that the alternatives were technologically infeasible.
Given that civilization was supposed to crash by now for lack of food, and that fact that we are still alive, that is unlikely to be true. Those who look beyond the predictions based on linear extrapolations using current technology are already synthesizing oil from renewable energy sources, and are likely to create an unlimited amount of such oil in the future.
Even spam from the aliens might be very valuable. We might get a copy of Wikipedia Galaxy Edition included in the transmission to throw off spam filters.
Upon seeing your nickname, alienzed, I hope you can reveal this mystery to us.
Point 1 is that FTL is looking possible but hard. There are valid solutions to general relativity where Star-Trek like FTL happens.
Point 2 is that FTL is unnecessary for interstellar travel. Project Orion showed that interstellar travel might likely be possible without FTL. Even if biological beings can't live forever (which I think they can), robots can. If we advance, say 50-100 years from now, our economic productivity will be such that an individual, or small group of individuals, could launch a self-replicating interstellar probe that would send back information. If we've scoured the Earth and made surveys, but we haven't found any probes or remnants.
Point 3 is that neighbouring supernova events appear survivable even without travel. Life would suck, but we could predict if say Sirius was going nova and take precautions such as living under lead shields. Supernova of the current solar system would be survivable because of point 2.
In sum, I see two scenarios for why aliens aren't here yet:
1. They are, but they don't want, can't or otherwise do not interact with us. Why I don't know, but it could be true. If the aliens were human, some alien idiot would have broken the rules and contacted us for some reason.
2. They for some reason do not exist or are not developed yet. This I doubt. I believe that the Dinosaurs were on the way to sapience before the asteroid hit, and if it hadn't have happened, we would be Velociraptors. We would have achieved our technology level many years earlier.
Notice that there is no no-FTL scenario. This is because of self-replication.
The solution is plain text. While it is possible to insert malware in word, excel, html and maybe even opendocument files via scripting, it is not possible to insert viruses into plain text and CSV files. It just can't be done. Do not accept files that are not plain text and the problem of "unsanitary data" goes away.
Please point to one with a low subsidy. This is not because I am trying to dodge, but because whenever I post that this country or that county's rail system sucks, I get "that's not a real one, look at this one." So, I did it real quick for the UK. A search for rail subsides UK reveals that the UK pays 5 billion pounds in rail subsides (I'm not sure if that includes freight rail). The UK data shows that trains carried 55 billion passenger-km of travel. Do the math, and you get 0.234964224 U.S. dollars / mile - similar to the USA. If you have a particular country you are interested in, please let me know.
Yes. Fuel cells have efficiency and durability issues. Zinc-based batteries also have issues due to shape change of the zinc powder and dendritic growth. Believe it or not, alkaline batteries (MnZn) are actually rechargables, but only for two-five cycles.
Yes. I should have put it in the first post. Here is an article by the Antiplanner on the costs of cars. I don't agree with everything he believes (like private roads), but he does have some good points about costs and efficiency. He does this calculation based on numbers from the US Government.
Running mass transit off the grid will always be more energy efficient than using cars, even electric ones. The smart and intelligent thing to do us utilize known technology to take up the slack.
Nope. It never will. First, lets take a trip to Japan, the country in the G8 with the biggest transit market share. There, we find a rail system that uses an average of 160 watt-hours per passenger mile. In testing of electric cars, it has been found that on the highway, an electric car (like the leaf, Rav4, etc.) average around 250 watt-hours per mile, higher than the train. However, in city driving electric cars average about 150-160 watt-hours per mile. It gets even better for the cars, in which contain 1.5 passengers on average in the united states. Now, that Japanese train is a hell of a lot better than most gas cars, but that is the difference between gas and electric, not the difference between rail and cars.
Buses are worse. Advanced diesel hybrid buses get 5.5 MPG, city. In the best case where fifty people are on the bus, that's 275 MPG. However, this rarely happens. How many people are actually on a bus in transit loving Europe? 10. So the bus gets 55 MPG. Basically, it's a Prius.
Do you really think that oil powered cars will exist anywhere outside of museums and historical societies by the time this thing even gets rolling? I think not.
As a side note, Leafs have shipped, Volts have shipped, and Rav4 EV Version 2 ships next year. An electric car, with the average 1.5 passengers, is more efficient than the Japanese rail system.
Roads and planes are subsidized at 0.5-1.1 cents per passenger mile, while rail in the USA is subsidized at +20 cents per passenger mile. Since road and rail will use similar amounts of electricity, roads make sense.
It's a legit project. video. There are several problems with the idea, and that's why it was stopped.
1. It's not efficient. Because of inefficiencies in the air electrode and oxygen evolution electrode, the system is only around 54% efficient round trip. Most battery systems are 70-99% efficient.
2. It requires heavy automation. They had to build a factory to reduce zinc oxide to zinc, and load it in to the cars.
3. It's expensive, because the air electrodes contain a lot of unobtainium.
Please try zinc instead. Zinc-air technology is amazing. It is the most efficient round trip fuel technology I've seen. If we moved all (or even some) hydrogen research dollars to zinc air, it would win. See for example, this bus: zinc air fuel cell bus.
Yep, but I no long call myself an environmentalist. I call myself an eco-capitalist or an eco-libertarian so I won't be associated with orthodox environmentalist. By the way, here's some proof of what I'm talking about:
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” - Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” - Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
It wasn't going to be free forever, so you need to start thinking about which businesses you want to support, because the big media conglomerates are about to roll over the web like the juggernauts they are.
It wasn't ever free, that's a lie to attempt compare ad-based web radio to piracy. We already support the business by listening and looking at adds. Foolish business try to demand payment, and get replaced by better ones that don't. The music industry makes less in a year than what Sergey has in his personal bank account. I personally think that Google is going to steamroll the media corps soon. Look at youtube. We already get all that stuff for free. Oh, and corps can take over the Internet. It'll be gone the day after, and we'll be back to sqaure zero (over dialup and mesh networks).
Wind power is growing at an average rate of 30% annually. That means that in 15-20 years if the current trends continue, it will be the sole source of electricity in the USA.
Environmentalists don't support clean energy. They pretend to, but what they really want is no energy, back to the dark ages. Give them a solar powered car, and they'll tell you to redesign your life around bicycles. Give them a solar power system, and they'll tell you to turn out the lights. Fortunately for the environment, clean energy is a profitable business model, and will triumph not out of ideology but out of capitalism. Because of this, the future of energy and industrial production, and maybe even general life is in international waters.
Google CEO Larry Page has announced Google's next acquisition: the United States of America. The hostile takeover began around 4 am last night when hundreds of thousands of self-driving plug-in Priuses, autonomous helicopters and fighter planes emerged from a secret parking lot below the company's Mountain View location. After several brief firefights with Google's secret robotic army, the president of the United States formally surrendered to Page and Brin at the Googleplex. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been declared the co-presidents of the United States. Bruce Schneier has been made the secretary of Homeland Security, and Richard Stallman his been dispatched to take care of the music and movie industries. Page and Brin have announced free food, soda, Odwalla Juice for all, as well as 20% time in addition to the normal weekend.
The main one, is that kids just aren't that interested in science. They barely pay attention when we have to derive something, they do not know how to study anymore, and if anything resembles hard work to them, they turn away from it.
They are not interested in science. They may be interested in something else. This includes engineering, gym, literature, music, and art. They may make valuable contributions. If not, they are only useful as biological automation components - and they're being phased out because they cost too much and are too prone to error.
A side part of this is their maturity. There is a reason people with kids can't have nice things, teenagers break shit. I mean, they have a total disregard for property that is not theirs.
This is because they had their video games taken away from them when they were children. The problem is that children who are micromanaged by their parents are not able to manage their time, and life properly. They just can't do the work they need to get done. Regardless, parents should be fined for equipment damage, and bullies should go to juvenile hall first violent offense. If you run around on the street and beat someone up, you go to jail. Why should highschool be any different? Saying that all kids break things is ageist crap and I'm tried of it. Fortunately I'm no longer going to be a teenager soon.
It sure as hell is easy to get funding for sports teams
Sports is one of the biggest problems with American education today. It should be banned. Students spend a trivial amount of time active in sports, it costs huge amounts of precious dollars, and it creates a culture that does not reflect the real world. In the working world, the nerd is king, and the football player is a biological component of the nerd's machine.
One last item that I'll add, is that educators (in the states at least) do not make enough money to justify the position. The first year I started teaching (just a few years ago), I brought home about $22,000.
You just discovered what my college prof relatives discovered. There's no money in education. Everyone says their overpayed, but the data shows that some of their students starting salaries are higher than their salaries.
I make less than our gym teacher, who sits on his ass all day, and has for the last 10 years while half our students are overweight.
Another reason to nuke PE and sports for good. I'm tired of my tax dollars going to pay for people to beat up the future of the USA.
I make less than our "computer stuff" teacher who lets the kids sit on their ass and play on facebook.
Computer stuff is a disaster. Most of them don't even know what code is much less how to write it.
The stress and frustration from parents isn't worth minimum wage. Thankfully, this is my last year. It's not that I don't like teaching, in fact, I truly enjoy it at times, its just not worth it financially.
Good luck to you in your new career. I'm glad someone cared enough for the kids, even if no one appreciated it.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar systems have been detected with up to 7 stars (3 is not all that uncommon), like this one: Nu Scorpii. Depending on how the stars run around, you could have a lot of planets in the habitable zone or closer. There are also globular clusters with tons of stars in them, however, planets would likely be unstable there.
In 30 years, wind will be the sole source of energy in the united states at current growth rates. This will scale up. Solar is falling in cost at 9% per year and still growing. Both together will scale up. EV's are shipping, and are going to be charged by the wind.
It happened with wood, it happened with whale oil, it happened with metals, and it happened with food. But we're still here. I know that those are past events, but they are events where similar lines of thinking occurred. In all cases, technologies that were denounced as fantasies that could not exist, be economical or scale up fast enough saved us. Today, those fantasy technologies are all around us, improving every day. We don't see much of the growth, but it's happening, and those who search for it can see it.
Notice how you said that none of the alternatives could scale up fast enough? A few years ago, you would have said that none of the alternatives were economical. Years before that, you would have said that the alternatives were technologically infeasible.
Please, stop cooling magma
Seriously, this is just not cool.
Given that civilization was supposed to crash by now for lack of food, and that fact that we are still alive, that is unlikely to be true. Those who look beyond the predictions based on linear extrapolations using current technology are already synthesizing oil from renewable energy sources, and are likely to create an unlimited amount of such oil in the future.
Even spam from the aliens might be very valuable. We might get a copy of Wikipedia Galaxy Edition included in the transmission to throw off spam filters.
Upon seeing your nickname, alienzed, I hope you can reveal this mystery to us.
Three points.
Point 1 is that FTL is looking possible but hard. There are valid solutions to general relativity where Star-Trek like FTL happens.
Point 2 is that FTL is unnecessary for interstellar travel. Project Orion showed that interstellar travel might likely be possible without FTL. Even if biological beings can't live forever (which I think they can), robots can. If we advance, say 50-100 years from now, our economic productivity will be such that an individual, or small group of individuals, could launch a self-replicating interstellar probe that would send back information. If we've scoured the Earth and made surveys, but we haven't found any probes or remnants.
Point 3 is that neighbouring supernova events appear survivable even without travel. Life would suck, but we could predict if say Sirius was going nova and take precautions such as living under lead shields. Supernova of the current solar system would be survivable because of point 2.
In sum, I see two scenarios for why aliens aren't here yet:
1. They are, but they don't want, can't or otherwise do not interact with us. Why I don't know, but it could be true. If the aliens were human, some alien idiot would have broken the rules and contacted us for some reason.
2. They for some reason do not exist or are not developed yet. This I doubt. I believe that the Dinosaurs were on the way to sapience before the asteroid hit, and if it hadn't have happened, we would be Velociraptors. We would have achieved our technology level many years earlier.
Notice that there is no no-FTL scenario. This is because of self-replication.
your data is sanitary.
The solution is plain text. While it is possible to insert malware in word, excel, html and maybe even opendocument files via scripting, it is not possible to insert viruses into plain text and CSV files. It just can't be done. Do not accept files that are not plain text and the problem of "unsanitary data" goes away.
Please point to one with a low subsidy. This is not because I am trying to dodge, but because whenever I post that this country or that county's rail system sucks, I get "that's not a real one, look at this one." So, I did it real quick for the UK. A search for rail subsides UK reveals that the UK pays 5 billion pounds in rail subsides (I'm not sure if that includes freight rail). The UK data shows that trains carried 55 billion passenger-km of travel. Do the math, and you get 0.234964224 U.S. dollars / mile - similar to the USA. If you have a particular country you are interested in, please let me know.
Yes. Fuel cells have efficiency and durability issues. Zinc-based batteries also have issues due to shape change of the zinc powder and dendritic growth. Believe it or not, alkaline batteries (MnZn) are actually rechargables, but only for two-five cycles.
Yes. I should have put it in the first post. Here is an article by the Antiplanner on the costs of cars. I don't agree with everything he believes (like private roads), but he does have some good points about costs and efficiency. He does this calculation based on numbers from the US Government.
Sure. Here is a source for the bus per person data. The numbers are extracted from a giant British report, see the "How Can This Be" section.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Running mass transit off the grid will always be more energy efficient than using cars, even electric ones. The smart and intelligent thing to do us utilize known technology to take up the slack.
Nope. It never will. First, lets take a trip to Japan, the country in the G8 with the biggest transit market share. There, we find a rail system that uses an average of 160 watt-hours per passenger mile. In testing of electric cars, it has been found that on the highway, an electric car (like the leaf, Rav4, etc.) average around 250 watt-hours per mile, higher than the train. However, in city driving electric cars average about 150-160 watt-hours per mile. It gets even better for the cars, in which contain 1.5 passengers on average in the united states. Now, that Japanese train is a hell of a lot better than most gas cars, but that is the difference between gas and electric, not the difference between rail and cars.
Buses are worse. Advanced diesel hybrid buses get 5.5 MPG, city. In the best case where fifty people are on the bus, that's 275 MPG. However, this rarely happens. How many people are actually on a bus in transit loving Europe? 10. So the bus gets 55 MPG. Basically, it's a Prius.
If the Nazi's, New Zealanders and South Africans can do it, so can we. But electric cars are shipping, so it is a moot point anyway.
Do you really think that oil powered cars will exist anywhere outside of museums and historical societies by the time this thing even gets rolling? I think not.
As a side note, Leafs have shipped, Volts have shipped, and Rav4 EV Version 2 ships next year. An electric car, with the average 1.5 passengers, is more efficient than the Japanese rail system.
Roads and planes are subsidized at 0.5-1.1 cents per passenger mile, while rail in the USA is subsidized at +20 cents per passenger mile. Since road and rail will use similar amounts of electricity, roads make sense.
It's a legit project. video. There are several problems with the idea, and that's why it was stopped.
1. It's not efficient. Because of inefficiencies in the air electrode and oxygen evolution electrode, the system is only around 54% efficient round trip. Most battery systems are 70-99% efficient.
2. It requires heavy automation. They had to build a factory to reduce zinc oxide to zinc, and load it in to the cars.
3. It's expensive, because the air electrodes contain a lot of unobtainium.
Please try zinc instead. Zinc-air technology is amazing. It is the most efficient round trip fuel technology I've seen. If we moved all (or even some) hydrogen research dollars to zinc air, it would win. See for example, this bus: zinc air fuel cell bus.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” - Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” - Prof Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” - Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
It wasn't going to be free forever, so you need to start thinking about which businesses you want to support, because the big media conglomerates are about to roll over the web like the juggernauts they are.
It wasn't ever free, that's a lie to attempt compare ad-based web radio to piracy. We already support the business by listening and looking at adds. Foolish business try to demand payment, and get replaced by better ones that don't. The music industry makes less in a year than what Sergey has in his personal bank account. I personally think that Google is going to steamroll the media corps soon. Look at youtube. We already get all that stuff for free. Oh, and corps can take over the Internet. It'll be gone the day after, and we'll be back to sqaure zero (over dialup and mesh networks).
But I gotta plug these guys: ZaReason. Good systems, no bloatware.
Two points:
Wind power is growing at an average rate of 30% annually. That means that in 15-20 years if the current trends continue, it will be the sole source of electricity in the USA.
Environmentalists don't support clean energy. They pretend to, but what they really want is no energy, back to the dark ages. Give them a solar powered car, and they'll tell you to redesign your life around bicycles. Give them a solar power system, and they'll tell you to turn out the lights. Fortunately for the environment, clean energy is a profitable business model, and will triumph not out of ideology but out of capitalism. Because of this, the future of energy and industrial production, and maybe even general life is in international waters.
Please ignore the above post. Slashdot is acting weird by being slow to respond to posts and I did not see that it had already been posted above.
Google world domination? Free Soda, 20% time, Plug-in hybrids and robots for all? Bring it on.
CNN news, December, 21, 2012.
Google CEO Larry Page has announced Google's next acquisition: the United States of America. The hostile takeover began around 4 am last night when hundreds of thousands of self-driving plug-in Priuses, autonomous helicopters and fighter planes emerged from a secret parking lot below the company's Mountain View location. After several brief firefights with Google's secret robotic army, the president of the United States formally surrendered to Page and Brin at the Googleplex. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been declared the co-presidents of the United States. Bruce Schneier has been made the secretary of Homeland Security, and Richard Stallman his been dispatched to take care of the music and movie industries. Page and Brin have announced free food, soda, Odwalla Juice for all, as well as 20% time in addition to the normal weekend.
The main one, is that kids just aren't that interested in science. They barely pay attention when we have to derive something, they do not know how to study anymore, and if anything resembles hard work to them, they turn away from it.
They are not interested in science. They may be interested in something else. This includes engineering, gym, literature, music, and art. They may make valuable contributions. If not, they are only useful as biological automation components - and they're being phased out because they cost too much and are too prone to error.
A side part of this is their maturity. There is a reason people with kids can't have nice things, teenagers break shit. I mean, they have a total disregard for property that is not theirs.
This is because they had their video games taken away from them when they were children. The problem is that children who are micromanaged by their parents are not able to manage their time, and life properly. They just can't do the work they need to get done. Regardless, parents should be fined for equipment damage, and bullies should go to juvenile hall first violent offense. If you run around on the street and beat someone up, you go to jail. Why should highschool be any different? Saying that all kids break things is ageist crap and I'm tried of it. Fortunately I'm no longer going to be a teenager soon.
It sure as hell is easy to get funding for sports teams
Sports is one of the biggest problems with American education today. It should be banned. Students spend a trivial amount of time active in sports, it costs huge amounts of precious dollars, and it creates a culture that does not reflect the real world. In the working world, the nerd is king, and the football player is a biological component of the nerd's machine.
One last item that I'll add, is that educators (in the states at least) do not make enough money to justify the position. The first year I started teaching (just a few years ago), I brought home about $22,000.
You just discovered what my college prof relatives discovered. There's no money in education. Everyone says their overpayed, but the data shows that some of their students starting salaries are higher than their salaries.
I make less than our gym teacher, who sits on his ass all day, and has for the last 10 years while half our students are overweight.
Another reason to nuke PE and sports for good. I'm tired of my tax dollars going to pay for people to beat up the future of the USA.
I make less than our "computer stuff" teacher who lets the kids sit on their ass and play on facebook.
Computer stuff is a disaster. Most of them don't even know what code is much less how to write it.
The stress and frustration from parents isn't worth minimum wage. Thankfully, this is my last year. It's not that I don't like teaching, in fact, I truly enjoy it at times, its just not worth it financially.
Good luck to you in your new career. I'm glad someone cared enough for the kids, even if no one appreciated it.