Is it really creating life if it uses the same building blocks that all known life uses? I say don't call it creating life until we can do it without carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
But what if non-carbon based life cannot exist? If one can take raw, inorganic, materials and put them together in a form which qualifies as a life form then one is able to create life.
For many people, religion is both support and a moral guide and a thousand other things besides, so if this is really such a fundamental breakthrough and life in itself can be created in labs, their religion will either have to change or dissapear.
If the world changes around their religion then that's their problem. It is up to them to either fix their religion to better match reality or retreat from reality (like the Amish). I won't be held back just because someone else can't wrap their head around some new aspect of physical reality.
So basically there will be a lot of bad blood. And by having a (hopefully) public discussion, things will have time to both settle down and settle in. In peoples minds that is.
The problem is that reality is not going to change, no matter how much these people want it to. We now know that the earth was not created in seven days. We now know that the planet is not merely some 10000 years old. We now know that life can and did evolve on this planet by itself with no outside help. We no longer need to cling to the religious "explanation" for these events, we now know how it actually happened. The problem is that religion has a tendancy to turn into dogma...instead of being a useful temporary explanation for something which we don't currently understand, it turns into the "truth" handed down by some mythical git a few thousand years ago. People forget that the religious explanation should be replaced by the vastly more useful scientific one.
Using religion as an emotional crutch is fine. Using it as a basis for one's ethics is problematic but somewhat acceptable. Using it as an excuse to avoid having to really understanding the surrounding world is not fine.
Well, if not discussing this with religious leaders, then who?
The point is: what do religious leaders know about the dangers in producing new forms of life? Many of them don't even understand the problems associated with over population for gods sake. Religion is the last thing we need.
With these experiments on the horizon, the genesis of life is no longer a religious or philosophical question. It is now a purely scientific endeavour, religion no longer need be concerned.
Eh? You going to need new player hardware anyway. Why use compression when a vastly more dense storage format is already available? It makes even more since when the DVD-Audio player will be able to play both DVD-A and CDs...
And remember how cheap VCR technology is now days...DVD will go the same way.
This is not being used as an alternative to normal soft-landings.
This is a special case where they WANT the probes to dig themselves into the ground. So it's either make use of all the free energy mars' gravity is giving you, or carry a drilling apparatus plus enough fuel to soft land it on the planet plus an energy source powerful enough to drive the drill. Think about it...
By Apollo-12 people were already complaining that NASA's budget could be better spent on welfare projects here at home.
It's worse than that. By '65 nasa's research budget was already being seriously slashed. NASA's budget was way down quite a while befor we even made it to the moon. Apollo coasted to the finish line.
The theory is that there may be frost at these depths. Not a great deal, of course, but hopefully enough to detect. One has to remember that we have only ever tested the martian surface down to about 4 inches. Think of what one would find in the first 4 inches of a desert on earth....not a whole hell of a lot. Go down a few feet though and you might run into some moisture.
This mission takes more than an RTG. You're going to need a full fledged reactor to generate enough energy to melt through all that ice. Of course it will be a specialized reactor, you don't need much electricity, you just need a lot of heat supplied to the base of the craft. However, once you're through the ice, all that evergy is available for other uses. And in the case of a reactor, it can be turned off (or down) if you don't need it's full capacity at all times.
Of course, since there may very well be life in the europan ocean, you'll want to do a good job containing the reactor. But thats not terribly difficult if you've got a decent mass budget to spend on shielding.
A bigger problem is definitely going to be communications... I don't think a hard line will work...the tunnel that your craft melted is going to freeze up again pretty quickly, and it will likely break any line that tries to run through it. Perhapse the burrower could leave radio repeaters at intervals during it's decent, each one would need it's own RTG, but this is already going to be an expensive and nuclear mission so that shouldn't make much difference.
Sensor technology, the control systems, mission objectives are all more complex today that in the '60s.
I don't know, actually. Modern remote sensing technology is mostly based on previously classified military technology...which means it's at least 10 or 20 years old.
If by control systems you mean RCS, then this hasn't changed much either...
And mission objectives have never been as ambitious as Apollo...nothing we've done since has come even close.
In the end spacecraft technology just isn't all that complicated. Advanced microprocessors and large pieces of software are quite a bit more complicated. Most of the excessive complexity seen in the areospace industry has been the result of having to work around old, expensive launch systems.
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
I think this is a pretty good example of the current environmental movement's misunderstanding of scale...
Think about it, we have maybe 10 probes sitting on Mars (3 or 4 landers, and several crashed orbiters). But then think about how big of a place mars really is. The chances of anyone running into one of those probes during any mars operation is extremely small. I suspect that by the time humans get there we will have a very hard time even finding any of our older probes, as they will be quite well covered with dust and therefor very hard to see.
There is also the physical problem of cleanup. How do you suggest our probes clean up after themselves? There is no physically possible way to return them to the earth, there simply isn't enough launch capacity for that. Someone down below suggested blowing them up, but that also would cost a decent ammount of mass and wouldn't solve the problem anyway (you're still polluting, you've just spread it around a little more).
To be sure, the technology in the '60s involved systems that were far less complex than today's systems.
This holds for most technology, but not aerospace technology. Most "modern" spacecraft and launch systems are built with almost entirely 1950s and 1960s technology.
Every single US launch vehicle (of any larger size, anyway), apart from the shuttle, is based on 1950s era ICBMS. The only alteration made to these ICBMS are usually in the area of control systems.
The shuttle is early 1970s technology.
There has been no new rocket engine development in this country since the SSME was developed in the early 70s. And this one (realitively) new engine is only used on one booster. All other US boosters use engines from the 1950s.
The very first US LH2/LOX engine, the RL10, is still in heavy use, for gods sake.
Most of the first space probes were impactors. The soviets started with Luna 2 in '59. The US followed in '62 with Ranger 4. The first soft landing didn't occur until Luna 9 in 1966.
Spill a few kilos of heavy water or whatever nuclear substance you choose into the local water supply and.. uhm.. you get the idea.
Uh, where do you think heavy water comes from? It's seperated out (by centrifuge, I think) from sea water.
You've just proved my point for me. The general public (some of it, anyway) knows that "heavy water" is related to something "nuclear." It is therefor automatically deemed evil. Never mind the fact that it is completely harmless (in any quantity), and in fact is quite difficult to differentiate from normal water.
I don't know that radiation has anything to do with the deterioration of the sarcophagus. The thing was built very rapidly in a very hostile environment on top of a structurally unsound building. And it hasn't been kept up terribly well since.
Of course, given the economic situation in the area one really can't blame them for the lack of attention. This is definitely an instance where it's in the West's best interests to help out.
...the long term cleanup/deposit of the large amounts of highly radioactive is still an unsolved problem. We don't really know what do with it.
Bullshit. Even without investing in breeder technology (which is already developed, but hasn't been proven on a large scale), nuclear waste it not terribly hard to get rid of. It has this vast advantage in that it's so dense it's easy to move and stash places. (As opposed to waste from coal and oil plants, which store their waste in the lungs of every living creature on the planet.)
Probably the best final disposal method is to shoot the waste (in metal containers) into the mud which covers the seafloor un the middle of the pacific. The mud is quite deap and has a very small particle size (to help contain the waste). Plus, of course, water is very good at blocking radiation.
Doing such a thing is terribly stupid, though. This "waste" is in fact a highly valuable fuel source in and of itself. We shouldn't be arguing about how to get rid of it. We should be developing ways the USE it.
Also take into account that you have to house the depleated uranium.
Depleated uranium has nothing to do with nuclear power reactors. DU is uranium which has had it's U235 extracted for use in atomic bombs (or nuclear sub reactors). Since there is a glut of extracted U235 on the planet at the moment, no one is refining it anymore.
Depleted uranium is also not terribly radioactive. It is used for tank-piercing shells and armor, for instance. Housing it is not a problem. It is no more dangerous then any other heavy metal.
I suspect the term you are looking for is "Spent fuel."
As mentioned by others, this isn't what happened to Chernobyl.
It's also extremely unlikely to happen anywhere else. Very likely a core moving in such manner would hit some volitile substance (like water), vaporize it and blow itself up in the process. Or, it would burn up enough of it's U235 such that it would shut itself down.
Finally, the CANDU (canadu?) reactors run on natural uranium. Natural uranium won't react without a moderator. So as soon as the fuel moves out of the reactor vessel it'll put itself out.
Interestingly, natural nuclear reactions in the ground are not unheard of. There is a uranium mine in Africa which has a lower U-235 content then other mines. It has been postulated that at some point in the distant past it's uranium underwent a spontanious chain reaction and burned off part of its U-235.
They do not even put the basic scrubbing systems on their plants that have black smoke bellowing out of them 24 hours a day.
How do you think these scrubbers work? Most of them are electrostatic...ie: they need large amounts of ELECTRICITY...exactly what their nuclear plants are there to produce.
Maybe we as a world we should spend more time worrying about what comes out of the factories besides packaged goods.
Then we need a clean energy source. And the only one avalable is nuclear.
And why should we as a nation give them aid? They screwed up, they can fix it.
The design of the reactor at Chernobyl did prevent disaster; the only reason it malfunctioned was because things went wrong while basic safety measures had been circumvented for testing purposes. The Chernobyl disaster was a result of human error and coincidence, not design. Further, nuclear power remains one of the safest and most efficient forms of power today (until we invent cold fusion, anyway)
Nope. The Chernobyl reactor design was pretty bad. No containment building as a start.
Human error did start off the accident, but a horrible reactor layout let it get out of hand.
Of course whats really sad is that no one will fund advanced reactor design. Some existing (though untested at large scale) designs are physically incapable of Chernobyl-like accidents.
Nuclear is the one technology capable of providing us with practically unlimited amounts of clean, safe evergy. Yet the public is unwilling to expend even a little energy to study it's real capabilities and dangers. The vast majority are happy just to label anything and everything with the world "nuclear" in it's title as automatically mysterious and evil.
I still wonder what would happen if the public were made aware of the radioactive substances that are the core of almost every smoke detector on the planet. Jesus, there would probably be a national "burn your smoke detectors" campaign.
Bugs should be brought to light, but there's far better ways to do that than uploading a script to rootshell.
But thats the point, there AREN'T any better ways to bring flaws to light.
Subscribe to Bugtraq for a month and watch how many of the submissions start with "I mailed company xxx about this a month ago but didn't get any response so I'm posting it here..." There really is no better way than to get the information out there and FORCE the company to respond.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought IBM's OS/2 porting problems were caused by the excessive amount of asm used...
Linux has the advantage of a limited amount of asm...and being compilable by an almost universal compiler.
Is it really creating life if it uses the same building blocks that all known life uses? I
say don't call it creating life until we can do it without carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen.
But what if non-carbon based life cannot exist? If one can take raw, inorganic, materials and put them together in a form which qualifies as a life form then one is able to create life.
For many people, religion is both support and a moral guide and a thousand other things besides, so if this is really such a fundamental breakthrough and life in itself can be created in labs, their religion will either have to change or dissapear.
If the world changes around their religion then that's their problem. It is up to them to either fix their religion to better match reality or retreat from reality (like the Amish). I won't be held back just because someone else can't wrap their head around some new aspect of physical reality.
So basically there will be a lot of bad blood. And by having a (hopefully) public discussion, things will have time to both settle down and settle in. In peoples minds that is.
The problem is that reality is not going to change, no matter how much these people want it to. We now know that the earth was not created in seven days. We now know that the planet is not merely some 10000 years old. We now know that life can and did evolve on this planet by itself with no outside help. We no longer need to cling to the religious "explanation" for these events, we now know how it actually happened. The problem is that religion has a tendancy to turn into dogma...instead of being a useful temporary explanation for something which we don't currently understand, it turns into the "truth" handed down by some mythical git a few thousand years ago. People forget that the religious explanation should be replaced by the vastly more useful scientific one.
Using religion as an emotional crutch is fine. Using it as a basis for one's ethics is problematic but somewhat acceptable. Using it as an excuse to avoid having to really understanding the surrounding world is not fine.
Well, if not discussing this with religious leaders, then who?
The point is: what do religious leaders know about the dangers in producing new forms of life? Many of them don't even understand the problems associated with over population for gods sake. Religion is the last thing we need.
With these experiments on the horizon, the genesis of life is no longer a religious or philosophical question. It is now a purely scientific endeavour, religion no longer need be concerned.
Eh? You going to need new player hardware anyway. Why use compression when a vastly more dense storage format is already available? It makes even more since when the DVD-Audio player will be able to play both DVD-A and CDs...
And remember how cheap VCR technology is now days...DVD will go the same way.
ARRGH...
This is not being used as an alternative to normal soft-landings.
This is a special case where they WANT the probes to dig themselves into the ground. So it's either make use of all the free energy mars' gravity is giving you, or carry a drilling apparatus plus enough fuel to soft land it on the planet plus an energy source powerful enough to drive the drill. Think about it...
Oh, I know...we should spend it on defense or something useful like that.
By Apollo-12 people were already complaining that NASA's budget could be better spent on welfare projects here at home.
It's worse than that. By '65 nasa's research budget was already being seriously slashed. NASA's budget was way down quite a while befor we even made it to the moon. Apollo coasted to the finish line.
I don't exactly consider mars to be deep space.
Maybe they're still going by the old definition of anything beyond lunar orbit being deep space...
The theory is that there may be frost at these depths. Not a great deal, of course, but hopefully enough to detect. One has to remember that we have only ever tested the martian surface down to about 4 inches. Think of what one would find in the first 4 inches of a desert on earth....not a whole hell of a lot. Go down a few feet though and you might run into some moisture.
This mission takes more than an RTG. You're going to need a full fledged reactor to generate enough energy to melt through all that ice. Of course it will be a specialized reactor, you don't need much electricity, you just need a lot of heat supplied to the base of the craft. However, once you're through the ice, all that evergy is available for other uses. And in the case of a reactor, it can be turned off (or down) if you don't need it's full capacity at all times.
Of course, since there may very well be life in the europan ocean, you'll want to do a good job containing the reactor. But thats not terribly difficult if you've got a decent mass budget to spend on shielding.
A bigger problem is definitely going to be communications... I don't think a hard line will work...the tunnel that your craft melted is going to freeze up again pretty quickly, and it will likely break any line that tries to run through it. Perhapse the burrower could leave radio repeaters at intervals during it's decent, each one would need it's own RTG, but this is already going to be an expensive and nuclear mission so that shouldn't make much difference.
Sensor technology, the control systems, mission objectives are all more complex today that in the '60s.
I don't know, actually. Modern remote sensing technology is mostly based on previously classified military technology...which means it's at least 10 or 20 years old.
If by control systems you mean RCS, then this hasn't changed much either...
And mission objectives have never been as ambitious as Apollo...nothing we've done since has come even close.
In the end spacecraft technology just isn't all that complicated. Advanced microprocessors and large pieces of software are quite a bit more complicated. Most of the excessive complexity seen in the areospace industry has been the result of having to work around old, expensive launch systems.
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
I think this is a pretty good example of the current environmental movement's misunderstanding of scale...
Think about it, we have maybe 10 probes sitting on Mars (3 or 4 landers, and several crashed orbiters). But then think about how big of a place mars really is. The chances of anyone running into one of those probes during any mars operation is extremely small. I suspect that by the time humans get there we will have a very hard time even finding any of our older probes, as they will be quite well covered with dust and therefor very hard to see.
There is also the physical problem of cleanup. How do you suggest our probes clean up after themselves? There is no physically possible way to return them to the earth, there simply isn't enough launch capacity for that. Someone down below suggested blowing them up, but that also would cost a decent ammount of mass and wouldn't solve the problem anyway (you're still polluting, you've just spread it around a little more).
DS2 can also use MGS as a relay.
To be sure, the technology in the '60s involved systems that were far less complex than today's systems.
This holds for most technology, but not aerospace technology. Most "modern" spacecraft and launch systems are built with almost entirely 1950s and 1960s technology.
Every single US launch vehicle (of any larger size, anyway), apart from the shuttle, is based on 1950s era ICBMS. The only alteration made to these ICBMS are usually in the area of control systems.
The shuttle is early 1970s technology.
There has been no new rocket engine development in this country since the SSME was developed in the early 70s. And this one (realitively) new engine is only used on one booster. All other US boosters use engines from the 1950s.
The very first US LH2/LOX engine, the RL10, is still in heavy use, for gods sake.
I know you're trying to be funny...but... :-)
Most of the first space probes were impactors. The soviets started with Luna 2 in '59. The US followed in '62 with Ranger 4. The first soft landing didn't occur until Luna 9 in 1966.
Spill a few kilos of heavy water or whatever nuclear substance you choose into the local water supply and.. uhm.. you get the idea.
Uh, where do you think heavy water comes from? It's seperated out (by centrifuge, I think) from sea water.
You've just proved my point for me. The general public (some of it, anyway) knows that "heavy water" is related to something "nuclear." It is therefor automatically deemed evil. Never mind the fact that it is completely harmless (in any quantity), and in fact is quite difficult to differentiate from normal water.
I don't know that radiation has anything to do with the deterioration of the sarcophagus. The thing was built very rapidly in a very hostile
environment on top of a structurally unsound building. And it hasn't been kept up terribly well since.
Of course, given the economic situation in the area one really can't blame them for the lack of attention. This is definitely an instance where it's in the West's best interests to help out.
Bullshit. Even without investing in breeder technology (which is already developed, but hasn't been proven on a large scale), nuclear waste it not terribly hard to get rid of. It has this vast advantage in that it's so dense it's easy to move and stash places. (As opposed to waste from coal and oil plants, which store their waste in the lungs of every living creature on the planet.)
Probably the best final disposal method is to shoot the waste (in metal containers) into the mud which covers the seafloor un the middle of the pacific. The mud is quite deap and has a very small particle size (to help contain the waste). Plus, of course, water is very good at blocking radiation.
Doing such a thing is terribly stupid, though. This "waste" is in fact a highly valuable fuel source in and of itself. We shouldn't be arguing about how to get rid of it. We should be developing ways the USE it.
Also take into account that you have to house the depleated uranium.
Depleated uranium has nothing to do with nuclear power reactors. DU is uranium which has had it's U235 extracted for use in atomic bombs (or nuclear sub reactors). Since there is a glut of extracted U235 on the planet at the moment, no one is refining it anymore.
Depleted uranium is also not terribly radioactive. It is used for tank-piercing shells and armor, for instance. Housing it is not a problem. It is no more dangerous then any other heavy metal.
I suspect the term you are looking for is "Spent fuel."
Very well said.
I would only add that coal plants release huge amounts of radioactive contaminants along with their other chemical biproducts.
And in terms of waste, this is why we should be working on breeder reactors.
As mentioned by others, this isn't what happened to Chernobyl.
It's also extremely unlikely to happen anywhere else. Very likely a core moving in such manner would hit some volitile substance (like water), vaporize it and blow itself up in the process. Or, it would burn up enough of it's U235 such that it would shut itself down.
Finally, the CANDU (canadu?) reactors run on natural uranium. Natural uranium won't react without a moderator. So as soon as the fuel moves out of the reactor vessel it'll put itself out.
Interestingly, natural nuclear reactions in the ground are not unheard of. There is a uranium mine in Africa which has a lower U-235 content then other mines. It has been postulated that at some point in the distant past it's uranium underwent a spontanious chain reaction and burned off part of its U-235.
They do not even put the basic scrubbing systems on their plants that have black smoke bellowing out of them 24 hours a day.
How do you think these scrubbers work? Most of them are electrostatic...ie: they need large amounts of ELECTRICITY...exactly what their nuclear plants are there to produce.
Maybe we as a world we should spend more time worrying about what comes out of the factories besides packaged goods.
Then we need a clean energy source. And the only one avalable is nuclear.
And why should we as a nation give them aid? They screwed up, they can fix it.
This is just sad.
The design of the reactor at Chernobyl did prevent disaster; the only reason it malfunctioned was because things went wrong while basic safety measures had been circumvented for testing purposes. The Chernobyl disaster was a result of human error and coincidence, not design. Further, nuclear power remains one of the safest and most efficient forms of power today (until we invent cold fusion, anyway)
Nope. The Chernobyl reactor design was pretty bad. No containment building as a start.
Human error did start off the accident, but a horrible reactor layout let it get out of hand.
Of course whats really sad is that no one will fund advanced reactor design. Some existing (though untested at large scale) designs are physically incapable of Chernobyl-like accidents.
Nuclear is the one technology capable of providing us with practically unlimited amounts of clean, safe evergy. Yet the public is unwilling to expend even a little energy to study it's real capabilities and dangers. The vast majority are happy just to label anything and everything with the world "nuclear" in it's title as automatically mysterious and evil.
I still wonder what would happen if the public were made aware of the radioactive substances that are the core of almost every smoke detector on the planet. Jesus, there would probably be a national "burn your smoke detectors" campaign.
Bugs should be brought to light, but there's far better ways to do that than uploading a script to rootshell.
But thats the point, there AREN'T any better ways to bring flaws to light.
Subscribe to Bugtraq for a month and watch how many of the submissions start with "I mailed company xxx about this a month ago but didn't get any response so I'm posting it here..." There really is no better way than to get the information out there and FORCE the company to respond.