You'd be suprised how fast 15 billion can go when you're talking massive amounts of construction. For example, This article puts a 1,000 foot tower at 1-1.5 Billion.
You're talking about building a structure 33 times as tall, tight enough to hold a reasonable vacuum, associated power plant, etc...
You're probably going to need worms and insects anyways for proper balance. If we can find a good sources of carbon and hydrogen most of the remaining required mass is taken care of. It doesn't really matter how expensive it is to make the materials, as long as it's cheaper than importing them.
If you're going to recycle it, it doesn't really matter what form you bring it in. Sure, use automated processes to fill the base with oxygen. Import astronaughts/colonists along with food to set most of the rest of the stuff up.
Why bother with LCD's. I'd use crops that can take the sunlight. You just have to make sure to keep them supplied with water and CO2. Doubles my efficiency per square foot.
I think that he's more concerned about the 'night' portion. Most plants can't survive a month without sunlight. Many do it annually, by essentially dying off and living off of storage, but it takes time to produce leaves again. So it's too slow for them to just operate in 'night mode', and too fast for them to utilize 'winter' mode.
Still, I'd think that we could find or make crops capable of going throught their complete cycle in the equivalent of 2 months of sunlight(24 hour light).
Worst comes to worst, use your reactor during the night to provide at least minimal light, keeping the plants alive, then have them grow quickly during the day. Or use the light on your seed crop section and natural light for food crops.
That's probably the best way to go about it. Breaking CO2 is much easier than SO2. I'd see the SO2 process as being set up remotely at first, to get you a good supply, then you bring the people, food, water and plants. The people's normal breathing provides the CO2, and they set up farms of one sort or another(hydroponics is only one possibility) to start recycling.
Thus, breaking SO2 would eventually be only for expanding the colony and purifiying silicon for other industrial processes. If they can find a source of carbon up there, it's solve the next big problem.
Of course, you're still going to have to import a lot of food for a while, just to get the needed mass for efficient recycling. Not many plants are 100% edible by humans, we still need suppliments, etc... I wouldn't be suprised if the sustainable amount of biomass to support each human ends up being measured in the tons(O2, H2O, plant mass, food mass, the future equivalent of the compost heap, etc...)
Umm, you mean about Iraq? I mean intelligence in general. Pretty much all intel groups make mistakes, and quite frequently. Maybe not as bad or willfully as Iraq, but it still occurs. It's like playing poker.
Plus, it would have been a lot easier to keep track of what equipment Iran was buying if Dick Cheney hadn't knowingly outed a covert CIA agent tasked with Iranian counterproliferation as political retribution against her husband.
True or false, I believe that it's more of a matter that even if it's difficult, Iran has enough technical sophistication to manufacture the equipment domestically if it had to.
What raises my ire is that I see both parties as pretty much hopelessly corrupt.
Never said that we'd use it to replace oil. As for building lots of plants, I'd shut down the natural gas plants first(it's one of the more expensive ways, and NG is valuable for many things), then the coal plants. Now, yes, with that much cheap electricity available, electric cars would make much more sense, even if it does just take the form of a bigger motor replacing the starter motor and a battery with a 30 mile range.
As for putting a nuclear generator in your car - well, that's pretty far off.;)
Or you've been working on it for years. Sure, the USA might have thousands of centrifuges, but we also built thousands of nukes over the years. If it takes a 'thousand centrifuge years' to process enough for one nuke, then it'd take Iran 20 years to make one.
Of course, the questions of efficiency, size of intended nuke, processing rate, how much people believe that Iran has 'only' 50 centrifuges(we've been wrong before!) have some importance as well.
Oh, and it's not just the Jews that are to wear 'ribbons', it's chritians as well. Patch sewn onto clothing. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Honestly, I'm reminded of a pair of gorillas getting into a dominance display, beating their chests. I wish everyone would take a step back, calm down, and get back to negotiating. I wish the progressive Iranian youths I've been hearing about will step up and at least reduce the theocracy that's developed.
Fuel cells will do nothing about the demand for power stations. Anyways, this makes fuel for nuclear plants even cheaper, and it's already a 'negligable' cost for the operation of a plant.
I say we build so many nuke plants in 'trustworthy'(IE already nuclear) countries that we're buying all the fuel just to feed all the darn things.;)
Realistically, it's going to be impossible to prevent any country that wants nuclear weapons from getting them. I'm kinda suprised that we've done as well as we have, as all it takes is a country going 'screw you' and building the stuff themselves. We know it can be done with cutting edge 1940's level technology, and it's been over 60 years. Even countries like Iran have reached the point where they can do it with domestic industry if they truly wanted to.
Yes, but how much is the CFC's responsable for? Is the variation part of a cycle? We know that the earth operates in cycles that can be measured in centuries and eons. Ozone levels also depend on on how active the sun is.
For that matter, water can be dangerous in a large enough dose. About a dozen people kill themselves a year by drinking too much water, and I'm not talking about drowning.
Sufficiently shielded, they won't break out even in the trash, besides, it sounds like they're special use. It's also likely that these bacteria will be suited for only a special enviroment, outside of which they'll quickly be overwhelmed by natural bacteria.
As for the dump, anywhere that bacteria can survive, it will already be. We're not talking about engineering bacteria to eat stuff that natural varieties can't. I've read that the way dumps are constructed, not enough air gets to the materials, resulting in an enviroment that bacteria can't grow in.
To enhance on this a bit, carrying the Sickle Cell trait alone provides substantial benefits in the form of resistance to malaria, in areas were malaria is epidemic.
The trait is a decidably mixed bag, giving higher risk of sudden death during exercise, for example.
Melanin levels are another mixed bag. Higher incidence of skin cancer for increased vitamin D production.
Oh, I agree. Space is still hazardous, and we've had many close calls. Given our shuttle losses, how many unmentioned close calls do you think there were during takeoff/landings?
I certainly don't advocate simply dusting off the apollo system for our return to the moon, but I do believe that the idea of putting the payload on top of the rocket/fuel is a better idea than strapping it to the side. I also feel that the idea that an ablative reentry system that's protected during launch also helps. The heat tiles of the shuttle are amazing technology (I held one on one side as a guy blasted the other with a blowtorch), but they're also fragile. Finally, at this time I think that disposable launch vehicles may actually be cheaper than reusable. After all, every pound is expensive to send up.
My idea of an ideal space program would be A: Set up our own space station in a more useful orbit, as the ISS has reached the point that pretty much all effort is maintaining it, not expanding our knowledge(other than how to maintain the ISS). B: Dedicated People launcher: Highest reliability, and is only for people/minimal supplies. C: Dedicated Cargo launchers: reliability sacrificed as needed for best cost ratio. If you can halve the cost of an individual launch, while taking only a 20% reliability hit, do it. You'd be able to launch 6 satellites, get 4-5 of them up there successfully, for the cost of 3.
We've been using the shuttle as essentially a reusable station, conducting experiments and such in it. I say we put a new station up, develop the rescue vehicle (or use multiples) to be able to bring everyone back, then just use the small people movers. Launch supplies seperate and regularly. Don't bring anything back that you don't have to, eventually working on recycling projects in space. Even if most of the supplies end up being crudely reproccesed into extra mass shielding, it's still a step. Work on hydroponics and organic recycling once you have enough waste materials (shouldn't take that long).
Space station modules: Habitation Life support Experiment/Lab(multiple) Solar Furnace Agriponics(hydroponics, aereoponics, maybe even soil)
Allow for the sale of experiment space, lab time, and astronaught work in orbit.
Thanks for that info. I'm not as much up on the Russian side of things. I remembered them vaguely, though I thought they suffocated in the upper atmosphere.
Still, between Russia/USSR and the USA, we've lost far more people on launch/reentry than in space.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Well, I'll admit that I'm pretty Randian normally speaking, but I'm also one of the 'we have to get off this rock
eventually' crowd, and right now there's no real financial motivation to go to the Moon or Mars, or even do much
beyond sending up communication and weather satellites.
You can get a suprising amount of private research for things that most don't see profit potential in though. Just look at Bigelow and how much money he's plowed into developing private space flight and his inflatable modules. He's done it all on the cheap as well, and gotten it to the point that NASA and other agencies are very interested in them.
NASA has proven to be a real pain for the civilian space industry. Certain FAA type regulation is fine, but from what I've heard NASA can be downright hostile to private space launches/travel.
Yes, but it should be relativly easy to thicken all those margins up quite a bit today. The energy levels required to get to the moon hasn't changed, but we have reliable fuel cells now, faster computers, and life support systems able to easily last the duration.
Point is, history shows us that the most hazardous portions of spaceflight is takeoff and reentry. I don't think that any space program has lost somebody in orbit.
The takeoff and reentry methods for the shuttle have thinner margins than the capsules of the Apollo missions. That's where the risk is.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Simple enough, the government, rather than doing itself, contracts it out. Preferably on a competition bid.
Actually, way back when NASA was new, they weren't bad. They had a specific goal and a mandate to reach it as fast as possible. Bureaucracy hadn't had a chance to build up. Now it's got it really bad, and the big three subcontractors for NASA are just as bad, if not worse.
I like the bounty system. You have multiple competitors for the goal, and the first wins. Increase the reward each year until somebody gets it.
Count me for another vote for MP Classic. Why can't microsoft get the idea that I might want a minimalist player, with a minimum of 'skin', so I can watch my video and still have enough screenspace to do something like, well, browsing slashdot?
I especially love how version 10 loves to put the window around itself, so you can't even shove it all the way into a cornor.
I don't hate trophy hunters, even though I'm not one of them. I'm very much a 'eat what I shoot' type person, unless I shot a non-game animal due to disease, injury(putting it out of it's misery), or threat(it's looking to eat me). Though there are people who eat bear, besides the Inuit.
I just think that if the government feels that it needs to hand out a limited number of tags, to manage a large predator population, it should be like the indians and seek the largest use from it.
If that means catering to the 'rich british safari' type, so be it.;)
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You'd be suprised how fast 15 billion can go when you're talking massive amounts of construction. For example, This article puts a 1,000 foot tower at 1-1.5 Billion.
You're talking about building a structure 33 times as tall, tight enough to hold a reasonable vacuum, associated power plant, etc...
You're probably going to need worms and insects anyways for proper balance. If we can find a good sources of carbon and hydrogen most of the remaining required mass is taken care of. It doesn't really matter how expensive it is to make the materials, as long as it's cheaper than importing them.
If you're going to recycle it, it doesn't really matter what form you bring it in. Sure, use automated processes to fill the base with oxygen. Import astronaughts/colonists along with food to set most of the rest of the stuff up.
Replace SO2 with SiO2. I need to pay more attention...
Thanks, but I'd rather pay the money for that pound...
Or just go on a diet while there and loose some weight. Hey, I'm contributing!
Why bother with LCD's. I'd use crops that can take the sunlight. You just have to make sure to keep them supplied with water and CO2. Doubles my efficiency per square foot.
I think that he's more concerned about the 'night' portion. Most plants can't survive a month without sunlight. Many do it annually, by essentially dying off and living off of storage, but it takes time to produce leaves again. So it's too slow for them to just operate in 'night mode', and too fast for them to utilize 'winter' mode.
Still, I'd think that we could find or make crops capable of going throught their complete cycle in the equivalent of 2 months of sunlight(24 hour light).
Worst comes to worst, use your reactor during the night to provide at least minimal light, keeping the plants alive, then have them grow quickly during the day. Or use the light on your seed crop section and natural light for food crops.
That's probably the best way to go about it. Breaking CO2 is much easier than SO2. I'd see the SO2 process as being set up remotely at first, to get you a good supply, then you bring the people, food, water and plants. The people's normal breathing provides the CO2, and they set up farms of one sort or another(hydroponics is only one possibility) to start recycling.
Thus, breaking SO2 would eventually be only for expanding the colony and purifiying silicon for other industrial processes. If they can find a source of carbon up there, it's solve the next big problem.
Of course, you're still going to have to import a lot of food for a while, just to get the needed mass for efficient recycling. Not many plants are 100% edible by humans, we still need suppliments, etc... I wouldn't be suprised if the sustainable amount of biomass to support each human ends up being measured in the tons(O2, H2O, plant mass, food mass, the future equivalent of the compost heap, etc...)
Umm, you mean about Iraq?
I mean intelligence in general. Pretty much all intel groups make mistakes, and quite frequently. Maybe not as bad or willfully as Iraq, but it still occurs. It's like playing poker.
Plus, it would have been a lot easier to keep track of what equipment Iran was buying if Dick Cheney hadn't knowingly outed a covert CIA agent tasked with Iranian counterproliferation as political retribution against her husband.
True or false, I believe that it's more of a matter that even if it's difficult, Iran has enough technical sophistication to manufacture the equipment domestically if it had to.
What raises my ire is that I see both parties as pretty much hopelessly corrupt.
Thanks for pointing that out. I never saw it. My sources are usually better than that.
I caught the original article, but missed the retraction. Let it never be said that I'm afraid to admit that I'm wrong.
Sorry about that.
Never said that we'd use it to replace oil. As for building lots of plants, I'd shut down the natural gas plants first(it's one of the more expensive ways, and NG is valuable for many things), then the coal plants. Now, yes, with that much cheap electricity available, electric cars would make much more sense, even if it does just take the form of a bigger motor replacing the starter motor and a battery with a 30 mile range.
;)
As for putting a nuclear generator in your car - well, that's pretty far off.
Or you've been working on it for years. Sure, the USA might have thousands of centrifuges, but we also built thousands of nukes over the years. If it takes a 'thousand centrifuge years' to process enough for one nuke, then it'd take Iran 20 years to make one.
Of course, the questions of efficiency, size of intended nuke, processing rate, how much people believe that Iran has 'only' 50 centrifuges(we've been wrong before!) have some importance as well.
Oh, and it's not just the Jews that are to wear 'ribbons', it's chritians as well. Patch sewn onto clothing. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Honestly, I'm reminded of a pair of gorillas getting into a dominance display, beating their chests. I wish everyone would take a step back, calm down, and get back to negotiating. I wish the progressive Iranian youths I've been hearing about will step up and at least reduce the theocracy that's developed.
Fuel cells will do nothing about the demand for power stations. Anyways, this makes fuel for nuclear plants even cheaper, and it's already a 'negligable' cost for the operation of a plant.
;)
I say we build so many nuke plants in 'trustworthy'(IE already nuclear) countries that we're buying all the fuel just to feed all the darn things.
Realistically, it's going to be impossible to prevent any country that wants nuclear weapons from getting them. I'm kinda suprised that we've done as well as we have, as all it takes is a country going 'screw you' and building the stuff themselves. We know it can be done with cutting edge 1940's level technology, and it's been over 60 years. Even countries like Iran have reached the point where they can do it with domestic industry if they truly wanted to.
Yes, but how much is the CFC's responsable for? Is the variation part of a cycle? We know that the earth operates in cycles that can be measured in centuries and eons. Ozone levels also depend on on how active the sun is.
In other words, it's not so simple.
For that matter, water can be dangerous in a large enough dose. About a dozen people kill themselves a year by drinking too much water, and I'm not talking about drowning.
Sufficiently shielded, they won't break out even in the trash, besides, it sounds like they're special use. It's also likely that these bacteria will be suited for only a special enviroment, outside of which they'll quickly be overwhelmed by natural bacteria.
As for the dump, anywhere that bacteria can survive, it will already be. We're not talking about engineering bacteria to eat stuff that natural varieties can't. I've read that the way dumps are constructed, not enough air gets to the materials, resulting in an enviroment that bacteria can't grow in.
To enhance on this a bit, carrying the Sickle Cell trait alone provides substantial benefits in the form of resistance to malaria, in areas were malaria is epidemic.
The trait is a decidably mixed bag, giving higher risk of sudden death during exercise, for example.
Melanin levels are another mixed bag. Higher incidence of skin cancer for increased vitamin D production.
Oh, I agree. Space is still hazardous, and we've had many close calls. Given our shuttle losses, how many unmentioned close calls do you think there were during takeoff/landings?
I certainly don't advocate simply dusting off the apollo system for our return to the moon, but I do believe that the idea of putting the payload on top of the rocket/fuel is a better idea than strapping it to the side. I also feel that the idea that an ablative reentry system that's protected during launch also helps. The heat tiles of the shuttle are amazing technology (I held one on one side as a guy blasted the other with a blowtorch), but they're also fragile. Finally, at this time I think that disposable launch vehicles may actually be cheaper than reusable. After all, every pound is expensive to send up.
My idea of an ideal space program would be
A: Set up our own space station in a more useful orbit, as the ISS has reached the point that pretty much all effort is maintaining it, not expanding our knowledge(other than how to maintain the ISS).
B: Dedicated People launcher: Highest reliability, and is only for people/minimal supplies.
C: Dedicated Cargo launchers: reliability sacrificed as needed for best cost ratio. If you can halve the cost of an individual launch, while taking only a 20% reliability hit, do it. You'd be able to launch 6 satellites, get 4-5 of them up there successfully, for the cost of 3.
We've been using the shuttle as essentially a reusable station, conducting experiments and such in it. I say we put a new station up, develop the rescue vehicle (or use multiples) to be able to bring everyone back, then just use the small people movers. Launch supplies seperate and regularly. Don't bring anything back that you don't have to, eventually working on recycling projects in space. Even if most of the supplies end up being crudely reproccesed into extra mass shielding, it's still a step. Work on hydroponics and organic recycling once you have enough waste materials (shouldn't take that long).
Space station modules:
Habitation
Life support
Experiment/Lab(multiple)
Solar Furnace
Agriponics(hydroponics, aereoponics, maybe even soil)
Allow for the sale of experiment space, lab time, and astronaught work in orbit.
Thanks for that info. I'm not as much up on the Russian side of things. I remembered them vaguely, though I thought they suffocated in the upper atmosphere.
Still, between Russia/USSR and the USA, we've lost far more people on launch/reentry than in space.
Well, I'll admit that I'm pretty Randian normally speaking, but I'm also one of the 'we have to get off this rock
eventually' crowd, and right now there's no real financial motivation to go to the Moon or Mars, or even do much
beyond sending up communication and weather satellites.
You can get a suprising amount of private research for things that most don't see profit potential in though. Just look at Bigelow and how much money he's plowed into developing private space flight and his inflatable modules. He's done it all on the cheap as well, and gotten it to the point that NASA and other agencies are very interested in them.
NASA has proven to be a real pain for the civilian space industry. Certain FAA type regulation is fine, but from what I've heard NASA can be downright hostile to private space launches/travel.
Yes, but it should be relativly easy to thicken all those margins up quite a bit today. The energy levels required to get to the moon hasn't changed, but we have reliable fuel cells now, faster computers, and life support systems able to easily last the duration.
Point is, history shows us that the most hazardous portions of spaceflight is takeoff and reentry. I don't think that any space program has lost somebody in orbit.
The takeoff and reentry methods for the shuttle have thinner margins than the capsules of the Apollo missions. That's where the risk is.
Simple enough, the government, rather than doing itself, contracts it out. Preferably on a competition bid.
Actually, way back when NASA was new, they weren't bad. They had a specific goal and a mandate to reach it as fast as possible. Bureaucracy hadn't had a chance to build up. Now it's got it really bad, and the big three subcontractors for NASA are just as bad, if not worse.
I like the bounty system. You have multiple competitors for the goal, and the first wins. Increase the reward each year until somebody gets it.
Odds are that, on average, it'll be cheaper.
Mostly the Asian ones.
Oddly enough Japanese/Chinese spree killers often manage to kill more with knives than americans with guns.
Still has alot of extra stuff compared to classic with only the seek bar visible.
I tried the mini mode, and it just acts too wierd. I also prefer the keyboard shortcuts of classic.
Count me for another vote for MP Classic. Why can't microsoft get the idea that I might want a minimalist player, with a minimum of 'skin', so I can watch my video and still have enough screenspace to do something like, well, browsing slashdot?
I especially love how version 10 loves to put the window around itself, so you can't even shove it all the way into a cornor.
I don't hate trophy hunters, even though I'm not one of them. I'm very much a 'eat what I shoot' type person, unless I shot a non-game animal due to disease, injury(putting it out of it's misery), or threat(it's looking to eat me). Though there are people who eat bear, besides the Inuit.
;)
I just think that if the government feels that it needs to hand out a limited number of tags, to manage a large predator population, it should be like the indians and seek the largest use from it.
If that means catering to the 'rich british safari' type, so be it.