Less Newton, more Leibniz
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I liked Confusion too - at least better than Quicksilver. But I missed the Waterhouse/Newton business - very little of that in the new book. Stephenson seems to be trying for a pretty tightly woven trilogy - a bit like LOTR - hard to know how to judge it before we've really seen the whole thing. Both Quicksilver and Confusion ended somewhat strangely...
sun shades are one option; so are solar power satellites, or power from the moon (Google for "lunar solar power").
In fact, anybody who (1) takes global warming seriously, and (2) cares about world poverty and wants to bring everybody up to western standards, soon realizes that there is nothing on Earth that can resolve both problems. The only solutions lie off this planet. Time to start thinking outside of the box, guys!
Fusion has had billions invested in it, and that investment continues ($10 billion over the next decade between ITER and the others). Energy production, even as projected with that huge investment over the next decade, will still be two orders of magnitude more expensive from fusion than from any commercial source.
In contrast, we're already doing space solar power - in fact solar power has been running in satellites since the 1950's. The 4 technology areas I mentioned are ECONOMIC issues, to get costs to a competitive point. We aren't even close to that point with fusion. And yet we've spent perhaps $30 million on space solar power since 1980.
Cheaper access to orbit is one of four major technical milestones we need to reach to enable utility scale solar power via Solar Power Satellites - Musk's company is promising a factor of 3-5 cost reduction now, and, if they succeed, will surely be just the start of continuing cost improvements in space launch. If we can just get some money invested in solar cell design and production for space use, wireless power transmission, and light-weight space construction, we'll be there.
At least all those other technical areas have had even less money invested in them than space launch - so there's good reason to hope all the needed breakthroughs can be made soon - with some R&D money.
But this argument is made in favor of robotic rovers, which are exactly analogous, on-the-ground vehicles. Yes, if all you're doing is photographing stuff from orbit, there's little need for people, or at least no need for people who know anything more than the average plumber.
But there's only so many pictures to take of the planets in our solar system, and we've pretty much done it all (except for Mercury and Pluto, and of course weather is always fascinating to watch).
Weinberg's inconsistency
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Weinberg argues that the Hubble cost seven times what it should have, because it was built for human servicing. Then he goes on to complain about the cancellation of the last servicing mission. Well, which is it? Supposedly for 1/7th of the cost of Hubble, we can put another one up - why aren't we doing that? Why doesn't Weinberg argue for that?
The truth is, robotic spaceflight IS NO LESS EXPENSIVE than human spaceflight, when you compare apples to apples. Weinberg claims the bulk of NASA's budget goes to human spaceflight, but that is false - roughly half of the space money in the NASA budget over the past couple of decades has gone to robotic missions. Many of which have crashed, gone off course, or otherwise been greatly degraded (Galileo had a tiny fraction of its designed data rate, due to a simple jam in its main antenna). Hubble itself was launched with a fatal flaw that made it close to unusable at first.
The shuttle is obviously a big part of the perceived cost problem for human spaceflight. Reusability sounded like a great goal, but when you're launching 100 tons to orbit and bringing back 75 (or sometimes the whole 100) every time, there's obviously a lot of waste. If you counted orbiter mass along with payload, the shuttle actually gets things to orbit for about $2500/pound...
But if the issue is just getting humans to orbit, we know how to do that as cheaply as robots, too. Soyuz can launch the same number of people for a tenth of the cost of the shuttle. In reality, all those big "requirements" for human spaceflight (air, food, temperature control etc.) are minor add-ons compared to the sophisticated controls an automated robotic system requires. Just look at the DARPA grand challenge for an example of how difficult it is for robots to do things humans can do naturally...
Anyway, enough ranting - Weinberg hasn't done anything original here, he's just echoing other people's arguments, badly.
Looks like the flight was a few days ago (March 11) - why is this the first report? They're being very quiet about this. And how did Joe Silva track this down?
Looks like I have to go by the bookstore this week:-)
I did read localroger's "Prime Intellect" - great novella, and I think a perfect exposition of some problems with Singularity hype. I wonder if it's eligible for any of those SF prizes?
and Roger Angel testified to the Senate that a lunar telescope could be 100 times as powerful as Hubble. It's been out there, just wasn't in the main announcement.
I did kind of like that one, but I thought a much more interesting Clarke book, concerning the long future, was "The City and the Stars". Anybody else have favorites?
Actually the problem limiting the station to 3 people wasn't so much the hab module (there have been as many as 10 people on board at one time before, when a shuttle was visiting) as the lack of escape for more than 3 people - there's only one Soyuz escape capsule. There was supposed to be a US vehicle for return that could accomodate 6 or 7, but it never happened.
Also, I think you're exaggerating the fuel issue. The main fuels likely to be used for major missions staged at the ISS (if that were ever to happen) would be liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and kerosene - possibly also xenon for ion engines. The problem is probably the cryogenics in the constant sun/shade alternations of low earth orbit. I don't think your cloud of vapor scenario is very likely with those fuels; also it would dissipate quickly.
Apparently NASA has proposed spending $200 million on a new craft to link up to Hubble to bring it down - I bet Orbital Recovery would offer their option for considerably less. Wingo's a smart guy - they certainly can do this. It seems the obvious choice here.
Extent of orbital normality
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I recently attended a talk by a NASA education guy on the subject of living in space - on the shuttle and ISS. For the most part, it's really not that different from what you might expect; the main problem is not so much things intrinsic to zero gravity (though there's some of that with liquids, crumbs, etc.) but that NASA generally skimps on the sort of amenities you might think the astronauts could use. For example, there was no "table" on ISS, until the crew up there built one out of some surplus supplies. And, similarly, no refrigerator or freezer. Things will be quite different once the first space hotel goes up.
Any extra effort required to make web pages and their URL's preserved for eternity makes it more difficult for people to create them in the first place, which will mean less knowledge available, not more. Something unobtrusive that goes around preserving pages for posterity, like the Internet Archive, is the best soplution.
Nuclear Power [...] is possibly the cleanest mass power source.
No, the Sun is (well, of course, that star does use nuclear fusion...). But by far the cleanest large-scale base-power option is space solar power. We've been discussing it a bit recently...
If you use chemical rockets, it would take quite a bit of fuel to boost Hubble. But with solar electric, as for example is being used by Smart-1's ion engine, you wouldn't need much fuel at all. NASA doesn't seem to like doing innovative things like solar electric though (well, they did use it on Deep Space 1, but that was just once so far).
Every time some miniscule issue comes up that doesn't have any significant bearing on the main question of humans=>CO2=>warming, like this (rather dubious) article, it gets trumpeted in headlines all over the place. Where are the headlines for the thousands of mainstream articles and studies that show every single climate model with increasing CO2 resulting in increasing global temperatures, greater warming in the north, greater instability in weather generally, and in short exactly the pattern of change we have seen for the last decade?
This is a really serious issue - there is OVERWHELMING scientific evidence for human causation of global temperature increases over the last century, and for an acceleration of the change in the last ten years. Take a look at this graph of CO2 concentrations over the past 1000 years, from the site of an organization that looks at the "positive side" of climate change! Anybody who doesn't find that graph extremely worrying has been drinking way too much of the happy juice.
The greenhouse effect of CO2 is extremely well established - Arrhenius wrote about it over 100 years ago. That means that increased CO2 in the atmosphere acts as one force (among all the other things influencing climate) to increase temperatures. The logic that is involved here is: Humans have increased CO2 concentrations; increased CO2 acts as a force to cause temperature increases. Therefore human actions have acted to increase temperatures.
I.e. the logic is A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C. No question of correlation here, it's a logical truth.
The logic you are assuming leaves out the "B implies C" part, i.e. A implies B, A B and C are all true, therefore A implies C. That's not logically valid, although used very frequently by so-called "conservatives", so it is easy for people who listen to those radio shows to get confused.
The key point is, increased CO2 DOES tend to increase temperatures. Decreasing CO2 would tend to decrease them. Humans have increased world CO2 levels by 25% since the 1800's, and are on a trend to double world CO2 by 2050. Given that first B implies C statement, that's not good, not good at all.
I'd seen the report on their resolving this problem a week or two ago (can't find the news item now though...) but had not noticed their creative use of the term CFD!
Slashdot Mirror
I liked Confusion too - at least better than Quicksilver. But I missed the Waterhouse/Newton business - very little of that in the new book. Stephenson seems to be trying for a pretty tightly woven trilogy - a bit like LOTR - hard to know how to judge it before we've really seen the whole thing. Both Quicksilver and Confusion ended somewhat strangely...
Has a science fiction author (self classified) ever won a Nobel Prize either? Wait, let's check Google, the fount of all knowledge.
Hmmm. L. Ron Hubbard won an Ig Nobel in 1994 for "Dianetics"! Is that close enough?
sun shades are one option; so are solar power satellites, or power from the moon (Google for "lunar solar power").
In fact, anybody who (1) takes global warming seriously, and (2) cares about world poverty and wants to bring everybody up to western standards, soon realizes that there is nothing on Earth that can resolve both problems. The only solutions lie off this planet. Time to start thinking outside of the box, guys!
In contrast, we're already doing space solar power - in fact solar power has been running in satellites since the 1950's. The 4 technology areas I mentioned are ECONOMIC issues, to get costs to a competitive point. We aren't even close to that point with fusion. And yet we've spent perhaps $30 million on space solar power since 1980.
At least all those other technical areas have had even less money invested in them than space launch - so there's good reason to hope all the needed breakthroughs can be made soon - with some R&D money.
But this argument is made in favor of robotic rovers, which are exactly analogous, on-the-ground vehicles. Yes, if all you're doing is photographing stuff from orbit, there's little need for people, or at least no need for people who know anything more than the average plumber.
But there's only so many pictures to take of the planets in our solar system, and we've pretty much done it all (except for Mercury and Pluto, and of course weather is always fascinating to watch).
The truth is, robotic spaceflight IS NO LESS EXPENSIVE than human spaceflight, when you compare apples to apples. Weinberg claims the bulk of NASA's budget goes to human spaceflight, but that is false - roughly half of the space money in the NASA budget over the past couple of decades has gone to robotic missions. Many of which have crashed, gone off course, or otherwise been greatly degraded (Galileo had a tiny fraction of its designed data rate, due to a simple jam in its main antenna). Hubble itself was launched with a fatal flaw that made it close to unusable at first.
The shuttle is obviously a big part of the perceived cost problem for human spaceflight. Reusability sounded like a great goal, but when you're launching 100 tons to orbit and bringing back 75 (or sometimes the whole 100) every time, there's obviously a lot of waste. If you counted orbiter mass along with payload, the shuttle actually gets things to orbit for about $2500/pound...
But if the issue is just getting humans to orbit, we know how to do that as cheaply as robots, too. Soyuz can launch the same number of people for a tenth of the cost of the shuttle. In reality, all those big "requirements" for human spaceflight (air, food, temperature control etc.) are minor add-ons compared to the sophisticated controls an automated robotic system requires. Just look at the DARPA grand challenge for an example of how difficult it is for robots to do things humans can do naturally...
Anyway, enough ranting - Weinberg hasn't done anything original here, he's just echoing other people's arguments, badly.
We've been debating this here: vote totals so far:
Sedna is:
tenth planet 17 votes - 29 %
the eleventh planet 14 votes - 24 %
the 42nd planet 9 votes - 15 %
not a planet! 17 votes - 29 %
Looks like the flight was a few days ago (March 11) - why is this the first report? They're being very quiet about this. And how did Joe Silva track this down?
Looks like I have to go by the bookstore this week :-)
I did read localroger's "Prime Intellect" - great novella, and I think a perfect exposition of some problems with Singularity hype. I wonder if it's eligible for any of those SF prizes?
and Roger Angel testified to the Senate that a lunar telescope could be 100 times as powerful as Hubble. It's been out there, just wasn't in the main announcement.
We did have this up earlier last night - along with a poll on exactly that question of replacing the shuttle. Should be interesting...
I did kind of like that one, but I thought a much more interesting Clarke book, concerning the long future, was "The City and the Stars". Anybody else have favorites?
See NASA TV.
Also, this was scooped on sciscoop yesterday, with more info than the slashdot story.
and the humans won.
Actually the problem limiting the station to 3 people wasn't so much the hab module (there have been as many as 10 people on board at one time before, when a shuttle was visiting) as the lack of escape for more than 3 people - there's only one Soyuz escape capsule. There was supposed to be a US vehicle for return that could accomodate 6 or 7, but it never happened.
Also, I think you're exaggerating the fuel issue. The main fuels likely to be used for major missions staged at the ISS (if that were ever to happen) would be liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and kerosene - possibly also xenon for ion engines. The problem is probably the cryogenics in the constant sun/shade alternations of low earth orbit. I don't think your cloud of vapor scenario is very likely with those fuels; also it would dissipate quickly.
Apparently NASA has proposed spending $200 million on a new craft to link up to Hubble to bring it down - I bet Orbital Recovery would offer their option for considerably less. Wingo's a smart guy - they certainly can do this. It seems the obvious choice here.
I recently attended a talk by a NASA education guy on the subject of living in space - on the shuttle and ISS. For the most part, it's really not that different from what you might expect; the main problem is not so much things intrinsic to zero gravity (though there's some of that with liquids, crumbs, etc.) but that NASA generally skimps on the sort of amenities you might think the astronauts could use. For example, there was no "table" on ISS, until the crew up there built one out of some surplus supplies. And, similarly, no refrigerator or freezer. Things will be quite different once the first space hotel goes up.
Any extra effort required to make web pages and their URL's preserved for eternity makes it more difficult for people to create them in the first place, which will mean less knowledge available, not more. Something unobtrusive that goes around preserving pages for posterity, like the Internet Archive, is the best soplution.
No, the Sun is (well, of course, that star does use nuclear fusion...). But by far the cleanest large-scale base-power option is space solar power. We've been discussing it a bit recently...
If you use chemical rockets, it would take quite a bit of fuel to boost Hubble. But with solar electric, as for example is being used by Smart-1's ion engine, you wouldn't need much fuel at all. NASA doesn't seem to like doing innovative things like solar electric though (well, they did use it on Deep Space 1, but that was just once so far).
Thanks Drog :-) I did the sciscoop one first, and should have proofread it a bit better... It does come with a poll though!
Every time some miniscule issue comes up that doesn't have any significant bearing on the main question of humans=>CO2=>warming, like this (rather dubious) article, it gets trumpeted in headlines all over the place. Where are the headlines for the thousands of mainstream articles and studies that show every single climate model with increasing CO2 resulting in increasing global temperatures, greater warming in the north, greater instability in weather generally, and in short exactly the pattern of change we have seen for the last decade?
This is a really serious issue - there is OVERWHELMING scientific evidence for human causation of global temperature increases over the last century, and for an acceleration of the change in the last ten years. Take a look at this graph of CO2 concentrations over the past 1000 years, from the site of an organization that looks at the "positive side" of climate change! Anybody who doesn't find that graph extremely worrying has been drinking way too much of the happy juice.
The greenhouse effect of CO2 is extremely well established - Arrhenius wrote about it over 100 years ago. That means that increased CO2 in the atmosphere acts as one force (among all the other things influencing climate) to increase temperatures. The logic that is involved here is: Humans have increased CO2 concentrations; increased CO2 acts as a force to cause temperature increases. Therefore human actions have acted to increase temperatures.
I.e. the logic is A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C. No question of correlation here, it's a logical truth.
The logic you are assuming leaves out the "B implies C" part, i.e.
A implies B, A B and C are all true, therefore A implies C. That's not logically valid, although used very frequently by so-called "conservatives", so it is easy for people who listen to those radio shows to get confused.
The key point is, increased CO2 DOES tend to increase temperatures. Decreasing CO2 would tend to decrease them. Humans have increased world CO2 levels by 25% since the 1800's, and are on a trend to double world CO2 by 2050. Given that first B implies C statement, that's not good, not good at all.
I'd seen the report on their resolving this problem a week or two ago (can't find the news item now though...) but had not noticed their creative use of the term CFD!