They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
We give a lot of power to unqualified people already through the democratic process. Given their background in managing complex systems on an enterprize/global scale, I'd trust IBM more than Arnold Schwarzenegger, or someone who majored in political science...
Don't forget about real-estate. A 500 ton asteroid would have nearly as much interior space as the ISS, so all you have to do is hollow the thing out (selling the resulting materials of course) then seal it, brace it, and bolt on some air tanks and maneuvering thrusters. You've constructed the world's roomiest space station!
Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.
What do you want to bet this asteroid retrieval system will be configured to use a hydrogen/oxygen engine of some kind? They could refill and relaunch it off the first asteroid for a fraction of the original launch costs!
I think people are getting a bit hung up on the "20% gold" statement. (i.e. that would ruin the gold economy or whatever). The point the article was trying to make is that given the expense, there isn't any likelyhood of the actual minerals being worth what it costs to retrieve them... Except for the fact that their location makes them valuable once extracted, which the article fails to mention.
Current cost to move a pound of material into earth orbit is ~$10,000. If they find an asteroid that is 20% water by mass (not unlikely) and install a solar-powered hydrogen/oxygen generator to separate it, they'd have about 220,000 pounds of rocket fuel in orbit worth approximately 2.2 billion in reduced transport costs. Not to mention the nitrogen (breathable air component), iron (construction material) and even rock dust (concrete base anyone?) that they'd likely be able to extract.
If I were to guess, they're actually AFTER those lighter elements and iron. Hydrogen, Oxygen, and nitrogen can become rocket fuel and breathable air. Iron can be melted down and 3d printed or milled into useful parts by machines. All those things cost on the order of $100,000 per pound to lift into space right now, so they'd really only need to get about 25,000 pounds (12 tons) of usable material to break even on their $2.5 billion of expenses.
They could make a small automated refinery that they send into orbit perhaps? Make it electrically/solar powered, refine micro batches of iron and whatever else can be extracted from the meteor and grind that into powder. Follow that up with something that captures steam output from the refinery and seperates it into hydrogen/oxygen via solar power. Next, send up a 3d printer that can turn iron dust into sintered metal parts. (you could probably even anneal them in the refinery module) When you've got enough of a stockpile of dust and printed parts to be worth it, send up a small habitat module with extra parts, so people can start assembling things out of the 3d printed assets and using all that fuel...
You gotta think in small batches and micro-stages here. We're settling wilderness, so baby steps will be needed.
It's a private company that happens to include a member of NASA and relies on data from a NASA study, it is not a NASA mission. American taxpayers aren't stuck paying for anything because it's being paid for by private citizens and investors.
Also see above RE: more likely uses for the asteroids. They won't be shipping them home, they'll be using them to built stuff in space. It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 per pound to get material into orbit, multiply that by two tons and you start to get an idea of their plans for profitability....
Even under the most strict (and asinine) interpretation of international property claim laws, this would fall under salvage rights. The rocks are unowned and set adrift, and nobody can make a decent claim to ownership. Therefore any person who reaches them first is entitled to collect whatever salvageable goods they wish.
The real question will be whether they're allowed to make a claim to the asteroid to keep someone ELSE from mining it once they do the gruntwork of getting it in orbit. That could become a real barrier to growth in this area, given that current international laws prohibit any nation from laying claim to an astral body.
I suspect without a change in laws we'll start seeing wild-west style ownership take place in space, in the form of jammers and guns. "It's ours, because if you send a spacecraft here to take it we will shoot you down or disable your probe."
I would. Why? I can cook my own food, I can't yell loud enough for my friends in Colorado to hear me. I can buy groceries myself, I can't psychically know the right route to where I'm headed on my own.
The simple fact is, modern smartphones/cellphones offer a number of services that are uniquely useful and generally worth the cost of ownership. Eating at restaurants is a timesaving measure that makes sense only when you've got enough money and enought to do that you value the time saved over the financial sacrifice of paying 3 to 4 times extra for a meal...
You do know that the rangefinders use rapidly moving lasers which are far less bright than, say, sun light reflecting off a piece of chrome? Even if you were somehow able to stare into one for a long time, it wouldn't be bright enough to do anything to you.
My real worry is how well the car reacts to other cars' laser rangefinders. Do the lasers cause interference?
As the others point out, humans fare way worse than cars on this. If you smell smoke, you know that something is wrong with your car. If a computer is plugged into the standard OBDII port on your car, it can tell you exactly what is wrong by checking an array of sensors before the smoke even starts.
I think he's referring to the fact that a digital driver could have as many "eyes" in the form of cameras as it needs, arrayed in whatever way works best. It can have a 360 degree ring of cameras on the top of the car, for example, which has no blind spots at all. (I mean, unless you manage to crawl under the car via a sewer system or something....)
Compare that to a pair of forward facing eyes, with an elaborate system of mirrors to try and allow them to see behind the car as well as in front. Lots more blind spots, and they can only look in one direction at a time.
>> Medical doctors are going to read that, it's their job.
I think you mean "Medical doctors SHOULD read that...", or under the best cases "Medical doctors are going to TRY to read that..."
Realistically? They won't have the time to do it properly. Doctors are massively overworked, trying to see far too many patients and dealing with a field that is too broad and grows way too rapidly to keep up with even if they *didn't* have the inconvenience of actually applying their knowledge. I mean, this study alone claims to have discovered 438,228 new drug interactions and side effects. (329 side effects per drug x 1332 drugs) You try to do a thorough read-through and analysis of that kind of data without taking any time off from work; and work quick, you probably only have a week at most until something new you need to learn comes along....
Your cellphone is not some magical box of protected data. If you've been committing crimes, and you get arrested for it, everything you've ever recorded is going to get looked at during that case. That includes the contents of your cellphone, and the police have the legal right to force entry to just about anything once they have probable cause.
I mean, it's not like they randomly pulled this guy out of line at an airport and demanded he unlock his phone. They've got witness testimony, previous convictions, and I'm assuming some more concrete evidence that he is a criminal. They're just trying to figure out if he's done anything ELSE, and corroborate their evidence wherever possible.
Whatever. Someone who's less trained could just bludgeon them to death with Coca Cola cans from the drink trolley, chuck a laptop at them, or rip the tray off their seat back and throw that. If they got really creative they could ram the drinks trolley down the aisle and smash the attackers against the cockpit door. There's no dodging that thing, as you mentioned in regards to the cramped space.
As you said, it just takes one good hit to disable a person. There are about 200 passengers per plane, about twice that number of objects heavy enough to cause injury, and at least 1 in 10 Americans has played baseball in their lives. Would you like those odds if you were one of the three guys with x-acto knives trying to take over the plane?
Well, the PSN network requires you register a credit card to make any real use of it (like playing games online, for example). This card must be registered directly with Sony.
Steam, by contrast, accepts PayPal, which is a financial institution with appropriate levels of security for such storage.
So yes, they did tell you to store your credit card details with them.
Worth pointing out: Even in space lasers aren't significantly better than projectiles. Projectiles use less fuel (hard to get in space), create less heat output (difficult to vent when you're floating in a vacuum) and come in a variety of different configurations for different purposes. Add the fact that in space projectiles fly in perfectly straight lines and don't slow down...
There are the obvious issues of speed and distance (lasers travel really fast, so they are good for hitting a maneuvering ship several thousand miles away) but guided projectiles solve this problem pretty easily.
I predict that the weapon of choice for space conflict will be guided missiles that carry a payload of several hundred depleted uranium flechettes, fired when the missile reaches an appropriate distance from the target.
I think MIT tends to be a bit better in this regard. Their undergraduate degrees aren't much more expensive than other universities despite their reputation, and their masters programs (at least in the tech labs like the Media Lab) are completely subsidized for their students. Students who get their courses of study approved and are accepted to the tech labs are not only given free tuition, they're actually given a stipend to support themselves on.
Combine that with the tremendous amount of technology MIT has given back to the world, and I think you have a good case for their being a legitimate charitable organization...
That said, the people at MY university were a bunch of tightfisted dickheads, and I thoroughly agree with you in general.
When we encounter aliens, especially if they come to us, I will be happy to learn THEIR system of measurement, especially if they're part of a large interstellar civilization with a logical and standardized system. The rest of you can stick to meters while I learn how to pilot the alien spaceships that measure speed in LUQs (Light Milliseconds per Quantum unit of time)
Slashdot Mirror
They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
Sure they do. It was sustained right up until it was fatal.
We give a lot of power to unqualified people already through the democratic process. Given their background in managing complex systems on an enterprize/global scale, I'd trust IBM more than Arnold Schwarzenegger, or someone who majored in political science...
Don't forget about real-estate. A 500 ton asteroid would have nearly as much interior space as the ISS, so all you have to do is hollow the thing out (selling the resulting materials of course) then seal it, brace it, and bolt on some air tanks and maneuvering thrusters. You've constructed the world's roomiest space station!
Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.
What do you want to bet this asteroid retrieval system will be configured to use a hydrogen/oxygen engine of some kind? They could refill and relaunch it off the first asteroid for a fraction of the original launch costs!
I think people are getting a bit hung up on the "20% gold" statement. (i.e. that would ruin the gold economy or whatever). The point the article was trying to make is that given the expense, there isn't any likelyhood of the actual minerals being worth what it costs to retrieve them... Except for the fact that their location makes them valuable once extracted, which the article fails to mention.
Current cost to move a pound of material into earth orbit is ~$10,000. If they find an asteroid that is 20% water by mass (not unlikely) and install a solar-powered hydrogen/oxygen generator to separate it, they'd have about 220,000 pounds of rocket fuel in orbit worth approximately 2.2 billion in reduced transport costs. Not to mention the nitrogen (breathable air component), iron (construction material) and even rock dust (concrete base anyone?) that they'd likely be able to extract.
If I were to guess, they're actually AFTER those lighter elements and iron. Hydrogen, Oxygen, and nitrogen can become rocket fuel and breathable air. Iron can be melted down and 3d printed or milled into useful parts by machines. All those things cost on the order of $100,000 per pound to lift into space right now, so they'd really only need to get about 25,000 pounds (12 tons) of usable material to break even on their $2.5 billion of expenses.
They could make a small automated refinery that they send into orbit perhaps? Make it electrically/solar powered, refine micro batches of iron and whatever else can be extracted from the meteor and grind that into powder. Follow that up with something that captures steam output from the refinery and seperates it into hydrogen/oxygen via solar power. Next, send up a 3d printer that can turn iron dust into sintered metal parts. (you could probably even anneal them in the refinery module) When you've got enough of a stockpile of dust and printed parts to be worth it, send up a small habitat module with extra parts, so people can start assembling things out of the 3d printed assets and using all that fuel...
You gotta think in small batches and micro-stages here. We're settling wilderness, so baby steps will be needed.
It's a private company that happens to include a member of NASA and relies on data from a NASA study, it is not a NASA mission. American taxpayers aren't stuck paying for anything because it's being paid for by private citizens and investors.
Also see above RE: more likely uses for the asteroids. They won't be shipping them home, they'll be using them to built stuff in space. It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 per pound to get material into orbit, multiply that by two tons and you start to get an idea of their plans for profitability....
Even under the most strict (and asinine) interpretation of international property claim laws, this would fall under salvage rights. The rocks are unowned and set adrift, and nobody can make a decent claim to ownership. Therefore any person who reaches them first is entitled to collect whatever salvageable goods they wish.
The real question will be whether they're allowed to make a claim to the asteroid to keep someone ELSE from mining it once they do the gruntwork of getting it in orbit. That could become a real barrier to growth in this area, given that current international laws prohibit any nation from laying claim to an astral body.
I suspect without a change in laws we'll start seeing wild-west style ownership take place in space, in the form of jammers and guns. "It's ours, because if you send a spacecraft here to take it we will shoot you down or disable your probe."
I would. Why? I can cook my own food, I can't yell loud enough for my friends in Colorado to hear me. I can buy groceries myself, I can't psychically know the right route to where I'm headed on my own.
The simple fact is, modern smartphones/cellphones offer a number of services that are uniquely useful and generally worth the cost of ownership. Eating at restaurants is a timesaving measure that makes sense only when you've got enough money and enought to do that you value the time saved over the financial sacrifice of paying 3 to 4 times extra for a meal...
You do know that the rangefinders use rapidly moving lasers which are far less bright than, say, sun light reflecting off a piece of chrome? Even if you were somehow able to stare into one for a long time, it wouldn't be bright enough to do anything to you.
My real worry is how well the car reacts to other cars' laser rangefinders. Do the lasers cause interference?
If they start selling a "Beta fish" to replace the jesus fishes, I'll buy 20.
As the others point out, humans fare way worse than cars on this. If you smell smoke, you know that something is wrong with your car. If a computer is plugged into the standard OBDII port on your car, it can tell you exactly what is wrong by checking an array of sensors before the smoke even starts.
I think he's referring to the fact that a digital driver could have as many "eyes" in the form of cameras as it needs, arrayed in whatever way works best. It can have a 360 degree ring of cameras on the top of the car, for example, which has no blind spots at all. (I mean, unless you manage to crawl under the car via a sewer system or something....)
Compare that to a pair of forward facing eyes, with an elaborate system of mirrors to try and allow them to see behind the car as well as in front. Lots more blind spots, and they can only look in one direction at a time.
I love the line "We want as many people as possible in the program,"
So. You started with a system where most people are presumed innocent.
You changed that system so everyone was presumed guilty, but checking all of them thoroughly takes too much work.
Now you've created a program to allow people to be presumed innocent, that you're going to try and get most people into. Entry costs $100.
End result: You're right back where you started, but a few billion dollars richer.
>> Medical doctors are going to read that, it's their job.
I think you mean "Medical doctors SHOULD read that...", or under the best cases "Medical doctors are going to TRY to read that..."
Realistically? They won't have the time to do it properly. Doctors are massively overworked, trying to see far too many patients and dealing with a field that is too broad and grows way too rapidly to keep up with even if they *didn't* have the inconvenience of actually applying their knowledge. I mean, this study alone claims to have discovered 438,228 new drug interactions and side effects. (329 side effects per drug x 1332 drugs) You try to do a thorough read-through and analysis of that kind of data without taking any time off from work; and work quick, you probably only have a week at most until something new you need to learn comes along....
Yeah, seems reasonable to me.
Your cellphone is not some magical box of protected data. If you've been committing crimes, and you get arrested for it, everything you've ever recorded is going to get looked at during that case. That includes the contents of your cellphone, and the police have the legal right to force entry to just about anything once they have probable cause.
I mean, it's not like they randomly pulled this guy out of line at an airport and demanded he unlock his phone. They've got witness testimony, previous convictions, and I'm assuming some more concrete evidence that he is a criminal. They're just trying to figure out if he's done anything ELSE, and corroborate their evidence wherever possible.
The actual name of this clock is "Zeno's Doom-o-Meter".
You get closer and closer to "doomsday" without ever actually reaching it. (If you do reach it? The clock explodes and the point is moot.)
Seriously, who came up with this method of measuring "doom"? The thing from the Futurama movie made more sense....
Tell that to the world's theoretical physicists.....
Whatever. Someone who's less trained could just bludgeon them to death with Coca Cola cans from the drink trolley, chuck a laptop at them, or rip the tray off their seat back and throw that. If they got really creative they could ram the drinks trolley down the aisle and smash the attackers against the cockpit door. There's no dodging that thing, as you mentioned in regards to the cramped space.
As you said, it just takes one good hit to disable a person. There are about 200 passengers per plane, about twice that number of objects heavy enough to cause injury, and at least 1 in 10 Americans has played baseball in their lives. Would you like those odds if you were one of the three guys with x-acto knives trying to take over the plane?
They sent out an email the day the incident occurred. I have in my inbox archive right now.
If your email is out of date, or you've told it to treat Steam notifications as spam mail, that's not their fault.
Well, the PSN network requires you register a credit card to make any real use of it (like playing games online, for example). This card must be registered directly with Sony.
Steam, by contrast, accepts PayPal, which is a financial institution with appropriate levels of security for such storage.
So yes, they did tell you to store your credit card details with them.
Worth pointing out: Even in space lasers aren't significantly better than projectiles. Projectiles use less fuel (hard to get in space), create less heat output (difficult to vent when you're floating in a vacuum) and come in a variety of different configurations for different purposes. Add the fact that in space projectiles fly in perfectly straight lines and don't slow down... There are the obvious issues of speed and distance (lasers travel really fast, so they are good for hitting a maneuvering ship several thousand miles away) but guided projectiles solve this problem pretty easily. I predict that the weapon of choice for space conflict will be guided missiles that carry a payload of several hundred depleted uranium flechettes, fired when the missile reaches an appropriate distance from the target.
I think MIT tends to be a bit better in this regard. Their undergraduate degrees aren't much more expensive than other universities despite their reputation, and their masters programs (at least in the tech labs like the Media Lab) are completely subsidized for their students. Students who get their courses of study approved and are accepted to the tech labs are not only given free tuition, they're actually given a stipend to support themselves on. Combine that with the tremendous amount of technology MIT has given back to the world, and I think you have a good case for their being a legitimate charitable organization... That said, the people at MY university were a bunch of tightfisted dickheads, and I thoroughly agree with you in general.
When we encounter aliens, especially if they come to us, I will be happy to learn THEIR system of measurement, especially if they're part of a large interstellar civilization with a logical and standardized system. The rest of you can stick to meters while I learn how to pilot the alien spaceships that measure speed in LUQs (Light Milliseconds per Quantum unit of time)