Some of those big rocks can hit the Earth at about 4 times escape velocity, kicking some rocks up into orbit or beyond is easily imagined. (Even rocks 10ft across. That's small as far as debris from a major impactor goes, which can leave a crater tens of miles across.)
Heck, we have plenty of evidence that some of the "splash" goes at least suborbital (raining down on the other side of the planet), and that rocks from the Moon and Mars have been "splashed" to Earth. Yes Earth has a higher escape velocity but it's not insurmountable.
However, I disagree with the notion that directors and screenwriters should follow a story absolutely when making a movie from a book or a remake.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. Even if the director/screenwriter wanted to, it's often very difficult to translate from one medium to another. (Although film has had a big influence on fiction -- there's much more dialog and description and much less exposition and long monologues than in older works.) Character's internal thought processes (if written from omniscient or first person viewpoint) is very hard to do on film without resorting to voice-over or adding a character for the other to explain everything to (both hokey solutions).
And yes, there's always room for works that add to or reinterpret an original in some creative way. (Myself, I'd like to see a version of WotW set maybe a couple of decades later than Wells's, where we have aircraft and the beginnings of quantum theory -- the latter to help us figure out the IR lasers that the Martian's heat-ray almost surely must be. And then we start fighting back. (What can I say, I was heavily influenced by John W. Campbell's editorship of Analog at a tender age.) Maybe I'll write it myself.)
That would be H.G. Wells, the story follows the book fairly faithfully minus the change to modern day USA instead of victorian England,
Um, no. There's no way to follow the book "fairly" faithfully if you make that change. (And that's not the fault of Wells, but of whoever decided to make that change.) That just does too much violence to some of the story, and would result in something utterly stupid. Oh, wait...
Seriously, I haven't seen that version of the movie. The previews turned me right off. I've read the book a number of times, saw George Pal's version, listened to Jeff Wayne's musical version (which is excellent, and there are strong rumors of a film version in the works) and have the Pendragon version. It's not the England -> USA setting change that's the problem, but the Victorian -> present day change. (George Pal's version suffered for that too.) The differences in technology and what we knew/know about the universe are just too great.
Oh, somebody could do a properly updated version (well, in fact they did -- but that wasn't quite what I had in mind) but the story would have to be rewritten by a competent (ie best-selling and/or Hugo-winning) SF writer first.
They just have to examine the few frames before the flare to see if anyone looks like they're pointing at the camera, ie, at the viewer. The biggest clue will be that they're looking at the camera, any easy thing for a human viewer to pick up on.
Now, if you can carefully line up small mirrors or something ahead of time (long enough before that it's on a different recording), and you've worked out the angles, etc, etc, then just maybe you'll get away with it (unless perhaps if they have overlapping camera coverage). But do you want to bet at the very least your job and maybe a prosecution for criminal mischief or vandalism on that?
Uh huh. And when they play back the tape that shows you starting to point something at the camera just before it goes blind, you explain that how, exactly?
Most people don't do sudden stuff like suddenly pay off ~$6,500 of their credit card debt in one payment.
Happens all the time. There's quite an industry in re-fi's and second mortgages so that you can pay off high credit-card debt. Lowers the interest rate and that interest might be tax-deductable, to boot. Done it myself more than once. (These days though I pay the card off every month.)
You'd think DHS could find a more relevant use of their time than chasing down all those transactions.
Chernobyl blew the 100TON lid off the reactor. It went into the air and crashed back down. I am not sure what you design to "contain" a blast like that.
Tell me the area of the lid and I'll tell you the pressure it took to blow it off -- then you engineer to beyond that.
Containments for the reactors I'm most familiar with (eg Pickering near Toronto) are multiple-meters thick heavily reinforced concrete, each reactor getting its own containment building. In addition to that there's a vacuum building, a large (larger than the containment buildings) cylindrical structure reinforced inside with a concrete lattice, constantaly maintained at a partial vacuum and connected to the containments to help keep them at negative pressure.
unless the Air Force has already mastered hypersonic flight with scramjets.
Or some other propulsion system. Back circa late 1980s or early 1990s, AvLeak ran several articles on a possible hypersonic aircraft (or aerospacecraft?) that (they hypothesized) used a type of external burning pulse jet, with the aft part of the vehicle forming essentially an aerospike engine. Reports said that the vehicle left a characteristic "donuts on a string" vapor trail.
It's possible that said vehicle was either the XOV or a related system (prototype?).
You have no right to control how they run their business via the government.
As long as that business requires licenses to operate from said government, then we have every right. A corporation is a government granted fiction, the limited liability rules underwhich the owners (stockholders) of said corporation operate is something provided by the government - that's the basic "government granted license". There are others, of course, governing actual operations.
If they're getting something from the government -- which they are, in this case a limitation on liability (as with any corporation) -- then we the people, as the source of the government's authority, have the right to control (within constitional limits) how they operate it.
(Too dang many neolibertarians these days overlook the role of government in the existence of corporations -- and its that very limitation on liability that makes it so easy for stockholders to not care much about how the company is run. I don't see many libertarians (or conservatives) advocating that we do away with corporations and go back to just partnerships or sole proprietorships.)
Offhand I can't think of a multicellular organism that doesn't comprise eukaryotic cells.
Sure, there are things that are colonies of prokaryotic cells, but those are recognized as organisms at the individual cell level, not the colony level. Do you have a counterexample?
Of course, there are plenty of single-celled eukaryotic organisms, and I think that's what the article is really talking about.
It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.
No, speculation -- coupled with observation and experiment -- is always useful. Even if we'll never know (without a time machine) how life did arise on Earth, knowing possible mechanisms helps both our understanding of biology as a whole as well as provides insights when looking for life elsewhere in the Universe.
Indeed, it's possible that life arose several times in Earth's history because the planet underwent some pretty severe planet-sterilizing (or perhaps just nearly so) events early in its history.
As for evidence being lost -- most of it has, yes, but there are still a few fossils around from as much as about 3.45 billion years ago, and there's some progression in complexity moving forward in time. Part of the problem was and is knowing what to look for and how to look for it.
Slashdot has always been anti-MS, often regardless of actual merit.
Probably because of the number of slashdotters (vs the general public) who actually understand the industry, and/or work in it.
The fact that Microsoft is apparently incapable of documenting their interfaces is symptomatic of the development "methodology" within MS, and the quality of their product (bugs? viruses? etc) is another symptom. The misery that their whale dreck has caused many said slashdotters is the main reason for said anti-MS sentiment -- and actually that has everything to do with actual merit.
I don't see how, once build, a space elevator could cost more than a space shuttle.
Talk about damning with faint praise...
But I didn't see a single number in your analysis. Come on, I did an analysis of building a beanstalk on Mars (and a pipeline from the polar icecap) with less handwaving than that;-)
I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time
Hand cook all your own meals, do you? (Or buy them at restaurants that use no technology - hmm, get food poisoning much?) Hand wash your own (handmade) clothes? Walk everywhere -- barefoot?
Just because you choose to spend the time you saved using one technology on using a different technology, doesn't mean that it hasn't saved you time.
do you have any idea how much o2 it takes to refine ores?
Same as the amount of damage a bulldozer would suffer if it ran over Arther Dent: none at all.
To use a terrestrial example, in refining aluminum from bauxite, you're pulling oxygen out of the ore. Ditto with many other e.g. smelting processes. (You weren't seriously thinking he meant with a blast furnace, were you?)
In metallic asteroids the interesting metals are in metallic form -- go look at a meteorite collection sometime, siderites are essentially high-nickel steel. If you want to separate them out there are plenty of processes that work great in space given the enormous energies available (solar at 1 kilowatt per square meter of reflective surface) -- zone refining, fractional distillation (of metals, yes) etc.
Or you could use carbonyl gas processes which, yeah, use oxygen (but not O2) as part of the CO gas -- but that gets recovered when you plate out the metals.
no? ok then let's leave the back of the envelope calculations turned space policy to the professionals.
My thought exactly. Although s/the professionals/those who know what they're talking about/.
10 dollars a pound to go into geosynchronous orbit instead of 10,000 dollars? That a simple enough explanation?
No, it's far too simple. The $10K/lb figure is easy enough, but where'd you get the $10/lb figure? How much does the elevator cost to build, how much does it cost to operate, what's the mass rate it can maintain (thus, what's the cost to operate per pound). How's the financing on the cost to build - how much revenue to you need to generate to pay that back? Over how many years are you amortizing those costs? What's the expected lifetime of the elevator, and what will it cost to replace? What will liability insurace cost?
Give us some answers to those questions and we might believe whatever $/lb figure you come up with -- as it is, $10/lb barely pays the electric bill.
(You might as well quote conventional launch rates soley in terms of fuel costs -- which is probably more like $100/lb.)
things like Gold - which has very little practical application
The usefulness of a material depends a great deal on its price.
Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold, back before the electrolytic refinement process was developed. It was used for a few ceremonial or status applications -- some rich people had aluminum plates, there's an aluminum cap on the Washington Monument, that kind of thing. These days we wrap food and beverages in the stuff and throw it away, among thousands of other uses.
Gold has several useful physical properties -- very dense, very malleable, conductive, corrosion resistant, reflective to IR but transparent to (green) light as a thin film, etc. We'll find plenty of uses for it depending on what the price drops to.
Keep in mind most people didn't have TVs that could show DVDs to their fullest potential when DVDs came out.
While that's true, DVD could at least use the full resolution the TV was capable of. VHS couldn't (and can't). VHS resolution was worse than broadcast (assuming good signal, tuning, etc), DVD was better, on the same TV.
That ain't going to be the case for the hi-def formats.
I might buy hybrid discs if there's no significant cost differential, for the same reason I buy widescreen editions even though I don't yet have a widescreen TV -- but there's no way I'm going to bother shelling out for a hi-def player until I've got a display worth its while, and there's no point in it at all if all my discs are straight DVD. (Yeah, I've heard some good things about players that will do upconversion of DVD to higher def -- any hi-def player that doesn't include that feature is brain-dead.)
Hi-def has a much tougher chicken'n'egg problem than DVD ever did, made worse by the DRM requirements obsoleting most of the HD TVs already out there.
If something as complex as humans can evolve on their own, then how many years do we have to wait for something simple to evolve on it's own....Light bulb....telephone.....pencil....Microsoft Windows....Ice Cream.....Chocolate Milk.
Well, but none of those reproduce by themselves. There are plenty of organisms that have evolved to emit light -- fireflies, for example -- without being light bulbs. Ice cream of course is a product of polar cows.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just you.
Some of those big rocks can hit the Earth at about 4 times escape velocity, kicking some rocks up into orbit or beyond is easily imagined. (Even rocks 10ft across. That's small as far as debris from a major impactor goes, which can leave a crater tens of miles across.)
Heck, we have plenty of evidence that some of the "splash" goes at least suborbital (raining down on the other side of the planet), and that rocks from the Moon and Mars have been "splashed" to Earth. Yes Earth has a higher escape velocity but it's not insurmountable.
However, I disagree with the notion that directors and screenwriters should follow a story absolutely when making a movie from a book or a remake.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. Even if the director/screenwriter wanted to, it's often very difficult to translate from one medium to another. (Although film has had a big influence on fiction -- there's much more dialog and description and much less exposition and long monologues than in older works.) Character's internal thought processes (if written from omniscient or first person viewpoint) is very hard to do on film without resorting to voice-over or adding a character for the other to explain everything to (both hokey solutions).
And yes, there's always room for works that add to or reinterpret an original in some creative way. (Myself, I'd like to see a version of WotW set maybe a couple of decades later than Wells's, where we have aircraft and the beginnings of quantum theory -- the latter to help us figure out the IR lasers that the Martian's heat-ray almost surely must be. And then we start fighting back. (What can I say, I was heavily influenced by John W. Campbell's editorship of Analog at a tender age.) Maybe I'll write it myself.)
That would be H.G. Wells, the story follows the book fairly faithfully minus the change to modern day USA instead of victorian England,
Um, no. There's no way to follow the book "fairly" faithfully if you make that change. (And that's not the fault of Wells, but of whoever decided to make that change.) That just does too much violence to some of the story, and would result in something utterly stupid. Oh, wait...
Seriously, I haven't seen that version of the movie. The previews turned me right off. I've read the book a number of times, saw George Pal's version, listened to Jeff Wayne's musical version (which is excellent, and there are strong rumors of a film version in the works) and have the Pendragon version. It's not the England -> USA setting change that's the problem, but the Victorian -> present day change. (George Pal's version suffered for that too.) The differences in technology and what we knew/know about the universe are just too great.
Oh, somebody could do a properly updated version (well, in fact they did -- but that wasn't quite what I had in mind) but the story would have to be rewritten by a competent (ie best-selling and/or Hugo-winning) SF writer first.
it explains (based on accounts by his still-living peers) how his original Action Office devolved into the cubicle.
No, I'm pretty sure we can pin that one on Unintelligent Design.
Totally different situation.
They just have to examine the few frames before the flare to see if anyone looks like they're pointing at the camera, ie, at the viewer. The biggest clue will be that they're looking at the camera, any easy thing for a human viewer to pick up on.
Now, if you can carefully line up small mirrors or something ahead of time (long enough before that it's on a different recording), and you've worked out the angles, etc, etc, then just maybe you'll get away with it (unless perhaps if they have overlapping camera coverage). But do you want to bet at the very least your job and maybe a prosecution for criminal mischief or vandalism on that?
Uh huh. And when they play back the tape that shows you starting to point something at the camera just before it goes blind, you explain that how, exactly?
Most people don't do sudden stuff like suddenly pay off ~$6,500 of their credit card debt in one payment.
Happens all the time. There's quite an industry in re-fi's and second mortgages so that you can pay off high credit-card debt. Lowers the interest rate and that interest might be tax-deductable, to boot. Done it myself more than once. (These days though I pay the card off every month.)
You'd think DHS could find a more relevant use of their time than chasing down all those transactions.
Pre-war on Eurasia, so I suspect things are worse today.
Nonsense. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Chernobyl blew the 100TON lid off the reactor. It went into the air and crashed back down. I am not sure what you design to "contain" a blast like that.
Tell me the area of the lid and I'll tell you the pressure it took to blow it off -- then you engineer to beyond that.
Containments for the reactors I'm most familiar with (eg Pickering near Toronto) are multiple-meters thick heavily reinforced concrete, each reactor getting its own containment building. In addition to that there's a vacuum building, a large (larger than the containment buildings) cylindrical structure reinforced inside with a concrete lattice, constantaly maintained at a partial vacuum and connected to the containments to help keep them at negative pressure.
If you really want to desalinate sea water, the way to do it is with reverse osmosis units powered by the electicity the nuke plant generates.
Reverse osmosis is the standard method for large scale desalination plants, a heck of a lot more efficient that boiling the water.
unless the Air Force has already mastered hypersonic flight with scramjets.
Or some other propulsion system. Back circa late 1980s or early 1990s, AvLeak ran several articles on a possible hypersonic aircraft (or aerospacecraft?) that (they hypothesized) used a type of external burning pulse jet, with the aft part of the vehicle forming essentially an aerospike engine. Reports said that the vehicle left a characteristic "donuts on a string" vapor trail.
It's possible that said vehicle was either the XOV or a related system (prototype?).
You have no right to control how they run their business via the government.
As long as that business requires licenses to operate from said government, then we have every right. A corporation is a government granted fiction, the limited liability rules underwhich the owners (stockholders) of said corporation operate is something provided by the government - that's the basic "government granted license". There are others, of course, governing actual operations.
If they're getting something from the government -- which they are, in this case a limitation on liability (as with any corporation) -- then we the people, as the source of the government's authority, have the right to control (within constitional limits) how they operate it.
(Too dang many neolibertarians these days overlook the role of government in the existence of corporations -- and its that very limitation on liability that makes it so easy for stockholders to not care much about how the company is run. I don't see many libertarians (or conservatives) advocating that we do away with corporations and go back to just partnerships or sole proprietorships.)
Offhand I can't think of a multicellular organism that doesn't comprise eukaryotic cells.
Sure, there are things that are colonies of prokaryotic cells, but those are recognized as organisms at the individual cell level, not the colony level. Do you have a counterexample?
Of course, there are plenty of single-celled eukaryotic organisms, and I think that's what the article is really talking about.
It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.
No, speculation -- coupled with observation and experiment -- is always useful. Even if we'll never know (without a time machine) how life did arise on Earth, knowing possible mechanisms helps both our understanding of biology as a whole as well as provides insights when looking for life elsewhere in the Universe.
Indeed, it's possible that life arose several times in Earth's history because the planet underwent some pretty severe planet-sterilizing (or perhaps just nearly so) events early in its history.
As for evidence being lost -- most of it has, yes, but there are still a few fossils around from as much as about 3.45 billion years ago, and there's some progression in complexity moving forward in time. Part of the problem was and is knowing what to look for and how to look for it.
We built a 70ft tower to get a lawyer here in town on,
Sounds like an excellent use of it, too. Noose or cage?
Slashdot has always been anti-MS, often regardless of actual merit.
Probably because of the number of slashdotters (vs the general public) who actually understand the industry, and/or work in it.
The fact that Microsoft is apparently incapable of documenting their interfaces is symptomatic of the development "methodology" within MS, and the quality of their product (bugs? viruses? etc) is another symptom. The misery that their whale dreck has caused many said slashdotters is the main reason for said anti-MS sentiment -- and actually that has everything to do with actual merit.
I don't see how, once build, a space elevator could cost more than a space shuttle.
;-)
Talk about damning with faint praise...
But I didn't see a single number in your analysis. Come on, I did an analysis of building a beanstalk on Mars (and a pipeline from the polar icecap) with less handwaving than that
I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time
Hand cook all your own meals, do you? (Or buy them at restaurants that use no technology - hmm, get food poisoning much?) Hand wash your own (handmade) clothes? Walk everywhere -- barefoot?
Just because you choose to spend the time you saved using one technology on using a different technology, doesn't mean that it hasn't saved you time.
do you have any idea how much o2 it takes to refine ores?
Same as the amount of damage a bulldozer would suffer if it ran over Arther Dent: none at all.
To use a terrestrial example, in refining aluminum from bauxite, you're pulling oxygen out of the ore. Ditto with many other e.g. smelting processes. (You weren't seriously thinking he meant with a blast furnace, were you?)
In metallic asteroids the interesting metals are in metallic form -- go look at a meteorite collection sometime, siderites are essentially high-nickel steel. If you want to separate them out there are plenty of processes that work great in space given the enormous energies available (solar at 1 kilowatt per square meter of reflective surface) -- zone refining, fractional distillation (of metals, yes) etc.
Or you could use carbonyl gas processes which, yeah, use oxygen (but not O2) as part of the CO gas -- but that gets recovered when you plate out the metals.
no? ok then let's leave the back of the envelope calculations turned space policy to the professionals.
My thought exactly. Although s/the professionals/those who know what they're talking about/.
Energy is cheap (relatively speaking). What are the other operating costs?
I'd be thrilled if we could get rocket launch costs down to the energy (ie fuel) costs.
10 dollars a pound to go into geosynchronous orbit instead of 10,000 dollars? That a simple enough explanation?
No, it's far too simple. The $10K/lb figure is easy enough, but where'd you get the $10/lb figure? How much does the elevator cost to build, how much does it cost to operate, what's the mass rate it can maintain (thus, what's the cost to operate per pound). How's the financing on the cost to build - how much revenue to you need to generate to pay that back? Over how many years are you amortizing those costs? What's the expected lifetime of the elevator, and what will it cost to replace? What will liability insurace cost?
Give us some answers to those questions and we might believe whatever $/lb figure you come up with -- as it is, $10/lb barely pays the electric bill.
(You might as well quote conventional launch rates soley in terms of fuel costs -- which is probably more like $100/lb.)
things like Gold - which has very little practical application
The usefulness of a material depends a great deal on its price.
Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold, back before the electrolytic refinement process was developed. It was used for a few ceremonial or status applications -- some rich people had aluminum plates, there's an aluminum cap on the Washington Monument, that kind of thing. These days we wrap food and beverages in the stuff and throw it away, among thousands of other uses.
Gold has several useful physical properties -- very dense, very malleable, conductive, corrosion resistant, reflective to IR but transparent to (green) light as a thin film, etc. We'll find plenty of uses for it depending on what the price drops to.
tip tat tat tat tip tat tat
;-)
Historically known as "shave and a haircut -- two bits".
See "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", for example. Probably went out of style in the 60s/70s, when beards and long hair became more popular
Keep in mind most people didn't have TVs that could show DVDs to their fullest potential when DVDs came out.
While that's true, DVD could at least use the full resolution the TV was capable of. VHS couldn't (and can't). VHS resolution was worse than broadcast (assuming good signal, tuning, etc), DVD was better, on the same TV.
That ain't going to be the case for the hi-def formats.
I might buy hybrid discs if there's no significant cost differential, for the same reason I buy widescreen editions even though I don't yet have a widescreen TV -- but there's no way I'm going to bother shelling out for a hi-def player until I've got a display worth its while, and there's no point in it at all if all my discs are straight DVD. (Yeah, I've heard some good things about players that will do upconversion of DVD to higher def -- any hi-def player that doesn't include that feature is brain-dead.)
Hi-def has a much tougher chicken'n'egg problem than DVD ever did, made worse by the DRM requirements obsoleting most of the HD TVs already out there.
If something as complex as humans can evolve on their own, then how many years do we have to wait for something simple to evolve on it's own....Light bulb....telephone.....pencil....Microsoft Windows....Ice Cream.....Chocolate Milk.
Well, but none of those reproduce by themselves. There are plenty of organisms that have evolved to emit light -- fireflies, for example -- without being light bulbs. Ice cream of course is a product of polar cows.