I work in the aviation industry, and I can think of a better type of Jet engine to use.
I don't work in the aviation industry, but at least I read his site. He knows full well that pulse jets in many ways can't compete with turbine jets. He's researching pulse jets because everyone else dropped them in the 1950's and he thinks there's still interesting work to be done with them.
If you read his full site, you'll note that he's also built turbine jets and attached them to the go-kart as well. He even re-engineered the casing of the turbocharger his turbine jet was made from so that it could drive a gearshaft and drive the kart directly instead of via thrust. Just as you describe, except that he built the thrust shaft himself.
But he's really working on pulse jets, and has already made big advances on them. Pulse jets normally require very long tubes; he's cut the minimum length in half. He's designed a new type of valve that lasts much longer than previous pulsejet valves... etc. The list goes on. His work has even won him some large research grants and corporate sponsorship, fairly impressive for a backyard engineer.
Yes, I'm sure you could build a more powerful go-kart than his, but that's not what his work's about.
The total thrust of the engine on this rocketplane is 800lb (two 400 lb rockets). The maximum thrust on an F-15 Eagle is 50,000lb. The thrust on the space shuttle (at launch) is about 6 MILLION pounds.
A rocket spaceplane operates on the principle that you can get more altitude out of your thrust/fuel by using wings and taking a ride up the atmosphere. But remember that once the atmosphere starts to crap out, you still have to get to orbit on pure rocket thrust. And the long-EZ plane weighs 890 lbs empty.
Probably, this thing has about 2 minutes of fuel and can fly a couple of miles.
It may be that we'll learn a few things about building refined rocket engines from these guys, but they're not going to space anytime soon. 400lbs is the biggest engine they make. Other groups actually looking at making space planes are designing much larger engines, or using existing ones designed for other purposes.
I applaud these XCOR guys - it's pretty cool to fly a small kit plane with a miniature rocket engine. But Space.Com is making things up about the purpose...
And solar satellites would happen precisely...never. We'd have thousands of environmentalist wackos telling us that
it's going to give kids cancer, fry some stupid-ass backward-flying striped wallaby or something, and it causes global warming somehow.
I know that's all crap, you know that's all crap.
Is it crap, though? I'm the furthest thing from a luddide and I'm all over the SPS theory. But there are real concerns.
You're talking about beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere on an EM wave; be it an IR laser or microwaves. You don't think there's some risk of that being problematic?
You have to find a frequency of EM wave that doesn't couple with (=get absorbed or reflected by) anything in the atmosphere. You have oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, dozens of other elements, water, ozone, birds, airplanes, and assorted idiots. You probably can't find one that won't be absorbed by biological tissue, so you have to route planes and people around it. God forbid you accidentally plant the receiver directly under a bird migration route. What happenes if a volcanic eruption throws a bunch of dust in the atmosphere?
As I said, I'm all in favor of solar power satellites. But to think that beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere is trivial and doesn't carry real risks is simply foolish. Much study, experiment, and planning is required. I personally suspect real SPS technology will become feasible around the same time as a beanstalk; then you can just transmit the power down a cable.
The problem is, you have to make the antimatter. And that costs energy. Present facilities are approximately 0.00001% efficient at using energy to create antimatter. Dr. Robert Forward, a futurist who has some great ideas but is known for being overly optimistic (to put it mildly), thinks a dedicated facility could be 0.01% efficient. Then you burn your antimatter fuel and if you do really well you can capture 50% of the energy you produce. So in the end, you've burnt one unit of energy to produce 0.005 units of energy. Not good.
If you could find a source of antimatter to mine, you'd be golden. But that doesn't seem likely.
A Mad Max style catastrophy would only happen if energy supplies ran out all at once. A nuclear war or an asteroid strike could cause this, but I doubt fossil fuel problems will.
The problem is not an actual energy shortage, its a political/military catastrophe resulting from a distribution imbalance. The trouble is that America' oil fields are much smaller than OPEC's, and America's have been producing for longer. Even in the optimistic estimates, America's domestic oil runs out within 20 years, probably sooner, while another 50 exists in OPEC fields after that. The US went to war when one of it's small oil allies was threatened. What do you think will happen when the domestic supply (currently producing 50% of the US needs) dwindle significantly, and OPEC jacks up the prices?
That's why this fusion research is so important; the US needs another major power supply online soonest.
I guess it depends on what "all at once" means. 15-20 years is not much time to switch an entire infrastructure that currently supplies 70% of electrical power and 95% of transportation. It can be done, but the economic impacts will be mighty.
IANAP, but I've worked electronics in plasma labs and lived with enough physicists to get a fair grip... this is difficult, but might work.
Plasma does not like to cross magnetic field lines; this principle is in fact how tokamak reactors work. If your reactor was continually generating new superheated plasma from the energy in the reaction, you could maybe split off a stream of it and send it down a different channel.
Let that stream of plasma impact some new magnetic fields. It will push on the field lines, imparting momentum to them. This could accelerate the magnets generating those lines, even if they were on the other side of the wall. If those magnets were attached to wheels, could you actually make a "magnetic turbine", directly converting the kinetic energy of the plasma into mechanical work?
Maybe a real physicist can enlighten me... Is this possible?
Rogue Nations' will perceive the rennaisance of US militarism as an unwillingness to resolve conflicts by diplomatic or democratic means, and resort to terrorism and guerilla operations. All of which means that there is more terror coming to American citizens, at home and abroad.
Exactly. This is fundamentally an image problem. Building a military solution to the problem and breaking a treaty in the process convinces the rest of the world even more that we're the enemy. So we get more terrorists coming our way.
The shit of it is, dubya and friends will point to the increased terrorism that results as evidence that they were right and we needed a defense system after all. Nicely self-fulfilling.
Of course, it won't be stopping the kind of terrorism that results.
It's time for the US to start playing by the same rules they force on everyone else. The fact that we don't is the reason we have so many enemies now.
""defending yourself" antagonizes the rest of the world. "
This was exactly the same logic used by British and French in trying to appease Hitler. Are you blind ?
The situations aren't even remotely parallel. Hitler was a known aggressor, using conventional means to conquer territory. Appeasing him gave him more time to build up forces with which to continue the process.
Nuclear ICBMs, on the other hand, are a negotiation tool. You can't use them to take over territory. The only thing you can use them for is to give leverage to a threat. If you use it, you're both fscked and you both know it.
There's no "known aggressor", like Hitler, that we'd be appeasing in this case. Nobody we'd be encouraging to take over the world by not building it. Who are you suggesting is Hitler in your scenario?
Furthermore, we know for a fact that building it will spark a military buildup, because China has promised to start an arms race if we build the damn thing.
Forget for a moment all the suitcase bombs, anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin gas, and conventional terrorism strategies. Assume that there is no way a terrorist or rogue state could attack the US without an ICBM. Assume, even that we could make NMD 100% effective against all existing nuclear ICBM technologies.
It's still an incredibly stupid idea.
Why? If other countries that might otherwise have the option (any country with a nuke) feel they cannot threaten the US anymore, it creates an unacceptable situation. Most countries already feel the US dictates terms to them too much as it is. If we had the ability to nuke them and they couldn't nuke us back, we'd be able to dictate any terms we wanted. This would be unacceptable to any nation with a backbone.
If we build it big enough to shoot down 20 missiles, everyone will make sure they have 30. If we build it big enough to shoot down 2000 simultaneous missiles, they'll develop advanced decoy or stealth tech to make sure some get through. The more the US persists, the more the rest of the world will work together to make sure that the power does not remain unilateral. Even the US cannot maintain absolute technological dominance over the rest of the world working together.
There's no effective level of defense, ever. We can't ever develop a "limited" shield, because everyone will just make sure they're above the limit. It's as simple as that.
In the meantime, every country in the world will waste trillions of dollars, drawing effort from the thousands of other problems we all face.
The ONLY real excuse I can see is the accidental launch theory. In which case, let the US put it's money where it's mouth is - if this is really to save lives against accidental launches, let everyone have the technology. Set up NMD bases all over the world under UN control with oversight from every country at every site. Everyone will have the ability to shoot down 2 incoming ICBMs in case of an accidental launch or true suicidal wacko, and nobody will have the ability to develop it to a point where it interferes with someone's deterrent force. If it's really only defensive, then use it to defend everyone.
a) A single nuke in a suitcase... won't wipe out the country.
Neither will a single missile or small number of missiles fired by a rogue nation. That's all dubya claims the NMD is intended to defend against.
There is no logic in not defending yourself from one form of attack when another is possible.
Sure there is, when:
The other kind of attack is vastly more likely.
It's expensive and we need money for other known problems.
"defending yourself" antagonizes the rest of the world.
It is known that the policy will start an arms race.
The system will never be 100% effective and the arms race could increase the long-term attack risk by giving the world an even larger supply of weapons.
The risk is that the person is caught, interrogated, and the US retaliates, devastating your tin-pot country for the next century or so. I'd call that quite a significant risk for a measly 10 kilotons, wouldn't you?
What, compared to the guaranteed retaliation if you launch an ICBM? Sounds quite low-risk in comparison.
If you're trying to terrorize the country, you don't really quibble about yield. Palestinian bombers will give their lives to injure two guys at a shopping mall. In terms of scaring the shit out of the Evil Americans, 10 kilotons is just fine.
You're also missing the point, stated repeatedly, that even if caught, a terrorist organization doesn't have a territory with borders that you can nuke in retaliation. The US can't go destroying all of Palestine because some Hamas nutcase tried to smuggle in a weapon of mass destruction.
"Damn," he thought. "I wanted to exact the almighty's revenge on the Americans. I was willing to give my life, but I discovered the best I could do was kill about 100,000. I guess it's just not worth it."
Not yet, but soon, for North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and lots of other fun-loving dictatorships out there.
Okay, I'll grant you that a bunch of them will have them soon, it was my weakest point. You still haven't explained why any of them would actually launch against the US; witness the "giant flaming return address" theory.
China already has 20 or so nukes pointed at the US
Which they haven't changed in years; they've maintained pretty much the same nuclear stockpile for at least a decade. Despite not being a member, they agreed to the MTCR guidelines in 1991 and 1994. They've been static because they know those 20 missiles are sufficient deterrent since we wont' risk losing a city.
Now, on the other hand, they've promised to escalate a new arms race if we build the NMD, because NMD threatens the deterrent factor of those 20 missiles. They need more to overwhelm it.
Suitcase nukes are hard to make, and harder to smuggle than you might think (please see my other post for details).
See my other post for a response to that theory. I'm not suggesting they make one - suitcase bombs already exist and 80+ became unaccounted for in the collapse of the USSR and the deterioration of their military. And while it may not be all that easy to smuggle one in, it's still easier than building a multimillion-dollar ICBM and doesn't carry anywhere near the liability or accountability.
And it is easy anyway. Thousands of Mexican civilians make it across the border undetected every year. You think a couple of trained terrorists couldn't do it with a 150lb suitcase?
Ever heard of the Maginot line? The NMD is the Maginot line, except that this time it's actually cheaper and easier for the enemy to go around it. Suitcase bomb or no, a wacko that wants to nuke us is going to find a way with or without the NMD. It's just a big honking waste of money that is guaranteed to piss off the rest of the world.
Furthermore, the concept of a "suitcase nuke" is absurd. Such a weapon would have a relatively insignificant explosive yield.
Bullshit. From the New York Post, November 8, 1999. (full text requires purchase).
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), citing the congressional testimony of KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin and Russian General Alexander Lebed, said the former Soviet Union produced 132 suitcase-sized, 10-kiloton nuclear weapons, but has accounted for only 48.
Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was a 15-kiloton weapon. 10 kilotons is a significant fraction of that, and I think would quite easily satisfy some wacko terrorists' needs.
These weapons are known to exist and are known to be missing in large numbers. This is not just FUD. This is the world you live in.
You are making a false assumption that it is easier to bring a small scale nuclear weapon into the US through canada than it is to bring it by sea into a North Western state.
Yeah, Canada's not the way. Mexico is. How many thousands of mexicans make it into the US each year? Two trained and in-shape fanatics could get a suitcase bomb onto an unmarked shore in northern Baja, across the border, and into San Diego on foot in less than a week. No need to waste a cargo ship, even.
does Michael honestly believe that other countries DON'T have strategic ballistic missles
Actually, they dont.
Point one:
A few other countries have NUKES. But probably only half of these have ICBMs that can actually reach the US. China has a few dozen, Russia has a lot. The other few are our european allies. India is close enough to space tech that they could probably build one. Maybe North Korea, adopted from China. Iraq if they work really hard for a decade. (Remember how proud they were of the SCUD, which had ~300km range? ) The Taliban doesn't even have electricity in 90% of their country.
Point Two:
Why the hell would you launch it at the US even if you had one? A suicide bomber is one thing: you lose one guy and you blame it on a sect you can't control. But launching a missile? In 45 minutes, the US turns every city you have into a nuclear wasteland.
Point Three.
If you want to nuke the US, you get or make a small bomb, like one of the infamous soviet suitcase nukes - dozens are unaccounted for. You send a single suicide bomber to carry it across the border from mexico or canada by hand. You lose one guy, there's nothing for the US to shoot down, and you don't have to develop any rocket technology. And a nuke leaves awfully little forensic evidence.
The rogue nation theory is FUD and W knows it. This is an excuse to get a start on something that could eventually be a full SDI shield and W, Russia, China, and everyone else knows that, too.
The real problem, of course, is that it breaks treaties (as if the rest of the world didn't hate the US enough already) and could start a new arms race with China, whose nuclear deterrent of ~40 rockets *could* be threatened by an ABM shield. An arms race is good for no one.
Except for W's friends in the military. And his friends in the companies that make the weapons. And himself. The truth is, the arms race with China will help Bush because.he needs a big bad enemy.
You hear your voice directly from inside your head as the sound reaches your ears via the eustachian tubes that go
What if this isn't true? I always assumed the shower curtain thing was heat conduction, and I was wrong.
Try this:
<ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS>
The answering machine voice dorkification effect is caused by a neural association/feedback change. When you speak, your brain is not only hearing the sounds you make, but is also sending commands to your vocal apparatus instructing it to make those sounds. The correlation between hearing and speech center activity results in a difference in perception from just hearing alone. </ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS>
Weird you say? There's even a precedent for my idea. When you move your eyes, images sweep across them at hundreds of degrees per second - but the world doesn't look like it's moving to you. But if you look at a screen, hold your eyes still, and sweep images at those rates everything looks like it's moving. Why? Because when you move your eye, your brain takes a copy of the eye-motion commands and subtracts that motion from what the eye really sees, resulting in a perception that the world didn't move.
I admit, it's pretty far-fetched and I'm still inclined to believe the eustachian tube hypothesis, but the truth is we don't know unless someone's actually done the science to tell.
Research like this is great because it replaces supposition with real knowledge. Three cheers to this shower dude.
What people have failed to notice is that this frequent updating isn't really a change for Apple.
If you've been an Apple user for any period of time, you're probably familiar with the fairly frequent updating Apple did of it's old OS. As soon as it became fairly easy to provide updates (i.e. Internet downloads), Apple started providing them pretty frequently, and it's even better about making the updates free than some other commercial OS providers I might name.
In the four years since I started graduate school, I've purchased MacOS's 8, 8.5, 9, and X, and downloaded major free updates like 8.1, 8.6, and 9.1, as well at least a dozen minor ones. In it's relatively short lifespan, 9.0 went through four minor updates (9.0.1 through 9.0.4) before becoming 9.1. And that's just the core OS; Apple frequently releases updates to separate components as they become available before bundling them into the next full OS update.
This is just more of the same. And since it's super friendly and idiot-proof (one click and a restart) but optional, there's no reason for them not to.
What will be the "transistor" of the next half century?
Genomics comes to mind... The rest will probably surprise us.
But there were more "fundamental" changes recently than just the transistor. A lot of what you see today, even the major changes you're thinking of would also not have been possible without:
Lasers
Digital data (the transistor is fundamentally no more digital than the tube)
Synthetic pharmaceuticals
major advances in polymer and other organic chemistry
Dude, he's nowhere near as far off as you think. Part of your confusion is that you don't really understand or remember what it was like back in 1950. Consider:
Men and women 70 years old, look as if they were 40?
Compare a well-to-do American (the only demographic he is concerned with) 70 year old today with 40- and 70- year olds of 1950. In 1950, someone 70 years old was probably on his deathbed. Today, with improved cancer and heart therapies, the advent of sunscreens, plastic surgery, laser vision and skin therapy, artificial joints, the exercise/health booms of the latter century, vastly improved dietary science... In 1990, my grandfather was 70, and was WATERSKIING after three replacement hips and a cancer surgery. No way that could have happened in 1950; he'd have already died. And now we have another 10 years of technology. This prediction certainly hasn't come true for every single person, but many first-world 70's folks do look and act like the 40's, or at least 50's, folks of the 1950.
"Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people"
Again, not universally, but what fraction of people graduating college today both know how to cook a real meal and do it almost every night? About 50% of american meals are not eaten at home now. And what percent of the remaining ones are accounted for by TV Dinner/rehydrated pasta/di giorno pizza/some other prepared food? Nearly all of it. I consider myself an accomplished cook for my age (27), but even I only make a *real* meal about twice a week. The rest of the time it's a quick batch of spaghetti, papa johns pizza, or just snacks. Very few people really cook much today. EVERYONE cooked ALL THE TIME in 1950, or rather, the housewives did.
I personally think the most interesting failed "prediction" he made was simply an assumption - he assumed the typical family would still have a working husband and a housewife.
And oh, I still shave the normal way
Really? In 1950 a lot of people still used and sharpened their straight razors. Disposables wouldn't hit the markets for another decade, and the few existing electrics sucked. I've shaved with an electric since the very first day I shaved, only using a razor on the few occasions it wasn't available. I may not actually be using a chemical, but it doesn't really take me any longer to shave than what he describes. About a minute, most days.
Wood, brick and stone is too expensive, so we build in something else (poured plastic)?
Actually, stone *is* too expensive for most houses, and brick use is down as well. When we do use stone or even brick anymore, it's frequently decorative over a steel frame rather than truly structural. Wood has managed to stay competitive, largely because it's light and strong, and advanced power tools have made working with wood now even easier than pouring concrete into a form.
But have you noticed how many new houses have tyvek wrappers, advanced polymer insulations that are blown into the walls by fans, polymer carpets, spray-on stucco outer coatings, composite-material fireproof roofing tiles, etc.? Not precisely what he said, but maybe only because we found new materials even better.
. The only way to raise DC voltage is to chop it up into AC and run it through a transformer.
Not so! One can directly raise DC voltages with a switched-capacitor circuit. You can also reduce and invert DC voltages with clever switched-capacitor circuits.
Now, getting the voltage necessary to drive a CRT out of a 5V power supply this way would be a royal pain.
Unless you really enjoy screwing around with electronics, I'd recommend just using an inverter and plugging in your hardware unaltered.
But if you're willing to go to the trouble and expense of modifying your computer, why not just shell out the extra bucks and use a laptop?
Why would the government regulate this? This is just a way to present data on a physical medium, nothing more. It's not fundamentally more encrypted than any other medium - what you do with the data is what matters.
If this becomes commonplace, then machines that can read it become commonplace and the government and anyone else just treats it like any other data medium.
Besides, how could they regulate it? All you'd need to use it is a very high-resolution printer.
"All that is needed is to engineer a virus to deliver the chemical key to activate this gene systemically."
It's nowhere near that easy!
Think about it - for a virus to spread, the host has to live long enough to spread it. People fret that HIV could mutate so that it killed hosts in six months. But if it did, we'd wipe out AIDS in two years, because we could detect infections and prevent their spread much more effectively.
The same issue is true inside your cells. If that virus injects its genetic material into your cells and immediately kills the cell through apoptosis, then the cell's machinery doesn't have time to manufacture copies of the virus. Such a virus wouldn't even infect you, because it would never get replicated! You'd lose one cell for each copy of the virus that invaded your body - no big deal.
You could try to engineer a virus that copies itself inside your cell, and *then* triggers apoptosis. But this is inefficient, because viruses typically lyse (burst) infected cells once they've replicated many copies anyway. No need to waste time inducing AIF.
To spread successfully, a virus doesn't want to kill it's host. We can successfully contain ebola in isolated outbreaks and we eradicated smallpox. But when was the last time we successfully contained a rhinovirus (common cold)?.
I wonder what's the environmental impact of a stream of 20km/s heavy projectiles slamming into the ground under an ascending spacecraft?
Seriously, though, I suspect it wouldn't work. The mass of this particular electromagnetic device is horrendous (a large building) and it shoots small (a gram or two) slugs. And 20km/s is not all that high as exhaust velocities go. And, it almost certainly works by storing power off the grid in capacitors or other storage devices - the launch vehicle would have to carry some way to generate that electricity.
In rocketry you want to take the minimum weight of fuel+reaction mass to produce the maximum exhaust momentum. If you're going to do it with electricity, an ion engine is your best bet among existing technologies.
The problem is the energy storage, and the solution to that is a fuel cell
A fuel cell is a great solution, and the progress is going quickly. Of course, you still have to deal with carrying fuel, which either means storing hydrogen (another whole problem) or carrying a converter to strip hydrogen off of methanol/gasoline/whatever.
If you want a purely-electric solution, keep your eye on ultracapacitors. They're still pretty expensive, but they're already starting to beat the energy density of batteries. Check out this story from today. Seems this company has built a 2500 Farad capacitor that weighs less than a kilogram and can discharge current at 625 Amps. (Anyone with a bit of electronics knowledge should have jaws on the floor about now; I did). It stores power at 2.5 V, which gives it about 10x the energy density of batteries.
There are still some problems before we can use them to power cars (leakage current, dielectric breakdown at temperatures above 80 C etc.), but the advantages are great, not least among them that you can charge a capacitor pretty much as fast as you can feed current - no more waiting for batteries to charge! The company's web site also lists a 4-farad capacitor that weighs 5.5 grams. Anyone want to recharge that mobile phone in five seconds?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't work in the aviation industry, but at least I read his site. He knows full well that pulse jets in many ways can't compete with turbine jets. He's researching pulse jets because everyone else dropped them in the 1950's and he thinks there's still interesting work to be done with them.
If you read his full site, you'll note that he's also built turbine jets and attached them to the go-kart as well. He even re-engineered the casing of the turbocharger his turbine jet was made from so that it could drive a gearshaft and drive the kart directly instead of via thrust. Just as you describe, except that he built the thrust shaft himself.
But he's really working on pulse jets, and has already made big advances on them. Pulse jets normally require very long tubes; he's cut the minimum length in half. He's designed a new type of valve that lasts much longer than previous pulsejet valves... etc. The list goes on. His work has even won him some large research grants and corporate sponsorship, fairly impressive for a backyard engineer.
Yes, I'm sure you could build a more powerful go-kart than his, but that's not what his work's about.
The total thrust of the engine on this rocketplane is 800lb (two 400 lb rockets). The maximum thrust on an F-15 Eagle is 50,000lb. The thrust on the space shuttle (at launch) is about 6 MILLION pounds.
A rocket spaceplane operates on the principle that you can get more altitude out of your thrust/fuel by using wings and taking a ride up the atmosphere. But remember that once the atmosphere starts to crap out, you still have to get to orbit on pure rocket thrust. And the long-EZ plane weighs 890 lbs empty.
Probably, this thing has about 2 minutes of fuel and can fly a couple of miles.
It may be that we'll learn a few things about building refined rocket engines from these guys, but they're not going to space anytime soon. 400lbs is the biggest engine they make. Other groups actually looking at making space planes are designing much larger engines, or using existing ones designed for other purposes.
I applaud these XCOR guys - it's pretty cool to fly a small kit plane with a miniature rocket engine. But Space.Com is making things up about the purpose...
I know that's all crap, you know that's all crap.
Is it crap, though? I'm the furthest thing from a luddide and I'm all over the SPS theory. But there are real concerns.
You're talking about beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere on an EM wave; be it an IR laser or microwaves. You don't think there's some risk of that being problematic?
You have to find a frequency of EM wave that doesn't couple with (=get absorbed or reflected by) anything in the atmosphere. You have oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, dozens of other elements, water, ozone, birds, airplanes, and assorted idiots. You probably can't find one that won't be absorbed by biological tissue, so you have to route planes and people around it. God forbid you accidentally plant the receiver directly under a bird migration route. What happenes if a volcanic eruption throws a bunch of dust in the atmosphere?
As I said, I'm all in favor of solar power satellites. But to think that beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere is trivial and doesn't carry real risks is simply foolish. Much study, experiment, and planning is required. I personally suspect real SPS technology will become feasible around the same time as a beanstalk; then you can just transmit the power down a cable.
If you could find a source of antimatter to mine, you'd be golden. But that doesn't seem likely.
The problem is not an actual energy shortage, its a political/military catastrophe resulting from a distribution imbalance. The trouble is that America' oil fields are much smaller than OPEC's, and America's have been producing for longer. Even in the optimistic estimates, America's domestic oil runs out within 20 years, probably sooner, while another 50 exists in OPEC fields after that. The US went to war when one of it's small oil allies was threatened. What do you think will happen when the domestic supply (currently producing 50% of the US needs) dwindle significantly, and OPEC jacks up the prices?
That's why this fusion research is so important; the US needs another major power supply online soonest.
I guess it depends on what "all at once" means. 15-20 years is not much time to switch an entire infrastructure that currently supplies 70% of electrical power and 95% of transportation. It can be done, but the economic impacts will be mighty.
Plasma does not like to cross magnetic field lines; this principle is in fact how tokamak reactors work. If your reactor was continually generating new superheated plasma from the energy in the reaction, you could maybe split off a stream of it and send it down a different channel.
Let that stream of plasma impact some new magnetic fields. It will push on the field lines, imparting momentum to them. This could accelerate the magnets generating those lines, even if they were on the other side of the wall. If those magnets were attached to wheels, could you actually make a "magnetic turbine", directly converting the kinetic energy of the plasma into mechanical work?
Maybe a real physicist can enlighten me... Is this possible?
Exactly. This is fundamentally an image problem. Building a military solution to the problem and breaking a treaty in the process convinces the rest of the world even more that we're the enemy. So we get more terrorists coming our way.
The shit of it is, dubya and friends will point to the increased terrorism that results as evidence that they were right and we needed a defense system after all. Nicely self-fulfilling.
Of course, it won't be stopping the kind of terrorism that results.
It's time for the US to start playing by the same rules they force on everyone else. The fact that we don't is the reason we have so many enemies now.
This was exactly the same logic used by British and French in trying to appease Hitler. Are you blind ?
The situations aren't even remotely parallel. Hitler was a known aggressor, using conventional means to conquer territory. Appeasing him gave him more time to build up forces with which to continue the process.
Nuclear ICBMs, on the other hand, are a negotiation tool. You can't use them to take over territory. The only thing you can use them for is to give leverage to a threat. If you use it, you're both fscked and you both know it.
There's no "known aggressor", like Hitler, that we'd be appeasing in this case. Nobody we'd be encouraging to take over the world by not building it. Who are you suggesting is Hitler in your scenario?
Furthermore, we know for a fact that building it will spark a military buildup, because China has promised to start an arms race if we build the damn thing.
It's still an incredibly stupid idea.
Why? If other countries that might otherwise have the option (any country with a nuke) feel they cannot threaten the US anymore, it creates an unacceptable situation. Most countries already feel the US dictates terms to them too much as it is. If we had the ability to nuke them and they couldn't nuke us back, we'd be able to dictate any terms we wanted. This would be unacceptable to any nation with a backbone.
If we build it big enough to shoot down 20 missiles, everyone will make sure they have 30. If we build it big enough to shoot down 2000 simultaneous missiles, they'll develop advanced decoy or stealth tech to make sure some get through. The more the US persists, the more the rest of the world will work together to make sure that the power does not remain unilateral. Even the US cannot maintain absolute technological dominance over the rest of the world working together.
There's no effective level of defense, ever. We can't ever develop a "limited" shield, because everyone will just make sure they're above the limit. It's as simple as that.
In the meantime, every country in the world will waste trillions of dollars, drawing effort from the thousands of other problems we all face.
The ONLY real excuse I can see is the accidental launch theory. In which case, let the US put it's money where it's mouth is - if this is really to save lives against accidental launches, let everyone have the technology. Set up NMD bases all over the world under UN control with oversight from every country at every site. Everyone will have the ability to shoot down 2 incoming ICBMs in case of an accidental launch or true suicidal wacko, and nobody will have the ability to develop it to a point where it interferes with someone's deterrent force. If it's really only defensive, then use it to defend everyone.
Neither will a single missile or small number of missiles fired by a rogue nation. That's all dubya claims the NMD is intended to defend against.
There is no logic in not defending yourself from one form of attack when another is possible.
Sure there is, when:
What, compared to the guaranteed retaliation if you launch an ICBM? Sounds quite low-risk in comparison.
If you're trying to terrorize the country, you don't really quibble about yield. Palestinian bombers will give their lives to injure two guys at a shopping mall. In terms of scaring the shit out of the Evil Americans, 10 kilotons is just fine.
You're also missing the point, stated repeatedly, that even if caught, a terrorist organization doesn't have a territory with borders that you can nuke in retaliation. The US can't go destroying all of Palestine because some Hamas nutcase tried to smuggle in a weapon of mass destruction.
"Damn," he thought. "I wanted to exact the almighty's revenge on the Americans. I was willing to give my life, but I discovered the best I could do was kill about 100,000. I guess it's just not worth it."
Okay, I'll grant you that a bunch of them will have them soon, it was my weakest point. You still haven't explained why any of them would actually launch against the US; witness the "giant flaming return address" theory.
China already has 20 or so nukes pointed at the US
Which they haven't changed in years; they've maintained pretty much the same nuclear stockpile for at least a decade. Despite not being a member, they agreed to the MTCR guidelines in 1991 and 1994. They've been static because they know those 20 missiles are sufficient deterrent since we wont' risk losing a city.
Now, on the other hand, they've promised to escalate a new arms race if we build the NMD, because NMD threatens the deterrent factor of those 20 missiles. They need more to overwhelm it.
Suitcase nukes are hard to make, and harder to smuggle than you might think (please see my other post for details).
See my other post for a response to that theory. I'm not suggesting they make one - suitcase bombs already exist and 80+ became unaccounted for in the collapse of the USSR and the deterioration of their military. And while it may not be all that easy to smuggle one in, it's still easier than building a multimillion-dollar ICBM and doesn't carry anywhere near the liability or accountability.
And it is easy anyway. Thousands of Mexican civilians make it across the border undetected every year. You think a couple of trained terrorists couldn't do it with a 150lb suitcase?
Ever heard of the Maginot line? The NMD is the Maginot line, except that this time it's actually cheaper and easier for the enemy to go around it. Suitcase bomb or no, a wacko that wants to nuke us is going to find a way with or without the NMD. It's just a big honking waste of money that is guaranteed to piss off the rest of the world.
Furthermore, the concept of a "suitcase nuke" is absurd. Such a weapon would have a relatively insignificant explosive yield.
Bullshit. From the New York Post, November 8, 1999. (full text requires purchase).
Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was a 15-kiloton weapon. 10 kilotons is a significant fraction of that, and I think would quite easily satisfy some wacko terrorists' needs.
These weapons are known to exist and are known to be missing in large numbers. This is not just FUD. This is the world you live in.
You are making a false assumption that it is easier to bring a small scale nuclear weapon into the US through canada than it is to bring it by sea into a North Western state.
Yeah, Canada's not the way. Mexico is. How many thousands of mexicans make it into the US each year? Two trained and in-shape fanatics could get a suitcase bomb onto an unmarked shore in northern Baja, across the border, and into San Diego on foot in less than a week. No need to waste a cargo ship, even.
Actually, they dont.
Point one:
A few other countries have NUKES. But probably only half of these have ICBMs that can actually reach the US. China has a few dozen, Russia has a lot. The other few are our european allies. India is close enough to space tech that they could probably build one. Maybe North Korea, adopted from China. Iraq if they work really hard for a decade. (Remember how proud they were of the SCUD, which had ~300km range? ) The Taliban doesn't even have electricity in 90% of their country.
Point Two: Why the hell would you launch it at the US even if you had one? A suicide bomber is one thing: you lose one guy and you blame it on a sect you can't control. But launching a missile? In 45 minutes, the US turns every city you have into a nuclear wasteland.
Point Three. If you want to nuke the US, you get or make a small bomb, like one of the infamous soviet suitcase nukes - dozens are unaccounted for. You send a single suicide bomber to carry it across the border from mexico or canada by hand. You lose one guy, there's nothing for the US to shoot down, and you don't have to develop any rocket technology. And a nuke leaves awfully little forensic evidence.
The rogue nation theory is FUD and W knows it. This is an excuse to get a start on something that could eventually be a full SDI shield and W, Russia, China, and everyone else knows that, too.
The real problem, of course, is that it breaks treaties (as if the rest of the world didn't hate the US enough already) and could start a new arms race with China, whose nuclear deterrent of ~40 rockets *could* be threatened by an ABM shield. An arms race is good for no one.
Except for W's friends in the military. And his friends in the companies that make the weapons. And himself. The truth is, the arms race with China will help Bush because .he needs a big bad enemy.
What if this isn't true? I always assumed the shower curtain thing was heat conduction, and I was wrong.
Try this:
<ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS>
The answering machine voice dorkification effect is caused by a neural association/feedback change. When you speak, your brain is not only hearing the sounds you make, but is also sending commands to your vocal apparatus instructing it to make those sounds. The correlation between hearing and speech center activity results in a difference in perception from just hearing alone.
</ALTERNATE HYPOTHESIS>
Weird you say? There's even a precedent for my idea. When you move your eyes, images sweep across them at hundreds of degrees per second - but the world doesn't look like it's moving to you. But if you look at a screen, hold your eyes still, and sweep images at those rates everything looks like it's moving. Why? Because when you move your eye, your brain takes a copy of the eye-motion commands and subtracts that motion from what the eye really sees, resulting in a perception that the world didn't move.
I admit, it's pretty far-fetched and I'm still inclined to believe the eustachian tube hypothesis, but the truth is we don't know unless someone's actually done the science to tell.
Research like this is great because it replaces supposition with real knowledge. Three cheers to this shower dude.
Without antimatter, we'll never be able to build the Enterprise's warp drive. ;)
If you've been an Apple user for any period of time, you're probably familiar with the fairly frequent updating Apple did of it's old OS. As soon as it became fairly easy to provide updates (i.e. Internet downloads), Apple started providing them pretty frequently, and it's even better about making the updates free than some other commercial OS providers I might name.
In the four years since I started graduate school, I've purchased MacOS's 8, 8.5, 9, and X, and downloaded major free updates like 8.1, 8.6, and 9.1, as well at least a dozen minor ones. In it's relatively short lifespan, 9.0 went through four minor updates (9.0.1 through 9.0.4) before becoming 9.1. And that's just the core OS; Apple frequently releases updates to separate components as they become available before bundling them into the next full OS update.
This is just more of the same. And since it's super friendly and idiot-proof (one click and a restart) but optional, there's no reason for them not to.
Genomics comes to mind... The rest will probably surprise us.
But there were more "fundamental" changes recently than just the transistor. A lot of what you see today, even the major changes you're thinking of would also not have been possible without:
Men and women 70 years old, look as if they were 40?
Compare a well-to-do American (the only demographic he is concerned with) 70 year old today with 40- and 70- year olds of 1950. In 1950, someone 70 years old was probably on his deathbed. Today, with improved cancer and heart therapies, the advent of sunscreens, plastic surgery, laser vision and skin therapy, artificial joints, the exercise/health booms of the latter century, vastly improved dietary science... In 1990, my grandfather was 70, and was WATERSKIING after three replacement hips and a cancer surgery. No way that could have happened in 1950; he'd have already died. And now we have another 10 years of technology. This prediction certainly hasn't come true for every single person, but many first-world 70's folks do look and act like the 40's, or at least 50's, folks of the 1950.
"Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people"
Again, not universally, but what fraction of people graduating college today both know how to cook a real meal and do it almost every night? About 50% of american meals are not eaten at home now. And what percent of the remaining ones are accounted for by TV Dinner/rehydrated pasta/di giorno pizza/some other prepared food? Nearly all of it. I consider myself an accomplished cook for my age (27), but even I only make a *real* meal about twice a week. The rest of the time it's a quick batch of spaghetti, papa johns pizza, or just snacks. Very few people really cook much today. EVERYONE cooked ALL THE TIME in 1950, or rather, the housewives did.
I personally think the most interesting failed "prediction" he made was simply an assumption - he assumed the typical family would still have a working husband and a housewife.
And oh, I still shave the normal way
Really? In 1950 a lot of people still used and sharpened their straight razors. Disposables wouldn't hit the markets for another decade, and the few existing electrics sucked. I've shaved with an electric since the very first day I shaved, only using a razor on the few occasions it wasn't available. I may not actually be using a chemical, but it doesn't really take me any longer to shave than what he describes. About a minute, most days.
Wood, brick and stone is too expensive, so we build in something else (poured plastic)?
Actually, stone *is* too expensive for most houses, and brick use is down as well. When we do use stone or even brick anymore, it's frequently decorative over a steel frame rather than truly structural. Wood has managed to stay competitive, largely because it's light and strong, and advanced power tools have made working with wood now even easier than pouring concrete into a form.
But have you noticed how many new houses have tyvek wrappers, advanced polymer insulations that are blown into the walls by fans, polymer carpets, spray-on stucco outer coatings, composite-material fireproof roofing tiles, etc.? Not precisely what he said, but maybe only because we found new materials even better.
Not so! One can directly raise DC voltages with a switched-capacitor circuit. You can also reduce and invert DC voltages with clever switched-capacitor circuits.
Now, getting the voltage necessary to drive a CRT out of a 5V power supply this way would be a royal pain.
Unless you really enjoy screwing around with electronics, I'd recommend just using an inverter and plugging in your hardware unaltered.
But if you're willing to go to the trouble and expense of modifying your computer, why not just shell out the extra bucks and use a laptop?
If this becomes commonplace, then machines that can read it become commonplace and the government and anyone else just treats it like any other data medium.
Besides, how could they regulate it? All you'd need to use it is a very high-resolution printer.
It's nowhere near that easy!
Think about it - for a virus to spread, the host has to live long enough to spread it. People fret that HIV could mutate so that it killed hosts in six months. But if it did, we'd wipe out AIDS in two years, because we could detect infections and prevent their spread much more effectively.
The same issue is true inside your cells. If that virus injects its genetic material into your cells and immediately kills the cell through apoptosis, then the cell's machinery doesn't have time to manufacture copies of the virus. Such a virus wouldn't even infect you, because it would never get replicated! You'd lose one cell for each copy of the virus that invaded your body - no big deal.
You could try to engineer a virus that copies itself inside your cell, and *then* triggers apoptosis. But this is inefficient, because viruses typically lyse (burst) infected cells once they've replicated many copies anyway. No need to waste time inducing AIF.
To spread successfully, a virus doesn't want to kill it's host. We can successfully contain ebola in isolated outbreaks and we eradicated smallpox. But when was the last time we successfully contained a rhinovirus (common cold)?.
I told it it was wrong. Guess I was in a "fight the Man" mood this afternoon.
I wonder what's the environmental impact of a stream of 20km/s heavy projectiles slamming into the ground under an ascending spacecraft?
Seriously, though, I suspect it wouldn't work. The mass of this particular electromagnetic device is horrendous (a large building) and it shoots small (a gram or two) slugs. And 20km/s is not all that high as exhaust velocities go. And, it almost certainly works by storing power off the grid in capacitors or other storage devices - the launch vehicle would have to carry some way to generate that electricity.
In rocketry you want to take the minimum weight of fuel+reaction mass to produce the maximum exhaust momentum. If you're going to do it with electricity, an ion engine is your best bet among existing technologies.
A fuel cell is a great solution, and the progress is going quickly. Of course, you still have to deal with carrying fuel, which either means storing hydrogen (another whole problem) or carrying a converter to strip hydrogen off of methanol/gasoline/whatever.
If you want a purely-electric solution, keep your eye on ultracapacitors. They're still pretty expensive, but they're already starting to beat the energy density of batteries. Check out this story from today. Seems this company has built a 2500 Farad capacitor that weighs less than a kilogram and can discharge current at 625 Amps. (Anyone with a bit of electronics knowledge should have jaws on the floor about now; I did). It stores power at 2.5 V, which gives it about 10x the energy density of batteries.
There are still some problems before we can use them to power cars (leakage current, dielectric breakdown at temperatures above 80 C etc.), but the advantages are great, not least among them that you can charge a capacitor pretty much as fast as you can feed current - no more waiting for batteries to charge! The company's web site also lists a 4-farad capacitor that weighs 5.5 grams. Anyone want to recharge that mobile phone in five seconds?