It is entirely possible that there are undiscovered planets in the habitable zone. It is the planets closest to the star with the shortest orbital periods that are the easiest to discover, either because generate frequent perturbations that can be detected in the data set, or are the most likely to cross the stellar disk (when using the brightness fluctuation method).
In fact unless you are using a folded optical design, shorter is often better (assuming you can maintain optical quality). The shortness of a telescope is measured by its focal ratio, with the lower the ratio the shorter the telescope. Galileo's telescope was F/12, and many of 17th and 18th centuries were F/60. The Mt. Palomar telescope is F/3.8, the Keck Telescope is F/1.75, KELT is F/1.8.
Modern understanding of good hygiene, sanitation, vermin control, physical activity, accident prevention, and adequate clothing, shelter, and HVAC systems contribute most to longevity. Those in the medical profession would have you think that you are living twice as long as you would have were it not for all of their medications, treatments, surgeries and other procedures. Of all the medical "miracles", only antibiotics and insulin have had enough effect to substantially increase life expectancy for the general population.
You left out good nutrition, also not high tech medicine, but extremely important for longevity (more important than accident prevention by far). And you left out vaccinations a tool that is doing wonders right now in extending the lives in the Third World right now, just as they did in industrialized societies (they are far more important for this purpose than HVAC).
But you entirely leave out "quality of life". How many people go through their entire lives without ever requiring intervention from modern medicine that relieved some otherwise excruciating/debilitating/disfiguring intervention? In my immediate family of extending to third degree I can't think of anyone.
This system socioeconomic organization - great independent (e)states with tenants who owed taxes and services to their overlord - suspiciously resembles Feudalism not by accident. The Westem Roman Empire devolved into Feudal Europe.
Nah.
Conservatives have made a cottage industry (all right- much bigger than a cottage now) trying to spin history this way, but it was the growth of vast independent estates (latifundia), virtual microstates of their own, that originally were tasked with delivering tax revenues to the government (there was no Roman IRS) collected from their tenants (coloni), which simply stopped paying taxes.
Tax rates did shoot up after that, but only because the tax base shrank - those with most of the wealth weren't paying so the government started squeezing blood from stones.
The same process (with some variation) occurred in China and the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman's were the "Sick Man of Europe" not because they were taxing everyone so much, but because they lost control of major territories (e.g. Egypt, which became autonomous in the 1800s) and lost the tax revenue from them, starving the central government of resources.
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
What happens with most empires is that the components (several cycles of Chinese empires, the Western Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc.) is that the political/geographic sub-components become too powerful, siphoning off revenue from the central government for their own use, which atrophies and loses its authority. A new conqueror may then come in to reconsolidate central power by stripping away the authority of the peripheral components.
depicting the actors who played the characters in the movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved book
That's how they get around paying Tolkien's estate. Otherwise the licensing would definitely make NZ come out in the red from the project.
Wait a second. The actors control their own image for commercial purposes also. Why is there cut necessarily smaller? If Tolkien's estate wants some more scratch they can negotiated a deal that keeps NZ in the black also. Now they are getting 100% of nothing.
...The means the odds of 0 or 1 engine failing (a successful launch) is 97.6% and the odds of more than one failing is 2.4% assuming the currently observed rate is representative of the actual rate. 2.4% would be an excellent failure rate for any rocket launch system. In fact, no one has achieved a failure rate that low....
There are vehicles that have matched or beaten this rate. The Delta 2 (retired) achieved 149 out of 151 (99%). The currently active Soyuz-U has achieved a failure rate indistinguishable from this (741 successes out of 761, 97.4%). There are other vehicles that claim 100%, but have launched too few to be able to claim this rate. One factor to consider is that launch systems often mature and have a long series on unbroken successes after having some failures early on: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2012.html
I don't think that taxonomy has been in use for a long time. I haven't heard any researcher refer to Neandertals as a subspecies of H. sapens for many years. Nor would it make much sense considering they are likely both daughter species of H. erectus.
Right. Genetic evidence shows an ancient lineage split with Neanderthals around 700-800,000 years ago, and modern humans coming into existence only around 250,000 years ago.
To expand on MightyMartian has to say even the most advanced parts of Europe had no technological advantage over East Asia until about 1700, had no economic advantage over China until about 1800. The per capita GDPs of England and China were the same until the Industrial Revolution. Europe only demonstrated any sort of cultural dominance over China in 1839 thanks to the new weaponry and supply capability of the Industrial Revolution. Those "advanced" Aryans sure were lazy for a long, long time.
... Before that, Northern and Western Europe was a backwater and had been since before the dawn of civilization.
Ever heard of Alexander of Macedon? You know...the guy who conquered half the world in the 4th century BC? Yeah, that was over two millennia ago. Maybe you should go take an Intro to Western Civ class, clown.
And when did Alexander of Macedon ever set foot in Northern or Western Europe? He himself thought he had conquered half the world, but we have learned a little more geography in the last 2400 years. Most of Greece, most of Turkey, part of the eastern half of the Middle East and Pakistan is not half the world.
Trying to explain away Norway's social and economic successes by saying "but they've got oil" does not cut the mustard.
Texas had also had in the past had oil revenues of a similar high level (20% of the state GDP in 1981): http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3739 , which is the same as Norway's today: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3421.htm . Yet Texas never developed the same level of social well-being, short work hours, or even economic development. The per capita GDP of Texas is far behind that of Norway (or California for that matter).
...in case you're like me wondering what species of slime mold a "Paul Broun" is...
Please. Slime molds exhibit altruistic behavior, with the amoebae sacrificing themselves for the good of the colony and species when erecting a fruiting body. Don't slander the slime mold.
If you don't allow government to set policy on things it has no business being involved in, this would be a non-story.
Ah the modern Republican strategy in a nutshell. When in power act like a bull in china shop*, wreck the machinery of government, the budget, the economy, then declare: "See! A strong government is a dangerous thing! Fix the damage we did? That's crazy talk! We must instead abolish government!"**
*Yes, I saw the Myth-Busters, this slanders bulls.
**Except for the having lots of guns: a vast military to bully the rest of world, and police to protect the property of the wealthy.
He got an MD 41 years ago from the Medical College of Georgia. Since then he has confined his practice exclusively to home visits in rural Georgia and thus escapes any scrutiny of his medical or scientific knowledge or skills from any outside party. All he has to do to retain his license is pay a fee every two years and take 20 hours of CME (continuing medical education) credits a year. Aside from taking those credits he has been running open-loop in terms of his contact with science and medicine for more than forty years.
The part of Georgia that elects him only elects Republicans in recent decades so Democrat bothered to enter a race against him, and no Republican challenged him in the primaries. So he ran completely unopposed this year, and is clearly feeling his oats - letting it all hang out there.
... Hawking radiation is VERY weak in general, and shouldn't have any significant effect on things like jets that operate on a galactic scale...
Just how weak? The amount of energy radiation by the M-87 black hole is just 10^-46 watts. How small is this? It would take 25 billion times the age of the Universe for the M-87 black hole to emit the energy of one photon of visible light (the smallest quantity of energy a human could directly detect). Hawking radiation drops with the inverse square of the mass, and so become immeasurable for all astronomical black holes.
The employees are being granted stock in phases, which is priced at the time of grant. They thus are getting paid in stock, and will be taxed at the market value. They can pay those taxes by selling off some of their shares.
This is not a problem for employees, though their stock when they get is worth less than they had expected.
The cost of building with carbon fiber is greatly exaggerated by a consistent confusion between the goals of using it as an engineering material, and the desire to make a fashion statement. Carbon fiber can be fabricated by the same techniques used in fiberglass, and although it costs ~$45/kg for woven fabric, this is only a little more the twice the price for fiberglass, and you are paying much less per unit of strength or stiffness.
So why do CF products typically cost a lot more than twice fiberglass equivalents? Google images of CF products and fiberglass products and you will have your answer. Without exception in the few hundred of images I viewed when I did that the CF products all had pretty, bare CF surfaces, but all the fiberglass products were painted. The decision to treat CF as a fashion statement, requiring cosmetically attractive, defect free bare surfaces is what costs an arm and a leg. If CF was treated just as a construction material, like fiberglass, where perfect fabric alignment is not essential, and patching, filling and sanding is routine procedure to produce an item for use - which then gets some sort of cosmetic treatment to ship (paint, enamel, contact paper - they make cool vinyl stick-ons that look exactly like carbon fiber too!).
"Current solar-powered battery storage technology isn't adequate to sustain artificial light sources for two weeks at the time"
I would need to see a study showing this for me to believe there are no feasible storage technologies. What about flywheels? Perhaps the rotor could be made from melted lunar soil with an automated melting/casting plant - the Moon's first industry. Then only the relatively light motor/generator need be sent from Earth. (And as long as you are casting rotors, perhaps other structural parts could be made the same way.)
Actual research with LEDs, which can selectively emit light in the bands actually used for photosynthesis, suggests that the amount of electricity required for illumination is in the order of 1000 watt/m^2 period, no "factor of 10" multiplier needed. So 50 KW is needed continuous (no, you don't turn the lights off for most crops - only photoperiod sensitive ones light strawberries).
"A rented plane and a bunch of photographs today and it's pretty obvious that it's a crater, folks."
Only if "crater" means "circular depression". Sinkholes make nice circular depressions also, and are far from rare in the South. And the summary misuses the term "astrobleme" which means "cosmic impact crater" and would be the whole circular structure. I gather the poster is referring to an elevated region in the center which may be an impact rebound peak.
Melted rock and magnetic dust makes the case stronger (but ancient volcanism could account for at least the melted rock), but the real smoking gun that would make the case without any doubt would be coesite or stishovite (for example), quartz that has been transformed by megabar (millions of atmospheres) of pressure. These materials (or other evidence of extremely intense shock waves such as characteristic microfractures) are virtual proof of a cosmic impact.
Real estate (i.e. a place on which to live) actually is a fixed asset - there is a finite known quantity to go around, and it can only be redistributed from one owner/user to another.
...
Basically, most immortals will live their lives like Richard Branson does now. Do what you want once you have built up enough capital to support yourself....
What if indefinite life extension technology becomes available, but the cost for extending one person's life required the equivalent of a $2 million dollar up-front payment (initial cost, plus the support annuity)? No way could most people raise that kind of money even for one family member. However nearly everyone in the top 1% can afford this for every family member (the family wealth threshold is around $9 million). So we would have Richard Branson, and a few million others, living forever in (mostly still) wealth, while the rest of us die around 80 or so.
If not everyone can live forever, you can be assured that the rich will be among those who will. That's as sure as... well, taxes.
It does show how utterly blind he is to what a manipulative, emotionally deformed sociopath he is. That he would would voluntarily put this out there for the rest of us to read with jaw-dropping stupified horror.
Slashdot Mirror
It is entirely possible that there are undiscovered planets in the habitable zone. It is the planets closest to the star with the shortest orbital periods that are the easiest to discover, either because generate frequent perturbations that can be detected in the data set, or are the most likely to cross the stellar disk (when using the brightness fluctuation method).
In fact unless you are using a folded optical design, shorter is often better (assuming you can maintain optical quality). The shortness of a telescope is measured by its focal ratio, with the lower the ratio the shorter the telescope. Galileo's telescope was F/12, and many of 17th and 18th centuries were F/60. The Mt. Palomar telescope is F/3.8, the Keck Telescope is F/1.75, KELT is F/1.8.
Modern understanding of good hygiene, sanitation, vermin control, physical activity, accident prevention, and adequate clothing, shelter, and HVAC systems contribute most to longevity. Those in the medical profession would have you think that you are living twice as long as you would have were it not for all of their medications, treatments, surgeries and other procedures. Of all the medical "miracles", only antibiotics and insulin have had enough effect to substantially increase life expectancy for the general population.
You left out good nutrition, also not high tech medicine, but extremely important for longevity (more important than accident prevention by far). And you left out vaccinations a tool that is doing wonders right now in extending the lives in the Third World right now, just as they did in industrialized societies (they are far more important for this purpose than HVAC).
But you entirely leave out "quality of life". How many people go through their entire lives without ever requiring intervention from modern medicine that relieved some otherwise excruciating/debilitating/disfiguring intervention? In my immediate family of extending to third degree I can't think of anyone.
This system socioeconomic organization - great independent (e)states with tenants who owed taxes and services to their overlord - suspiciously resembles Feudalism not by accident. The Westem Roman Empire devolved into Feudal Europe.
Tax rates did shoot up after that, but only because the tax base shrank - those with most of the wealth weren't paying so the government started squeezing blood from stones.
See for example:
http://www.financialtaskforce.org/2012/06/11/how-tax-repatriation-helped-cause-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire/
The same process (with some variation) occurred in China and the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman's were the "Sick Man of Europe" not because they were taxing everyone so much, but because they lost control of major territories (e.g. Egypt, which became autonomous in the 1800s) and lost the tax revenue from them, starving the central government of resources.
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
What happens with most empires is that the components (several cycles of Chinese empires, the Western Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc.) is that the political/geographic sub-components become too powerful, siphoning off revenue from the central government for their own use, which atrophies and loses its authority. A new conqueror may then come in to reconsolidate central power by stripping away the authority of the peripheral components.
depicting the actors who played the characters in the movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved book
That's how they get around paying Tolkien's estate. Otherwise the licensing would definitely make NZ come out in the red from the project.
Wait a second. The actors control their own image for commercial purposes also. Why is there cut necessarily smaller? If Tolkien's estate wants some more scratch they can negotiated a deal that keeps NZ in the black also. Now they are getting 100% of nothing.
...The means the odds of 0 or 1 engine failing (a successful launch) is 97.6% and the odds of more than one failing is 2.4% assuming the currently observed rate is representative of the actual rate. 2.4% would be an excellent failure rate for any rocket launch system. In fact, no one has achieved a failure rate that low....
There are vehicles that have matched or beaten this rate. The Delta 2 (retired) achieved 149 out of 151 (99%). The currently active Soyuz-U has achieved a failure rate indistinguishable from this (741 successes out of 761, 97.4%). There are other vehicles that claim 100%, but have launched too few to be able to claim this rate. One factor to consider is that launch systems often mature and have a long series on unbroken successes after having some failures early on: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2012.html
I don't think that taxonomy has been in use for a long time. I haven't heard any researcher refer to Neandertals as a subspecies of H. sapens for many years. Nor would it make much sense considering they are likely both daughter species of H. erectus.
Right. Genetic evidence shows an ancient lineage split with Neanderthals around 700-800,000 years ago, and modern humans coming into existence only around 250,000 years ago.
To expand on MightyMartian has to say even the most advanced parts of Europe had no technological advantage over East Asia until about 1700, had no economic advantage over China until about 1800. The per capita GDPs of England and China were the same until the Industrial Revolution. Europe only demonstrated any sort of cultural dominance over China in 1839 thanks to the new weaponry and supply capability of the Industrial Revolution. Those "advanced" Aryans sure were lazy for a long, long time.
... Before that, Northern and Western Europe was a backwater and had been since before the dawn of civilization.
Ever heard of Alexander of Macedon? You know...the guy who conquered half the world in the 4th century BC? Yeah, that was over two millennia ago. Maybe you should go take an Intro to Western Civ class, clown.
And when did Alexander of Macedon ever set foot in Northern or Western Europe? He himself thought he had conquered half the world, but we have learned a little more geography in the last 2400 years. Most of Greece, most of Turkey, part of the eastern half of the Middle East and Pakistan is not half the world.
Maybe Ringling Brothers is holding auditions AC.
Trying to explain away Norway's social and economic successes by saying "but they've got oil" does not cut the mustard.
Texas had also had in the past had oil revenues of a similar high level (20% of the state GDP in 1981): http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3739 , which is the same as Norway's today: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3421.htm . Yet Texas never developed the same level of social well-being, short work hours, or even economic development. The per capita GDP of Texas is far behind that of Norway (or California for that matter).
...in case you're like me wondering what species of slime mold a "Paul Broun" is...
Please. Slime molds exhibit altruistic behavior, with the amoebae sacrificing themselves for the good of the colony and species when erecting a fruiting body. Don't slander the slime mold.
If you don't allow government to set policy on things it has no business being involved in, this would be a non-story.
Ah the modern Republican strategy in a nutshell. When in power act like a bull in china shop*, wreck the machinery of government, the budget, the economy, then declare: "See! A strong government is a dangerous thing! Fix the damage we did? That's crazy talk! We must instead abolish government!"**
*Yes, I saw the Myth-Busters, this slanders bulls.
**Except for the having lots of guns: a vast military to bully the rest of world, and police to protect the property of the wealthy.
He got an MD 41 years ago from the Medical College of Georgia. Since then he has confined his practice exclusively to home visits in rural Georgia and thus escapes any scrutiny of his medical or scientific knowledge or skills from any outside party. All he has to do to retain his license is pay a fee every two years and take 20 hours of CME (continuing medical education) credits a year. Aside from taking those credits he has been running open-loop in terms of his contact with science and medicine for more than forty years.
The part of Georgia that elects him only elects Republicans in recent decades so Democrat bothered to enter a race against him, and no Republican challenged him in the primaries. So he ran completely unopposed this year, and is clearly feeling his oats - letting it all hang out there.
... Hawking radiation is VERY weak in general, and shouldn't have any significant effect on things like jets that operate on a galactic scale...
Just how weak? The amount of energy radiation by the M-87 black hole is just 10^-46 watts. How small is this? It would take 25 billion times the age of the Universe for the M-87 black hole to emit the energy of one photon of visible light (the smallest quantity of energy a human could directly detect). Hawking radiation drops with the inverse square of the mass, and so become immeasurable for all astronomical black holes.
Only if you don't think the cost of a piece of technology is part of its design.
We don't have to guess about this, articles about the nature of employee stock compensation are readily available: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lockup-release-2012-8
The employees are being granted stock in phases, which is priced at the time of grant. They thus are getting paid in stock, and will be taxed at the market value. They can pay those taxes by selling off some of their shares.
This is not a problem for employees, though their stock when they get is worth less than they had expected.
The cost of building with carbon fiber is greatly exaggerated by a consistent confusion between the goals of using it as an engineering material, and the desire to make a fashion statement. Carbon fiber can be fabricated by the same techniques used in fiberglass, and although it costs ~$45/kg for woven fabric, this is only a little more the twice the price for fiberglass, and you are paying much less per unit of strength or stiffness.
So why do CF products typically cost a lot more than twice fiberglass equivalents? Google images of CF products and fiberglass products and you will have your answer. Without exception in the few hundred of images I viewed when I did that the CF products all had pretty, bare CF surfaces, but all the fiberglass products were painted. The decision to treat CF as a fashion statement, requiring cosmetically attractive, defect free bare surfaces is what costs an arm and a leg. If CF was treated just as a construction material, like fiberglass, where perfect fabric alignment is not essential, and patching, filling and sanding is routine procedure to produce an item for use - which then gets some sort of cosmetic treatment to ship (paint, enamel, contact paper - they make cool vinyl stick-ons that look exactly like carbon fiber too!).
"Current solar-powered battery storage technology isn't adequate to sustain artificial light sources for two weeks at the time"
I would need to see a study showing this for me to believe there are no feasible storage technologies. What about flywheels? Perhaps the rotor could be made from melted lunar soil with an automated melting/casting plant - the Moon's first industry. Then only the relatively light motor/generator need be sent from Earth. (And as long as you are casting rotors, perhaps other structural parts could be made the same way.)
Actual research with LEDs, which can selectively emit light in the bands actually used for photosynthesis, suggests that the amount of electricity required for illumination is in the order of 1000 watt/m^2 period, no "factor of 10" multiplier needed. So 50 KW is needed continuous (no, you don't turn the lights off for most crops - only photoperiod sensitive ones light strawberries).
http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/43/7/1947.full
"A rented plane and a bunch of photographs today and it's pretty obvious that it's a crater, folks."
Only if "crater" means "circular depression". Sinkholes make nice circular depressions also, and are far from rare in the South. And the summary misuses the term "astrobleme" which means "cosmic impact crater" and would be the whole circular structure. I gather the poster is referring to an elevated region in the center which may be an impact rebound peak.
Melted rock and magnetic dust makes the case stronger (but ancient volcanism could account for at least the melted rock), but the real smoking gun that would make the case without any doubt would be coesite or stishovite (for example), quartz that has been transformed by megabar (millions of atmospheres) of pressure. These materials (or other evidence of extremely intense shock waves such as characteristic microfractures) are virtual proof of a cosmic impact.
Real estate (i.e. a place on which to live) actually is a fixed asset - there is a finite known quantity to go around, and it can only be redistributed from one owner/user to another.
... Basically, most immortals will live their lives like Richard Branson does now. Do what you want once you have built up enough capital to support yourself. ...
What if indefinite life extension technology becomes available, but the cost for extending one person's life required the equivalent of a $2 million dollar up-front payment (initial cost, plus the support annuity)? No way could most people raise that kind of money even for one family member. However nearly everyone in the top 1% can afford this for every family member (the family wealth threshold is around $9 million). So we would have Richard Branson, and a few million others, living forever in (mostly still) wealth, while the rest of us die around 80 or so.
If not everyone can live forever, you can be assured that the rich will be among those who will. That's as sure as... well, taxes.
It does show how utterly blind he is to what a manipulative, emotionally deformed sociopath he is. That he would would voluntarily put this out there for the rest of us to read with jaw-dropping stupified horror.