As far as I am aware there are two main types of radiation. An electromagentic shield wouldn't be really needed, since whatever it stops could be stopped by your skin anyway. The other type you'd need a foot of lead or lots of water. I'm open to correction here but that's my understanding.
Hahah, alright so. You construct an 11km high tower/launch ramp, a compressive tower the same as cell towers as a truss of smaller elements. A reasonable height-to-base ratiomight be 20:1. So a 10 km tower would have 3 base points 0.5 km apart, assuming you have a triangular cross section for the tower as a whole.
Each principal column would in turn be a truss with 3 sub-columns spaced 25 meters apart, which in turn are made of tertiary columns 1.2 meters apart and 0.06 meters in diameter each. The tertiary columns have a wall thickness of 0.03 meters. This puts you above the denser elements of the atmosphere. Its not nearly as hard as it seems, Frank Lloyd Wright designed mile-high skyscrapers back in the 30's.
Then you run maglev/railgun type vacuum tubes up the length of it, therefore using extremely cheap electrical energy to power the vessel through the first stage, which I think should put the ship into LEO at 7g, althoughyou'd probably still need a booster stage.
If you could launch at 10000 ft above sea level, you could reduce your velocity change to get into orbit by approx. 250 m/s. However, you need about 8000 m/s to get into orbit. A 3% improvement, which would actually be a serious improvement. A RL-10A has an Isp of about 450 seconds; thus, exhaust velocity Ve is about 4400 km/sec. Structure and payload mass fraction is exp[deltaV/Ve]; a RL-10A powered vehicle could achieve a maxium amount of structure plus payload to 8km/sec of 16.3%. Typically about 5% of this is actually payload. A 3% decrease in delta-V to orbit increases this to 17.3%. This increases the *payload* to 6% of the gross lift-off mass -- a 20% increase in payload.
Imagine the benefits of launching higher and a lot faster.
This has the effect of vastly reducing the cost to get to LEO and from there to proper orbit and eventually escape; if it was as cheap to get to orbit as it is to cross oceans, we'd already be on Mars.
So lets talk mineral wealth. The most detailed study of an asteroid, Eros, collected by NEAR shows that it contains precious metals worth at least $20 trillion. If Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance's of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.
That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.
So once you make it economical to get up there, you need to build out an infrastructure. There are lots of theories on how to do this by aseroid resource extraction, I'm wavering towards the "rubble pile" asteroids which come pre-demolished, I can go into more detail if you like.
Let's be clear though, unless a launch tower would drastically lower costs to space, the initial buildout has to be for space and by space. Then once orbital manufacture has reached a sufficiently advanced level, you can send manufactured goods, worth many times their wieght in gold, straight back to earth markets.
/borrowed from many sources, I haven't the time to do the maths right now.
Energy is basically free, you have the sun right there. The main cost after building it is getting the stuff from the earth to the launcher, I'm envisioning some sort of two stage railgun apparatus here.
One thing that is not the same is resupply, and that (not surprisingly) is the sticking point with all these sorts of schemes.
Couldn't you just fire a continuous stream of supply pods after it? You could even use them to help build up velocity if you wanted. It doesn't matter how long your supply chain is, once it is unbroken. You could even fire a cluster of them intended to end up around Mars in orbit.
Hrm. Took me aback as well, that might just work with some serious modifications. Of course I don't see much point in going to Mars right away, we'd be better off concentrating on the mineral wealth floating around near to earth and using that to build orbital manufactories and further survey ships. Once we have a significant orbital infrastructure we can populate that level and look at going much further out, in style.
I mean I get the whole wonder of the mission and so on, but there's a reason man didn't go back to the moon. We need real economic incentives to build onwards and upwards, realistically. Once we're up there in force it's a whole lot easier to go anywhere else.
Ah that's nothing, if you want some really dodgy names go to the Philippines. Dildo, Lolita, Thumper, Flipper, Ding Dong and Hitler are a few that spring to mind. I love Filipinos but seriously.
No, e-ink lowers the cost of entry over books in terms of knowledge, which is the key to almost everything. You create industries by looking at the requirements of other African nations and setting up trade agreements (a la EU or China) to help countries bootstrap one another with needs at their level, until they are ready to compete on the global level. Apply tarriffs and trade incentives as needed. Almost an economic walled garden, but I don't think western countries have any right to complain if that's the route Africa takes, and in the end everyone wins.
I can see a lot of advantages to using e-ink devices though, you can store tens of thousands of books in each one at no extra weight cost, and if you harden it a bit it should last a lot longer than most books in tropical conditions. Also for an added bonus, you can change your curriculum or update books at very little cost.
Thats only one example though, neither sci fi nor fantasy can generally be considered "progressive" or "conservative", since there exists a full spectrum of ideologies and themes in both genres. Sci fi and fantasy are just the medium through which the themes are expressed, there's nothing intrinsically conservative about fantasy.
Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.
A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order.
I'd think that's a bit of generalisation about fantasy and sci fi both. The literature is a lot more complex than that, I mean look at one of the founding pillars of modern fantasy, Michael Moorcock's Elric series, a hero sets forth specifically to change and modernise the old order. Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy. Its much too simple to take broad general view of a vastly wide and varied body of works.
I was not aware of the dubious groups funded by the Bradley foundation, although looking down the list they also fund anti child abuse groups and some of the most quoted and respected think tanks in the US. How and ever, this is an ad hominem reaction.
The only legitimate argument on the site is that the Earth can produce enough food, although the argument relies on petrochemical fertilizers, and does not acknowledge constraints on the petrochemicals.
The site does not even acknowledge concerns about the high risk of global diseases, the massive amounts of waste products and pollution from industry and agriculture, or constraints on energy and water supplies.
Surely global diseases would reduce the population? Waste products and pollution are being dealt with over the course of decades via various environmental initiatives such as carbon taxes. If you were to cover 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara desert with photovoltaic cells, you would supply 100% of the world's power requirements. I'm not saying that's a good idea, I am saying that we are swimming in energy. Water resources follow on from this, in those areas where water is in short supply, which I doubt would be tha majority of settled areas.
Oh, and nobody has even mentioned that there might not be enough jobs for everyone in the world.
Mmm, funny thing, the more people there are, the larger the economy. People produce as well as consume. This was covered by one of the videos.
In one section, the authors "prove" the Earth's population will peak around 8 B in 30 years and begin to decline by linking to the UN Population DB and telling you to use the "low variant" model. They don't tell you that the other three models (constant fertility, medium, high) all show the population continuing to rise for the duration of the model (present - 2050).
Talk about selective information. What a crock of shit.
As lifestyles improve, population growth declines. This is readily observable. There is no shortage of energy and hence other materials available, so there is no reason why the people of China, India, and Africa shouldn't have a fully westernised lifestyle, whatever that may be. We aren't choking on our own wastes, we aren't running out of things we can't replace, we are in short doing alright.
Malthusians need to recognise the facts, including the fact that the priest who gave them their name advocated killing off the poor to sustain the lifestyles of the rich.
Wind scales very well, this is the idea behind the European supergrid concept. When you roll it out piecemeal its about as efficient as having a gas turbine on every roof. A wide install base and multiple connections to the grid means that wind does quite nicely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
Nuclear on the other hand comes in with an installed cost of at best roughly equal to wind, and at worst three times more expensive.
"The lifetime cost of new generating capacity in the United States was estimated in 2006 by the U.S. government: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MWh, coal (cheap in the U.S.) at $53.10, natural gas at $52.50 and nuclear at $59.30"
Farming subsidies are the real weapons of economic control
Farming subsidies exist so western countries don't have to rely on third world dictators and their enslaved workers for their daily bread. Africa is an entire continent, they should be able to bootstrap their economies by selling to one another. It would need a good unified plan however.
Wasn't Paranormal Activity rated R? The game is definitely more adult fare. It's very dark, and certainly has imagery and themes that should probably be covered by an R rating. I don't know that he could make the movie and stay faithful to the game without going that route. Not sure what alternative you're suggesting.
There was no good reason for Paranormal Activity to be rated R, excessive profanity(!) I think it was. Really though, the bottom line is that PA was just a plain old fashioned terrifying movie, and what it does for the purposes of this discussion is underline the difference between horror and gore, and it might be that this director doesn't recognise that difference. All too often creativity in horror is just replaced by stringing intestines up for the christmas decorations.
Slashdot Mirror
Pick one. Destroy them. Let the rest learn from the example. We can most certainly do this.
People were being tortured to death you iredeemable pleb.
I grow tired of the evil enabled by fools. Let us together remove it, and breathe once again the fresh, honest air.
Indeed it does, I stand corrected, no idea where I read that originally. Possibly Al Jazeera. :D
Al Jazeera means "the truth", so The Truth = Freedom. Why would anyone want or need to doctor up a message like that? It's true!
Hitler, Himmler, and Hess: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4609892.stm I remember Jaime Sin alright, best name/job combination ever! :D
As far as I am aware there are two main types of radiation. An electromagentic shield wouldn't be really needed, since whatever it stops could be stopped by your skin anyway. The other type you'd need a foot of lead or lots of water. I'm open to correction here but that's my understanding.
Hahah, alright so. You construct an 11km high tower/launch ramp, a compressive tower the same as cell towers as a truss of smaller elements. A reasonable height-to-base ratiomight be 20:1. So a 10 km tower would have 3 base points 0.5 km apart, assuming you have a triangular cross section for the tower as a whole.
Each principal column would in turn be a truss with 3 sub-columns spaced 25 meters apart, which in turn are made of tertiary columns 1.2 meters apart and 0.06 meters in diameter each. The tertiary columns have a wall thickness of 0.03 meters. This puts you above the denser elements of the atmosphere. Its not nearly as hard as it seems, Frank Lloyd Wright designed mile-high skyscrapers back in the 30's.
Then you run maglev/railgun type vacuum tubes up the length of it, therefore using extremely cheap electrical energy to power the vessel through the first stage, which I think should put the ship into LEO at 7g, althoughyou'd probably still need a booster stage.
If you could launch at 10000 ft above sea level, you could reduce your velocity change to get into orbit by approx. 250 m/s. However, you need about 8000 m/s to get into orbit. A 3% improvement, which would actually be a serious improvement. A RL-10A has an Isp of about 450 seconds; thus, exhaust velocity Ve is about 4400 km/sec. Structure and payload mass fraction is exp[deltaV/Ve]; a RL-10A powered vehicle could achieve a maxium amount of structure plus payload to 8km/sec of 16.3%. Typically about 5% of this is actually payload. A 3% decrease in delta-V to orbit increases this to 17.3%. This increases the *payload* to 6% of the gross lift-off mass -- a 20% increase in payload.
Imagine the benefits of launching higher and a lot faster.
This has the effect of vastly reducing the cost to get to LEO and from there to proper orbit and eventually escape; if it was as cheap to get to orbit as it is to cross oceans, we'd already be on Mars.
So lets talk mineral wealth. The most detailed study of an asteroid, Eros, collected by NEAR shows that it contains precious metals worth at least $20 trillion. If Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance's of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.
That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.
So once you make it economical to get up there, you need to build out an infrastructure. There are lots of theories on how to do this by aseroid resource extraction, I'm wavering towards the "rubble pile" asteroids which come pre-demolished, I can go into more detail if you like.
Let's be clear though, unless a launch tower would drastically lower costs to space, the initial buildout has to be for space and by space. Then once orbital manufacture has reached a sufficiently advanced level, you can send manufactured goods, worth many times their wieght in gold, straight back to earth markets.
/borrowed from many sources, I haven't the time to do the maths right now.
Energy is basically free, you have the sun right there. The main cost after building it is getting the stuff from the earth to the launcher, I'm envisioning some sort of two stage railgun apparatus here.
One thing that is not the same is resupply, and that (not surprisingly) is the sticking point with all these sorts of schemes.
Couldn't you just fire a continuous stream of supply pods after it? You could even use them to help build up velocity if you wanted. It doesn't matter how long your supply chain is, once it is unbroken. You could even fire a cluster of them intended to end up around Mars in orbit.
Hrm. Took me aback as well, that might just work with some serious modifications. Of course I don't see much point in going to Mars right away, we'd be better off concentrating on the mineral wealth floating around near to earth and using that to build orbital manufactories and further survey ships. Once we have a significant orbital infrastructure we can populate that level and look at going much further out, in style.
I mean I get the whole wonder of the mission and so on, but there's a reason man didn't go back to the moon. We need real economic incentives to build onwards and upwards, realistically. Once we're up there in force it's a whole lot easier to go anywhere else.
Ah that's nothing, if you want some really dodgy names go to the Philippines. Dildo, Lolita, Thumper, Flipper, Ding Dong and Hitler are a few that spring to mind. I love Filipinos but seriously.
No, e-ink lowers the cost of entry over books in terms of knowledge, which is the key to almost everything. You create industries by looking at the requirements of other African nations and setting up trade agreements (a la EU or China) to help countries bootstrap one another with needs at their level, until they are ready to compete on the global level. Apply tarriffs and trade incentives as needed. Almost an economic walled garden, but I don't think western countries have any right to complain if that's the route Africa takes, and in the end everyone wins.
There's nothing about e-readers that precludes the simultaneous use of paper and ink.
I can see a lot of advantages to using e-ink devices though, you can store tens of thousands of books in each one at no extra weight cost, and if you harden it a bit it should last a lot longer than most books in tropical conditions. Also for an added bonus, you can change your curriculum or update books at very little cost.
Thats only one example though, neither sci fi nor fantasy can generally be considered "progressive" or "conservative", since there exists a full spectrum of ideologies and themes in both genres. Sci fi and fantasy are just the medium through which the themes are expressed, there's nothing intrinsically conservative about fantasy.
Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.
A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order.
I'd think that's a bit of generalisation about fantasy and sci fi both. The literature is a lot more complex than that, I mean look at one of the founding pillars of modern fantasy, Michael Moorcock's Elric series, a hero sets forth specifically to change and modernise the old order. Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy. Its much too simple to take broad general view of a vastly wide and varied body of works.
Burn!
Ah this is just paving the way for the next version of chrome - no browser at all! Just sit there and use your imagination.
they all require the use of some as-yet-unknown material that has negative mass. As no such material is even theorized to exist
Einstein among others suggested that the Casimir effect might be indicative of the possibility of such a substance existing.
Wow, what a horrible site full of misinformation and straw man arguments.
This site was funded by the Bradley Foundation
I was not aware of the dubious groups funded by the Bradley foundation, although looking down the list they also fund anti child abuse groups and some of the most quoted and respected think tanks in the US. How and ever, this is an ad hominem reaction.
The only legitimate argument on the site is that the Earth can produce enough food, although the argument relies on petrochemical fertilizers, and does not acknowledge constraints on the petrochemicals.
You don't need oil to produce nitrogen fertilisers. Please read this:
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2007/11/314-peak-oil-and-fertilizer-no-problem.html
We have no shortage of any of the ingredients needed for it.
The site does not even acknowledge concerns about the high risk of global diseases, the massive amounts of waste products and pollution from industry and agriculture, or constraints on energy and water supplies.
Surely global diseases would reduce the population? Waste products and pollution are being dealt with over the course of decades via various environmental initiatives such as carbon taxes. If you were to cover 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara desert with photovoltaic cells, you would supply 100% of the world's power requirements. I'm not saying that's a good idea, I am saying that we are swimming in energy. Water resources follow on from this, in those areas where water is in short supply, which I doubt would be tha majority of settled areas.
Oh, and nobody has even mentioned that there might not be enough jobs for everyone in the world.
Mmm, funny thing, the more people there are, the larger the economy. People produce as well as consume. This was covered by one of the videos.
In one section, the authors "prove" the Earth's population will peak around 8 B in 30 years and begin to decline by linking to the UN Population DB and telling you to use the "low variant" model. They don't tell you that the other three models (constant fertility, medium, high) all show the population continuing to rise for the duration of the model (present - 2050).
Talk about selective information. What a crock of shit.
As lifestyles improve, population growth declines. This is readily observable. There is no shortage of energy and hence other materials available, so there is no reason why the people of China, India, and Africa shouldn't have a fully westernised lifestyle, whatever that may be. We aren't choking on our own wastes, we aren't running out of things we can't replace, we are in short doing alright.
Malthusians need to recognise the facts, including the fact that the priest who gave them their name advocated killing off the poor to sustain the lifestyles of the rich.
Wind scales very well, this is the idea behind the European supergrid concept. When you roll it out piecemeal its about as efficient as having a gas turbine on every roof. A wide install base and multiple connections to the grid means that wind does quite nicely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
Nuclear on the other hand comes in with an installed cost of at best roughly equal to wind, and at worst three times more expensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
"The lifetime cost of new generating capacity in the United States was estimated in 2006 by the U.S. government: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MWh, coal (cheap in the U.S.) at $53.10, natural gas at $52.50 and nuclear at $59.30"
Farming subsidies are the real weapons of economic control
Farming subsidies exist so western countries don't have to rely on third world dictators and their enslaved workers for their daily bread. Africa is an entire continent, they should be able to bootstrap their economies by selling to one another. It would need a good unified plan however.
Overpopulation is a myth
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
Please read, learn and revise opinion accordingly.
Wasn't Paranormal Activity rated R? The game is definitely more adult fare. It's very dark, and certainly has imagery and themes that should probably be covered by an R rating. I don't know that he could make the movie and stay faithful to the game without going that route. Not sure what alternative you're suggesting.
There was no good reason for Paranormal Activity to be rated R, excessive profanity(!) I think it was. Really though, the bottom line is that PA was just a plain old fashioned terrifying movie, and what it does for the purposes of this discussion is underline the difference between horror and gore, and it might be that this director doesn't recognise that difference. All too often creativity in horror is just replaced by stringing intestines up for the christmas decorations.