Last I heard Slashdot was an *AMERICAN* web site, owned by VA LINUX, which is an *AMERICAN* company. I mean, if you think it's too American, there's plenty of other places online for news and discussion.
I do not think that the american way of doing things (writing numbers, spelling "color" or making sandwhiches) is necessarily better than the way any other country does things, but complaining about the US-Centricity of a web site based in US is like complaining that a japanese web site is in japanese! Please!
Hey, thanks a bunch! That makes a lot of sense, and I was going to slap on RedHat for the first few months anyways. Security isn't a big issue for us at the moment (it's going to be so heavily firewalled, maybe only a few IP addresses are even going to be allowed access to it in any way).
Any ideas about hardware? We don't need monitors or periferals, but does it matter what kind of eithernet card I get (so long as it's 100 base T, and has a working driver under linux)?
First of all, visible light just isn't the best spectrum to do astronomy in for a lot of things, especially not the detection of extrasolar planets. Infrared radiation, unhindered by most space dust, and lower in energy, is clearly superior for studying things that are not giant balls of gas. The Next Generation Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder both use infrared radiation to study objects of great interest that are difficult to study with something like the HST.
Interferometry, the technology you refer to that allows telescopes to combine their phase information to generate an image with angular resolution of that of a single larger telescope (through something known as apature synthesis) is only one of the many uses of intereferometry. Perhaps much more exciting than that is the ability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder to use nulling interferometry to selectively block out the radiation from a star, without blocking out the much fainter (millions of times less) glow of a circling planet.
Unfortunately the earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to infra-red light, and room temperature objects (like most of the surface of the earth, and the telescopes on it) generate so much infra-red radiation that it makes it nearly impossible to do any far-infrared studies from the ground. The Darwin Project web site has a good explaination about the reasons terrestrial planet hunting should be done in space.
Ground based observatories will always have a place, however eventually it will be a matter of cost and convenience rather than any technical superiority.
Not saying this isn't cool, but it's mostly postponing the inevitable day when very little new astronomy can be done inside the confines of an atmosphere....
I'm an undergrad at Cornell, currently assisting with some magnetohydronamics research (Parallelizing a FORTRAN program written by a bunch of russian scientists... yay...). I'll probably be using the cluster at the end of the year, and I must say I'm rather impressed with it. It's not as cool as some that Cornell has had in the past, however they are very willing to let many individuals use it, and I find it great that I get to be involved with supercomputing at an undergraduate level. (Some day I hope to be a computational physicist).
Also, slightly off topic, I've been hired to create and install/maintain a linux cluster of 6 linux boxes connected with 100 base-T Eithernet, and I have about $3500 to spend for it. Anyone have any suggestions about what to use? I'm thinking 1.3-1.4 GHZ Athelon processors, a small drive, 256-512 megs of ram...
Also, can anyone tell me why using Red Hat would be a bad idea... it'll just be running FORTRAN programs non-stop, with a bit of SSH and SCP, nothing kernel-intensive. In the Space Sciences Building where I work, we use Red Hat and Solaris, and I don't really see much point using a "better" distribution, like Debian (as I have never really used it much before).
Very funny Wil... A bunch of us here at Cornell Univeristy were watching a "Q-a-thon", which was all the ST:TNG episodes with Q the other day. There was a big screen TV nearby our projection system, and while we were watching Star Trek, we noticed that some odd movie had come on with you in it; it was a very improbable coincidence... I mean, how many movies have you actually been in?;)
Actually I can see you as Bruce's kindy dorky sidekick:) I think I'd pay to go see that in the theatres. Bruce could use one of those.
I think that RoadRunner actually *DOES* support Macintoshes. I assist Professor Thomas Gold occasionally on weekends with his macintosh at home, and he called up RoadRunner one time because it wasn't working and they screwed up his printer because they told him to improperly alter his appletalk networking settings, so his laser printer wouldn't work. After about 1/2 hour on the phone I decided to just go over and check it out, and sure enough those guys had completely screwed him up. He's an expert in many fields, and world-renowned, but he simply doesn't have time to learn all the intricate details of a computer. I am a little dissapointed that they had him turn his appletalk off of "eithernet" as that was clearly the right setting.
Well I always thought quite the opposite: having extra letters in words is silly. I mean, it's bad enough that the french don't even pronounce half the letters in their words, but still words like "colour" and "flavour" I would ask exactly how the u contributes to the word.
British spelling can be annoying sometime, however I must say that "aluminium" does have a certain sophistication to it.
However I must concede that British accents are far superior to how almost any american speaks. ('cept Cockney accents, they're almost as bad as ebonics!)
I belive that you are correct in saying that these cards would not have prevented the events of 9/11. I am not really sure what would have. However, once again, I am still not able to figure out why this would be such a bad thing, other than perhaps the sense of false security.
Later of course we could expand it for more specific information like your health records, financial status, political slant, religious affiliations and employment history. Of course you would not have to provide this to anyone else, but then again they would not have to hire you, provide products or services, and extend credit to you.
If I was an employer, I would like to be able to see a potential employee's employment record. I do not want to hire lazy idiots that do not have the motivation or commitment to fufill, their responsibilities to the company properly. If they want to explain why they were fired from such-and-such job, then that is their perogative, however I would be suspicious of anyone that would choose to hide thier past from me.
There are, of course, a few things that it should not contain, things like political slant or religous affiliation, however the health record part is different to me. A finite amount of money comes into my (hypothetical, of course) company, which is used to pay costs, pay shareholders, and pay employees. Mandated healthcare coverage means that *EVERYONE* pays when someone runs up a multi-million dollar medical bill. This is all fine and nice for the person concerned, but it screws the shareholders that own the company, and the other employees (less money for raises and bonuses). So I feel that because during the hiring process one is judging another's ability to contribute to the company, one must have the information necessary to determine this. This information could be very vague (one does not need to see the exact medical information, only a dollar amount, broken down by one-time and chronic things). I do not think that the government should force corporations to hire individuals that they know would not contribute anything overall to the country, or prevent them from being able to determine this. This undermines the freedom of the employer. It's already bad enough with things like affirmative action requiring quotas in some areas (I'm all for ending racial discrimination, but if the white guy can do it better, I wanna be able to hire him).
But I do agree that this wouldn't have stopped 9/11, but at the same time I think you are making some things out to be worse than they are. (Also, how many employers REALLY care if you are democrat or republican. They want to make money, which means they want to hire the best people they can find.)
I think that in a society that's flowing full-force into the information age, this type of central database is inevitable, as it makes many transactions and checks much much more secure. (When I go to Wal-mart they don't even ask to see the name on the card, or verify my identity in any way. With something like this, credit fraud would be more difficult).
I've read sections of Card's book How to Write Science Fiction that I got for my younger brother. In there he explains that the ansible is a complete an utter fictional device, which knowingly violates the laws of physics. He used it as a plot device, and tried to make it at least somewhat credible. Study relativity, you'll understand why FTL makes no sense. If you have FTL communication, cause and effect is no longer preserved from every possible inertial reference frame.
Also, note, that the information that's transferred means absolutely nothing until it's decoded by classical signals.
This is not, however, to say that this communication is not useful. In the fields of quatum computing, this could be used to link distant processors together.
IANAP (but I hope to be one some day, after I finish up my bachelors here at Cornell) but I follow this stuff intently. Hope this clears up something.
55 hours is more than 2 days. The web sites I considered "on time" were either same-day, or the next. more than 2 days is like, what the heck is the hold up? I don't really think it took them a lot of time to change that (any half-decent person with photoshop could have made that in less than 15 minutes). I just didn't like the next day, going to their web site, and seeing about how blazing fast the titanium was, when everyone else had already shown their support. I'm not saying what they did was morally wrong, however I was very dissapointed, and also dissapointed in the brevity of what they put up. At least they had a link to the red cross web site.
It was not a troll. I am an avid mac user, and I felt:( when I saw that they put no mention on their page for several days. I did *NOT* say the employees did nothing, in fact I talked to one on the phone that said they were all very upset, etc over it.
I simply stated that they didn't publicly show anything on their web site, but even Microsoft did. It was like... like they were no longer the "cool ones."
Last week during the disaster, hundreds of websites changed their front page to reflect the horrible disaster which occurred. Everything from search engines like google.com to humor sites like keepersoflists.org and even Microsoft.com put something up about the disaster. Apple blatently ignored the issue for several days, and while a tech support individual I spoke with (about an unrelated issue) said they were all stunned by the event, the web site did not reflect this for several days. It made me a little less happy to be a Mac user. (Yes, I use linux/unix every day as well)
I wish Apple would have been a little cooler about the whole thing. At least they are finally catching up.
So what about Martial Law? Should we not "give up essential liberty" to "obtain temporary safety" for us and our loved ones in times of emergencies when Martial Law is invoked? I've heard this quote over and over, and it does not cover extreme situations. Essential liberties, and what exactly are those? What liberties are essential, and who decides that? What liberties are rights, and what liberties are priveleges? What sacrifices must we make, and what sacrifices must we refuse? The founding fathers could agree on all of this! (look at slavery)
It's easy to quote those long dead, but think, think for a moment that what they say may not always (or even now) apply.
FIrst of all, thank you for at least reading my post, unlike the one anonymous coward who just spat a bunch of BS back.
You may not care now, but what about in 5 years when they are still doing it. Instead of Terrorists, what if the are looking for Tax Evaders, would you care then?
I fully understand these concerns of yours. However, Tax Evasion is a crime, a crime that steals from us all, and if I evade taxes and get caught because I bragged about it on e-mail, so be it.
What if the next President after Bush is Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, they will be scanning our email to find out who wasn't Christian and who might be Gay, would that be okay with you ?
First of all, Pat Robertson isn't really all that interested in having a list of all gay people in the united states. He happens to apply moral principles which are thousands of years old, and therefore has moral problems with homesexuality. He's much more interested in helping gays than restricting them (I do not think he feels you can force heterosexuality via legislation, he's not that stupid). So what if he DID compile a list of everyone in the US that was gay??? How would that hurt anyone? It's only acting on a list like that (and there are no laws which would allow him to do anything with that information) that could possibly be a breach of rights!
The problem with giving up freedom is we will never get it back and just because the current administration CLAIM they will not abuse the power, how about the next one ?
Are you kidding me??? For almost a hundred years, the freedom of african american slaves was utterly and totally ignored by the constitution. But amendments were passed and they were recognized as being free. Giving up freedom temporarily does *NOT* always mean it will be perminant. Under the Sedition of Act of 1798, it was illegal to criticize the government of the United States under penalty of fines and/or imprisonment. However, the Sedition Act was later repealed after Thomas Jefferson won the presidency. Just goes to show that you can get back freedoms that are temporarily sacrificed. Look at all the freedoms that go away under Martial Law, with curfiews, etc. I'm all for individual freedom, but we cannot be free unless the country itself is free from oppression and domination, and that is where freedom starts - protecting your country. Even if that means a sacrifice.
Normally I do not respond to anonymous cowards, however it appears you didn't even read my post!
No where in my post did I condone the restriction of free speech. In fact today I think free speech is restricted too much. In my dorm at Cornell University, if I was to say "I hate Jews, they are a bunch of $@#&$%'s..." (I use that example because many of my friends are jews, and I do not hate them in the least) I would be punished and that would be put on my perminent record. That is not free speech.
I'm all for allowing *ANYONE* to say "The US Government Sucks" or "AMERICA IS BAD" or whatever. What did my post just say? That America is too individualistic. The Right to Free Speech *IS* constitutional, and I hold that as being very sacred. (Some Europeans I've met don't understand why our constitution is some important).
My post specifically stated that there was something wrong with taking away a RIGHT (free speech was my example!) but that there was nothing wrong with taking away a privelege (privacy in a public forum) if there is a need. In my mind, illegal search and seisure does not apply to internet transmissions any more than it does to someone transferring a giant load of illegal weapons/drugs/whatever in the back of their pickup truck, in public, from one house to another, on a public roadway. You wanna talk in private, go there and talk in person. Otherwise, the government is bound by laws that it makes, and it can change those if it wants to.
Perhaps you don't understand we are not worried about terrorists having their rights violated.
Perhaps you have never learned about government, in which case your ignorance could be excused, however in the United States, even CRIMINALS have rights. Constitutionally, we must protect those rights as much as we would protect a non-criminals. The subset of rights which criminals have may be smaller than those of innocents, however it is no less important! Perhaps you should try reading the constitution, or at least reading a book about it if there's too many big words in it for you.
America is about dissent. Sadly, people like me who understand it, and support your right to voice that dissent do not enjoy the same consideration from short sighted people such as yourself.
You know, I think that before you write an acidic post like that above, you should ACTUALLY READ THE POST YOU ARE REPLYING TO. In fact, if you have the time/brainpower, you may want to THINK ABOUT WHAT THEY SAID FIRST. You appear to be able to speak english, so I would assume you are capable of comprehending the ideas of my last post. All I said was that I personally do not care if the FBI looks through my e-mail, I have nothing to hide, and that I think too many people put their privacy (from a government organization that cares little to NOTHING about the stupid details of most people's everyday lives) above the lives of their fellow citizens. And if you couldn't understand it when I wrote that, you probably still don't understand it now.
Also, do you not see the irony in hiding behind anonymity to criticise someone for being cowardly?
I definately agree. When we're talking about peoples lives at stake (this terrorist attack was nothing compared to what a nuclear or bioterrorism attack could have done) I don't understand why so many people care if the government looks through their messages to their friends that were sent through a communications system developed by the department of defense to find clues.
I don't care if the FBI wants to read through my love poetry to my girlfriend, or me telling my mom what I did today. I don't care if they find out about all the programming projects I'm working on, they dont' care *AT ALL* about that stuff, they only want to konw if I've been mentioning terrorist-related things. It's not like a corporation is selling away your privacy, it's a governing body that's trying it's best to do what's best for the people right now. If you don't like what our government is doing, either VOTE or MOVE.
The US is far too individual-centric, and we need to realize that each one of us has a responsibility to the larger community, and that that includes making sacrifices like this. We are not giving up a freedom (like free speech) we are giving up a privlege (privacy in a public forum). This is the same government that made phone-tap laws, and if they want to treat the internet differently, that their perogative. And if it's unconstitutional, our system of checks and balances will catch it sooner or later. Meanwhile, the FBI will be parsing your grocery lists. Oooh, so scary!
Really big sheets of metal? No, we can't make that now.
According to this site we throw away 350000 tons of aluminum foil every year. That's a lot of foil. Check out what the area of one roll is compared to how much it weighs. Now tell me that we cannot weld smaller, easier produced pieces together. Tell me that we cannot have thousands of robots doing this welding at inexpensive prices in a hundred years (they can already do this now, but they are not super cheap, they aren't mass produced).
So we can make really big sheets of metal now with existing technology. It's just rather expensive, that's all.
Try to get permission to use them, even on Venus.
I intentionally ignored this aspect. My fundamental assumption was that humankind would have to actually *WANT* to do this and focus on it somewhat to be able to accomplish this. This is merely a political problem. Also, china wants to use nuclear devices to help build a dam to generate hydroelectic power. If they can do it, we can do it on another planet.
We can poke around genetically, but we have very little control. You're proposing totally reworking an organism on a scale that's totally beyond what we can reasonably envision today.
True, our current biotech is *NOT* very good, however it's the fastest growing field of science and technology, and developments in nanofabrication, femtosecond pulse lasers, atomic force microscopes, and nanotubules has been giving us a much finer control in the realms of biomolecules and DNA. Biotech will most likely be the science where all the action is in the next century, as bioinformatics is slowly coming into the light, and our manipulation technology is growing by leaps and bounds (they are working on ways of reading the entire genetic code of a cell from a single copy of the DNA). What I proposed to do with the microorganisms may actually mostly be a "simple" matter of combining traits from different microrganisms, with the modifications necessary to make the genes compatable. This is very different from designing the organism from scratch, and I can forsee this within the next 100 years (we can already cross-transplant genes between species, look at the mouse that grew a human ear).
Where are you finding this "nuclear drive"? In as much as treaties ban nukes in space, I have to say that this surprises me.
I'm not sure where you have been, but NASA had developed this stuff in the 60s and early 70s. I believe they had some working prototypes even, however they were not allowed to fly these for political reasons (*sigh*). Also, NASA has been renewing its work in nuclear propulsion. A friend of mine received two PhDs from MIT, and one of his graduate thesises was on Nuclear Propulsion Using Magnetohydrodynamic Vorteces for Containment and Propulsion. So there's plenty of work going on with nulcear drives, in fact had we not stopped in the 70s, we could be using them for all sorts of things right now.
Also one other idea being pursued is the idea of an antimatter-fusion hybrid drive, using antiprotons to spark fusion reactions. This is being developed currently at Penn State University, and was the subject of my younger brother's science project a few years ago. NASA moved the site about it, so I couldn't find it for you.
We also have chemical rockets. Neither will be enough to move an asteroid from 3 AU to 0.7 AU with anything like a reasonable cost.
Chemical rockets are not worth mentioning here, as they lack the necessary specific impulse. Ion engines could do this, but they would take a very very long time. The actual moving process could take 30 years, in which case things like solar sails and nuclear propulsion become rather viable. Also, if we use a near-earth asteroid, it would only be 1 AU to.7 AU, a much smaller distance, and we may even be able to bring it close enough to earth to give it a "reverse gravitational slingshot" in which kinetic energy is transferred to EARTH rather than to the asteroid, thus saving us most of the work with our rockets. It's okay if moving the asteroid has a very high cost ($1 Trillon) in that if you can get 1 billion people to eventually live on Venus, that's only $1000 per person. Not too bad...
Grounded loosely in today's science, yes. But so is Star Trek.
Are you KIDDING?!?!?! Star Trek blatantly violates both relativity and quantum theory (warp drive and transporters, respectively) not to mention constantly gets their technobabble wrong (no, you cannot use ejected antimatter to create an electrolytic reaction to cause a space monster that ate your ship to throw up, like that one episode of voyager). Anything remotely scientific in Star Trek is nothing more than a plot device (I used to be and still am a big fan of TNG, but the more physics I take, the more I see is wrong with it, especially any time they do time travel). *ONCE* in a while they get something right.
What I am saying is *NOT* loosely based on science, it's actually possible today (granted current technology would require an amount of time and energy that would make it nonfeasible, and yes the biotech part isn't yet possible). Going to the moon was once science fiction, and there was nothing in the laws of physics to say it couldn't be done, but the physics said that the amount of energy required to do it was enormous. So it took a while until we learned to do it. It's the same way with this. It's just a matter of time/energy put into it. Eventually construction techniques, energy sources, robotics and biotechnology should be able to tackle all of these problems, as solutions can already be envisioned and planned today.
I'm not talking about doing this in 50 years. I'm talking about starting it in 100, and it possibly taking several hundred to finish. Few can argue that it's impossible, though. Politically infeasible? Maybe. Expensive? Perhaps, depends on whether or not we have self-replicating robotics and inexpensive intra-system travel. Those last two, may for now be science fiction, true. For now.
First of all, the article made no mention of thermal conductivity. This is vital to superconductors in that high thermal conductivity allows it to be cooled easier (heat flows into and out of it at a faster rate).
Also, how easy are these to shape? It would seem to me that eventually they would be able to form this kind of thing into any shape mold that they wanted, being as the constituant parts are very very small, and pretty much independent until they are set as a crystal.
Also, how well made were these crystals? If they were better crystalized, might the transition temperature go up even more?
I know it's a lot to expect from Yahoo news, but I really want to know!
But with all the miracle technology you are positing to do all of this, you might as well assume that we can develop artifical gravity for the Moon
You missed the point. Artificial gravity is not forseeable using any widely held view of physics at this point. There are no highly respected physicists that I am aware of that have proposed a reasonable (if difficult) way of producing gravity. However, large quantities of TIN FOIL (which is basically what I am suggesting) are produced each year. I'm simply talking about scaling up existing technologies to make much bigger things. How would one do this? Simple: lots of robots. Right now robots suck. they can make cars, they can pretend to be a dog, but they cannot really do all the nifty things a human worker can do. This will change in the future (it might be 100 years before robots can replace all kinds of manual labor, but it will happen). And once we have robots that can mine and refine resources and use them to replicate, we will have a very powerful manufactoring technology which will allow us to make gigantic creations not currently feasible with human workers.
The technologies needed to do what I proposed are:
1. Making really big sheets of metal in space. Right now we can make little sheets of metal. All you need is a lot of robots workign together, and lots of energy (fission, fusion, solar?) to fuel the process.
2. Nuclear devices. We have about 20000 between the US and russia. I'm sure we can make better ones in a hundred years.
3. Genetically engineered monocellular life forms. Got that. We just have to make them better, that's all. 100 years of biotech development, and we'll have something working.
4. Ion drive. Got that. A recent Deep Space probe just proved that it's feasable, and actually rather simple. Should be dime-a-dozen in 100 years.
5. Nuclear drive. Got that. Working on making it better. Have had it for what, 25 years?
None of this technology is "miracle technology." Miracle technologies do what we would currently think is impossible, like artificial gravity. Nothing I'm talking about doing has any real reason to be impossible, in fact most of it's possible today, it's simply very very expensive! (we could make that shield without too much trouble, provided that was where all surplus money was spent). So my motto isn't that "anything is possible" but rather "anything possible we can do if we chose too, given enough time, energy, and matter".
First it was simple math. Then physics. Then chemistry and biology, and now this. While computers have been part of observation and analysis of astronomical objects for decades, the level of autonomy that they are currently being given (and the pure size of the data, terrabytes instead of simply analysing several megabyte images) will lead to a revolution in astronomy. Gone are the days where we are simply content to study the sky one star or nebula at a time, and coming soon are times where computers will sift through massive quantities of information, perhaps generated by large constellations of cheap but high-quality wide-field view telescopes in orbit. Perhaps some day we will even be able to correlate data into a very accurate map of the stars in our galaxy, and the galaxies around us. We will be able to better study the bulk statistics of stars and nebulae, of asteroids and planets and black holes. And because of this we will be able to find very rare phenomena happenning, and study it in detail with much better telescopes operated under human supervision.
These are exciting times, seeing the transition take place, and the raw power being given to the astronomers. There are still thousands of questions to be answered, and it is my hope that projects like this and what they lead to will help to answer and test the answers of many of those questions. And while it will probably be a while until the computers start writing their own scientific papers, heh, they will play an increasing role in astronomy. In fact I wonder if it's possible to do useful astronomy (that is astronomy that signifigantly advances our understanding) now without them?
Remember, the amount of metal we are dealing with is such that we could make a sheet 65 million km by 65 million km. That means that we don't need *ONE* sheet to do this, but rather we can have *MANY* smaller sheets. One idea is to put one in the orbit that takes 24 hours. It would be designed to be the right size such that at that distance it blocked out the sun to most (if not all) of venus. With the size we are talking about (half the size of the orbital radius at maximum!) its' not hard to have something this big. It'd end up being perhaps several times the surface area of the "day side" of the planet. I do not belive this sort of "Macro Engineering" is more than perhaps 200 years away, and is very feasible as it would not involve any new physics, merely some new engineering.
Also, how are you going to keep it together? Between sheer and tidal stresses and constant bombardment, it'll need to be tough.
Tiny meteors hit this thing, so what? Little holes will make almost no difference in the effectiveness of it, and the damage should be fairly localized as it would be weak enough that small sections would simply tear off. If larger sections are damaged, robotic space craft can mend it without too much trouble. Also, if I remember my astrophysics correctly, tidal forces act in the direction parallel to the line between the two objects. This would be perpendicular to the tangent plane of the "sun blocker" at any given point, roughly. Tidal effects affect the moon because the earth's gravity pulls the closer side of the moon more than the far side, thus trying to rip it apart. Indeed, if it was inside the Roche limit of Earth, it would become a ring or simply a large mess as tidal forces sheered it apart. Because the difference in the gravitational strength of venus on the side of the sun blocker facing the sun will be the same as the other side (it's a millimeter away for goodness sakes!) that becomes a nil point. Of course shearing forces are mostly the result of what shape the blocker ends up being (if it's made up of many small segments flying in constellation, this may not be an issue. no reason an ion drive on each segment that's solar powered couldn't keep it where it's supposed to be).
It's also possible that nuclear devices or large asteroid impacts could be used to cool off venus and distribute its temperature equally enough that vast underground dwellings would be feasible. This way you have the right gravity, atmosphere, etc, all contained and just like on earth (if only underground), something you cannot do on the moon.
I'm trying to keep to technologies that are envisionable at this point. The moon can only be terraformed so much, because of it's mass. It will *NEVER* be like living on earth, unless we somehow create an artificial gravity field. Same with Mars. But Venus, in the long run at least, has the best potential on really being like life on earth. It may take bombarding it with comets to bring water, assaulting it with genetically engineered organisms and nuclear devices, and large space-based mirror/blockers, but if mankind really wants Venus to be another home, at least to buildings made of metal if not to forests and oceans deep, then it shall be so.
Finally, how are you going to get the plants down there so that they can survive long enough to make a shred of difference?
That's why I suggested *FLOATING* plants, as in plants that ride up in the UPPER atmosphere which is by far much much cooler (like the earth's stratusphere). I'm talking about tiny monocellular organisms, basically a specially engineered type of extremophiles.
I am not suggesting doing *ANYTHING* signifigant to the surface until we have the atmosphere under control.
You do have a point with the water. It's been a while since I took Solar System Astronomy, so I had forgotten that there was little water left in the atmosphere (So much of what I hear about venus was about it's runaway greenhouse effect, etc, which talked about PAST water). I managed to find a very interesting comparison between two theories that explain the dissapearance of water.
I'm not suggesting we can turn Venus into a completely terran-like world in the next few hundred years, however it should be quite possible with a mixture of bio- and nano-technology to reduce the surface temperatures to a level where building large domed structures and underground settlements becomes feasable and even inexpensive when mass produced. There's still plenty of metals and carbon and oxygen, etc, around for biomass, even if it's rather short on hydrogen. At very least, we should be able to remove the carbon mostly from the atmosphere, leaving an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that can help make Venus more like earth.
To make matters worse, Venus is still too close to the Sun to be habitable without artifical tending of the climate (something I don't know how to do, do you?).
I may not be a planetary engineer, however it's very simple to see that blocking out the sun is a very practical solution, and is constantly used in science-fiction novels because it's very believable. Take an asteroid, roughly spherical, about 10 km in radius. Now lets say this asteroid is one of the iron-rich asteroids which is a minor, but signifigant portion of the asteroid population. Because the volume of this asteroid is roughly 4X10^15 km^3, a sheet of iron could be made at a thickness of 1 mm to be 64 MILLION km X 64 MILLION km in size. That's half of it's orbital radius! This is by far overkill, when all one really needs is a set of orbital night-day strips around venus, and a set of much smaller "obscuring" strips that cast vertical bars over the sun so as to dampen it's overall luminousity as measured by the venusian surface. Would this be a big project? Sure! But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says it couldn't be done, and the materials for it are already in space (large nuclear propulsion would be necessary to position them, or perhaps large solar sails). Of course one could always detonate nuclear devices inside the venusian surface to kick up enough dust to cool the planet rapidly as well, allowing a hundred years or so for it to settle.
These ideas are very far out. But the whole idea of reshaping another planet is far out too. So is the idea of going to another planet! But if it's one thing that mankind has learned, often it's physics and human imagination that are the limit. Physics says yes, and human imagination has already gone there.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard Slashdot was an *AMERICAN* web site, owned by VA LINUX, which is an *AMERICAN* company. I mean, if you think it's too American, there's plenty of other places online for news and discussion.
I do not think that the american way of doing things (writing numbers, spelling "color" or making sandwhiches) is necessarily better than the way any other country does things, but complaining about the US-Centricity of a web site based in US is like complaining that a japanese web site is in japanese! Please!
Hey, thanks a bunch! That makes a lot of sense, and I was going to slap on RedHat for the first few months anyways. Security isn't a big issue for us at the moment (it's going to be so heavily firewalled, maybe only a few IP addresses are even going to be allowed access to it in any way).
Any ideas about hardware? We don't need monitors or periferals, but does it matter what kind of eithernet card I get (so long as it's 100 base T, and has a working driver under linux)?
Thanks,
Justin
IANAA, but I have a few comments neverthe less :)
First of all, visible light just isn't the best spectrum to do astronomy in for a lot of things, especially not the detection of extrasolar planets. Infrared radiation, unhindered by most space dust, and lower in energy, is clearly superior for studying things that are not giant balls of gas. The Next Generation Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder both use infrared radiation to study objects of great interest that are difficult to study with something like the HST.
Interferometry, the technology you refer to that allows telescopes to combine their phase information to generate an image with angular resolution of that of a single larger telescope (through something known as apature synthesis) is only one of the many uses of intereferometry. Perhaps much more exciting than that is the ability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder to use nulling interferometry to selectively block out the radiation from a star, without blocking out the much fainter (millions of times less) glow of a circling planet.
Unfortunately the earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to infra-red light, and room temperature objects (like most of the surface of the earth, and the telescopes on it) generate so much infra-red radiation that it makes it nearly impossible to do any far-infrared studies from the ground. The Darwin Project web site has a good explaination about the reasons terrestrial planet hunting should be done in space.
Ground based observatories will always have a place, however eventually it will be a matter of cost and convenience rather than any technical superiority.
Not saying this isn't cool, but it's mostly postponing the inevitable day when very little new astronomy can be done inside the confines of an atmosphere....
I'm an undergrad at Cornell, currently assisting with some magnetohydronamics research (Parallelizing a FORTRAN program written by a bunch of russian scientists... yay...). I'll probably be using the cluster at the end of the year, and I must say I'm rather impressed with it. It's not as cool as some that Cornell has had in the past, however they are very willing to let many individuals use it, and I find it great that I get to be involved with supercomputing at an undergraduate level. (Some day I hope to be a computational physicist).
Also, slightly off topic, I've been hired to create and install/maintain a linux cluster of 6 linux boxes connected with 100 base-T Eithernet, and I have about $3500 to spend for it. Anyone have any suggestions about what to use? I'm thinking 1.3-1.4 GHZ Athelon processors, a small drive, 256-512 megs of ram...
Also, can anyone tell me why using Red Hat would be a bad idea... it'll just be running FORTRAN programs non-stop, with a bit of SSH and SCP, nothing kernel-intensive. In the Space Sciences Building where I work, we use Red Hat and Solaris, and I don't really see much point using a "better" distribution, like Debian (as I have never really used it much before).
Cheers,
Justin
Yeah, i'm stuck watching them on my computer, with no commerical interruptions, possibly before they air... dang! ;)
Justin
Very funny Wil... A bunch of us here at Cornell Univeristy were watching a "Q-a-thon", which was all the ST:TNG episodes with Q the other day. There was a big screen TV nearby our projection system, and while we were watching Star Trek, we noticed that some odd movie had come on with you in it; it was a very improbable coincidence... I mean, how many movies have you actually been in? ;)
:) I think I'd pay to go see that in the theatres. Bruce could use one of those.
Actually I can see you as Bruce's kindy dorky sidekick
Cheers, Justin
Guns don't kill people, GNUs do :)
I think that RoadRunner actually *DOES* support Macintoshes. I assist Professor Thomas Gold occasionally on weekends with his macintosh at home, and he called up RoadRunner one time because it wasn't working and they screwed up his printer because they told him to improperly alter his appletalk networking settings, so his laser printer wouldn't work. After about 1/2 hour on the phone I decided to just go over and check it out, and sure enough those guys had completely screwed him up. He's an expert in many fields, and world-renowned, but he simply doesn't have time to learn all the intricate details of a computer. I am a little dissapointed that they had him turn his appletalk off of "eithernet" as that was clearly the right setting.
Just my thoughts.
Well I always thought quite the opposite: having extra letters in words is silly. I mean, it's bad enough that the french don't even pronounce half the letters in their words, but still words like "colour" and "flavour" I would ask exactly how the u contributes to the word.
British spelling can be annoying sometime, however I must say that "aluminium" does have a certain sophistication to it.
However I must concede that British accents are far superior to how almost any american speaks. ('cept Cockney accents, they're almost as bad as ebonics!)
I belive that you are correct in saying that these cards would not have prevented the events of 9/11. I am not really sure what would have. However, once again, I am still not able to figure out why this would be such a bad thing, other than perhaps the sense of false security.
Later of course we could expand it for more specific information like your health records, financial status, political slant, religious affiliations and employment history. Of course you would not have to provide this to anyone else, but then again they would not have to hire you, provide products or services, and extend credit to you.
If I was an employer, I would like to be able to see a potential employee's employment record. I do not want to hire lazy idiots that do not have the motivation or commitment to fufill, their responsibilities to the company properly. If they want to explain why they were fired from such-and-such job, then that is their perogative, however I would be suspicious of anyone that would choose to hide thier past from me.
There are, of course, a few things that it should not contain, things like political slant or religous affiliation, however the health record part is different to me. A finite amount of money comes into my (hypothetical, of course) company, which is used to pay costs, pay shareholders, and pay employees. Mandated healthcare coverage means that *EVERYONE* pays when someone runs up a multi-million dollar medical bill. This is all fine and nice for the person concerned, but it screws the shareholders that own the company, and the other employees (less money for raises and bonuses). So I feel that because during the hiring process one is judging another's ability to contribute to the company, one must have the information necessary to determine this. This information could be very vague (one does not need to see the exact medical information, only a dollar amount, broken down by one-time and chronic things). I do not think that the government should force corporations to hire individuals that they know would not contribute anything overall to the country, or prevent them from being able to determine this. This undermines the freedom of the employer. It's already bad enough with things like affirmative action requiring quotas in some areas (I'm all for ending racial discrimination, but if the white guy can do it better, I wanna be able to hire him).
But I do agree that this wouldn't have stopped 9/11, but at the same time I think you are making some things out to be worse than they are. (Also, how many employers REALLY care if you are democrat or republican. They want to make money, which means they want to hire the best people they can find.)
I think that in a society that's flowing full-force into the information age, this type of central database is inevitable, as it makes many transactions and checks much much more secure. (When I go to Wal-mart they don't even ask to see the name on the card, or verify my identity in any way. With something like this, credit fraud would be more difficult).
Just my two cents.
I've read sections of Card's book How to Write Science Fiction that I got for my younger brother. In there he explains that the ansible is a complete an utter fictional device, which knowingly violates the laws of physics. He used it as a plot device, and tried to make it at least somewhat credible. Study relativity, you'll understand why FTL makes no sense. If you have FTL communication, cause and effect is no longer preserved from every possible inertial reference frame.
Also, note, that the information that's transferred means absolutely nothing until it's decoded by classical signals.
This is not, however, to say that this communication is not useful. In the fields of quatum computing, this could be used to link distant processors together.
IANAP (but I hope to be one some day, after I finish up my bachelors here at Cornell) but I follow this stuff intently. Hope this clears up something.
55 hours is more than 2 days. The web sites I considered "on time" were either same-day, or the next. more than 2 days is like, what the heck is the hold up? I don't really think it took them a lot of time to change that (any half-decent person with photoshop could have made that in less than 15 minutes). I just didn't like the next day, going to their web site, and seeing about how blazing fast the titanium was, when everyone else had already shown their support. I'm not saying what they did was morally wrong, however I was very dissapointed, and also dissapointed in the brevity of what they put up. At least they had a link to the red cross web site.
It was not a troll. I am an avid mac user, and I felt :( when I saw that they put no mention on their page for several days. I did *NOT* say the employees did nothing, in fact I talked to one on the phone that said they were all very upset, etc over it.
I simply stated that they didn't publicly show anything on their web site, but even Microsoft did. It was like... like they were no longer the "cool ones."
My friends also though tthis was bad.
Last week during the disaster, hundreds of websites changed their front page to reflect the horrible disaster which occurred. Everything from search engines like google.com to humor sites like keepersoflists.org and even Microsoft.com put something up about the disaster. Apple blatently ignored the issue for several days, and while a tech support individual I spoke with (about an unrelated issue) said they were all stunned by the event, the web site did not reflect this for several days. It made me a little less happy to be a Mac user. (Yes, I use linux/unix every day as well)
I wish Apple would have been a little cooler about the whole thing. At least they are finally catching up.
Yuck.
So what about Martial Law? Should we not "give up essential liberty" to "obtain temporary safety" for us and our loved ones in times of emergencies when Martial Law is invoked? I've heard this quote over and over, and it does not cover extreme situations. Essential liberties, and what exactly are those? What liberties are essential, and who decides that? What liberties are rights, and what liberties are priveleges? What sacrifices must we make, and what sacrifices must we refuse? The founding fathers could agree on all of this! (look at slavery)
It's easy to quote those long dead, but think, think for a moment that what they say may not always (or even now) apply.
FIrst of all, thank you for at least reading my post, unlike the one anonymous coward who just spat a bunch of BS back.
You may not care now, but what about in 5 years when they are still doing it. Instead of Terrorists, what if the are looking for Tax Evaders, would you care then?
I fully understand these concerns of yours. However, Tax Evasion is a crime, a crime that steals from us all, and if I evade taxes and get caught because I bragged about it on e-mail, so be it.
What if the next President after Bush is Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, they will be scanning our email to find out who wasn't Christian and who might be Gay, would that be okay with you ?
First of all, Pat Robertson isn't really all that interested in having a list of all gay people in the united states. He happens to apply moral principles which are thousands of years old, and therefore has moral problems with homesexuality. He's much more interested in helping gays than restricting them (I do not think he feels you can force heterosexuality via legislation, he's not that stupid). So what if he DID compile a list of everyone in the US that was gay??? How would that hurt anyone? It's only acting on a list like that (and there are no laws which would allow him to do anything with that information) that could possibly be a breach of rights!
The problem with giving up freedom is we will never get it back and just because the current administration CLAIM they will not abuse the power, how about the next one ?
Are you kidding me??? For almost a hundred years, the freedom of african american slaves was utterly and totally ignored by the constitution. But amendments were passed and they were recognized as being free. Giving up freedom temporarily does *NOT* always mean it will be perminant. Under the Sedition of Act of 1798, it was illegal to criticize the government of the United States under penalty of fines and/or imprisonment. However, the Sedition Act was later repealed after Thomas Jefferson won the presidency. Just goes to show that you can get back freedoms that are temporarily sacrificed. Look at all the freedoms that go away under Martial Law, with curfiews, etc. I'm all for individual freedom, but we cannot be free unless the country itself is free from oppression and domination, and that is where freedom starts - protecting your country. Even if that means a sacrifice.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Normally I do not respond to anonymous cowards, however it appears you didn't even read my post!
No where in my post did I condone the restriction of free speech. In fact today I think free speech is restricted too much. In my dorm at Cornell University, if I was to say "I hate Jews, they are a bunch of $@#&$%'s..." (I use that example because many of my friends are jews, and I do not hate them in the least) I would be punished and that would be put on my perminent record. That is not free speech.
I'm all for allowing *ANYONE* to say "The US Government Sucks" or "AMERICA IS BAD" or whatever. What did my post just say? That America is too individualistic. The Right to Free Speech *IS* constitutional, and I hold that as being very sacred. (Some Europeans I've met don't understand why our constitution is some important).
My post specifically stated that there was something wrong with taking away a RIGHT (free speech was my example!) but that there was nothing wrong with taking away a privelege (privacy in a public forum) if there is a need. In my mind, illegal search and seisure does not apply to internet transmissions any more than it does to someone transferring a giant load of illegal weapons/drugs/whatever in the back of their pickup truck, in public, from one house to another, on a public roadway. You wanna talk in private, go there and talk in person. Otherwise, the government is bound by laws that it makes, and it can change those if it wants to.
Perhaps you don't understand we are not worried about terrorists having their rights violated.
Perhaps you have never learned about government, in which case your ignorance could be excused, however in the United States, even CRIMINALS have rights. Constitutionally, we must protect those rights as much as we would protect a non-criminals. The subset of rights which criminals have may be smaller than those of innocents, however it is no less important! Perhaps you should try reading the constitution, or at least reading a book about it if there's too many big words in it for you.
America is about dissent. Sadly, people like me who understand it, and support your right to voice that dissent do not enjoy the same consideration from short sighted people such as yourself.
You know, I think that before you write an acidic post like that above, you should ACTUALLY READ THE POST YOU ARE REPLYING TO. In fact, if you have the time/brainpower, you may want to THINK ABOUT WHAT THEY SAID FIRST. You appear to be able to speak english, so I would assume you are capable of comprehending the ideas of my last post. All I said was that I personally do not care if the FBI looks through my e-mail, I have nothing to hide, and that I think too many people put their privacy (from a government organization that cares little to NOTHING about the stupid details of most people's everyday lives) above the lives of their fellow citizens. And if you couldn't understand it when I wrote that, you probably still don't understand it now.
Also, do you not see the irony in hiding behind anonymity to criticise someone for being cowardly?
I definately agree. When we're talking about peoples lives at stake (this terrorist attack was nothing compared to what a nuclear or bioterrorism attack could have done) I don't understand why so many people care if the government looks through their messages to their friends that were sent through a communications system developed by the department of defense to find clues.
I don't care if the FBI wants to read through my love poetry to my girlfriend, or me telling my mom what I did today. I don't care if they find out about all the programming projects I'm working on, they dont' care *AT ALL* about that stuff, they only want to konw if I've been mentioning terrorist-related things. It's not like a corporation is selling away your privacy, it's a governing body that's trying it's best to do what's best for the people right now. If you don't like what our government is doing, either VOTE or MOVE.
The US is far too individual-centric, and we need to realize that each one of us has a responsibility to the larger community, and that that includes making sacrifices like this. We are not giving up a freedom (like free speech) we are giving up a privlege (privacy in a public forum). This is the same government that made phone-tap laws, and if they want to treat the internet differently, that their perogative. And if it's unconstitutional, our system of checks and balances will catch it sooner or later. Meanwhile, the FBI will be parsing your grocery lists. Oooh, so scary!
Really big sheets of metal? No, we can't make that now.
.7 AU, a much smaller distance, and we may even be able to bring it close enough to earth to give it a "reverse gravitational slingshot" in which kinetic energy is transferred to EARTH rather than to the asteroid, thus saving us most of the work with our rockets. It's okay if moving the asteroid has a very high cost ($1 Trillon) in that if you can get 1 billion people to eventually live on Venus, that's only $1000 per person. Not too bad...
According to this site we throw away 350000 tons of aluminum foil every year. That's a lot of foil. Check out what the area of one roll is compared to how much it weighs. Now tell me that we cannot weld smaller, easier produced pieces together. Tell me that we cannot have thousands of robots doing this welding at inexpensive prices in a hundred years (they can already do this now, but they are not super cheap, they aren't mass produced).
So we can make really big sheets of metal now with existing technology. It's just rather expensive, that's all.
Try to get permission to use them, even on Venus.
I intentionally ignored this aspect. My fundamental assumption was that humankind would have to actually *WANT* to do this and focus on it somewhat to be able to accomplish this. This is merely a political problem. Also, china wants to use nuclear devices to help build a dam to generate hydroelectic power. If they can do it, we can do it on another planet.
We can poke around genetically, but we have very little control. You're proposing totally reworking an organism on a scale that's totally beyond what we can reasonably envision today.
True, our current biotech is *NOT* very good, however it's the fastest growing field of science and technology, and developments in nanofabrication, femtosecond pulse lasers, atomic force microscopes, and nanotubules has been giving us a much finer control in the realms of biomolecules and DNA. Biotech will most likely be the science where all the action is in the next century, as bioinformatics is slowly coming into the light, and our manipulation technology is growing by leaps and bounds (they are working on ways of reading the entire genetic code of a cell from a single copy of the DNA). What I proposed to do with the microorganisms may actually mostly be a "simple" matter of combining traits from different microrganisms, with the modifications necessary to make the genes compatable. This is very different from designing the organism from scratch, and I can forsee this within the next 100 years (we can already cross-transplant genes between species, look at the mouse that grew a human ear).
Where are you finding this "nuclear drive"? In as much as treaties ban nukes in space, I have to say that this surprises me.
I'm not sure where you have been, but NASA had developed this stuff in the 60s and early 70s. I believe they had some working prototypes even, however they were not allowed to fly these for political reasons (*sigh*). Also, NASA has been renewing its work in nuclear propulsion. A friend of mine received two PhDs from MIT, and one of his graduate thesises was on Nuclear Propulsion Using Magnetohydrodynamic Vorteces for Containment and Propulsion. So there's plenty of work going on with nulcear drives, in fact had we not stopped in the 70s, we could be using them for all sorts of things right now.
Also one other idea being pursued is the idea of an antimatter-fusion hybrid drive, using antiprotons to spark fusion reactions. This is being developed currently at Penn State University, and was the subject of my younger brother's science project a few years ago. NASA moved the site about it, so I couldn't find it for you.
We also have chemical rockets. Neither will be enough to move an asteroid from 3 AU to 0.7 AU with anything like a reasonable cost.
Chemical rockets are not worth mentioning here, as they lack the necessary specific impulse. Ion engines could do this, but they would take a very very long time. The actual moving process could take 30 years, in which case things like solar sails and nuclear propulsion become rather viable. Also, if we use a near-earth asteroid, it would only be 1 AU to
Grounded loosely in today's science, yes. But so is Star Trek.
Are you KIDDING?!?!?! Star Trek blatantly violates both relativity and quantum theory (warp drive and transporters, respectively) not to mention constantly gets their technobabble wrong (no, you cannot use ejected antimatter to create an electrolytic reaction to cause a space monster that ate your ship to throw up, like that one episode of voyager). Anything remotely scientific in Star Trek is nothing more than a plot device (I used to be and still am a big fan of TNG, but the more physics I take, the more I see is wrong with it, especially any time they do time travel). *ONCE* in a while they get something right.
What I am saying is *NOT* loosely based on science, it's actually possible today (granted current technology would require an amount of time and energy that would make it nonfeasible, and yes the biotech part isn't yet possible). Going to the moon was once science fiction, and there was nothing in the laws of physics to say it couldn't be done, but the physics said that the amount of energy required to do it was enormous. So it took a while until we learned to do it. It's the same way with this. It's just a matter of time/energy put into it. Eventually construction techniques, energy sources, robotics and biotechnology should be able to tackle all of these problems, as solutions can already be envisioned and planned today.
I'm not talking about doing this in 50 years. I'm talking about starting it in 100, and it possibly taking several hundred to finish. Few can argue that it's impossible, though. Politically infeasible? Maybe. Expensive? Perhaps, depends on whether or not we have self-replicating robotics and inexpensive intra-system travel. Those last two, may for now be science fiction, true. For now.
Can this be made into really long wires? So that we can transmit power/communications by this?
Just wondering...
First of all, the article made no mention of thermal conductivity. This is vital to superconductors in that high thermal conductivity allows it to be cooled easier (heat flows into and out of it at a faster rate).
Also, how easy are these to shape? It would seem to me that eventually they would be able to form this kind of thing into any shape mold that they wanted, being as the constituant parts are very very small, and pretty much independent until they are set as a crystal.
Also, how well made were these crystals? If they were better crystalized, might the transition temperature go up even more?
I know it's a lot to expect from Yahoo news, but I really want to know!
But with all the miracle technology you are positing to do all of this, you might as well assume that we can develop artifical gravity for the Moon
You missed the point. Artificial gravity is not forseeable using any widely held view of physics at this point. There are no highly respected physicists that I am aware of that have proposed a reasonable (if difficult) way of producing gravity. However, large quantities of TIN FOIL (which is basically what I am suggesting) are produced each year. I'm simply talking about scaling up existing technologies to make much bigger things. How would one do this? Simple: lots of robots. Right now robots suck. they can make cars, they can pretend to be a dog, but they cannot really do all the nifty things a human worker can do. This will change in the future (it might be 100 years before robots can replace all kinds of manual labor, but it will happen). And once we have robots that can mine and refine resources and use them to replicate, we will have a very powerful manufactoring technology which will allow us to make gigantic creations not currently feasible with human workers.
The technologies needed to do what I proposed are:
1. Making really big sheets of metal in space. Right now we can make little sheets of metal. All you need is a lot of robots workign together, and lots of energy (fission, fusion, solar?) to fuel the process.
2. Nuclear devices. We have about 20000 between the US and russia. I'm sure we can make better ones in a hundred years.
3. Genetically engineered monocellular life forms. Got that. We just have to make them better, that's all. 100 years of biotech development, and we'll have something working.
4. Ion drive. Got that. A recent Deep Space probe just proved that it's feasable, and actually rather simple. Should be dime-a-dozen in 100 years.
5. Nuclear drive. Got that. Working on making it better. Have had it for what, 25 years?
None of this technology is "miracle technology." Miracle technologies do what we would currently think is impossible, like artificial gravity.
Nothing I'm talking about doing has any real reason to be impossible, in fact most of it's possible today, it's simply very very expensive! (we could make that shield without too much trouble, provided that was where all surplus money was spent). So my motto isn't that "anything is possible" but rather "anything possible we can do if we chose too, given enough time, energy, and matter".
First it was simple math. Then physics. Then chemistry and biology, and now this. While computers have been part of observation and analysis of astronomical objects for decades, the level of autonomy that they are currently being given (and the pure size of the data, terrabytes instead of simply analysing several megabyte images) will lead to a revolution in astronomy. Gone are the days where we are simply content to study the sky one star or nebula at a time, and coming soon are times where computers will sift through massive quantities of information, perhaps generated by large constellations of cheap but high-quality wide-field view telescopes in orbit. Perhaps some day we will even be able to correlate data into a very accurate map of the stars in our galaxy, and the galaxies around us. We will be able to better study the bulk statistics of stars and nebulae, of asteroids and planets and black holes. And because of this we will be able to find very rare phenomena happenning, and study it in detail with much better telescopes operated under human supervision.
These are exciting times, seeing the transition take place, and the raw power being given to the astronomers. There are still thousands of questions to be answered, and it is my hope that projects like this and what they lead to will help to answer and test the answers of many of those questions. And while it will probably be a while until the computers start writing their own scientific papers, heh, they will play an increasing role in astronomy. In fact I wonder if it's possible to do useful astronomy (that is astronomy that signifigantly advances our understanding) now without them?
Remember, the amount of metal we are dealing with is such that we could make a sheet 65 million km by 65 million km. That means that we don't need *ONE* sheet to do this, but rather we can have *MANY* smaller sheets. One idea is to put one in the orbit that takes 24 hours. It would be designed to be the right size such that at that distance it blocked out the sun to most (if not all) of venus. With the size we are talking about (half the size of the orbital radius at maximum!) its' not hard to have something this big. It'd end up being perhaps several times the surface area of the "day side" of the planet. I do not belive this sort of "Macro Engineering" is more than perhaps 200 years away, and is very feasible as it would not involve any new physics, merely some new engineering.
Also, how are you going to keep it together? Between sheer and tidal stresses and constant bombardment, it'll need to be tough.
Tiny meteors hit this thing, so what? Little holes will make almost no difference in the effectiveness of it, and the damage should be fairly localized as it would be weak enough that small sections would simply tear off. If larger sections are damaged, robotic space craft can mend it without too much trouble. Also, if I remember my astrophysics correctly, tidal forces act in the direction parallel to the line between the two objects. This would be perpendicular to the tangent plane of the "sun blocker" at any given point, roughly. Tidal effects affect the moon because the earth's gravity pulls the closer side of the moon more than the far side, thus trying to rip it apart. Indeed, if it was inside the Roche limit of Earth, it would become a ring or simply a large mess as tidal forces sheered it apart. Because the difference in the gravitational strength of venus on the side of the sun blocker facing the sun will be the same as the other side (it's a millimeter away for goodness sakes!) that becomes a nil point. Of course shearing forces are mostly the result of what shape the blocker ends up being (if it's made up of many small segments flying in constellation, this may not be an issue. no reason an ion drive on each segment that's solar powered couldn't keep it where it's supposed to be).
It's also possible that nuclear devices or large asteroid impacts could be used to cool off venus and distribute its temperature equally enough that vast underground dwellings would be feasible. This way you have the right gravity, atmosphere, etc, all contained and just like on earth (if only underground), something you cannot do on the moon.
I'm trying to keep to technologies that are envisionable at this point. The moon can only be terraformed so much, because of it's mass. It will *NEVER* be like living on earth, unless we somehow create an artificial gravity field. Same with Mars. But Venus, in the long run at least, has the best potential on really being like life on earth. It may take bombarding it with comets to bring water, assaulting it with genetically engineered organisms and nuclear devices, and large space-based mirror/blockers, but if mankind really wants Venus to be another home, at least to buildings made of metal if not to forests and oceans deep, then it shall be so.
Finally, how are you going to get the plants down there so that they can survive long enough to make a shred of difference?
:)
That's why I suggested *FLOATING* plants, as in plants that ride up in the UPPER atmosphere which is by far much much cooler (like the earth's stratusphere). I'm talking about tiny monocellular organisms, basically a specially engineered type of extremophiles.
I am not suggesting doing *ANYTHING* signifigant to the surface until we have the atmosphere under control.
You do have a point with the water. It's been a while since I took Solar System Astronomy, so I had forgotten that there was little water left in the atmosphere (So much of what I hear about venus was about it's runaway greenhouse effect, etc, which talked about PAST water). I managed to find a very interesting comparison between two theories that explain the dissapearance of water.
I'm not suggesting we can turn Venus into a completely terran-like world in the next few hundred years, however it should be quite possible with a mixture of bio- and nano-technology to reduce the surface temperatures to a level where building large domed structures and underground settlements becomes feasable and even inexpensive when mass produced. There's still plenty of metals and carbon and oxygen, etc, around for biomass, even if it's rather short on hydrogen. At very least, we should be able to remove the carbon mostly from the atmosphere, leaving an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that can help make Venus more like earth.
To make matters worse, Venus is still too close to the Sun to be habitable without artifical tending of the climate (something I don't know how to do, do you?).
I may not be a planetary engineer, however it's very simple to see that blocking out the sun is a very practical solution, and is constantly used in science-fiction novels because it's very believable. Take an asteroid, roughly spherical, about 10 km in radius. Now lets say this asteroid is one of the iron-rich asteroids which is a minor, but signifigant portion of the asteroid population. Because the volume of this asteroid is roughly 4X10^15 km^3, a sheet of iron could be made at a thickness of 1 mm to be 64 MILLION km X 64 MILLION km in size. That's half of it's orbital radius! This is by far overkill, when all one really needs is a set of orbital night-day strips around venus, and a set of much smaller "obscuring" strips that cast vertical bars over the sun so as to dampen it's overall luminousity as measured by the venusian surface. Would this be a big project? Sure! But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says it couldn't be done, and the materials for it are already in space (large nuclear propulsion would be necessary to position them, or perhaps large solar sails). Of course one could always detonate nuclear devices inside the venusian surface to kick up enough dust to cool the planet rapidly as well, allowing a hundred years or so for it to settle.
These ideas are very far out. But the whole idea of reshaping another planet is far out too. So is the idea of going to another planet! But if it's one thing that mankind has learned, often it's physics and human imagination that are the limit. Physics says yes, and human imagination has already gone there.
But I'm still just a student, what do I know?