Try Sirius. It beats the hell out of XM. Unfortunately my current GM daily-driver has XM built-in, and frigging Directed appears to be holding off releasing their new GM-LAN-based Sirius converter, probably because of that god awful merger they keep threatening to fuck us with.
But assuming you're not stuck with a built-in XM tuner, try Sirius. I bet you'll like it more, because your complaints are very similar to what I hate about XM.
Hell, at least your stations play music. On the occasions I actually go to work, my drive-time FM airwaves are filled with mind-numbing morning talk-show garbage.
For one, no one I KNOW walks with their cameras out in front of them, so the cameras would have setup such a way such that there is a single camera dedicated to capture the event. How do you know a camera is going to capture an event in the first place?
RTFA. The positions of the phones are assumed to be static. They use the motion of people around them to work out a few basic things about their relative positions, and that's really about it. The slash blurb makes it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.
Frankly I was hoping this could be adapted to camera-driven robotics localization scenarios. My RC lawn mower is nice, but one of these days I want it to drive itself. (And yes, I'm aware of the Roomba-like wandering mower bots, none of which are appropriate for several acres.)
You might be surprised. Most of the Linux distros are apparently pretty intolerant of older hardware these days. Had a friend at work who was screwing around with some older machines. (And please don't pester me for details, I have no idea or interest, he just mentioned it recently after somebody else made a comment similar to yours.)
I suppose my first question is, why bother? You can pick up a fairly decent machine for a couple hundred bucks (particularly in comparison to a 10 year old box). Why waste time with an old machine?
The briefly required travelers to surrender toothpaste and bottled water. I travel by air fairly often and haven't encountered any such difficulties recently. Long lines to get through security is about the worst of it now.
9/11 is relevant, as it demonstrated to my company a need for rather more extreme physical security measures. Our data centers were in fairly stout, very secure buildings -- and one was completely destroyed, and the other was nearly destroyed (along with major portions of our headquarters in a third building).
Granted, this was in large part due to certain factors that were unique to the 9/11 situation in particular, but had we been in some kind of seemingly ridiculous monster bunker like that referenced in the article, we'd have stood a much better chance of being up and running.
Look, the point is simple: it's a financial decision. If it seems to make financial sense, businesses will do it.
It's childish to pretend that such vast sums are being blown merely as an ego-booster. I'm sure that happens here and there because the world is a large, strange place, but that just isn't how real businesses operate, and insisting otherwise merely demonstrates a certain lack of experience and/or sophistication.
You've got the scale all wrong. A relatively small breach of data (account data on a laptop or whatever) is a far cry from bringing down a major piece of the global financial market infrastructure (and yes, we really do process enough activity to warrant that description).
My company lost two of our four major data centers in the 9/11 attack on the WTC. Completely independent of the many other effects of 9/11, the loss of those data centers and the related downtime and confusion and disruption of service had major financial repercussions for our Fortune 50 company for years to come. Yes, a giant bunker is a great thing to have for data centers of a certain size, complexity, and value. It's just a piece of a much larger strategy, but there isn't any ego-stroking involved. It simply doesn't work that way in the real world.
It's just a business decision. Relative to the loss potential of that kind of disruption (which we now understand in a very detailed and personal way), the cost of sheer overkill in physical security (and not just in the childish "ninja attack" sense) is relatively insignificant.
Since you bring up commas, and the misuse thereof -- the weirdest punctuation habit I've seen is the tendency to insert multiple commas in a series. I know several people who do this, all of whom are otherwise fairly well-educated and relatively competent communicators, and it bothers me to an unreasonable degree. What I find especially odd about it is that, apparently, the number of commas appears to denote the length of the pause they want you to read into whatever they've written. I speak face-to-face with a couple people who do this, and I've started to notice they put more than the usual amount of emphasis and "enhanced timing" in different parts of their spoken dialog. They do this with variations of cadence and the length of pauses. Consequently I've concluded the weird comma-trains are an attempt to capture in writing that element of spoken language that is otherwise difficult to represent. Still,,,,, it's distracting as hell.
Speaking as someone who actually works with system that transfers hundreds of billions in assets and securities on an annual basis (yeah, hundreds of billions, that'll keep you awake at night from time to time), physical security is a very real, very important consideration. There is nothing pseudo about it. In fact, after 9/11, federal law requires companies like ours to have certain levels of physical security which are surprisingly stringent (on top of redundancy at widely separated physical locations and other similar requirements).
And for a business which needs that level of assurance, the cost is fairly trivial, and certainly isn't going to affect their ability to deal with more mundane security issues like those you describe. Anecdotal evidence aside, rock-solid physical security is utterly irrelevant and tells you nothing about an organization's "soft" security capabilities, infrastructure, and attitude.
If you see it as mere ego-boosting, that just tells me you haven't been involved with anything in IT yet where a disruption will affect global markets and everything that follows. And while the grandparent poster may dismiss this as "mental masturbation of modern society" the fact is, somewhere down the chain that translates into potentially major impacts on real people's lives.
Almost certainly it's being posted to slashdot for the "cool factor" (remind me, whose ego is being stroked here, again?) but that doesn't make the real-world reasons for spending those dollars any less relevant when a responsibly-operated business concludes there is a need for this.
BMW's efforts tell you everything you need to know about why the $2.80/Kg figure is specious. Heck, simple math and a few facts tell you everything you need to know. Energy by weight (unit-mass) is irrelevant. As you note, hydrogen has to be compressed to be reasonably useful, and it turns out that achieving near-parity with gasoline's energy density by unit-volume, you have to compress hydrogen almost to a liquid state (LH2).
LH2 needs to be cooled at around -425F and stored at something around 11,000 PSI. At that point, you have a volumetric energy density that is about 22% that of an equivalent volume of room-temperature, 1-atmosphere (about 14 PSI) gasoline. The BMW Hydrogen 7 vehicle actually stores hydrogen at soemthing like -250 F, and about 8700 PSI, and I've read that this works out to about 13% of the volumetric energy density of gasoline.
Just to establish that cooling and compression is actually required, note that gaseous hydrogen has an energy density by volume of only 0.0003% that of gasoline.
The trouble with working with and storing hydrogen is that it bonds with metal easily (causing hydrogen embrittlement) meaning virtually every contact point has to be stainless steel, and given it's tiny size and weight, it escapes very easily. Jack up the pressure a few thousand PSI and the problem becomes even worse. BMW's fuel storage system will lose about 50% of it's total volume in a period of about 9 days, and their tank is an expensive, exotic beast comprised of something like 40 layers of specialized insulators and sealers.
So storage is complex, and I imagine harvesting hydrogen from a 1 acre area would be immensely complex, and you can also conclude that compression is complex -- and expensive. And it requires a huge amount of power.
An off-the-shelf hydrogen compressor which can process this volume of gas in a matter of hours will run you about $50K. Look it up. I did a few months ago when my father decided he'd start making hydrogen in his back yard. Compressing enough hydrogen to produce the energy-equivalence of a full tank of gasoline will also cost you about 4kwh of electricity (per tank). And you need a compressor like this -- for the volume and pressure we're talking about, anything less and you'll be losing just as much as you're compressing.
Simple math demonstrates that recouping the cost of just the compressor and electricity is virtually impossible. Assume no maintenance or failures, no costs associated with the farming of the hydrogen, and no storage or storage-loss expenses. That's about 40 years of bi-weekly 16-gallon gasoline fill-ups at $3/gallon, or the equivalent cost of about 17,000 gallons of gasoline before this setup paid for itself. And that's with a boatload of irrational assumptions skewed heavily in the favor of hydrogen. Add the costs I said to ignore, plus this $2.80/gallon production costs, assume some losses and incidental expenses over the decades, and suddenly hydrogen becomes tremendously expensive again. Even allowing for tremendous inflation of gasoline prices, you're talking nearly half a lifetime's worth of fuel just in the most basic plant and operation costs, barring storage, delivery, modifications, etc.
The only part I disagree with is that the engine modifications would be all that tricky. It's remarkably easy to convert a gasoline engine to burn hydrogen, either very efficiently, or somewhat less efficiently, but retaining the ability to continue burning gasoline as well.
Note that all these figures are off the top of my head from memory, but they're generally close enough to correct to adequately illustrate that the cost of just cracking the hydrogen doesn't even scratch the surface of real-world hydrogen-based fuels.
Thanks for the link to the bacterial bio-fuels article, by the way. I hadn't seen that one. Very interesting. I also can't help but wonder about this abiotic oil business.
Even more to the point, the article says the boss challenged him to create a visualization tool that was entertaining... this is sort of interesting, but entertaining? Or did Fudgie misspeak?
The Chinese Menace! I fret daily -- hourly -- over the malicious machinations of The Horde. And yet these neutrino rays are a fresh threat, against which Science assures us mere Faraday Pants are inadequate. I propose to you a joint effort, by which we shall advance the state of the art in the extreme defense of personal integrity -- this, by developing Chlorine Socks. Possibly these will have to be electrified; much work yet remains.
P.S. Is your Hemisphere available in a jaunty bowler style?
Actually I suspect THAT is because programmers have anywhere from little to no respect for most network administrators. Especially the net admins who claim to know how to program. Right or wrong, the always-handy car analogy is that programmers see themselves as anything from ASE-certified techs all the way up to automotive engineers, and network admins are roughly on par with the guy in the oil pit at Jiffy Lube. I certainly know that isn't always justified with today's large and very complex networks but nonetheless, that's the perception.
Literally no flame intended, I'm just making an observation based on knowing hundreds of programmers over the past 30 years...
All you really need is thrust which exceeds the gravitational field and ample fuel to reach the crossover point (as long as you have thrust and fuel, you don't need to meet or exceed escape velocity), after which the Earth's gravity well does all the hard work.
As a good starting point for tackling the problem, the ascent module portion of the Apollo lunar modules weighed about 10,000 lbs and required about 4000 lbs of propellant to leave the moon. A roughly car-sized meteorite should produce a blast equivalent to the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, so let's use that as a guideline for the size of our hypothetical rock-weapon. Lunar regolith mass and density is approximately similar to Earthside basalt, which is about 187 lbs per cubic foot. Let's say your average car is about 180 cubic feet, which is about 33,000 lbs of basalt mass. Let's call the requirement 15,000 pounds of fuel, for a total launch mass of 48,000 pounds. I'm ignoring mass that burns off in the atmosphere, but I'm also seriously rounding up the fuel requirement (considering how much mass drops as the fuel itself burns off).
So, would you suppose that a country which can launch and return a lander -- the Apollo Saturn V systems were in the range of 6.5 million pounds at launch -- could manage a 48,000 pound launch? Probably. The entire crew-section of the Apollo program -- the command module, the lander, the return vehicle, the rovers, etc. -- weighed about 50,000 lbs.
The entire exercise is trivial for a country that can not only reach the moon, but establish a base of operations.
If you add up all the various taxes they pay, Denmark sucks down about 65-70% of everyone's income. They're ranked as one of the most heavily taxed countries in the world, barely trailing Belgium and Japan. They collect nearly 50% of GDP as tax revenue. (If you feel like Googling this, look for the total tax burden, not just income tax.)
Your second point is a great example of why I don't think your first point is relevant. Almost nothing about establishing or maintaining a moon base is relevant to a Mars base. They're totally different environments in almost every way -- soil composition, atmospheric conditions, and more obvious things like accessibility and even our ability to communicate over time. I have a hard time seeing the relevance, but if you're aware of any recent books that tackle the question, I'd love to hear about it.
Based on everything I've read, the main point of attempting to establish a moon base (as it relates to Mars missions) is to create a better jumping off point, and LEO is really the best place for that, in my opinion. By the way, IANAPSSG (I Am Not A Paid Space Science Guy, LOL)...
You know, with the kind of money a company like Mattel has and access to US resources, I do wonder (not for any good reason) whether Mattel could put a man on the moon before China if they decided to try...
And why did that happen? Why, if that is true, is the U.S. building China by having almost everything made there?
It happened primarily because China was just starting to focus on retaking control of Taiwan at that point in time. Or at least, that's my opinion, I've read plenty of other opinions that relate to other events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example.
For the purposes of this topic, the US is much less of a single entity than China. US corporations are taking a very short-term view by taking advantage of the economic disparity, but if I had to guess, if it was entirely up to the US government, this would not be happening. Indeed, even talking about the "US government" this way implies a certain degree of centralized, unified single-mindedness of purpose that doesn't exist.
The moon is certainly not as close as most people seem to think, but lobbing a devastatingly huge rock out of its gravity well and doing considerable damage to Earthside cities and nations isn't exactly difficult. If you can put a lander within a few square klicks on the moon, you have the skillset and technology to land a big deadly rock within a few hundred square klicks on Earth, and that kind of bargaining power is virtually absolute.
Previously when I tried to discuss this, it degraded into assertions that the Chinese weren't especially militaristic or warlike, and I suppose that's always debatable, but if one even allows for it to be reasonably, potentially true, than the possibility must be taken seriously. You won't get a lot of opportunities to re-think it if it turns out to be true.
There's also a lot you can do with rocks. For starters you can throw them. Go read some Heinlein.
What saddens me is that this article has received about a jillion replies, and you're the first person to bring this up. I mentioned it a few years back when/. ran a story about China's announcement that they intended to make a moon attempt and was modded into oblivion -- but it's a damned scary prospect to me.
A lot of people don't realize, it isn't a simple case of the US and China not seeing eye to eye. For the first time in decades China's Defense Posture report in (or about) 1992 openly listed the US as an "enemy nation"... previously we were categorized more neutrally. Yes, even under Regan. This is one of those documents which are taken very, very seriously by both governments.
Slashdot Mirror
And since he posted AC, you're still wondering...
Try Sirius. It beats the hell out of XM. Unfortunately my current GM daily-driver has XM built-in, and frigging Directed appears to be holding off releasing their new GM-LAN-based Sirius converter, probably because of that god awful merger they keep threatening to fuck us with.
But assuming you're not stuck with a built-in XM tuner, try Sirius. I bet you'll like it more, because your complaints are very similar to what I hate about XM.
I don't mind hearing advertising with my music
Hell, at least your stations play music. On the occasions I actually go to work, my drive-time FM airwaves are filled with mind-numbing morning talk-show garbage.
For one, no one I KNOW walks with their cameras out in front of them, so the cameras would have setup such a way such that there is a single camera dedicated to capture the event. How do you know a camera is going to capture an event in the first place?
RTFA. The positions of the phones are assumed to be static. They use the motion of people around them to work out a few basic things about their relative positions, and that's really about it. The slash blurb makes it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.
Frankly I was hoping this could be adapted to camera-driven robotics localization scenarios. My RC lawn mower is nice, but one of these days I want it to drive itself. (And yes, I'm aware of the Roomba-like wandering mower bots, none of which are appropriate for several acres.)
Here's something simple [fireballcnc.com] that I found selling on ebay for less than $500 right now.
Er, you can buy it for $375 from the website you linked to...
He said, "IT oursourcing."
:)
You're welcome.
You might be surprised. Most of the Linux distros are apparently pretty intolerant of older hardware these days. Had a friend at work who was screwing around with some older machines. (And please don't pester me for details, I have no idea or interest, he just mentioned it recently after somebody else made a comment similar to yours.)
I suppose my first question is, why bother? You can pick up a fairly decent machine for a couple hundred bucks (particularly in comparison to a 10 year old box). Why waste time with an old machine?
Back around 2001, I ran Windows 2000 with SQL Server on a 90MHz Pentium.
It ran fairly well in 96MB of RAM.
The biggest problem XP would have with older machines is a lack of driver support.
The briefly required travelers to surrender toothpaste and bottled water. I travel by air fairly often and haven't encountered any such difficulties recently. Long lines to get through security is about the worst of it now.
9/11 is relevant, as it demonstrated to my company a need for rather more extreme physical security measures. Our data centers were in fairly stout, very secure buildings -- and one was completely destroyed, and the other was nearly destroyed (along with major portions of our headquarters in a third building).
Granted, this was in large part due to certain factors that were unique to the 9/11 situation in particular, but had we been in some kind of seemingly ridiculous monster bunker like that referenced in the article, we'd have stood a much better chance of being up and running.
Look, the point is simple: it's a financial decision. If it seems to make financial sense, businesses will do it.
It's childish to pretend that such vast sums are being blown merely as an ego-booster. I'm sure that happens here and there because the world is a large, strange place, but that just isn't how real businesses operate, and insisting otherwise merely demonstrates a certain lack of experience and/or sophistication.
You've got the scale all wrong. A relatively small breach of data (account data on a laptop or whatever) is a far cry from bringing down a major piece of the global financial market infrastructure (and yes, we really do process enough activity to warrant that description).
My company lost two of our four major data centers in the 9/11 attack on the WTC. Completely independent of the many other effects of 9/11, the loss of those data centers and the related downtime and confusion and disruption of service had major financial repercussions for our Fortune 50 company for years to come. Yes, a giant bunker is a great thing to have for data centers of a certain size, complexity, and value. It's just a piece of a much larger strategy, but there isn't any ego-stroking involved. It simply doesn't work that way in the real world.
It's just a business decision. Relative to the loss potential of that kind of disruption (which we now understand in a very detailed and personal way), the cost of sheer overkill in physical security (and not just in the childish "ninja attack" sense) is relatively insignificant.
Since you bring up commas, and the misuse thereof -- the weirdest punctuation habit I've seen is the tendency to insert multiple commas in a series. I know several people who do this, all of whom are otherwise fairly well-educated and relatively competent communicators, and it bothers me to an unreasonable degree. What I find especially odd about it is that, apparently, the number of commas appears to denote the length of the pause they want you to read into whatever they've written. I speak face-to-face with a couple people who do this, and I've started to notice they put more than the usual amount of emphasis and "enhanced timing" in different parts of their spoken dialog. They do this with variations of cadence and the length of pauses. Consequently I've concluded the weird comma-trains are an attempt to capture in writing that element of spoken language that is otherwise difficult to represent. Still,,,,, it's distracting as hell.
Speaking as someone who actually works with system that transfers hundreds of billions in assets and securities on an annual basis (yeah, hundreds of billions, that'll keep you awake at night from time to time), physical security is a very real, very important consideration. There is nothing pseudo about it. In fact, after 9/11, federal law requires companies like ours to have certain levels of physical security which are surprisingly stringent (on top of redundancy at widely separated physical locations and other similar requirements).
And for a business which needs that level of assurance, the cost is fairly trivial, and certainly isn't going to affect their ability to deal with more mundane security issues like those you describe. Anecdotal evidence aside, rock-solid physical security is utterly irrelevant and tells you nothing about an organization's "soft" security capabilities, infrastructure, and attitude.
If you see it as mere ego-boosting, that just tells me you haven't been involved with anything in IT yet where a disruption will affect global markets and everything that follows. And while the grandparent poster may dismiss this as "mental masturbation of modern society" the fact is, somewhere down the chain that translates into potentially major impacts on real people's lives.
Almost certainly it's being posted to slashdot for the "cool factor" (remind me, whose ego is being stroked here, again?) but that doesn't make the real-world reasons for spending those dollars any less relevant when a responsibly-operated business concludes there is a need for this.
BMW's efforts tell you everything you need to know about why the $2.80/Kg figure is specious. Heck, simple math and a few facts tell you everything you need to know. Energy by weight (unit-mass) is irrelevant. As you note, hydrogen has to be compressed to be reasonably useful, and it turns out that achieving near-parity with gasoline's energy density by unit-volume, you have to compress hydrogen almost to a liquid state (LH2).
LH2 needs to be cooled at around -425F and stored at something around 11,000 PSI. At that point, you have a volumetric energy density that is about 22% that of an equivalent volume of room-temperature, 1-atmosphere (about 14 PSI) gasoline. The BMW Hydrogen 7 vehicle actually stores hydrogen at soemthing like -250 F, and about 8700 PSI, and I've read that this works out to about 13% of the volumetric energy density of gasoline.
Just to establish that cooling and compression is actually required, note that gaseous hydrogen has an energy density by volume of only 0.0003% that of gasoline.
The trouble with working with and storing hydrogen is that it bonds with metal easily (causing hydrogen embrittlement) meaning virtually every contact point has to be stainless steel, and given it's tiny size and weight, it escapes very easily. Jack up the pressure a few thousand PSI and the problem becomes even worse. BMW's fuel storage system will lose about 50% of it's total volume in a period of about 9 days, and their tank is an expensive, exotic beast comprised of something like 40 layers of specialized insulators and sealers.
So storage is complex, and I imagine harvesting hydrogen from a 1 acre area would be immensely complex, and you can also conclude that compression is complex -- and expensive. And it requires a huge amount of power.
An off-the-shelf hydrogen compressor which can process this volume of gas in a matter of hours will run you about $50K. Look it up. I did a few months ago when my father decided he'd start making hydrogen in his back yard. Compressing enough hydrogen to produce the energy-equivalence of a full tank of gasoline will also cost you about 4kwh of electricity (per tank). And you need a compressor like this -- for the volume and pressure we're talking about, anything less and you'll be losing just as much as you're compressing.
Simple math demonstrates that recouping the cost of just the compressor and electricity is virtually impossible. Assume no maintenance or failures, no costs associated with the farming of the hydrogen, and no storage or storage-loss expenses. That's about 40 years of bi-weekly 16-gallon gasoline fill-ups at $3/gallon, or the equivalent cost of about 17,000 gallons of gasoline before this setup paid for itself. And that's with a boatload of irrational assumptions skewed heavily in the favor of hydrogen. Add the costs I said to ignore, plus this $2.80/gallon production costs, assume some losses and incidental expenses over the decades, and suddenly hydrogen becomes tremendously expensive again. Even allowing for tremendous inflation of gasoline prices, you're talking nearly half a lifetime's worth of fuel just in the most basic plant and operation costs, barring storage, delivery, modifications, etc.
The only part I disagree with is that the engine modifications would be all that tricky. It's remarkably easy to convert a gasoline engine to burn hydrogen, either very efficiently, or somewhat less efficiently, but retaining the ability to continue burning gasoline as well.
Note that all these figures are off the top of my head from memory, but they're generally close enough to correct to adequately illustrate that the cost of just cracking the hydrogen doesn't even scratch the surface of real-world hydrogen-based fuels.
Thanks for the link to the bacterial bio-fuels article, by the way. I hadn't seen that one. Very interesting. I also can't help but wonder about this abiotic oil business.
Even more to the point, the article says the boss challenged him to create a visualization tool that was entertaining... this is sort of interesting, but entertaining? Or did Fudgie misspeak?
Almost half a decade? Holy shit, that's nearly one-twentieth of a century!
My story isn't as cool, because A: I'm not famous and B: I was a dork, of sorts.
Only one of those makes you different.
The Chinese Menace! I fret daily -- hourly -- over the malicious machinations of The Horde. And yet these neutrino rays are a fresh threat, against which Science assures us mere Faraday Pants are inadequate. I propose to you a joint effort, by which we shall advance the state of the art in the extreme defense of personal integrity -- this, by developing Chlorine Socks. Possibly these will have to be electrified; much work yet remains.
P.S. Is your Hemisphere available in a jaunty bowler style?
DO NOT MOCK MY FARADAY PANTS!
Actually I suspect THAT is because programmers have anywhere from little to no respect for most network administrators. Especially the net admins who claim to know how to program. Right or wrong, the always-handy car analogy is that programmers see themselves as anything from ASE-certified techs all the way up to automotive engineers, and network admins are roughly on par with the guy in the oil pit at Jiffy Lube. I certainly know that isn't always justified with today's large and very complex networks but nonetheless, that's the perception.
Literally no flame intended, I'm just making an observation based on knowing hundreds of programmers over the past 30 years...
All you really need is thrust which exceeds the gravitational field and ample fuel to reach the crossover point (as long as you have thrust and fuel, you don't need to meet or exceed escape velocity), after which the Earth's gravity well does all the hard work.
As a good starting point for tackling the problem, the ascent module portion of the Apollo lunar modules weighed about 10,000 lbs and required about 4000 lbs of propellant to leave the moon. A roughly car-sized meteorite should produce a blast equivalent to the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, so let's use that as a guideline for the size of our hypothetical rock-weapon. Lunar regolith mass and density is approximately similar to Earthside basalt, which is about 187 lbs per cubic foot. Let's say your average car is about 180 cubic feet, which is about 33,000 lbs of basalt mass. Let's call the requirement 15,000 pounds of fuel, for a total launch mass of 48,000 pounds. I'm ignoring mass that burns off in the atmosphere, but I'm also seriously rounding up the fuel requirement (considering how much mass drops as the fuel itself burns off).
So, would you suppose that a country which can launch and return a lander -- the Apollo Saturn V systems were in the range of 6.5 million pounds at launch -- could manage a 48,000 pound launch? Probably. The entire crew-section of the Apollo program -- the command module, the lander, the return vehicle, the rovers, etc. -- weighed about 50,000 lbs.
The entire exercise is trivial for a country that can not only reach the moon, but establish a base of operations.
If you add up all the various taxes they pay, Denmark sucks down about 65-70% of everyone's income. They're ranked as one of the most heavily taxed countries in the world, barely trailing Belgium and Japan. They collect nearly 50% of GDP as tax revenue. (If you feel like Googling this, look for the total tax burden, not just income tax.)
Your second point is a great example of why I don't think your first point is relevant. Almost nothing about establishing or maintaining a moon base is relevant to a Mars base. They're totally different environments in almost every way -- soil composition, atmospheric conditions, and more obvious things like accessibility and even our ability to communicate over time. I have a hard time seeing the relevance, but if you're aware of any recent books that tackle the question, I'd love to hear about it.
Based on everything I've read, the main point of attempting to establish a moon base (as it relates to Mars missions) is to create a better jumping off point, and LEO is really the best place for that, in my opinion. By the way, IANAPSSG (I Am Not A Paid Space Science Guy, LOL)...
LOL...
You know, with the kind of money a company like Mattel has and access to US resources, I do wonder (not for any good reason) whether Mattel could put a man on the moon before China if they decided to try...
And why did that happen? Why, if that is true, is the U.S. building China by having almost everything made there?
It happened primarily because China was just starting to focus on retaking control of Taiwan at that point in time. Or at least, that's my opinion, I've read plenty of other opinions that relate to other events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example.
For the purposes of this topic, the US is much less of a single entity than China. US corporations are taking a very short-term view by taking advantage of the economic disparity, but if I had to guess, if it was entirely up to the US government, this would not be happening. Indeed, even talking about the "US government" this way implies a certain degree of centralized, unified single-mindedness of purpose that doesn't exist.
The moon is certainly not as close as most people seem to think, but lobbing a devastatingly huge rock out of its gravity well and doing considerable damage to Earthside cities and nations isn't exactly difficult. If you can put a lander within a few square klicks on the moon, you have the skillset and technology to land a big deadly rock within a few hundred square klicks on Earth, and that kind of bargaining power is virtually absolute.
Previously when I tried to discuss this, it degraded into assertions that the Chinese weren't especially militaristic or warlike, and I suppose that's always debatable, but if one even allows for it to be reasonably, potentially true, than the possibility must be taken seriously. You won't get a lot of opportunities to re-think it if it turns out to be true.
There's also a lot you can do with rocks. For starters you can throw them. Go read some Heinlein.
/. ran a story about China's announcement that they intended to make a moon attempt and was modded into oblivion -- but it's a damned scary prospect to me.
What saddens me is that this article has received about a jillion replies, and you're the first person to bring this up. I mentioned it a few years back when
A lot of people don't realize, it isn't a simple case of the US and China not seeing eye to eye. For the first time in decades China's Defense Posture report in (or about) 1992 openly listed the US as an "enemy nation"... previously we were categorized more neutrally. Yes, even under Regan. This is one of those documents which are taken very, very seriously by both governments.
The power of nuclear weapons pales in comparison.