I like it. Outside the box thinking, that. Efficient. It's actually a way of letting the 'market' solve the problem. (Ecosystems and free markets operate under essentially the same mathematical models.):)
Back in 1987 I drove across the country from LA to Pittsburgh, including across Texas on I-10. I was running 90 MPH on most of that stretch, and the _semi trucks_ were blowing my doors off, never mind the cars. When the mover arrived with our stuff (I left before him), I asked him about it. He said he regularly ran 110 to 120 going across Texas. The then-new high powered, slippery semi trucks had no problem with those speeds.
Realize that a good part of that stretch of I-10 is literally flatter* than a pancake, and originally had one or more stretches that ran 300 miles without a curve, and dam* few exits. They later added some curves just to keep people awake, after they found people were nodding off and leaving the highway in unplanned ways.
* someone tested the 'flat as a pancake' meme (IIRC about Nebraska, but it applies here as well). It turns out that if Nebraska were scaled down to pancake size, it would be an order of magnitude flatter than a typical pancake. When I lived in Houston I figured the reason that folks build big stuff there is just to provide something interesting on the horizon.
It's about time dep't: The Cray-II was immersed in a tank of Fluorinert (type of Freon). This allowed circuit boards to be stacked eight high in a single module:
Six months later Cray had his "eureka" moment. He called the main engineers together for a meeting and presented a new solution to the problem. Instead of making one larger circuit board, each "card" would instead consist of a 3-D stack of eight, connected together in the middle of the boards using pins sticking up from the surface (known as "pogos" or "z-pins"). The cards were packed right on top of each other, so the resulting stack was only about 3 inches high. With this sort of density there was no way any conventional air-cooled system would work; there was too little room for air to flow between the ICs. Instead the system would be immersed in a tank of a new inert liquid from 3M, Fluorinert. The cooling liquid was forced sideways through the modules under pressure, and the flow rate was roughly one inch per second. The heated liquid was cooled using chilled water heat exchangers and returned to the main tank. Work on the new design started in earnest in 1982, several years after the original start date.
You are right, I did miss your point!:D And I agree with it, mostly.
But there is one additional factor - the cost of materials lifted off Earth is so high that the best, most recent studies are indicating that getting materials for a large space station/habitat by mining and extraction on the Moon will be 1/5 or less of the cost of lifting the materials off Earth. This includes some reasonable estimates for the cost of doing things on the Moon. So this implies that a significant presence (perhaps mostly robotic, but still...) will be useful just to get ready to go to the asteroids, at least in the short term. In the long term I think that both will occur, and there will be those who like one or the other in roughly equal proportions.
OTOH, one might argue that if you can mine the Moon for materials, you can mine the asteroids without much more effort. I've argued previously that eventually most space vehicles and habitats may be made of nickel steel, using the nickel iron that many asteroids are made of. Shipping such materials around space is relatively cheap (depending on how fast one wants it delivered) so pure mass vs. strength is no longer so important.
A very significant issue with asteroid living is the lack of gravity. In this respect the asteroids are like space stations or space colonies, with the sole advantage of raw materials close by.
The parent is assuming it has to be done fast. Many space activities involve a trade off between energy required and time expended. On one hand, one solar-powered robotic 'ditch digger', working essentially two weeks on, two weeks off, could dig a big enough hole in a few years, one bucket at a time. A dozen could probably do it in less than a year. On the other hand, the technology was worked out but never implemented in the 1960s to build a new canal across Nicaragua, replacing the Panama Canal. It would have uses a series of atomic explosions 200 feet underground. The canal could theoretically have been dug in its entirety in a couple of years. This would have been a bad idea on several levels, but shows that with the application of enough energy the time scale shortens radically.
Nearly everything mechanical having to do with colonization of the moon and space has become an engineering and finance problem, not a science problem. There are still big issues - payloads to get off Earth are still on the order of less than 1% of the mass of the launch system; we are really never going to build orbital colonies without a substantial mining and fabrication capability on the moon; and we have not proven that the resources in space are worth enough to justify the effort (though the evidence is good.)
More significantly, we are way behind the curve in the biological area compared to the mechanical area, and this is a science problem. We have only a primitive idea of how to build a sustained 'closed' biological system that produces useful food from biowaste, recycles air, etc.; we don't know how the 1/6 gravity on the moon will affect us or other life; and so forth. NASA does not have a charter to put significant funding into those critical questions.
Hmm. You just gave me something to think about - perhaps wind would be the best way to drive the rotation. I haven't done the arithmetic, but using O'Neill cylinders as an example, It might work thusly: instead of using motors to drive the two cylinders, use windmills to drive the air inside around (compensating for the drag and maintaining the rotational speed), simultaneously providing a stable breeze to recirculate the air inside the cylinder. The only drag then would be the bearing drag at each end of the cylinder vs. the rest of the structure, plus the gas drag that you mention. Without doing the sums I can't say if this would require/cause too much wind or too little, and how to allow for or compensate for other gas effects (localized expansion due to solar influx near the 'windows', etc.). But it's an intriguing notion.
You've touched on a very important point. There has been a lot of work on this topic. For small diameters the spin rate is so high that the coriolis force on your body is disruptive - your feet want to go one way, your head in another. The centrigugal force is also different at the feet and the head. And the stars would be going by outside the window (if there are any) at rather startling rates.
So 200-300 meters becomes the most reasonable minimum radius. According to NASA via Wikipedia:
Turning one's head rapidly in such an environment causes a "tilt" to be sensed as one's inner ears move at different rotational rates. Centrifuge studies show that people get motion-sick in habitats with a rotational radius of less than 100 metres, or with a rotation rate above 3 rotations per minute. However, the same studies and statistical inference indicate that almost all people should be able to live comfortably in habitats with a rotational radius larger than 500 meters and below 1 RPM. Experienced persons were not merely more resistant to motion sickness, but could also use the effect to determine "spinward" and "antispinward" directions in the centrifuges.
Fortunately, for a reasonably large structure, the additional strength required to support such a rotation rate is not large compared to the strength required to support normal atmospheric pressure and other requirements. So it's not a deal-breaker. More detail here, and here (O'Neill colonies). O'Neill proposed cylinders eight km in diameter and 32 km long, with a population of (IIRC) 20,000, built with materials from the moon.
My thought is, don't try to make a permanent self-sustaining biosphere right off the bat. Start by trying to keep things alive for, say, a lunar month. Learn from that, and try for two months. Learn, rinse, repeat. A single experimental bio-sustainability probe could perhaps perform such experiments a dozen times over a year or so using the same materials. (Question - use hydroponics, or soil-based growing medium?) Learn what is missing. It might be best to start with something simple such as simple algae in a liquid medium.
It's worth noting that a long-term sustainable closed ecosystem has actually been done. One can buy, today, a desktop closed ecosystem that (IIRC) contains algae, simple brine shrimp, and maybe a third thing, all in a sealed glass container. All that is added is light. So maybe that's where one starts - on earth, figure out a simple system like this that can handle two weeks of darkness.
Perhaps for a second phase, try grabbing some lunar soil and incorporating it as an extension of the original, earth-sourced soil - say 10%. Then 20%. And so forth. IF such soil extension works, then we might already have an idea
This is the biological equivalent of sending up Sputnik, then Laika, then a human up and down, then orbit a human, and so forth. Don't try to build a space station before figuring out how to launch a rocket. Don't try to build a complete forest on the moon before figuring out how to grow algae in the dark. Maybe the best solution is a big salt water aquarium full of seaweed and shrimp.
I don't see the point of spending lots of resources leaving a somewhat hospitable gravity well just to get stuck in an inhospitable one. You are still going to need most of the tech you need in a space station to survive on Mars or the Moon. You can't step outside and live for long on both places. And I doubt the winds and dust storms on Mars will be that helpful. Vast expanses of low productivity[1] inhospitable land isn't what I call a benefit.
That's pretty much what most of the earliest floating algae in the sea might have said to the first plants that put their roots up into the dry land and populated previously-unknown continents with their progeny; and what later sea-dwelling critters might have said to the first fish-thing that decided to use its fins to slither out onto the unpopulated land surface, that by then had developed into a huge new ecosystem, ready for animals to enjoy and exploit. And thus, after many revolutions around the sun, man.
Just because there's a desert to cross doesn't mean it's not worth while to cross it - or even to learn how to live in it. What seems hostile and incompatible with life to us, now, will not always be incompatible with future life, then, because we will adapt both biologically and technologically. There is a lot to learn but we can learn and evolve to become what lives on, between and among the planets and someday the stars. In us, life has evolved a way to accelerate evolution by means of a species that can direct its own evolution and the evolution of its ecosystem. We may or may not recognize our children, but they will remember us.
Back in the day (as it happened, in that day the soon-to-be founders of Matrox, which was mentioned in an earlier post, worked in the same building as I did, at Tektronix in Wilsonville), we used various early computer games as useful hardware test cases for Tek's graphics terminals and workstations. Just as now, games pushed the envelope of everything - software, hardware, and thermal. Running Asteroids was a good way to find out how to blow up the terminal's embedded OS, or smoke the power supply.
A co-worker at Tek and I modified Asteroids to run as a 4-D game with three screens and gravity - missiles would curve around 'planets' and 'stars'. Unfortunately the graphics transforms slowed the Tek workstation down so much it was unplayable. I just was cleaning out old boxes after a dozen or so moves, and found the line printer listing! So now I'm thinking of implementing it in Erlang or something - a way to teach myself the language.
I think it depends greatly on usage. As we move more toward internet-based watching, resolution becomes more important - text requires better resolution than images of ripples on water, for example. It also depends on which viewers. Let's stipulate that the 'average' football fan doesn't really care whether the edges of the numbers on a jersey are crisp, as two 300 pound behemoths crash into each other at a combined speed of 30 miles per hour. But another viewer might very much like to see the details on the wings of a butterfly and be able to distinguish the species of flowers the butterfly is flying over, while also being able to see the entire broad view of the field. This is the reason why IMAX is better than normal movies - you get the detail _and_ you get the view that extends past your momentary field of vision, so you can and must move your head from side to side to take it all in.
I remember seeing (I think it was "Space Station 3D", at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC), which included clips from normal movie cameras of some of the earlier launches of the rocket. They looked like home movies compared to the IMAX segments - the rocket was grainy, and the entire shot only took up the center of the IMAX screen. I believe that IMAX had over 9 times as many pixels per area of the screen as the Cinema quality segments, and extended three times as far across the room.
I had the good fortune to see some extremely high quality prints produced by an award-winning nature photographer (I forget his name, unfortunately). His prints, typically about 3 feet by 4 feet, are printed at 1000 dpi (each image is several hundred megabytes). The original photos are taken with the highest resolution film available, on 8x10 view camera (like Ansel Adams), then digitally processed by the photographer with the best equipment, to get the utmost dynamic range and pixel resolution. The detail is amazing. You can look at a forest scene, then get very close, and on the farthest trees in the picture, if you look very, very close, you can see individual leaves or pine needles, at or beyond the limit of your eye. As a result, the picture looks like the real thing, not like a picture. (of course, it's not 3D).
I want both the width of screen that allows me to be embedded in the scene, and resolution sufficient that if I put my head a foot from the screen, I still can't distinguish individual pixels. Anything less is a compromise to short term technical constraints that should not drive our standards.
I see no reason to take these assessments that 'most people can't see any better than X from 10 feet away) as any excuse (not justfication - excuse!) for not producing images or videos that are better than that. What if I want to project a forest scene on an entire wall, and look for moths on the trees? Why should the resolution be limited to what an undeducated, squinty-eyed dork can pay attention to while stuffing chips in his mouth? Is it not better to ask, what's the best we can do _for the future_ when people might have more demands? We occasionally see clips from kinescopes - copies taken from a TV camera from the 1950s, that always look grainy, with poor resolution, etc. Do we want what we have now to look the same in 20 or 40 years? I would rather have the standards support something better than we can even technically do today, in order to meet the future head-on.
I think that leaves out the Niquist sampling theorem and the dynamic environment.
Even assuming the eye is a non-moving digital receiver, for the TV to exceed the eye's spatial frequency it has to provide 2X the spatial resolution in each direction.
But also, as was shown in the first 3D head-up display work at NASA Ames in the early 1990s, the eye's natural dithering combined with retinal and brain processing provides a virtual resolution that can be much higher - several times higher - than simple static pixels. Which is partly why 'nature' looks better. In the NASA experiment a pair of 128x128 pixel displays were built into a helmet that also had eye tracking. When the eye tracking and display were running at high enough resolutions (60 Hz+), the dithering of the eyes was picked up by the eye tracker and the 3D scene could be synthesized to match the new perspective. As a result a virtual resolution an order of magnitude greater was perceived than the rough 128 pixels.
The eye is constantly moving very slight amounts so that an edge between colors (for example) may be picked up by different cells (vertically and horizontally). Since cells are not aligned in vertical rows, this provides a virtual edge line that our brain extrapolates into our perception based on this constantly shifting view, resulting in perhaps (nobody knows AFAIK) five to ten times the apparent static resolution. It's the eye+brain's equivalent of subpixel rendering - call it subpixel perceiving.
Also the retinal cells are constantly switching on and off (firing and resting), shifting the view between adjacent retinal cells- anyone who has taken LSD has been aware of that as they see the 'squirming' of the image as it's picked up by different cells. Normally our brain filters that out but LSD turns off the filters, apparently.
So, bottom line, the Lechner Distance is not the final word. It assumes a static environment that does not exist, and ignores temporal characteristics in retina and brain processing of the image.
Let's put them all in a big circle, pointed inward, and have them accelerate as fast as possible toward the center. Then see what happens!:D That would be video worth watching!
Without RTFA, I'm thinking that the typical message would only need to be about 100 bytes or less, every 100 msec. so the throughput per car would only be on the order of 1KiB to 2KiB per second, even taking encryption into account. So that's 10-20 Kbps per car - quite a bit better than 100Mbps. Just guessing, of course.
And I wouldn't be surprised if any production system would have its own set of channels that are illegal to use for anything but navigation. This wouldn't stop the jammers, but it would isolate the auto traffic from any other standard signals. I think that a good timebase * ident * encryption method would work against most attempts to penetrate, leaving only vulnerability to brute force 100 KW jamming by someone who wants to stop everything that moves. And then (assuming the drivers aren't even more idiotic than they are now), drivers could just revert to actually driving.
If this is only a collision avoidance system, not navigation or actual driving, drivers are still driving, but they would now just have an enhanced collision alert + auto brake function.
All I can say is that, in the case cited, for every rat that someone said they saw, there were 10 rats in reality. Everything else extrapolates from that.
I will add some anecdotal evidence. Some time ago when I lived in a house in the woods, I heard but never saw mice. So I put out traps, first regular snap'em traps then live traps. I caught 22 mice in two nights - I was getting up about every 20 minutes at the sound of the traps going off. I think it was two families. Most of them were half-grown, probably on their first trip out. I put them all in a big garbage can that I had, and took them out into the woods and let them go - I figure I was giving them a fair chance (better than poisoning or broken necks), and also (since they came from the woods) putting them back in the environment that they normally lived in. I lived 1/2 mile from the next house, so they had to be at least nominally able to survive in the woods and if not, I was feeding the Great Horned owl that lived nearby, and the coyotes, and the hawks and eagles, etc. I learned later that in most states it's illegal to dump critters like that but in this case I think I might still have done so.
(Two of those I caught in live traps had gross evidence of being near-missed by the snap'em traps - ick.)
The quote was, IIRC, from Einstein, not talking about biz at all.
The resource extraction biz is inherently the other way around. There are tech biz operated like your quote, just no resource extractor biz. Large simple problems in the past, small complex problems in the future. Declining production years in a resource biz are almost the classic example of picking up nickels in front of the steamroller.
The natural gas situation is a pretty good counter example - present proven reserves (_real_ proven reserves) are almost an order of magnitude greater than was even considered theoretically possible 30 years ago.
From my own experience in the oil exploration field, it is way more technical that most people realize. It is not uncommon for the drill bit assembly to include neutron activation analysis, nuclear magnetic resonance, gamma ray sensing, and a variety of other capabilities with multiple computer modules, all running in an environment that includes 100 G shock, 446F/230C and 30,000 psi/207 MPas, all running several miles down a bendy pipe. The chips used are rated higher than either military or space grade (except they don't usually need rad-hard). I discovered that it's the ideal boy-toy business, a combination of big heavy dangerous things that go boom, bleeding-edge geekdom, and responsibility for projects that are burning $500,000 per day and 100 miles from anywhere (not a bad job for an engineer two years out of college, although that wasn't what I did.)
It's been about 20 years since my favorite example of what technology has done in the oil biz - I forget the name of the place but it's an estuary in the UK. The UK government allowed drillers access to a single island, one acre in size. No impact was allowed to the estuary except for the movement of boats to and from the island, and the single physical pipe that transported the oil from the wellhead to the outside world (I forget if it went to land or to a floating terminal). From that island they drilled a single vertical hole, then (10 times) 'turned left' and drilled horizontally. The longest of the ten horizontal holes was over 10 km. The drill bit knew at all times where it was both geographically and within the oil seam, which at times was only a foot thick. The bit went up, down, left and right according to its best analysis of the route. Using technology to prevent damage to the environment counts, IMHO as a 'new more complex problem' compared to the bad old days of wildcatters.
The Canadian tar sands, by themselves, have more than doubled proven reserves of oil, albeit (as another commenter mentioned) at a higher cost both environmental (in both senses - potential damage and cost to prevent damage) and financial, as well as technical advances. US shale oil, if and when we get to that, is even larger, harder and more technically challenging. Then, if we get to that, there are the undersea methane clathrates - undeniably more complex and by best estimates a couple of orders of magnitude greater than all known present amounts of oil + gas in the ground.
I hope it all works out but right now I see much of science and technology as dooming mankind more than helping. We are gambling that there is a point where science and technology suddenly shine with a bounty for all of humanity.
It's possible, although historically technology has definitely improved our lives and saved our butts. Sanitation engineering, just for starters.
As I see it, science and technology are potentially what will change us from a single 'plant' (ecosystem) on a single planet to a spacefaring race, putting seeds of life throughout the solar system and eventually the galaxy. To me this is 'black sky' - beyond blue sky, but the opportunity is there, and unlimited. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Just as a plant or a fungus assembles a packet of DNA into a 'seed' or similar entity and projects it beyond itself, we can use technology to take our life and the life of this planet to other climes. Some species of mushrooms have distributed themselves throughout the entire planet, the same species showing up on all non-frozen continents. Their parent never knew what happened to them, of couse. But their 'technology' (sporulation, etc.) made it possible. I think our technology is also like that - it's a natural part of us, and a natural extension of life that makes it possible for our life (the entire ecosystem, in a sense) to expand beyond the bounds of Earth.
That's an interesting point that I've thought about a few times - as civilization becomes more technical and more intertwined, the value of what surrounds each of us, and the potential cost of a mistake or a purposeful act, becomes greater and greater. In the extreme you have a pilot flying a $1.5 billion airplane, or the captain of a ship that could cause similar levels of cost due to a collision. But even on the highway, a serious auto accident is likely to cost more than the combined annual incomes of the two parties. A simple mistake such as missing a stitch when the OR doctor removes an appendix could result in $millions in damage and insurance claims. As recently as 200 years ago, only a select few in the aristocracy had the potential to cost a nation the equivalent of even a million present-day dollars, now almost everyone has that potential. Today a drunk could conceivably leave a bar, crash into a post and cause the derailment of a high speed train with potential deaths in the hundreds or even thousands, and $millions in damage - unlikely but possible.
As the risks and relative costs become higher, it appears that the need for society to constrain behavior must inevitably become greater. Is there another way? Is personal liberty the inevitable victim of advanced civilization?
Sorry, blatantly false. Try to find a US oil production graph showing this, LOL. Prediction dead accurate.
Oddly enough I did read an article this week, discussing this very topic. Proven reserves of oil are now four times what they were in 1970. The same or similar is true of gold, aluminum, and various other resources. Granted, the technologies of extraction have made all the difference, and it costs more in some cases as we go deeper, etc. But that is the essence of tech progress: "exchanging small simple problems for bigger, more complex ones."
Intelligence isn't like hair color or height and isn't directly inheritable.
Interestingly, according to recent literature psychopathy is about 80% inheritable. (But only about 50% of children who show the symptoms early become psychopathic as addults - the other half seem to find a way to fit into society's norms.) One then must ask, "Why would psychopathy be so successful (at some small percentage of the population) that it inherits this strongly, while intelligence isn't.?" Of course intelligence has a strong environmental/development component, and it is complicated by the fact that higher intelligence also puts one at risk of various forms of mental disruption - depression, schizophrenia, etc.
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I like it. Outside the box thinking, that. Efficient. It's actually a way of letting the 'market' solve the problem. (Ecosystems and free markets operate under essentially the same mathematical models.) :)
100% of 2012 U.S. presidential candidates are certified assholes. Fuck them all. Die with festering boils you SOBs.
FTFY
Back in 1987 I drove across the country from LA to Pittsburgh, including across Texas on I-10. I was running 90 MPH on most of that stretch, and the _semi trucks_ were blowing my doors off, never mind the cars. When the mover arrived with our stuff (I left before him), I asked him about it. He said he regularly ran 110 to 120 going across Texas. The then-new high powered, slippery semi trucks had no problem with those speeds.
Realize that a good part of that stretch of I-10 is literally flatter* than a pancake, and originally had one or more stretches that ran 300 miles without a curve, and dam* few exits. They later added some curves just to keep people awake, after they found people were nodding off and leaving the highway in unplanned ways.
* someone tested the 'flat as a pancake' meme (IIRC about Nebraska, but it applies here as well). It turns out that if Nebraska were scaled down to pancake size, it would be an order of magnitude flatter than a typical pancake. When I lived in Houston I figured the reason that folks build big stuff there is just to provide something interesting on the horizon.
It's about time dep't:
The Cray-II was immersed in a tank of Fluorinert (type of Freon). This allowed circuit boards to be stacked eight high in a single module:
Six months later Cray had his "eureka" moment. He called the main engineers together for a meeting and presented a new solution to the problem. Instead of making one larger circuit board, each "card" would instead consist of a 3-D stack of eight, connected together in the middle of the boards using pins sticking up from the surface (known as "pogos" or "z-pins"). The cards were packed right on top of each other, so the resulting stack was only about 3 inches high. With this sort of density there was no way any conventional air-cooled system would work; there was too little room for air to flow between the ICs. Instead the system would be immersed in a tank of a new inert liquid from 3M, Fluorinert. The cooling liquid was forced sideways through the modules under pressure, and the flow rate was roughly one inch per second. The heated liquid was cooled using chilled water heat exchangers and returned to the main tank. Work on the new design started in earnest in 1982, several years after the original start date.
You are right, I did miss your point! :D And I agree with it, mostly.
But there is one additional factor - the cost of materials lifted off Earth is so high that the best, most recent studies are indicating that getting materials for a large space station/habitat by mining and extraction on the Moon will be 1/5 or less of the cost of lifting the materials off Earth. This includes some reasonable estimates for the cost of doing things on the Moon. So this implies that a significant presence (perhaps mostly robotic, but still...) will be useful just to get ready to go to the asteroids, at least in the short term. In the long term I think that both will occur, and there will be those who like one or the other in roughly equal proportions.
OTOH, one might argue that if you can mine the Moon for materials, you can mine the asteroids without much more effort. I've argued previously that eventually most space vehicles and habitats may be made of nickel steel, using the nickel iron that many asteroids are made of. Shipping such materials around space is relatively cheap (depending on how fast one wants it delivered) so pure mass vs. strength is no longer so important.
A very significant issue with asteroid living is the lack of gravity. In this respect the asteroids are like space stations or space colonies, with the sole advantage of raw materials close by.
... and those on Mars would also prefer to 'buy' locally. :D
The parent is assuming it has to be done fast. Many space activities involve a trade off between energy required and time expended. On one hand, one solar-powered robotic 'ditch digger', working essentially two weeks on, two weeks off, could dig a big enough hole in a few years, one bucket at a time. A dozen could probably do it in less than a year. On the other hand, the technology was worked out but never implemented in the 1960s to build a new canal across Nicaragua, replacing the Panama Canal. It would have uses a series of atomic explosions 200 feet underground. The canal could theoretically have been dug in its entirety in a couple of years. This would have been a bad idea on several levels, but shows that with the application of enough energy the time scale shortens radically.
Nearly everything mechanical having to do with colonization of the moon and space has become an engineering and finance problem, not a science problem. There are still big issues - payloads to get off Earth are still on the order of less than 1% of the mass of the launch system; we are really never going to build orbital colonies without a substantial mining and fabrication capability on the moon; and we have not proven that the resources in space are worth enough to justify the effort (though the evidence is good.)
More significantly, we are way behind the curve in the biological area compared to the mechanical area, and this is a science problem. We have only a primitive idea of how to build a sustained 'closed' biological system that produces useful food from biowaste, recycles air, etc.; we don't know how the 1/6 gravity on the moon will affect us or other life; and so forth. NASA does not have a charter to put significant funding into those critical questions.
Hmm. You just gave me something to think about - perhaps wind would be the best way to drive the rotation. I haven't done the arithmetic, but using O'Neill cylinders as an example, It might work thusly: instead of using motors to drive the two cylinders, use windmills to drive the air inside around (compensating for the drag and maintaining the rotational speed), simultaneously providing a stable breeze to recirculate the air inside the cylinder. The only drag then would be the bearing drag at each end of the cylinder vs. the rest of the structure, plus the gas drag that you mention. Without doing the sums I can't say if this would require/cause too much wind or too little, and how to allow for or compensate for other gas effects (localized expansion due to solar influx near the 'windows', etc.). But it's an intriguing notion.
You've touched on a very important point. There has been a lot of work on this topic. For small diameters the spin rate is so high that the coriolis force on your body is disruptive - your feet want to go one way, your head in another. The centrigugal force is also different at the feet and the head. And the stars would be going by outside the window (if there are any) at rather startling rates.
So 200-300 meters becomes the most reasonable minimum radius. According to NASA via Wikipedia:
Turning one's head rapidly in such an environment causes a "tilt" to be sensed as one's inner ears move at different rotational rates. Centrifuge studies show that people get motion-sick in habitats with a rotational radius of less than 100 metres, or with a rotation rate above 3 rotations per minute. However, the same studies and statistical inference indicate that almost all people should be able to live comfortably in habitats with a rotational radius larger than 500 meters and below 1 RPM. Experienced persons were not merely more resistant to motion sickness, but could also use the effect to determine "spinward" and "antispinward" directions in the centrifuges.
Fortunately, for a reasonably large structure, the additional strength required to support such a rotation rate is not large compared to the strength required to support normal atmospheric pressure and other requirements. So it's not a deal-breaker.
More detail here, and here (O'Neill colonies). O'Neill proposed cylinders eight km in diameter and 32 km long, with a population of (IIRC) 20,000, built with materials from the moon.
Followup - a friend sent me this link about desktop closed ecosystems: Eco-sphere.com.
My thought is, don't try to make a permanent self-sustaining biosphere right off the bat. Start by trying to keep things alive for, say, a lunar month. Learn from that, and try for two months. Learn, rinse, repeat. A single experimental bio-sustainability probe could perhaps perform such experiments a dozen times over a year or so using the same materials. (Question - use hydroponics, or soil-based growing medium?) Learn what is missing. It might be best to start with something simple such as simple algae in a liquid medium.
It's worth noting that a long-term sustainable closed ecosystem has actually been done. One can buy, today, a desktop closed ecosystem that (IIRC) contains algae, simple brine shrimp, and maybe a third thing, all in a sealed glass container. All that is added is light. So maybe that's where one starts - on earth, figure out a simple system like this that can handle two weeks of darkness.
Perhaps for a second phase, try grabbing some lunar soil and incorporating it as an extension of the original, earth-sourced soil - say 10%. Then 20%. And so forth. IF such soil extension works, then we might already have an idea
This is the biological equivalent of sending up Sputnik, then Laika, then a human up and down, then orbit a human, and so forth. Don't try to build a space station before figuring out how to launch a rocket. Don't try to build a complete forest on the moon before figuring out how to grow algae in the dark. Maybe the best solution is a big salt water aquarium full of seaweed and shrimp.
I would support such a project.
I don't see the point of spending lots of resources leaving a somewhat hospitable gravity well just to get stuck in an inhospitable one. You are still going to need most of the tech you need in a space station to survive on Mars or the Moon. You can't step outside and live for long on both places. And I doubt the winds and dust storms on Mars will be that helpful. Vast expanses of low productivity[1] inhospitable land isn't what I call a benefit.
That's pretty much what most of the earliest floating algae in the sea might have said to the first plants that put their roots up into the dry land and populated previously-unknown continents with their progeny; and what later sea-dwelling critters might have said to the first fish-thing that decided to use its fins to slither out onto the unpopulated land surface, that by then had developed into a huge new ecosystem, ready for animals to enjoy and exploit. And thus, after many revolutions around the sun, man.
Just because there's a desert to cross doesn't mean it's not worth while to cross it - or even to learn how to live in it. What seems hostile and incompatible with life to us, now, will not always be incompatible with future life, then, because we will adapt both biologically and technologically. There is a lot to learn but we can learn and evolve to become what lives on, between and among the planets and someday the stars. In us, life has evolved a way to accelerate evolution by means of a species that can direct its own evolution and the evolution of its ecosystem. We may or may not recognize our children, but they will remember us.
Back in the day (as it happened, in that day the soon-to-be founders of Matrox, which was mentioned in an earlier post, worked in the same building as I did, at Tektronix in Wilsonville), we used various early computer games as useful hardware test cases for Tek's graphics terminals and workstations. Just as now, games pushed the envelope of everything - software, hardware, and thermal. Running Asteroids was a good way to find out how to blow up the terminal's embedded OS, or smoke the power supply.
A co-worker at Tek and I modified Asteroids to run as a 4-D game with three screens and gravity - missiles would curve around 'planets' and 'stars'. Unfortunately the graphics transforms slowed the Tek workstation down so much it was unplayable. I just was cleaning out old boxes after a dozen or so moves, and found the line printer listing! So now I'm thinking of implementing it in Erlang or something - a way to teach myself the language.
Ha! When I was young all we had was a 110 baud KSR-33 teletype with mechanical keys and paper printout, and we LIKED it!
Look during the day, when there's more light to see by.
I think it depends greatly on usage. As we move more toward internet-based watching, resolution becomes more important - text requires better resolution than images of ripples on water, for example. It also depends on which viewers. Let's stipulate that the 'average' football fan doesn't really care whether the edges of the numbers on a jersey are crisp, as two 300 pound behemoths crash into each other at a combined speed of 30 miles per hour. But another viewer might very much like to see the details on the wings of a butterfly and be able to distinguish the species of flowers the butterfly is flying over, while also being able to see the entire broad view of the field. This is the reason why IMAX is better than normal movies - you get the detail _and_ you get the view that extends past your momentary field of vision, so you can and must move your head from side to side to take it all in.
I remember seeing (I think it was "Space Station 3D", at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC), which included clips from normal movie cameras of some of the earlier launches of the rocket. They looked like home movies compared to the IMAX segments - the rocket was grainy, and the entire shot only took up the center of the IMAX screen. I believe that IMAX had over 9 times as many pixels per area of the screen as the Cinema quality segments, and extended three times as far across the room.
I had the good fortune to see some extremely high quality prints produced by an award-winning nature photographer (I forget his name, unfortunately). His prints, typically about 3 feet by 4 feet, are printed at 1000 dpi (each image is several hundred megabytes). The original photos are taken with the highest resolution film available, on 8x10 view camera (like Ansel Adams), then digitally processed by the photographer with the best equipment, to get the utmost dynamic range and pixel resolution. The detail is amazing. You can look at a forest scene, then get very close, and on the farthest trees in the picture, if you look very, very close, you can see individual leaves or pine needles, at or beyond the limit of your eye. As a result, the picture looks like the real thing, not like a picture. (of course, it's not 3D).
I want both the width of screen that allows me to be embedded in the scene, and resolution sufficient that if I put my head a foot from the screen, I still can't distinguish individual pixels. Anything less is a compromise to short term technical constraints that should not drive our standards.
I see no reason to take these assessments that 'most people can't see any better than X from 10 feet away) as any excuse (not justfication - excuse!) for not producing images or videos that are better than that. What if I want to project a forest scene on an entire wall, and look for moths on the trees? Why should the resolution be limited to what an undeducated, squinty-eyed dork can pay attention to while stuffing chips in his mouth? Is it not better to ask, what's the best we can do _for the future_ when people might have more demands? We occasionally see clips from kinescopes - copies taken from a TV camera from the 1950s, that always look grainy, with poor resolution, etc. Do we want what we have now to look the same in 20 or 40 years? I would rather have the standards support something better than we can even technically do today, in order to meet the future head-on.
I think that leaves out the Niquist sampling theorem and the dynamic environment.
Even assuming the eye is a non-moving digital receiver, for the TV to exceed the eye's spatial frequency it has to provide 2X the spatial resolution in each direction.
But also, as was shown in the first 3D head-up display work at NASA Ames in the early 1990s, the eye's natural dithering combined with retinal and brain processing provides a virtual resolution that can be much higher - several times higher - than simple static pixels. Which is partly why 'nature' looks better. In the NASA experiment a pair of 128x128 pixel displays were built into a helmet that also had eye tracking. When the eye tracking and display were running at high enough resolutions (60 Hz+), the dithering of the eyes was picked up by the eye tracker and the 3D scene could be synthesized to match the new perspective. As a result a virtual resolution an order of magnitude greater was perceived than the rough 128 pixels.
The eye is constantly moving very slight amounts so that an edge between colors (for example) may be picked up by different cells (vertically and horizontally). Since cells are not aligned in vertical rows, this provides a virtual edge line that our brain extrapolates into our perception based on this constantly shifting view, resulting in perhaps (nobody knows AFAIK) five to ten times the apparent static resolution. It's the eye+brain's equivalent of subpixel rendering - call it subpixel perceiving.
Also the retinal cells are constantly switching on and off (firing and resting), shifting the view between adjacent retinal cells- anyone who has taken LSD has been aware of that as they see the 'squirming' of the image as it's picked up by different cells. Normally our brain filters that out but LSD turns off the filters, apparently.
So, bottom line, the Lechner Distance is not the final word. It assumes a static environment that does not exist, and ignores temporal characteristics in retina and brain processing of the image.
Let's put them all in a big circle, pointed inward, and have them accelerate as fast as possible toward the center. Then see what happens! :D
That would be video worth watching!
Without RTFA, I'm thinking that the typical message would only need to be about 100 bytes or less, every 100 msec. so the throughput per car would only be on the order of 1KiB to 2KiB per second, even taking encryption into account. So that's 10-20 Kbps per car - quite a bit better than 100Mbps. Just guessing, of course.
And I wouldn't be surprised if any production system would have its own set of channels that are illegal to use for anything but navigation. This wouldn't stop the jammers, but it would isolate the auto traffic from any other standard signals. I think that a good timebase * ident * encryption method would work against most attempts to penetrate, leaving only vulnerability to brute force 100 KW jamming by someone who wants to stop everything that moves. And then (assuming the drivers aren't even more idiotic than they are now), drivers could just revert to actually driving.
If this is only a collision avoidance system, not navigation or actual driving, drivers are still driving, but they would now just have an enhanced collision alert + auto brake function.
All I can say is that, in the case cited, for every rat that someone said they saw, there were 10 rats in reality. Everything else extrapolates from that.
I will add some anecdotal evidence. Some time ago when I lived in a house in the woods, I heard but never saw mice. So I put out traps, first regular snap'em traps then live traps. I caught 22 mice in two nights - I was getting up about every 20 minutes at the sound of the traps going off. I think it was two families. Most of them were half-grown, probably on their first trip out. I put them all in a big garbage can that I had, and took them out into the woods and let them go - I figure I was giving them a fair chance (better than poisoning or broken necks), and also (since they came from the woods) putting them back in the environment that they normally lived in. I lived 1/2 mile from the next house, so they had to be at least nominally able to survive in the woods and if not, I was feeding the Great Horned owl that lived nearby, and the coyotes, and the hawks and eagles, etc. I learned later that in most states it's illegal to dump critters like that but in this case I think I might still have done so.
(Two of those I caught in live traps had gross evidence of being near-missed by the snap'em traps - ick.)
The quote was, IIRC, from Einstein, not talking about biz at all.
The resource extraction biz is inherently the other way around. There are tech biz operated like your quote, just no resource extractor biz. Large simple problems in the past, small complex problems in the future. Declining production years in a resource biz are almost the classic example of picking up nickels in front of the steamroller.
The natural gas situation is a pretty good counter example - present proven reserves (_real_ proven reserves) are almost an order of magnitude greater than was even considered theoretically possible 30 years ago.
From my own experience in the oil exploration field, it is way more technical that most people realize. It is not uncommon for the drill bit assembly to include neutron activation analysis, nuclear magnetic resonance, gamma ray sensing, and a variety of other capabilities with multiple computer modules, all running in an environment that includes 100 G shock, 446F/230C and 30,000 psi/207 MPas, all running several miles down a bendy pipe. The chips used are rated higher than either military or space grade (except they don't usually need rad-hard). I discovered that it's the ideal boy-toy business, a combination of big heavy dangerous things that go boom, bleeding-edge geekdom, and responsibility for projects that are burning $500,000 per day and 100 miles from anywhere (not a bad job for an engineer two years out of college, although that wasn't what I did.)
It's been about 20 years since my favorite example of what technology has done in the oil biz - I forget the name of the place but it's an estuary in the UK. The UK government allowed drillers access to a single island, one acre in size. No impact was allowed to the estuary except for the movement of boats to and from the island, and the single physical pipe that transported the oil from the wellhead to the outside world (I forget if it went to land or to a floating terminal). From that island they drilled a single vertical hole, then (10 times) 'turned left' and drilled horizontally. The longest of the ten horizontal holes was over 10 km. The drill bit knew at all times where it was both geographically and within the oil seam, which at times was only a foot thick. The bit went up, down, left and right according to its best analysis of the route. Using technology to prevent damage to the environment counts, IMHO as a 'new more complex problem' compared to the bad old days of wildcatters.
The Canadian tar sands, by themselves, have more than doubled proven reserves of oil, albeit (as another commenter mentioned) at a higher cost both environmental (in both senses - potential damage and cost to prevent damage) and financial, as well as technical advances. US shale oil, if and when we get to that, is even larger, harder and more technically challenging. Then, if we get to that, there are the undersea methane clathrates - undeniably more complex and by best estimates a couple of orders of magnitude greater than all known present amounts of oil + gas in the ground.
So I disagree with your assessment. :)
I hope it all works out but right now I see much of science and technology as dooming mankind more than helping. We are gambling that there is a point where science and technology suddenly shine with a bounty for all of humanity.
It's possible, although historically technology has definitely improved our lives and saved our butts. Sanitation engineering, just for starters.
As I see it, science and technology are potentially what will change us from a single 'plant' (ecosystem) on a single planet to a spacefaring race, putting seeds of life throughout the solar system and eventually the galaxy. To me this is 'black sky' - beyond blue sky, but the opportunity is there, and unlimited. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Just as a plant or a fungus assembles a packet of DNA into a 'seed' or similar entity and projects it beyond itself, we can use technology to take our life and the life of this planet to other climes. Some species of mushrooms have distributed themselves throughout the entire planet, the same species showing up on all non-frozen continents. Their parent never knew what happened to them, of couse. But their 'technology' (sporulation, etc.) made it possible. I think our technology is also like that - it's a natural part of us, and a natural extension of life that makes it possible for our life (the entire ecosystem, in a sense) to expand beyond the bounds of Earth.
That's an interesting point that I've thought about a few times - as civilization becomes more technical and more intertwined, the value of what surrounds each of us, and the potential cost of a mistake or a purposeful act, becomes greater and greater. In the extreme you have a pilot flying a $1.5 billion airplane, or the captain of a ship that could cause similar levels of cost due to a collision. But even on the highway, a serious auto accident is likely to cost more than the combined annual incomes of the two parties. A simple mistake such as missing a stitch when the OR doctor removes an appendix could result in $millions in damage and insurance claims. As recently as 200 years ago, only a select few in the aristocracy had the potential to cost a nation the equivalent of even a million present-day dollars, now almost everyone has that potential. Today a drunk could conceivably leave a bar, crash into a post and cause the derailment of a high speed train with potential deaths in the hundreds or even thousands, and $millions in damage - unlikely but possible.
As the risks and relative costs become higher, it appears that the need for society to constrain behavior must inevitably become greater. Is there another way? Is personal liberty the inevitable victim of advanced civilization?
Sorry, blatantly false. Try to find a US oil production graph showing this, LOL. Prediction dead accurate.
Oddly enough I did read an article this week, discussing this very topic. Proven reserves of oil are now four times what they were in 1970. The same or similar is true of gold, aluminum, and various other resources. Granted, the technologies of extraction have made all the difference, and it costs more in some cases as we go deeper, etc. But that is the essence of tech progress: "exchanging small simple problems for bigger, more complex ones."
Intelligence isn't like hair color or height and isn't directly inheritable.
Interestingly, according to recent literature psychopathy is about 80% inheritable. (But only about 50% of children who show the symptoms early become psychopathic as addults - the other half seem to find a way to fit into society's norms.) One then must ask, "Why would psychopathy be so successful (at some small percentage of the population) that it inherits this strongly, while intelligence isn't.?" Of course intelligence has a strong environmental/development component, and it is complicated by the fact that higher intelligence also puts one at risk of various forms of mental disruption - depression, schizophrenia, etc.