> Unfortunately, transporting one kilo of hydrogen to the > moon is a very expensive thing, which is why it would > have been nice to have plentiful water already there.
True enough. Unfortunately, you can't have everything. Still, for every person you'd probably need about their body weight in water as recycling would help recover waste water. The hydrogen could be delivered to ISS, and a moon ship could take it the rest of the way. Alternatively, the hydrogen canister itself could be launched toward moon orbit and picked up. Efficient and cheap propulsion technologies such as Ion propulsion could be used to keep a constant supply of hydrogen "on the way". At least until we successfully build atomic engines on the moon, as which point we could take a stroll toward our sun and scoop the hydrogen we need.
DOH! You're right. I'm getting confused in the head again. At the very least, hydrogen is still lighter than oxygen, so you may get 2 kilos of water for every 1 kilo of hydrogen.
* AKAImBatman bangs his head against the wall to clear his thinking
> what i was trying to say is that the way some christians > have gone about trying to prove their point and the > arguments are silly:)
Unfortunately, it happens on both sides of the coin. It's human nature to want everyone to think the same way you do, and as a result people can get into fights just for the sake of getting into fights. Of course, I'm excluding certain organizations such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology. Those people just plain freak me out.
> you'd have to go waaay out there -- like, a few light-weeks out
That would be outside of our solar system. Considering that the best source of Hydrogen is at the *center* of our solar system, it would make the best sense to fly into the wind, don't you think? Especially when that wind is composed of exactly the material you're looking for.
That would be far enough out that even the environmental wackos couldn't complain about using atomic engines. Time to revive NERVA or ORION! With those engines, you could go for a stroll toward Venus and pick up as much free hydrogen as you need! WooHoo! Remember, we don't need as much for water. Most of the problems with the ram scoop concept were due to the need for hydrogen as PROPULSION which requires far more material.
You don't need much. Water is one part hydrogen and two parts oxygen. As long as you have plenty of Oxygen (cracked from iron oxides perhaps), the Hydrogen could go a long way.
Cripes. Another one of these. Hey, buddy, I've got a bridge to sell you. Real good deal. If you buy now, I'll even throw in some beach front property in Arizona.
> Iron OXIDES. Oxygen is very abundant on the moon, given enough energy.
Excellent! That was what I thought. My geology is a little rusty, so I couldn't remember why rock tended to absorb oxygen.
> Hydrogen, on the other hand, is almost only ever found > as water on this planet; this is the big problem.
Hmm... perhaps it would be feasible to transport the Hydrogen from Earth. Hydrogen is very light, and only makes up one third of water. It's also lighter and smaller than oxygen, so you'd probably be able to make five kilos of water for every kilo of hydrogen.
> I like the idea of scooping up chunks of Earth's upper > atmosphere and taking it to the Moon, though. You still > need an engine that's orders of magnitude more > powerful and efficient than anything we have now, but > something like that might at least be within reach.
Well, since you'd be skimming the upper atmosphere, the engines wouldn't have to be ultra-powerful, just highly effiicient. Atomic engines would give the necessary power easily. An array of ion engines using materials mined from the moon would work as well, but would make each trip up and down the gravity well far slower.
Why? Is that any harder to believe than the current theory of the Big Bang that says two Multiverses collided thus producing matter and energy? The Universe is a strange place. Get used to it.
I can't prove the existence of God any more than you can prove we evolved from apes. That doesn't mean that my beliefs are wrong, merely that I believe other's beliefs are wrong. Others believe the exact opposite. I take it by faith that God exists while others take it by faith that we evolved from apes. Why can't we prove one or the other? Because the quantum probability of evolution is astronomical, and there's no real way to calculate the "chances" that a God exists because he'd be outside of our Universe.
To steal a quote from WarGames, "The only way to win is not to play the game."
> Are you so naive as to believe that the entire earth was > flooded for 40 days and then the water just went away in > one day?
You must have one of those new-fangled Bibles. Mine says that Noah was on water for a great deal of time after the flood and had to send out birds to try and find land. It even says that they eventually landed on a mountain peak and had to wait for God's signal to leave.
> Where did it go?
You know, there's these BIG, BIG, BIG, BIIIIGGGG bodies of water that we call our "Oceans". These "oceans" loose a great deal of their water to polar ice caps. There's also this thing called "drainage". If you flood a given piece of land, water will seek out the lowest point and eventually settle there. The lowest points on Earth are those things we call "Oceans".
> Where did it come from?
Good question. Answer: Just like no one really knows where we or our universe came from, we don't know exactly. The most commonly held theory is that there used to be a shell of water in our outer atmosphere that collapsed. This shell would have been a natural radiation shield that combined with the greater electromagnetic field of the Earth, probably allowed humans to live much longer.
> Where is the Ark?
Long buried somewhere between Iraq and Iran (or so current geologists believe). The constant dispute over these areas has made searching a very difficult proposition. There's also the theory that the ark was disassembled to provide materials for Noah and his family to rebuild.
> How could we all be inbred from Adam and Eve, and then > Noah and his incestous family and still all be fucntional?
Stronger genetics. The genetics of a species slowly degrades over time as more and more errors are introduced into the genome. It probably didn't help anything that many cultures once encouraged inbreeding as a way of "keeping the bloodlines strong". We're doing the same thing with livestock today, and are beginning to run into problems.
That's one theory. Another theory states that the moon is a leftover chunk of a 10th planet that used to exist between Mars and Jupiter. That planet was destroyed in some major event, and its remains became the asteroid belt as well as several moons.
Back on topic, any settlement on the moon would do best to take various materials containing hydrogen and oxygen, and crack them. Once cracked, the raw hydrogen and oxygen particles could be combined to make water. Hydrogen is pretty easy to come by. A ram scoop mounted on some form of runabout may be able to collect quite a bit. I'm not sure what materials hold oxygen, but I do know that rocks tend to absorb it, and that the moon does have an atmosphere a few feet thick. Alternatively, an efficient enough engine could allow the runabout to scoop off the top of Earth's atmosphere in the same way it could gather hydrogen.
That's one way of doing it, but as you say, heat is a problem. Yet, very little research has gone into producing more efficient atomic devices. This is 1960s battery technology! The only major work done on improving atomic devices is a Mems generator developed at Cornell. That particular battery does not suffer from the heat dissipation issue, although I'm not conversant in the issues of scaling up such a design.
My point is that atomic power is seen as "evil" and as a result is not explored as a viable technology. Instead, we've got all our technological muscle devoted to low power density devices like hydrogen fuel cells. With the right atomics, I could power your car indefinitely and probably wouldn't generate much more heat than a combustion engine! Sadly, there wasn't enough respect for the power of atomics early on and a string of accidents in power plants forever tarnished the good name of nuclear power.
Side Note: I wonder if anyone has thought of mixing atomics with batteries? Take your car for example. Rather heavy atomics would be needed to power your vehicle during use. However, if you inserted batteries similar to those in hybrid cars between the generator and the engines, your car could self-charge when not in use, and provide full power during driving. Long trips at high speeds (i.e. Interstate travel) could pose a problem for electric vehicles, but it would certainly be an interesting avenue to explore.
Depends on the technology and materials used. LiOn and NiMH batteries already use very exotic materials and technologies, thus are extremely expensive. A technology based on the radioactive decay of a few grams of material should be in about the same price range. Besides, I'd be willing to pay more for a battery that never needs to be recharged, lasts for ten years, and can be moved from older devices to newer devices.
BTW, the most likely candidate for an atomic battery would be what's known as an RTG device. Very simply, it translates the radioactive decay of a material into electricity or mechanical power. Such devices have been in use since the 1960s and are used in space craft, UPS devices, and pacemakers.
I think we need to talk to people from KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, and all of these groups and as a combined effort build the first and default composition manager.
That's what freedesktop.org is. It's a collaboration between GNOME and KDE to develop a set of interoperable standards. For example, you may have noticed that both KDE and GNOME can use the same ".desktop" shortcuts and that ".desktop" files have completely replaced the ".kdelink" files that KDE used to use. Now if GNOME would come up with some sort of (God forbid) STANDARD on how their foot menu works, we might even be able to automatically install icons. Right now, nearly every distro does something different with the way the foot menu works. At least KDE figured it out and has been standard from version to version.
Actually, that should read "Al-Qaeda Plots to Buy 10,000 Laptop Batteries." The truth of the matter is that access to atomic batteries would make no difference. There could be a headline in tomorrow's paper that reads "Al-Qaeda Plots to Buy 10,000 Smoke Detectors". Radium, Radon, and other radioactive materials are easy to come by. Yes, these could be used to create a "dirty bomb". However, the materials necessary to create a fission bomb, much less a fusion bomb, are carefully controlled by all major super-powers.
Even so, you'll never get all the batteries back at the end of their service lives. Some will get thrown out. Some dude will get pissed off when his girlfriend calls him to dump him and throw his nuclear-powered cell phone into a lake. A kid will take apart the old pager he found.
This would be expected. As long as the majority of atomic material never makes it to the landfill, the impact on the environment should be minimal. After all, there are TONS of natural formations that give out radiation. Even your own body gives off a few millirads per year!
The most frustrating part is that atomic batteries are already in use. Pacemakers use a miniscule atomic battery that keeps them running for the life of the patient. If people can get atomic batteries embedded in their bodies, why can't I have one in my laptop?!
Ooooo, I like this! "Micro-particle technology" could be the buzz phrase of the future! Unfortunately, this industry is rather unforgiving. Remember the "scandal" when the Pentium Pro ran 32 bit code faster than 16 bit? People should have been rejoicing and dancing in the streets! Instead, they were pissed off that Windows 95 *might* run slower. All it would take is one Ziff-Davis article that mentioned the word "atomic" and the jig would be up.
The best solution would be to either keep the exact process a "trade-secret" or to be as up front as possible and attempt to educate consumers. If you can convince them of the safety of such micro-atomic devices, they'll be wooed by the always-on power generation features.
Don't laugh but nuclear batteries are also feasible mass production artifacts, just no one would want them because they would fuck up the env, so bad idea.
Indeed. In fact, there are quite a few ways of generating nuclear power without building a full blown reactor. The coolest part is that your battery life would be determined by the half-life the the material used as a power source. If they could find a heavy element with a realistic life-span of about 3 years (the average life of a computer), then we'd have a winner on our hands. Plus, the actual amount of radioactive material would be tremendously small (think ounces per hundreds of people). If the waste became a concern, a standard battery slot could be developed so that batteries with longer lives could be manufactured. Those 10+ year batteries could simply be moved from computer to computer over the years.
The real problem is that people freak when you use the words "nuclear" or "radioactive". Maybe we should call them "magic" batteries?
Actually, we have figured it out. That's the whole point of the Hybrid cars. There's no way that a hybrid could get more energy out of the system than what's going in. However, it *can* try to use power more efficiently and recover it where possible. Thus you use electricity for acceleration, the engine for cruising, and regenerative braking to get back some of the used energy.
This article is basically describing something similar for computing.
This is the first useful comment in the entire thread. And unfortunately, seems to confirm my opinion that this is a boring, outdated paper. Well, let's hope that someone at least got a good grade from it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Unfortunately, transporting one kilo of hydrogen to the
> moon is a very expensive thing, which is why it would
> have been nice to have plentiful water already there.
True enough. Unfortunately, you can't have everything. Still, for every person you'd probably need about their body weight in water as recycling would help recover waste water. The hydrogen could be delivered to ISS, and a moon ship could take it the rest of the way. Alternatively, the hydrogen canister itself could be launched toward moon orbit and picked up. Efficient and cheap propulsion technologies such as Ion propulsion could be used to keep a constant supply of hydrogen "on the way". At least until we successfully build atomic engines on the moon, as which point we could take a stroll toward our sun and scoop the hydrogen we need.
DOH! You're right. I'm getting confused in the head again. At the very least, hydrogen is still lighter than oxygen, so you may get 2 kilos of water for every 1 kilo of hydrogen.
* AKAImBatman bangs his head against the wall to clear his thinking
> what i was trying to say is that the way some christians :)
> have gone about trying to prove their point and the
> arguments are silly
Unfortunately, it happens on both sides of the coin. It's human nature to want everyone to think the same way you do, and as a result people can get into fights just for the sake of getting into fights. Of course, I'm excluding certain organizations such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology. Those people just plain freak me out.
> you'd have to go waaay out there -- like, a few light-weeks out
That would be outside of our solar system. Considering that the best source of Hydrogen is at the *center* of our solar system, it would make the best sense to fly into the wind, don't you think? Especially when that wind is composed of exactly the material you're looking for.
That would be far enough out that even the environmental wackos couldn't complain about using atomic engines. Time to revive NERVA or ORION! With those engines, you could go for a stroll toward Venus and pick up as much free hydrogen as you need! WooHoo! Remember, we don't need as much for water. Most of the problems with the ram scoop concept were due to the need for hydrogen as PROPULSION which requires far more material.
You don't need much. Water is one part hydrogen and two parts oxygen. As long as you have plenty of Oxygen (cracked from iron oxides perhaps), the Hydrogen could go a long way.
> WE DID EVOLVE FROM APES! IT'S A PROVEN FACT!
Cripes. Another one of these. Hey, buddy, I've got a bridge to sell you. Real good deal. If you buy now, I'll even throw in some beach front property in Arizona.
> Christ, you're an idiot
Heh. I love this.
> Iron OXIDES. Oxygen is very abundant on the moon, given enough energy.
Excellent! That was what I thought. My geology is a little rusty, so I couldn't remember why rock tended to absorb oxygen.
> Hydrogen, on the other hand, is almost only ever found
> as water on this planet; this is the big problem.
Hmm... perhaps it would be feasible to transport the Hydrogen from Earth. Hydrogen is very light, and only makes up one third of water. It's also lighter and smaller than oxygen, so you'd probably be able to make five kilos of water for every kilo of hydrogen.
> I like the idea of scooping up chunks of Earth's upper
> atmosphere and taking it to the Moon, though. You still
> need an engine that's orders of magnitude more
> powerful and efficient than anything we have now, but
> something like that might at least be within reach.
Well, since you'd be skimming the upper atmosphere, the engines wouldn't have to be ultra-powerful, just highly effiicient. Atomic engines would give the necessary power easily. An array of ion engines using materials mined from the moon would work as well, but would make each trip up and down the gravity well far slower.
> I hope that you are joking...
Why? Is that any harder to believe than the current theory of the Big Bang that says two Multiverses collided thus producing matter and energy? The Universe is a strange place. Get used to it.
I can't prove the existence of God any more than you can prove we evolved from apes. That doesn't mean that my beliefs are wrong, merely that I believe other's beliefs are wrong. Others believe the exact opposite. I take it by faith that God exists while others take it by faith that we evolved from apes. Why can't we prove one or the other? Because the quantum probability of evolution is astronomical, and there's no real way to calculate the "chances" that a God exists because he'd be outside of our Universe.
To steal a quote from WarGames, "The only way to win is not to play the game."
> Are you so naive as to believe that the entire earth was
> flooded for 40 days and then the water just went away in
> one day?
You must have one of those new-fangled Bibles. Mine says that Noah was on water for a great deal of time after the flood and had to send out birds to try and find land. It even says that they eventually landed on a mountain peak and had to wait for God's signal to leave.
> Where did it go?
You know, there's these BIG, BIG, BIG, BIIIIGGGG bodies of water that we call our "Oceans". These "oceans" loose a great deal of their water to polar ice caps. There's also this thing called "drainage". If you flood a given piece of land, water will seek out the lowest point and eventually settle there. The lowest points on Earth are those things we call "Oceans".
> Where did it come from?
Good question. Answer: Just like no one really knows where we or our universe came from, we don't know exactly. The most commonly held theory is that there used to be a shell of water in our outer atmosphere that collapsed. This shell would have been a natural radiation shield that combined with the greater electromagnetic field of the Earth, probably allowed humans to live much longer.
> Where is the Ark?
Long buried somewhere between Iraq and Iran (or so current geologists believe). The constant dispute over these areas has made searching a very difficult proposition. There's also the theory that the ark was disassembled to provide materials for Noah and his family to rebuild.
> How could we all be inbred from Adam and Eve, and then
> Noah and his incestous family and still all be fucntional?
Stronger genetics. The genetics of a species slowly degrades over time as more and more errors are introduced into the genome. It probably didn't help anything that many cultures once encouraged inbreeding as a way of "keeping the bloodlines strong". We're doing the same thing with livestock today, and are beginning to run into problems.
> Your myths don't interest me.
Then why mention them? Hmmm?
That's one theory. Another theory states that the moon is a leftover chunk of a 10th planet that used to exist between Mars and Jupiter. That planet was destroyed in some major event, and its remains became the asteroid belt as well as several moons.
Back on topic, any settlement on the moon would do best to take various materials containing hydrogen and oxygen, and crack them. Once cracked, the raw hydrogen and oxygen particles could be combined to make water. Hydrogen is pretty easy to come by. A ram scoop mounted on some form of runabout may be able to collect quite a bit. I'm not sure what materials hold oxygen, but I do know that rocks tend to absorb it, and that the moon does have an atmosphere a few feet thick. Alternatively, an efficient enough engine could allow the runabout to scoop off the top of Earth's atmosphere in the same way it could gather hydrogen.
That's one way of doing it, but as you say, heat is a problem. Yet, very little research has gone into producing more efficient atomic devices. This is 1960s battery technology! The only major work done on improving atomic devices is a Mems generator developed at Cornell. That particular battery does not suffer from the heat dissipation issue, although I'm not conversant in the issues of scaling up such a design.
My point is that atomic power is seen as "evil" and as a result is not explored as a viable technology. Instead, we've got all our technological muscle devoted to low power density devices like hydrogen fuel cells. With the right atomics, I could power your car indefinitely and probably wouldn't generate much more heat than a combustion engine! Sadly, there wasn't enough respect for the power of atomics early on and a string of accidents in power plants forever tarnished the good name of nuclear power.
Side Note: I wonder if anyone has thought of mixing atomics with batteries? Take your car for example. Rather heavy atomics would be needed to power your vehicle during use. However, if you inserted batteries similar to those in hybrid cars between the generator and the engines, your car could self-charge when not in use, and provide full power during driving. Long trips at high speeds (i.e. Interstate travel) could pose a problem for electric vehicles, but it would certainly be an interesting avenue to explore.
> What about the price? Microscopicly huge?
Depends on the technology and materials used. LiOn and NiMH batteries already use very exotic materials and technologies, thus are extremely expensive. A technology based on the radioactive decay of a few grams of material should be in about the same price range. Besides, I'd be willing to pay more for a battery that never needs to be recharged, lasts for ten years, and can be moved from older devices to newer devices.
BTW, the most likely candidate for an atomic battery would be what's known as an RTG device. Very simply, it translates the radioactive decay of a material into electricity or mechanical power. Such devices have been in use since the 1960s and are used in space craft, UPS devices, and pacemakers.
I think we need to talk to people from KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, and all of these groups and as a combined effort build the first and default composition manager.
That's what freedesktop.org is. It's a collaboration between GNOME and KDE to develop a set of interoperable standards. For example, you may have noticed that both KDE and GNOME can use the same ".desktop" shortcuts and that ".desktop" files have completely replaced the ".kdelink" files that KDE used to use. Now if GNOME would come up with some sort of (God forbid) STANDARD on how their foot menu works, we might even be able to automatically install icons. Right now, nearly every distro does something different with the way the foot menu works. At least KDE figured it out and has been standard from version to version.
Al-Qaeda Plots to Buy 10,000 AA Batteries
Actually, that should read "Al-Qaeda Plots to Buy 10,000 Laptop Batteries." The truth of the matter is that access to atomic batteries would make no difference. There could be a headline in tomorrow's paper that reads "Al-Qaeda Plots to Buy 10,000 Smoke Detectors". Radium, Radon, and other radioactive materials are easy to come by. Yes, these could be used to create a "dirty bomb". However, the materials necessary to create a fission bomb, much less a fusion bomb, are carefully controlled by all major super-powers.
Even so, you'll never get all the batteries back at the end of their service lives. Some will get thrown out. Some dude will get pissed off when his girlfriend calls him to dump him and throw his nuclear-powered cell phone into a lake. A kid will take apart the old pager he found.
This would be expected. As long as the majority of atomic material never makes it to the landfill, the impact on the environment should be minimal. After all, there are TONS of natural formations that give out radiation. Even your own body gives off a few millirads per year!
The most frustrating part is that atomic batteries are already in use. Pacemakers use a miniscule atomic battery that keeps them running for the life of the patient. If people can get atomic batteries embedded in their bodies, why can't I have one in my laptop?!
Ooooo, I like this! "Micro-particle technology" could be the buzz phrase of the future! Unfortunately, this industry is rather unforgiving. Remember the "scandal" when the Pentium Pro ran 32 bit code faster than 16 bit? People should have been rejoicing and dancing in the streets! Instead, they were pissed off that Windows 95 *might* run slower. All it would take is one Ziff-Davis article that mentioned the word "atomic" and the jig would be up.
The best solution would be to either keep the exact process a "trade-secret" or to be as up front as possible and attempt to educate consumers. If you can convince them of the safety of such micro-atomic devices, they'll be wooed by the always-on power generation features.
Don't laugh but nuclear batteries are also feasible mass production artifacts, just no one would want them because they would fuck up the env, so bad idea.
Indeed. In fact, there are quite a few ways of generating nuclear power without building a full blown reactor. The coolest part is that your battery life would be determined by the half-life the the material used as a power source. If they could find a heavy element with a realistic life-span of about 3 years (the average life of a computer), then we'd have a winner on our hands. Plus, the actual amount of radioactive material would be tremendously small (think ounces per hundreds of people). If the waste became a concern, a standard battery slot could be developed so that batteries with longer lives could be manufactured. Those 10+ year batteries could simply be moved from computer to computer over the years.
The real problem is that people freak when you use the words "nuclear" or "radioactive". Maybe we should call them "magic" batteries?
Actually, we have figured it out. That's the whole point of the Hybrid cars. There's no way that a hybrid could get more energy out of the system than what's going in. However, it *can* try to use power more efficiently and recover it where possible. Thus you use electricity for acceleration, the engine for cruising, and regenerative braking to get back some of the used energy.
This article is basically describing something similar for computing.
Heh. No argument here. :-) What can I say, it's Monday, development db is down and I'm bored.
Dude, I feel your pain.
What else should we do for the next hour, until the next article arrives?
Work?
without loosing all concentration
LOSING, LOSING, LOSING!
* AKAImBatman beats himself over the head with a wet mackerel.
I think Safari needs a grammar checker...
The editors changed the story and didn't mark it as an update OR give credit! Thanks a lump, guys.
This is the first useful comment in the entire thread. And unfortunately, seems to confirm my opinion that this is a boring, outdated paper. Well, let's hope that someone at least got a good grade from it.