It's merely a question of how much yield you're trying to achieve. Half a century ago, a Hiroshima sized bomb could be fit into a 15cm artillery shell...
Basically, there is nothing that distinguishes those "tests" from the military posturing of Iran or North Korea and it pursues the same aim - to intimidate the enemy.
Then I've got a grand idea for Ferrari. Stop building cars, only build prototypes - because only prototypes are any advance at all and who cares about actually driving a car? Once a prototype is finished it shouldn't be allowed to build another of that kind to maximize advancement in automobiles. I'm sure like that Ferrari would have been long past the flying car by now. (Not.)
Quite the contrary. Getting stuff to Mars is cheap - about 10% of the project cost in those NASA projects. Ongoing operations are on a similar order of magnitude. Design is the most important part of the cost, hardware cost is quite neglible.
This is quite unlike the japanese JAXA - where launch costs can make up 50% of the mission. But the Japanese, too, only send single missions and pay for it by having unreliable hardware (although part of this may be, because their missions tends to be technologically more ambitious than NASA - despite the low budgets).
Your romantic Hollywood picture of science notwithstanding, science is for the most part about doing the same things over and over again under only slightly differing circumstances. It may not be spectacular. - But imaging what we would know if all of earths geology came from two surveys conducted somewhere in the North German plains and the US middle west prairie. Right: nothing much.
Those rovers are easily the most successful probes on a planetary surface ever. And this has been clear for years now. When you do something that turns out to be wildly successful, the most reasonable reaction that people have is to do it again. But not NASA. NASA could have build, launched and operated at least ten or twenty duplicates of Spirit and Opportunity for the price of its current "Curiosity" rover (some $2,300,000,000) that may or may not work.
What happened to the good old scientific practice of repeating your measurements and assuring your hypothesis? NASA could have spread new landing sites all over Mars and could even have gone so far as trading the risk of losing a few rovers to unfavorable terrain for the chance to do exploration of scientifically more interesting landing sites, that are more than flat deserts with the occasional crater.
Quantity is a quality all of its own that you must not underestimate.
Even if there were huge quantities of anti-matter (implying that the spacecraft would have been vaporized in a short bright flash of light) and we could store it somehow (ignoring the safety implications of the storage failing) and in any way efficiently convert the resulting hard gamma radiation into anything useful at all, pure anti-matter still only has about 1000 times the energy density of fission fuel and about 100 times that of fuel for nuclear fusion. (Compare that to a factor of about 10 million between chemical and nuclear fuel.)
No, not even anti-matter will be able to do miracles.
Search engines aren't about finding stuff, they are about shoving stuff into you in a way that maximizes ad-revenue. And as far as I can tell, they couldn't do that any better than they currently do.
Admittedly, the example was suboptimal - but I hope the principle is clear. Say if you can get people from A to B using half the fuel - you'll have the same economic performance and some fuel left to add something else to your economy. Also, a lot of stuff such as writing software has precious little to do with energy or material usage in the first place.
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[9] Indeed, aviation development in the US was suppressed to such an extent that when the U.S. entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and the U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
If you can find a way to build three houses using the same amount of energy, material and time that you used to need to build just one of those houses, then you just tripled the economic output of that activity.
In short, the argument that economic growth is in any way whatever tied to energy or material use is bogus.
The Wright brothers may have been the first to build airplanes that could be adequately controlled and sure they patented it. However, the Americans were the only nation who didn't have operational airplanes during WWI because the patent protection basically prevented improvements of the flaws in the Wright brother's patent protected design. They ended up buying French airplanes instead.
There are even viruses that cause cancer. Not primarily, but retroviruses have to mess with reproduction mechanisms of their host cell in order to propagate and if something goes wrong in that process, you end up with a possibility to get a cancer cell. The likelihood of something going wrong depends upon the the RNA (or even DNA) of the virus (there are some DNA viruses). And of course those viruses can spread and infect other people. So, in a way some cancers can even be infective (or at least their root cause), I think I remember that some kinds of leukemia are among those.
About 25% die with cancer. Sure, chemicals play a role, but the true reason for such high cancer rates is that people don't usually die because of curable illnesses. And cancer is - so far - not curable. The more progress we have in curing other diseases, treating injuries and preventing accidents - the more cancer deaths there will be, it's unavoidable.
Someone having cancer after being contaminated with some chemical is *not* proof of the cancer being caused by the chemical. The normal rate of cancer is just too high to proof even the effect of highly carcinogenic substances this way.
What you should really ask is, what was the (health) damage suffered before they cleaned it up. The statement that they poured this stuff into the environment in the "first years" suggests that it hasn't been cleaned up for at least 20 years even though everybody knew it wouldn't be going away.
Actually, the original quote is something along the lines of "[They] have nuclear weapons, all we have is a protractor"... but I kinda expected some people to recognize it anyway.
Fission is a viable energy source, but it should be avoided wherever there is a better solution with less impact.
Fission products are problematic. Even though they only take a few centuries to decay, total inventories should be minimized. It's not the first choice, but it's among the last. I just happen to think that the alternatives (especially some renewables) are not sufficient, if you want to use them to an extend that is compatible with basic considerations of environmental protection. Hence nuclear power as a fall-back to replace fossil fuels where absolutely necessary, but reduced the necessary minimum. If you mistake nuclear power as a panacea, it'll turn around and bite you.
Yes, of course biofuels are not the only factor influencing food prices, but a very significant one. However, you forget one element in your analysis:
Time.
There is no doubt that the current prices are good for the African economies in the long run, as farmers can earn more money - but they increased far too fast for the economy as a whole to cope with it. It takes decades to develop knowledge, to create profits to reinvest into farm equipment etc. Food in developing countries makes up a part of expenses as large as, say, rents in Europe - imagine what would happen if rents rose by 300% above inflation within 3-4 years. It would be a major struggle already if that happened within 20 years. The consequences of something like that happening within such a short period would be catastrophic.
By creating a situation in which African countries are de-facto dependent on cheap food prices, we took upon ourselves the responsibility to keep those prices roughly at that level. That doesn't mean they have to stay there forever, but they must not jump by 200-300% within 3-4 years. Our ignorance of that matter is as shocking as the ignorance of Mao during the Great Jump forward. And remember, we're not just talking about Somalia, but many other places as well. Over 100mio additional people are undernourished since prices jumped to current levels. Typically, about 1-2% a year of those people will die as a result of being undernourished. The numbers involved are staggering.
Nobody stops you from upgrading some parts while they are still on the ground - but a lot of the mechanical parts, the transfer stage, landing etc. won't need to be redeveloped, and even the upgraded parts will be easier to implement. You could also think about using modularized instruments that you can change depending on the needs of the mission.
Btw. rather than improved cameras, a better computer would do a whole lot more to improve the science output of the mars rovers, because it would enable a lot more autonomous driving.
Sure, saying those wafers are useless is premature, however, what about common-sized satellites and space probes?
Instead of building yet another mars rover, NASA should have used what it had and just build ten more Mars Exploration Rovers instead of one extremely expensive, completely new rover - with a whole new set of technical issues. All they would have had to do would be to build a new modular spacecraft to carry them with in a Delta IV or Atlas V - because the Delta II is no longer available.
Same goes for just about any space probe build in the last 30 years. Back in the 60ies and 70ies practically all probes were build in series - which they did because of the rather high rate of malfunctions, but it was also more economic.
Those guys at NASA should be forced to watch some Star Trek - maybe then they'll understand what advantages a standardized Mark I Planetary Probe can offer over designing and testing brand new ones each time.
Right now, those countries absolutely need that cheap food. That's not to say that this is a good policy in the long run. If you don't stop dumping cheap food on those countries, its people are screwed and depended on your food supplies (as indeed, they are). But if you stop suddenly and too fast, you're starving them.
By making those countries dependent on our food in the first place, we made ourselves responsible for their nourishment, whether or not that was our intention. And now, we're ignoring this huge responsibility.
There is a difference between reducing exports by a given quantity in a time-span of 3 years vs. a time-span of 30 years. The difference are about 100 million additional people being undernourished (about 900mio vs. 800mio until 2007, according to the FAO) and at least hundreds of thousands dieing from that condition.
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It's merely a question of how much yield you're trying to achieve. Half a century ago, a Hiroshima sized bomb could be fit into a 15cm artillery shell ...
Basically, there is nothing that distinguishes those "tests" from the military posturing of Iran or North Korea and it pursues the same aim - to intimidate the enemy.
Then I've got a grand idea for Ferrari. Stop building cars, only build prototypes - because only prototypes are any advance at all and who cares about actually driving a car? Once a prototype is finished it shouldn't be allowed to build another of that kind to maximize advancement in automobiles. I'm sure like that Ferrari would have been long past the flying car by now. (Not.)
Quite the contrary. Getting stuff to Mars is cheap - about 10% of the project cost in those NASA projects. Ongoing operations are on a similar order of magnitude. Design is the most important part of the cost, hardware cost is quite neglible.
This is quite unlike the japanese JAXA - where launch costs can make up 50% of the mission. But the Japanese, too, only send single missions and pay for it by having unreliable hardware (although part of this may be, because their missions tends to be technologically more ambitious than NASA - despite the low budgets).
Your romantic Hollywood picture of science notwithstanding, science is for the most part about doing the same things over and over again under only slightly differing circumstances. It may not be spectacular. - But imaging what we would know if all of earths geology came from two surveys conducted somewhere in the North German plains and the US middle west prairie. Right: nothing much.
Otherwise, they'd keep building them.
Those rovers are easily the most successful probes on a planetary surface ever. And this has been clear for years now. When you do something that turns out to be wildly successful, the most reasonable reaction that people have is to do it again. But not NASA. NASA could have build, launched and operated at least ten or twenty duplicates of Spirit and Opportunity for the price of its current "Curiosity" rover (some $2,300,000,000) that may or may not work.
What happened to the good old scientific practice of repeating your measurements and assuring your hypothesis? NASA could have spread new landing sites all over Mars and could even have gone so far as trading the risk of losing a few rovers to unfavorable terrain for the chance to do exploration of scientifically more interesting landing sites, that are more than flat deserts with the occasional crater.
Quantity is a quality all of its own that you must not underestimate.
Even if there were huge quantities of anti-matter (implying that the spacecraft would have been vaporized in a short bright flash of light) and we could store it somehow (ignoring the safety implications of the storage failing) and in any way efficiently convert the resulting hard gamma radiation into anything useful at all, pure anti-matter still only has about 1000 times the energy density of fission fuel and about 100 times that of fuel for nuclear fusion. (Compare that to a factor of about 10 million between chemical and nuclear fuel.)
No, not even anti-matter will be able to do miracles.
Search engines aren't about finding stuff, they are about shoving stuff into you in a way that maximizes ad-revenue. And as far as I can tell, they couldn't do that any better than they currently do.
Admittedly, the example was suboptimal - but I hope the principle is clear. Say if you can get people from A to B using half the fuel - you'll have the same economic performance and some fuel left to add something else to your economy. Also, a lot of stuff such as writing software has precious little to do with energy or material usage in the first place.
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[9] Indeed, aviation development in the US was suppressed to such an extent that when the U.S. entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and the U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
If you can find a way to build three houses using the same amount of energy, material and time that you used to need to build just one of those houses, then you just tripled the economic output of that activity.
In short, the argument that economic growth is in any way whatever tied to energy or material use is bogus.
The Wright brothers may have been the first to build airplanes that could be adequately controlled and sure they patented it. However, the Americans were the only nation who didn't have operational airplanes during WWI because the patent protection basically prevented improvements of the flaws in the Wright brother's patent protected design. They ended up buying French airplanes instead.
Coal has significant operational issues I don't deny that. But you can mitigate those with enough money, stack scrubbers etc
Except for the holes in the ground - and in your argument.
There are even viruses that cause cancer. Not primarily, but retroviruses have to mess with reproduction mechanisms of their host cell in order to propagate and if something goes wrong in that process, you end up with a possibility to get a cancer cell. The likelihood of something going wrong depends upon the the RNA (or even DNA) of the virus (there are some DNA viruses). And of course those viruses can spread and infect other people. So, in a way some cancers can even be infective (or at least their root cause), I think I remember that some kinds of leukemia are among those.
About 25% die with cancer. Sure, chemicals play a role, but the true reason for such high cancer rates is that people don't usually die because of curable illnesses. And cancer is - so far - not curable. The more progress we have in curing other diseases, treating injuries and preventing accidents - the more cancer deaths there will be, it's unavoidable.
Someone having cancer after being contaminated with some chemical is *not* proof of the cancer being caused by the chemical. The normal rate of cancer is just too high to proof even the effect of highly carcinogenic substances this way.
What you should really ask is, what was the (health) damage suffered before they cleaned it up. The statement that they poured this stuff into the environment in the "first years" suggests that it hasn't been cleaned up for at least 20 years even though everybody knew it wouldn't be going away.
It's always astonishing how unreliable memory is, even though you seem to remember it as if you'd just read it.
Actually, the original quote is something along the lines of "[They] have nuclear weapons, all we have is a protractor" ... but I kinda expected some people to recognize it anyway.
... all they have is a protractor.
I used to think that and I've gone beyond it.
Fission is a viable energy source, but it should be avoided wherever there is a better solution with less impact.
Fission products are problematic. Even though they only take a few centuries to decay, total inventories should be minimized. It's not the first choice, but it's among the last. I just happen to think that the alternatives (especially some renewables) are not sufficient, if you want to use them to an extend that is compatible with basic considerations of environmental protection. Hence nuclear power as a fall-back to replace fossil fuels where absolutely necessary, but reduced the necessary minimum. If you mistake nuclear power as a panacea, it'll turn around and bite you.
Yes, of course biofuels are not the only factor influencing food prices, but a very significant one. However, you forget one element in your analysis:
Time.
There is no doubt that the current prices are good for the African economies in the long run, as farmers can earn more money - but they increased far too fast for the economy as a whole to cope with it. It takes decades to develop knowledge, to create profits to reinvest into farm equipment etc. Food in developing countries makes up a part of expenses as large as, say, rents in Europe - imagine what would happen if rents rose by 300% above inflation within 3-4 years. It would be a major struggle already if that happened within 20 years. The consequences of something like that happening within such a short period would be catastrophic.
By creating a situation in which African countries are de-facto dependent on cheap food prices, we took upon ourselves the responsibility to keep those prices roughly at that level. That doesn't mean they have to stay there forever, but they must not jump by 200-300% within 3-4 years. Our ignorance of that matter is as shocking as the ignorance of Mao during the Great Jump forward. And remember, we're not just talking about Somalia, but many other places as well. Over 100mio additional people are undernourished since prices jumped to current levels. Typically, about 1-2% a year of those people will die as a result of being undernourished. The numbers involved are staggering.
Reserves.
Nobody stops you from upgrading some parts while they are still on the ground - but a lot of the mechanical parts, the transfer stage, landing etc. won't need to be redeveloped, and even the upgraded parts will be easier to implement. You could also think about using modularized instruments that you can change depending on the needs of the mission.
Btw. rather than improved cameras, a better computer would do a whole lot more to improve the science output of the mars rovers, because it would enable a lot more autonomous driving.
They are planned to be released in low orbit, where they will enter the atmosphere within a few months at most.
Sure, saying those wafers are useless is premature, however, what about common-sized satellites and space probes?
Instead of building yet another mars rover, NASA should have used what it had and just build ten more Mars Exploration Rovers instead of one extremely expensive, completely new rover - with a whole new set of technical issues. All they would have had to do would be to build a new modular spacecraft to carry them with in a Delta IV or Atlas V - because the Delta II is no longer available.
Same goes for just about any space probe build in the last 30 years. Back in the 60ies and 70ies practically all probes were build in series - which they did because of the rather high rate of malfunctions, but it was also more economic.
Those guys at NASA should be forced to watch some Star Trek - maybe then they'll understand what advantages a standardized Mark I Planetary Probe can offer over designing and testing brand new ones each time.
Right now, those countries absolutely need that cheap food. That's not to say that this is a good policy in the long run. If you don't stop dumping cheap food on those countries, its people are screwed and depended on your food supplies (as indeed, they are). But if you stop suddenly and too fast, you're starving them.
By making those countries dependent on our food in the first place, we made ourselves responsible for their nourishment, whether or not that was our intention. And now, we're ignoring this huge responsibility.
There is a difference between reducing exports by a given quantity in a time-span of 3 years vs. a time-span of 30 years. The difference are about 100 million additional people being undernourished (about 900mio vs. 800mio until 2007, according to the FAO) and at least hundreds of thousands dieing from that condition.