What I meant by Crusoe-type technology was the "hardware in software" design. Portable chip design *still* uses legacy instruction sets, and the entire idea of Crusoe was not to emulate the architecture, but to emulate the instruction set. They also ended up emulating part of the architecture, as the north bridge is on die too, I believe. But the code-morphing software idea may be helpful by using a more powerful processor which is difficult to program for (like the Crusoe) and emulating a more standard instruction set. See also Nintendo's recent stance with the GameCube - they're interested in appeasing third-party developers, and the architecture lends a lot to that. Crusoe-type technology may allow them to use more powerful technology without sacrificing the ease of use.
You're dead on about the battery life of the Nomad/Lynx/GameGear. That was Nintendo's entire reason for sticking with a black and white screen - a PocketGB runs for up to *ten* hours on two AAA batteries. The best the GameGear ever got was 2, and that was on a real good day (and probably with high-drain batteries).
It wasn't that Nintendo couldn't develop a Lynx/Nomad/GameGear quality handheld. It's that they couldn't develop one that would sip power as good as the GameBoy can, and when it comes to portable gaming, I don't give a hoot whether I'm playing a game with the flashiest graphics for an hour - the one I'll play more is the one I CAN play more - the one with the longest battery life.
I'm curious to see if Sega/Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are looking into grabbing Crusoe-type technology for handheld video games. It's true that the LCD grabs the most power (that's why the GB Color uses a passive backlit screen) but I'm sure that the processor requirements were scaled down massively for power consumption. I don't know about the battery life of the WonderSwan/NeoGeo Pocket, but the battery life of the Lynx/Nomad/Game Gear killed them all.
Atari was quite frankly stupid for producing the Lynx as powerful as it was. The Lynx tended to average an hour and a half on batteries! I had more friends who hated the thing even though the games were cool simply because I could still play my Gameboy during study hall near the end of the day and their batteries had died at lunch.
If you want, check out a good undergrad Astro text - Carroll & Ostlie's "Modern Astrophysics". However, I'm in Paris right now, and a bit away from any of my texts, so I use what I can.
You know, for the life of me, I've made that mistake about 20 times now. Not that I care, as, well, I'm not an observational astro person (nor could I be!) and don't know many of the constellations at all (and very few of the Southern Hemisphere ones at all). But you are correct, that was just one of my common mistakes.
A shuttle launch is not research - at least, not space launch research.
I said give the money to NASA for BPP research - give $50 million to the Breakthrough Physics group, for instance - and give it to them every *year* - and they will not claim it's paltry money. They'll do some pretty amazing stuff, I guarantee you. Hell, for that amount of money, they'll probably try to build an Alcubierre drive or a WHIP (wormhole induced propulsion) engine.
Besides, the argument was not necessarily to show that such a simple thing would make an immediate difference. It was to show that even such a simple thing would never happen (us all donating $50M in a lump sum from individual contributions).
I don't hate capitalism. Pointing out the flaws of a system isn't a sign of hating it - it's pointing out that it has flaws. I actually personally think that capitalism is the right way to go in an industrial society, because it allows for the free development of solutions to problems which otherwise would have gone unsolved.
That would probably explain why I was pushing for an upstart.:)
Note that I also don't 'don't like politics' - I actually love it. I think it's hilarious, and a lot of fun to watch. Studying Clinton's State of the Union addresses for some of my classes were some of the funniest things I've ever done. It's great to see how just changing the wording a bit, here and there, can make all the difference to trying to hide from the people the way politics is done - which you have to do, because unfortunately politics isn't fair - and can't be fair, incidentally.
I don't think any governments kill space business at all - space is the natural expansion after a planet has been exhausted of unexplored territory. Fascism could actually rush into space much faster than capitalism, though I don't think it could make a sustained run, but as we've never seen anyone try, who knows? It depends whether or not they would be able to find enough resources after expanding quickly. Socialism may hurt space expansion by relieving problems in society and not letting them reach a boiling point to force people to change. However, personally, I can't complain about that - I have no desire to see people suffer.
We don't really need to change big business at all - it's pretty much okay. You just need a few people to realize that "hey, there's a market there, let's go after it." It'll happen in time, I'm sure. I'd say 10 to 15 years, but I'm probably quite optimistic, so I'd rather say 20-30 years. Not a bad time frame at all. Only about oh, 60 years or so from first Moon landing to common space flight. Kinda parallels Chris Columbus's journey.
I'm not sure that that pernicious form of modernism is all that wrong - unfortunately, we have no independent set of data to test - the world is as it is, and whether or not it would've gotten here without any one specific person, I don't know. Would the world be different? Quite, but personally, I don't think it would be that different. It's hard to tell though, as hindsight always reveals things as obvious.
I agree with you that one thing that may be holding us back from expanding in to space are the decent conditions on Earth. Unfortunately, this may perhaps be for the better. Space is an entirely new 'expansion' area, regardless of what science fiction tells us. Before, people who were down on their luck could migrate, simply - buy a wagon and move. Crawl on a boat and go, and then set up shop in the new frontier, and manage somehow. Space isn't like that. We can't take those who are down on their luck and use them to build up the 'final frontier' - unfortunately, we require too much technical expertise.
This time, unfortunately, we need a controlled expansion, because the problems to overcome are much greater than ever before.
First off, it's a violation of several nuclear treaties. And if you think that means nothing to the Chinese, it would to the rest of the world, who would surely put a stop to it before it was completed.
Second, why in the world would you ever build a missile base on the moon? That's an incredibly dumb place to put it - no defense, no security, no camouflage - plus not to mention the fact that you would have significant lead time on the missile being fired and hitting its target - an obscene number of things could go wrong.
Considering I *am* a scientist working in a field of science that is science for science sake (particle astrophysics - REALLY just pure science... we tried to bull a reason once just for fun, and it took a lot of work), I find this greatly amusing.
I'm (obviously!) very very for pure science. However, what I'm trying to say, is we will never capture the mass media's attention. Ever. We never have - and we never will. I didn't say I didn't see any value in pure science - in fact, ALL I see is value - but I don't see any economic value. And economic value is what puts bread on the table for people. Literally. People will not sacrifice their livelihood for the possible massive gains of the future. Not even scientists.
On a side note, I've begun to notice in people two qualities - first, a 'Golden Age' idea, which is that there must have been a time when things were better, and a 'hero' idea, which was that there were visionaries and heroes who somehow saw beyond the immediate moment. The funny part is both are wrong.
I've got a guess on the first - people's memory degrades rather drastically over time, so I'm figuring that people simply don't remember the bad parts, and only see a happy haze in the past. Note that as people get older, they get much more conservative and "When I was your age..." ish, though this is very anecdotal.
I don't know about the second. The fact is is that there were no visionaries, or heroes, ever - not the way that we see it. So many of history's 'heroes' are created by history itself - by media placing people in far higher lights than they themselves were. Einstein was raised to far higher levels in death than in life, as were people like Washington, Lincoln, FDR, (insert president name here).
Then again, as Star Trek said, "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decisions." (paraphrased - I must be getting old too)
Vega is the star Alpha Lyrae (constellation Lyra, genitive Lyrae, meaning 'The Swan'). It has a color of 0, by definition (B-V color). Its apparent magnitude is 0.03, and its absolute magnitude is 0.6. It is visible in the Northern Hemisphere primarily, and is visible year round to most of North America.
It is, correctly, at a distance of 25 light years, and is an A0 normal-type dwarf (V).
Storage and distribution are some of the largest problems in electrical design. Capacitors bleed, and they have horrible, horrible size/energy ratios. Not only that, when they discharge, they release a sizable amount of energy in electromagnetic interference. Batteries are the only efficient energy storage mechanism, or superconductors.
Unfortunately superconductors are NOT ideal for transmission, as they have a current limit that can flow through them. That's the main reason they haven't been mass-deployed currently. Transmission will always, always burn power, and that alone would make solar power unfeasible as a total power source.
Oh, and as a reminder, deserts wouldn't work. The sand would blow on top of them, covering them. There aren't any places on Earth that would be suitable for solar panels that don't have people there currently.
The problem is, as I've mentioned in a comment farther down, is that you can't do that with humans. Humans can't see beyond 'petty short-term concerns': it's not feasible, at least, it's never happened in our entire history. And again, it makes sense - trying to pay attention to all of the goings on of an entire planet is impossible, especially when you have other things to do. (Not only that - but if you did try, you'd have one hell of a boring life.)
Strangely enough, a dictatorship would most likely be much better in a situation like this, as dictatorships have long shown that they can very efficiently build huge, completely inefficient, prohibitively expensive monuments to the size of their [ego].
I'm sure if a dictatorship ran the US, we'd have several bases on the moon. Most of them would be royal palaces.
As for the financial benefits, these are all side benefits, which, unfortunately, are more attributable to the companies who actually did them, rather than the space launch program.
An old adage says "Necessity is the mother of invention," and I'm inclined to believe that it's completely true, rather than mostly true. Humans don't innovate without need - period - because, well, we're lazy.
As for whether or not this is a problem, I don't know. If an asteroid strikes us before we're able to deal with it, yup, it was a problem. Other than that, eh...
My word! You're definitely working in a different field of research than I am!
Our best bets for cheap propulsion right now are still in the 'theoretical' stage - theory's cheap. I wasn't talking about experimental space research - THAT'S expensive. But theory's damn cheap. Take a look at the recent Solar Sail studies that NASA has been working on. I'm not sure of the costs, but somehow I doubt they were prohibitively high.
Even so, amend my previous statement to $500 a year. $50M a year is enough to make any researcher (or several researchers!) jump and crawl over each other to get at it.
(Common grants for space research (theory/design - not construction) typically are in the $50K-$150K range.)
I don't really think it's about "caring", I think it's more about "importance." The fact is is that space offers nothing to us at the current moment. It only holds the promise of more to come. Think of what's up there currently - defense satellites to protect the Earth's nations. Communications satellites to link the Earth's people. Spy satellites for national security. Our satellites are almost all turned inward, and the relatively rare few which are actually looking towards space are doing pure science, rather than any commercially benefitial ventures.
Apollo was, in my opinion, somewhat of a mistake. We went there to Get There (tm). It served no practical purpose whatsoever, and once we got there, the public was basically done with it. Why? Because our job was to Get There (tm) - and when we did, well, that was that. Good job. Now go home.
Take a good look at the Human Genome Project. It got funding, it still has funding, and it completed (mostly) recently. It'll still get funding for a while, because it can genuinely and completely claim legitimate viable commercial interests.
Take a look at the NASA programs which get funding (and there are quite a few) - Hubble, for instance. Why? Because the public likes Hubble - it generates a commercial product (pretty images). This sounds quite stupid, but it's true, strangely enough!
Personally, if the Chinese get to the moon, I think all they will do is put a Red flag there, then come back. Why? Because we don't have anything else to do there yet that will make the cost viable.
America is definitely not languishing when it comes to space science - it's the entire world. The nations with developing space programs simply have not reached the plateau where 'getting to space' has been accomplished, and 'doing something there' hasn't had to be examined yet.
I hate to say this, but the country's actually got it right this time. NASA isn't pointing this out to the general populous because the general populous wouldn't take notice. It's not tangible - it's not real. You can firmly say that "Yes, I'm all for space research" but when it comes to funding it, most people would rather have well-kept roads.
Let me put it this way. If everyone on Slashdot donated $500 to NASA for BPP research, that would be a serious hell of a lot of money - probably close to $50 million dollars - definitely not paltry research money! Everyone on Slashdot could afford $500 - really. You might have to tack it onto a credit card bill, or eat a little lightly for the remainder of the year, but you could afford it. But this won't happen. No matter how much I would yell and scream, it won't happen - because, unfortunately, it will not directly have an affect on you. Some of you might do it - those who the $500 is nothing at all - but most probably wouldn't (including me), because the effect is not tangible.
In my regard, this makes sense. You cannot estimate the financial benefits of space research. Period. The estimated benefits to humanity are actually somewhere between 0 and 6 times the cost of it. Note I included zero - it is entirely possible that the research would find nothing.
Has this happened? Oh yes. Tons of people are staring at general relativity, and have been staring at general relativity for dozens of years, trying to find the 'Holy Grail' - a metric which allows FTL travel with normal matter. It isn't going to happen - it doesn't exist. Sometimes we have to accept that life doesn't provide us with an easy way out. (That, and theory has never done much to revolutionize normal people's lives - it's all experiment).
Research, unfortunately, cannot be looked at logically. It is a potential benefit, rather than a guaranteed benefit.
On a side note, I don't think the US Government is failing. It's working exactly as it always has, and was intended to - media tends to put it in everyone's face more, and so, eh, public opinion is kinda down, but public opinion isn't exactly a 'national health indicator'. I don't know why exactly you think the government is failing (there has always been corruption, immorality in office, and short-term benefits rather than long-term planning) but to me, it just seems running perfectly fine. I don't let a dream of a perfect world (or even a 'better world') get in the way of my view of reality. Fact is, you start dealing with 300 million some odd people, and the government's not going to be great. Especially when (by all standard indicators) the country is exceptionally wealthy.
This was a good article, with a good analysis of the current market state of space launches. Not all that surprising, in my case - this is what you deal with when you have an out-of-house company doing rocket launches (or a government agency - say hello to pork barrel). Unfortunately, this is the way that economies work in a capitalistic and democratic environment, because, quite simply, people are selfish.
Democracy will always have inefficiencies like pork barrel projects - people do not see 'national' benefits, they see local benefits. This is not a human flaw, this is a sort of information filter. The entire economic state of the nation, PLUS one's normal daily routines would be impossible, so we filter it down to the important issues - the local ones. So, if you want the *people* to govern themselves (and don't even think of doing a true democracy... nothing would get done) you split the country up into multiple sections (states, in our case) and let representatives from each one of those states do the governing. It makes sense - there isn't really a better alternative. However, your problem, flat out, is if you want the body of representatives to deal with the money allocation of the nation, you're going to have pork barrel projects, because in order to stay in office, they need to be noticed. In order to be noticed, they absolutely have to do something that their constituents will see.
That's government for you - but what's causing the capitalist companies to do what they're doing? The same thing - individual short-sightedness. Look at history - history has shown that any time one company starts to make a run at a new market, another one will start chasing after it, and they'll innovate, innovate, and innovate. However, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing et al. aren't chasing after the cheap end of launches. Why? Because there's no guarantee they'll win. It's not safe. Not only that, it's extremely risky. The better method for them is to attempt to slowly cut costs here and there (not showing the dropping cost to the consumer, of course... a price war would be bad. You might not win) and quietly funding research here and there, possibly.
Price wars are bad for the big players in a market - a lot of times they lose. Look at Intel and AMD, Amazon and (insert anyone), Apple and (any of the PC manufacturers nowadays). In each case, a price war started, and suddenly the original big player (Intel, anyone in the book selling business, and Apple) lost out - in some cases almost catastrophically. Price wars are good for upstarts - not necessarily in government spending (sometimes, though) but in the consumer market definitely.
What I take from this lesson in economics and politics is this: if we want to get cheap launches into space, we need to realize two things: don't look to politics, first off. Politics is propaganda, because with a nation of 300 some odd million people, it has to be. And second off, you need an upstart. Someone needs to found a cheap-space-launch business that works. It might not have the highest volume of Lockheed-Martin, or Boeing, but it would make government contracters ask LM and Boeing why their estimates aren't lower. And since LM and Boeing and others will simply buy out the first few upstarts, you need to keep founding them (if you're smart, you'd be one person, founding multiples of them with the same money that the major players give you:) That's probably some sort of fraud, however...)
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well, and we can again see that upstarts coming in were the major players in shaking up industries (first Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Packard Bell, now Emachines).
NASA is also funding a program besides the SLI program - the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, which is designed to very much so overcome the problems in spaceflight by poking at the holes in science currently.
If anyone out there is a student looking for an area of physics to study, look carefully at the BPP page, and follow my advice - find the 'holes' in physics which were found by EXPERIMENT, rather than by theory, and stab at them several thousand times over until they pop. My personal best bet? Anomalous weight changes over a superconducting surface, and the Casimir effect. Try everything. Literally. Chances are, at some point, you'll get something that makes people go "Huh?" - and at that point, you've hit on something, and go at it like crazy. (BPP project: http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm) (I don't use HTML tags because I'm lazy. Sorry. Chalk it up to humanity.)
Sigh. I didn't actually mean to propose New Mexico - I was just there recently, and there is a lot of scientific activity there simply because the population density is so low, which is why I used it as an example. (See also Los Alamos, and nuclear research)
What I was trying to get across is that this would be situated in an area with virtually no one around, so the whole "public danger" argument is crap.
Actually, it's the "university" portion that he was talking about - I definitely think QM should be taught as first-year undergrad material. High school... might be a bit too early.
Unfortunately mechanics is still very important - QM teaches people to think abstractly, about vague concepts and multiple attack methods to any problem. Mechanics is different - it's logical, step by step reasoning, with possibly multiple attack methods, but if so, they're fundamentally the same thing. And in high school, it's the learning method, rather than the information, which is important. Science in high school is intended to teach a method of thought and investigation, and to whet the appetite for knowledge.
University teaching, though, is backwards. There's no reason for people to unlearn things, and since in a university, order of class taking is for the most part, free, it would make sense to have physics majors take quantum mechanics first, and anyone who just wants to take physics as an elective could take classical mechanics first. The order we currently have just leads to confusion.
(Action principles get taught? That's surprising. I had to figure it out on my own.)
I think I have to disagree with one point here... the comment that they haven't been screwing up the planetary probe program
I like NASA. They give me money. So don't get me wrong on this - but in my opinion, they did screw something up. Goldin's motto has been 'faster, better, cheaper' and they have been messing that up, and not because of Congress - it's because of the way NASA's structured. They spend far too much time on development and far too little time on testing and quality control. This is understandable - NASA pushes for the 'best' approach (development/planning) and then, when the design is ready, they push for the 'faster' portion and often times, they push a bit too hard.
What needs to be done is more than congressional fixing - a bit of restructuring is necessary on NASA's end, too. Less beauracracy in the way things are developed, and more money spend on the actual creation/testing portion of the process.
Note that 'development' and 'research' are not the same things - when I say development, I mean the portion of a project where it is decided what is going to be done, before actually attempting to do it.
After seeing a few NASA projects go through the development/planning->design->production stage, I think I have to agree with those who say that the "faster" portion should never touch the "design" segment.
Incidentally, the MCO and MPL losses are delaying Mars exploration, about two years, I think, for reevaluation. This is a good thing. One loss is an "oops, oh well." Two losses are not mistakes - they indicate that something is not quite going according to plan.
Actually, as New Mexicans are quite fond of saying, they're Americans, rather than Mexicans. It's one of only two states/provinces in US/Canada that actually has the name of its country on the license plate.
You are correct about the atmosphere diffracting and spreading the beam, however, this is an engineering problem rather than a theoretical limitation. The beam would scatter uniformly, and diffuse so that the main effect of the laser would be to heat the atmosphere slightly rather than doing any serious danger.
New Mexico has one of the lowest population per square meter in the country (Alaska and Wyoming are ahead of it, I'm almost sure). I didn't say that "the" people there wouldn't be an issue. I said that "people" wouldn't be an issue - because there wouldn't be any around. It's the same reason that nuclear testing grounds were in those areas.
Considering the pathetically minimal impact on environment, I'm surprised you're even concerned. Myself, personally, I'd be more upset about the rapid urbanization in many of the cities than what's being done out in the unpopulated desert.
And the air being dusty means little - it depends whether or not those dust particles absorb/reflect the wavelength of light being used. Most likely not.
True. However, my typical methods on Slashdot for correcting people are usually to just try to calmly correct people without trying to be insulting.
I decided a while ago that people are really truly fascinated with physics and astrophysics for some reason (I wrote a paper on this in college, actually, it has to do with something I call the "carpenter effect": people are somehow mystified and at the same time scared of whatever or whomever created the world. It shows up in almost every major religions, except a few) and therefore, considering that they're both my field, and that bad science in both of them is rampant (see also xxx.lanl.gov's gr-qc list, which has a number of total-bull papers) that I should do my best to inform people of the truth.
A professor of mine told me once that he thought that quantum mechanics should be taught before classical mechanics, because then we'd never even think about these dumb ideas like absolute locality, etc. I'm inclined to believe him. People who don't complete physics the entire way through get more misinformation that information, quite often.
Slashdot Mirror
What I meant by Crusoe-type technology was the "hardware in software" design. Portable chip design *still* uses legacy instruction sets, and the entire idea of Crusoe was not to emulate the architecture, but to emulate the instruction set. They also ended up emulating part of the architecture, as the north bridge is on die too, I believe. But the code-morphing software idea may be helpful by using a more powerful processor which is difficult to program for (like the Crusoe) and emulating a more standard instruction set. See also Nintendo's recent stance with the GameCube - they're interested in appeasing third-party developers, and the architecture lends a lot to that. Crusoe-type technology may allow them to use more powerful technology without sacrificing the ease of use.
Or something like that...
Patrick
You're dead on about the battery life of the Nomad/Lynx/GameGear. That was Nintendo's entire reason for sticking with a black and white screen - a PocketGB runs for up to *ten* hours on two AAA batteries. The best the GameGear ever got was 2, and that was on a real good day (and probably with high-drain batteries).
It wasn't that Nintendo couldn't develop a Lynx/Nomad/GameGear quality handheld. It's that they couldn't develop one that would sip power as good as the GameBoy can, and when it comes to portable gaming, I don't give a hoot whether I'm playing a game with the flashiest graphics for an hour - the one I'll play more is the one I CAN play more - the one with the longest battery life.
I'm curious to see if Sega/Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are looking into grabbing Crusoe-type technology for handheld video games. It's true that the LCD grabs the most power (that's why the GB Color uses a passive backlit screen) but I'm sure that the processor requirements were scaled down massively for power consumption. I don't know about the battery life of the WonderSwan/NeoGeo Pocket, but the battery life of the Lynx/Nomad/Game Gear killed them all.
Atari was quite frankly stupid for producing the Lynx as powerful as it was. The Lynx tended to average an hour and a half on batteries! I had more friends who hated the thing even though the games were cool simply because I could still play my Gameboy during study hall near the end of the day and their batteries had died at lunch.
Ah, the memories of a video game junkie.
No, I snag reference information off the 'Net.
If you want, check out a good undergrad Astro text - Carroll & Ostlie's "Modern Astrophysics". However, I'm in Paris right now, and a bit away from any of my texts, so I use what I can.
You know, for the life of me, I've made that mistake about 20 times now. Not that I care, as, well, I'm not an observational astro person (nor could I be!) and don't know many of the constellations at all (and very few of the Southern Hemisphere ones at all). But you are correct, that was just one of my common mistakes.
A shuttle launch is not research - at least, not space launch research.
I said give the money to NASA for BPP research - give $50 million to the Breakthrough Physics group, for instance - and give it to them every *year* - and they will not claim it's paltry money. They'll do some pretty amazing stuff, I guarantee you. Hell, for that amount of money, they'll probably try to build an Alcubierre drive or a WHIP (wormhole induced propulsion) engine.
Besides, the argument was not necessarily to show that such a simple thing would make an immediate difference. It was to show that even such a simple thing would never happen (us all donating $50M in a lump sum from individual contributions).
I don't hate capitalism. Pointing out the flaws of a system isn't a sign of hating it - it's pointing out that it has flaws. I actually personally think that capitalism is the right way to go in an industrial society, because it allows for the free development of solutions to problems which otherwise would have gone unsolved.
:)
That would probably explain why I was pushing for an upstart.
Note that I also don't 'don't like politics' - I actually love it. I think it's hilarious, and a lot of fun to watch. Studying Clinton's State of the Union addresses for some of my classes were some of the funniest things I've ever done. It's great to see how just changing the wording a bit, here and there, can make all the difference to trying to hide from the people the way politics is done - which you have to do, because unfortunately politics isn't fair - and can't be fair, incidentally.
I don't think any governments kill space business at all - space is the natural expansion after a planet has been exhausted of unexplored territory. Fascism could actually rush into space much faster than capitalism, though I don't think it could make a sustained run, but as we've never seen anyone try, who knows? It depends whether or not they would be able to find enough resources after expanding quickly. Socialism may hurt space expansion by relieving problems in society and not letting them reach a boiling point to force people to change. However, personally, I can't complain about that - I have no desire to see people suffer.
We don't really need to change big business at all - it's pretty much okay. You just need a few people to realize that "hey, there's a market there, let's go after it." It'll happen in time, I'm sure. I'd say 10 to 15 years, but I'm probably quite optimistic, so I'd rather say 20-30 years. Not a bad time frame at all. Only about oh, 60 years or so from first Moon landing to common space flight. Kinda parallels Chris Columbus's journey.
Good points, but just a few comments:
I'm not sure that that pernicious form of modernism is all that wrong - unfortunately, we have no independent set of data to test - the world is as it is, and whether or not it would've gotten here without any one specific person, I don't know. Would the world be different? Quite, but personally, I don't think it would be that different. It's hard to tell though, as hindsight always reveals things as obvious.
I agree with you that one thing that may be holding us back from expanding in to space are the decent conditions on Earth. Unfortunately, this may perhaps be for the better. Space is an entirely new 'expansion' area, regardless of what science fiction tells us. Before, people who were down on their luck could migrate, simply - buy a wagon and move. Crawl on a boat and go, and then set up shop in the new frontier, and manage somehow. Space isn't like that. We can't take those who are down on their luck and use them to build up the 'final frontier' - unfortunately, we require too much technical expertise.
This time, unfortunately, we need a controlled expansion, because the problems to overcome are much greater than ever before.
First off, it's a violation of several nuclear treaties. And if you think that means nothing to the Chinese, it would to the rest of the world, who would surely put a stop to it before it was completed.
Second, why in the world would you ever build a missile base on the moon? That's an incredibly dumb place to put it - no defense, no security, no camouflage - plus not to mention the fact that you would have significant lead time on the missile being fired and hitting its target - an obscene number of things could go wrong.
Plus you have to miss all of those satellites...
Somehow I doubt the moon is a security risk.
Considering I *am* a scientist working in a field of science that is science for science sake (particle astrophysics - REALLY just pure science... we tried to bull a reason once just for fun, and it took a lot of work), I find this greatly amusing.
I'm (obviously!) very very for pure science. However, what I'm trying to say, is we will never capture the mass media's attention. Ever. We never have - and we never will. I didn't say I didn't see any value in pure science - in fact, ALL I see is value - but I don't see any economic value. And economic value is what puts bread on the table for people. Literally. People will not sacrifice their livelihood for the possible massive gains of the future. Not even scientists.
On a side note, I've begun to notice in people two qualities - first, a 'Golden Age' idea, which is that there must have been a time when things were better, and a 'hero' idea, which was that there were visionaries and heroes who somehow saw beyond the immediate moment. The funny part is both are wrong.
I've got a guess on the first - people's memory degrades rather drastically over time, so I'm figuring that people simply don't remember the bad parts, and only see a happy haze in the past. Note that as people get older, they get much more conservative and "When I was your age..." ish, though this is very anecdotal.
I don't know about the second. The fact is is that there were no visionaries, or heroes, ever - not the way that we see it. So many of history's 'heroes' are created by history itself - by media placing people in far higher lights than they themselves were. Einstein was raised to far higher levels in death than in life, as were people like Washington, Lincoln, FDR, (insert president name here).
Then again, as Star Trek said, "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decisions." (paraphrased - I must be getting old too)
Vega is the star Alpha Lyrae (constellation Lyra, genitive Lyrae, meaning 'The Swan'). It has a color of 0, by definition (B-V color). Its apparent magnitude is 0.03, and its absolute magnitude is 0.6. It is visible in the Northern Hemisphere primarily, and is visible year round to most of North America.
/ extra/brightest.html
It is, correctly, at a distance of 25 light years, and is an A0 normal-type dwarf (V).
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations
if you doubt an astrophysics major.
It is located at an RA of 18h36m56.3 seconds and a declination of +38 degrees, 47 minutes, 1 second (I believe... it may be 38.4701 degrees)
Vega is important for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it is the basis for many magnitude systems.
Vega will be the next North Star in a few thousand years (16k or so, I believe).
I love wasting time on old Slashdot stories...
Storage and distribution are some of the largest problems in electrical design. Capacitors bleed, and they have horrible, horrible size/energy ratios. Not only that, when they discharge, they release a sizable amount of energy in electromagnetic interference. Batteries are the only efficient energy storage mechanism, or superconductors.
Unfortunately superconductors are NOT ideal for transmission, as they have a current limit that can flow through them. That's the main reason they haven't been mass-deployed currently. Transmission will always, always burn power, and that alone would make solar power unfeasible as a total power source.
Oh, and as a reminder, deserts wouldn't work. The sand would blow on top of them, covering them. There aren't any places on Earth that would be suitable for solar panels that don't have people there currently.
It will, unfortunately, not be resolvably visible.
In the age of jets flying overhead all the time, I'm afraid that one moving dot in the sky will do little to stir public interest.
FYI, Mir is commonly visible at magnitudes of somewhere around 0-1 (rather bright - about as bright as Vega, basically) over much of the Earth.
The problem is, as I've mentioned in a comment farther down, is that you can't do that with humans. Humans can't see beyond 'petty short-term concerns': it's not feasible, at least, it's never happened in our entire history. And again, it makes sense - trying to pay attention to all of the goings on of an entire planet is impossible, especially when you have other things to do.
(Not only that - but if you did try, you'd have one hell of a boring life.)
Strangely enough, a dictatorship would most likely be much better in a situation like this, as dictatorships have long shown that they can very efficiently build huge, completely inefficient, prohibitively expensive monuments to the size of their [ego].
I'm sure if a dictatorship ran the US, we'd have several bases on the moon. Most of them would be royal palaces.
As for the financial benefits, these are all side benefits, which, unfortunately, are more attributable to the companies who actually did them, rather than the space launch program.
An old adage says "Necessity is the mother of invention," and I'm inclined to believe that it's completely true, rather than mostly true. Humans don't innovate without need - period - because, well, we're lazy.
As for whether or not this is a problem, I don't know. If an asteroid strikes us before we're able to deal with it, yup, it was a problem. Other than that, eh...
My word! You're definitely working in a different field of research than I am!
Our best bets for cheap propulsion right now are still in the 'theoretical' stage - theory's cheap. I wasn't talking about experimental space research - THAT'S expensive. But theory's damn cheap. Take a look at the recent Solar Sail studies that NASA has been working on. I'm not sure of the costs, but somehow I doubt they were prohibitively high.
Even so, amend my previous statement to $500 a year. $50M a year is enough to make any researcher (or several researchers!) jump and crawl over each other to get at it.
(Common grants for space research (theory/design - not construction) typically are in the $50K-$150K range.)
I don't really think it's about "caring", I think it's more about "importance." The fact is is that space offers nothing to us at the current moment. It only holds the promise of more to come. Think of what's up there currently - defense satellites to protect the Earth's nations. Communications satellites to link the Earth's people. Spy satellites for national security. Our satellites are almost all turned inward, and the relatively rare few which are actually looking towards space are doing pure science, rather than any commercially benefitial ventures.
Apollo was, in my opinion, somewhat of a mistake. We went there to Get There (tm). It served no practical purpose whatsoever, and once we got there, the public was basically done with it. Why? Because our job was to Get There (tm) - and when we did, well, that was that. Good job. Now go home.
Take a good look at the Human Genome Project. It got funding, it still has funding, and it completed (mostly) recently. It'll still get funding for a while, because it can genuinely and completely claim legitimate viable commercial interests.
Take a look at the NASA programs which get funding (and there are quite a few) - Hubble, for instance. Why? Because the public likes Hubble - it generates a commercial product (pretty images). This sounds quite stupid, but it's true, strangely enough!
Personally, if the Chinese get to the moon, I think all they will do is put a Red flag there, then come back. Why? Because we don't have anything else to do there yet that will make the cost viable.
America is definitely not languishing when it comes to space science - it's the entire world. The nations with developing space programs simply have not reached the plateau where 'getting to space' has been accomplished, and 'doing something there' hasn't had to be examined yet.
I hate to say this, but the country's actually got it right this time. NASA isn't pointing this out to the general populous because the general populous wouldn't take notice. It's not tangible - it's not real. You can firmly say that "Yes, I'm all for space research" but when it comes to funding it, most people would rather have well-kept roads.
Let me put it this way. If everyone on Slashdot donated $500 to NASA for BPP research, that would be a serious hell of a lot of money - probably close to $50 million dollars - definitely not paltry research money! Everyone on Slashdot could afford $500 - really. You might have to tack it onto a credit card bill, or eat a little lightly for the remainder of the year, but you could afford it. But this won't happen. No matter how much I would yell and scream, it won't happen - because, unfortunately, it will not directly have an affect on you. Some of you might do it - those who the $500 is nothing at all - but most probably wouldn't (including me), because the effect is not tangible.
In my regard, this makes sense. You cannot estimate the financial benefits of space research. Period. The estimated benefits to humanity are actually somewhere between 0 and 6 times the cost of it. Note I included zero - it is entirely possible that the research would find nothing.
Has this happened? Oh yes. Tons of people are staring at general relativity, and have been staring at general relativity for dozens of years, trying to find the 'Holy Grail' - a metric which allows FTL travel with normal matter. It isn't going to happen - it doesn't exist. Sometimes we have to accept that life doesn't provide us with an easy way out. (That, and theory has never done much to revolutionize normal people's lives
- it's all experiment).
Research, unfortunately, cannot be looked at logically. It is a potential benefit, rather than a guaranteed benefit.
On a side note, I don't think the US Government is failing. It's working exactly as it always has, and was intended to - media tends to put it in everyone's face more, and so, eh, public opinion is kinda down, but public opinion isn't exactly a 'national health indicator'. I don't know why exactly you think the government is failing (there has always been corruption, immorality in office, and short-term benefits rather than long-term planning) but to me, it just seems running perfectly fine. I don't let a dream of a perfect world (or even a 'better world') get in the way of my view of reality. Fact is, you start dealing with 300 million some odd people, and the government's not going to be great. Especially when (by all standard indicators) the country is exceptionally wealthy.
This was a good article, with a good analysis of the current market state of space launches. Not all that surprising, in my case - this is what you deal with when you have an out-of-house company doing rocket launches (or a government agency - say hello to pork barrel). Unfortunately, this is the way that economies work in a capitalistic and democratic environment, because, quite simply, people are selfish.
:) That's probably some sort of fraud, however...)
Democracy will always have inefficiencies like pork barrel projects - people do not see 'national' benefits, they see local benefits. This is not a human flaw, this is a sort of information filter. The entire economic state of the nation, PLUS one's normal daily routines would be impossible, so we filter it down to the important issues - the local ones. So, if you want the *people* to govern themselves (and don't even think of doing a true democracy... nothing would get done) you split the country up into multiple sections (states, in our case) and let representatives from each one of those states do the governing. It makes sense - there isn't really a better alternative. However, your problem, flat out, is if you want the body of representatives to deal with the money allocation of the nation, you're going to have pork barrel projects, because in order to stay in office, they need to be noticed. In order to be noticed, they absolutely have to do something that their constituents will see.
That's government for you - but what's causing the capitalist companies to do what they're doing? The same thing - individual short-sightedness. Look at history - history has shown that any time one company starts to make a run at a new market, another one will start chasing after it, and they'll innovate, innovate, and innovate. However, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing et al. aren't chasing after the cheap end of launches. Why? Because there's no guarantee they'll win. It's not safe. Not only that, it's extremely risky. The better method for them is to attempt to slowly cut costs here and there (not showing the dropping cost to the consumer, of course... a price war would be bad. You might not win) and quietly funding research here and there, possibly.
Price wars are bad for the big players in a market - a lot of times they lose. Look at Intel and AMD, Amazon and (insert anyone), Apple and (any of the PC manufacturers nowadays). In each case, a price war started, and suddenly the original big player (Intel, anyone in the book selling business, and Apple) lost out - in some cases almost catastrophically. Price wars are good for upstarts - not necessarily in government spending (sometimes, though) but in the consumer market definitely.
What I take from this lesson in economics and politics is this: if we want to get cheap launches into space, we need to realize two things: don't look to politics, first off. Politics is propaganda, because with a nation of 300 some odd million people, it has to be. And second off, you need an upstart. Someone needs to found a cheap-space-launch business that works. It might not have the highest volume of Lockheed-Martin, or Boeing, but it would make government contracters ask LM and Boeing why their estimates aren't lower. And since LM and Boeing and others will simply buy out the first few upstarts, you need to keep founding them (if you're smart, you'd be one person, founding multiples of them with the same money that the major players give you
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well, and we can again see that upstarts coming in were the major players in shaking up industries (first Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Packard Bell, now Emachines).
NASA is also funding a program besides the SLI program - the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, which is designed to very much so overcome the problems in spaceflight by poking at the holes in science currently.
If anyone out there is a student looking for an area of physics to study, look carefully at the BPP page, and follow my advice - find the 'holes' in physics which were found by EXPERIMENT, rather than by theory, and stab at them several thousand times over until they pop. My personal best bet? Anomalous weight changes over a superconducting surface, and the Casimir effect. Try everything. Literally. Chances are, at some point, you'll get something that makes people go "Huh?" - and at that point, you've hit on something, and go at it like crazy.
(BPP project: http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm)
(I don't use HTML tags because I'm lazy. Sorry. Chalk it up to humanity.)
Okay. Find out for yourself then. Do the research, and post here what you find.
A stupid man will believe everything someone tells him.
Another stupid man will not believe anything anyone tells him.
An intelligent man will find out the truth.
Sigh. I didn't actually mean to propose New Mexico - I was just there recently, and there is a lot of scientific activity there simply because the population density is so low, which is why I used it as an example. (See also Los Alamos, and nuclear research)
What I was trying to get across is that this would be situated in an area with virtually no one around, so the whole "public danger" argument is crap.
Actually, it's the "university" portion that he was talking about - I definitely think QM should be taught as first-year undergrad material. High school... might be a bit too early.
Unfortunately mechanics is still very important - QM teaches people to think abstractly, about vague concepts and multiple attack methods to any problem. Mechanics is different - it's logical, step by step reasoning, with possibly multiple attack methods, but if so, they're fundamentally the same thing. And in high school, it's the learning method, rather than the information, which is important. Science in high school is intended to teach a method of thought and investigation, and to whet the appetite for knowledge.
University teaching, though, is backwards. There's no reason for people to unlearn things, and since in a university, order of class taking is for the most part, free, it would make sense to have physics majors take quantum mechanics first, and anyone who just wants to take physics as an elective could take classical mechanics first. The order we currently have just leads to confusion.
(Action principles get taught? That's surprising. I had to figure it out on my own.)
I think I have to disagree with one point here... the comment that they haven't been screwing up the planetary probe program
I like NASA. They give me money. So don't get me wrong on this - but in my opinion, they did screw something up. Goldin's motto has been 'faster, better, cheaper' and they have been messing that up, and not because of Congress - it's because of the way NASA's structured. They spend far too much time on development and far too little time on testing and quality control. This is understandable - NASA pushes for the 'best' approach (development/planning) and then, when the design is ready, they push for the 'faster' portion and often times, they push a bit too hard.
What needs to be done is more than congressional fixing - a bit of restructuring is necessary on NASA's end, too. Less beauracracy in the way things are developed, and more money spend on the actual creation/testing portion of the process.
Note that 'development' and 'research' are not the same things - when I say development, I mean the portion of a project where it is decided what is going to be done, before actually attempting to do it.
After seeing a few NASA projects go through the development/planning->design->production stage, I think I have to agree with those who say that the "faster" portion should never touch the "design" segment.
Incidentally, the MCO and MPL losses are delaying Mars exploration, about two years, I think, for reevaluation. This is a good thing. One loss is an "oops, oh well." Two losses are not mistakes - they indicate that something is not quite going according to plan.
Actually, as New Mexicans are quite fond of saying, they're Americans, rather than Mexicans. It's one of only two states/provinces in US/Canada that actually has the name of its country on the license plate.
You are correct about the atmosphere diffracting and spreading the beam, however, this is an engineering problem rather than a theoretical limitation. The beam would scatter uniformly, and diffuse so that the main effect of the laser would be to heat the atmosphere slightly rather than doing any serious danger.
New Mexico has one of the lowest population per square meter in the country (Alaska and Wyoming are ahead of it, I'm almost sure). I didn't say that "the" people there wouldn't be an issue. I said that "people" wouldn't be an issue - because there wouldn't be any around. It's the same reason that nuclear testing grounds were in those areas.
Considering the pathetically minimal impact on environment, I'm surprised you're even concerned. Myself, personally, I'd be more upset about the rapid urbanization in many of the cities than what's being done out in the unpopulated desert.
And the air being dusty means little - it depends whether or not those dust particles absorb/reflect the wavelength of light being used. Most likely not.
True. However, my typical methods on Slashdot for correcting people are usually to just try to calmly correct people without trying to be insulting.
I decided a while ago that people are really truly fascinated with physics and astrophysics for some reason (I wrote a paper on this in college, actually, it has to do with something I call the "carpenter effect": people are somehow mystified and at the same time scared of whatever or whomever created the world. It shows up in almost every major religions, except a few) and therefore, considering that they're both my field, and that bad science in both of them is rampant (see also xxx.lanl.gov's gr-qc list, which has a number of total-bull papers) that I should do my best to inform people of the truth.
A professor of mine told me once that he thought that quantum mechanics should be taught before classical mechanics, because then we'd never even think about these dumb ideas like absolute locality, etc. I'm inclined to believe him. People who don't complete physics the entire way through get more misinformation that information, quite often.
Man, this is offtopic. But, eh.
I did. :)
Whoops, forgot Slashdot limits reply levels on the main page - thought that was in reply to my message. Sorry about that.
However, considering the other poster was referring to my comment, but simply using the wrong word, it was still a valid point, I thought.