Roger, While I agree with you that in our current society, sex with children would be very harmful, if we were more enlightened it would be completely different. May I ask: What is your definition of a pedophile?
A pedophile is one whose primary sexual attraction is to children. This does not mean s/he cannot have sex with adults, only that the most satisfying image possible is that of sex with a child. Both hetero- and homo- sexual variations are possible.
I think you should be able to entertain whatever fantasies you want, but I think I speak for the consensus when I say sex between adults and minors should not be allowed. I don't think the power relationship can be resolved in any productive way. While it might be possible to establish a relationship that even the minor party finds enjoyable and feels is non-coercive, the weight of years and experience will always be there in ways that just don't exist when two adults are thrashing out their differences.
And it is really hard to imagine a world in which this would be different, no matter what the differences in mores or technology. We are born knowing nothing and need a prolonged developmental period to establish our concept of self. Sexual experimentation between children may be a natural part of that process, but I don't think that sex between children and adults is.
I have seen indications that some so-called pedophiles area actually "getting off" on the power imbalance itself, rather than the child-adult thing. That may be an individual quirk, but it's worth paying attention to. Most of us arne't into sex with kids, but everyone understands power. In our culture, it's the universal fetish.
You just wasted a lot of time writing that in response to an old troll.
Not really. Not knowing his history, I still figured on the possibility it was a troll. But I think it is always good to bring a rational thought into such a discourse. After all, if the only responses are "begone troll" and "begone pedophile," and this happens time and again, doesn't this create a potentially inaccurate representation of/. posters? He is, after all, trolling our open-mindedness. Do we want to lose that to deny him his little yuk?
Then you should know that there is no general discussion board or its equivalent here. Your topic has not come up for a good reason -- the website operators haven't seen fit to give it a forum.
OTOH you sound sincere (maybe even desperate) enough, so I'll bite.
We are tricked, trapped, harassed, arrested, and seen as dirt by our government, authorities, and most of the people in this country. It reminds me very much of stories I've heard about Nazi Germany.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you here. What you want to do, what you dream of doing, is repellant to most of us and highly illegal. But our Founding Fathers had clear ideas on this which are being ignored. It should not be illegal for you to write your stories, draw your graphics, and prosyletize for your position such as it is. It should IMNSHO be highly illegal for you to actually do anything about your fantasies with another underage human being, but that's just me at this time. Joe Haldeman painted a vivid picture of a society in which homosexuality is normal and "us heterosexuals" were treated about as you and your lot are (in The Forever War), very discomfiting that. The theory of relativity does not just apply to physics.
I always find it astonishing that erotic training is termed "child abuse",
Here you are so close to the line that an electron microscope could not detect the separation. How convenient it must seem to you that this necessary "erotic training" might require your services, eh? While there is a part of me that feels you are right in principle there is a much larger part that feels you are exactly the person I would NOT want any dependent of mine going to for advice. You are right that sex in general is not inherently harmful, but you are wrong in assuming that sex in coercive relationships is not inherently harmful.
I would have an even less hospitable view of you than I do had I not read Pat Califia's amazing writings. She and her comrades in a related sexual minority did come out in public for your cause -- at some cost to themselves -- but even they were reticent about your actual practices. You are on better ground when you demand your right to write and speak and draw and even make highly realistic 3-D graphic simulations. I will defend those rights, well, not to the death (coward alert) but at least until it doesn't seem worth my while to live in this country any more. You reach a point when an honestly corrupt place like Mexico looks positively wonderful by comparison.
I did not choose my sexual orientation, and even though many people say it's a sickness or a disease, it's just as valid as homosexuality, bisexuality, and many other orientations whose members were once persecuted as we are, but are now seen as being normal
While I agree that you did not choose your orientation, I disagree that we have to consider it "just as valid" as any other. There are degrees of validity in all things. Most of us here would, I think, draw the curtain and turn the eye at anything nonlethal and non-crippling between consenting adults; but what about those Victorian fetishists who got off on their own amputations? Similarly, our society has drawn a firm line this side of children. Don't cross it. Not in deed, at least.
As for word and thought and image, those should be free. As they aren't, and you are rightful in your protest. But don't ask for the right to touch our sons and daughters if you want to live very long.
- 200 mhz processor: $35
- Custom PowerVR card: $25
- Custom Motherboard: $25
- Memory: $20
- Custom Yamaha sound chip: $20
- Controller: $20
- Modem: $15
- Two games (coming with most bundles now): $40
I think you neglect the power of bulk purchasing in nearly all of these estimates.
Let's take one: "Custom motherboard: $25." Exactly what hat do you pull that out of? In single quantities a motherboard like the DC would be $1K+, but in the lots they're having them made I don't see why they would be more than $2.00 a unit. There is a quantity/delivery/price factor in every item you mention which you are ignoring.
Previously, everyone stated that Sega was able to make a profit with each unit sold. Then Sony came along, announcing huge losses with each PS2 sold. It makes me wonder which is the truth.
Both are the truth. Sega makes a profit, though a small one, on each DC. Sony loses a ton on each PS2, partly because of Rambus and partly because it's just plain more expensive to build. This article explains it in some detail, along with a few pokes at the alleged superiority of the PS2.
Well, since someone brought up 30x90 it's worth mentioning that feral pigs are known to roam that area of New Orleans east. Fortunately 30x90 isn't too far from the water...
30x90 isn't in a swamp, it's in a landfill. The closest you can get to it by land without trespassing is to go to Almonaster Blvd, which runs east-west paralleling the Intracoastal Waterway about 2000 ft to the south. 30x90 is at the water's edge almost exactly between Jourdan Rd, which runs from Almonaster to the water parallel to the Industrial Canal (which in turn right-angles the ICW), and Elaine St. which runs to the water about 1 mile past Jourdan. The ruins of the Pic'nSave warehouse flank the landfill on one side, and a succession of auto salvage yards flank the other.
If you thought to bring a small boat (even a jet ski would do, or a 12 ft flatboat with small outboard) and launch it from the Paris Rd boat launch, though, you could sail up and stand right at the spot.
I seem to remember that a few years ago, someone found four equidistant points on land and erected a small but carefully aligned 3-sided pyramid at each one, thereby constructing a giant imaginary tetrahedron as large as the earth.
This sculpture was one of the characters in David Brin's novel Earth.
It could SIMPLY have been that the bookstore staff were clueless. I've seen this happen. My wife prevented it from happening in a mall bookstore she was working in, in fact.
Well, mebbe. It seems awfully unlikely that the publisher would not have had some VERY NOTICEABLE NOTICES on the package to let the vendors know they were not kiddie books. OTOH now they shrink wrap all of them, so maybe there was some confusion.
NO! To sneak them back onto the shelves in order to indoctrinate little kids with counter-cultural messages....
Back in the mid-80's I happened to be walking past the kiddie trade book section at WaldenBooks when something grabbed my attention. I couldn't exactly say why, since all the books were the same size, thickness, and similar color schemes... but one just wasn't right. I homed in on it... roses? What's the one with the rose on the spine? It was the first effort of A.N. Roquelaure (known now as Anne Rice), The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which, in case you haven't heard, is in fact a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale but most certainly isn't the Disney version.
Naturally I couldn't leave it there where some practical joker had left it in the potential grasp of prepubescent kiddies, so I swallowed hard and did my upright citizenly duty and bought it:-)
What I'd really like to know is what the hell Iraq would have done with a bunch of PS2s - much less what they'll do with the PS1. The machine are designed specifically for graphics rendering. Everything they render is pre-built into them...oh wait - yeah - physics...so now we're getting somewhere. OK, they want to use the PlayStations for physics modeling...
Both PS/1 and PS/2 are general purpose computers, albeit with less open architectures than a PC. Everything they render is most certainly not pre-built into them, although the video hardware has a lot of iron streamlined for turning 3D abstractions into 2D views which would be wasted if you're doing something else.
The physics in these games is always coded by the game programmer in the general-purpose CPU, because it's different for every game. While we may laugh at these consoles being used to control military hardware, it's no sillier than many of the impromptu hardware hacks which are performed during any war -- especially if you have a couple of talented hacker types who are familiar with the hardware and software environment.
While I think the whole embargo is silly, it seems possible that there is some specific project for which the Iraqis may have adapted this cheap and importable hardware. I am sure I've read of Linux being booted on the Dreamcast and think I remember seeing that it had been ported to PS/1; this indicates that the specs are out there for anyone who wants to use these as general purpose computing engines.
See, there are several ways to go to the moon. There is the cheap fast way, which is what we did, which is you start with a great big rocket and throw every bit of it away as you use it up until you splash down damn near buck naked with a rock in your hand in the Pacific as the last of your heat shield dissolves around you. Definitely uses the least amount of material, problem is it doesn't leave any infrastructure. Next time you want to go you're right back where you started.
Or you could build a platform in Low Earth Orbit, move provisions to it, set up a much more efficient orbital transfer system with ships designed for deep space, maybe have another smaller platform in lunar orbit, and set up what amounts to regular service between the two planets. Very expensive, especially at first, but ultimately much cheaper per pound if your goal is to ferry tonnage onto lunar soil in order to build a base.
Colonization wasn't the game, obviously. Impressing the rooshians was. And once we impressed the rooshians as cheaply as possible we picked up our toys and came home.
I guess we can poke a little blame JFK's way for setting such a ludicrous timetable, but then he too was driven by the cold war. We could have had colonization as seen in the movie 2001 by now, but we didn't go for it. And that's the rest of the story.
Us: Aren't you listening? We've got fucking robotic ants in space! What more do you want?!
Actually, we don't have them yet, but while we've pretty much given up on wiping out war or poverty or setting up a human presence in deep space, we think we might have the robotic ants by, oh, 2020 or so.
It's the people with an attitude exactly like yours who are the reason why we don't have a Kubrick like space station in Earth orbit.
No, there are plenty of good reasons to have a space station in LEO, even some moderately good reasons to have a base on the Moon, to send human missions to Mars and to the asteroids, and a lot of other things. But putting a station at Sol-Earth L5 is STUPID. It's just as hard to get there as it is to get to Mars or Venus or the asteroid belt but there is NOTHING THERE.
It's people like you who fail to prioritize what we're doing who did Apollo the cheap, fast way instead of the slower but more future-oriented way -- by building the space station as a platform.
As it appears to me, the only reason for putting this human-manned station at Sol-Earth L5 is as a jumping point for the "ANTS." But if that's all it is good for it isn't going to get done.
It's fine to say we should do grand things; I am very glad we went to the Moon and wish we would go back. But there should be a point to the grand things we do. We learned a lot from Apollo but it didn't become the springboard for space colonization some hoped for because the sad truth was, the people paying for it didn't have lofty goals; they saw it as a stunt and when the stunt was done, they didn't see any practical reason to continue it.
The Solar System is full of interesting places and things, some of which could be very useful to us and some of which could teach us a lot. While I'd certainly be in favor of sending probes to the planetary L-points to see what junk has collected there, I can't see the point of building a permanent colony in what is essentially the middle of nowhere.
Did anybody notice the bit about "not launching before 2020, and then only from a human-manned station at a LaGrange point"?
Folks, they are not talking about the earth-moon LaGrange points as the L5 society does, they are talking about the Sun-Earth LaGrange points.
Does anybody else find 2020 a wildly optimistic date for such a venture? After all, it was more than 30 years ago that Clarke and Kubrick gave us 2001 with its lovely vision of a space station in near Earth orbit and only this year are we starting to put together something that looks less like Kubrick's vision than a bunch of tin cans bolted together.
And while putting a permanent station in such a place would be easier than putting one on Mars (no gravity well on the far end), I can't see any damn reason for doing it.
Personally, I think the whole ANT project is driven by its nauseatingly cute acronym.
All right, I know Iain Banks fills his stories with all the angst and aimlessness that would result from having pretty much whatever you want when you want it, but I still have to admit that if Sma's module landed in the back yard and she offered me a job, I'd accept without reading the fine print.
And if they aren't out there, then the first step in our making such a Culture for ourselves won't be cheap fusion power or ion drives, it will be strong AI. Humans need to be freed from the necessity of work; only then can the work we do be fulfilling instead of a constant reminder of our vulnerability.
Solved easy fusion problem might also mean a capability to produce H-bombs that radiate much less and are therefore much more likely to be used in a conflict.
Don't worry, it's the reactor (or more accurately its waste crap) that will radiate more than promised, not any derivative bombs less.
And we do have bombs which radiate less, at least in fallout terms. They are called neutron bombs, and the principal objection to them was that they might be more likely to be used in conflict. They are, unfortunately, smaller and simpler than actual yield-biased H-bombs.
My *real* points were *correct*, and relate to fusion fuel breeding only
Yeppers, no argument from me there. It's just that so few people know anything about nuclear weapons I like to get the details right.
The design estimates you quote were in fact bandied about -- a lot of numbers were bandied about -- but were based on the assumption that reactions would not go to completion, there would be hidden inefficiencies to be discovered, etc. In actual fact the first gun-type bomb at Hiroshima, the first implosion bomb at Trinity, the first fusion boosted fission bomb (Greenhouse Item), the first staged fusion experiment (Greenhouse George), and the first Teller-Ulam staged thermonuclear (Ivy Mike) all achieved very close to their maximum design yields. There were no hidden inefficiencies; our weaponeers had a firm grasp of their craft. All these first-time wepaons were optimized for yield and worked flawlessly.
By comparison, Castle Bravo blew up in their faces, destroyed some testing equipment, and put the observers in serious jeopardy. This certainly hadn't ever happened before, nor AFAIK has it happened since.
Many devices over-yielded, or under-yielded, by more than a factor of 2 in those days. I am fairly sure that Ivy Mike was only predicted to yield 4 or 5 Mt, not 10.5 (I can look it up somewhere, I'm sure).
Mike's yield of 10.4 Mt was right in the middle of its design projection. Yes, as I have pointed out myself, about 80% of the actual energy comes from dirty fissioning of the U238 secondary tamper, but this is accounted for in yield calculations. The original goal of the "Super" project from the early days was to burn 1 cubic meter of deuterium. Mike accomplished exactly that.
As Richard Rhodes points out dryly, though, "if Los Alamos had found a way to burn unlimited quantities of thermonuclear fuel, it had also devised a way to burn unlimited quantities of cheap ordinary uranium."
To be clear: Much more energy came from fast fission of U-238 in both Mike and Bravo, than came from fusion. Most "fusion" bombs get half or more of their energy from fast fission in the tamper. So I'm not sure what:
"achieved exactly its theoretical yield for burning 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium"
actually means. Mike clearly didn't "burn" *most* of the deuterium - never mind all of it - and it didn't get most of it's energy from deuterium *at* *all*.
Mike was designed to fully fuse 1 cubic meter of deuterium. It did so. This would supply a certain amount of neutrons to induce fission in U-238. They did so. This would produce, if it all worked, a yield of about 10 Mt. Which is about what they got.
The bomb that ran over, Castle Bravo Shrimp (dontcha love nuclear physicist humor?), was also designed to yield about 10 Mt but yielded almost 15. The reason for this is that Shrimp's lithium secondary core was enriched to only 40%, and the lithium-7 was discounted. But the Li7 contributed to the yield through a side reaction in which it absorbs 1 neutron and 2 are knocked out, leaving a Li6. This meant more neutrons were available to fission secondary U238 than expected. Since there was a lot more U238 than deuterium in both Mike and Shrimp, more energy was produced by Shrimp since more of the U238 was fissioned.
Even the two "snowball Earth" periods weren't enough to kill all life, it is certainly true.
But even a small blip by geological standards would wipe out our civilization. We would have great trouble dealing with a sudden change in sea level (either way, by expanding of the caps during an ice age or their elimination and subsequent sea level rise). There is evidence that these changes can happen suddenly and unexpectedly in the geological record, which is one reason why people worry about them.
And while it is pretty certain we can't wipe out all life, it is pretty certain that we can wipe ourselves out, possibly taking with us everything we love and care about in our world. The ecosystem always comes back after a major shock, but it seldom looks much the way it did before the shock occurred.
But I *do* know that the first H-bomb (Ivy Mike), which was liquid D2-fueled - the only one of it's kind - achieved *much* higher than predicted yield.
No, Ivy Mike achieved exactly its theoretical yield for burning 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium. It was also pumped with tritium for good luck:-)
The one that ran away was Castle Bravo, the first "dry" H-bomb fuelled by Lithium-6 Deuteride. The Li6 was not pure, and the scientists did not realize that Li7 underwent a side reaction which contributed to the yield. As a result it yielded 14+ Mt, up from 10 Mt predicted.
PS. Why did you think they were out of business? Even www.encyclopaediabritannica.com takes you to that web page...
There was a great deal of noise about the problems they were having in the early 90's, and at one point they did stop making the yearbooks available. I just ASSuMe-d that the process had gone to completion. It is good to know they are still around, though I wonder if the quality is the same. Thanks for the info, I'll check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
A pedophile is one whose primary sexual attraction is to children. This does not mean s/he cannot have sex with adults, only that the most satisfying image possible is that of sex with a child. Both hetero- and homo- sexual variations are possible.
I think you should be able to entertain whatever fantasies you want, but I think I speak for the consensus when I say sex between adults and minors should not be allowed. I don't think the power relationship can be resolved in any productive way. While it might be possible to establish a relationship that even the minor party finds enjoyable and feels is non-coercive, the weight of years and experience will always be there in ways that just don't exist when two adults are thrashing out their differences.
And it is really hard to imagine a world in which this would be different, no matter what the differences in mores or technology. We are born knowing nothing and need a prolonged developmental period to establish our concept of self. Sexual experimentation between children may be a natural part of that process, but I don't think that sex between children and adults is.
I have seen indications that some so-called pedophiles area actually "getting off" on the power imbalance itself, rather than the child-adult thing. That may be an individual quirk, but it's worth paying attention to. Most of us arne't into sex with kids, but everyone understands power. In our culture, it's the universal fetish.
You just wasted a lot of time writing that in response to an old troll.
Not really. Not knowing his history, I still figured on the possibility it was a troll. But I think it is always good to bring a rational thought into such a discourse. After all, if the only responses are "begone troll" and "begone pedophile," and this happens time and again, doesn't this create a potentially inaccurate representation of /. posters? He is, after all, trolling our open-mindedness. Do we want to lose that to deny him his little yuk?
*sigh* live and learn.
Then you should know that there is no general discussion board or its equivalent here. Your topic has not come up for a good reason -- the website operators haven't seen fit to give it a forum.
OTOH you sound sincere (maybe even desperate) enough, so I'll bite.
We are tricked, trapped, harassed, arrested, and seen as dirt by our government, authorities, and most of the people in this country. It reminds me very much of stories I've heard about Nazi Germany.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you here. What you want to do, what you dream of doing, is repellant to most of us and highly illegal. But our Founding Fathers had clear ideas on this which are being ignored. It should not be illegal for you to write your stories, draw your graphics, and prosyletize for your position such as it is. It should IMNSHO be highly illegal for you to actually do anything about your fantasies with another underage human being, but that's just me at this time. Joe Haldeman painted a vivid picture of a society in which homosexuality is normal and "us heterosexuals" were treated about as you and your lot are (in The Forever War), very discomfiting that. The theory of relativity does not just apply to physics.
I always find it astonishing that erotic training is termed "child abuse",
Here you are so close to the line that an electron microscope could not detect the separation. How convenient it must seem to you that this necessary "erotic training" might require your services, eh? While there is a part of me that feels you are right in principle there is a much larger part that feels you are exactly the person I would NOT want any dependent of mine going to for advice. You are right that sex in general is not inherently harmful, but you are wrong in assuming that sex in coercive relationships is not inherently harmful.
I would have an even less hospitable view of you than I do had I not read Pat Califia's amazing writings. She and her comrades in a related sexual minority did come out in public for your cause -- at some cost to themselves -- but even they were reticent about your actual practices. You are on better ground when you demand your right to write and speak and draw and even make highly realistic 3-D graphic simulations. I will defend those rights, well, not to the death (coward alert) but at least until it doesn't seem worth my while to live in this country any more. You reach a point when an honestly corrupt place like Mexico looks positively wonderful by comparison.
I did not choose my sexual orientation, and even though many people say it's a sickness or a disease, it's just as valid as homosexuality, bisexuality, and many other orientations whose members were once persecuted as we are, but are now seen as being normal
While I agree that you did not choose your orientation, I disagree that we have to consider it "just as valid" as any other. There are degrees of validity in all things. Most of us here would, I think, draw the curtain and turn the eye at anything nonlethal and non-crippling between consenting adults; but what about those Victorian fetishists who got off on their own amputations? Similarly, our society has drawn a firm line this side of children. Don't cross it. Not in deed, at least.
As for word and thought and image, those should be free. As they aren't, and you are rightful in your protest. But don't ask for the right to touch our sons and daughters if you want to live very long.
The lemon battery consumes its zinc electrode. You need lemons and metal.
I think you neglect the power of bulk purchasing in nearly all of these estimates.
Let's take one: "Custom motherboard: $25." Exactly what hat do you pull that out of? In single quantities a motherboard like the DC would be $1K+, but in the lots they're having them made I don't see why they would be more than $2.00 a unit. There is a quantity/delivery/price factor in every item you mention which you are ignoring.
Both are the truth. Sega makes a profit, though a small one, on each DC. Sony loses a ton on each PS2, partly because of Rambus and partly because it's just plain more expensive to build. This article explains it in some detail, along with a few pokes at the alleged superiority of the PS2.
Well, since someone brought up 30x90 it's worth mentioning that feral pigs are known to roam that area of New Orleans east. Fortunately 30x90 isn't too far from the water...
If you thought to bring a small boat (even a jet ski would do, or a 12 ft flatboat with small outboard) and launch it from the Paris Rd boat launch, though, you could sail up and stand right at the spot.
Mapquest shows it here.
This sculpture was one of the characters in David Brin's novel Earth.
Well, mebbe. It seems awfully unlikely that the publisher would not have had some VERY NOTICEABLE NOTICES on the package to let the vendors know they were not kiddie books. OTOH now they shrink wrap all of them, so maybe there was some confusion.
Eris must be pleased.
Back in the mid-80's I happened to be walking past the kiddie trade book section at WaldenBooks when something grabbed my attention. I couldn't exactly say why, since all the books were the same size, thickness, and similar color schemes ... but one just wasn't right. I homed in on it ... roses? What's the one with the rose on the spine? It was the first effort of A.N. Roquelaure (known now as Anne Rice), The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which, in case you haven't heard, is in fact a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale but most certainly isn't the Disney version.
Naturally I couldn't leave it there where some practical joker had left it in the potential grasp of prepubescent kiddies, so I swallowed hard and did my upright citizenly duty and bought it :-)
Both PS/1 and PS/2 are general purpose computers, albeit with less open architectures than a PC. Everything they render is most certainly not pre-built into them, although the video hardware has a lot of iron streamlined for turning 3D abstractions into 2D views which would be wasted if you're doing something else.
The physics in these games is always coded by the game programmer in the general-purpose CPU, because it's different for every game. While we may laugh at these consoles being used to control military hardware, it's no sillier than many of the impromptu hardware hacks which are performed during any war -- especially if you have a couple of talented hacker types who are familiar with the hardware and software environment.
While I think the whole embargo is silly, it seems possible that there is some specific project for which the Iraqis may have adapted this cheap and importable hardware. I am sure I've read of Linux being booted on the Dreamcast and think I remember seeing that it had been ported to PS/1; this indicates that the specs are out there for anyone who wants to use these as general purpose computing engines.
Or you could build a platform in Low Earth Orbit, move provisions to it, set up a much more efficient orbital transfer system with ships designed for deep space, maybe have another smaller platform in lunar orbit, and set up what amounts to regular service between the two planets. Very expensive, especially at first, but ultimately much cheaper per pound if your goal is to ferry tonnage onto lunar soil in order to build a base.
Colonization wasn't the game, obviously. Impressing the rooshians was. And once we impressed the rooshians as cheaply as possible we picked up our toys and came home.
I guess we can poke a little blame JFK's way for setting such a ludicrous timetable, but then he too was driven by the cold war. We could have had colonization as seen in the movie 2001 by now, but we didn't go for it. And that's the rest of the story.
Don't you mean the accounting department?
Actually, we don't have them yet, but while we've pretty much given up on wiping out war or poverty or setting up a human presence in deep space, we think we might have the robotic ants by, oh, 2020 or so.
No, there are plenty of good reasons to have a space station in LEO, even some moderately good reasons to have a base on the Moon, to send human missions to Mars and to the asteroids, and a lot of other things. But putting a station at Sol-Earth L5 is STUPID. It's just as hard to get there as it is to get to Mars or Venus or the asteroid belt but there is NOTHING THERE.
It's people like you who fail to prioritize what we're doing who did Apollo the cheap, fast way instead of the slower but more future-oriented way -- by building the space station as a platform.
As it appears to me, the only reason for putting this human-manned station at Sol-Earth L5 is as a jumping point for the "ANTS." But if that's all it is good for it isn't going to get done.
It's fine to say we should do grand things; I am very glad we went to the Moon and wish we would go back. But there should be a point to the grand things we do. We learned a lot from Apollo but it didn't become the springboard for space colonization some hoped for because the sad truth was, the people paying for it didn't have lofty goals; they saw it as a stunt and when the stunt was done, they didn't see any practical reason to continue it.
The Solar System is full of interesting places and things, some of which could be very useful to us and some of which could teach us a lot. While I'd certainly be in favor of sending probes to the planetary L-points to see what junk has collected there, I can't see the point of building a permanent colony in what is essentially the middle of nowhere.
Folks, they are not talking about the earth-moon LaGrange points as the L5 society does, they are talking about the Sun-Earth LaGrange points.
Does anybody else find 2020 a wildly optimistic date for such a venture? After all, it was more than 30 years ago that Clarke and Kubrick gave us 2001 with its lovely vision of a space station in near Earth orbit and only this year are we starting to put together something that looks less like Kubrick's vision than a bunch of tin cans bolted together.
And while putting a permanent station in such a place would be easier than putting one on Mars (no gravity well on the far end), I can't see any damn reason for doing it.
Personally, I think the whole ANT project is driven by its nauseatingly cute acronym.
And if they aren't out there, then the first step in our making such a Culture for ourselves won't be cheap fusion power or ion drives, it will be strong AI. Humans need to be freed from the necessity of work; only then can the work we do be fulfilling instead of a constant reminder of our vulnerability.
Maybe by 2100...maybe...
Don't worry, it's the reactor (or more accurately its waste crap) that will radiate more than promised, not any derivative bombs less.
And we do have bombs which radiate less, at least in fallout terms. They are called neutron bombs, and the principal objection to them was that they might be more likely to be used in conflict. They are, unfortunately, smaller and simpler than actual yield-biased H-bombs.
Yeppers, no argument from me there. It's just that so few people know anything about nuclear weapons I like to get the details right.
The design estimates you quote were in fact bandied about -- a lot of numbers were bandied about -- but were based on the assumption that reactions would not go to completion, there would be hidden inefficiencies to be discovered, etc. In actual fact the first gun-type bomb at Hiroshima, the first implosion bomb at Trinity, the first fusion boosted fission bomb (Greenhouse Item), the first staged fusion experiment (Greenhouse George), and the first Teller-Ulam staged thermonuclear (Ivy Mike) all achieved very close to their maximum design yields. There were no hidden inefficiencies; our weaponeers had a firm grasp of their craft. All these first-time wepaons were optimized for yield and worked flawlessly.
By comparison, Castle Bravo blew up in their faces, destroyed some testing equipment, and put the observers in serious jeopardy. This certainly hadn't ever happened before, nor AFAIK has it happened since.
(And yes, my numbers come from Rhodes.)
Mike's yield of 10.4 Mt was right in the middle of its design projection. Yes, as I have pointed out myself, about 80% of the actual energy comes from dirty fissioning of the U238 secondary tamper, but this is accounted for in yield calculations. The original goal of the "Super" project from the early days was to burn 1 cubic meter of deuterium. Mike accomplished exactly that.
As Richard Rhodes points out dryly, though, "if Los Alamos had found a way to burn unlimited quantities of thermonuclear fuel, it had also devised a way to burn unlimited quantities of cheap ordinary uranium."
To be clear: Much more energy came from fast fission of U-238 in both Mike and Bravo, than came from fusion. Most "fusion" bombs get half or more of their energy from fast fission in the tamper. So I'm not sure what:
"achieved exactly its theoretical yield for burning 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium"
actually means. Mike clearly didn't "burn" *most* of the deuterium - never mind all of it - and it didn't get most of it's energy from deuterium *at* *all*.
Mike was designed to fully fuse 1 cubic meter of deuterium. It did so. This would supply a certain amount of neutrons to induce fission in U-238. They did so. This would produce, if it all worked, a yield of about 10 Mt. Which is about what they got.
The bomb that ran over, Castle Bravo Shrimp (dontcha love nuclear physicist humor?), was also designed to yield about 10 Mt but yielded almost 15. The reason for this is that Shrimp's lithium secondary core was enriched to only 40%, and the lithium-7 was discounted. But the Li7 contributed to the yield through a side reaction in which it absorbs 1 neutron and 2 are knocked out, leaving a Li6. This meant more neutrons were available to fission secondary U238 than expected. Since there was a lot more U238 than deuterium in both Mike and Shrimp, more energy was produced by Shrimp since more of the U238 was fissioned.
Is that clear enough?
But even a small blip by geological standards would wipe out our civilization. We would have great trouble dealing with a sudden change in sea level (either way, by expanding of the caps during an ice age or their elimination and subsequent sea level rise). There is evidence that these changes can happen suddenly and unexpectedly in the geological record, which is one reason why people worry about them.
And while it is pretty certain we can't wipe out all life, it is pretty certain that we can wipe ourselves out, possibly taking with us everything we love and care about in our world. The ecosystem always comes back after a major shock, but it seldom looks much the way it did before the shock occurred.
No, Ivy Mike achieved exactly its theoretical yield for burning 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium. It was also pumped with tritium for good luck :-)
The one that ran away was Castle Bravo, the first "dry" H-bomb fuelled by Lithium-6 Deuteride. The Li6 was not pure, and the scientists did not realize that Li7 underwent a side reaction which contributed to the yield. As a result it yielded 14+ Mt, up from 10 Mt predicted.
There was a great deal of noise about the problems they were having in the early 90's, and at one point they did stop making the yearbooks available. I just ASSuMe-d that the process had gone to completion. It is good to know they are still around, though I wonder if the quality is the same. Thanks for the info, I'll check it out.