Hubble had 6 gyroscopes originally, and all 6 were replaced during the last servicing, but two of those had already failed. Those aren't coming back. (6-2=4. Total.)
3 of the 4 remaining functional gyroscopes were actually in use, as required for optimal performance, with one left powered down as a backup in case one of the remaining three failed. Like hard drives, the chance of failure is much greater when they're active. (4=3 active + 1 backup)
One of the active gyroscopes failed (3-1=2), so they tried to power up the backup, but that failed as well (2+0=2)
One of the biggest advantages that an orbital telescope can provide (beyond avoiding atmospheric distortion) is a stationary platform for targetting distant objects and long exposures. Any telescope on Earth is rotating at a constant rate of 1 revolution per day, as well as being plagued by the many vibrations traveling through the Earth itself. You can build it on a moving platform so that servos keep it focused on a specific point in the sky, at least while that point is above the horizon, but then you introduce all the vibrations of the tracking mechanism, which makes it impossible to take clear images of fine detail. Rather like trying to use a high-power telescope while holding it in your hands - all you'll ever be able to see is a blur.
An orbital telescope though stays focused where you point it. It orbits the planet, but the parallax from that is irrelevant over long interstellar distances, and it only takes a little help from vibration-damped precision gyroscopes to keep gravitational fluctuations, solar wind, etc. from causing it to start spinning.
And that's why you should never spend our lunch break reading in a heavily shielded bank vault. The universe is always on the look out for new and exciting ways to mess with you!
I always wondered though - did the guy really not have a second pair of glasses? Or know where the optometrist was located to find another pair that was at least adequate enough? I suppose really the over-dramatic response was likely shock as the reality of the situation finally found a chink in his carefully constructed emotional armor. Or just dramatic license, but one must never say such things.
Perhaps not biology so much, but chemistry, engineering, physics - any field that does a lot of simulation or other computational work will probably be using 'NIX in the back rooms. Perhaps not on their desktops, but Windows starts showing its weaknesses (and getting expensive) when you're running it on hundreds or thousands of compute nodes.
It's also worth noting that STEM has traditionally been a stronghold of UNIX and Linux - most important stuff, both legacy and cutting-edge, considers 'NIX to the primary target platform, with Windows usually having a ported version. If Chromebooks embrace their Linux inheritance, they will get native compatibility with that ecosystem and its vast practical software library. Coupled with being able to run the vast Android app ecosystem for popular "light" software? That might actually be a potent combination.
Mars would require refueling on the surface to return to Earth, but the Moon has a substantially shallower gravity well, and you don't need to build up much additional speed to reach Earth in a timely fashion (in fact, I want to say that getting back to Earth actually takes less than full lunar escape velocity).
As a rough estimate, Mars has under 1/2 the escape velocity (1/4 the energy) as Earth. And the Moon has under 1/2 the escape velocity of Mars. (Actual values: Earth = 11.2km/s, Mars=5.03km/s, Moon=2.38km/s)
That was the plan for last year's BFS design. It completely refuels in a highly elliptical Earth orbit, then goes to the moon, lands, takes off, and returns to Earth with a "substantial payload" using that one tank. I think it was with a much lower payload than just to Earth orbit, but even if it's ten or twenty tons instead of a hundred, that's still a lot of supplies and equipment that you can deliver with each landing.
Water and rock, for starters. Water for synthesizing fuel, rather than having to haul it up from Earth, and rock for radiation shielding for low-acceleration orbital structures.
(Shielding quality is almost entirely based on mass, with only very minor fluctuation based on density. And in general, higher density shielding like lead is actually less desirable in space due to the more dangerous radioactive particle cascades created when atoms are shattered by cosmic ray collisions.)
There should be most other elements present on Earth as well - though we'll have to wait and see if any are available in concentrations worth mining for. The moon was tectonically active for a long time, but I'm not altogether sure how much of a role water pays in the concentration of surface ores, nor what the ground-water system looks like on the moon. It probably won't be as easily mined as (eventually) from asteroids - but it has the advantage of being far more approachable with Earth-side mining technologies designed for operating under gravity, and we'd probably want to do a lot of tunneling anyway to create shielded habitats, so we may as well follow along ore veins while doing so.
Especially since it's likely to be the more common bulk-construction and consumption elements - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, iron, aluminum, etc. that are going to be the most valuable to mine in space - something like gold is so expensive to begin with that launching it into orbit doesn't increase its cost much. Similarly it'll probably be a long time before it makes sense to create microchips or most other "high technology" in orbit - it'll be the comparatively low-tech bulk construction that will benefit most.
"Optimal" means the best possible - *not* the best we've tried. The optimal form of capitalism has never been tried, is generally opposed by capitalists, and may not be possible.
Meanwhile, historically we've really only tried four basic forms of economies - capitalism, state-owned capitalism (often mis-labeled communism, which it bears only the most superficial resemblance to), commune-scale communism, and gift economies. The last two of which were probably the basis of human exchange for most of our existence, but seemingly have problems scaling much beyond the village size.
Capitalism has shown itself to be a remarkably efficient way to allocate resources. It's also shown itself, time and again, to be very prone to becoming an extremely unfair method of allocating wealth. Mainly because it tends to give capitalists, whose primary contribution is generally inherited wealth, outsized economic and political power - which they immediately abuse to tilt the playing field further in their favor, creating a multi-generational concentration of wealth into the hands of the already wealthy.
Bottom line - it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether you reach a fascist state by having the political machine take over the economy, or having the economic powers grow to such a point that they take over the government - either way you have a small body of elites controlling both the government and the economy, and abusing the power of both as they see fit.
Capitalism appears to have much of value to offer, but we still need to develop a counter-point social technology to keep it's problems in check.
I feel your pain - while we can't terraform the Moon, we sill probably have thriving cities there eventually. But figure, fuel is going to be most of the mass of any major interplanetary vehicle, and any fuel we make on the Moon is fuel we don't need to launch from Earth, making our early steps into the solar system considerably cheaper.
Meanwhile, launching supplies from Earth (or asteroids) is only going to keep getting cheaper for the foreseeable future - it won't be long in the grand scheme of things before we can replace all that lunar water for far less than the money we originally saved by turning it into fuel. And in the meantime, there will be economically viable water-mines on the moon, providing easy access to all the water a developing lunar colony could want. Not a bad trade-off, I think.
To be fair, neither does landing on the moon. Orbital refueling is already required for leaving Earth orbit, it already has landing legs, and the Moon's gravity well is shallow enough that the BFS probably wouldn't be coming in much faster than after aerobraking through the thin Martian atmosphere.
The only possible necessary addition would be constructing a landing pad on the Moon, if a sufficiently flat and smooth surface can't be found to skip that phase. It'd even give them a chance to practice landing the BFS in a vacuum on imperfect terrain, which would be very useful for Mars, under a dramatically lower surface gravity that would give them more time to recover from any problems.
> If there is an engineering deficiency that will be fatal to astronauts, it won't make a difference whether they die on Mars or the Moon. It takes roughly 3 days to get from Earth to the Moon.
Ecological collapse springs to mind. Mars is too far away to live on fresh rations, water, oxygen, etc. shipped from Earth - that's all going to have to be recycled in place, via some combination of engineering and ecology. If that system breaks down, as it probably will at some point, being only the third time we've attempted it, and the first time we've done it off Earth, then you can ship more supplies to the Moon, or evacuate. If the same thing happens on Mars, they're dead - help is months away, and even if they have a ship standing by and enough fuel to get to Earth, the odds of an orbital alignment that takes less than several months for a return trip are slim.
Similarly, most moderate health crises requiring Earth-bound facilities to treat can be delayed three days to get back from the Moon, probably even 6+ if there's not a ship standing by on the Moon. But on Mars that becomes tragic PR.
> Returning Americans back to the Moon is a huge waste of time (and money)
I must disagree. The Moon is *right there* - the long-term orbital support services it can offer in terms of fuel, raw materials, industrial potential, etc. will all benefit Earth directly. Essentially it's one giant rocky asteroid already captured in Earth orbit and ripe for mining and development. Especially important since its mere existence makes it difficult to capture other asteroids into long-term stable Earth orbits. And living in such a deep gravity well, we need all the help we can get.
Mars is the one that will be a "waste" of money - it has much better long-term potential to become a fully self-sufficient colony, and likely a supply depot for developing the asteroid belt and beyond, but it has basically nothing to offer Earth except science. And that science will be best served if we wait to go there in person until we're ready to seriously explore its potential ecosystem without contaminating it with our early flailing around trying to survive.
Because they're just future dirt that hasn't been eaten yet? The original residents almost certainly aren't using them anymore. Nobody who loved or honored them is around to care anymore. So what's the objection?
Apparently it's no longer good enough that riding an airplane is the best way to catch a respiratory disease. Now they help you share eye infections as well!
I agree. I was replying to the AC who seemed to be implying that the cost of equipment for Polo was a problem with the "open source" definition of traditional sports.
Is there even any particular reason it would need to be fertile? There's an awful lot of chemovore bacteria living deep inside rocks after all, that might not care where the meteor buried itself so long as the ambient temperature was tolerable and the atmosphere non-toxic enough to allow them to migrate to the local rocks. And once you have life of some sort, evolution will bring it to the surface eventually if it's even remotely feasible - there's all that space and energy-gradient available with no competition.
If you've paid any attention to the religious involvement in the anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights movements in the U.S, then you know "government keeping their nose out of things" is categorically NOT what they're after.
I'm not saying *all* churches have the problem - plenty of the moderate ones seem to be decent people minding their own business. But there's plenty of far more aggressive ones as well. Hate-mongering sells.
>Here in the US, parties don't control representatives. No, but the do *select* the representatives (a bit of Primary theater notwithstanding), and are controlled by oligarchs. So the candidates that make it to the election are pre-selected to be amenable to obeying the oligarchs.
I'm not talking about Sanders himself so much as the grass-roots movement around him that's displacing some of the bought-and-paid-for career politicians with upstarts that (might) be less so.
As for the alliance between churches and the oligarchs - that's something that was "formally" established in the... early 1900s I believe it was, when a group of wealthy businessman proposed an alliance with several prominent church leaders to help advance each others agendas as both were rapidly losing political ground. The alliance could then back candidates who backed both the businessman's love of limited responsibility and regulations, and the churchs' distaste for science education, abortions, gay rights, and anything else they could use to get their flocks riled up. The overwhelming success caused the informal alliance to spread rapidly.
Correction - when he lets go he *believes* it is deserved Part of his statement referenced times when, in retrospect, it was not deserved. And then there's the fact that phrases like "Go kill yourself" are *never* deserved, especially in a professional setting, unless you're maybe talking to a Nazi or child rapist or something.
The guy is basically the Linux benevolent dictator for life - his word is law, gratuitous over-the-top rudeness is uncalled for.
Even survival is secondary to the true primary motivation - effective reproduction. After all, biology is programmed by hundreds of millions of years of reproductive "winners" - *everything* else is secondary. As can be seen in many species where reproduction is dangerous if not outright fatal.
Though I should say, the constitution test part sounds good to me - if you're going to participate in government you should at least know how it works in theory. Perhaps coupled with tests of literacy, numeracy, and logic, to show that you are capable of effectively acquiring and applying new knowledge.
I'd be tempted to throw basic statistical concepts in there as well, considering how much politicians like to intentionally misinterpret them - but that would require seriously adjusting our mathematical education track (seriously - why aren't statistics taught as part of the normal high-school curriculum? Way more broadly useful than the usual pre-calculus track)
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Hubble had 6 gyroscopes originally, and all 6 were replaced during the last servicing, but two of those had already failed. Those aren't coming back. (6-2=4. Total.)
3 of the 4 remaining functional gyroscopes were actually in use, as required for optimal performance, with one left powered down as a backup in case one of the remaining three failed. Like hard drives, the chance of failure is much greater when they're active. (4=3 active + 1 backup)
One of the active gyroscopes failed (3-1=2), so they tried to power up the backup, but that failed as well (2+0=2)
One of the biggest advantages that an orbital telescope can provide (beyond avoiding atmospheric distortion) is a stationary platform for targetting distant objects and long exposures. Any telescope on Earth is rotating at a constant rate of 1 revolution per day, as well as being plagued by the many vibrations traveling through the Earth itself. You can build it on a moving platform so that servos keep it focused on a specific point in the sky, at least while that point is above the horizon, but then you introduce all the vibrations of the tracking mechanism, which makes it impossible to take clear images of fine detail. Rather like trying to use a high-power telescope while holding it in your hands - all you'll ever be able to see is a blur.
An orbital telescope though stays focused where you point it. It orbits the planet, but the parallax from that is irrelevant over long interstellar distances, and it only takes a little help from vibration-damped precision gyroscopes to keep gravitational fluctuations, solar wind, etc. from causing it to start spinning.
And that's why you should never spend our lunch break reading in a heavily shielded bank vault. The universe is always on the look out for new and exciting ways to mess with you!
I always wondered though - did the guy really not have a second pair of glasses? Or know where the optometrist was located to find another pair that was at least adequate enough? I suppose really the over-dramatic response was likely shock as the reality of the situation finally found a chink in his carefully constructed emotional armor. Or just dramatic license, but one must never say such things.
Perhaps not biology so much, but chemistry, engineering, physics - any field that does a lot of simulation or other computational work will probably be using 'NIX in the back rooms. Perhaps not on their desktops, but Windows starts showing its weaknesses (and getting expensive) when you're running it on hundreds or thousands of compute nodes.
It's also worth noting that STEM has traditionally been a stronghold of UNIX and Linux - most important stuff, both legacy and cutting-edge, considers 'NIX to the primary target platform, with Windows usually having a ported version. If Chromebooks embrace their Linux inheritance, they will get native compatibility with that ecosystem and its vast practical software library. Coupled with being able to run the vast Android app ecosystem for popular "light" software? That might actually be a potent combination.
Mars would require refueling on the surface to return to Earth, but the Moon has a substantially shallower gravity well, and you don't need to build up much additional speed to reach Earth in a timely fashion (in fact, I want to say that getting back to Earth actually takes less than full lunar escape velocity).
As a rough estimate, Mars has under 1/2 the escape velocity (1/4 the energy) as Earth. And the Moon has under 1/2 the escape velocity of Mars. (Actual values: Earth = 11.2km/s, Mars=5.03km/s, Moon=2.38km/s)
That was the plan for last year's BFS design. It completely refuels in a highly elliptical Earth orbit, then goes to the moon, lands, takes off, and returns to Earth with a "substantial payload" using that one tank. I think it was with a much lower payload than just to Earth orbit, but even if it's ten or twenty tons instead of a hundred, that's still a lot of supplies and equipment that you can deliver with each landing.
Water and rock, for starters. Water for synthesizing fuel, rather than having to haul it up from Earth, and rock for radiation shielding for low-acceleration orbital structures.
(Shielding quality is almost entirely based on mass, with only very minor fluctuation based on density. And in general, higher density shielding like lead is actually less desirable in space due to the more dangerous radioactive particle cascades created when atoms are shattered by cosmic ray collisions.)
There should be most other elements present on Earth as well - though we'll have to wait and see if any are available in concentrations worth mining for. The moon was tectonically active for a long time, but I'm not altogether sure how much of a role water pays in the concentration of surface ores, nor what the ground-water system looks like on the moon. It probably won't be as easily mined as (eventually) from asteroids - but it has the advantage of being far more approachable with Earth-side mining technologies designed for operating under gravity, and we'd probably want to do a lot of tunneling anyway to create shielded habitats, so we may as well follow along ore veins while doing so.
Especially since it's likely to be the more common bulk-construction and consumption elements - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, iron, aluminum, etc. that are going to be the most valuable to mine in space - something like gold is so expensive to begin with that launching it into orbit doesn't increase its cost much. Similarly it'll probably be a long time before it makes sense to create microchips or most other "high technology" in orbit - it'll be the comparatively low-tech bulk construction that will benefit most.
"Optimal" means the best possible - *not* the best we've tried. The optimal form of capitalism has never been tried, is generally opposed by capitalists, and may not be possible.
Meanwhile, historically we've really only tried four basic forms of economies - capitalism, state-owned capitalism (often mis-labeled communism, which it bears only the most superficial resemblance to), commune-scale communism, and gift economies. The last two of which were probably the basis of human exchange for most of our existence, but seemingly have problems scaling much beyond the village size.
Capitalism has shown itself to be a remarkably efficient way to allocate resources. It's also shown itself, time and again, to be very prone to becoming an extremely unfair method of allocating wealth. Mainly because it tends to give capitalists, whose primary contribution is generally inherited wealth, outsized economic and political power - which they immediately abuse to tilt the playing field further in their favor, creating a multi-generational concentration of wealth into the hands of the already wealthy.
Bottom line - it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether you reach a fascist state by having the political machine take over the economy, or having the economic powers grow to such a point that they take over the government - either way you have a small body of elites controlling both the government and the economy, and abusing the power of both as they see fit.
Capitalism appears to have much of value to offer, but we still need to develop a counter-point social technology to keep it's problems in check.
I feel your pain - while we can't terraform the Moon, we sill probably have thriving cities there eventually. But figure, fuel is going to be most of the mass of any major interplanetary vehicle, and any fuel we make on the Moon is fuel we don't need to launch from Earth, making our early steps into the solar system considerably cheaper.
Meanwhile, launching supplies from Earth (or asteroids) is only going to keep getting cheaper for the foreseeable future - it won't be long in the grand scheme of things before we can replace all that lunar water for far less than the money we originally saved by turning it into fuel. And in the meantime, there will be economically viable water-mines on the moon, providing easy access to all the water a developing lunar colony could want. Not a bad trade-off, I think.
To be fair, neither does landing on the moon. Orbital refueling is already required for leaving Earth orbit, it already has landing legs, and the Moon's gravity well is shallow enough that the BFS probably wouldn't be coming in much faster than after aerobraking through the thin Martian atmosphere.
The only possible necessary addition would be constructing a landing pad on the Moon, if a sufficiently flat and smooth surface can't be found to skip that phase. It'd even give them a chance to practice landing the BFS in a vacuum on imperfect terrain, which would be very useful for Mars, under a dramatically lower surface gravity that would give them more time to recover from any problems.
> If there is an engineering deficiency that will be fatal to astronauts, it won't make a difference whether they die on Mars or the Moon. It takes roughly 3 days to get from Earth to the Moon.
Ecological collapse springs to mind. Mars is too far away to live on fresh rations, water, oxygen, etc. shipped from Earth - that's all going to have to be recycled in place, via some combination of engineering and ecology. If that system breaks down, as it probably will at some point, being only the third time we've attempted it, and the first time we've done it off Earth, then you can ship more supplies to the Moon, or evacuate. If the same thing happens on Mars, they're dead - help is months away, and even if they have a ship standing by and enough fuel to get to Earth, the odds of an orbital alignment that takes less than several months for a return trip are slim.
Similarly, most moderate health crises requiring Earth-bound facilities to treat can be delayed three days to get back from the Moon, probably even 6+ if there's not a ship standing by on the Moon. But on Mars that becomes tragic PR.
> Returning Americans back to the Moon is a huge waste of time (and money)
I must disagree. The Moon is *right there* - the long-term orbital support services it can offer in terms of fuel, raw materials, industrial potential, etc. will all benefit Earth directly. Essentially it's one giant rocky asteroid already captured in Earth orbit and ripe for mining and development. Especially important since its mere existence makes it difficult to capture other asteroids into long-term stable Earth orbits. And living in such a deep gravity well, we need all the help we can get.
Mars is the one that will be a "waste" of money - it has much better long-term potential to become a fully self-sufficient colony, and likely a supply depot for developing the asteroid belt and beyond, but it has basically nothing to offer Earth except science. And that science will be best served if we wait to go there in person until we're ready to seriously explore its potential ecosystem without contaminating it with our early flailing around trying to survive.
>What happened to simply choosing the best candidate for the job instead of meeting quotas?
We tried that - half the companies continued hiring all men instead. Or do you really think all the best qualified candidates just happen to be men?
Because they're just future dirt that hasn't been eaten yet? The original residents almost certainly aren't using them anymore. Nobody who loved or honored them is around to care anymore. So what's the objection?
Apparently it's no longer good enough that riding an airplane is the best way to catch a respiratory disease. Now they help you share eye infections as well!
Exactly.
I agree. I was replying to the AC who seemed to be implying that the cost of equipment for Polo was a problem with the "open source" definition of traditional sports.
What's the problem? Sure, you need to first have a horse, a field, and some equipment, but when you have those the game itself is free.
Try running Linux for free - you still need to already have a computer.
No, the funniest thing is that anyone ever managed to turn playing silly games of any kind into a profession.
Is there even any particular reason it would need to be fertile? There's an awful lot of chemovore bacteria living deep inside rocks after all, that might not care where the meteor buried itself so long as the ambient temperature was tolerable and the atmosphere non-toxic enough to allow them to migrate to the local rocks. And once you have life of some sort, evolution will bring it to the surface eventually if it's even remotely feasible - there's all that space and energy-gradient available with no competition.
If you've paid any attention to the religious involvement in the anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights movements in the U.S, then you know "government keeping their nose out of things" is categorically NOT what they're after.
I'm not saying *all* churches have the problem - plenty of the moderate ones seem to be decent people minding their own business. But there's plenty of far more aggressive ones as well. Hate-mongering sells.
>Here in the US, parties don't control representatives.
No, but the do *select* the representatives (a bit of Primary theater notwithstanding), and are controlled by oligarchs. So the candidates that make it to the election are pre-selected to be amenable to obeying the oligarchs.
I'm not talking about Sanders himself so much as the grass-roots movement around him that's displacing some of the bought-and-paid-for career politicians with upstarts that (might) be less so.
As for the alliance between churches and the oligarchs - that's something that was "formally" established in the... early 1900s I believe it was, when a group of wealthy businessman proposed an alliance with several prominent church leaders to help advance each others agendas as both were rapidly losing political ground. The alliance could then back candidates who backed both the businessman's love of limited responsibility and regulations, and the churchs' distaste for science education, abortions, gay rights, and anything else they could use to get their flocks riled up. The overwhelming success caused the informal alliance to spread rapidly.
Correction - when he lets go he *believes* it is deserved
Part of his statement referenced times when, in retrospect, it was not deserved. And then there's the fact that phrases like "Go kill yourself" are *never* deserved, especially in a professional setting, unless you're maybe talking to a Nazi or child rapist or something.
The guy is basically the Linux benevolent dictator for life - his word is law, gratuitous over-the-top rudeness is uncalled for.
Even survival is secondary to the true primary motivation - effective reproduction. After all, biology is programmed by hundreds of millions of years of reproductive "winners" - *everything* else is secondary. As can be seen in many species where reproduction is dangerous if not outright fatal.
Though I should say, the constitution test part sounds good to me - if you're going to participate in government you should at least know how it works in theory. Perhaps coupled with tests of literacy, numeracy, and logic, to show that you are capable of effectively acquiring and applying new knowledge.
I'd be tempted to throw basic statistical concepts in there as well, considering how much politicians like to intentionally misinterpret them - but that would require seriously adjusting our mathematical education track (seriously - why aren't statistics taught as part of the normal high-school curriculum? Way more broadly useful than the usual pre-calculus track)