The benefit of nuclear is that it doesn't care if you haven't seen the sun for two months because of a regularly scheduled global dust storm. Which would potentially be a problem for orbital power as well.
Orbital solar is a nice idea, but nobody has figured out how to get the power down to the surface yet. We've done experiments that have managed fairly efficient wireless power transmission over a few tens of miles, but to get from a "stationary" satellite to the surface of Mars is 12,693 miles - we need to get three orders of magnitude improvement in power transmission range for that to be useful. On the plus side - an orbital death ray would likely be quite handy for melting roads, landing pads, etc. into the Martian surface.
Meanwhile, nuclear power would leave them dependent on Earth for power for the foreseeable future - but that's going to be true regardless. And nuclear fuel is incredibly safe and easy to transport - it's insanely energy dense, chemically stable, and not appreciably radioactive below critical mass.
Indeed. Where reactors might be a boon though (outside of space probes, rovers, etc) is near the poles, where surface ice is plentiful, but sunlight may be far more intermittent. They'd also be quite handy as a secondary power supply during heavy dust storms.
Really though, it sounds like these are designed for research probes, which makes a lot more sense. 3kW is barely enough to be useful for a human outpost, but is quite a bit for a probe or rover. And I would guess the cost/watt is quite favorable to radiothermal generators... This: 3 kW / 750kg = 4W/kg
Nasa Mars 2020 Rover radiothermal generator: 110 W / 45kg= 2.5W/kg
Hmm, honestly a much smaller improvement than I was expecting. Perhaps the working life is considerably longer? With a such a small improvement I'm hoping this is a small proof-of-concept reactor, and not just a pork-funded dead end.
So what? I mean, it makes the return flight for passengers a bit more expensive, though still nothing compared to the cost of getting them there in the first place. (crap efficiency on a much lower-cost flight = still cheap)
Meanwhile most everything a moon base is producing (fuel, water, air, etc) will be for use in space, and most will never get closer to Earth than lunar orbit. So the real question is, how does the absolute increase in annual passenger costs to Earth compare to the absolute reduction in annual launch costs required for additional supplies from Earth?
That would be true of the radiothermal devices often used in many satellites and rovers, which use the heat from the decay of fairly radioactive elements to generate electricity. But this is a fission reactor, not a radiothermal generator.
The thing with fission fuel is, generally speaking, it's not particularly radioactive. You could eat it, and the heavy metal poisoning would kill you before the radiation did. U-235 for example has a half-life of 703.8 million years (longer=less radioactive) - common carbon and potassium isotopes are far more radioactive. It's the stuff with half-lives in the days to decades range that's really dangerous. Which does include a lot of the fission byproducts (aka high-level nuclear waste), but a fresh reactor, or replacement fuel rods, won't contain much if any of those.
The only real radiation risk with nuclear fuel in a launching accident is that it *doesn't* blow up, but instead lands in one piece someplace out of the way where it doesn't get discovered, with the fuel all mashed together into a critical mass that goes on fissioning unsupervised, bleeding nuclear waste into the environment for decades. But that's *extremely* unlikely.
Only, you really don't have wind power. Due to the much lower atmospheric pressure (0.6%), a 400mph Martian gale-force wind will hit you with all the force of a very light (3mph) breeze here on Earth. So there just isn't really much power to be extracted.
On the up side, that means that something like an inflatable greenhouse will have no problem withstanding the force of even the worst Martian storms. On the down side, sandblasting is still a problem. The wind might not have any force behind it, but the dust it's carrying is still moving at hundreds of miles per hour, and each grain will do every bit as much damage as it would here on Earth.
Back on the upside, actual sandblasting problems have been far less than expected - presumably either the larger, more damaging grains of sand don't float well on the low-pressure winds, or most everything that does float has long since been worn smooth so that it's not nearly as abrasive. Might still call for a special abrasion-resistant coating on that inflatable greenhouse though.
There was a time when that was a valid position - but the predictions made 30,50,80 years ago have been proven correct well within their error bars. So what now? At what point do we stop saying "okay, you've been right so far, but there's no evidence that you'll continue to be right"? There's no way to prove with 100% certainty that predictions made today will be accurate except to wait and see. But the science has made accurate predictions so far, and the opposition is just people saying "I don't believe it". All the "unsettled science " is in the area of hammering out the exact details - narrowing the error bars so we have a better idea of exactly what we'll be facing, beyond "major problem" - the dominant forces and trends are all behaving as predicted.
The only area for doubt is whether some as-yet undiscovered side effect might re-stabilize things - but there's no evidence to suggest such a thing exists, so gambling the fate of our civilization on finding one would have to be done entirely on blind faith.
So what? The existence of freeloaders is irrelevant when they impose no marginal cost on the system, as is the case with digital goods.
In that case, they're only relevant at all if they *would* pay for things if they couldn't get them for free. And even then, eliminating them is only good for business if the resulting increase in sales is greater than the decrease in sales due to also eliminating the people that would have borrowed a copy for a while and then eventually bought their own (or gone on to buy later content). I seem to recall that there's quite a bit of evidence in the music world that the net effect of piracy is actually to increase sales.
Well, I'm certain an awful lot of the people waiting for someone else to hack it are eager for the pirated games. Not so certain about the people actually trying to hack the system. I suspect they're in it mostly for the challenge / hacker cred. Possibly also for freeing up a whole bunch of hardware for whatever use its owner's want.
Heck, I'm sure there's plenty of people out there like me that want a hacked console so they can store their entire library on a single convenient always-attached drive instead of changing discs/cartridges all the Fing time. The same way plenty of people rip their music and video libraries for use on their phones.
Of course, once the data is in a conveniently shareable format, well... the fact that a person can be simultaneously generous and greedy with their digital collecting makes widespread sharing inevitable. A fact that many people have argued makes the current illegality of the practice morally repugnant.
More importantly, it keeps the revenue flowing with basically no additional expenditure of effort or money by the console manufacturer. License fees are all pure profit.
Uhm, that *is* piracy in it's purest commercial form (with a bit of physical damage to the customer's hardware thrown in) . Going right back to the birth of the term in regards to Hollywood as a pirate distributor of East-coast media.
That's why you do the calculations in terms of the probability of NOT getting pregnant instead. Not getting pregnant all year requires not getting pregnant for twelve months in a row, so you avoid all the potential interactions between multiple pregnancies.
Just doing simple probabilities - a 20% chance of not getting pregnant within a year translates to an 88% chance of not getting pregnant every month in that year (.88^12 ~=.20) Therefore, the average woman has only a 12% chance of getting pregnant within any given month.
>we are not actually wild animals and have empathy, love and altruism...
Actually, all of those things are commonly observed in wild animals as well. Humans are extremely smart, but are otherwise basically tool-using animals in every respect.
Actually, I believe the statistics are 80% chance of pregnancy per year for a sexually active woman who uses no protection. Which would be about 12% per month. Of course that's the mean rate, individuals can vary wildly.
But the Dragon is irrelevant to SpaceX's long-term plans. The BFR (assuming it works as planned) is going to be the first fully reusable rocket they build. And, if we believe the cost projections* it will cost ~$9M per launch, versus the F9R's $24.3M. Combined with the greater payload capacity, that would drive the cost down below $200/pound, and eventually below $40. That's only $40k per 200lb person+effects, and eventually $8k. Not cheap, but easily within the range of even a low six-figure salary. Granted that's the cost to SpaceX, and the profit margins will likely be quite generous for some time, but as competitors enter the reusable launch vehicle market profit margins should begin to shrink rapidly.
And that's the plan for the 2020's-2030's. If they plan their vacation for the 2050's prices will likely be considerably cheaper as more advanced/affordable rockets enter the field. There'll also be a much greater chance of orbital and lunar resorts to cater to their vacation, rather than just floating around Earth in the rocket's cabin.
Oh? What VM do you recommend? I've looked repeatedly over the years, and have never found a decent MacOS supporting VM that runs on anything other than another Mac, which kind of defeats the point.
Generally speaking everyone, everywhere is drinking treated sewage from all the cities upstream anyway, so what's the problem with just pumping your own treated sewage back up to the purification plant and reusing it a few times in the same city before flushing it down the river to the next one?
Greywater is of course also a wonderful solution - why bother making water potable first if you're just going to wash/flush/etc. with it? I've even heard some cities have greywater systems running parallel to the potable water systems, so purifaction plants don't have to work as hard, and your greywater consumption isn't limited to your own production.
If a $1 increase in the minimum wage makes it worth it to automate, then they would do so within a year or two anyway - the price of automation has been in freefall for many years, and no end is in sight.
Also, there's a world of difference between an occasional "share the wealth" deal with neighborhood kids, and building a business on other people's labor. Burger flippers aren't friendly neighborhood exchanges, they're working to make money for a business with a keen eye on the bottom line. If someone's working to line your pockets, then they should be able to get ahead as well by doing so.
If paying them enough to make that possible means you can't sell burgers profitably, then your business is a parasite upon the labor market, and has no ethical right to exist. Let the budget burger joints shrivel up, and put that human labor to more profitable endeavors. If there's no such opportunities, well, nobody said kids should be entitled to make money - let them learn early that they need to be able to offer something of value to be able to make money, while they still have the time and opportunities to develop such skills easily.
Yes. If you'd rather leave your lawn unmowed than pay somebody a fair wage, then by all means let the grass and weeds grow high. If you get tired of that, then pay somebody enough that they can make a living tending lawns. Or hire some kid, who you're almost certainly paying under the table anyway.
The minimum wage was never intended to deal with kids working a few hours for pocket money - it was intended to make sure that anyone willing to work a full time job can support themselves, rather than depending on handouts to make ends meet.
Why should society tolerate anyone paying less than a living wage? If it's not worth paying someone a living wage to do, it's not worth doing, since it depends on the exploitation of the laborers.
Meanwhile, have you seen any shortage of plumbers, drywallers, etc?
In other words, they don't actually exist, so no matter how hard those minimum wage employees work, they could only get a better job by replacing someone else, who would then have to work a minimum wage job,
Slashdot Mirror
RTGs are radioactive. Nuclear fuel is not.
The benefit of nuclear is that it doesn't care if you haven't seen the sun for two months because of a regularly scheduled global dust storm. Which would potentially be a problem for orbital power as well.
Orbital solar is a nice idea, but nobody has figured out how to get the power down to the surface yet. We've done experiments that have managed fairly efficient wireless power transmission over a few tens of miles, but to get from a "stationary" satellite to the surface of Mars is 12,693 miles - we need to get three orders of magnitude improvement in power transmission range for that to be useful. On the plus side - an orbital death ray would likely be quite handy for melting roads, landing pads, etc. into the Martian surface.
Meanwhile, nuclear power would leave them dependent on Earth for power for the foreseeable future - but that's going to be true regardless. And nuclear fuel is incredibly safe and easy to transport - it's insanely energy dense, chemically stable, and not appreciably radioactive below critical mass.
Indeed. Where reactors might be a boon though (outside of space probes, rovers, etc) is near the poles, where surface ice is plentiful, but sunlight may be far more intermittent. They'd also be quite handy as a secondary power supply during heavy dust storms.
Really though, it sounds like these are designed for research probes, which makes a lot more sense. 3kW is barely enough to be useful for a human outpost, but is quite a bit for a probe or rover. And I would guess the cost/watt is quite favorable to radiothermal generators...
This: 3 kW / 750kg = 4W/kg
Nasa Mars 2020 Rover radiothermal generator: 110 W / 45kg= 2.5W/kg
Hmm, honestly a much smaller improvement than I was expecting. Perhaps the working life is considerably longer? With a such a small improvement I'm hoping this is a small proof-of-concept reactor, and not just a pork-funded dead end.
So what? I mean, it makes the return flight for passengers a bit more expensive, though still nothing compared to the cost of getting them there in the first place. (crap efficiency on a much lower-cost flight = still cheap)
Meanwhile most everything a moon base is producing (fuel, water, air, etc) will be for use in space, and most will never get closer to Earth than lunar orbit. So the real question is, how does the absolute increase in annual passenger costs to Earth compare to the absolute reduction in annual launch costs required for additional supplies from Earth?
That would be true of the radiothermal devices often used in many satellites and rovers, which use the heat from the decay of fairly radioactive elements to generate electricity. But this is a fission reactor, not a radiothermal generator.
The thing with fission fuel is, generally speaking, it's not particularly radioactive. You could eat it, and the heavy metal poisoning would kill you before the radiation did. U-235 for example has a half-life of 703.8 million years (longer=less radioactive) - common carbon and potassium isotopes are far more radioactive. It's the stuff with half-lives in the days to decades range that's really dangerous. Which does include a lot of the fission byproducts (aka high-level nuclear waste), but a fresh reactor, or replacement fuel rods, won't contain much if any of those.
The only real radiation risk with nuclear fuel in a launching accident is that it *doesn't* blow up, but instead lands in one piece someplace out of the way where it doesn't get discovered, with the fuel all mashed together into a critical mass that goes on fissioning unsupervised, bleeding nuclear waste into the environment for decades. But that's *extremely* unlikely.
Only, you really don't have wind power. Due to the much lower atmospheric pressure (0.6%), a 400mph Martian gale-force wind will hit you with all the force of a very light (3mph) breeze here on Earth. So there just isn't really much power to be extracted.
On the up side, that means that something like an inflatable greenhouse will have no problem withstanding the force of even the worst Martian storms. On the down side, sandblasting is still a problem. The wind might not have any force behind it, but the dust it's carrying is still moving at hundreds of miles per hour, and each grain will do every bit as much damage as it would here on Earth.
Back on the upside, actual sandblasting problems have been far less than expected - presumably either the larger, more damaging grains of sand don't float well on the low-pressure winds, or most everything that does float has long since been worn smooth so that it's not nearly as abrasive. Might still call for a special abrasion-resistant coating on that inflatable greenhouse though.
There was a time when that was a valid position - but the predictions made 30,50,80 years ago have been proven correct well within their error bars. So what now? At what point do we stop saying "okay, you've been right so far, but there's no evidence that you'll continue to be right"? There's no way to prove with 100% certainty that predictions made today will be accurate except to wait and see. But the science has made accurate predictions so far, and the opposition is just people saying "I don't believe it". All the "unsettled science " is in the area of hammering out the exact details - narrowing the error bars so we have a better idea of exactly what we'll be facing, beyond "major problem" - the dominant forces and trends are all behaving as predicted.
The only area for doubt is whether some as-yet undiscovered side effect might re-stabilize things - but there's no evidence to suggest such a thing exists, so gambling the fate of our civilization on finding one would have to be done entirely on blind faith.
So what? The existence of freeloaders is irrelevant when they impose no marginal cost on the system, as is the case with digital goods.
In that case, they're only relevant at all if they *would* pay for things if they couldn't get them for free. And even then, eliminating them is only good for business if the resulting increase in sales is greater than the decrease in sales due to also eliminating the people that would have borrowed a copy for a while and then eventually bought their own (or gone on to buy later content). I seem to recall that there's quite a bit of evidence in the music world that the net effect of piracy is actually to increase sales.
Well, I'm certain an awful lot of the people waiting for someone else to hack it are eager for the pirated games. Not so certain about the people actually trying to hack the system. I suspect they're in it mostly for the challenge / hacker cred. Possibly also for freeing up a whole bunch of hardware for whatever use its owner's want.
Heck, I'm sure there's plenty of people out there like me that want a hacked console so they can store their entire library on a single convenient always-attached drive instead of changing discs/cartridges all the Fing time. The same way plenty of people rip their music and video libraries for use on their phones.
Of course, once the data is in a conveniently shareable format, well... the fact that a person can be simultaneously generous and greedy with their digital collecting makes widespread sharing inevitable. A fact that many people have argued makes the current illegality of the practice morally repugnant.
More importantly, it keeps the revenue flowing with basically no additional expenditure of effort or money by the console manufacturer. License fees are all pure profit.
Uhm, that *is* piracy in it's purest commercial form (with a bit of physical damage to the customer's hardware thrown in) . Going right back to the birth of the term in regards to Hollywood as a pirate distributor of East-coast media.
That's why you do the calculations in terms of the probability of NOT getting pregnant instead. Not getting pregnant all year requires not getting pregnant for twelve months in a row, so you avoid all the potential interactions between multiple pregnancies.
Well, I should say within an *average* month - I seem to recall that there is some seasonal variability in human fertility.
Just doing simple probabilities - a 20% chance of not getting pregnant within a year translates to an 88% chance of not getting pregnant every month in that year (.88^12 ~= .20) Therefore, the average woman has only a 12% chance of getting pregnant within any given month.
>we are not actually wild animals and have empathy, love and altruism...
Actually, all of those things are commonly observed in wild animals as well. Humans are extremely smart, but are otherwise basically tool-using animals in every respect.
Actually, I believe the statistics are 80% chance of pregnancy per year for a sexually active woman who uses no protection. Which would be about 12% per month. Of course that's the mean rate, individuals can vary wildly.
But the Dragon is irrelevant to SpaceX's long-term plans. The BFR (assuming it works as planned) is going to be the first fully reusable rocket they build. And, if we believe the cost projections* it will cost ~$9M per launch, versus the F9R's $24.3M. Combined with the greater payload capacity, that would drive the cost down below $200/pound, and eventually below $40. That's only $40k per 200lb person+effects, and eventually $8k. Not cheap, but easily within the range of even a low six-figure salary. Granted that's the cost to SpaceX, and the profit margins will likely be quite generous for some time, but as competitors enter the reusable launch vehicle market profit margins should begin to shrink rapidly.
And that's the plan for the 2020's-2030's. If they plan their vacation for the 2050's prices will likely be considerably cheaper as more advanced/affordable rockets enter the field. There'll also be a much greater chance of orbital and lunar resorts to cater to their vacation, rather than just floating around Earth in the rocket's cabin.
*https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/spacex-bfr-to-be-lower-cost-than-falcon-1-at-7-million-per-launch.html
Oh? What VM do you recommend? I've looked repeatedly over the years, and have never found a decent MacOS supporting VM that runs on anything other than another Mac, which kind of defeats the point.
640PB should be enough for me.
Generally speaking everyone, everywhere is drinking treated sewage from all the cities upstream anyway, so what's the problem with just pumping your own treated sewage back up to the purification plant and reusing it a few times in the same city before flushing it down the river to the next one?
Greywater is of course also a wonderful solution - why bother making water potable first if you're just going to wash/flush/etc. with it? I've even heard some cities have greywater systems running parallel to the potable water systems, so purifaction plants don't have to work as hard, and your greywater consumption isn't limited to your own production.
If a $1 increase in the minimum wage makes it worth it to automate, then they would do so within a year or two anyway - the price of automation has been in freefall for many years, and no end is in sight.
Also, there's a world of difference between an occasional "share the wealth" deal with neighborhood kids, and building a business on other people's labor. Burger flippers aren't friendly neighborhood exchanges, they're working to make money for a business with a keen eye on the bottom line. If someone's working to line your pockets, then they should be able to get ahead as well by doing so.
If paying them enough to make that possible means you can't sell burgers profitably, then your business is a parasite upon the labor market, and has no ethical right to exist. Let the budget burger joints shrivel up, and put that human labor to more profitable endeavors. If there's no such opportunities, well, nobody said kids should be entitled to make money - let them learn early that they need to be able to offer something of value to be able to make money, while they still have the time and opportunities to develop such skills easily.
Yes. If you'd rather leave your lawn unmowed than pay somebody a fair wage, then by all means let the grass and weeds grow high. If you get tired of that, then pay somebody enough that they can make a living tending lawns. Or hire some kid, who you're almost certainly paying under the table anyway.
The minimum wage was never intended to deal with kids working a few hours for pocket money - it was intended to make sure that anyone willing to work a full time job can support themselves, rather than depending on handouts to make ends meet.
Why should society tolerate anyone paying less than a living wage? If it's not worth paying someone a living wage to do, it's not worth doing, since it depends on the exploitation of the laborers.
Meanwhile, have you seen any shortage of plumbers, drywallers, etc?
In other words, they don't actually exist, so no matter how hard those minimum wage employees work, they could only get a better job by replacing someone else, who would then have to work a minimum wage job,