Why WERE we going back? Did we really "get what we paid for" on those later trips to the moon? It sounds like engineering for engineering's sake more than science for science's sake.
Actually, it was the later missions that provided most of the science return of the Apollo program. Apollo 11's crew only spent a couple of hours EVA on the surface, collecting some photos and a few only moderately-well-documented samples. Apollo 12 increased that to 7 hours, and returned samples from Surveyor 3, providing us with data on the lunar environment. Apollos 14, 15, 16, and 17 landed at many diverse sites, including the lunar highlands, Hadley Rille (a volcanic lava tube remnant), and the lunar mountains. They deployed a much larger science instrument package than Apollo 11. They returned well-documented rock and core samples and provided information that later supported the new "massive collision" theory of lunar origin.
So, if you're talking scientific return, Apollo 11 was the least valuable of the landings. Any serious scientific exploration must include multiple missions.
Linear growth is theoretically possible, of course, but it means that each generation has fewer "rights" than the previous one (if you include "average number of children per person" as a "right")
To pull the economy out of this recession / nascent depression, and to leave us with something worthwhile when all is said and done, government spending in the next few years should be focused on capital improvements - specifically infrastructure. Transportation, communication, energy, access to raw materials.
Note that space offers opportunities for 3 out of those four (all but transportation - I don't think anybody is still seriously dreaming of ballistic business travel). However, it is unclear to me whether NASA in general and Ares / Orion does anything at all toward improving commercial access to space for those purposes.
Our current high-tech economy is heavily dependent on exotic elements (vanadium, iridium, etc.) whose supplies on Earth are dwindling. A space initiative which focuses on in-situ concentration of those exotics on either near-Earth or asteroid belt bodies, followed by return of only the concentrated elements to Earth, could be the basis for a sustatinable 21st-century economy for the USA.
Or we could sit on our butts and watch someone else (China? India?) do it. Empires don't last forever.
Eric: Horatio, there does not look like there is any mosaicing information in this image. Horatio: Eric, that means the image was taken with a camera with a Foveon X3 sensor. Cally: Zeroing in on professional camera stores... I have an address Horatio (menacingly): Eric, get on it.
In fact, current estimates are that 97% of lead used in lead-acid batteries is recycled. 60-80 percent of a new lead-acid battery that you buy is recycled from an older battery. Don't believe the Greenpeace BS - their data is 20 years old, before many laws were passed regulating lead-acid battery recycling.
Disclaimer - I'm a heavyuser of lead-acid batteries.
All known hydrogen-hydrogen fusion reactions produce strong neutron fluxes. Strong enough to kill, and death by radiation poisoning is not my idea of a fun time.
There, fixed that for you.
The holy grail for Polywell fusors is proton-(11)Boron fusion. Aneutronic, and generates alpha particles which are almost trivially easy to convert to electricity.
Solves a whole lot more than you give it credit for, and I speak from firsthand knowledge. The other posters have effectively rebutted your assertion, so I'll just leave you with my blogs:
I have not tried it, but I was a programmer for the ancestor company 25 years ago, and, at the time, it was a pretty good system. It claims to be able to import / export LaTex. It was designed by a mathematician so it is fairly complete. Free trial download available. http://www.mackichan.com/
I have no connection with the company other than 1 year of employment a quarter century ago...
The two numbers you should be using for this discussion are "Elem & Sec Instructional" and "Elem & Secondary - Other". Note that second category includes bus drivers, cafeteria workers, school nurses, custodians, maintainence workers, etc. so it's disingenuous to call them "administrators." Even at that, at worst, it's a 4.6 : 2.0 ratio, or 2.3 : 1 (closer to 30% non-instructional), not "61.78" and those non-instructional people are essential to keeping the schools open and functional.
I call bullshit - where did you get that statistic? In a school district I'm very familiar with, there are typically 1-3 administrators per school (depending on school size), with 2 assistant superintendents and 1 superintendent for the whole district of 24,000 students. This is a ratio of something like 10:1 employees:managers, which is pretty well in line with private industry, and way lower than your "~56%".
From the article found here, in California (which has generally pretty clean power plants), "Over the course of 100,000 miles, CO2 emissions from EVs are projected to be 10 tons versus 35 tons for ICE vehicles". Even on the East Coast, which has much dirtier plants, "EVs in the Northeast would reduce CO emissions by 99.8 percent, volatile organic compounds (VOC) by 90 percent, NOx by 80 percent, and CO2 by as much as 60 percent".
One interesting comparison in the article takes power line inefficiences into account, starts with raw BTUs from the carbon product used for power generation and comes up with an equivalent "69 MPG" for a pure EV. So, you'd have to get an ICE up to 69 MPG (average!) to match it. Note that you cannot directly compare the "200 MPG" of plugin hybrids to this number, since "200 MPG" does not include the petroleum/coal used to generate the power.
What your discussion seems to gloss over is the fact that the chart clearly labels year 2000 CO2 concentrations (370 ppmv), which are nearly 25% higher than any of the previous spikes (which are around 300 ppmv). The slope of the curve which got there is nearly vertical - indicating something unusual is going on. Personally, the historically unprecedented mass oxidation of fossil fuels seems like a very good explanation to me. But if you believe instead that it's the decreasing number of Pirates causing it, then, well, I suppose we're done talking.
Yep, that book (and the similar Jupiter and Saturn volumes)were a major part of my internship. I highly recommend JPL as a place to take an internship - you'll get to work on all sorts of exotic stuff...
I note that we're at the end of that book's lifetime (1990-2005); I wonder whether JPL still relies on printed books, or if they just generate the plots in computer-readable form these days?
I was an intern at JPL a couple of decades ago, and they always started with a "porkchop plot" (or "butterfly plot") of possible trajectories and their energy requirements. Here is a webpage that documents that to some extent:
This is a great vision, but, as Joel points out at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html, there are quite a few applications where latency matters, not bandwidth (scroll down about 4/5 of the way, where he says, "Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web application").
Even if you got all of the other latency limitations out of the way, you're left with speed-of-light delays. Imagine a server on the other side of the Earth; it's 20000 km away. That's a 13 ms round-trip, which limits interactivity to 8 Hz, which is way below the threshold considered "interactive" (which is around 20 Hz).
What this means is that those operations which are latency-sensitive need to live on the client, or very close (on-LAN, most likely, or, perhaps, at a municipal level), which still means substantial local computing power.
Although the energetic requirements are an order of magnitude higher for orbital spaceflight, this $50 million prize is almost an order of magnitude higher than the $10 million X-prize. The economic payback seems higher as well, since there are lots more reasons (both reasearch and tourism) to go to orbit than there are in sub-orbital spaceflight.
Caveat: I did not read the whole book, just browsed through the online pages. However, this seems like a classic example of the "hasty generalization" fallacy (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/hasty%2 0generalization). The author extrapolates his personal experiences and assumes that they are representative of the whole nation's school system, weaving a conspiracy theory through it to further sensationalize it.
First of all, there is no "national school system" in the United States. Each state is responsible for public education within its own borders. I don't know about New York, but at least in Colorado, the situation is nowhere close to that described in his prologue. If a Colorado administrator had subjected a student to the verbal abuse described there, they would be subject to disciplinary action at the least, and possibly termination.
I know that education in the United States is not perfect. There are many areas that desparately need improvment, especially science and math education, but hysterical diatribes such as these do little to advance the dialogue and only serve to inflame the True Believers.
The best way to get around this (for any project, not just a game) is to have accountability to some other person or group. In other words, you *have* to finish that last 20% because those other people keep asking you to.
This works best, of course, if they really like the project you've developed and can give you positive feedback as well.
Most planetary scientests have accepted for decades that water is a major force in Martian geology. The polar ice caps have long been known to have a substantial water component. The Viking missions detected chemical salts typical of evaporation deposits. Nothing other than water has been proposed for the major outflow channels found all over the Martian surface. See planetary scientist William K. Hartmann's excellent recent book, "A Traveler's Guide to Mars" for lots more information.
Evidence of *recent* water activity is interesting and important, but the loss of this nuance is typical of "news" journalism, which must justify every story as Brand! New! Exciting! Information!
Slashdot Mirror
Why WERE we going back? Did we really "get what we paid for" on those later trips to the moon? It sounds like engineering for engineering's sake more than science for science's sake.
Actually, it was the later missions that provided most of the science return of the Apollo program. Apollo 11's crew only spent a couple of hours EVA on the surface, collecting some photos and a few only moderately-well-documented samples. Apollo 12 increased that to 7 hours, and returned samples from Surveyor 3, providing us with data on the lunar environment. Apollos 14, 15, 16, and 17 landed at many diverse sites, including the lunar highlands, Hadley Rille (a volcanic lava tube remnant), and the lunar mountains. They deployed a much larger science instrument package than Apollo 11. They returned well-documented rock and core samples and provided information that later supported the new "massive collision" theory of lunar origin.
So, if you're talking scientific return, Apollo 11 was the least valuable of the landings. Any serious scientific exploration must include multiple missions.
Linear growth is theoretically possible, of course, but it means that each generation has fewer "rights" than the previous one (if you include "average number of children per person" as a "right")
To pull the economy out of this recession / nascent depression, and to leave us with something worthwhile when all is said and done, government spending in the next few years should be focused on capital improvements - specifically infrastructure. Transportation, communication, energy, access to raw materials.
Note that space offers opportunities for 3 out of those four (all but transportation - I don't think anybody is still seriously dreaming of ballistic business travel). However, it is unclear to me whether NASA in general and Ares / Orion does anything at all toward improving commercial access to space for those purposes.
Our current high-tech economy is heavily dependent on exotic elements (vanadium, iridium, etc.) whose supplies on Earth are dwindling. A space initiative which focuses on in-situ concentration of those exotics on either near-Earth or asteroid belt bodies, followed by return of only the concentrated elements to Earth, could be the basis for a sustatinable 21st-century economy for the USA.
Or we could sit on our butts and watch someone else (China? India?) do it. Empires don't last forever.
Eric: Horatio, there does not look like there is any mosaicing information in this image.
Horatio: Eric, that means the image was taken with a camera with a Foveon X3 sensor.
Cally: Zeroing in on professional camera stores... I have an address
Horatio (menacingly): Eric, get on it.
Where's my CSI: Miami royalty check?
I, for one, welcome our robotic CNC overlords.
In fact, current estimates are that 97% of lead used in lead-acid batteries is recycled. 60-80 percent of a new lead-acid battery that you buy is recycled from an older battery. Don't believe the Greenpeace BS - their data is 20 years old, before many laws were passed regulating lead-acid battery recycling.
Disclaimer - I'm a heavy user of lead-acid batteries.
All known hydrogen -hydrogen fusion reactions produce strong neutron fluxes. Strong enough to kill, and death by radiation poisoning is not my idea of a fun time.
There, fixed that for you.
The holy grail for Polywell fusors is proton-(11)Boron fusion. Aneutronic, and generates alpha particles which are almost trivially easy to convert to electricity.
Solves a whole lot more than you give it credit for, and I speak from firsthand knowledge. The other posters have effectively rebutted your assertion, so I'll just leave you with my blogs:
Volt914
Electrojeep
And note, I get my electricity from wind power, so zero carbon emissions from my conversions.
I have not tried it, but I was a programmer for the ancestor company 25 years ago, and, at the time, it was a pretty good system. It claims to be able to import / export LaTex. It was designed by a mathematician so it is fairly complete. Free trial download available. http://www.mackichan.com/
I have no connection with the company other than 1 year of employment a quarter century ago...
The two numbers you should be using for this discussion are "Elem & Sec Instructional" and "Elem & Secondary - Other". Note that second category includes bus drivers, cafeteria workers, school nurses, custodians, maintainence workers, etc. so it's disingenuous to call them "administrators." Even at that, at worst, it's a 4.6 : 2.0 ratio, or 2.3 : 1 (closer to 30% non-instructional), not "61.78" and those non-instructional people are essential to keeping the schools open and functional.
I call bullshit - where did you get that statistic? In a school district I'm very familiar with, there are typically 1-3 administrators per school (depending on school size), with 2 assistant superintendents and 1 superintendent for the whole district of 24,000 students. This is a ratio of something like 10:1 employees:managers, which is pretty well in line with private industry, and way lower than your "~56%".
From the article found here, in California (which has generally pretty clean power plants), "Over the course of 100,000 miles, CO2 emissions from EVs are projected to be 10 tons versus 35 tons for ICE vehicles". Even on the East Coast, which has much dirtier plants, "EVs in the Northeast would reduce CO emissions by 99.8 percent, volatile organic compounds (VOC) by 90 percent, NOx by 80 percent, and CO2 by as much as 60 percent".
One interesting comparison in the article takes power line inefficiences into account, starts with raw BTUs from the carbon product used for power generation and comes up with an equivalent "69 MPG" for a pure EV. So, you'd have to get an ICE up to 69 MPG (average!) to match it. Note that you cannot directly compare the "200 MPG" of plugin hybrids to this number, since "200 MPG" does not include the petroleum/coal used to generate the power.
Err, make that http://www.venganza.org/ - I even previewed and everything...
What your discussion seems to gloss over is the fact that the chart clearly labels year 2000 CO2 concentrations (370 ppmv), which are nearly 25% higher than any of the previous spikes (which are around 300 ppmv). The slope of the curve which got there is nearly vertical - indicating something unusual is going on. Personally, the historically unprecedented mass oxidation of fossil fuels seems like a very good explanation to me. But if you believe instead that it's the decreasing number of Pirates causing it, then, well, I suppose we're done talking.
Yep, that book (and the similar Jupiter and Saturn volumes)were a major part of my internship. I highly recommend JPL as a place to take an internship - you'll get to work on all sorts of exotic stuff...
I note that we're at the end of that book's lifetime (1990-2005); I wonder whether JPL still relies on printed books, or if they just generate the plots in computer-readable form these days?
I was an intern at JPL a couple of decades ago, and they always started with a "porkchop plot" (or "butterfly plot") of possible trajectories and their energy requirements. Here is a webpage that documents that to some extent:
p All.html
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/porkcho
The Lake Nicaragua Shark:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=lake+nic
</pedantic>
Oops - typo - 40,000 km roundtrip / 300,000 km/s = .133 seconds = 130 ms (not 13, as I typed). Point still stands (8 Hz interactivity rate).
This is a great vision, but, as Joel points out at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , there are quite a few applications where latency matters, not bandwidth (scroll down about 4/5 of the way, where he says, "Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web application").
Even if you got all of the other latency limitations out of the way, you're left with speed-of-light delays. Imagine a server on the other side of the Earth; it's 20000 km away. That's a 13 ms round-trip, which limits interactivity to 8 Hz, which is way below the threshold considered "interactive" (which is around 20 Hz).
What this means is that those operations which are latency-sensitive need to live on the client, or very close (on-LAN, most likely, or, perhaps, at a municipal level), which still means substantial local computing power.
Although the energetic requirements are an order of magnitude higher for orbital spaceflight, this $50 million prize is almost an order of magnitude higher than the $10 million X-prize. The economic payback seems higher as well, since there are lots more reasons (both reasearch and tourism) to go to orbit than there are in sub-orbital spaceflight.
Staying at home - priceless
I have discovered a truly remarkable formula to solve any polynomial, but my site has too little bandwidth for me to post it here.
Caveat: I did not read the whole book, just browsed through the online pages. However, this seems like a classic example of the "hasty generalization" fallacy (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/hasty%2 0generalization). The author extrapolates his personal experiences and assumes that they are representative of the whole nation's school system, weaving a conspiracy theory through it to further sensationalize it.
First of all, there is no "national school system" in the United States. Each state is responsible for public education within its own borders. I don't know about New York, but at least in Colorado, the situation is nowhere close to that described in his prologue. If a Colorado administrator had subjected a student to the verbal abuse described there, they would be subject to disciplinary action at the least, and possibly termination.
I know that education in the United States is not perfect. There are many areas that desparately need improvment, especially science and math education, but hysterical diatribes such as these do little to advance the dialogue and only serve to inflame the True Believers.
The best way to get around this (for any project, not just a game) is to have accountability to some other person or group. In other words, you *have* to finish that last 20% because those other people keep asking you to.
This works best, of course, if they really like the project you've developed and can give you positive feedback as well.
Most planetary scientests have accepted for decades that water is a major force in Martian geology. The polar ice caps have long been known to have a substantial water component. The Viking missions detected chemical salts typical of evaporation deposits. Nothing other than water has been proposed for the major outflow channels found all over the Martian surface. See planetary scientist William K. Hartmann's excellent recent book, "A Traveler's Guide to Mars" for lots more information.
Evidence of *recent* water activity is interesting and important, but the loss of this nuance is typical of "news" journalism, which must justify every story as Brand! New! Exciting! Information!