The racist attack in the GP post certainly deserved some scorn. As for the people themselves, I don't know much about Wikramasinghe, but I know that Hoyle was brilliant and accomplished and also a bit of an over-opinionated nut. His absurd position on the authenticity of Archaeopteryx attests to that. Wikramasinghe was apparently his student and shared many of his ideas, including the ones about Archaeopteryx. It seems to me that they formed some pretty solid theories about the cosmological origins of various molecules fundamental to known life, along with some less sound, but still compelling theories about the origins of life itself, and then some over the top wild speculation and wishful thinking.
For me, the only reason to worry about whether it's the "official" character or not is to determine if the story fits within the canon or not. The thing is, we're living in a post-continuity world as far as characters like Superman are concerned. Every incarnation in every medium stands alone. The continuity in the comics is bjorked to Krypton and back and the editors have no qualms about retconning and re-retconning and rebooting and re-inventing and re-imagining.
Well, the people who actually published the review are certainly being silenced. They've also been put in a position where, if journalistic integrity were actually important to people these days and if the people doing the review were serious journalists, they would have no choice but to either resign or lose all respect as journalists. Instead, it seems that this is just going to pass with a shrug. This is the true face of corruption. It creeps in until no-one can be bothered to care or act because it would be only so much spitting against the wind.
All that said, it doesn't seem to be illegal. It's sort of photographic negative of activity that could constitute false advertising. It does put them in a potentially liable position if they ever give the product of a competitor a bad review without a big, obvious disclaimer. It's also utterly disgusting, but it's not illegal.
Unfortunately, by extension, the government could legally apply pressure to, extort, pressure, or simply pay the press to report the way they want. While there are too many channels to control the entirety of the press this way, the parts of the press that aren't vulnerable to this only reach a small margin of the people. Of course, the lunatic fringe segment of the press would probably reach a larger segment of the population, which would make it easy for people to lump the honest press in with the loonies.
Accepted by the deployer, usually not the deployee. Then the deployers often end up surprised that some of the deployees carry a grudge about the whole thing.
I'm not really think of Mark Zuckeberg specifically, just the fetishism about avoiding "distinctly wrong attire". Maybe it's just that I don't like being choked by neck ties. The arguments for following these conventions have always just seemed too circular for me to take them seriously. I don't jump off bridges just because everyone else is doing it either.
The problem with that is that the concern about people wearing the "wrong attire" thing is one of those stupid social feedback loop things. All the arguments for wearing it are circular. Of course, plenty of things are based on such circularity but still manage to make some sense. The problem is, the same logic applies to whatever attire is required to conform and show respect to all the other people following the same trend in just about any place and time. Imagine showing up to the court of Elizabeth I without your ruff and hose and garter but instead in modern business wear. Or in the court of Phillip IV with a ruff. How about in a Ming dynasty court with a modern short nail manicure? Having supposedly correct attire for doing business is just one of those fashion things fundamentally no different from foot-binding, skull shaping, lip discs, circumcision, bellbottom jeans, etc.
...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
All of those options were available at the time. He was killed by Young after they had established a gate connection to the planet, so all the resources of the ship were available including the minds of trauma surgeons on Earth dropped into any body they chose (the stones were fully operational in that episode as one of the characters mentions that she's just made a report to the IOA during these events). Turns out I did forget that they were able to lift the debris, they just stopped because the pressure was holding the wound closed. A tourniquet is not a sophisticated or difficult piece of medical technology. His odds of bleeding to death may have been fairly high if he was extracted, but his odds of dying were 100% with the treatment method they ended up using.
When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia.
That would be exactly the situation here. The only options were to either euthanize him, or leave him there in pain to die alone. He asked for the former, and got it.
That's nowhere near the situation. I said _chronic_ pain. Acute, temporary and treatable pain is an entirely different animal. When someone is asking for death in a situation like that, the ethical thing to do is to refuse because they're not in their right mind. Deciding if someone's plea for death should be fulfilled is obviously fraught with ethical problems. The first question is whether the problem they have is treatable. In his case, the answer was yes, so immediately euthanasia is probably contraindicated. Two other questions that come into play, however, are quality of life and how long the patient will have to suffer (and consequently how long until they change their mind about wanting to die). For quality of life, he would have been fine. He might have lost one or both legs, but keeping both was still a distinct possibility. Recuperation time measured in months at most. As for the length of time until he changed his mind about wanting to die you can start by asking: "will he want to die next year because of this injury?" The answer is clearly "no". It's the same for next month, next week, next day. It's probably "no" for the very next hour if they got him out of there and into surgery on the ship.
Long story short, the people in charge on the ship were all criminally incompetent. Outright violent psychopaths in some cases as well.
Nope. The ship had already jumped once, but they'd ended up back in range (and at that point, Rush could control the jumping of the ship) and had plenty of time. Young hangs around the corpse he just created for a long time after killing him. They never even bring in a surgeon from Earth, even though they have plenty of time to do so and their one medic is apparently completely incompetent even though, with the available technology they could have been sending her to med school on Earth every day for most of the trip. Even under time constraints, putting a tourniquet on a leg and cutting it off doesn't take that long. If there's trouble getting through the bones, they had explosives and guns. Gruesome medicine, but not so gruesome as killing someone who could have survived. For that matter, I just re-read a transcript of the episode, and it turns out they were even able to lift the debris off him, but it was slowing the bleeding. So, they could have applied a tourniquet, lifted it off, then rushed him back to the ship for surgery.
There really isn't any excuse for it. If you take the situation at face value, then it's criminal incompetence. If you don't, then it's bad writing.
Simulations of nuclear weapons vs. asteroids typically show that the nukes mostly just heat the asteroid up. In space, there's no atmosphere to superheat into an airburst, so a nuclear explosion consists of the vaporised remains of the bomb and the delivery vehicle and a lot of radiation. At the speeds involved, there's only about a 50 millisecond window to even detonate a nuke near enough to an asteroid that's approaching us for it to have any effect. Even if the timing is just right, a maximum of 50% of the energy of the nuke is going to hit the asteroid, and it's really going to be more like 10%. As has been mentioned, we pretty much have to hit the asteroid on approach, because it's going to be a lot harder to catch up to while it's moving away. If we do manage to blow it up, then we go from one large body travelling in a fairly predictable path to a number of objects of varying size travelling on less predictable paths, so if it's not going to hit us, we're better off not blowing it into pieces that might hit us. Also, we might have a lot of nuclear warheads, but we don't have anywhere near as many rockets capable of getting the payload to the asteroid. Nuking it might be cathartic, but there are a lot of problems with the idea.
The big problem with Stargate: Universe was the plot induced stupidity in the characters. They were clearly trying to emulate the grim, gritty BSG which had plenty of its own plot-induced stupidity. Trouble is, it gets hard to ignore it when the plot-induced stupidity railroads the characters to irredeemable actions. There were plenty of these. Certainly enough that several main characters should have been relieved of all authority and locked up for the whole trip. The one that got to me the most was when there was a character trapped by the legs after a shuttle crash and, at his request, the commander suffocates him to death. I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off. When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia. When a patient is in transitory pain, no matter how extreme, but has excellent prospects for survival without pain, you simply shouldn't consider their requests since they're not in their right minds. That kind of nonsense, leaving you with no choice but to either pretend big chunks of the show didn't happen or hate some of the main characters, tends to wreck a show.
Sort of reminds of the first and only episode of Star Trek: Enterprise I watched. It was titled "Dear Doctor". In it, the captain and the ships doctor have a cure for an illness that's killing off the population of a planet who they've agreed to help. They decide, based on some crazy nazi-style eugenics destiny argument (with allusions to the not yet established Prime Directive), that the population is destined to die off in favor of another intelligent species that lives on the planet with them. So they withhold the cure as the "ethical" thing to do, but still present them with a partial treatment, then go on their merry way.
Generally speaking, I don't have a problem with fiction with characters that morally flawed. Humans are often morally flawed. The problem is when the fictional treatment also puts these criminally incompetent characters on a pedestal.
Since they're an insurance company, in the business of making legal bets of the form: if X happens to you, we pay you $Y, it would seem that they're under contractual obligation to pay out if X happens. So, they actually do have a contractual obligation not to go bankrupt from paying out claims. When the X in question is "this mortgage is defaulted on", it all ties together quite nicely.
Actually, I think the reason no democratic country has ever suffered a famine is because of Scotsmen. Specifically the elusive no true Scotsman. The original quote from Amartya Sen was more like: "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy." The problem is, the existence of a large-scale, pervasive famine would almost certainly guaranty that a democracy would cease to be considered functioning. Which makes the original quote essentially a tautology. There have certainly been failed democracies that experienced famines. Also, plenty of minor famines have happened in democracies. Some examples include India and the United States. Democracy is neat and all, but it's not a panacea.
Ok, terrible to reply to a robospam post. I'm just wondering if a post offering "Cheap NFL Jerseys from China" in a story about a Chinese counterfeiting operation is irony or some sort of slightly confused bot that actually read the summary and thought the post might be a relevant product pitch?
Titan's atmosphere is mostly N2, with something like 5% methane. The lakes are just lakes and not counted as part of the atmosphere, although obviously evaporated material from the lakes will make up part of the atmosphere.
Quite right. Very little need for filler gases as long as oxygen partial pressure is right. Humans should be able to acclimate. They probably should be able to anyway. There might be special health problems that would affect some people over time. I mean, we've tested plenty of people in oxygen only atmospheres at about 1/3 atmosphere in space and on the ground, but they've been pretty universally healthy and haven't had to live that way for decades. They also haven't been exposed for decades. I would expect there to be some health problems for humans under those conditions their entire lives that wouldn't be typical on Earth (for example, what happens to lungs that are geared to work at a certain level if they're underworked due to a thinner atmosphere), probably offset somewhat by a lower incidence of other problems.
I wouldn't worry too much about boiling blood either. As you said, internal pressure and enthalpy. Also, none of our important body fluids are strictly speaking just water. For starters, we're talking about a saline solution, then globulins and glucose, etc. I'm pretty sure all of those raise the boiling point.
Darn, I read your comment and immediately wanted to go to Titan for all the yummy candy atmosphere of titanthat makes up its atmosphere.:) Of course, Titan's atmosphere seems to be mostly composed of Nitrogen and Methane, neither of which is denser than N2 or O2, (especially with one of them actually being N2). So, you're wrong, sorry. Also, I should point out the atmosphere of Venus, which is about 93 times as dense as the atmosphere of Earth. The point is that, while the surface gravity and diameter of a planet probably do set an upper limit on how dense an atmosphere the planet can hold, planets like Earth and Mars are nowhere near those limits. There's no strictly gravitational reason Mars can't hold an atmosphere as dense as ours. There are long term problems with it, such as interaction with solar wind, of course.
Well, I always thought that geosynchronous orbits all had a semi-major axis out to 42,164 km, so that it did imply a specific distance. In any case, for clarity, I should have said geostationary. It just doesn't abbreviate as nicely and I was already doing enough typing .:)
The one saving grace of Unobtanium in movies is that at least they don't just use an existing substance and then say really bizarre things about it. Take the recent _Avengers_ movie. Apparently iridium comes from meteorites (sort of technically true, but a bit misleading) and if you want to get some, you have to murder a bunch of people and steal it from a big vault. Instead of just going online and buying it. I would almost rather they just called it Unobtanium. Or, since the Marvel universe has rich history of fictitious materials, just use Adamantium or Vibranium or Omnium or something.
Talking about best alien invader stories makes me think about some of the worst. I think the prize has to go to _Signs_ with the aliens whose best attack is a poison gas finger and who could conquer the Earth if only they could invent rain wear. It even manages to edge out _Plan 9 from Outer Space_.
As for the exotic matter, who knows what unusual properties we'll find if we're ever able to make the attempt. But we certainly can't rely in any way on magical unknowns. As you say, most of the technologies that would actually let you build a space elevator probably obsolete it. Still, some sort of active structure like a space fountain or a launch loop may be possible. Or there might be some way to support a traditional space elevator at various points along its length with solar sail setups, some sort of interactions with fleets of satellites, orbital rings, etc. Who knows. At this point, we seem to be better off looking at other options.
On geosynchronous vs geostationary, I really only meant the distance and, despite what you said, geosynchronous does imply a certain distance. A geostationary orbit is just a circular geosynchronous orbit and both have the same semi-major axis and therefore imply the same distance from Earth for the purposes of this discussion. As far as a traditional beanstalk goes, it's not exactly in what you would call orbit since it's physically tethered to the Earth, so it's not in geostationary or geosynchronous orbit. The center of gravity should actually be somewhere at least slightly beyond geosynchronous orbit.
On objects burning up. I won't deny that it is a complicated question, but it seems to me that there are more or less two possibilities. In one, the cable (probably a ribbon) comes down gently and might cause some accidents and damage, but is mainly just a nuisance. In the other, the cable comes down hard and burns up. Either way, it shouldn't cause very much devastation on the ground.
On unobtanium. Completely agree there. Sadly, it's become some sort of film convention and film directors are film directors. Sad, but there's not much to be done about it. It can get worse. How about movies where the aliens are attacking because they want our water. You know, because it powers their civilization. You can tell it's the water they're after because the sea level has dropped enough for people to notice in the few hours since they arrived. Naturally the mind boggling levels of energy involved even in just displacing that much water can't be used to just burn off all the inhabited areas of Earth. Ever notice that no technologically advanced aliens who just want to exterminate us actually seem to have any weapons of mass destruction anywhere near as effective as ours? Bleh. This is leading to an entirely different rant.
As for wierd synthetic baryonic matter with previously unseen properties, don't give up too soon. Remember, it's not the density that's important, it's the strength to weight ratio. If you can increase the strength enough, it won't matter. It might be completely impossible, or not useful even if it is possible, but it's nice to know that there might be some wiggle room in there.
who cares about the first few hundred kilometers? They will be the thinnest portion of the cable, and won't fall far enough to have built up any real speed.
The point about the first few hundred kilometers was that they would be a special case, either being inside the atmosphere already, or not having far enough to fall, or enough extra inertial energy to pack any sort of wallop once they hit the atmosphere. Beyond that, the remainder of the cable will smack the atmosphere pretty hard and probably be destroyed.
burn up when falling
any references for this? I suspect otherwise.
Any references for objects moving at orbital speeds burning up in the atmosphere? Are you joking? I could probably find a few hundred concrete examples if I felt I needed to prove it
The vast majority of the heat generated by a de-orbiting object is a result of extreme compression in the shockwave leading the object, very little is due to air friction. So at least unless/until it starts entering the atmosphere horizontally a cable would be mostly shielded from any sort of extreme heating by the cable below it having already pushed the air out of the way. Moreover, the upper portions of the cable will be being continuously pulled "downwards" by the lower ones, which will be experiencing greater gravitational acceleration, so the entire cable might well enter the atmosphere fairly vertically.
So, after misunderstanding my claim about the first few hundred kilometers to mean that the whole cable would come straight down in one spot and correcting me by saying that it would "wrap itself around the planet", you're now saying that it would come down in one spot. Down in one precise spot the exact shape of the cross-section of the cable no less, for there to be no compression.
A material actually strong enough to support its own weight to geosynch wouldn't need to thicken at all
You're wrong there
No I'm not. That sentence (sentence fragment, actually), taken by itself is completely correct. A cable with a breaking length of something like 5000 km under a hypothetical normalized sea-level gravity could reach geosynch with uniform thickness. I did not say that was practical, I merely stated it as a fact. The rest of the sentence was ", but would have a strength to weight ratio slightly higher than the most optimistic projections for carbon nanotubes". The point was that tapering was almost certainly practical, and almost certainly necessary, but in our hypothetical universe with materials where the space elevator becomes a possibility, the taper doesn't need to be as extreme as you were suggesting. The stronger the material relative to its weight, the less thickening is required
- *any* plausible cable will thicken exponentially with altitude, otherwise you're just including a lot of wasted strength and weight on the lower sections.
Yes, any practical cable will certainly taper, but the degree of taper depends on the tensile strength/weight ratio of the material. For very strong materials, the taper is very slight and, if it expands too quickly, you end up including a lot of wasted strength and weight in the _upper_ sections. Also, the thickening is not a straightforward exponential thickening, the curve does grow all the way, but it reaches a peak of growth and then the growth flattens off towards geosynch. The actual formula is more complex.
Even carbon nanotube is expected to have a non-tapered breaking length of only about 5-6000km.
Yes, at _sea level_ (or normalized sea-level gravity, anyway). Gravity at geosynch is about 1/50th of sea level gravity. It decreases by the inverse square law from sea-level up.
Being strong enough to support its own weight simply means that it is in fact *conceivable* to thicken fast enough
Hmm. I'm not sure that kosher or halal requirements have anything to say about the location where, for example, cattle are slaughtered. But they do touch on the spiritual "cleanliness" of how the animal was slaughtered, and kosher and halal foods do tend to be labeled and the adherents take the labels very seriously. The rules are also open to some interpretation. I wouldn't be surprised if there were rabbis and imams who would object to kosher or halal labelling for meat slaughtered on the site of a massacre.
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Claiming that I'm more guilty based on what I stole is ludicrous.
Errr grand theft vs. petty theft?
The racist attack in the GP post certainly deserved some scorn. As for the people themselves, I don't know much about Wikramasinghe, but I know that Hoyle was brilliant and accomplished and also a bit of an over-opinionated nut. His absurd position on the authenticity of Archaeopteryx attests to that. Wikramasinghe was apparently his student and shared many of his ideas, including the ones about Archaeopteryx. It seems to me that they formed some pretty solid theories about the cosmological origins of various molecules fundamental to known life, along with some less sound, but still compelling theories about the origins of life itself, and then some over the top wild speculation and wishful thinking.
The question is, can we get enough chrome to chrome the moon?
For me, the only reason to worry about whether it's the "official" character or not is to determine if the story fits within the canon or not. The thing is, we're living in a post-continuity world as far as characters like Superman are concerned. Every incarnation in every medium stands alone. The continuity in the comics is bjorked to Krypton and back and the editors have no qualms about retconning and re-retconning and rebooting and re-inventing and re-imagining.
Well, the people who actually published the review are certainly being silenced. They've also been put in a position where, if journalistic integrity were actually important to people these days and if the people doing the review were serious journalists, they would have no choice but to either resign or lose all respect as journalists. Instead, it seems that this is just going to pass with a shrug. This is the true face of corruption. It creeps in until no-one can be bothered to care or act because it would be only so much spitting against the wind.
All that said, it doesn't seem to be illegal. It's sort of photographic negative of activity that could constitute false advertising. It does put them in a potentially liable position if they ever give the product of a competitor a bad review without a big, obvious disclaimer. It's also utterly disgusting, but it's not illegal.
Unfortunately, by extension, the government could legally apply pressure to, extort, pressure, or simply pay the press to report the way they want. While there are too many channels to control the entirety of the press this way, the parts of the press that aren't vulnerable to this only reach a small margin of the people. Of course, the lunatic fringe segment of the press would probably reach a larger segment of the population, which would make it easy for people to lump the honest press in with the loonies.
Accepted by the deployer, usually not the deployee. Then the deployers often end up surprised that some of the deployees carry a grudge about the whole thing.
I'm not really think of Mark Zuckeberg specifically, just the fetishism about avoiding "distinctly wrong attire". Maybe it's just that I don't like being choked by neck ties. The arguments for following these conventions have always just seemed too circular for me to take them seriously. I don't jump off bridges just because everyone else is doing it either.
The problem with that is that the concern about people wearing the "wrong attire" thing is one of those stupid social feedback loop things. All the arguments for wearing it are circular. Of course, plenty of things are based on such circularity but still manage to make some sense. The problem is, the same logic applies to whatever attire is required to conform and show respect to all the other people following the same trend in just about any place and time. Imagine showing up to the court of Elizabeth I without your ruff and hose and garter but instead in modern business wear. Or in the court of Phillip IV with a ruff. How about in a Ming dynasty court with a modern short nail manicure? Having supposedly correct attire for doing business is just one of those fashion things fundamentally no different from foot-binding, skull shaping, lip discs, circumcision, bellbottom jeans, etc.
...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
All of those options were available at the time. He was killed by Young after they had established a gate connection to the planet, so all the resources of the ship were available including the minds of trauma surgeons on Earth dropped into any body they chose (the stones were fully operational in that episode as one of the characters mentions that she's just made a report to the IOA during these events). Turns out I did forget that they were able to lift the debris, they just stopped because the pressure was holding the wound closed. A tourniquet is not a sophisticated or difficult piece of medical technology. His odds of bleeding to death may have been fairly high if he was extracted, but his odds of dying were 100% with the treatment method they ended up using.
When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia.
That would be exactly the situation here. The only options were to either euthanize him, or leave him there in pain to die alone. He asked for the former, and got it.
That's nowhere near the situation. I said _chronic_ pain. Acute, temporary and treatable pain is an entirely different animal. When someone is asking for death in a situation like that, the ethical thing to do is to refuse because they're not in their right mind. Deciding if someone's plea for death should be fulfilled is obviously fraught with ethical problems. The first question is whether the problem they have is treatable. In his case, the answer was yes, so immediately euthanasia is probably contraindicated. Two other questions that come into play, however, are quality of life and how long the patient will have to suffer (and consequently how long until they change their mind about wanting to die). For quality of life, he would have been fine. He might have lost one or both legs, but keeping both was still a distinct possibility. Recuperation time measured in months at most. As for the length of time until he changed his mind about wanting to die you can start by asking: "will he want to die next year because of this injury?" The answer is clearly "no". It's the same for next month, next week, next day. It's probably "no" for the very next hour if they got him out of there and into surgery on the ship.
Long story short, the people in charge on the ship were all criminally incompetent. Outright violent psychopaths in some cases as well.
Nope. The ship had already jumped once, but they'd ended up back in range (and at that point, Rush could control the jumping of the ship) and had plenty of time. Young hangs around the corpse he just created for a long time after killing him. They never even bring in a surgeon from Earth, even though they have plenty of time to do so and their one medic is apparently completely incompetent even though, with the available technology they could have been sending her to med school on Earth every day for most of the trip. Even under time constraints, putting a tourniquet on a leg and cutting it off doesn't take that long. If there's trouble getting through the bones, they had explosives and guns. Gruesome medicine, but not so gruesome as killing someone who could have survived. For that matter, I just re-read a transcript of the episode, and it turns out they were even able to lift the debris off him, but it was slowing the bleeding. So, they could have applied a tourniquet, lifted it off, then rushed him back to the ship for surgery.
There really isn't any excuse for it. If you take the situation at face value, then it's criminal incompetence. If you don't, then it's bad writing.
Simulations of nuclear weapons vs. asteroids typically show that the nukes mostly just heat the asteroid up. In space, there's no atmosphere to superheat into an airburst, so a nuclear explosion consists of the vaporised remains of the bomb and the delivery vehicle and a lot of radiation. At the speeds involved, there's only about a 50 millisecond window to even detonate a nuke near enough to an asteroid that's approaching us for it to have any effect. Even if the timing is just right, a maximum of 50% of the energy of the nuke is going to hit the asteroid, and it's really going to be more like 10%. As has been mentioned, we pretty much have to hit the asteroid on approach, because it's going to be a lot harder to catch up to while it's moving away. If we do manage to blow it up, then we go from one large body travelling in a fairly predictable path to a number of objects of varying size travelling on less predictable paths, so if it's not going to hit us, we're better off not blowing it into pieces that might hit us. Also, we might have a lot of nuclear warheads, but we don't have anywhere near as many rockets capable of getting the payload to the asteroid. Nuking it might be cathartic, but there are a lot of problems with the idea.
The big problem with Stargate: Universe was the plot induced stupidity in the characters. They were clearly trying to emulate the grim, gritty BSG which had plenty of its own plot-induced stupidity. Trouble is, it gets hard to ignore it when the plot-induced stupidity railroads the characters to irredeemable actions. There were plenty of these. Certainly enough that several main characters should have been relieved of all authority and locked up for the whole trip. The one that got to me the most was when there was a character trapped by the legs after a shuttle crash and, at his request, the commander suffocates him to death. I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off. When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia. When a patient is in transitory pain, no matter how extreme, but has excellent prospects for survival without pain, you simply shouldn't consider their requests since they're not in their right minds. That kind of nonsense, leaving you with no choice but to either pretend big chunks of the show didn't happen or hate some of the main characters, tends to wreck a show.
Sort of reminds of the first and only episode of Star Trek: Enterprise I watched. It was titled "Dear Doctor". In it, the captain and the ships doctor have a cure for an illness that's killing off the population of a planet who they've agreed to help. They decide, based on some crazy nazi-style eugenics destiny argument (with allusions to the not yet established Prime Directive), that the population is destined to die off in favor of another intelligent species that lives on the planet with them. So they withhold the cure as the "ethical" thing to do, but still present them with a partial treatment, then go on their merry way.
Generally speaking, I don't have a problem with fiction with characters that morally flawed. Humans are often morally flawed. The problem is when the fictional treatment also puts these criminally incompetent characters on a pedestal.
Since they're an insurance company, in the business of making legal bets of the form: if X happens to you, we pay you $Y, it would seem that they're under contractual obligation to pay out if X happens. So, they actually do have a contractual obligation not to go bankrupt from paying out claims. When the X in question is "this mortgage is defaulted on", it all ties together quite nicely.
Actually, I think the reason no democratic country has ever suffered a famine is because of Scotsmen. Specifically the elusive no true Scotsman. The original quote from Amartya Sen was more like: "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy." The problem is, the existence of a large-scale, pervasive famine would almost certainly guaranty that a democracy would cease to be considered functioning. Which makes the original quote essentially a tautology. There have certainly been failed democracies that experienced famines. Also, plenty of minor famines have happened in democracies. Some examples include India and the United States. Democracy is neat and all, but it's not a panacea.
Ok, terrible to reply to a robospam post. I'm just wondering if a post offering "Cheap NFL Jerseys from China" in a story about a Chinese counterfeiting operation is irony or some sort of slightly confused bot that actually read the summary and thought the post might be a relevant product pitch?
Titan's atmosphere is mostly N2, with something like 5% methane. The lakes are just lakes and not counted as part of the atmosphere, although obviously evaporated material from the lakes will make up part of the atmosphere.
Quite right. Very little need for filler gases as long as oxygen partial pressure is right. Humans should be able to acclimate. They probably should be able to anyway. There might be special health problems that would affect some people over time. I mean, we've tested plenty of people in oxygen only atmospheres at about 1/3 atmosphere in space and on the ground, but they've been pretty universally healthy and haven't had to live that way for decades. They also haven't been exposed for decades. I would expect there to be some health problems for humans under those conditions their entire lives that wouldn't be typical on Earth (for example, what happens to lungs that are geared to work at a certain level if they're underworked due to a thinner atmosphere), probably offset somewhat by a lower incidence of other problems.
I wouldn't worry too much about boiling blood either. As you said, internal pressure and enthalpy. Also, none of our important body fluids are strictly speaking just water. For starters, we're talking about a saline solution, then globulins and glucose, etc. I'm pretty sure all of those raise the boiling point.
Darn, I read your comment and immediately wanted to go to Titan for all the yummy candy atmosphere of titanthat makes up its atmosphere. :) Of course, Titan's atmosphere seems to be mostly composed of Nitrogen and Methane, neither of which is denser than N2 or O2, (especially with one of them actually being N2). So, you're wrong, sorry. Also, I should point out the atmosphere of Venus, which is about 93 times as dense as the atmosphere of Earth. The point is that, while the surface gravity and diameter of a planet probably do set an upper limit on how dense an atmosphere the planet can hold, planets like Earth and Mars are nowhere near those limits. There's no strictly gravitational reason Mars can't hold an atmosphere as dense as ours. There are long term problems with it, such as interaction with solar wind, of course.
How about base jumping inside the Vehicle Assembly Building?
Well, I always thought that geosynchronous orbits all had a semi-major axis out to 42,164 km, so that it did imply a specific distance. In any case, for clarity, I should have said geostationary. It just doesn't abbreviate as nicely and I was already doing enough typing . :)
The one saving grace of Unobtanium in movies is that at least they don't just use an existing substance and then say really bizarre things about it. Take the recent _Avengers_ movie. Apparently iridium comes from meteorites (sort of technically true, but a bit misleading) and if you want to get some, you have to murder a bunch of people and steal it from a big vault. Instead of just going online and buying it. I would almost rather they just called it Unobtanium. Or, since the Marvel universe has rich history of fictitious materials, just use Adamantium or Vibranium or Omnium or something.
Talking about best alien invader stories makes me think about some of the worst. I think the prize has to go to _Signs_ with the aliens whose best attack is a poison gas finger and who could conquer the Earth if only they could invent rain wear. It even manages to edge out _Plan 9 from Outer Space_.
As for the exotic matter, who knows what unusual properties we'll find if we're ever able to make the attempt. But we certainly can't rely in any way on magical unknowns. As you say, most of the technologies that would actually let you build a space elevator probably obsolete it. Still, some sort of active structure like a space fountain or a launch loop may be possible. Or there might be some way to support a traditional space elevator at various points along its length with solar sail setups, some sort of interactions with fleets of satellites, orbital rings, etc. Who knows. At this point, we seem to be better off looking at other options.
On geosynchronous vs geostationary, I really only meant the distance and, despite what you said, geosynchronous does imply a certain distance. A geostationary orbit is just a circular geosynchronous orbit and both have the same semi-major axis and therefore imply the same distance from Earth for the purposes of this discussion. As far as a traditional beanstalk goes, it's not exactly in what you would call orbit since it's physically tethered to the Earth, so it's not in geostationary or geosynchronous orbit. The center of gravity should actually be somewhere at least slightly beyond geosynchronous orbit.
On objects burning up. I won't deny that it is a complicated question, but it seems to me that there are more or less two possibilities. In one, the cable (probably a ribbon) comes down gently and might cause some accidents and damage, but is mainly just a nuisance. In the other, the cable comes down hard and burns up. Either way, it shouldn't cause very much devastation on the ground.
On unobtanium. Completely agree there. Sadly, it's become some sort of film convention and film directors are film directors. Sad, but there's not much to be done about it. It can get worse. How about movies where the aliens are attacking because they want our water. You know, because it powers their civilization. You can tell it's the water they're after because the sea level has dropped enough for people to notice in the few hours since they arrived. Naturally the mind boggling levels of energy involved even in just displacing that much water can't be used to just burn off all the inhabited areas of Earth. Ever notice that no technologically advanced aliens who just want to exterminate us actually seem to have any weapons of mass destruction anywhere near as effective as ours? Bleh. This is leading to an entirely different rant.
As for wierd synthetic baryonic matter with previously unseen properties, don't give up too soon. Remember, it's not the density that's important, it's the strength to weight ratio. If you can increase the strength enough, it won't matter. It might be completely impossible, or not useful even if it is possible, but it's nice to know that there might be some wiggle room in there.
who cares about the first few hundred kilometers? They will be the thinnest portion of the cable, and won't fall far enough to have built up any real speed.
The point about the first few hundred kilometers was that they would be a special case, either being inside the atmosphere already, or not having far enough to fall, or enough extra inertial energy to pack any sort of wallop once they hit the atmosphere. Beyond that, the remainder of the cable will smack the atmosphere pretty hard and probably be destroyed.
burn up when falling
any references for this? I suspect otherwise.
Any references for objects moving at orbital speeds burning up in the atmosphere? Are you joking? I could probably find a few hundred concrete examples if I felt I needed to prove it
The vast majority of the heat generated by a de-orbiting object is a result of extreme compression in the shockwave leading the object, very little is due to air friction. So at least unless/until it starts entering the atmosphere horizontally a cable would be mostly shielded from any sort of extreme heating by the cable below it having already pushed the air out of the way. Moreover, the upper portions of the cable will be being continuously pulled "downwards" by the lower ones, which will be experiencing greater gravitational acceleration, so the entire cable might well enter the atmosphere fairly vertically.
So, after misunderstanding my claim about the first few hundred kilometers to mean that the whole cable would come straight down in one spot and correcting me by saying that it would "wrap itself around the planet", you're now saying that it would come down in one spot. Down in one precise spot the exact shape of the cross-section of the cable no less, for there to be no compression.
A material actually strong enough to support its own weight to geosynch wouldn't need to thicken at all
You're wrong there
No I'm not. That sentence (sentence fragment, actually), taken by itself is completely correct. A cable with a breaking length of something like 5000 km under a hypothetical normalized sea-level gravity could reach geosynch with uniform thickness. I did not say that was practical, I merely stated it as a fact. The rest of the sentence was ", but would have a strength to weight ratio slightly higher than the most optimistic projections for carbon nanotubes". The point was that tapering was almost certainly practical, and almost certainly necessary, but in our hypothetical universe with materials where the space elevator becomes a possibility, the taper doesn't need to be as extreme as you were suggesting. The stronger the material relative to its weight, the less thickening is required
- *any* plausible cable will thicken exponentially with altitude, otherwise you're just including a lot of wasted strength and weight on the lower sections.
Yes, any practical cable will certainly taper, but the degree of taper depends on the tensile strength/weight ratio of the material. For very strong materials, the taper is very slight and, if it expands too quickly, you end up including a lot of wasted strength and weight in the _upper_ sections. Also, the thickening is not a straightforward exponential thickening, the curve does grow all the way, but it reaches a peak of growth and then the growth flattens off towards geosynch. The actual formula is more complex.
Even carbon nanotube is expected to have a non-tapered breaking length of only about 5-6000km.
Yes, at _sea level_ (or normalized sea-level gravity, anyway). Gravity at geosynch is about 1/50th of sea level gravity. It decreases by the inverse square law from sea-level up.
Being strong enough to support its own weight simply means that it is in fact *conceivable* to thicken fast enough
It became a non-issue even earlier than that. It actually happened as soon as plane passengers on flight 93 realized what the hijackers were planning.
Hmm. I'm not sure that kosher or halal requirements have anything to say about the location where, for example, cattle are slaughtered. But they do touch on the spiritual "cleanliness" of how the animal was slaughtered, and kosher and halal foods do tend to be labeled and the adherents take the labels very seriously. The rules are also open to some interpretation. I wouldn't be surprised if there were rabbis and imams who would object to kosher or halal labelling for meat slaughtered on the site of a massacre.