Do neutrons react weakly with matter? That's kind of news to me. In fact, the radiation damage that you mention would seem unlikely to happen if the neutrons interact weakly. Are you sure you're not thinking of neutrinos with that first line? The rest of the post seems to make sense. There are some fusion reactions which don't directly produce neutrons, such as hydrogen-boron-11, but even those would almost certainly produce some neutrons through secondary effects.
Achieving break-even fusion seems like it has to be an eventually achievable goal. After all, stars show us that it's just a matter of scale in the end and it's been achieved non-sustainably with fusion bombs (some have argued that sustainable fusion power is achievable now by detonating fusion bombs in giant underground chambers). The question I have is, once we have sustainable fusion reactors, are they really viable as a general-use power source? The reason I wonder is because, unlike stars which run on plain-old single proton hydrogen, most sustainable fusion reactors seem to require tritium or other reasonably exotic isotopes. There aren't really any natural processes that concentrate tritium that I'm aware of, so we either need to concentrate it or make it ourselves through other nuclear reactions. That's fine for experimental reactors, military applications, space missions, etc. where it doesn't matter if the fuel costs more per unit of output energy than other power generation methods. The question is whether the fuel can be supplied in a way that is economic and sustainable for regular power generation. Has anyone done any work on what a future fuel supply chain for fusion power would look like?
Don't get me wrong, even if fusion power will never be viable versus say solar power (which is, after all, just a way of capturing the output of a natural fusion reactor), I still think that it's worthwhile developing it simply for the increased understanding we'll gain, let alone the applications in space and other endeavours where fuel cost is not the primary concern. I'm just wondering if we'll end up with the situation where we have workable fusion reactors, but fuelling them economically will be the next advance that will continuously be 20 years away. Also I wonder if they will be another power source that looks good on paper until you consider the externalities. You know the sort of thing: marvellously clean and cheap reactor fuelled by a chain of very dirty and expensive mining and fuel processing operations.
Obviously there are a number of potential fuels for fusion and some are cheaper and easier to get than tritium. In an ideal world, we would be able to use regular hydrogen in which case we're swimming in fuel. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that, even if we could replicate the conditions of the core of the sun, a reactor that could power the city of New York running on regular hydrogen fuel would need to mass many times more than the entire city, so it seems like we'd need to develop some truly amazing fusion technology to use regular hydrogen for fusion fuel.
Pretty difficult for the two party system in the USA to vanish unless the US changes the way it conducts voting. The US (it's actually up to individual states, but they pretty much all do it the same way) works on a "one man, one vote, for one candidate" simple plurality system. Each person gets one vote which they cast in favor of the one candidate they want to win. Naively, this seems like a good system. In fact, it's the perfect system... when there are exactly two choices (also when there's one or zero choices, but that's not really relevant to anything). Such a system is perfect for voting on bills. Yea or nay (abstaining is also a choice, but also isn't really relevant for this discussion) is fine for choosing something binary such as whether to adopt a bill or not, but it stinks for deciding between 3+ candidates. The primary reason for this is the so-called "spoiler effect", best known in recent times for "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush", but it also meant that a vote for Perot was a vote for Clinton, and so on. Essentially, it forces people to compromise on something that needn't be compromised on. Essentially you have to game the system and choose the least worst candidate with an actual chance to win rather than choosing the candidate you want, because if you choose the candidate you want, you "split the vote" and the candidate you least want is sure to win.
There are a lot of ways around this problem. For starters, any other single pass voting method that isn't crazy (like throwing a dart at a board) is better. All known single pass methods do contain paradoxes (I'm not sure if anyone has proven that they _must_ contain paradoxes), but none of them have a paradox as bad as the method that's being used. Beyond those, there are all kinds of multi-pass methods that can work. This is the 21st century, and a country that prides itself on being democratic should be doing it right.
They didn't exactly have that as a written spec though. It was just outside the range they'd tested and all the people who knew better said not to do it. You might consider it unfair to lump the administrative and political aspects of the shuttle in with its physical technical limitations, but those factors weren't really separable. The shuttle wasn't really just the one craft, it was the whole system, which includes all the support staff, the procedures and the administrative structure.
The jury is still out on the Star Trek "reboot" movie? I watched it in the theatres when it came out. I should preface the next thing I say by pointing out that I have eclectic tastes and can enjoy just about anything. As a dumb action-comedy/self-parody movie, I found the movie enjoyable enough. As part of the actual Star Trek franchise though, the jury is in. It wasn't any good.
For starters, it's a time travel story. Time travel stories can be quite good sometimes, but 90% of Star Trek time travel stories aren't very good. You have to be very careful with time travel as a plot point. Beyond that: * Red matter? They drill to the core of a planet to turn it into a black hole with something called "red matter". The stuff works without needing to be at the core of a planet, which means you could destroy a planet just by dropping some on the surface, but the villains still need to drill a hole to the core.
* Crazy villains. It's common for villains to be crazy. But the villains in this story were cloudcuckooland nutso crazy. Their planet blows up, so they go after someone who was trying to stop it for revenge. They end up back in time and then wait around for decades for him to show up so they can commit genocide a few times while he watches. All this for love of their lost empire. For some reason, despite being from the future, with advanced technological knowledge and future technology in their possession, they don't hook up with their beloved empire and share the technology.
* Wacky supernova. Despite a supernova being a natural phenomenon we understand pretty well and not one of the wacky "anomalies" that crop up in the Star Trek universe, it apparently manages to hit the entire Romulan empire at once by surprise (they knew it was coming, but it supposedly arrived early), even though everyone and their mother has FTL communication and starships. For that to happen, the entire Romulan empire would need to be in one star system and the star of that system would have had to be the one that went supernova, which means that an entire technologically advanced civilization was living for centuries with sufficient technology to evacuate in a place they would have to know was doomed at any moment.
*Wacky supernova solution. Red matter makes black holes. Got it. How exactly does that stop a supernova, which is the big explosion when a Star collapses into a black hole?
*Wacky chases. Guy runs from space monster. Monster gets attacked by bigger monster which then chases guy. This isn't action movie stuff, this is wacky comedy stuff. This is the sort of thing that happens to Wile E. Coyote, not captains of the Enterprise. This is just stupid and it this sort of thing happens way too much in movies these days. Either directors or general audiences are clearly taking too much crack.
There are all kinds of other problems. Of course plenty of stuff like this is present in all kinds of other Star Trek material, but it's all present in the stuff that we put our faces in our hands and groan for, not the good stuff. Lots of directors (especially those like Bay), just really don't seem to get it. This seems to have always been the case. Just look at all the Batman movies made by the people who seemed to have their minds stuck on the old TV show.
You make the fuel in situ from local resources. You can use nuclear or maybe solar power. You can then make methane and oxygen out of Martian CO2 and hydrogen. To get the hydrogen, either you ship the hydrogen there (8 tons of hydrogen lets you make 112 tons of methane and oxygen), or you use martian water and electrolysis to generate the hydrogen for the process. Aside from that, you could also mine for perchlorates and process plenty of other martian resources to make fuel. The methane plan has a lot of appeal though because, if you bring the hydrogen along, all you have to do is set up your power supply (either a self-contained nuclear reactor or tons of high-efficiency thin-film solar cells which could be spread out and staked down by robots) and suck in atmosphere. If you don't bring the hydrogen, you need to mine for water, but that's considerably easier than mining for just about anything else, or you can possibly extract water from the extremely tiny quantities in the martian atmosphere, but that would probably never be practical.
As the Rogers Commission report showed, NASA management held that the shuttle would catastrophically fail about 1 out of every 100,000 flights, which is a ridiculous figure. The engineers more realistically put it between 1 out of every 100 flights and 1 out of every 50. Reality put it at about 1 out of every 68 flights. I'm not sure what the human-rating requirements were before the two shuttle disasters, but the current standards are 1 catastrophe in every 500 ascents and 1 in every 500 descents, so the Shuttle would have had a long way to go to meet those standards. Of course, NASA doesn't actually have any spacecraft that meet those new standards and it's about 100% probable that, if a new craft is developed that the engineers say doesn't meet those standards, NASA will find a way to say it meets those standards anyway.
In a lot of ways the shuttle was a monstrosity designed by multiple committees (some of them purely political). It should have become obvious after a short period of time that, even if a cheap re-usable spacecraft were possible, it simply wasn't possible for NASA to manage it. If they have to rebuild the entire thing every time they fly it anyway, it would have made more sense to make it out of new parts every time rather than extensively (and expensively) testing all the old ones.
Elon Musk, or someone else, might be able to make a re-usable craft work, or find a good way to knock off lots of cheap, but high-quality craft. The price point from the article might be unrealistic, but the overall goal is a good one. Send a craft to Mars, refuel there, send it back. Do enough of those and all of the other costs (like maintaining the launch facilities and all the controllers, etc.) can be amortized across all the launches, resulting in much cheaper launches.
His numbers may not be realistic, but neither is your criticism. As far as fuel costs go, they're a miniscule portion of the overall costs of launching something like the space shuttle. If you were able to get all those other costs down so that the fuel costs were a major part of the launch rather than a rounding error, then that 500,000 gallons of fuel could be had for $500,000 at $1 per gallon (not incredibly unrealistic given current prices) and a vessel carrying a number of people, each paying $500,000 could be launched. On Mars, the craft would be refueled with fuel produced in situ. With good recycling of water and oxygen, the supplies needed for the whole trip wouldn't really be that extreme, especially if you can fill up on water again on Mars.
The $500,000 per passenger figure probably isn't all that realistic, but he is absolutely right that there's no reason, if economies of scale come into play, that space travel, even to Mars, couldn't come down to a fraction of what it costs today. Comparing what he's suggesting to the absolutely ridiculous costs of the space shuttle is crazy.
Well, basalt contains Feldspar, which consists of Al2Si2O8 in combination with either calcium, sodium or potassium. The aluminium and oxygen certainly could be used in rocket fuel. Plenty of other Martian resources can be used for rocket fuel also. There are available perchlorates. There's also the CO2 rich atmosphere and available water. Using electricity (from nuclear or solar power) hydrogen can be obtained from the water, then the hydrogen can be used to make methane with the CO2.
Properly dehydrated and compacted it should work fine in a hybrid rocket. It could also be used to make methane, which can be used as a liquid propellant.
We seem to have taken a big jump from where we were for the "it" in that statement to be intelligent design I said:
Basically, "Intelligent Design" as the origin of life is a logical dodge, just like Panspermia
Note the "as the origin of life", there. You then wrote:
It's not a dodge. It's answering a different question
But since the question was "the origin of life", I thought that answering a different question that avoids the actual origin of life itself (because an "Intelligent Designer" would be alive, but left unexplained" definitely constituted a dodge, so I wrote. I was confused by what "it" meant in that context because you essentially jumped the track logically speaking with that.
There was some reality show where they broke in and robbed businesses (with the owners prior consent) that I saw an episode of once. Can't remember the name of it. Anyway, they broke into a bar and stole a number of things, including a number of liquor bottles. In their summation, they talked about the value of what they'd stolen. They valued the liquor in something like the high tens of thousands of dollars, clearly based on the fact that, sold shot by shot, that's how much money the bar can make from selling it. It was ridiculous of course since real thieves would never get that much for it, and it was also drastically above what replacing it would cost the bar-owner.
I'm sorry, but what are you even talking about? In "The question it is trying to answer is teleology, not methodology" what thing are you referring to when you say "it". If the answer is the search for the origins of species and of life itself, then saying that the question it is trying to answer is teleology is begging the question since you're presupposing that, by searching for the origins of life, you're searching for an intelligent creator. If "it" refers to the question you're trying to answer when you find tractors on an alien planet, then teleology comes into it, but only after you've determined that you're probably looking at something artificial (hence the contrived example uses tractors, which a human can tell are highly unlikely to not be artificial from a quick glance). Of course, if the tractors are the only evidence of intelligent life there, the very first thing you specifically have to check is if humans made them. If you find something you think is intelligently designed and you know of only one set of intelligent designers, the most logical first step is to assume that the object was designed by the intelligent designers you know of. The whole example, including the straw man imbecile first year philosophy student, is ridiculous.
In any case, I don't just "feel" that intelligent design and Panspermia are dodges when you're trying to determine the origin of life and/or speciation, I'm objectively stating that they are. When you have a question you're trying to answer, substituting another question and answering that instead is a fallacy, especially when, once you've provided the "answer" you start waving your hands and saying "ok, you're done searching now, nothing more to search for".
This company isn't making solar cells themselves though, they've just developed a method of slicing silicon wafers thinner with less waste. Making giant silicon crystals is expensive, so you save money with less waste. You also save money since you're now getting more slices, which are just as useful for making solar cells as the thicker ones, from the same crystal. The resulting cells are also a bit lighter and thinner (although I think only a small part of the thickness and weight of a typical cell is the actual semiconductor) so shipping costs may go down fractionally. It will make solar cells made in China cheaper along with those made anywhere else.
I just did the calculations for myself based on $1 per watt solar panels (which work out to about $7.31 per actual average yearly watt at my location). I looked at my last few years of power bills and, based on what I would save, I would make the initial outlay back in 5 years without any subsidies and then the panels would continue to work for decades after that.
That information, if ever true, is total bunk with modern cells. The really expensive, high-efficiency, long lived and highly durable cells only make sense in places that can't be on grid. Regular mass-produced solar cells make sense pretty much everywhere currently, but they still haven't reached the price point where not using solar is completely stupid for most homeowners. It has reached the point where it's economical in about the five year range though.
It might be better to combine hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water with the Sabatier process to make methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. It would be a lot easier to store.
The best batteries currently are all variants on lithium-ion.
Are they? I was under the impression that, if you weren't worried about weight, which you aren't in home power storage, the best batteries were still lead-acid batteries.
They're "completely optional" in the cases where the advertising is necessary. In the cases where they're medically necessary the advertising serves no purpose except perhaps to get patients and doctors to choose one brand of drug that can achieve the desired result over the other. When you need medical treatment, the optional situation is to get a prescription for the drug or treatment that best suits your medical condition. The purpose of advertising is to pervert that.
It's not a dodge. It's answering a different question.
Errr... When the topic up for debate is a particular question and, instead of trying to answer it, you substitute a different question and answer that instead, that's a dodge. Claiming that it isn't is... well, it's all sorts of things. Let's just say it's odd.
Well, personally, I take multiple trips with multiple decoy cars and drivers on different routes. Several just with an empty box, without the lightbulb randomly interspersed with the actual light bulb drops. That way, even if someone manages to track the routes, they can never know which car the bulb is in or even if there is one in that drop. There are additional security procedures, but it wouldn't be wise for the sake of security to discuss them here.
Seriously though, the GP was using crazy logic on the costs of transporting the bulbs to the dump, etc. Proper accounting of costs doesn't count the entire cost of a trip to the dump in the disposal cost of a lightbulb unless you took the trip just to dispose of the lightbulb. Only crazy people do that.
You know, for stereotypical nerd behaviour like communicating to each other in incomprehensible jargon and obscure references that other people don't get, obsessive behaviour, dressing up in ridiculous costumes for gatherings, etc, I've come to realize that nothing beats a hard-core sports fan.
if you're model is good enough, you should be able to make money on sports betting on it.
Not against people whose model is just as good, and not (over the long term) against any professional gambling enterprise (legal casino or bookie) set up to profit whether you win or lose. A professional gambling outfit either takes a cut that negates all statistical advantages of having a good predictive method or they set up the odds so that they'll make back what they lost to you last time when you lose to them next time. The only people who make money reliably in gambling are those who have found a sucker or group of suckers to victimize.
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Do neutrons react weakly with matter? That's kind of news to me. In fact, the radiation damage that you mention would seem unlikely to happen if the neutrons interact weakly. Are you sure you're not thinking of neutrinos with that first line? The rest of the post seems to make sense. There are some fusion reactions which don't directly produce neutrons, such as hydrogen-boron-11, but even those would almost certainly produce some neutrons through secondary effects.
Achieving break-even fusion seems like it has to be an eventually achievable goal. After all, stars show us that it's just a matter of scale in the end and it's been achieved non-sustainably with fusion bombs (some have argued that sustainable fusion power is achievable now by detonating fusion bombs in giant underground chambers). The question I have is, once we have sustainable fusion reactors, are they really viable as a general-use power source? The reason I wonder is because, unlike stars which run on plain-old single proton hydrogen, most sustainable fusion reactors seem to require tritium or other reasonably exotic isotopes. There aren't really any natural processes that concentrate tritium that I'm aware of, so we either need to concentrate it or make it ourselves through other nuclear reactions. That's fine for experimental reactors, military applications, space missions, etc. where it doesn't matter if the fuel costs more per unit of output energy than other power generation methods. The question is whether the fuel can be supplied in a way that is economic and sustainable for regular power generation. Has anyone done any work on what a future fuel supply chain for fusion power would look like?
Don't get me wrong, even if fusion power will never be viable versus say solar power (which is, after all, just a way of capturing the output of a natural fusion reactor), I still think that it's worthwhile developing it simply for the increased understanding we'll gain, let alone the applications in space and other endeavours where fuel cost is not the primary concern. I'm just wondering if we'll end up with the situation where we have workable fusion reactors, but fuelling them economically will be the next advance that will continuously be 20 years away. Also I wonder if they will be another power source that looks good on paper until you consider the externalities. You know the sort of thing: marvellously clean and cheap reactor fuelled by a chain of very dirty and expensive mining and fuel processing operations.
Obviously there are a number of potential fuels for fusion and some are cheaper and easier to get than tritium. In an ideal world, we would be able to use regular hydrogen in which case we're swimming in fuel. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that, even if we could replicate the conditions of the core of the sun, a reactor that could power the city of New York running on regular hydrogen fuel would need to mass many times more than the entire city, so it seems like we'd need to develop some truly amazing fusion technology to use regular hydrogen for fusion fuel.
Pretty difficult for the two party system in the USA to vanish unless the US changes the way it conducts voting. The US (it's actually up to individual states, but they pretty much all do it the same way) works on a "one man, one vote, for one candidate" simple plurality system. Each person gets one vote which they cast in favor of the one candidate they want to win. Naively, this seems like a good system. In fact, it's the perfect system... when there are exactly two choices (also when there's one or zero choices, but that's not really relevant to anything). Such a system is perfect for voting on bills. Yea or nay (abstaining is also a choice, but also isn't really relevant for this discussion) is fine for choosing something binary such as whether to adopt a bill or not, but it stinks for deciding between 3+ candidates. The primary reason for this is the so-called "spoiler effect", best known in recent times for "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush", but it also meant that a vote for Perot was a vote for Clinton, and so on. Essentially, it forces people to compromise on something that needn't be compromised on. Essentially you have to game the system and choose the least worst candidate with an actual chance to win rather than choosing the candidate you want, because if you choose the candidate you want, you "split the vote" and the candidate you least want is sure to win.
There are a lot of ways around this problem. For starters, any other single pass voting method that isn't crazy (like throwing a dart at a board) is better. All known single pass methods do contain paradoxes (I'm not sure if anyone has proven that they _must_ contain paradoxes), but none of them have a paradox as bad as the method that's being used. Beyond those, there are all kinds of multi-pass methods that can work. This is the 21st century, and a country that prides itself on being democratic should be doing it right.
They didn't exactly have that as a written spec though. It was just outside the range they'd tested and all the people who knew better said not to do it. You might consider it unfair to lump the administrative and political aspects of the shuttle in with its physical technical limitations, but those factors weren't really separable. The shuttle wasn't really just the one craft, it was the whole system, which includes all the support staff, the procedures and the administrative structure.
The jury is still out on the Star Trek "reboot" movie? I watched it in the theatres when it came out. I should preface the next thing I say by pointing out that I have eclectic tastes and can enjoy just about anything. As a dumb action-comedy/self-parody movie, I found the movie enjoyable enough. As part of the actual Star Trek franchise though, the jury is in. It wasn't any good.
For starters, it's a time travel story. Time travel stories can be quite good sometimes, but 90% of Star Trek time travel stories aren't very good. You have to be very careful with time travel as a plot point. Beyond that:
* Red matter? They drill to the core of a planet to turn it into a black hole with something called "red matter". The stuff works without needing to be at the core of a planet, which means you could destroy a planet just by dropping some on the surface, but the villains still need to drill a hole to the core.
* Crazy villains. It's common for villains to be crazy. But the villains in this story were cloudcuckooland nutso crazy. Their planet blows up, so they go after someone who was trying to stop it for revenge. They end up back in time and then wait around for decades for him to show up so they can commit genocide a few times while he watches. All this for love of their lost empire. For some reason, despite being from the future, with advanced technological knowledge and future technology in their possession, they don't hook up with their beloved empire and share the technology.
* Wacky supernova. Despite a supernova being a natural phenomenon we understand pretty well and not one of the wacky "anomalies" that crop up in the Star Trek universe, it apparently manages to hit the entire Romulan empire at once by surprise (they knew it was coming, but it supposedly arrived early), even though everyone and their mother has FTL communication and starships. For that to happen, the entire Romulan empire would need to be in one star system and the star of that system would have had to be the one that went supernova, which means that an entire technologically advanced civilization was living for centuries with sufficient technology to evacuate in a place they would have to know was doomed at any moment.
*Wacky supernova solution. Red matter makes black holes. Got it. How exactly does that stop a supernova, which is the big explosion when a Star collapses into a black hole?
*Wacky chases. Guy runs from space monster. Monster gets attacked by bigger monster which then chases guy. This isn't action movie stuff, this is wacky comedy stuff. This is the sort of thing that happens to Wile E. Coyote, not captains of the Enterprise. This is just stupid and it this sort of thing happens way too much in movies these days. Either directors or general audiences are clearly taking too much crack.
There are all kinds of other problems. Of course plenty of stuff like this is present in all kinds of other Star Trek material, but it's all present in the stuff that we put our faces in our hands and groan for, not the good stuff. Lots of directors (especially those like Bay), just really don't seem to get it. This seems to have always been the case. Just look at all the Batman movies made by the people who seemed to have their minds stuck on the old TV show.
You make the fuel in situ from local resources. You can use nuclear or maybe solar power. You can then make methane and oxygen out of Martian CO2 and hydrogen. To get the hydrogen, either you ship the hydrogen there (8 tons of hydrogen lets you make 112 tons of methane and oxygen), or you use martian water and electrolysis to generate the hydrogen for the process. Aside from that, you could also mine for perchlorates and process plenty of other martian resources to make fuel. The methane plan has a lot of appeal though because, if you bring the hydrogen along, all you have to do is set up your power supply (either a self-contained nuclear reactor or tons of high-efficiency thin-film solar cells which could be spread out and staked down by robots) and suck in atmosphere. If you don't bring the hydrogen, you need to mine for water, but that's considerably easier than mining for just about anything else, or you can possibly extract water from the extremely tiny quantities in the martian atmosphere, but that would probably never be practical.
The trick is that once you get partway there, you'll be dead from some random solar flare's radiation
While radiation risks in space are certainly real, the actual odds of what you suggest happening are very small.
As the Rogers Commission report showed, NASA management held that the shuttle would catastrophically fail about 1 out of every 100,000 flights, which is a ridiculous figure. The engineers more realistically put it between 1 out of every 100 flights and 1 out of every 50. Reality put it at about 1 out of every 68 flights. I'm not sure what the human-rating requirements were before the two shuttle disasters, but the current standards are 1 catastrophe in every 500 ascents and 1 in every 500 descents, so the Shuttle would have had a long way to go to meet those standards. Of course, NASA doesn't actually have any spacecraft that meet those new standards and it's about 100% probable that, if a new craft is developed that the engineers say doesn't meet those standards, NASA will find a way to say it meets those standards anyway.
In a lot of ways the shuttle was a monstrosity designed by multiple committees (some of them purely political). It should have become obvious after a short period of time that, even if a cheap re-usable spacecraft were possible, it simply wasn't possible for NASA to manage it. If they have to rebuild the entire thing every time they fly it anyway, it would have made more sense to make it out of new parts every time rather than extensively (and expensively) testing all the old ones.
Elon Musk, or someone else, might be able to make a re-usable craft work, or find a good way to knock off lots of cheap, but high-quality craft. The price point from the article might be unrealistic, but the overall goal is a good one. Send a craft to Mars, refuel there, send it back. Do enough of those and all of the other costs (like maintaining the launch facilities and all the controllers, etc.) can be amortized across all the launches, resulting in much cheaper launches.
His numbers may not be realistic, but neither is your criticism. As far as fuel costs go, they're a miniscule portion of the overall costs of launching something like the space shuttle. If you were able to get all those other costs down so that the fuel costs were a major part of the launch rather than a rounding error, then that 500,000 gallons of fuel could be had for $500,000 at $1 per gallon (not incredibly unrealistic given current prices) and a vessel carrying a number of people, each paying $500,000 could be launched. On Mars, the craft would be refueled with fuel produced in situ. With good recycling of water and oxygen, the supplies needed for the whole trip wouldn't really be that extreme, especially if you can fill up on water again on Mars.
The $500,000 per passenger figure probably isn't all that realistic, but he is absolutely right that there's no reason, if economies of scale come into play, that space travel, even to Mars, couldn't come down to a fraction of what it costs today. Comparing what he's suggesting to the absolutely ridiculous costs of the space shuttle is crazy.
Well, basalt contains Feldspar, which consists of Al2Si2O8 in combination with either calcium, sodium or potassium. The aluminium and oxygen certainly could be used in rocket fuel. Plenty of other Martian resources can be used for rocket fuel also. There are available perchlorates. There's also the CO2 rich atmosphere and available water. Using electricity (from nuclear or solar power) hydrogen can be obtained from the water, then the hydrogen can be used to make methane with the CO2.
Properly dehydrated and compacted it should work fine in a hybrid rocket. It could also be used to make methane, which can be used as a liquid propellant.
We seem to have taken a big jump from where we were for the "it" in that statement to be intelligent design I said:
Basically, "Intelligent Design" as the origin of life is a logical dodge, just like Panspermia
Note the "as the origin of life", there. You then wrote:
It's not a dodge. It's answering a different question
But since the question was "the origin of life", I thought that answering a different question that avoids the actual origin of life itself (because an "Intelligent Designer" would be alive, but left unexplained" definitely constituted a dodge, so I wrote. I was confused by what "it" meant in that context because you essentially jumped the track logically speaking with that.
There was some reality show where they broke in and robbed businesses (with the owners prior consent) that I saw an episode of once. Can't remember the name of it. Anyway, they broke into a bar and stole a number of things, including a number of liquor bottles. In their summation, they talked about the value of what they'd stolen. They valued the liquor in something like the high tens of thousands of dollars, clearly based on the fact that, sold shot by shot, that's how much money the bar can make from selling it. It was ridiculous of course since real thieves would never get that much for it, and it was also drastically above what replacing it would cost the bar-owner.
I'm sorry, but what are you even talking about? In "The question it is trying to answer is teleology, not methodology" what thing are you referring to when you say "it". If the answer is the search for the origins of species and of life itself, then saying that the question it is trying to answer is teleology is begging the question since you're presupposing that, by searching for the origins of life, you're searching for an intelligent creator. If "it" refers to the question you're trying to answer when you find tractors on an alien planet, then teleology comes into it, but only after you've determined that you're probably looking at something artificial (hence the contrived example uses tractors, which a human can tell are highly unlikely to not be artificial from a quick glance). Of course, if the tractors are the only evidence of intelligent life there, the very first thing you specifically have to check is if humans made them. If you find something you think is intelligently designed and you know of only one set of intelligent designers, the most logical first step is to assume that the object was designed by the intelligent designers you know of. The whole example, including the straw man imbecile first year philosophy student, is ridiculous.
In any case, I don't just "feel" that intelligent design and Panspermia are dodges when you're trying to determine the origin of life and/or speciation, I'm objectively stating that they are. When you have a question you're trying to answer, substituting another question and answering that instead is a fallacy, especially when, once you've provided the "answer" you start waving your hands and saying "ok, you're done searching now, nothing more to search for".
This company isn't making solar cells themselves though, they've just developed a method of slicing silicon wafers thinner with less waste. Making giant silicon crystals is expensive, so you save money with less waste. You also save money since you're now getting more slices, which are just as useful for making solar cells as the thicker ones, from the same crystal. The resulting cells are also a bit lighter and thinner (although I think only a small part of the thickness and weight of a typical cell is the actual semiconductor) so shipping costs may go down fractionally. It will make solar cells made in China cheaper along with those made anywhere else.
I just did the calculations for myself based on $1 per watt solar panels (which work out to about $7.31 per actual average yearly watt at my location). I looked at my last few years of power bills and, based on what I would save, I would make the initial outlay back in 5 years without any subsidies and then the panels would continue to work for decades after that.
That information, if ever true, is total bunk with modern cells. The really expensive, high-efficiency, long lived and highly durable cells only make sense in places that can't be on grid. Regular mass-produced solar cells make sense pretty much everywhere currently, but they still haven't reached the price point where not using solar is completely stupid for most homeowners. It has reached the point where it's economical in about the five year range though.
Like models pretending to be miners to the tune of: "45 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt."
Classic.
It might be better to combine hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water with the Sabatier process to make methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. It would be a lot easier to store.
The best batteries currently are all variants on lithium-ion.
Are they? I was under the impression that, if you weren't worried about weight, which you aren't in home power storage, the best batteries were still lead-acid batteries.
They're "completely optional" in the cases where the advertising is necessary. In the cases where they're medically necessary the advertising serves no purpose except perhaps to get patients and doctors to choose one brand of drug that can achieve the desired result over the other. When you need medical treatment, the optional situation is to get a prescription for the drug or treatment that best suits your medical condition. The purpose of advertising is to pervert that.
It's not a dodge. It's answering a different question.
Errr... When the topic up for debate is a particular question and, instead of trying to answer it, you substitute a different question and answer that instead, that's a dodge. Claiming that it isn't is... well, it's all sorts of things. Let's just say it's odd.
Well, personally, I take multiple trips with multiple decoy cars and drivers on different routes. Several just with an empty box, without the lightbulb randomly interspersed with the actual light bulb drops. That way, even if someone manages to track the routes, they can never know which car the bulb is in or even if there is one in that drop. There are additional security procedures, but it wouldn't be wise for the sake of security to discuss them here.
Seriously though, the GP was using crazy logic on the costs of transporting the bulbs to the dump, etc. Proper accounting of costs doesn't count the entire cost of a trip to the dump in the disposal cost of a lightbulb unless you took the trip just to dispose of the lightbulb. Only crazy people do that.
You know, for stereotypical nerd behaviour like communicating to each other in incomprehensible jargon and obscure references that other people don't get, obsessive behaviour, dressing up in ridiculous costumes for gatherings, etc, I've come to realize that nothing beats a hard-core sports fan.
if you're model is good enough, you should be able to make money on sports betting on it.
Not against people whose model is just as good, and not (over the long term) against any professional gambling enterprise (legal casino or bookie) set up to profit whether you win or lose. A professional gambling outfit either takes a cut that negates all statistical advantages of having a good predictive method or they set up the odds so that they'll make back what they lost to you last time when you lose to them next time. The only people who make money reliably in gambling are those who have found a sucker or group of suckers to victimize.