Yeah, if, as many people have suggested, it takes that long to charge up to fire a shot, that means it has to then wait another 16 hours to take another shot, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Something that needs to be chilled like a superconductor or some other component makes more sense. In my mind, the required 16 hour prep time makes the use of this thing on protesters part of a very hostile action. It's bad enough with all the riot gear and the police paramilitary tactics around every sizable protest. The whole "pain compliance" thing isn't going to make protesters feel very friendly towards the police, especially if it feels like they've pre-planned it.
Incidentally, gl4ss, regarding your current sig: "world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.", I contend that the world was actually created, as it is, 5 minutes after you will read this post, if you read it. Sure, you may be able to prove that false, but only for the next five minutes.
As far as I can tell, the argument is all about all those unnecessary factors of two that crop up. It seems like you could get rid of those just by using diameter instead of radius in most of those formulae. I was just poking a little fun at the push for using Tau by pushing the use of diameter instead of radius based on the same reasoning. Obviously if you did both at the same time, you'd end up with lots of unnecessary factors of 1/2 all over the place instead.
Not going to argue with you about the heat pumps. The "efficiency" is apples and oranges to the efficiency I was talking about, but you clearly know that. As for the visible light from a light bulb ending up mostly as heat, that's generally true, but the margins of wasted electrical power are so slim in electric heating that the light that escapes and doesn't end up as heat drops incandescent bulbs way out of the ranks of electric space heaters even if the amount of electricity converted to heat inside the home for the light-bulbs is still in the high 90's for incandescent bulbs.
I wasn't accusing you of deceit. I was simply saying that it wasn't really an applicable example of what you were talking about. I don't think you're being deceitful per se, but you are using what appears to be more than a healthy dose of hyperbole and you're being a bit inconsistent. For example, in this post you say that you always have excellent karma, but in a previous post, you said "I've always had Excellent karma on Slashdot for years until I made a post that the believe that evolution occurs is not in direct opposition to the belief that there is a Creator/God", which sort of implies that you had good karma, then lost it due to a wave of persecution from one little comment. Unless you were laying on the hyperbole pretty thick, then you're being inconsistent.
The comment you link to in this post was a mere three weeks ago, and is moderated (Score: 1, Interesting). Looking at all your posts since then (well, I think all, but Slashdot's search functionality is so lousy currently it's hard to tell if it's really showing all the posts) there's one other post (the one you linked to when I first asked for an example) that's modded to (score: 0, Troll) and it looks like it was modded up as insightful, but also modded down as over-rated and as troll. Believe me, I've felt the frustration of having perfectly reasonable posts downmodded when it seemed inappropriate to me (I've also felt the guilt of having off-topic spurious posts modded +5), but you seem to be being extremely thin-skinned about it.
But have you ever in your life taken a trip to the landfill _just_ to throw out some lightbulbs, or have they just been among the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other items you had in the load?
Considering that it's dead simple to make electric heaters in the 99%-100% efficiency range, doesn't all that energy lost as visible light make them relatively inefficient for the space heater domain?
But the logic demanding the use of tau instead of pi also demands the use of the diameter instead of the radius. So, to be consistent, wouldn't it be 1/12 tau d^3?
That example is very recent. In any case, that wasn't an example of you "merely stating that [you] believe in God" getting you "massively down-modded and attacked." That's an example of you using a post-modernist philosophy game to attack atheism. It's worth noting on this that I, as an agnostic, consider agnosticism to broadly fall under the category of atheism. Atheism is a spectrum of philosophies, not a single belief system that you can attack so easily.
I think that you've seriously exaggerated how much of a victim of discrimination for your basic religious beliefs you've been on Slashdot. It seems very unlikely that you were down-modded and attacked, especially massively so, merely for stating that you believe in God. I'm almost certain that other content in your messages has more to do with it.
But someone fired for insisting on 3.00000000000 may still go and sue their employer for religious discrimination afterwards. Much in the same way that someone who was proselytizing at work might sue their employer for religious discrimination. I suppose the closer example is the person who grudgingly uses a close approximation of pi, but never misses an opportunity to tell everyone, ad nauseum, that they should be using 3.00000000000. That really would seem to be enough interference with their job and workplace environment to warrant dismissal.
Perhaps making broad dismissive statements about what other Slashdotters believe is what gets you downmodded. There are certainly apple fans on Slashdot, but I hardly thing Jobs is universally more respected than Gates. In my opinion Jobs ranks below Gates in most ways though I'm certainly no big Gates fan either. I have nothing but respect for Steve Wozniak though.
Since this has occurred on Slashdot. Do you mind posting some links to the actual instances where you innocently posted your views and were mercilessly and cruelly attacked? That way, we can decide for ourselves.
I've never really understood the notion that complex things can only spring from more complex things. If we consider the entirety of human civilization, it is more complex than human civilization of 10,000 years ago by pretty much every measure we can think of, but modern human civilization is clearly the creation of prior versions of human civilization. Then there's pretty much any large multi-cellular organism you care to name. It's clearly more complex than a blastula, but it derives from a blastula. There are examples all over the place of complex systems being "created" by less complex ones, yet somehow an argument that starts with the idea that complexity can only arise from greater complexity isn't seen as ridiculous right off the bat.
In your example of a planet with tractors, you're correct that we would almost certainly initially consider them to be intelligently designed. This wouldn't so much be because of the complexity argument, but because we would have a very hard time understanding how they could have arisen naturally. If we found no other evidence of the designers, we would spend a lot of time studying the tractors and, if we found from studying them that they evolved naturally, we would change our theory about their origin. Features like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland defy explanation and myths spring up to explain how and why they were constructed, until we can explain them.
Your philosophy student is a straw man. The argument the grandparent posted (which you claim that he got from the "New Atheists", but which the poster probably got from his own mind; I know that it was one of the first things that occurred to me the first time someone tried to tell me that there must be a god because people were too complex to have risen on their own) is not founded on the belief that complex things must arise from more complex things as you seem to believe. It is actually meant to illustrate the logical fallacy inherent in that point of view. It's simple inductive logic that if complex things must have more complex things to create them, then you need an infinite series of increasingly complex creators to explain even the simplest thing.
The strawman philosophy student in your example is wrong on several counts. He's wrong because he's assuming that complex things cannot come from less complex things and he's wrong because he assumes that, if the complex thing he's looking at came from something more complex, that more complex thing can't exist. The first part is an unfounded philosophical conjecture with countless counter-examples in nature and in technology. The second seems to follow from the first, but is illogical even if the first were true. The existence of tractors on earth certainly doesn't preclude the existence of more complex creators. Just because something isn't required doesn't mean it can't exist.
This flows into the "Intelligent Design" question. Basically, "Intelligent Design" as the origin of life is a logical dodge, just like Panspermia. If someone asks, "how did life originate?" answering "Some other life created it" or "It floated in from somewhere else where it already existed" isn't answering the question. If we could prove either of those things, it would be an increase in knowledge and worth knowing, but it would be far from the ultimate answer. If we discovered that Panspermia seeded life on Earth, we wouldn't close the book on the search for the origins of life, we'd just focus our efforts towards space. If we discovered that we were intelligently designed, we would seek out answers about where the designer(s) life originated. As it stands, some sort of Panspermia followed by a lot of evolution is a maybe and Intelligent Design of some kind is a maybe as well. Neither appear to be necessary to the process, however. If Panspermia turns out to have happened, it probably won't alter our fundamental understanding of life very much, it will just change our ideas about where it started. If some form of Intelligent Design turns out have happened with us and the other life on Earth, then there will be a lot more questions. The biggest will be why the Intelligent Designers made their designs in such a way that they're full of incredibly convincing fake evidence that natural evolution occurred.
How about a better example of being fired for non-religious beliefs. You can be fired for believing that pi is equal to 3.5. The really interesting question is if you can be fired because you believe that pi is equal to exactly 3 and your belief on the matter is due to the bible saying so (or at least implying it).
There's a lot of argument about it. Most historians do seem to think that he set the fire, but not necessarily just against the Nazis. The description of him in the article you link kind of has patsy written all over it. He may well have simply acted alone with no input from anyone, or he may have been a useful idiot for someone, whether they were on the side of the Nazis or against them.
In any case, I probably shouldn't have used it as an example, since it's certainly not a settled matter. Of course, whether or not the Nazis set the fire or not, there clearly was a real-life conspiracy among them to use the event to sweep away their political opposition. I just wanted to include a non-US example in there. How about I instead substitute the French bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, which they tried to blame on terrorists? Not a great example, but I'm just thinking off the top of my head.
On the one hand, I know that there are plenty of evil conspiracies that governments engage in to further their goals. The Nazi's burned the Reichstag to gain popular support. Some factions in the CIA conspired to fake and/or actually commit terrorist attacks on US citizens and blame them on Cuba to start a war with Cuba (the Northwoods documents are real, but they were never green lighted by the President, but the CIA agents behind it still planned it and sought approval to do it and even specifically talked about manufacturing another "remember the Maine" incident). The FBI under Hoover pulled off a huge list of dirty tricks including COINTELPRO... Governements, including the US government, pull off all kinds of dirty tricks. It frankly wouldn't surprise me if there's a few proposals floating around for all kinds of false flag operations they can pull off to justify a war with Iran (it wouldn't even surprise me if sinking a ship such as the Enterprise were in one of those proposals).
Conspiracies are real things. They happen in real life. The events of 9/11, for example, are proven to be a conspiracy... by a group of mostly Saudi terrorists. Whether there was actually any US government participation in it is another story. I think it's quite likely that there was some, but probably not in the grandiose secret hidden demolition charges way most of the conspiracy theorists seem to think. Just like the first World Trade Center Bombing, various intelligence and law enforcement agencies seem to have had their eye on the people who did it, but still let them go about their business and possibly even provided some material support here and there. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies do this a lot. They monitor and sometimes infiltrate criminal and terrorist organizations and cultivate "informants" and double-agents. They let small crimes (and sometimes big ones) get by in order to build up for really big takedowns. Consider FBI informants "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "the rifleman" Flemmi who were getting away with murder and eliminating the competition with FBI protection. Let's face it, sometimes they commit out and out entrapment and manufacture crimes. Some may argue that the ends justify the means and maybe they're right, but they seem pretty hard to justify to me. So, maybe some in the US government actually did give the 9/11 terrorists a pass, or even provide them assistance just to see what they would do or to give them a chance to commit a terrorist act (which they could swoop in and heroically prevent). I'll even concede that I wouldn't put it past some of the kinds of people in these positions to allow a terrorist attack to occur just to have an excuse for a war. That, sadly, does not stretch credibility to the breaking point.
Having said all that, most of the conspiracy theories around this stuff are nuts. For example, your nano thermite paint idea. Why, exactly would that be necessary? How would it even be practical since a layer of thermite paint couldn't produce enough heat to do much more than slightly warm the very thick steel we're talking about? Why would it even be necessary given the damage from the collision and the furnace from the burning jet fuel (and everything else flammable in the building)? Has anyone claiming it's what happened bothered doing any research or experimentation? Most of the really vocal conspiracy theorists seem to be really bad at the physics of the real world and to be terrible at logic. Like the ones who insist that the Pentagon was hit by a missile because the hole in the wall wasn't the same size and shape as the front profile of the plane that hit it and don't understand that: A. a jet plane is a flying, hollow, aluminium can and the Pentagon is a re-enforced concrete fortress and B. it would require the people behind the conspiracy to simultaneously be brilliant enough to pull off the elaborate conspiracy, but stupid enough to use a real plane in three other places, but use a missile in a fourth.
Then there's the moon hoax conspiracy idiots who consiste
Actually it would be like Edison's light bulb patents covering anything at all, since the only original part was the carbonized filament his researchers used. Except that it turned out that wasn't original either.
The current situation is less than ideal, I'll grant, but I find it odd that you focus your efforts into vilifying the actual power generation method rather than focusing on the energy companies and the stuff they get up to or on the problems of the antiquated grid itself. Clearly we need better ways to buffer renewable power sources and we need a smarter, more capable grid (a smart UPS/generator in every home so that the power _never_ goes out for anyone would also be nice here in the 21st century), that can deal with the ups and downs of renewable power generation would be balanced out smoothly.
Ask Big Energy why they must build more conventional plants when they add wind to the grid, and why those conventional plants have to be running while the wind farms are generating.
Ok, the answers to that one are so blazingly obvious I wonder why you bothered to ask. The obvious answer is that demand is increasing all the time so they need to build more plants anyway. Also the wind doesn't blow all the time, so it needs to be supplemented. As for those plants running while the wind farms are generating... Hmm, maybe because they cost a lot to build, the companies that built them want to run them as much as they can and sell the power?
Seriously, the stuff you're saying comes off like a bit of a crazy rant. I certainly get that some people don't like these wind farms being built next to them. How that equates into the wind farms being some giant conspiracy to erect towers that don't really generate power (which seems to be what you're implying), I have no idea.
There is already a problem with going a bit faster that what we do now. There is so much energy in the coils that sparks are forming that are welding the shuttle to the rails. Try to go 50 time that and you have much bigger issues.
But is that a factor of the speed, or of the force that has to be applied to accelerate against air resistance?
It's not buoyed up by the internal vacuum (ok the vacuum will add some buoyancy, but will by no means keep it up. They mean for it to be magnetically suspended.
I think you're overestimating the forces involved and some of the logistics. It's over 1000 miles long, but the whole structure is not suspended in the air. Maybe the last 100 miles is suspended in the air. The rest is a tunnel sitting on (or under) the ground. So, 90% of it can basically be a thick-walled iron pipe with some concrete around it. The forces involved (unless there's an accident) are fairly small by engineering standards. Take whatever your payload weighs and multiply by four to get an estimate. As for the aerospace engineering tolerances, for that last 100 miles, you'll want to keep the weight down while withstanding atmospheric pressure (although it will reduce with height) and some decently high stratospheric winds, but it doesn't have all the other aerodynamic demands of a jet planes hull. It's just a re-enforced, airtight tube. It certainly could spectacularly fail, of course, but a leak should be detectable instantaneously and would only be catastrophic if it were perfectly timed, otherwise a payload in transit would be able to be braked.
With the abysmal safety record on Sodor? You'd have to be crazy to let those people (and sentient trains) operate their railroad, let alone a space program. Somewhere in their office they have a full-time employee devoted entirely to flipping the "minutes since last accident" sign back to 0.
Except of course that you haven't read the article. The payload would accelerate along a very long evacuated tunnel, following the curve of the earth. The mountain (or magnetically levitated tunnel section) would be a small part of that at the very end. You would pull some heavy G's for a short period of time from the change in direction, but it wouldn't be anywhere near 2000. It would probably be more than humans could take, but not more than all kinds of non-living payloads could take.
Unobtanium doesn't seem to be necessary. Room temperature superconductors would be nice, but the kind we actually have would work just fine with an active cooling system. We have plenty of materials that can withstand the pressure and keep the tube evacuated of air. We have cables that can provide the necessary structural tension that high up. Stronger, lighter, more durable, more conductive, etc. materials would be nice, but they always would be for any project. This project does not require them.
As for the hybrid idea; I don't think you realize that this is a hybrid system. At least it is for anything you want to do outside LEO. If you want a payload to the Moon or Mars, etc. you use this system to put rocket engines, fuel and payloads in orbit, then assemble them there, then boost your way to your desired location at a significant savings compared to doing it from the surface of the Earth.
Doing what you suggest and accelerating on the surface ignores the little problem of air pressure, which is far higher at the surface than it is 12 miles up. If you're going to accelerate something to those kinds of velocities in an evacuated tube on the surface then eject it into the atmosphere you're basically going to be building yourself an explosion machine. Consider what happens to spacecraft when they aerobrake in the _upper_ atmosphere. Consider what happens when you try that at ground level. Maybe you could do what you suggest from a very, very tall ramp structure built to launch off the top of a very, very tall mountain.
As for what lightning does to such a structure suspended in the stratosphere, I assume that it grounds out through the lightning rods and earths through the conductive (or superconductive) parts of the structure. As for the winds, they may be high, but they're in a very sparse atmosphere so they're proportionately less energetic.
There are a lot of other ways to use hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, oil and coal to launch a spacecraft than just building a rocket as you point out. Concepts like this are interesting, but you always want to get things right the first time if you can and use the best method. The idea in the article, for example, has some things in common with a launch loop, which is kinetically supported structure (basically a maglev system continuously hurls a cable, connected into a loop, into the sky at both ends) which implements the same maglev launch vehicle concept as this plan, but does away with the evacuated tube by having all the acceleration happen in the part of the loop that's outside the atmosphere. Then there are space fountains, which are kinetically supported structures like launch loops but using loose pellets and magnetic levitation to hold up an otherwise impossibly large structure. Then there's the space elevator concept, which you can make practical with modern materials if you support it along its length at strategic points with every technology you can think of: balloons, dirigibles in atmosphere, then maybe laser supported sails ( I suppose with the lasers mounted on the top-most balloons) outside the atmosphere, in the ranges where Earth blocks the light from the sun at night, then a network of tether-rigged solar sails out where they can avoid the shadow of the Earth. Actively supported like that, we might be able to get a space elevator to work without needing ridiculously strong materials. Then there's simply launching a payload using an earth-based laser to propel a craft with a light sail from the ground (or from a high balloon platform. Then there's this maglev system. Maybe we can find a way for it to work with just the ground cable and the train and skip the tunnel and track. Essentially magnetically levitate the payload and some sort of magnetic sled up to 12 miles and accelerate it there (would probably require a very long sled with a its own very powerful power supply if at all possible). Beyond those ideas, there are dozens or hundreds more ideas to skip the part where you use 50 times your payload's mass in fuel to get it up there. Some are more reasonable than others. Basically we just have to simulate the best we can, perform whatever scaled experiments we can afford, then pick one and then maybe we can re-kickstart the space age provided it actually works.
A. There are plenty of materials that can support their own weight at those lengths. Even plain old steel, aluminium and titanium cables have breaking lengths of about 20-30 km, which meets or exceeds the requirements for most or all of the length of the elevated part of the structure (some of the cables are sloped so would be longer than 12 miles/20 km near the end, but it's a slope, so only the cables at the very end actually need to be that long). Materials like fibreglass and kevlar can reach 5 times that or more (and also aren't ferromagnetic like steel cable which would probably be a bit of a problem around a maglev system like this).
B. There's no actual need for the cables to support their entire length. This is only meant to reach up 12 miles. That's only a little bit above the cruising altitude of the Concorde. It's inside the atmosphere where aircraft, including lighter than air ones can work. There's no reason that the cable couldn't be supported at various points along its length with balloons, blimps or dirigibles.
C. The plans call for cables for stabilization of an actively supported structure. It may turn out that the design can be tweaked so that it can be actively stabilized as well. Maybe magnetically in a system with more than one ground cable. Maybe using gas jets (high pressure exhaust from the cooling system that chills the superconductors maybe?) or some other system. Heck, maybe using propellers (not sure about how practical that would be 20 km up) or jet engines.
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Yeah, if, as many people have suggested, it takes that long to charge up to fire a shot, that means it has to then wait another 16 hours to take another shot, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Something that needs to be chilled like a superconductor or some other component makes more sense. In my mind, the required 16 hour prep time makes the use of this thing on protesters part of a very hostile action. It's bad enough with all the riot gear and the police paramilitary tactics around every sizable protest. The whole "pain compliance" thing isn't going to make protesters feel very friendly towards the police, especially if it feels like they've pre-planned it.
Incidentally, gl4ss, regarding your current sig: "world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.", I contend that the world was actually created, as it is, 5 minutes after you will read this post, if you read it. Sure, you may be able to prove that false, but only for the next five minutes.
As far as I can tell, the argument is all about all those unnecessary factors of two that crop up. It seems like you could get rid of those just by using diameter instead of radius in most of those formulae. I was just poking a little fun at the push for using Tau by pushing the use of diameter instead of radius based on the same reasoning. Obviously if you did both at the same time, you'd end up with lots of unnecessary factors of 1/2 all over the place instead.
Not going to argue with you about the heat pumps. The "efficiency" is apples and oranges to the efficiency I was talking about, but you clearly know that.
As for the visible light from a light bulb ending up mostly as heat, that's generally true, but the margins of wasted electrical power are so slim in electric heating that the light that escapes and doesn't end up as heat drops incandescent bulbs way out of the ranks of electric space heaters even if the amount of electricity converted to heat inside the home for the light-bulbs is still in the high 90's for incandescent bulbs.
I wasn't accusing you of deceit. I was simply saying that it wasn't really an applicable example of what you were talking about. I don't think you're being deceitful per se, but you are using what appears to be more than a healthy dose of hyperbole and you're being a bit inconsistent. For example, in this post you say that you always have excellent karma, but in a previous post, you said "I've always had Excellent karma on Slashdot for years until I made a post that the believe that evolution occurs is not in direct opposition to the belief that there is a Creator/God", which sort of implies that you had good karma, then lost it due to a wave of persecution from one little comment. Unless you were laying on the hyperbole pretty thick, then you're being inconsistent.
The comment you link to in this post was a mere three weeks ago, and is moderated (Score: 1, Interesting). Looking at all your posts since then (well, I think all, but Slashdot's search functionality is so lousy currently it's hard to tell if it's really showing all the posts) there's one other post (the one you linked to when I first asked for an example) that's modded to (score: 0, Troll) and it looks like it was modded up as insightful, but also modded down as over-rated and as troll. Believe me, I've felt the frustration of having perfectly reasonable posts downmodded when it seemed inappropriate to me (I've also felt the guilt of having off-topic spurious posts modded +5), but you seem to be being extremely thin-skinned about it.
But have you ever in your life taken a trip to the landfill _just_ to throw out some lightbulbs, or have they just been among the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other items you had in the load?
Considering that it's dead simple to make electric heaters in the 99%-100% efficiency range, doesn't all that energy lost as visible light make them relatively inefficient for the space heater domain?
But the logic demanding the use of tau instead of pi also demands the use of the diameter instead of the radius. So, to be consistent, wouldn't it be 1/12 tau d^3?
That example is very recent. In any case, that wasn't an example of you "merely stating that [you] believe in God" getting you "massively down-modded and attacked." That's an example of you using a post-modernist philosophy game to attack atheism. It's worth noting on this that I, as an agnostic, consider agnosticism to broadly fall under the category of atheism. Atheism is a spectrum of philosophies, not a single belief system that you can attack so easily.
I think that you've seriously exaggerated how much of a victim of discrimination for your basic religious beliefs you've been on Slashdot. It seems very unlikely that you were down-modded and attacked, especially massively so, merely for stating that you believe in God. I'm almost certain that other content in your messages has more to do with it.
But someone fired for insisting on 3.00000000000 may still go and sue their employer for religious discrimination afterwards. Much in the same way that someone who was proselytizing at work might sue their employer for religious discrimination. I suppose the closer example is the person who grudgingly uses a close approximation of pi, but never misses an opportunity to tell everyone, ad nauseum, that they should be using 3.00000000000. That really would seem to be enough interference with their job and workplace environment to warrant dismissal.
Perhaps making broad dismissive statements about what other Slashdotters believe is what gets you downmodded. There are certainly apple fans on Slashdot, but I hardly thing Jobs is universally more respected than Gates. In my opinion Jobs ranks below Gates in most ways though I'm certainly no big Gates fan either. I have nothing but respect for Steve Wozniak though.
Since this has occurred on Slashdot. Do you mind posting some links to the actual instances where you innocently posted your views and were mercilessly and cruelly attacked? That way, we can decide for ourselves.
I've never really understood the notion that complex things can only spring from more complex things. If we consider the entirety of human civilization, it is more complex than human civilization of 10,000 years ago by pretty much every measure we can think of, but modern human civilization is clearly the creation of prior versions of human civilization. Then there's pretty much any large multi-cellular organism you care to name. It's clearly more complex than a blastula, but it derives from a blastula. There are examples all over the place of complex systems being "created" by less complex ones, yet somehow an argument that starts with the idea that complexity can only arise from greater complexity isn't seen as ridiculous right off the bat.
In your example of a planet with tractors, you're correct that we would almost certainly initially consider them to be intelligently designed. This wouldn't so much be because of the complexity argument, but because we would have a very hard time understanding how they could have arisen naturally. If we found no other evidence of the designers, we would spend a lot of time studying the tractors and, if we found from studying them that they evolved naturally, we would change our theory about their origin. Features like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland defy explanation and myths spring up to explain how and why they were constructed, until we can explain them.
Your philosophy student is a straw man. The argument the grandparent posted (which you claim that he got from the "New Atheists", but which the poster probably got from his own mind; I know that it was one of the first things that occurred to me the first time someone tried to tell me that there must be a god because people were too complex to have risen on their own) is not founded on the belief that complex things must arise from more complex things as you seem to believe. It is actually meant to illustrate the logical fallacy inherent in that point of view. It's simple inductive logic that if complex things must have more complex things to create them, then you need an infinite series of increasingly complex creators to explain even the simplest thing.
The strawman philosophy student in your example is wrong on several counts. He's wrong because he's assuming that complex things cannot come from less complex things and he's wrong because he assumes that, if the complex thing he's looking at came from something more complex, that more complex thing can't exist. The first part is an unfounded philosophical conjecture with countless counter-examples in nature and in technology. The second seems to follow from the first, but is illogical even if the first were true. The existence of tractors on earth certainly doesn't preclude the existence of more complex creators. Just because something isn't required doesn't mean it can't exist.
This flows into the "Intelligent Design" question. Basically, "Intelligent Design" as the origin of life is a logical dodge, just like Panspermia. If someone asks, "how did life originate?" answering "Some other life created it" or "It floated in from somewhere else where it already existed" isn't answering the question. If we could prove either of those things, it would be an increase in knowledge and worth knowing, but it would be far from the ultimate answer. If we discovered that Panspermia seeded life on Earth, we wouldn't close the book on the search for the origins of life, we'd just focus our efforts towards space. If we discovered that we were intelligently designed, we would seek out answers about where the designer(s) life originated. As it stands, some sort of Panspermia followed by a lot of evolution is a maybe and Intelligent Design of some kind is a maybe as well. Neither appear to be necessary to the process, however. If Panspermia turns out to have happened, it probably won't alter our fundamental understanding of life very much, it will just change our ideas about where it started. If some form of Intelligent Design turns out have happened with us and the other life on Earth, then there will be a lot more questions. The biggest will be why the Intelligent Designers made their designs in such a way that they're full of incredibly convincing fake evidence that natural evolution occurred.
How about a better example of being fired for non-religious beliefs. You can be fired for believing that pi is equal to 3.5. The really interesting question is if you can be fired because you believe that pi is equal to exactly 3 and your belief on the matter is due to the bible saying so (or at least implying it).
There's a lot of argument about it. Most historians do seem to think that he set the fire, but not necessarily just against the Nazis. The description of him in the article you link kind of has patsy written all over it. He may well have simply acted alone with no input from anyone, or he may have been a useful idiot for someone, whether they were on the side of the Nazis or against them.
In any case, I probably shouldn't have used it as an example, since it's certainly not a settled matter. Of course, whether or not the Nazis set the fire or not, there clearly was a real-life conspiracy among them to use the event to sweep away their political opposition. I just wanted to include a non-US example in there. How about I instead substitute the French bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, which they tried to blame on terrorists? Not a great example, but I'm just thinking off the top of my head.
On the one hand, I know that there are plenty of evil conspiracies that governments engage in to further their goals. The Nazi's burned the Reichstag to gain popular support. Some factions in the CIA conspired to fake and/or actually commit terrorist attacks on US citizens and blame them on Cuba to start a war with Cuba (the Northwoods documents are real, but they were never green lighted by the President, but the CIA agents behind it still planned it and sought approval to do it and even specifically talked about manufacturing another "remember the Maine" incident). The FBI under Hoover pulled off a huge list of dirty tricks including COINTELPRO... Governements, including the US government, pull off all kinds of dirty tricks. It frankly wouldn't surprise me if there's a few proposals floating around for all kinds of false flag operations they can pull off to justify a war with Iran (it wouldn't even surprise me if sinking a ship such as the Enterprise were in one of those proposals).
Conspiracies are real things. They happen in real life. The events of 9/11, for example, are proven to be a conspiracy... by a group of mostly Saudi terrorists. Whether there was actually any US government participation in it is another story. I think it's quite likely that there was some, but probably not in the grandiose secret hidden demolition charges way most of the conspiracy theorists seem to think. Just like the first World Trade Center Bombing, various intelligence and law enforcement agencies seem to have had their eye on the people who did it, but still let them go about their business and possibly even provided some material support here and there. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies do this a lot. They monitor and sometimes infiltrate criminal and terrorist organizations and cultivate "informants" and double-agents. They let small crimes (and sometimes big ones) get by in order to build up for really big takedowns. Consider FBI informants "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "the rifleman" Flemmi who were getting away with murder and eliminating the competition with FBI protection. Let's face it, sometimes they commit out and out entrapment and manufacture crimes. Some may argue that the ends justify the means and maybe they're right, but they seem pretty hard to justify to me. So, maybe some in the US government actually did give the 9/11 terrorists a pass, or even provide them assistance just to see what they would do or to give them a chance to commit a terrorist act (which they could swoop in and heroically prevent). I'll even concede that I wouldn't put it past some of the kinds of people in these positions to allow a terrorist attack to occur just to have an excuse for a war. That, sadly, does not stretch credibility to the breaking point.
Having said all that, most of the conspiracy theories around this stuff are nuts. For example, your nano thermite paint idea. Why, exactly would that be necessary? How would it even be practical since a layer of thermite paint couldn't produce enough heat to do much more than slightly warm the very thick steel we're talking about? Why would it even be necessary given the damage from the collision and the furnace from the burning jet fuel (and everything else flammable in the building)? Has anyone claiming it's what happened bothered doing any research or experimentation? Most of the really vocal conspiracy theorists seem to be really bad at the physics of the real world and to be terrible at logic. Like the ones who insist that the Pentagon was hit by a missile because the hole in the wall wasn't the same size and shape as the front profile of the plane that hit it and don't understand that: A. a jet plane is a flying, hollow, aluminium can and the Pentagon is a re-enforced concrete fortress and B. it would require the people behind the conspiracy to simultaneously be brilliant enough to pull off the elaborate conspiracy, but stupid enough to use a real plane in three other places, but use a missile in a fourth.
Then there's the moon hoax conspiracy idiots who consiste
Actually it would be like Edison's light bulb patents covering anything at all, since the only original part was the carbonized filament his researchers used. Except that it turned out that wasn't original either.
The current situation is less than ideal, I'll grant, but I find it odd that you focus your efforts into vilifying the actual power generation method rather than focusing on the energy companies and the stuff they get up to or on the problems of the antiquated grid itself. Clearly we need better ways to buffer renewable power sources and we need a smarter, more capable grid (a smart UPS/generator in every home so that the power _never_ goes out for anyone would also be nice here in the 21st century), that can deal with the ups and downs of renewable power generation would be balanced out smoothly.
Ask Big Energy why they must build more conventional plants when they add wind to the grid, and why those conventional plants have to be running while the wind farms are generating.
Ok, the answers to that one are so blazingly obvious I wonder why you bothered to ask. The obvious answer is that demand is increasing all the time so they need to build more plants anyway. Also the wind doesn't blow all the time, so it needs to be supplemented. As for those plants running while the wind farms are generating... Hmm, maybe because they cost a lot to build, the companies that built them want to run them as much as they can and sell the power?
Seriously, the stuff you're saying comes off like a bit of a crazy rant. I certainly get that some people don't like these wind farms being built next to them. How that equates into the wind farms being some giant conspiracy to erect towers that don't really generate power (which seems to be what you're implying), I have no idea.
There is already a problem with going a bit faster that what we do now. There is so much energy in the coils that sparks are forming that are welding the shuttle to the rails. Try to go 50 time that and you have much bigger issues.
But is that a factor of the speed, or of the force that has to be applied to accelerate against air resistance?
It's not buoyed up by the internal vacuum (ok the vacuum will add some buoyancy, but will by no means keep it up. They mean for it to be magnetically suspended.
I think you're overestimating the forces involved and some of the logistics. It's over 1000 miles long, but the whole structure is not suspended in the air. Maybe the last 100 miles is suspended in the air. The rest is a tunnel sitting on (or under) the ground. So, 90% of it can basically be a thick-walled iron pipe with some concrete around it. The forces involved (unless there's an accident) are fairly small by engineering standards. Take whatever your payload weighs and multiply by four to get an estimate. As for the aerospace engineering tolerances, for that last 100 miles, you'll want to keep the weight down while withstanding atmospheric pressure (although it will reduce with height) and some decently high stratospheric winds, but it doesn't have all the other aerodynamic demands of a jet planes hull. It's just a re-enforced, airtight tube. It certainly could spectacularly fail, of course, but a leak should be detectable instantaneously and would only be catastrophic if it were perfectly timed, otherwise a payload in transit would be able to be braked.
With the abysmal safety record on Sodor? You'd have to be crazy to let those people (and sentient trains) operate their railroad, let alone a space program. Somewhere in their office they have a full-time employee devoted entirely to flipping the "minutes since last accident" sign back to 0.
Except of course that you haven't read the article. The payload would accelerate along a very long evacuated tunnel, following the curve of the earth. The mountain (or magnetically levitated tunnel section) would be a small part of that at the very end. You would pull some heavy G's for a short period of time from the change in direction, but it wouldn't be anywhere near 2000. It would probably be more than humans could take, but not more than all kinds of non-living payloads could take.
Unobtanium doesn't seem to be necessary. Room temperature superconductors would be nice, but the kind we actually have would work just fine with an active cooling system. We have plenty of materials that can withstand the pressure and keep the tube evacuated of air. We have cables that can provide the necessary structural tension that high up. Stronger, lighter, more durable, more conductive, etc. materials would be nice, but they always would be for any project. This project does not require them.
As for the hybrid idea; I don't think you realize that this is a hybrid system. At least it is for anything you want to do outside LEO. If you want a payload to the Moon or Mars, etc. you use this system to put rocket engines, fuel and payloads in orbit, then assemble them there, then boost your way to your desired location at a significant savings compared to doing it from the surface of the Earth.
Doing what you suggest and accelerating on the surface ignores the little problem of air pressure, which is far higher at the surface than it is 12 miles up. If you're going to accelerate something to those kinds of velocities in an evacuated tube on the surface then eject it into the atmosphere you're basically going to be building yourself an explosion machine. Consider what happens to spacecraft when they aerobrake in the _upper_ atmosphere. Consider what happens when you try that at ground level. Maybe you could do what you suggest from a very, very tall ramp structure built to launch off the top of a very, very tall mountain.
As for what lightning does to such a structure suspended in the stratosphere, I assume that it grounds out through the lightning rods and earths through the conductive (or superconductive) parts of the structure. As for the winds, they may be high, but they're in a very sparse atmosphere so they're proportionately less energetic.
There are a lot of other ways to use hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, oil and coal to launch a spacecraft than just building a rocket as you point out. Concepts like this are interesting, but you always want to get things right the first time if you can and use the best method. The idea in the article, for example, has some things in common with a launch loop, which is kinetically supported structure (basically a maglev system continuously hurls a cable, connected into a loop, into the sky at both ends) which implements the same maglev launch vehicle concept as this plan, but does away with the evacuated tube by having all the acceleration happen in the part of the loop that's outside the atmosphere. Then there are space fountains, which are kinetically supported structures like launch loops but using loose pellets and magnetic levitation to hold up an otherwise impossibly large structure. Then there's the space elevator concept, which you can make practical with modern materials if you support it along its length at strategic points with every technology you can think of: balloons, dirigibles in atmosphere, then maybe laser supported sails ( I suppose with the lasers mounted on the top-most balloons) outside the atmosphere, in the ranges where Earth blocks the light from the sun at night, then a network of tether-rigged solar sails out where they can avoid the shadow of the Earth. Actively supported like that, we might be able to get a space elevator to work without needing ridiculously strong materials. Then there's simply launching a payload using an earth-based laser to propel a craft with a light sail from the ground (or from a high balloon platform. Then there's this maglev system. Maybe we can find a way for it to work with just the ground cable and the train and skip the tunnel and track. Essentially magnetically levitate the payload and some sort of magnetic sled up to 12 miles and accelerate it there (would probably require a very long sled with a its own very powerful power supply if at all possible). Beyond those ideas, there are dozens or hundreds more ideas to skip the part where you use 50 times your payload's mass in fuel to get it up there. Some are more reasonable than others. Basically we just have to simulate the best we can, perform whatever scaled experiments we can afford, then pick one and then maybe we can re-kickstart the space age provided it actually works.
A. There are plenty of materials that can support their own weight at those lengths. Even plain old steel, aluminium and titanium cables have breaking lengths of about 20-30 km, which meets or exceeds the requirements for most or all of the length of the elevated part of the structure (some of the cables are sloped so would be longer than 12 miles/20 km near the end, but it's a slope, so only the cables at the very end actually need to be that long). Materials like fibreglass and kevlar can reach 5 times that or more (and also aren't ferromagnetic like steel cable which would probably be a bit of a problem around a maglev system like this).
B. There's no actual need for the cables to support their entire length. This is only meant to reach up 12 miles. That's only a little bit above the cruising altitude of the Concorde. It's inside the atmosphere where aircraft, including lighter than air ones can work. There's no reason that the cable couldn't be supported at various points along its length with balloons, blimps or dirigibles.
C. The plans call for cables for stabilization of an actively supported structure. It may turn out that the design can be tweaked so that it can be actively stabilized as well. Maybe magnetically in a system with more than one ground cable. Maybe using gas jets (high pressure exhaust from the cooling system that chills the superconductors maybe?) or some other system. Heck, maybe using propellers (not sure about how practical that would be 20 km up) or jet engines.