The coriolis forces would probably make it too uncomfortable to sleep in a small centrifuge. Studies have shown that you really need to be under 2 rpm for most humans to live without adverse effects. Above 7 rpm and you can just forget about it. Not to mention that it's quite likely that you'd get a lot more benefit from the simulated gravity while awake, upright and moving around. So, at 2 rpm, you need a radius of at least 224 meters, and it's a linear speed around the outside of about 169 km/h. On the moon, if you had the resources, you could pull that off with what amounts to a fast circular train on a circular track about 1.4 km long. The track would need to be mounted on an almost vertical slope, or the interior of the car would need to have sloped floors and the speed would need to be adjusted slightly so that the moons gravity and the centrifugal force add up to exactly 1 g perpendicular to the floor. This would provide a large living area with earth normal gravity. Parallel tracks above and below could have smaller "elevators" that can match speed with the habitat then lock on to let people on and off without having to stop the entire thing every time someone needs to get off.
So, even if it turns out that humans can't survive for long periods of time under the moon's gravity, we have a solution we know will work because it uses train technology we know will work (unless it turns out that there's a biologically significant difference between simulated gravity and real gravity that would ruin this plan, which seems very unlikely) and that millions of people use every day on Earth. The only problem is, it's an intermediate or long term solution, not a near term one because we either need the lift capacity to send all the digging equipment, track and train cars to the moon (although, it obviously doesn't have to start with a full 1.4 km long train, that's just a way to make full use of the track), or we need to have the infrastructure on the moon to build it.
Now, if it turns out that spending half the day in earth normal gravity and the other half at 1/8th g still causes health problems, then we may be up a creek without some sort of bio-engineering solution. That doesn't seem likely though.
Re:"I've found the solution to no space: delete da
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Tales of IT Idiocy
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The png format existed by then. Was there any reason that tiff files were used instead.
Oops. Got confused about which example demonlapin meant. The reason that example was bad is because an if() conditionally executes the next statement or code block, which means something ending with ; or surrounded by {}. So, if you have a ; right after an if(), that means that it conditionally executes everything between the if() and the;, which is nothing but whitespace, and then it proceeds to the code block surrounded by {}. which is now no longer executed conditionally.
It depends on the language. In C, = is the assignment operator and == is the equal to operator. if (a==b) will perform the next statement if a and b are equal to each other. If (a=b) will assign the value of b to a and then always perform the next statement. This can sometimes lead to obscure logic errors that are a pain to hunt down until you notice it and slap your hand over your face and groan. Anyone who has been programming in C for any length of time gets this drilled down to the level of the subconscious so that they always notice it. Until, that is, they've been doing it a long, long time and one day their subconscious fails them and they search and search and search through the code until they spot it, then there's a facepalm of epic proportions.
You wrote: "No, I'm not "misinterpreting" what you're saying, I just take it to its logical conclusion: you argued that lack of habitability of parts of Canada were discouraging the US from invading it. Your premise is preposterous, and so is your conclusion." That pretty heavily misinterprets what I was saying because you act as if I'm claiming that the US isn't invading Canada _right now_ because parts of it aren't very habitable. That's ridiculous and obviously not what I was saying. I was talking about a hypothetical future where global warming has turned those less habitable parts of Canada into a paradise (a scenario that I said I didn't find particularly realistic in the first place), just as the poster I was replying to was. The problem I was pointing out was that, even if it were all good for every part of Canada, it would not be so good for many other parts of the world, including large chunks of the US. In that sort of scenario the chance of armed conflicts all over the world is pretty high. So high it's pretty much inevitable. It's even going to be high among currently friendly countries like the US and Canada. The US is, after all, a very heavily armed and aggressive country.
The overall point, specifics aside, is that nations won't be operating in a vacuum where they can reap the rewards of a locally improved situation while ignoring the problems of the rest of the world. It just doesn't work that way most of the time.
Well, the Mali empire is a great example. They were wealthy and powerful for centuries because they were a chokepoint for gold from more southern parts of Africa to Europe, but they didn't really have all that much of their own gold production. Once traders started cutting out the middle man and sailing around them, their empire lost all that wealth and power.
There really are plenty of examples, but it's silly to expect me to provide them. It's dead obvious that gold will generally be worth less in places that are actively exploiting the gold resources they have and worth more in places without such resources or where they're not exploited. It's also obvious that a lot of the value gold beyond its rarity and shininess is cultural, so different cultures will have different values for it. Frankly it's amazing that anyone could think that the value of gold wouldn't vary widely from place to place without modern automated markets and instant communications.
Ok. A square kilometer of land receives an average of 250 MegaWatts of solar energy and about 715 millimeters of rain per year. Even if it's not particularly arable land, with work it can typically feed at least a thousand people. It contains all kinds of things that can be harvested and mined and used. Actually, the top hundred meters of soil and rock will contain something like 750 kg of gold, which, at current prices, is about $37.5 million dollars, which is the value of the land if it sells at $150,000 an acre. So... that just confuses things comparing something that contains gold to just plain gold...
Anyway, you wanted to compare productive output of the land and the lump of gold. So, the land has all of the above going for it and more, and the equivalent value 750 kg of gold... sits there. Or, it does if you want to back your currency with it. Otherwise, you can use it productively to make things. It does have some useful properties (almost always useful in extremely small amounts and extremely thin films, of course), so you can do that. But, if your going to back your currency with commodities you're actively using, why can't you also use all of the other commodities you're actively using?
People don't identify themselves by their stamp collecting habits because most people aren't fanatically obsessed with stamp collecting to the point that they're stunned when they encounter somone who doesn't collect stamps. You said: "We don't have a commonly used word that describes the state of not collecting stamps, or a word that describes people who avoid collecting stamps." Of course we don't have a commonly used word for it, but if we did, that word would be aphilatelist. And it would _not_ be a hobby, regardless of how many other people did it. It's the same with religion, no matter how many people have a religion, not having a religion is not a religion. You yourself seem like you would agree that it would be ridiculous to define everyone as having a religion if only say, 5% of people had an actual religion and the rest of the world never really thought about it. Why is it any less ridiculous when 95% of people have a religion? Try looking at it from another point of view. I could argue that the follower of any religion (except some extreme pantheistic ones I suppose) is an atheist. Christians, after all, don't believe in Hindu gods or in zeus or Odin, or Mithras, or Mardok, or the flying spaghetti monster (or the divinity of various saints and other religious figures that other Christians may believe in depending on Christian sect). So really, nearly all religious people are atheists because of all the things they don't believe in. Frankly, I don't understand your point of view given your example conversation from the end of your post. It supports _my_ position, not yours. Let's alter it a bit: "I believe in zero gods" -- Equivalent to claiming atheism as a religion.
"I'm confused.. I think you meant to say you do not believe in gods." --Equivalent to saying that what they meant to say is that they don't have a religion.
"Well yeah that's the same thing."
"No, one is the absence of belief, one is the belief in nothing. It makes no sense!!!! You can't believe in nothing, it's not there to be believed in!" --There you go, you can't believe in nothing (well, some forms of nihilists believe in nothing in an almost religious way, but most don't). Lack of belief is not a religion.
Anyway, atheists can't be lumped together like that. Agnosticism is a form of atheism, but then you have what you might call strong atheism. Agnosticism may or may not intersect with religious beliefs. for example, quite a few Christians may actually be quite agnostic in practice. First of all, most of them haven't actually read the vast majority of the bible. Many of them believe broadly in Christianity but don't actually believe that their religious authorities have all the answers. They could be considered weakly agnostic. At the other end of the spectrum some strong atheists may well be outright hostile to religion. Some to the extent that their hostility practically is a form of religious fervor, including a personal hatred of supernatural beings who they don't actually believe in.
The point is, some atheists may actually consider atheism to be their religion. For those people, you should respect their wishes and call it their religion. Other atheists (surely the majority) do not consider lack of religion to be a religion. Is it that hard to respect their wishes?
That's just stupid in so many ways. When was the last time someone you just met asked you: "So, what kind of stamp collector are you?". That never happens because people don't go around defining everyone else by their stamp collecting habits. There's no automatic assumptions from nearly everyone that everyone must be some kind of stamp collector, although not necessarily collecting the same stamps as them. If the world were like that, then non-stamp collectors would identify themselves, or be identified by others as aphilatelists. And, in this alternate universe, if religion happened to not be widely practiced, alternate versions of us could be having this exact same conversation, and alternate you would have just written: "We don't have a commonly used word that describes the state of not [having a religion], or a word that describes people who avoid [having a religion]. People don't identify themselves as not-religion-practicers."
The simple fact is, most atheists don't identify themselves as atheists except when demanded to identify themselves. The rest of the time, they just carry on with their lives.
Many of them are as easily quantified, divided, stored and transferred. Some of them more easily. Consider quantification of gold: Currently worth about $52 per gram. Great. How accurate is your scale? Not perfect? Then you're going to be off by a few dollars. I won't even go into the purity here.
Divisible: I'll grant you, easily divisible. Of course, then you run into the quantification problem. Storable: Stores easy, have to give it that Not a lot of corrosion happening wherever you put it. Transferable: Yeah, in heavily armored trucks. Or do you just mean carried around in your pocket? Sure, but it's so soft that, if everyone does that, in a few years your gold coin will be missing a few dollars worth (and laundromats will be making a killing on the gold dust they filter out of the water people wash their pants in). Use an alloy. Great. How can you tell that it's really 18k and not 16k? Oh, it's stamped on the coin so you can just take it on faith.
No, the reason that people could go from one place to another and trade their gold and other precious metals at different rates wasn't because governments set the values. It could happen if local government set the values in ignorance of how other countries were setting them, certainly. It didn't matter whether the value was set by local government or not, however, the simple fact is that the precious metals were worth differing amounts in different places. In some places a particular metal was worth more because it was more scarce and in others it was worth less because it was less scarce and in yet others, it was worth more even though it was less scarce and in others it was worth less even though it was more scarce. Heck, in some places gold was worth pretty much nothing because, ok, sure it's shiny, but nowhere near as shiny and pretty as this polished shell! Without governments setting prices, the values of precious metals were essentially arbitrary. I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of power in cultural inertia. There is. Thousands of years of something being precious "just because" is virtually a tangible thing as things go. It's not going to convince me that money backed by gold is any less of a fiat currency than any other. To look at it from another point of view, money based on assets that are actually out for the public to see doesn't require much faith whereas money based on a gold in a vault that barely anyone gets to enter... Well, I think it takes a lot of faith to believe it's not just lead bars with thin electroplating.
Good point, because, after all, magnetism can compress matter to such a degree that the cumulative magnetic field strength is so high that even gravity can't escape... Oh, wait, I have that backwards, it's the other way around.
Well, NYC covers about 790 square kilometers, so that's 790 million square meters. It gets a yearly average of 147.08 watts per square meter of sunlight (this includes nighttime). In January, NY's worst month for solar power, it gets 69.58 watts per square meter. So, that's an average of 116 GW for the average and about 55 GW for the worst month. So, to work on solar power, NYC needs to find a way to turn about 9% of that solar power hitting it to electricity for January numbers or 4.3% for the average. In an area as built up as NYC, that's very doable with conventional photovoltaics.
Clearly some form of power storage is needed for solar. Battery technology tends to be dirty, insufficient, and require too frequent replacement, even with stationary lead-acid batteries. There are other ways such as melting salt and harvesting the heat for power later, or pumping water uphill to reservoirs and then getting it back with hydrothermal. Another method is to synthesize fuels from the atmosphere and water. Methane is dead easy to make and has the bonus that it can be used in existing infrastructure such as natural gas lines. There are also more complex liquid fuels that can be made and have the bonus that they can be burned in existing gas or diesel engines. Such synthesized fuels are carbon-neutral since all of the CO2 released came from the atmosphere to start with.
Now, if you want to revise your definition of NYC to just the island of Manhattan, then we're only talking about 87.5 km squared. Take out 4 km squared for Central park and so forth. So 83.5 km squared. So only 12.28 GW average and 5.8 GW in the worst case. Of course, we don't know how your 5 GW figure applies, since you said it was for NYC and that almost always means the whole thing and not just Manhattan Island. There are about 1.65 million people living in Manhattan and average electric power use is about 300 Watts in the US, so that's 495 MW. We'll quadruple it to 2 GW because of other people working there and because of all the businesses there, etc. So, that's 16.28% of the average and 34.48% in the worst month. Even in that case, it's doable with good long term power storage.
Of course I only wrote this because I bothered thinking about the actual numbers. The first thing I started to write is that you were using a deliberately unreasonable example. NYC is a city. Not only a city, but the most densely populated major city in the US. So, your question is a ridiculous farce. You might as well demand that cities produce all of their own food within their borders. The answer to your question, if it hadn't turned out that NYC gets enough sunlight for its own electrical needs, is that you build solar powerplants somewhere sunny and sparsely populated, then you send the power by transmission line to NYC.
Now, that approach is may still be necessary for NYC if you need not just electric power, but _all_ power that people use. If you average out all of the power that people use in terms of electricity, transportation, heating, all the power used in manufacturing and transporting and providing the goods and services people buy, etc., as well as all the power used generating and transmitting electricity for end use and mining fossil fuels and all other resources, it actually works out to about 11 kW/person rather than 300 W/person (around 37 times more). Of course, the majority of that usually isn't actually _used_ local to the end user, but rather is used in factories, data centers, mines, refineries, bled out from transmission lines, etc. The point is that, even if you consider all of that power use per person, you can still get all of the power we use from solar. You just have to build huge solar power plants in Arizona and convert the power to the forms you need (such as into synthetic hydrocarbons) and then transmit it over lines and pipe it through pipelines and ship it in tankers, etc.
Just so you know, the plutonium-238 plugs in those RTGs do actually glow. It doesn't make the whole rover glow of course (unless you can see in the infrared), but the actual plutonium does.
Depending on whether or not the plutonium were fine dust and what isotope it was, I personally would probably go for the hydrazine. Plutonium 238, for example, is really toxic (not due to its radioctivity, since it's hundreds of times more toxic by weight than plutonium-239, which has a similar radiation profile).
The GP posters fears are a bit wacky of course, since nuclear fuel sent into space would be a solid mass and encapsulated so that it wouldn't burn up or break up and be distributed in the atmosphere. Also, there would be a few kilograms of plutonium, but potentially hundreds of thousands of kilograms of hydrazine. Still, to answer your question again, if I had a choice between being showered in hydrazine or with an encapsulated lump of plutonium falling from space... I'd take the one that wouldn't blow me into a thousand pieces.
If you encapsulate the nuclear fuel (non-critical masses of it obviously) in a sufficient container, it will be able to survive re-entry and hitting just about anything without rupturing. Even it lands where it can't be retrieved, the container won't leak for a good few millenia and will contain the fuels radiation. Of course, you wouldn't want one of those containers to land on you.
Usually because you won't get enough thrust out of the engine. At an unachievable optimum efficiency, you need a theoretical 48 watts of power per kilogram just for the thrust to counteract gravity at the surface of the earth. This is ignoring aerodynamic effects entirely, of course, but it's just illustrative. So, if you want to actually go up, you need more power than that. So, the absolute maximum that 1 MW could lift would be a bit more than 20 tons. With an imaginary efficiency of 25 % (still unrealistically high), that would be around 5 tons. Considering that you're still going to have to carry the craft itself, crew, cargo, engines and propellant (unless you come up with some neat air breathing design that refills its propellant tanks with air as it lifts off), it's unlikely that you're going to find a nuclear reactor that can provide you with that kind of power per kilogram in a practical weight range. That's ignoring whether or not the engines themselves can be made to weigh less at the earth's surface than the thrust they're capable of producing. Now, as nuclear reactors get bigger, it is possible that they could scale so that they provide the necessary power per unit of weight. That might mean a nuclear rocket that can take off from the surface of the earth. Until then, chemical rockets are the way to go. They don't have remotely near the energy density of nuclear, but for up to maybe 15 minutes, they can pour out massive amounts of power
Now, nuclear can certainly pour out power faster than chemical rockets too, but not usually in a safe, contained manner. There are some nuclear rocket designs that carry out fission externally that could take off from earth (either by a continuous reaction, or by throwing a bunch of small, low yield nuclear bombs out of the back), but people aren't too keen on massive use of open air fission reactions these days. Plus, you need a way to protect the cargo and crew from the radiation. Carrying enough shielding to do that with such an active nuclear reaction tends to re-introduce the weight problem. You can also use distance as a substitute for shielding, like the spacecraft from _2001_ which had the engines and the crew compartment separated by a very long thin section , but such a design is impractical to launch from earth. So, overall it looks like we're stuck with using reactors to make power to run some sort of electric drive or direct thermal exhaust options. Either way, the actual thrust to weight ratios of these systems looks like it's less than 1 on the surface.
In space, however, the nuclear rockets blow by chemical rockets by a huge margin. Out there, for most operations, you may be able to get 100 times the total thrust out of a nuclear rocket than you could ever get out of a chemical one, it just may take 1000 times as long to do so. Since chemical rocket burn times are measured in seconds, that's not much of a problem out there.
In the long run, we may get total package nuclear powered spacecraft that can take off from the ground and fly all the way to another planet, land, take off again and land back on earth without needing to refuel or use chemical stages, etc. There's nothing saying it's impossible. Our current tech can't manage that (safely) yet, however. We may get there some day, however.
Does Cuba count as heavily armed? For that matter, regardless of what its domestic policies might be, does it actually do anything that would be considered highly aggressive in the international arena?
khipu completely and probably deliberately misinterpreted me and wrote:
So, you're saying that it would be better for large parts of Canada to remain uninhabitable in order to avoid a hypothetical conflict over land?
No. No, I'm not saying that. I was replying to a poster who wrote: "Canadians who want to stop global warming (assuming it's possible) are working against the country's best interests". What I was saying was that the actual global situation that might lead to exploitable land opening up in Canada would probably lead to more chaos death and misery on average for the rest of the world. Frankly, even in Canada, the change in weather that might make some areas more habitable would probably make other areas less habitable (including areas that are already heavily inhabited. The balance of positive versus negative changes is more likely to fall on the negative side and you have to realize that countries don't live in a vacuum. Humans can be really good at spreading the misery around.
I wasn't advocating laws fixing the value of one precious metal against another, I was just pointing those out as a common example of how precious metal coinage was actually largely still a fiat currency with a value set by law. Such laws were deemed necessary because some people would take their 10 gold coins, cross a border and trade them for 170 silver coins, cross back over the border and trade them for 11 gold coins until they were filthy rich. So, nations needed all kinds of internal laws and treaties with one another to synchronize the value of their currencies. If precious metals had some sort of specific intrinsic value, that sort of thing wouldn't be necessary, but they don't, so nations had to craft laws like that so that people wouldn't lose faith in the currency. Now, gold and silver and so forth would still have had value even if they stopped basing the currency on them (like they have now), but the value would have been subject to supply and demand just like any other commodity.
Basically, in currency, you want to avoid the situation where something relatively small happens (like a mine discovers a huge new vein, or a cargo ship sinks, etc.) and suddenly everyone's life savings can only buy half of what it could before. Modern fiat currencies (and the system of "saving" your money in the stock market) don't actually provide that sort of security sadly, but precious metals don't either.
Why? Because it's a waste to lock up useful copper doing nothing but not a waste to lock up useless gold? Nations have plenty of other commodities that they can back their currencies with and not need to lock them in heavily armed vaults. That can include things such as the land it holds and the productive output of its workforce.
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The coriolis forces would probably make it too uncomfortable to sleep in a small centrifuge. Studies have shown that you really need to be under 2 rpm for most humans to live without adverse effects. Above 7 rpm and you can just forget about it. Not to mention that it's quite likely that you'd get a lot more benefit from the simulated gravity while awake, upright and moving around. So, at 2 rpm, you need a radius of at least 224 meters, and it's a linear speed around the outside of about 169 km/h. On the moon, if you had the resources, you could pull that off with what amounts to a fast circular train on a circular track about 1.4 km long. The track would need to be mounted on an almost vertical slope, or the interior of the car would need to have sloped floors and the speed would need to be adjusted slightly so that the moons gravity and the centrifugal force add up to exactly 1 g perpendicular to the floor. This would provide a large living area with earth normal gravity. Parallel tracks above and below could have smaller "elevators" that can match speed with the habitat then lock on to let people on and off without having to stop the entire thing every time someone needs to get off.
So, even if it turns out that humans can't survive for long periods of time under the moon's gravity, we have a solution we know will work because it uses train technology we know will work (unless it turns out that there's a biologically significant difference between simulated gravity and real gravity that would ruin this plan, which seems very unlikely) and that millions of people use every day on Earth. The only problem is, it's an intermediate or long term solution, not a near term one because we either need the lift capacity to send all the digging equipment, track and train cars to the moon (although, it obviously doesn't have to start with a full 1.4 km long train, that's just a way to make full use of the track), or we need to have the infrastructure on the moon to build it.
Now, if it turns out that spending half the day in earth normal gravity and the other half at 1/8th g still causes health problems, then we may be up a creek without some sort of bio-engineering solution. That doesn't seem likely though.
The png format existed by then. Was there any reason that tiff files were used instead.
Did they punch the hole in the corner or the middle of one of the edges?
Oops. Got confused about which example demonlapin meant. The reason that example was bad is because an if() conditionally executes the next statement or code block, which means something ending with ; or surrounded by {}. So, if you have a ; right after an if(), that means that it conditionally executes everything between the if() and the ;, which is nothing but whitespace, and then it proceeds to the code block surrounded by {}. which is now no longer executed conditionally.
It depends on the language. In C, = is the assignment operator and == is the equal to operator. if (a==b) will perform the next statement if a and b are equal to each other. If (a=b) will assign the value of b to a and then always perform the next statement. This can sometimes lead to obscure logic errors that are a pain to hunt down until you notice it and slap your hand over your face and groan. Anyone who has been programming in C for any length of time gets this drilled down to the level of the subconscious so that they always notice it. Until, that is, they've been doing it a long, long time and one day their subconscious fails them and they search and search and search through the code until they spot it, then there's a facepalm of epic proportions.
Well, the ending is right out of any of Heinlein's later books.
Not to mention the fact that there's a genuine condition called polymastia. Usually it does not result in such a regular formation, however.
You wrote: "No, I'm not "misinterpreting" what you're saying, I just take it to its logical conclusion: you argued that lack of habitability of parts of Canada were discouraging the US from invading it. Your premise is preposterous, and so is your conclusion." That pretty heavily misinterprets what I was saying because you act as if I'm claiming that the US isn't invading Canada _right now_ because parts of it aren't very habitable. That's ridiculous and obviously not what I was saying. I was talking about a hypothetical future where global warming has turned those less habitable parts of Canada into a paradise (a scenario that I said I didn't find particularly realistic in the first place), just as the poster I was replying to was. The problem I was pointing out was that, even if it were all good for every part of Canada, it would not be so good for many other parts of the world, including large chunks of the US. In that sort of scenario the chance of armed conflicts all over the world is pretty high. So high it's pretty much inevitable. It's even going to be high among currently friendly countries like the US and Canada. The US is, after all, a very heavily armed and aggressive country.
The overall point, specifics aside, is that nations won't be operating in a vacuum where they can reap the rewards of a locally improved situation while ignoring the problems of the rest of the world. It just doesn't work that way most of the time.
Well, the Mali empire is a great example. They were wealthy and powerful for centuries because they were a chokepoint for gold from more southern parts of Africa to Europe, but they didn't really have all that much of their own gold production. Once traders started cutting out the middle man and sailing around them, their empire lost all that wealth and power.
There really are plenty of examples, but it's silly to expect me to provide them. It's dead obvious that gold will generally be worth less in places that are actively exploiting the gold resources they have and worth more in places without such resources or where they're not exploited. It's also obvious that a lot of the value gold beyond its rarity and shininess is cultural, so different cultures will have different values for it. Frankly it's amazing that anyone could think that the value of gold wouldn't vary widely from place to place without modern automated markets and instant communications.
Ok. A square kilometer of land receives an average of 250 MegaWatts of solar energy and about 715 millimeters of rain per year. Even if it's not particularly arable land, with work it can typically feed at least a thousand people. It contains all kinds of things that can be harvested and mined and used. Actually, the top hundred meters of soil and rock will contain something like 750 kg of gold, which, at current prices, is about $37.5 million dollars, which is the value of the land if it sells at $150,000 an acre. So... that just confuses things comparing something that contains gold to just plain gold...
Anyway, you wanted to compare productive output of the land and the lump of gold. So, the land has all of the above going for it and more, and the equivalent value 750 kg of gold... sits there. Or, it does if you want to back your currency with it. Otherwise, you can use it productively to make things. It does have some useful properties (almost always useful in extremely small amounts and extremely thin films, of course), so you can do that. But, if your going to back your currency with commodities you're actively using, why can't you also use all of the other commodities you're actively using?
People don't identify themselves by their stamp collecting habits because most people aren't fanatically obsessed with stamp collecting to the point that they're stunned when they encounter somone who doesn't collect stamps. You said: "We don't have a commonly used word that describes the state of not collecting stamps, or a word that describes people who avoid collecting stamps." Of course we don't have a commonly used word for it, but if we did, that word would be aphilatelist. And it would _not_ be a hobby, regardless of how many other people did it. It's the same with religion, no matter how many people have a religion, not having a religion is not a religion. You yourself seem like you would agree that it would be ridiculous to define everyone as having a religion if only say, 5% of people had an actual religion and the rest of the world never really thought about it. Why is it any less ridiculous when 95% of people have a religion?
Try looking at it from another point of view. I could argue that the follower of any religion (except some extreme pantheistic ones I suppose) is an atheist. Christians, after all, don't believe in Hindu gods or in zeus or Odin, or Mithras, or Mardok, or the flying spaghetti monster (or the divinity of various saints and other religious figures that other Christians may believe in depending on Christian sect). So really, nearly all religious people are atheists because of all the things they don't believe in.
Frankly, I don't understand your point of view given your example conversation from the end of your post. It supports _my_ position, not yours. Let's alter it a bit:
"I believe in zero gods" -- Equivalent to claiming atheism as a religion.
"I'm confused.. I think you meant to say you do not believe in gods." --Equivalent to saying that what they meant to say is that they don't have a religion.
"Well yeah that's the same thing."
"No, one is the absence of belief, one is the belief in nothing. It makes no sense!!!! You can't believe in nothing, it's not there to be believed in!" --There you go, you can't believe in nothing (well, some forms of nihilists believe in nothing in an almost religious way, but most don't). Lack of belief is not a religion.
Anyway, atheists can't be lumped together like that. Agnosticism is a form of atheism, but then you have what you might call strong atheism. Agnosticism may or may not intersect with religious beliefs. for example, quite a few Christians may actually be quite agnostic in practice. First of all, most of them haven't actually read the vast majority of the bible. Many of them believe broadly in Christianity but don't actually believe that their religious authorities have all the answers. They could be considered weakly agnostic. At the other end of the spectrum some strong atheists may well be outright hostile to religion. Some to the extent that their hostility practically is a form of religious fervor, including a personal hatred of supernatural beings who they don't actually believe in.
The point is, some atheists may actually consider atheism to be their religion. For those people, you should respect their wishes and call it their religion. Other atheists (surely the majority) do not consider lack of religion to be a religion. Is it that hard to respect their wishes?
That's just stupid in so many ways. When was the last time someone you just met asked you: "So, what kind of stamp collector are you?". That never happens because people don't go around defining everyone else by their stamp collecting habits. There's no automatic assumptions from nearly everyone that everyone must be some kind of stamp collector, although not necessarily collecting the same stamps as them. If the world were like that, then non-stamp collectors would identify themselves, or be identified by others as aphilatelists. And, in this alternate universe, if religion happened to not be widely practiced, alternate versions of us could be having this exact same conversation, and alternate you would have just written: "We don't have a commonly used word that describes the state of not [having a religion], or a word that describes people who avoid [having a religion]. People don't identify themselves as not-religion-practicers."
The simple fact is, most atheists don't identify themselves as atheists except when demanded to identify themselves. The rest of the time, they just carry on with their lives.
Many of them are as easily quantified, divided, stored and transferred. Some of them more easily.
Consider quantification of gold: Currently worth about $52 per gram. Great. How accurate is your scale? Not perfect? Then you're going to be off by a few dollars. I won't even go into the purity here.
Divisible: I'll grant you, easily divisible. Of course, then you run into the quantification problem.
Storable: Stores easy, have to give it that Not a lot of corrosion happening wherever you put it.
Transferable: Yeah, in heavily armored trucks. Or do you just mean carried around in your pocket? Sure, but it's so soft that, if everyone does that, in a few years your gold coin will be missing a few dollars worth (and laundromats will be making a killing on the gold dust they filter out of the water people wash their pants in). Use an alloy. Great. How can you tell that it's really 18k and not 16k? Oh, it's stamped on the coin so you can just take it on faith.
No, the reason that people could go from one place to another and trade their gold and other precious metals at different rates wasn't because governments set the values. It could happen if local government set the values in ignorance of how other countries were setting them, certainly. It didn't matter whether the value was set by local government or not, however, the simple fact is that the precious metals were worth differing amounts in different places. In some places a particular metal was worth more because it was more scarce and in others it was worth less because it was less scarce and in yet others, it was worth more even though it was less scarce and in others it was worth less even though it was more scarce. Heck, in some places gold was worth pretty much nothing because, ok, sure it's shiny, but nowhere near as shiny and pretty as this polished shell! Without governments setting prices, the values of precious metals were essentially arbitrary. I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of power in cultural inertia. There is. Thousands of years of something being precious "just because" is virtually a tangible thing as things go. It's not going to convince me that money backed by gold is any less of a fiat currency than any other. To look at it from another point of view, money based on assets that are actually out for the public to see doesn't require much faith whereas money based on a gold in a vault that barely anyone gets to enter... Well, I think it takes a lot of faith to believe it's not just lead bars with thin electroplating.
Good point, because, after all, magnetism can compress matter to such a degree that the cumulative magnetic field strength is so high that even gravity can't escape... Oh, wait, I have that backwards, it's the other way around.
Well, NYC covers about 790 square kilometers, so that's 790 million square meters. It gets a yearly average of 147.08 watts per square meter of sunlight (this includes nighttime). In January, NY's worst month for solar power, it gets 69.58 watts per square meter. So, that's an average of 116 GW for the average and about 55 GW for the worst month. So, to work on solar power, NYC needs to find a way to turn about 9% of that solar power hitting it to electricity for January numbers or 4.3% for the average. In an area as built up as NYC, that's very doable with conventional photovoltaics.
Clearly some form of power storage is needed for solar. Battery technology tends to be dirty, insufficient, and require too frequent replacement, even with stationary lead-acid batteries. There are other ways such as melting salt and harvesting the heat for power later, or pumping water uphill to reservoirs and then getting it back with hydrothermal. Another method is to synthesize fuels from the atmosphere and water. Methane is dead easy to make and has the bonus that it can be used in existing infrastructure such as natural gas lines. There are also more complex liquid fuels that can be made and have the bonus that they can be burned in existing gas or diesel engines. Such synthesized fuels are carbon-neutral since all of the CO2 released came from the atmosphere to start with.
Now, if you want to revise your definition of NYC to just the island of Manhattan, then we're only talking about 87.5 km squared. Take out 4 km squared for Central park and so forth. So 83.5 km squared. So only 12.28 GW average and 5.8 GW in the worst case. Of course, we don't know how your 5 GW figure applies, since you said it was for NYC and that almost always means the whole thing and not just Manhattan Island. There are about 1.65 million people living in Manhattan and average electric power use is about 300 Watts in the US, so that's 495 MW. We'll quadruple it to 2 GW because of other people working there and because of all the businesses there, etc. So, that's 16.28% of the average and 34.48% in the worst month. Even in that case, it's doable with good long term power storage.
Of course I only wrote this because I bothered thinking about the actual numbers. The first thing I started to write is that you were using a deliberately unreasonable example. NYC is a city. Not only a city, but the most densely populated major city in the US. So, your question is a ridiculous farce. You might as well demand that cities produce all of their own food within their borders. The answer to your question, if it hadn't turned out that NYC gets enough sunlight for its own electrical needs, is that you build solar powerplants somewhere sunny and sparsely populated, then you send the power by transmission line to NYC.
Now, that approach is may still be necessary for NYC if you need not just electric power, but _all_ power that people use. If you average out all of the power that people use in terms of electricity, transportation, heating, all the power used in manufacturing and transporting and providing the goods and services people buy, etc., as well as all the power used generating and transmitting electricity for end use and mining fossil fuels and all other resources, it actually works out to about 11 kW/person rather than 300 W/person (around 37 times more). Of course, the majority of that usually isn't actually _used_ local to the end user, but rather is used in factories, data centers, mines, refineries, bled out from transmission lines, etc. The point is that, even if you consider all of that power use per person, you can still get all of the power we use from solar. You just have to build huge solar power plants in Arizona and convert the power to the forms you need (such as into synthetic hydrocarbons) and then transmit it over lines and pipe it through pipelines and ship it in tankers, etc.
Just so you know, the plutonium-238 plugs in those RTGs do actually glow. It doesn't make the whole rover glow of course (unless you can see in the infrared), but the actual plutonium does.
Depending on whether or not the plutonium were fine dust and what isotope it was, I personally would probably go for the hydrazine. Plutonium 238, for example, is really toxic (not due to its radioctivity, since it's hundreds of times more toxic by weight than plutonium-239, which has a similar radiation profile).
The GP posters fears are a bit wacky of course, since nuclear fuel sent into space would be a solid mass and encapsulated so that it wouldn't burn up or break up and be distributed in the atmosphere. Also, there would be a few kilograms of plutonium, but potentially hundreds of thousands of kilograms of hydrazine. Still, to answer your question again, if I had a choice between being showered in hydrazine or with an encapsulated lump of plutonium falling from space... I'd take the one that wouldn't blow me into a thousand pieces.
If you encapsulate the nuclear fuel (non-critical masses of it obviously) in a sufficient container, it will be able to survive re-entry and hitting just about anything without rupturing. Even it lands where it can't be retrieved, the container won't leak for a good few millenia and will contain the fuels radiation. Of course, you wouldn't want one of those containers to land on you.
Usually because you won't get enough thrust out of the engine. At an unachievable optimum efficiency, you need a theoretical 48 watts of power per kilogram just for the thrust to counteract gravity at the surface of the earth. This is ignoring aerodynamic effects entirely, of course, but it's just illustrative. So, if you want to actually go up, you need more power than that. So, the absolute maximum that 1 MW could lift would be a bit more than 20 tons. With an imaginary efficiency of 25 % (still unrealistically high), that would be around 5 tons. Considering that you're still going to have to carry the craft itself, crew, cargo, engines and propellant (unless you come up with some neat air breathing design that refills its propellant tanks with air as it lifts off), it's unlikely that you're going to find a nuclear reactor that can provide you with that kind of power per kilogram in a practical weight range. That's ignoring whether or not the engines themselves can be made to weigh less at the earth's surface than the thrust they're capable of producing. Now, as nuclear reactors get bigger, it is possible that they could scale so that they provide the necessary power per unit of weight. That might mean a nuclear rocket that can take off from the surface of the earth. Until then, chemical rockets are the way to go. They don't have remotely near the energy density of nuclear, but for up to maybe 15 minutes, they can pour out massive amounts of power
Now, nuclear can certainly pour out power faster than chemical rockets too, but not usually in a safe, contained manner. There are some nuclear rocket designs that carry out fission externally that could take off from earth (either by a continuous reaction, or by throwing a bunch of small, low yield nuclear bombs out of the back), but people aren't too keen on massive use of open air fission reactions these days. Plus, you need a way to protect the cargo and crew from the radiation. Carrying enough shielding to do that with such an active nuclear reaction tends to re-introduce the weight problem. You can also use distance as a substitute for shielding, like the spacecraft from _2001_ which had the engines and the crew compartment separated by a very long thin section , but such a design is impractical to launch from earth. So, overall it looks like we're stuck with using reactors to make power to run some sort of electric drive or direct thermal exhaust options. Either way, the actual thrust to weight ratios of these systems looks like it's less than 1 on the surface.
In space, however, the nuclear rockets blow by chemical rockets by a huge margin. Out there, for most operations, you may be able to get 100 times the total thrust out of a nuclear rocket than you could ever get out of a chemical one, it just may take 1000 times as long to do so. Since chemical rocket burn times are measured in seconds, that's not much of a problem out there.
In the long run, we may get total package nuclear powered spacecraft that can take off from the ground and fly all the way to another planet, land, take off again and land back on earth without needing to refuel or use chemical stages, etc. There's nothing saying it's impossible. Our current tech can't manage that (safely) yet, however. We may get there some day, however.
Does Cuba count as heavily armed? For that matter, regardless of what its domestic policies might be, does it actually do anything that would be considered highly aggressive in the international arena?
Ok, but what's the rationale?
khipu completely and probably deliberately misinterpreted me and wrote:
So, you're saying that it would be better for large parts of Canada to remain uninhabitable in order to avoid a hypothetical conflict over land?
No. No, I'm not saying that. I was replying to a poster who wrote: "Canadians who want to stop global warming (assuming it's possible) are working against the country's best interests". What I was saying was that the actual global situation that might lead to exploitable land opening up in Canada would probably lead to more chaos death and misery on average for the rest of the world. Frankly, even in Canada, the change in weather that might make some areas more habitable would probably make other areas less habitable (including areas that are already heavily inhabited. The balance of positive versus negative changes is more likely to fall on the negative side and you have to realize that countries don't live in a vacuum. Humans can be really good at spreading the misery around.
I wasn't advocating laws fixing the value of one precious metal against another, I was just pointing those out as a common example of how precious metal coinage was actually largely still a fiat currency with a value set by law. Such laws were deemed necessary because some people would take their 10 gold coins, cross a border and trade them for 170 silver coins, cross back over the border and trade them for 11 gold coins until they were filthy rich. So, nations needed all kinds of internal laws and treaties with one another to synchronize the value of their currencies. If precious metals had some sort of specific intrinsic value, that sort of thing wouldn't be necessary, but they don't, so nations had to craft laws like that so that people wouldn't lose faith in the currency. Now, gold and silver and so forth would still have had value even if they stopped basing the currency on them (like they have now), but the value would have been subject to supply and demand just like any other commodity.
Basically, in currency, you want to avoid the situation where something relatively small happens (like a mine discovers a huge new vein, or a cargo ship sinks, etc.) and suddenly everyone's life savings can only buy half of what it could before. Modern fiat currencies (and the system of "saving" your money in the stock market) don't actually provide that sort of security sadly, but precious metals don't either.
Why? Because it's a waste to lock up useful copper doing nothing but not a waste to lock up useless gold? Nations have plenty of other commodities that they can back their currencies with and not need to lock them in heavily armed vaults. That can include things such as the land it holds and the productive output of its workforce.