If you want plutonium-238, certainly you would need nuclear power plants to make it. I don't insist on RTGs, they're just one option with certain advantages when you're shipping equipment to far off location and need to power it reliably for a long time.
I've wondered that many times, and have never come up with a good reason for why people live (as opposed to "endure in mining camps") in deserts.
That's the point I was making about your argument. Just because you personally don't get it, or it's outside your comfort zone, doesn't make it pointless.
To make life less precarious, less of a drudge. Let me rephrase that: to make life easier.
In retrospect, those things obviously made life easier and better. Beforehand, you can be assured that there were plenty of naysayers like yourself who demanded to know why you would want to have anything to do with fire, or horses, or putting things on wheels when you can build a perfectly good travois.
To leap from "it's stupid to live on Mars" to "it's stupid to live at all" is... too absurd for words.
I think I said that because you said:
"Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason
And it simply isn't. If that's not a good reason, what is?
Antarctica gets far less precipitation than Arizona.
In the interior, yes. Coastal areas tend to get a decent amount, however. Either way, both Arizona and Antarctica get a lot more precipitation than anywhere we would initially colonize on Mars.
Under a *deep* -- and therefore very expensive -- gravity well.
It's all going to be expensive. The point is that you don't have to build an industrial chain on Mars from scratch. You take along the supplies you need to start and bootstrap it from there. You use in situ resources, but you don't use them to make everything from scratch, you use them as a multiplier for what you do bring along with you. For example, an entire lifetime (obviously not a lifetime of luxury) of supplies for an astronaut would be about 150 tons. That's food/water/oxygen/clothing/sanitary supplies/medicine. At current launch costs, that's about $4 billion per astronaut for the launch costs to get it off Earth.
75% or so of that mass, however, is just water. Even if you ignore in situ resources entirely, you can recycle water used for human consumption. There are consumables involved in the filtration that require a significant industrial chain to actually make, but you can recycle thousands of kilograms of water for every kilogram of consumables you bring. If you're using local water, you also need consumables. But you can bring those along with you and use a small amount to use a large amount of in situ water.
Oxygen is a bit trickier since we don't have a good process for cracking CO2 yet, but this is where we stop ignoring the in situ resources and acknowledge that, with some basic equipment, you can get oxygen from water (or from perchlorates, or from other materials) on Mars. There are consumables that you can't reproduce on Mars without an industrial base for that as well such as filters and electrolyte/catalyst membranes but, once again, you can bring along a relatively small mass of consumables and use them to generate a lifetime supply of oxygen from local resources.
Mine it and process it?
That is the way such things work, yes. Although, rather than mining and processing, you'll be extracting material from the air and processing in some cases. Did you think that anyone was suggesting heading down to the local Martian department store?
*Really*?? Sigh....:(
So, 200 wheelbarrows full of rock on Earth would be like 600 wheelbarrows of rock on Mars? Get back to me when you've moved 10 wheelbarrowfulls(sp?) of rock 100 yards.
Mass would be the same, weight would be less. So, without frequent stops and starts, it would be easier. I'm not sure why you think it would be otherwise (except of course for the obvious fact that you'd have to do it in a spacesuit).
Also I'm not sure about taiwanjohn, but I've moved a lot more than 10 loads of rock, soil, compost, whatever over my lifetime. On decent ground, without much of a slope, it's pretty easy. Even when I was 10 years old or so. That's the whole point behind a wheelbarrow. Loading the wheelbarrow has always been the hard part.
Obviously "a couple of shovels" is a bit of an understatement.
And the buttload of infrastructure to convert the local material into something usable by the 3D printer?
Not sure about metal sintering 3D printers. I gather you need powdered metal, iron or some alloy thereof along with a wax binder. Presumably you can recycle the wax to a certain degree. For the metal, you have various materials readily available on Mars. Iron is clearly widely available on Mars either as iron oxide in the soil or as fairly pure iron from meteorites. Overall though, I would think that it would be best to save the 3d printer for complex metal parts. For something like a shovel it would be better to use relatively traditional blacksmithing methods.
Go see how he made it. I guarantee you that there's a huge load of complex Earth infrastructure behind it which would have to be replicated on Mars.
The experiments in that article were about getting it to set under Martian conditions. A commercial Sorel cement product was used. It didn't look into what ki
I was including more modern designs like SRGs under the blanket term RTGs. The more modern designs get at least 20% efficiency. So, with 1 kilogram of plutonium 238 producing 500 Watts of heat, you would get 100 Watts and still at least 75 Watts after 30 years. The terrestrial section you linked to is mostly for obsolete equipment. The space section is more representative of what you could expect of anything sent to Mars. It includes a design that masses 35 kilograms total, and produces 140 Watts from 500 Watts of heat from 1 kg of fuel.
A piece of construction equipment like a Komatsu 300 uses about 5 gallons of gas per hour. 5 gallons of gasoline is about 661.2 MJ, so 5 gallons per hour is a rate of about 183.667 kilowatts. Exactly how to equate that to the power efficiency of radiothermal generation depends on a few factors. The most "efficient" (in terms of energy conversion) way to operate heavy equipment from a radiothermal source, ignoring all other considerations, is to run it off a stirling engine directly powered by the heat of the radioactive fuel. In that case, you can pretty much directly equate the 500 thermal Watts from 1 kg of pu-238 to thermal Watts from gasoline and say that a radiothermal-powered Komatsu 300 would need about 368 kgs of pu-238, or about 490 kgs to have that power level 30 years out. The actual engine would obviously need to mass more than 35 kg, but would also obviously not need to be in excess of 17 metric tons as I'm pretty certain the Stirling engine design would scale a bit more gracefully than that. Of course, you won't be running that piece of equipment 24/7. Most likely, it would sit idle nearly all the time, except for short periods of intense use. Not to mention that, for a Mars mission, you will want equipment with a modular, interchangeable design to reduce weight. So, you'll probably have a power plant somewhere and distrubute power either as electrical power over cables or by using the power to generate fuel that you can store for later use (methane and oxygen again).
Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
If the construction crews wore the kind of suits that someone would wear at 115,000 ft altitude.
That very well might be a better test. On the other hand, it wouldn't simulate the different gravity on Mars at all. Also, performing all of the constuction under such conditions wouldn't be practical. Experimentally, it should be sufficient to have part of the construction crew working under those conditions for long enough to adapt to them and then guage their effectiveness in various tasks and extrapolate from there.
Where will all of the feed stock come from?
I've got the sneaking suspicion that lots and lots of people don't realize what a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
From the atmosphere and the ground, respectively. Zubrin's plan for generating methane fuel on Mars didn't even call for using electrolysis on in situ water, but rather for bringing a relatively small amount of initial hydrogen. There's no reason, however, that we can't use in situ water as a resource as well. As for other materials you might need for various processes, you would bring them with you initially.
Same thing for the tools required. There's no reason you need to build everything locally to begin with. A bicycle, for example. It may take a very deep chain of industry to build a bicycle but, if you bring 5 bicycles and a supply of replacement parts and repair tools, there's no reason you can't still have three servicable bicycles thirty years later.
My fault. Should have said "tunnels", because maybe there aren't Martian caves where we think it's best (or even "ok") to live.
There are Martian caves/lava tubes. As long as you find one the right size, there's no reason you can't make use of
The advantages for methane that are mentioned in the article are that it's cleaner burning than kerosene, which means more re-usability for engines. Also for Mars missions it can be made in situ using electrolysis and the sabatier process.
Yes, because I've researched: (a) how difficult it is for humans to work in space suits, and
It's certanly more difficult than working in regular clothes without a breathing apparatus. You won't find anyone arguing that it isn't. That's not the same as impossible. Also, remember that working in a spacesuit in freefall isn't going to be the same thing as working in a spacesuit on a planet with gravity that's on the same order of magnitude as Earth gravity. Restrictive yes, but better spacesuit designs and better tools for compensating for the limited mobility can help with that.
(b) how much the human body does not like ionizing radiation, and
It doesn't, but it's not much worse on the surface of Mars than on the ISS. Unlike on the ISS, there's the option of being covered by large amounts of shielding most of the time, whether you're indoors in a shelter or driving around in a vehicle.
(c) how fucking cold it is on Mars.
That's just silly. It can get very cold on Mars at the poles and in winter. Most of the time, at moderate latitudes, temperatures on Mars are within typical Earth ranges. Since no-one will be outside without an insulated spacesuit, that shouldn't be a problem. Not to mention the fact that we're talking about an atmosphere 1% as thick as the atmosphere of Earth. So, even if the temperature is -150 degrees celcius, the actual amount of heat that the air can absorb is far, far less than -150 degrees celcius air on Earth. There's a reason that a vacuum flask can keep hot liquids hot or cold liquids cold for extended periods of time. There are still convection currents of course, but, once again, you would be in an insulated space suit.
Who builds those biospheres? Lots of people with lots of trucks and cranes. Trucks and cranes... just don't run on Mars. No oxygen.
Uhhh... Yeah. Because Mars colonists would totatally just buy regular trucks and cranes from some local vendor, fly them to Mars, then scratch their heads when the motors won't start. Or, maybe instead of something that idiotic, they could actually use something that works on Mars? There's electrically powered equipment powered via umbilicals to a power plant, batteries, maybe even RTGs. Alternately, they actually could use construction equipment off the lot powered by locally generated methane and oxygen (generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively). The oxygen tank would need to be four times as big as the fuel tank and fed through a regulator into a modified air intake. It might need a modified radiator, modified logic on the engine computer, maybe a regulator on the exhaust itself, but otherwise wouldn't need much modification.
Where do they build them? In Arizona. Nice, warm, sunny, near-to-civilization Arizona. Not only build it in deep, frozen Antarctica, but have it succeed in deep, frozen Antarctica and then I'll be relatively impressed.
Mars is always sunny and, in any location we might colonize early, there's never any precipitation. Antarctica, not so much. Frankly, Arizona seems closer to the environment of Mars than Antarctica. Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
But still it won't protect people from radiation.
What, you say? Live in caves?
Digging caves is hard. It takes lots and lots of heavy machinery. Which must be transported to Mars, along with fuel and spare parts, and machine shops, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
You don't dig caves. Caves are, technically speaking, Karst formations. Caves are pre-existing geological features that you locate and move in to. Ditto for lava tubes.
The things you mention are challenges, certainly, but not exactly surprises. Also not impossible obstacles.
As a side note, that war explains why Biathlon is so culturally significant to the Scandinavian countries...
No kidding. That's the war in which the White Death, Simo Hayha was personally responsible for around.4% of Soviet deaths through his skill as a marksman and outdoorsman.
If you would like to discuss the thermodynamics of AGW, I have some excellent sources I can give you for reference.
Please cut and paste them into a comment then. Plus, we would like to know either what this amazing news that you claim is coming in a couple of weeks actually is, or a good explanation for why you can't tell us.
Unless it comes from Microsoft, for example. Or the NSA. The Police. Or a politician.
Microsoft: Windows 8 is a great recent example
NSA: massive unconstitutional spying on the citizens of their own country (not to mention having a security infrastructure that was so easily breached),
Police: Aside from everything in the media about police corruption, incompetance, etc. since every locality has police, we get tend to also get to judge police officers in a direct one on one basis. The ones I've known socially, or when dealing with them in a professional capacity have tended to be lacking in anything approaching professionalism. From the ones who have gleefully talked about the illegal things they get away with protected by their badges in candid moments, to the one who gave me a speeding ticket for 75 in a 65 back when I was a teenager who was driving about 100 MPH himself and who crossed three lanes without signalling (or looking as far as I could tell) right after giving me the ticket, to the pair who couldn't hold in their fits of laughter while taking down the report I was trying to give them about my car which had just been stolen, to the officer who grilled me about the perfectly benign contents of my trunk when my car was found (a broken scale from the bakery where I worked at the time got him pretty excited) the police have failed to impress me with their professionalism. There have been other interactions that haven't been so bad, except of course that the officers have always seemed bored and reluctant to interact with anyone at best or otherwise are outright hostile towards members of the public interrupting them.
Politicians: Congresspersons regularly pass laws without reading them. This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of public record. How much worse could you get as a professional?
It was probably the "Expect some big news within a couple of weeks." It's either just a dumb rhetorical technique, or you actually have some new information, but aren't sharing it. It's almost certainly the latter. It's like how, during the whole SCO fiasco, Darl McBride went out to meet a bunch of anti-SCO protestors holding a folder he claimed held the secret evidence proving his case against Linux. Anyone with half a brain knew that it was just his shopping list or something like that and that it was really just a display of smug contempt.
This is something I've always believed, but this is the first time I've ever seen that belief validated in any way by anyone.
Unfortunately, this article doesn't seem to be validating you. It seems to be implying that you're mentally ill. Personally, I can enjoy music, but I don't seek it out. If the radio is on, I often leave it on. If it's off, it generally doesn't even occur to me to turn it on.
In contrast, the stated reason export restrictions are in place is to sanction or otherwise prevent the sharing of goods and information with certain countries.
Which seems difficult enough to do when you're talking about actual physical advanced weapons systems or industrial equipment massing thousands of tons. It's painfully obvious that it's impossible to do with software that's freely downloadable over the Internet. The kinds of people who think that it could somehow be done are either highly ignorant, just plain stupid, crazy or actually have a well thought out plan whose only downside is some small detail like turning the world into a prison or just killing nearly everyone. You say that the discussion of whether or not the law makes sense should be tabled for another time, but the sheer idiocy of the law has to be considered.
Also, it should be noted that Red Hat is really a service company. Computer services are thier product. Any proprietary software they produce doesn't have random contributors off the Internet and the open source code is, like the label says, open and provided as source (also as compiled code, but that's still just another kind of computer code). Everything else available on the Internet is computer code as well. You could draw a distinction between mere data and markup versus executable content, but good luck finding many web pages these days that don't count as executable content. So, if Red Hat is responsible for contributers from banned countries to open source software. Shouldn't every blog in the world be similarly responsible for any comments posted by people from banned countries?
Don't worry, they're not bitter. It's just the crazy space nutter troll. I've been a bit worried about the poor space nutter troll lately, what with missing quite a few space articles, while posting in articles that have nothing to do with space. It's nice to see the manic screeds back where they belong.
Filtering water through wafers of wood is not obvious to me.
I can understand how filtering water through this particular wood wouldn't be obvious to you, but how would filtering water through wood as a method of purification not be obvious to you? Filtering water through charcoal is pretty obvious considering that it's been used for distillation for centuries, maybe millenia. Charcoal is made from wood. Filtration through all kinds of natural materials, including plant-derived cellulose materials has been done since antiquity. This is, considering the prior art, a blindingly obvious idea. The novel part is that they've done a lot of legwork and found a good, efficient, available candidate material.
The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination.
Which is pretty much what I was saying when I said: "All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief." When you go to sleep in your bed and wake up in your bed, you believe you spent the night sleeping in your bed without other evidence to the contrary. For most people (who aren't known somnambulists and who don't live with hyperactive practical jokers) it's the best hypothesis. Going by the connotation of the term "belief" I use, you "believe" in the overwhelmingly likely hypothesis unless or until something better comes along. You believe that you spent all night in your bed asleep, until you see the video your friends made where they kept you asleep using ether and carried you around town, posing you in inappropriate positions in public places. After that, you should generally believe something different about how you spent your night.
All minds function on belief. Belief that your senses or memory aren't failing you or, sometimes, belief that your senses or memory _are_ failing you. You do the best you can with what you have and re-assess when you believe you have new information. The scientific mind tends to shy away from religious beliefs, irrational beliefs, inflexible beliefs, etc. but it still has beliefs.
You clearly mean something different by "belief". Good for you, but that makes this just a semantic argument. It's like the stupid argument about the word "luck". Some people are "lucky", meaning that they have enjoyed beneficial random circumstances. That doesn't mean that there's a mystical force granting those beneficial circumstances and it doesn't predict the future random circumstances those people may encounter. That doesn't stop some people from arguing that I'm talking about a mystical force when I use the term "luck".
The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.
We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS." He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.
No we're not. Note that I said "we". It's possible that you are, but you neglected to mention that in any of your posts in this thread. Rather you said:
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately
What tense is that written in? Past or present? Ditto to:
..the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all.
You're reminding me of the old anecdote about the rifleman who shoots the side of a barn and then paints a target around the bullethole. Except, there's already a target, but you're saying that the really target was actually the spot over to the left and up a bit where your bullet happened to hit.
I'm not aware of anyone treating Duesberg like a subhuman before his self-promotion really started getting fatal results. I am aware of the fact that, although Duesberg is, in fact, a scientist, he isn't really one in the context of AIDS research. The reason being that he isn't actually doing any research. True, analysis of the results
Or you could, you know, try it in a parking lot. My non-sporty brakes easily overpower my 420 HP engine.
Didn't bother to reply to this at first, because why bother arguing with someone who isn't even listening to you. Unless you're suggesting that I drive at highway speeds in a parking lot.
What is there to go fixably wrong? You sequence the DNA to a 1.5GB file - if there's any problem in that stage you're hosed already. Then you do a binary diff to your reference sequence - thWhat is there to go fixably wrong? You sequence the DNA to a 1.5GB file - if there's any problem in that stage you're hosed already. Then you do a binary diff to your reference sequence - that's a pretty thoroughly mature technology. Then you encrypt it - again, any problems = you're hosed. And if we're working on the assumption that the lab has no access to the data once it leaves the sequencer as a 3MB encrypted file then they would be hard-pressed to fix anything in the data anyway, at most they could reformat it into something more efficient to process, but that would seem a risky undertaking when you have no access the data to verify that you didn't just hose things completely.at's a pretty thoroughly mature technology. Then you encrypt it - again, any problems = you're hosed. And if we're working on the assumption that the lab has no access to the data once it leaves the sequencer as a 3MB encrypted file then they would be hard-pressed to fix anything in the data anyway, at most they could reformat it into something more efficient to process, but that would seem a risky undertaking when you have no access the data to verify that you didn't just hose things completely.
Well that's pretty much the point. If the model of the system is so secure that you're hosed if anything at all goes wrong, most people are going to hedge their bets by putting in a back door so they can try to fix things. When you're going to have to tell your clients to redo millions of dollars of really expensive data entry if anything goes wrong, you're going to be under a fair amount of pressure to make sure that doesn't happen. One way to do that is to secretly break your security model. It happens all the time.
Agree on all the rest, I just have a lot of faith in human nature. I was just looking at my showerhead. It has a swiveling plastic ball joint through which water flows. Past that ball joint is a hook arrangement the showerhead hangs on, then a flexible hose leading to the showerhead. I've had more than one showerhead with this basic design and the ball joints tend to wear out and start spraying water around. The thing is, the swiveling joint swivels so that you can position the showerhead when it's hanging up, but the water goes from that ball joint to a flexible hose so that you can detach the showerhead. The ball joint isn't completely pointless in the design, but having the joint carry water is pointless. So, it's either very poorly thought out by someone who should know better, or intentionally designed that way to ensure that it doesn't last too long and you'll buy another one. Either way, that just helps bolster my faith in human nature... also, I really need to be the one to pick a showerhead the next time one wears out.
Except that for sea level changes it absolutely has been, and will continue to be so.
But what I keep saying is that this is _not_ just about sea level rising. The sea level doesn't rise and everything goes on just the way it has with slightly higher sea level. The actual effects of the sea level change can be catastrophic and sudden.
All it would mean is possibly some abandoned structures by the coast if people ignore it, or hastily placed mitigation elements put in place until a more permanent solution is realized - and again all this happens over the course of 100 years as sea level rises gradually affect different areas. But no-where near something to panic over.
And you're completely ignoring the example I gave of New Orleans why? That example makes it abundantly clear is that what happens in most of these situations is that people ignore it and put things off and dismiss the people warning them about it as hysterical. Then things collapse in a rush and it's time to _really_ panic.
It will change, yes - but the main point you seem to be missing is IT IS OVER THE PERIOD OF 100 YEARS!!!!!!!
Yes, but what I think you're missing is that gradual changes in these sorts of systems tends not to actually be so gradual. What actually tends to happen is that things remain more or less the same for decades, then there's a storm or some other typical but infrequent condition and entire sections of coastline vanish overnight.
People have easily kept water at bay that changes that slowly. They will continue to do so
People tend to ignore it when it changes slowly. What actually happens is that people with a good understanding of the system speak up about what will happen, then shout when no-one seems to be listening, then get marginalized (if they actually work for the organization that's supposed to be fixing the problem, they get fired, asked to resign, demoted, re-assigned, etc.). Long term budget concerns are always beaten by short-term concerns, even if the long-term concerns will end up saving money in the final accounting. Roads are a great example. In most areas, they could be made a lot better than they are, and last a lot longer, but instead, they just get constant repairs and frequent repaving which ends up costing more than if they did it right in the first place. The marginal costs are completely ignored: all the extra damage to cars from bad roads (or under construction roads), plus all the fuel and time wasted by construction delays. The same kinds of people who make those decisions make the decisions about how to deal with rising waters.
Consider, for example, New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. That was an entirely predictable man-made disaster. All the paving and man-made drainage systems, etc. plus the short-sighted design of the levees were what made things so bad.
Okay, yeah editing is an issue as well, but not one relevant to archives of immutable data.
True, but I'm not as confident as you that early versions of this will actually allow for immutable data. Avoiding all bugs that might require things to be re-encoded is a monumental task. Maybe they could pull it off. I would be truly, truly impressed.
It probably wouldn't be racial studies that do it though, IIRC there's not actually any well-defined racial boundaries from a genetic perspective - there's not even one single solitary gene shared by most black people that isn't also present in a lot of whites and asians (and vice-versa), we just travel and intermix too much. It only takes one person with a bad case of wanderlust a thousand years ago to introduce a gene into a large portion of an otherwise isolated population.
True. It depends a bit on the groups. Island populations, for example. Specific studies on people with a particular medical condition with a genetic link might be better example than people with particular ethnicities.
Yeah, I can't argue against the incompetence card. In fact that's why I think homomorphic encryption could be a wonderful thing for genetics - it means that the sequenced DNA need never be stored in plaintext anywhere outside the sequencing machine, not even in volatile memory while being analyzed. There's still the risk that someone gets their hands on both the key and data, but a single "never, ever keep these two things in the same place" security rule would go a long way towards protecting against that, and has at least a chance of being followed.
That is true. I think something like that could be accomplished without a method that makes calculations millions of times slower at best, however. I wish them the best of luck in developing these methods however. There might be potential in these methods in other fields, such as secure crypto-currencies, etc.
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You'd better reopen Hanford PDQ.
If you want plutonium-238, certainly you would need nuclear power plants to make it. I don't insist on RTGs, they're just one option with certain advantages when you're shipping equipment to far off location and need to power it reliably for a long time.
I've wondered that many times, and have never come up with a good reason for why people live (as opposed to "endure in mining camps") in deserts.
That's the point I was making about your argument. Just because you personally don't get it, or it's outside your comfort zone, doesn't make it pointless.
To make life less precarious, less of a drudge. Let me rephrase that: to make life easier.
In retrospect, those things obviously made life easier and better. Beforehand, you can be assured that there were plenty of naysayers like yourself who demanded to know why you would want to have anything to do with fire, or horses, or putting things on wheels when you can build a perfectly good travois.
To leap from "it's stupid to live on Mars" to "it's stupid to live at all" is... too absurd for words.
I think I said that because you said:
"Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason
And it simply isn't. If that's not a good reason, what is?
Antarctica gets far less precipitation than Arizona.
In the interior, yes. Coastal areas tend to get a decent amount, however. Either way, both Arizona and Antarctica get a lot more precipitation than anywhere we would initially colonize on Mars.
Under a *deep* -- and therefore very expensive -- gravity well.
It's all going to be expensive. The point is that you don't have to build an industrial chain on Mars from scratch. You take along the supplies you need to start and bootstrap it from there. You use in situ resources, but you don't use them to make everything from scratch, you use them as a multiplier for what you do bring along with you. For example, an entire lifetime (obviously not a lifetime of luxury) of supplies for an astronaut would be about 150 tons. That's food/water/oxygen/clothing/sanitary supplies/medicine. At current launch costs, that's about $4 billion per astronaut for the launch costs to get it off Earth.
75% or so of that mass, however, is just water. Even if you ignore in situ resources entirely, you can recycle water used for human consumption. There are consumables involved in the filtration that require a significant industrial chain to actually make, but you can recycle thousands of kilograms of water for every kilogram of consumables you bring. If you're using local water, you also need consumables. But you can bring those along with you and use a small amount to use a large amount of in situ water.
Oxygen is a bit trickier since we don't have a good process for cracking CO2 yet, but this is where we stop ignoring the in situ resources and acknowledge that, with some basic equipment, you can get oxygen from water (or from perchlorates, or from other materials) on Mars. There are consumables that you can't reproduce on Mars without an industrial base for that as well such as filters and electrolyte/catalyst membranes but, once again, you can bring along a relatively small mass of consumables and use them to generate a lifetime supply of oxygen from local resources.
Mine it and process it?
That is the way such things work, yes. Although, rather than mining and processing, you'll be extracting material from the air and processing in some cases. Did you think that anyone was suggesting heading down to the local Martian department store?
*Really*?? Sigh.... :(
So, 200 wheelbarrows full of rock on Earth would be like 600 wheelbarrows of rock on Mars? Get back to me when you've moved 10 wheelbarrowfulls(sp?) of rock 100 yards.
Mass would be the same, weight would be less. So, without frequent stops and starts, it would be easier. I'm not sure why you think it would be otherwise (except of course for the obvious fact that you'd have to do it in a spacesuit).
Also I'm not sure about taiwanjohn, but I've moved a lot more than 10 loads of rock, soil, compost, whatever over my lifetime. On decent ground, without much of a slope, it's pretty easy. Even when I was 10 years old or so. That's the whole point behind a wheelbarrow. Loading the wheelbarrow has always been the hard part.
Obviously "a couple of shovels" is a bit of an understatement.
And the buttload of infrastructure to convert the local material into something usable by the 3D printer?
Not sure about metal sintering 3D printers. I gather you need powdered metal, iron or some alloy thereof along with a wax binder. Presumably you can recycle the wax to a certain degree. For the metal, you have various materials readily available on Mars. Iron is clearly widely available on Mars either as iron oxide in the soil or as fairly pure iron from meteorites. Overall though, I would think that it would be best to save the 3d printer for complex metal parts. For something like a shovel it would be better to use relatively traditional blacksmithing methods.
Go see how he made it. I guarantee you that there's a huge load of complex Earth infrastructure behind it which would have to be replicated on Mars.
The experiments in that article were about getting it to set under Martian conditions. A commercial Sorel cement product was used. It didn't look into what ki
I wouldn't get my hopes up...
I was including more modern designs like SRGs under the blanket term RTGs. The more modern designs get at least 20% efficiency. So, with 1 kilogram of plutonium 238 producing 500 Watts of heat, you would get 100 Watts and still at least 75 Watts after 30 years. The terrestrial section you linked to is mostly for obsolete equipment. The space section is more representative of what you could expect of anything sent to Mars. It includes a design that masses 35 kilograms total, and produces 140 Watts from 500 Watts of heat from 1 kg of fuel.
A piece of construction equipment like a Komatsu 300 uses about 5 gallons of gas per hour. 5 gallons of gasoline is about 661.2 MJ, so 5 gallons per hour is a rate of about 183.667 kilowatts. Exactly how to equate that to the power efficiency of radiothermal generation depends on a few factors. The most "efficient" (in terms of energy conversion) way to operate heavy equipment from a radiothermal source, ignoring all other considerations, is to run it off a stirling engine directly powered by the heat of the radioactive fuel. In that case, you can pretty much directly equate the 500 thermal Watts from 1 kg of pu-238 to thermal Watts from gasoline and say that a radiothermal-powered Komatsu 300 would need about 368 kgs of pu-238, or about 490 kgs to have that power level 30 years out. The actual engine would obviously need to mass more than 35 kg, but would also obviously not need to be in excess of 17 metric tons as I'm pretty certain the Stirling engine design would scale a bit more gracefully than that. Of course, you won't be running that piece of equipment 24/7. Most likely, it would sit idle nearly all the time, except for short periods of intense use. Not to mention that, for a Mars mission, you will want equipment with a modular, interchangeable design to reduce weight. So, you'll probably have a power plant somewhere and distrubute power either as electrical power over cables or by using the power to generate fuel that you can store for later use (methane and oxygen again).
Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
If the construction crews wore the kind of suits that someone would wear at 115,000 ft altitude.
That very well might be a better test. On the other hand, it wouldn't simulate the different gravity on Mars at all. Also, performing all of the constuction under such conditions wouldn't be practical. Experimentally, it should be sufficient to have part of the construction crew working under those conditions for long enough to adapt to them and then guage their effectiveness in various tasks and extrapolate from there.
Where will all of the feed stock come from?
I've got the sneaking suspicion that lots and lots of people don't realize what a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
From the atmosphere and the ground, respectively. Zubrin's plan for generating methane fuel on Mars didn't even call for using electrolysis on in situ water, but rather for bringing a relatively small amount of initial hydrogen. There's no reason, however, that we can't use in situ water as a resource as well. As for other materials you might need for various processes, you would bring them with you initially.
Same thing for the tools required. There's no reason you need to build everything locally to begin with. A bicycle, for example. It may take a very deep chain of industry to build a bicycle but, if you bring 5 bicycles and a supply of replacement parts and repair tools, there's no reason you can't still have three servicable bicycles thirty years later.
My fault. Should have said "tunnels", because maybe there aren't Martian caves where we think it's best (or even "ok") to live.
There are Martian caves/lava tubes. As long as you find one the right size, there's no reason you can't make use of
The advantages for methane that are mentioned in the article are that it's cleaner burning than kerosene, which means more re-usability for engines. Also for Mars missions it can be made in situ using electrolysis and the sabatier process.
Yes, because I've researched:
(a) how difficult it is for humans to work in space suits, and
It's certanly more difficult than working in regular clothes without a breathing apparatus. You won't find anyone arguing that it isn't. That's not the same as impossible. Also, remember that working in a spacesuit in freefall isn't going to be the same thing as working in a spacesuit on a planet with gravity that's on the same order of magnitude as Earth gravity. Restrictive yes, but better spacesuit designs and better tools for compensating for the limited mobility can help with that.
(b) how much the human body does not like ionizing radiation, and
It doesn't, but it's not much worse on the surface of Mars than on the ISS. Unlike on the ISS, there's the option of being covered by large amounts of shielding most of the time, whether you're indoors in a shelter or driving around in a vehicle.
(c) how fucking cold it is on Mars.
That's just silly. It can get very cold on Mars at the poles and in winter. Most of the time, at moderate latitudes, temperatures on Mars are within typical Earth ranges. Since no-one will be outside without an insulated spacesuit, that shouldn't be a problem. Not to mention the fact that we're talking about an atmosphere 1% as thick as the atmosphere of Earth. So, even if the temperature is -150 degrees celcius, the actual amount of heat that the air can absorb is far, far less than -150 degrees celcius air on Earth. There's a reason that a vacuum flask can keep hot liquids hot or cold liquids cold for extended periods of time. There are still convection currents of course, but, once again, you would be in an insulated space suit.
Who builds those biospheres? Lots of people with lots of trucks and cranes. Trucks and cranes... just don't run on Mars. No oxygen.
Uhhh... Yeah. Because Mars colonists would totatally just buy regular trucks and cranes from some local vendor, fly them to Mars, then scratch their heads when the motors won't start. Or, maybe instead of something that idiotic, they could actually use something that works on Mars? There's electrically powered equipment powered via umbilicals to a power plant, batteries, maybe even RTGs. Alternately, they actually could use construction equipment off the lot powered by locally generated methane and oxygen (generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively). The oxygen tank would need to be four times as big as the fuel tank and fed through a regulator into a modified air intake. It might need a modified radiator, modified logic on the engine computer, maybe a regulator on the exhaust itself, but otherwise wouldn't need much modification.
Where do they build them? In Arizona. Nice, warm, sunny, near-to-civilization Arizona.
Not only build it in deep, frozen Antarctica, but have it succeed in deep, frozen Antarctica and then I'll be relatively impressed.
Mars is always sunny and, in any location we might colonize early, there's never any precipitation. Antarctica, not so much. Frankly, Arizona seems closer to the environment of Mars than Antarctica. Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
But still it won't protect people from radiation.
What, you say? Live in caves?
Digging caves is hard. It takes lots and lots of heavy machinery. Which must be transported to Mars, along with fuel and spare parts, and machine shops, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
You don't dig caves. Caves are, technically speaking, Karst formations. Caves are pre-existing geological features that you locate and move in to. Ditto for lava tubes.
The things you mention are challenges, certainly, but not exactly surprises. Also not impossible obstacles.
As a side note, that war explains why Biathlon is so culturally significant to the Scandinavian countries...
No kidding. That's the war in which the White Death, Simo Hayha was personally responsible for around .4% of Soviet deaths through his skill as a marksman and outdoorsman.
If you would like to discuss the thermodynamics of AGW, I have some excellent sources I can give you for reference.
Please cut and paste them into a comment then. Plus, we would like to know either what this amazing news that you claim is coming in a couple of weeks actually is, or a good explanation for why you can't tell us.
Unless it comes from Microsoft, for example. Or the NSA. The Police. Or a politician.
Microsoft: Windows 8 is a great recent example
NSA: massive unconstitutional spying on the citizens of their own country (not to mention having a security infrastructure that was so easily breached),
Police: Aside from everything in the media about police corruption, incompetance, etc. since every locality has police, we get tend to also get to judge police officers in a direct one on one basis. The ones I've known socially, or when dealing with them in a professional capacity have tended to be lacking in anything approaching professionalism. From the ones who have gleefully talked about the illegal things they get away with protected by their badges in candid moments, to the one who gave me a speeding ticket for 75 in a 65 back when I was a teenager who was driving about 100 MPH himself and who crossed three lanes without signalling (or looking as far as I could tell) right after giving me the ticket, to the pair who couldn't hold in their fits of laughter while taking down the report I was trying to give them about my car which had just been stolen, to the officer who grilled me about the perfectly benign contents of my trunk when my car was found (a broken scale from the bakery where I worked at the time got him pretty excited) the police have failed to impress me with their professionalism. There have been other interactions that haven't been so bad, except of course that the officers have always seemed bored and reluctant to interact with anyone at best or otherwise are outright hostile towards members of the public interrupting them.
Politicians: Congresspersons regularly pass laws without reading them. This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of public record. How much worse could you get as a professional?
It was probably the "Expect some big news within a couple of weeks." It's either just a dumb rhetorical technique, or you actually have some new information, but aren't sharing it. It's almost certainly the latter. It's like how, during the whole SCO fiasco, Darl McBride went out to meet a bunch of anti-SCO protestors holding a folder he claimed held the secret evidence proving his case against Linux. Anyone with half a brain knew that it was just his shopping list or something like that and that it was really just a display of smug contempt.
This is something I've always believed, but this is the first time I've ever seen that belief validated in any way by anyone.
Unfortunately, this article doesn't seem to be validating you. It seems to be implying that you're mentally ill. Personally, I can enjoy music, but I don't seek it out. If the radio is on, I often leave it on. If it's off, it generally doesn't even occur to me to turn it on.
In contrast, the stated reason export restrictions are in place is to sanction or otherwise prevent the sharing of goods and information with certain countries.
Which seems difficult enough to do when you're talking about actual physical advanced weapons systems or industrial equipment massing thousands of tons. It's painfully obvious that it's impossible to do with software that's freely downloadable over the Internet. The kinds of people who think that it could somehow be done are either highly ignorant, just plain stupid, crazy or actually have a well thought out plan whose only downside is some small detail like turning the world into a prison or just killing nearly everyone. You say that the discussion of whether or not the law makes sense should be tabled for another time, but the sheer idiocy of the law has to be considered.
Also, it should be noted that Red Hat is really a service company. Computer services are thier product. Any proprietary software they produce doesn't have random contributors off the Internet and the open source code is, like the label says, open and provided as source (also as compiled code, but that's still just another kind of computer code). Everything else available on the Internet is computer code as well. You could draw a distinction between mere data and markup versus executable content, but good luck finding many web pages these days that don't count as executable content. So, if Red Hat is responsible for contributers from banned countries to open source software. Shouldn't every blog in the world be similarly responsible for any comments posted by people from banned countries?
This guy invented the microprocessor...
The patent he had on a "microcontroller" was invalidated. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like he's very good in the courtroom, however.
Well, go look back at history and look at all the other competing aircraft designs that failed.
The Wright brothers design was one of the ones that failed.
Don't worry, they're not bitter. It's just the crazy space nutter troll. I've been a bit worried about the poor space nutter troll lately, what with missing quite a few space articles, while posting in articles that have nothing to do with space. It's nice to see the manic screeds back where they belong.
Unless the drains in the house lead somewhere very strange, that's going to happen anyway.
Sorry. New tree breeds are frequently patented.
Filtering water through wafers of wood is not obvious to me.
I can understand how filtering water through this particular wood wouldn't be obvious to you, but how would filtering water through wood as a method of purification not be obvious to you? Filtering water through charcoal is pretty obvious considering that it's been used for distillation for centuries, maybe millenia. Charcoal is made from wood. Filtration through all kinds of natural materials, including plant-derived cellulose materials has been done since antiquity. This is, considering the prior art, a blindingly obvious idea. The novel part is that they've done a lot of legwork and found a good, efficient, available candidate material.
The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination.
Which is pretty much what I was saying when I said: "All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief." When you go to sleep in your bed and wake up in your bed, you believe you spent the night sleeping in your bed without other evidence to the contrary. For most people (who aren't known somnambulists and who don't live with hyperactive practical jokers) it's the best hypothesis. Going by the connotation of the term "belief" I use, you "believe" in the overwhelmingly likely hypothesis unless or until something better comes along. You believe that you spent all night in your bed asleep, until you see the video your friends made where they kept you asleep using ether and carried you around town, posing you in inappropriate positions in public places. After that, you should generally believe something different about how you spent your night.
All minds function on belief. Belief that your senses or memory aren't failing you or, sometimes, belief that your senses or memory _are_ failing you. You do the best you can with what you have and re-assess when you believe you have new information. The scientific mind tends to shy away from religious beliefs, irrational beliefs, inflexible beliefs, etc. but it still has beliefs.
You clearly mean something different by "belief". Good for you, but that makes this just a semantic argument. It's like the stupid argument about the word "luck". Some people are "lucky", meaning that they have enjoyed beneficial random circumstances. That doesn't mean that there's a mystical force granting those beneficial circumstances and it doesn't predict the future random circumstances those people may encounter. That doesn't stop some people from arguing that I'm talking about a mystical force when I use the term "luck".
The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.
We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS." He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.
No we're not. Note that I said "we". It's possible that you are, but you neglected to mention that in any of your posts in this thread. Rather you said:
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately
What tense is that written in? Past or present? Ditto to:
..the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all.
You're reminding me of the old anecdote about the rifleman who shoots the side of a barn and then paints a target around the bullethole. Except, there's already a target, but you're saying that the really target was actually the spot over to the left and up a bit where your bullet happened to hit.
I'm not aware of anyone treating Duesberg like a subhuman before his self-promotion really started getting fatal results. I am aware of the fact that, although Duesberg is, in fact, a scientist, he isn't really one in the context of AIDS research. The reason being that he isn't actually doing any research. True, analysis of the results
Or you could, you know, try it in a parking lot. My non-sporty brakes easily overpower my 420 HP engine.
Didn't bother to reply to this at first, because why bother arguing with someone who isn't even listening to you. Unless you're suggesting that I drive at highway speeds in a parking lot.
What is there to go fixably wrong? You sequence the DNA to a 1.5GB file - if there's any problem in that stage you're hosed already. Then you do a binary diff to your reference sequence - thWhat is there to go fixably wrong? You sequence the DNA to a 1.5GB file - if there's any problem in that stage you're hosed already. Then you do a binary diff to your reference sequence - that's a pretty thoroughly mature technology. Then you encrypt it - again, any problems = you're hosed. And if we're working on the assumption that the lab has no access to the data once it leaves the sequencer as a 3MB encrypted file then they would be hard-pressed to fix anything in the data anyway, at most they could reformat it into something more efficient to process, but that would seem a risky undertaking when you have no access the data to verify that you didn't just hose things completely.at's a pretty thoroughly mature technology. Then you encrypt it - again, any problems = you're hosed. And if we're working on the assumption that the lab has no access to the data once it leaves the sequencer as a 3MB encrypted file then they would be hard-pressed to fix anything in the data anyway, at most they could reformat it into something more efficient to process, but that would seem a risky undertaking when you have no access the data to verify that you didn't just hose things completely.
Well that's pretty much the point. If the model of the system is so secure that you're hosed if anything at all goes wrong, most people are going to hedge their bets by putting in a back door so they can try to fix things. When you're going to have to tell your clients to redo millions of dollars of really expensive data entry if anything goes wrong, you're going to be under a fair amount of pressure to make sure that doesn't happen. One way to do that is to secretly break your security model. It happens all the time.
Agree on all the rest, I just have a lot of faith in human nature. I was just looking at my showerhead. It has a swiveling plastic ball joint through which water flows. Past that ball joint is a hook arrangement the showerhead hangs on, then a flexible hose leading to the showerhead. I've had more than one showerhead with this basic design and the ball joints tend to wear out and start spraying water around. The thing is, the swiveling joint swivels so that you can position the showerhead when it's hanging up, but the water goes from that ball joint to a flexible hose so that you can detach the showerhead. The ball joint isn't completely pointless in the design, but having the joint carry water is pointless. So, it's either very poorly thought out by someone who should know better, or intentionally designed that way to ensure that it doesn't last too long and you'll buy another one. Either way, that just helps bolster my faith in human nature... also, I really need to be the one to pick a showerhead the next time one wears out.
Oh, well, as long as you say so.
Except that for sea level changes it absolutely has been, and will continue to be so.
But what I keep saying is that this is _not_ just about sea level rising. The sea level doesn't rise and everything goes on just the way it has with slightly higher sea level. The actual effects of the sea level change can be catastrophic and sudden.
All it would mean is possibly some abandoned structures by the coast if people ignore it, or hastily placed mitigation elements put in place until a more permanent solution is realized - and again all this happens over the course of 100 years as sea level rises gradually affect different areas. But no-where near something to panic over.
And you're completely ignoring the example I gave of New Orleans why? That example makes it abundantly clear is that what happens in most of these situations is that people ignore it and put things off and dismiss the people warning them about it as hysterical. Then things collapse in a rush and it's time to _really_ panic.
It will change, yes - but the main point you seem to be missing is IT IS OVER THE PERIOD OF 100 YEARS!!!!!!!
Yes, but what I think you're missing is that gradual changes in these sorts of systems tends not to actually be so gradual. What actually tends to happen is that things remain more or less the same for decades, then there's a storm or some other typical but infrequent condition and entire sections of coastline vanish overnight.
People have easily kept water at bay that changes that slowly. They will continue to do so
People tend to ignore it when it changes slowly. What actually happens is that people with a good understanding of the system speak up about what will happen, then shout when no-one seems to be listening, then get marginalized (if they actually work for the organization that's supposed to be fixing the problem, they get fired, asked to resign, demoted, re-assigned, etc.). Long term budget concerns are always beaten by short-term concerns, even if the long-term concerns will end up saving money in the final accounting. Roads are a great example. In most areas, they could be made a lot better than they are, and last a lot longer, but instead, they just get constant repairs and frequent repaving which ends up costing more than if they did it right in the first place. The marginal costs are completely ignored: all the extra damage to cars from bad roads (or under construction roads), plus all the fuel and time wasted by construction delays. The same kinds of people who make those decisions make the decisions about how to deal with rising waters.
Consider, for example, New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. That was an entirely predictable man-made disaster. All the paving and man-made drainage systems, etc. plus the short-sighted design of the levees were what made things so bad.
Okay, yeah editing is an issue as well, but not one relevant to archives of immutable data.
True, but I'm not as confident as you that early versions of this will actually allow for immutable data. Avoiding all bugs that might require things to be re-encoded is a monumental task. Maybe they could pull it off. I would be truly, truly impressed.
It probably wouldn't be racial studies that do it though, IIRC there's not actually any well-defined racial boundaries from a genetic perspective - there's not even one single solitary gene shared by most black people that isn't also present in a lot of whites and asians (and vice-versa), we just travel and intermix too much. It only takes one person with a bad case of wanderlust a thousand years ago to introduce a gene into a large portion of an otherwise isolated population.
True. It depends a bit on the groups. Island populations, for example. Specific studies on people with a particular medical condition with a genetic link might be better example than people with particular ethnicities.
Yeah, I can't argue against the incompetence card. In fact that's why I think homomorphic encryption could be a wonderful thing for genetics - it means that the sequenced DNA need never be stored in plaintext anywhere outside the sequencing machine, not even in volatile memory while being analyzed. There's still the risk that someone gets their hands on both the key and data, but a single "never, ever keep these two things in the same place" security rule would go a long way towards protecting against that, and has at least a chance of being followed.
That is true. I think something like that could be accomplished without a method that makes calculations millions of times slower at best, however. I wish them the best of luck in developing these methods however. There might be potential in these methods in other fields, such as secure crypto-currencies, etc.