And as former submariner, I'm sharply aware of the technology used by submarines. And it's limits. And how little of it applies to going to Mars.
We have people on Mount Everest, in the Antarctica, we had people on the moon.
None of which are relevant to the challenges of a Mars mission.
We could have gone to mars 40 years ago. There is no fancy extra technology needed.
With enough money (it would have taken a great deal, more than Lunar missions), and with enough willingness to take the risks (odds are, knowing what we know now and wasn't publicly discussed then, that we'd have lost the first crew, maybe multiple crews), yeah.
No idea why people like you always claim that.
I have no idea why you (clueless idiots with no reading comprehension and the IQ of used bubblegum) think I'm saying we need new technology, because I never said any such thing. A critique of another's proposed technology in no way is the same thing as claiming new technology is required.
I just have to wonder, why are these writers such assholes? I thought we as a tech society were past nerd bashing.
So does anyone know of any good online tech zines that embrace and exalt this culture, instead of trying to find ways to tear people down?
You must be new here.
Once you've been on/. a while, you'll find that this soi-disant hub of tech culture revels in those stereotypes (as many tech types do). Tech culture has to get over itself before the media is going to.
FInstead, using technology that exists today (no on-orbit ship manufacturing or propellant depots) we could get to Mars in 10 or so years using something like Mars Direct.
You have to read Zubrin with a boxcar load of salt, as he's not always clear about the difference between actual proven technology, lab experiments, and back of the envelope calculations.
Most of the technology doesn't in fact actually exist today. The whole handwaving scheme relies on technologies and systems that have been tested (at best) on the the bench under strict laboratory conditions. (Some of it hasn't even made it off the back of Zubrin's envelope.)
Obama made a deal with SpaceX who have trashed the 39A pad, making it unusable by anything but a SpaceX Falcon9, and constraining SLS rockets to only 39B which will choke the maximum flight rate.
Considering that current operational flight rate of the SLS averages around zero per decade - I don't see that as being much of a constraint.
Seriously, the Senate Launch System exists only to funnel pork - there are no payloads funded, let alone manifested.
It's fun to try If you want to understand the PCB etch process, or if you absolutely need a PCB right away. But the results are quite frankly terrible compared to paying $10 for 5 boards from china.
Another thing that's in play here, is I think there's been a shift in (for lack of a better term) "project management" by hobbyists. When I was younger, it seemed most hobbyists (regardless of the hobby) had several projects on the bench at any given time... long term ones, short term ones, one where you were waiting on parts or that you really shouldn't tackle the next step until you'd gotten that new whatever or gotten around to cleaning and precisely adjusting that old whatever. But along with the decreasing attention spans of the general public, the hobbyist attention span has decreased as well - and there also seems to be increased serial monogamy and obsession with completing the One True Project. This shift means they can't wait two weeks for a board from China.
You really have to do economics when doing engineering.
Real engineers know this, and have known it for a very long time. Armchair/hobbyist engineers and those with hopped up titles (I.E. the "engineers" that populate the IT industry and most of the/. demographic), don't.
An actual real-world engineer is as much a bean counter as he is a mathematician.
So you see no value in staying close to home and working out the bulk of our problems.... Ok...I think a crawl, walk, run progression is useful here
/facepalm
That's the problem - going to the moon doesn't lead to working out the bulk of the problems. It's not crawl, walk, run. It's fly, burrow, swim. The environments, the required technologies, and the detailed engineering are simply too different.
Yes they are different destinations, but if you look at the difficulties they both present,
They're radically different. The Moon is in darkness for two weeks, Mars is not. The Moon has wildy variable temperatures, Mars is much more temperate. The Moon has no atmosphere, while Mars does have one - which effects everything from space suit design to lander design, etc... etc...
They are only "not that different" when, as you did, you completely ignore all the actual differences. Details matter.
You're making a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily valid. The amount of downtime and the impact depends heavily on the nature of the company, and in particular, whether sales/income depends on maintaining continuous operation of the business.
Indeed. It doesn't matter much if my wife's business has a hot spare data center or cloud installation to back up the local one... because a catastrophe that destroys local capacity will almost certainly destroy or seriously damage the physical premises - and the physical inventory located therein. No physical premises, no physical inventory - no business. They maintain off-site backups in the event of a casualty that smokes the servers but leaves the building intact - but they're at the other end of the city, not halfway across the continent. A disaster big enough to wipe out both has also likely taken out the city, and thus the local economy on which the business depends. There's just not much percentage in spending the money and effort to maintain the capability for short term recovery in the event of such a disaster.
Much of the effort towards.9999 reliability and the ability to recover in an hour from anything short of an asteroid impact that levels the continent seems to me to be IT folks puffing up to prove their importance and gain attention.
And if they're down for even a couple of days, they're probably going out of business. If Facebook went down for a week, Google+ would become the #1 social network.
Would it stay that way past the end of the week? That's the real question that you have to answer when making these plans.
It's about going everywhere else. The tech developed going to Mars will undoubtedly be useful when going other places. You crawl before you walk, you walk before you run.
Then go to the moon first.... Colonize it where the technology can be perfected in a place where help is perhaps a week away
The problem is - that's like perfecting the technology to colonize the Sahara desert as precursor to colonizing the bottom of the ocean. It's an abysmally stupid idea because the two environments are so radically different.
Not that help for a Lunar colony would actually be a week away - more like weeks or months unless there is a vehicle with the required equipment onboard standing on the pad prepped for launch.
Even in the original Dallas Morning News article that broke this story Ã" before it went viral and Ahmed got invited to the White House, JPL, MIT, got scholarships, and become the hero of Silicon Valley Ã" the only thing the police officials said was that they knew it wasn't a bomb, that Ahmed never claimed it was anything but a clock, and that they were trying to determine WHY he built and AND brought it to school.
None of which required that he be handcuffed, fingerprinted, suspended... etc... etc...
The issue isn't whether they thought it was a bomb or not - the issue is their overreaction and it's racist overtones.
I would submit that there are not many times that results in a more positive outcome.
I would submit that you're an idiot trying to give other idiots a free pass for being idiots.
what I really wish is that the school would not have called the police in the first place.
What I really wish is that apologists like yourself would go away. You're much corrosive and dangerous to society than out-and-out racists and idiots because you honestly think (read: have deluded yourself into thinking) that you're neither, that you're on the side of the good guys. You're not.
I'd like to just clarify my own view regarding this case: I think Ahmed didn't deserve to be handcuffed, he very clearly wasn't a danger to anyone.
The why in $DIETY's name would you link to the second article - which does everything it can to give the impression that he is but which stops just short of actually declaring him a terrorist?
My takeaway? Reality is complex (in this case perplexingly so), and the media doesn't do well with complexities.
My takeaway? You're fooling yourself, trying to give one impression with your words - but giving a very different one with your actions. You claim one thing now, but your submission includes a link to someone trying to justify the very actions your claim Ahmed didn't deserve.
There's nothing complex or perplexing about the case - fake bomb or not a fake bomb, the actions of the school and police department were way out of line.
Gotta love the passive agressive accusations in the second article - "I don't mean to accuse him of being a terrorist, but wasn't he acting suspicious, isn't all this a little funny, isn't it kinda like he was a terrorist?".
Good Lord, We had no inclination of taking the slew of pharmaceutical drugs back in my day as a teen.
So?
You aren't (by implication) a teen anymore. You may not however be old (or mature) enough to grasp that times change.
When I was a teen, lo these many decades ago, society was different too... and not necessarily better. Tying one on an Friday night and then driving home was completely acceptable. Even though it killed people. A guy getting a girl drunk and raping her was just "boys will be boys" - and if she wore anything that might be considered 'sexy', she was a slut and it was her fault for "leading him on anyway".
I have no desire to go back to those days.
We didn't need it in the past and we all came out well adjusted (always a few exceptions)
No, we didn't "all come out well adjusted". Some did. Others turned into recluses. Others carried on day by day but suffered a half life in silence. Others turned to alcohol, or weed, or... worse. Yet others could no longer bear the pain because society has a deep stigma against not being "well adjusted" and chose the ultimate way out. You only think they turned out "well adjusted" because you've rejected the notion that things might be other than their surface appearance out of hand.
I have at least three classmates who might have made it out of their early twenties if back then assholes like you hadn't made idiot claims like "we had no inclination to diagnose and treat mental illnesses and we turned out well adjusted". I have two cousins my age who might be useful members of society rather than living in a bottle if they hadn't been taught growing up that "real men don't seek treatment", an attitude born of the same ignorance you spout.
The thing is, if you're using solar and have no grid use for the generated power at the time of generation, does it really matter how efficient your conversion is? You're using energy that would otherwise go unused. It's free input energy and the output (if you target methane) is a form of storable and transportable energy for which we already have a storage and transportation infrastructure.
I read this and I think "broken window fallacy" - because you need to build and maintain what will almost certainly be some complicated and finicky machinery just in case you're generating power and don't happen to need it at that moment. Just because the energy is 'free' (it actually isn't) doesn't mean it makes sense to go to elaborate lengths to not 'waste' any.
No administration since Nixon has given half a squat about our space program.
Arguably no Administration ever has cared about the space program. The cared about about beating Rooskies, and the space program was a means to that end - but no more.
Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.
That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.
They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.
Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.
On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.
Sorry, but that really is one the (probably inadvertently) funniest things I've seen posted to Slashdot in a while.
Seriously, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool Tesla fanbot, you're seriously clueless about how the world works. If Porsche put's an electric car into full production, it'll be Tesla playing catch up. They don't have a tenth of Porsche's reputation or a hundredth of it's marketing muscle. People who've barely heard of Tesla will be lining up around the block to get in line to pre order one.
(I just noted that my spell checker, which I've taught fanboy, tripped on 'fanbot'. But it fits, so I'll let it stand.)
Honestly, Chandrayaan-2 is only a near-Earth mission, and not a super-long one - they don't need a long half-life element like 238Pu. Dirt-cheap 90Sr probably makes more sense, it's a widely available waste product.
Why would using a material that has half the energy density (thus requiring RTG's twice the size and weight) make any sense in an application that's both volume and weight limited?
We're still at 1AU or thereabouts, isn't it better to use solar panels and save the non-renewable Pu for past-Mars-orbit missions where solar panels won't work?
Well, there's two possibilities here. The first is that they're using this mission as a technology demonstrator, proof of concept, or prototype - that they can actually build, deploy, and operate such a thing. The second is that the RTGs are intended for the lander and/or rover - which are in darkness two weeks out of every four. (Indian engineers being much righter than the average Slashdot Armchair variety of the same, it's almost certainly the latter.)
Not to mention that Pu238 is renewable (it's manufactured in the first place, it doesn't occur naturally). It's also, like all radioactive materials, a wasting asset - as it emits radiation, it's also transmuting into a different (and less suitable) form. If they don't have a deep space mission planned in the next few years, they might as well use it now before it's gone.
And to the folks above going back and forth over why they're using Pu238 rather than Sr90? Remember one of the sources of the Pu is question is as a byproduct of a nuclear weapons program - and India has a nuclear weapons program. Another reason not to use Sr90, is that it's energy density very low - thus it's suitable for the terrestrial applications the xUSSR used it for, not so much for space applications where it cause the RTG to be much larger and heavier.
"Clean" nukes aren't actually clean except by comparison with "dirty" nukes - they're still plenty nasty.
Either way, the ruling case here is the need for a near surface or surface burst to expose the ice cap to the maximum radiation level - both will suck up surface material and turn it into fallout
So, not only wrong, but you don't even have a clue what you're talking about.
Oh and the surface of mars is already blasted by cosmic rays and the such already
So? That doesn't make drenching with fallout sensible. Doubly so since so many colonization plans depend on mining surface material or using it for construction. In either case, making it 'hot' is a really bad idea. So, not only wrong, but you don't even have a clue what you're talking about.
There's a reason why practically anyone who had a dog in the fight, and many who didn't, arranged themselves in opposition to Google and the sockpuppet 'Author's Guild'.
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded
And they had damn good reason to be so. Not only did the lawsuit verge on being a sockpuppet, Google was trying (basically) not only to get exclusive rights to the material, but also rigging the game so they paid a third party who may or may not (most likely not) actually represent the author or their estate. Then to make matters worse - there was no statutory requirement that said third party actually make any effort to locate the persons to whom the money was due. The onus was placed entirely on said individual to prove that they were in fact the rightful recipient (to the satisfaction of said third party).
It was a horribly bad deal for anyone who wasn't Google. And that includes the public - who would see what should be available to all locked up under the aegis of a single corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
And as former submariner, I'm sharply aware of the technology used by submarines. And it's limits. And how little of it applies to going to Mars.
None of which are relevant to the challenges of a Mars mission.
With enough money (it would have taken a great deal, more than Lunar missions), and with enough willingness to take the risks (odds are, knowing what we know now and wasn't publicly discussed then, that we'd have lost the first crew, maybe multiple crews), yeah.
I have no idea why you (clueless idiots with no reading comprehension and the IQ of used bubblegum) think I'm saying we need new technology, because I never said any such thing. A critique of another's proposed technology in no way is the same thing as claiming new technology is required.
You must be new here.
/. a while, you'll find that this soi-disant hub of tech culture revels in those stereotypes (as many tech types do). Tech culture has to get over itself before the media is going to.
Once you've been on
You have to read Zubrin with a boxcar load of salt, as he's not always clear about the difference between actual proven technology, lab experiments, and back of the envelope calculations.
Most of the technology doesn't in fact actually exist today. The whole handwaving scheme relies on technologies and systems that have been tested (at best) on the the bench under strict laboratory conditions. (Some of it hasn't even made it off the back of Zubrin's envelope.)
Considering that current operational flight rate of the SLS averages around zero per decade - I don't see that as being much of a constraint.
Seriously, the Senate Launch System exists only to funnel pork - there are no payloads funded, let alone manifested.
Another thing that's in play here, is I think there's been a shift in (for lack of a better term) "project management" by hobbyists. When I was younger, it seemed most hobbyists (regardless of the hobby) had several projects on the bench at any given time... long term ones, short term ones, one where you were waiting on parts or that you really shouldn't tackle the next step until you'd gotten that new whatever or gotten around to cleaning and precisely adjusting that old whatever. But along with the decreasing attention spans of the general public, the hobbyist attention span has decreased as well - and there also seems to be increased serial monogamy and obsession with completing the One True Project. This shift means they can't wait two weeks for a board from China.
Real engineers know this, and have known it for a very long time. Armchair/hobbyist engineers and those with hopped up titles (I.E. the "engineers" that populate the IT industry and most of the /. demographic), don't.
An actual real-world engineer is as much a bean counter as he is a mathematician.
That's the problem - going to the moon doesn't lead to working out the bulk of the problems. It's not crawl, walk, run. It's fly, burrow, swim. The environments, the required technologies, and the detailed engineering are simply too different.
They're radically different. The Moon is in darkness for two weeks, Mars is not. The Moon has wildy variable temperatures, Mars is much more temperate. The Moon has no atmosphere, while Mars does have one - which effects everything from space suit design to lander design, etc... etc...
They are only "not that different" when, as you did, you completely ignore all the actual differences. Details matter.
Indeed. It doesn't matter much if my wife's business has a hot spare data center or cloud installation to back up the local one... because a catastrophe that destroys local capacity will almost certainly destroy or seriously damage the physical premises - and the physical inventory located therein. No physical premises, no physical inventory - no business. They maintain off-site backups in the event of a casualty that smokes the servers but leaves the building intact - but they're at the other end of the city, not halfway across the continent. A disaster big enough to wipe out both has also likely taken out the city, and thus the local economy on which the business depends. There's just not much percentage in spending the money and effort to maintain the capability for short term recovery in the event of such a disaster.
Much of the effort towards .9999 reliability and the ability to recover in an hour from anything short of an asteroid impact that levels the continent seems to me to be IT folks puffing up to prove their importance and gain attention.
Would it stay that way past the end of the week? That's the real question that you have to answer when making these plans.
The problem is - that's like perfecting the technology to colonize the Sahara desert as precursor to colonizing the bottom of the ocean. It's an abysmally stupid idea because the two environments are so radically different.
Not that help for a Lunar colony would actually be a week away - more like weeks or months unless there is a vehicle with the required equipment onboard standing on the pad prepped for launch.
None of which required that he be handcuffed, fingerprinted, suspended... etc... etc...
The issue isn't whether they thought it was a bomb or not - the issue is their overreaction and it's racist overtones.
I would submit that you're an idiot trying to give other idiots a free pass for being idiots.
What I really wish is that apologists like yourself would go away. You're much corrosive and dangerous to society than out-and-out racists and idiots because you honestly think (read: have deluded yourself into thinking) that you're neither, that you're on the side of the good guys. You're not.
The why in $DIETY's name would you link to the second article - which does everything it can to give the impression that he is but which stops just short of actually declaring him a terrorist?
My takeaway? You're fooling yourself, trying to give one impression with your words - but giving a very different one with your actions. You claim one thing now, but your submission includes a link to someone trying to justify the very actions your claim Ahmed didn't deserve.
There's nothing complex or perplexing about the case - fake bomb or not a fake bomb, the actions of the school and police department were way out of line.
Gotta love the passive agressive accusations in the second article - "I don't mean to accuse him of being a terrorist, but wasn't he acting suspicious, isn't all this a little funny, isn't it kinda like he was a terrorist?".
I read that as "the Slashdot pseudo-religion", which fits too.
No hate, just admiration for being one of the few willing to stand up to the pseudo scientific asshattery of the Slashdot Hivemind.
So?
You aren't (by implication) a teen anymore. You may not however be old (or mature) enough to grasp that times change.
When I was a teen, lo these many decades ago, society was different too... and not necessarily better. Tying one on an Friday night and then driving home was completely acceptable. Even though it killed people. A guy getting a girl drunk and raping her was just "boys will be boys" - and if she wore anything that might be considered 'sexy', she was a slut and it was her fault for "leading him on anyway".
I have no desire to go back to those days.
No, we didn't "all come out well adjusted". Some did. Others turned into recluses. Others carried on day by day but suffered a half life in silence. Others turned to alcohol, or weed, or... worse. Yet others could no longer bear the pain because society has a deep stigma against not being "well adjusted" and chose the ultimate way out. You only think they turned out "well adjusted" because you've rejected the notion that things might be other than their surface appearance out of hand.
I have at least three classmates who might have made it out of their early twenties if back then assholes like you hadn't made idiot claims like "we had no inclination to diagnose and treat mental illnesses and we turned out well adjusted". I have two cousins my age who might be useful members of society rather than living in a bottle if they hadn't been taught growing up that "real men don't seek treatment", an attitude born of the same ignorance you spout.
I have no desire to go back to those days either.
I read this and I think "broken window fallacy" - because you need to build and maintain what will almost certainly be some complicated and finicky machinery just in case you're generating power and don't happen to need it at that moment. Just because the energy is 'free' (it actually isn't) doesn't mean it makes sense to go to elaborate lengths to not 'waste' any.
Arguably no Administration ever has cared about the space program. The cared about about beating Rooskies, and the space program was a means to that end - but no more.
That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.
Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.
On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.
*chuckles*
Sorry, but that really is one the (probably inadvertently) funniest things I've seen posted to Slashdot in a while.
Seriously, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool Tesla fanbot, you're seriously clueless about how the world works. If Porsche put's an electric car into full production, it'll be Tesla playing catch up. They don't have a tenth of Porsche's reputation or a hundredth of it's marketing muscle. People who've barely heard of Tesla will be lining up around the block to get in line to pre order one.
(I just noted that my spell checker, which I've taught fanboy, tripped on 'fanbot'. But it fits, so I'll let it stand.)
Why would using a material that has half the energy density (thus requiring RTG's twice the size and weight) make any sense in an application that's both volume and weight limited?
Well, there's two possibilities here. The first is that they're using this mission as a technology demonstrator, proof of concept, or prototype - that they can actually build, deploy, and operate such a thing. The second is that the RTGs are intended for the lander and/or rover - which are in darkness two weeks out of every four. (Indian engineers being much righter than the average Slashdot Armchair variety of the same, it's almost certainly the latter.)
Not to mention that Pu238 is renewable (it's manufactured in the first place, it doesn't occur naturally). It's also, like all radioactive materials, a wasting asset - as it emits radiation, it's also transmuting into a different (and less suitable) form. If they don't have a deep space mission planned in the next few years, they might as well use it now before it's gone.
And to the folks above going back and forth over why they're using Pu238 rather than Sr90? Remember one of the sources of the Pu is question is as a byproduct of a nuclear weapons program - and India has a nuclear weapons program. Another reason not to use Sr90, is that it's energy density very low - thus it's suitable for the terrestrial applications the xUSSR used it for, not so much for space applications where it cause the RTG to be much larger and heavier.
So, not only wrong, but you don't even have a clue what you're talking about.
So? That doesn't make drenching with fallout sensible. Doubly so since so many colonization plans depend on mining surface material or using it for construction. In either case, making it 'hot' is a really bad idea.
So, not only wrong, but you don't even have a clue what you're talking about.
There's a reason why practically anyone who had a dog in the fight, and many who didn't, arranged themselves in opposition to Google and the sockpuppet 'Author's Guild'.
And they had damn good reason to be so. Not only did the lawsuit verge on being a sockpuppet, Google was trying (basically) not only to get exclusive rights to the material, but also rigging the game so they paid a third party who may or may not (most likely not) actually represent the author or their estate. Then to make matters worse - there was no statutory requirement that said third party actually make any effort to locate the persons to whom the money was due. The onus was placed entirely on said individual to prove that they were in fact the rightful recipient (to the satisfaction of said third party).
It was a horribly bad deal for anyone who wasn't Google. And that includes the public - who would see what should be available to all locked up under the aegis of a single corporation.
It's a shame that idiots don't know how to use emoticons then blame other people for their own fuckups.