*whack* Probably not as much as you think. They'll be very high up, so be rather effieient. They're not hauling people or too much equipment, so those jets will be very efficient.
Sorry, but not quite. An airframe has what is commonly known as a "best lift-to-drag ratio" which varies relatively little with altitude and temperature. The speed at which you get this best L/D is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the air density. What does this mean? It means that:
Your minimum drag is roughly a constant fraction of your weight.
Accordingly, the thrust you need to stay in the air is just about a constant fraction of your weight, so long as you stick to the best L/D speed.
On the other hand, your speed keeps going up as you go to higher altitudes. THEREFORE,
Your power requirements (thrust times speed) increase with increasing altitude.
It's true that a higher-altitude flight is generally more efficient per unit distance, but that's because you're typically flying at better than the best L/D airspeed (and taking a greater drag penalty). If you are just trying to stay in the air, and ignoring the inefficiencies of engines designed for high altitude operating at low altitude, you are much better off flying at lower speed in the thicker air where you can achieve the same drag at lower airspeed. --
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The AC is right. Nothing flies at FL51 except the occasional Lear jet and the military, and the latter presumably avoid the vicinity of cities when flying maneuvers. --
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No kidding. This would be an ideal application for the NASA balloon project (if they could get it to stop leaking). Fly at a lower altitude to get more lifting capacity (denser air), add solar panels for power, modify it to be more of a blimp shape instead of a pumpkin and use some of its power for station-keeping, and it wouldn't require any fuel to speak of. Nor would it require pilots (six pilots at $75,000/yr each plus bennies... I make that at least $600,000/yr/city). --
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If you are arguing that Slashdot's spirit of community is a victim of Slashdot's success, I agree whole-heartedly. --
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What is your opinion of the "Gore tax", aka the e-rate Internet access subsididy? Specifically, how do you view:
The fairness of the tax on telephone users;
The value obtained for the money distributed via the tax;
The various bills pending to attach strings (such as Internet filtering) to this money?
Would we be better off eliminating the e-rate and getting rid of the subsidies and strings, or is this worth trying to fix the problems while keeping the busybodies in check? --
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And user error shouldn't cause a problem like that!
We say that now, but the 1960's were a different era in computers. Lots of devices are are no more advanced; commit a user error and your car will wreck itself (and maybe you), and there hasn't been the airplane built yet that can't be wrecked by user (pilot) error. (The LEM resembles an aircraft in many respects of its controls and degrees of freedom.) Also consider the resource constraints of the computer system. From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html:
You have to constantly keep in mind the amazing - to anyone using a PC today - constraints we had to work with in programming the LGC. There were 36,864 15-bit words of what we called "Fixed" memory, which today would be called ROM, and 2048 words of "Erasable" memory or RAM.
When that's all you've got, you don't necessarily have any room for idiot-proofing. That's what your checklists and procedures are for: to prevent user error (been there, done that). --
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Yeah, and [the LEM] had a major one show up during the landing, that the astronauts didn't know the workaround to.
If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of, you're exaggerating it.
It wasn't major; it was an occasional "main loop timeout" error flag which indicated that the computer hadn't had time to complete all its assigned tasks during the time-slice.
It didn't occur often enough to cause problems with the landing.
The astronauts "didn't know the workaround" because it was their error. They'd left another radar, only used for the rendezvous with the CSM, operating during the landing. This sucked up enough CPU to cause the timeout condition. They'd turned the radar on earlier in the flight and hadn't turned it off; user error.
They got down on the Moon just fine, so it's really hard to consider this a "major bug". --
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Hey, how are you gonna deal with the salt? Salt will harden as stone, layer after layer.
You don't let it build up to that concentration (salt is still soluble in water at several times the level found in seawater; witness the Dead Sea). You take the super-salinated water and drain it back into the ocean, where the salt came from in the first place.
I wonder how many of these halophyte plants could be used for rehabilitating farmland lost to salt buildup from bad irrigation? If they take up salt in their tissues where it gets harvested and removed, you could use them to build organic matter in the soil at the same time you remove the excess salt. --
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Pauli's exclusion principle exists and the other does not; I mis-attributed Pauli's principle to Fermi because it only works with fermions. This is what I get for trusting my memory too much. --
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you... need to publish a description of what you are doing.
If putting the source code up for public ftp transfer isn't publication of a description, what is it? --
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It seems to me that I have prior art on this patent.
But unless you made your art public, or produced it, it would not be "prior art" as the patent law construes it. If that weren't the case you couldn't re-invent something that's held elsewhere as a trade secret and patent it (which you can).
Disclaimer: IANAL and this isn't legal advise. It's barely information, and I could easily be wrong in some detail or other. --
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Absolute zero is only the lowest energy a system can achieve, thermally. There's a minimum beneath which you can't go, just like there is a lowest energy level an electron can have in an atom. It still has energy, it just can't get rid of any more because it also has to obey minimums of angular momentum.
It's very interesting that the quantum behavior of condensates has now been examined both with bosons (which can all be in the same quantum state) and fermions (which must obey the Fermi exclusion principle). --
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I don't agree that we have suitable alternative in wind power or anything else at this point (besides nuclear power, and you know how anything with nuclear in it scares people).
Would you believe hydrogen from green slime? That would do for just about anything stationary, unless you need carbon as part of a chemical feedstock. Aside from chemical plants I can't think of anything that really has to have it, and even many chemical processes essential to farming (like ammonia synthesis) only need the hydrogen.
If you want motive power for free-running vehicles, wind power is only good for charging batteries (and we all know how crappy batteries are compared to a tankful of gas). The lousy density of hydrogen makes it not a whole lot better. However, nothing says you can't have a hybrid car that tops off its batteries whenever you're at a plug and uses the batteries to boost its fuel-burning efficiency by 50% or more. We can do that today. Heck, we could have had that in full production five years ago. We could have had 90-MPG passenger cars here except that they all seem to use direct-injection diesels and you can't get one to pass the EPA emissions tests any more.
No kidding about popular paranoia about all things nuclear. Know why Magnetic Resonance Imaging is now the favored term? It's because Nuclear Magnetic Resonance makes the ignorant masses all uneasy.
...this is a worldwide problem that is not going to be solved until we develop clean, cheap, and renewable energy that can replace the gasoline engine and coal power plants. You think the South American governments would spend a dime to see clean burning cars over cheaper gas?
Brazil spent a bunch of money converting cars to run on domestically-produced ethanol instead of imported oil. They'd probably be game for something like this.
I would like to see us focus all our research on fusion energy.... I like to think of myself as a practical environmentalist.
I think you just contradicted yourself there.;) Fusion energy has been "20 years away" since about 1960, and isn't obviously any closer. Stellarators are unstable, tokamaks are better but not good enough, Z-pinch machines have to be kilometers long to achieve breakeven; magnetic confinement is just too big, heavy and expensive. Laser fusion didn't work, heavy-ion beams apparently didn't work, laser compression fusion didn't ignite the pellets and the latest twist is to try to squeeze the pellets with lasers and ignite them with high-energy proton beams. Anything that fuses deuterium and tritium is going to have to deal with gram quantities of very high energy neutrons (14.7 MeV) and the consequent radiation damage to reactor structures and creation of radioactive byproducts from neutron spallation. If you're looking for a panacea, you're probably better off pushing for solar power satellites.
There was an article on harnessing the energy of warm ocean-surface water in a magazine a few years ago, but I'm having no luck at all finding it in their issue index otherwise I'd point you at it. Would you believe 23 gigawatts per unit and hurricane-abatement benefits besides? The only problem is that you can't do anything like this in a small way, you have to make a few really big ones and the learning curve is a bitch even if the cost of money is no object (same problem fusion has, minus the fast neutrons). --
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For example, a full tank of jet-fuel in an aircraft is pretty much non-flammable. The tank contains liquid Jet-A and Jet-A vapour, but not a lot of oxygen. The mixture is far too rich to burn. A spark in that situation would just...spark.
The investigators digging into the explosion and crash of TWA flight 800 would beg to differ with you.
Gasoline does form a mixture in enclosed spaces which is too rich to ignite. Jet fuel (and diesel fuel) do not; especially when warm, they create vapors which are in the combustible range of concentration. Jet fuel tanks are usually vented to keep the vapor concentration below the combustible range, but this is not a sure thing. I'm betting that the next move is to purge them with either CO2 or nitrogen and make the vapor concentration irrelevant. (When the aircraft is at jet cruising altitudes, the skin is very cold and any fuel which can cool to near-skin temperatures will be too cold to create a combustible mixture.) --
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Our reliance on fossil fuels is not a political choice, it's an economic one.
As it is becoming increasingly obvious, this economic judgement is due to ignoring the external costs of increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Your uncle mort doesn't drive that giant cadillac to bingo every night because the US Congress told him to waste our fossil fuels; he did it because it's to his economic advantage to get somewhere moderately cheap.
If he was paying the full cost (internal and external) of the gas, he might drive something else. Or maybe bingo would be located somewhere that people wouldn't have to drive to get to; people tend not to locate evening entertainment in places which require an airplane flight to get in and out of, after all.
Wind power is _not_ a suitable alternative to coal/gas.
It works fine for making electricity. As long as it's blowing, it replaces coal and gas being burned in electric powerplants (such gas is an increasing fraction of total consumption).
I support... taxing gasoline more heavily.
So you do favor internalizing some of the costs Uncle Mort is currently free to ignore. Bravo. If everyone just paid a tax on every pound of fossil carbon they dumped into the air, they'd be free to decide how much it was worth it to them to either use the fossil carbon, use renewable carbon (biomass), or use no carbon at all (wind power, nuclear, solar). It's just the kind of thing a free market handles well. --
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The ignition temperature is what it takes to ignite something, and it depends on the composition. The flash point is the temperature at which a fuel is capable of producing a combustible mixture in a given atmosphere (usually air). The boiling point of gasoline is somewhat below the boiling point of water, but the flash point is typically well below 0 Fahrenheit (otherwise you couldn't ignite it and your car wouldn't start).
Flash point is meaningless in an atmosphere which will not support combustion. --
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Always, always RTFarticle. If you'd done that, you would have known:
Corners are no problem, because the system uses fiber optics.
The novel drilling system would transfer light energy from lasers on the surface, down a borehole by a fiber optic bundle, to a series of lenses that would direct the laser light to the rock face.
They are claiming no need for pipe to line the borehole:
Moreover, researchers believe that lasers have the ability to melt the rock in a way that creates a ceramic sheath in the wellbore, eliminating the expense of buying and setting steel well casing.
I'm skeptical about #2, because a ceramic lining will be far more brittle, fragile and harder to make consistent than steel. On the other hand, I suppose that you could get clever with curled-up pieces of steel sheet, drop them down the hole, unwrap them so that they are set firmly against the borehole and then laser-weld them together to build a lining in place. You could use the same technique to place and weld patches to existing bore liners. --
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After Canter and Siegel committed the Green Card spam, there was a lot of talk about doing nasty things to them. I've wondered how different the world would be today if the talk hadn't been just talk. Would Usenet still be useful instead of a cesspool of spam? --
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I suppose you could put lots of water into the Sahara desert and make it green again, and then call it "water pollution". Or maybe not. If you change things in an undesirable fashion you'd call it pollution, but changing things in a manner which improves things for humans is, in a human terms, anything but.
It is speculated that Mars may have little bits of life hanging on at the margins deep underground, because that's where the liquid water and other conditions exist which allow survival and growth. The changes brought on by adding greenhouse gases would make the surface warmer and wetter. If this makes it possible for such indigenous life to return to the surface, it might even be good for the stuff which originated there. --
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One of the problems with holographic storage is that layering hologram on top of hologram makes the entire storage medium increasingly opaque. Eventually you get to the point where you can't read data through all the other data (or it takes too much power, leading to overheating, or too much exposure/integration time, leading to really slow acccess). These problems have been detailed before, and I'm really disappointed that the article didn't mention how they are supposed to be licked by this new medium. If they aren't it's no breakthrough, just a curiosity. --
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It may turn out that we will need to take our most polluting power generators up there with us just to improve the atmosphere.:-)
Nobody's suggesting sending up coal-burning powerplants (no coal, and the sulfuric acid particles would cool things off) but some researchers have suggested setting up chemical plants on Mars to manufacture and release fluorocarbons (the same things being phased out by the Montreal Protocol, IIRC) into the atmosphere. Fluorocarbons are quite stable and are potent greenhouse gases; a few million tons a year would be enough to affect the climate of Mars significantly. Once you've evaporated the CO2 ice caps you'd have a lot more atmosphere on the Red Planet and you could think about terraforming. --
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Re:Nice argument for going back to the Moon
on
Green Cheese? No.
·
· Score: 2
Actually, if what you're thinking about is having some kind of closed ecological system (a la Biosphere 2), I suppose there would be lots more things to import than mere CO2.
The biggies are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON). If you can get all of those from the environment, you are 95% of the way there. I know that lunar regolith also has calcium, potassium and so forth, so even some of the rest could be derived from native sources. It's really low on sodium, though, and I haven't seen anything on elemental abundances that so much as mentions halogens.
Besides, you're thinking really long-range. On the short run, I'd bet it would be more expensive to bring to the moon all the equipment required to process those basic elements, than it would be to simply bring them along.
I wasn't aware that plant seeds and bacterial cultures were expensive equipment. If you consider what one tomato seed can turn into (many pounds of fresh tomatoes, plus stem, roots and leaves for composting to make soil for other things) you'll get an idea of how much cheaper it could be to send the equipment to make greenhouses and dig ices than it would be to send food. A tomato seed is what, about a milligram? Think about it.
To do this you need enough people there to set up and run the gear to make glass, build structures and so forth. It's a task many times bigger than Apollo, agreed. But if they are going to be there for long, doing this preliminary work to make the area habitable would pay off in vastly reduced shipping costs down the line. --
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You can't have it both ways; either you are wrong in [A] your argument that [B]everybody will use it right away (thus eliminating the need for continuing to expand the Interstates in parallel, thus necessitating tax increases) or you are wrong in [C] your argument that they WON'T use it right away (thus eliminating the need for expanding the entrance system).
Thank you for illustrating the fallacy of the false dichotomy and the straw-man argument (despite your claim [A], none of the above are my arguments).
Neither [B] nor [C] apply. Of course the number of rail-capable vehicles begins at a very low number. The rail system would attract users incrementally, not in huge lumps. Insofar as these users stop using the in-city Interstates (as opposed to bypasses), this reduces or eliminates the need to expand them. If the rail system became congested right away, people would probably stop their move away from using road vehicles. It's a question of where the new users are going to appear, and shifts in user preference over time; the number of early adopters is small compared to the people who take a wait-and-see attitude. --
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Nice argument for going back to the Moon
on
Green Cheese? No.
·
· Score: 1
In addition to mapping abundances of things like titanium, this mission confirmed that there is plenty of water on the Moon (and in a region where quite a bit of sunlight is available). This means that we can fuel rockets from materials found on the moon, and perhaps export fuel to low-earth orbit (which might be cheaper than launching it up from below).
What I want to know is if any carbon and nitrogen (from CO, CO2, NH3) got captured along with the water; that would give you most of the building blocks of food along with rocket fuel, and eliminate the need to import most things from Earth. --
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Slashdot Mirror
- Your minimum drag is roughly a constant fraction of your weight.
- Accordingly, the thrust you need to stay in the air is just about a constant fraction of your weight, so long as you stick to the best L/D speed.
- On the other hand, your speed keeps going up as you go to higher altitudes. THEREFORE,
- Your power requirements (thrust times speed) increase with increasing altitude.
It's true that a higher-altitude flight is generally more efficient per unit distance, but that's because you're typically flying at better than the best L/D airspeed (and taking a greater drag penalty). If you are just trying to stay in the air, and ignoring the inefficiencies of engines designed for high altitude operating at low altitude, you are much better off flying at lower speed in the thicker air where you can achieve the same drag at lower airspeed.--
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The AC is right. Nothing flies at FL51 except the occasional Lear jet and the military, and the latter presumably avoid the vicinity of cities when flying maneuvers.
--
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No kidding. This would be an ideal application for the NASA balloon project (if they could get it to stop leaking). Fly at a lower altitude to get more lifting capacity (denser air), add solar panels for power, modify it to be more of a blimp shape instead of a pumpkin and use some of its power for station-keeping, and it wouldn't require any fuel to speak of. Nor would it require pilots (six pilots at $75,000/yr each plus bennies... I make that at least $600,000/yr/city).
--
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If you are arguing that Slashdot's spirit of community is a victim of Slashdot's success, I agree whole-heartedly.
--
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What is your opinion of the "Gore tax", aka the e-rate Internet access subsididy? Specifically, how do you view:
- The fairness of the tax on telephone users;
- The value obtained for the money distributed via the tax;
- The various bills pending to attach strings (such as Internet filtering) to this money?
Would we be better off eliminating the e-rate and getting rid of the subsidies and strings, or is this worth trying to fix the problems while keeping the busybodies in check?--
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- Development of any kind.
- Business and capitalism in general.
- Western literature and civilization in general ("only dead white males").
- Science and the scientific method (by proponents of "other ways of knowing").
You also forget that indifference to Christianity (because it is a religion) is part of the foundation of the United States government."I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
(There are more thought-provoking quotes on this page.)--
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- It wasn't major; it was an occasional "main loop timeout" error flag which indicated that the computer hadn't had time to complete all its assigned tasks during the time-slice.
- It didn't occur often enough to cause problems with the landing.
- The astronauts "didn't know the workaround" because it was their error. They'd left another radar, only used for the rendezvous with the CSM, operating during the landing. This sucked up enough CPU to cause the timeout condition. They'd turned the radar on earlier in the flight and hadn't turned it off; user error.
They got down on the Moon just fine, so it's really hard to consider this a "major bug".--
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I wonder how many of these halophyte plants could be used for rehabilitating farmland lost to salt buildup from bad irrigation? If they take up salt in their tissues where it gets harvested and removed, you could use them to build organic matter in the soil at the same time you remove the excess salt.
--
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Pauli's exclusion principle exists and the other does not; I mis-attributed Pauli's principle to Fermi because it only works with fermions. This is what I get for trusting my memory too much.
--
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Disclaimer: IANAL and this isn't legal advise. It's barely information, and I could easily be wrong in some detail or other.
--
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It's very interesting that the quantum behavior of condensates has now been examined both with bosons (which can all be in the same quantum state) and fermions (which must obey the Fermi exclusion principle).
--
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If you want motive power for free-running vehicles, wind power is only good for charging batteries (and we all know how crappy batteries are compared to a tankful of gas). The lousy density of hydrogen makes it not a whole lot better. However, nothing says you can't have a hybrid car that tops off its batteries whenever you're at a plug and uses the batteries to boost its fuel-burning efficiency by 50% or more. We can do that today. Heck, we could have had that in full production five years ago. We could have had 90-MPG passenger cars here except that they all seem to use direct-injection diesels and you can't get one to pass the EPA emissions tests any more.
No kidding about popular paranoia about all things nuclear. Know why Magnetic Resonance Imaging is now the favored term? It's because Nuclear Magnetic Resonance makes the ignorant masses all uneasy.
Brazil spent a bunch of money converting cars to run on domestically-produced ethanol instead of imported oil. They'd probably be game for something like this. I think you just contradicted yourself there.There was an article on harnessing the energy of warm ocean-surface water in a magazine a few years ago, but I'm having no luck at all finding it in their issue index otherwise I'd point you at it. Would you believe 23 gigawatts per unit and hurricane-abatement benefits besides? The only problem is that you can't do anything like this in a small way, you have to make a few really big ones and the learning curve is a bitch even if the cost of money is no object (same problem fusion has, minus the fast neutrons).
--
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Gasoline does form a mixture in enclosed spaces which is too rich to ignite. Jet fuel (and diesel fuel) do not; especially when warm, they create vapors which are in the combustible range of concentration. Jet fuel tanks are usually vented to keep the vapor concentration below the combustible range, but this is not a sure thing. I'm betting that the next move is to purge them with either CO2 or nitrogen and make the vapor concentration irrelevant. (When the aircraft is at jet cruising altitudes, the skin is very cold and any fuel which can cool to near-skin temperatures will be too cold to create a combustible mixture.)
--
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Flash point is meaningless in an atmosphere which will not support combustion.
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- Corners are no problem, because the system uses fiber optics.
- They are claiming no need for pipe to line the borehole:
I'm skeptical about #2, because a ceramic lining will be far more brittle, fragile and harder to make consistent than steel. On the other hand, I suppose that you could get clever with curled-up pieces of steel sheet, drop them down the hole, unwrap them so that they are set firmly against the borehole and then laser-weld them together to build a lining in place. You could use the same technique to place and weld patches to existing bore liners.--
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After Canter and Siegel committed the Green Card spam, there was a lot of talk about doing nasty things to them. I've wondered how different the world would be today if the talk hadn't been just talk. Would Usenet still be useful instead of a cesspool of spam?
--
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It is speculated that Mars may have little bits of life hanging on at the margins deep underground, because that's where the liquid water and other conditions exist which allow survival and growth. The changes brought on by adding greenhouse gases would make the surface warmer and wetter. If this makes it possible for such indigenous life to return to the surface, it might even be good for the stuff which originated there.
--
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One of the problems with holographic storage is that layering hologram on top of hologram makes the entire storage medium increasingly opaque. Eventually you get to the point where you can't read data through all the other data (or it takes too much power, leading to overheating, or too much exposure/integration time, leading to really slow acccess). These problems have been detailed before, and I'm really disappointed that the article didn't mention how they are supposed to be licked by this new medium. If they aren't it's no breakthrough, just a curiosity.
--
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To do this you need enough people there to set up and run the gear to make glass, build structures and so forth. It's a task many times bigger than Apollo, agreed. But if they are going to be there for long, doing this preliminary work to make the area habitable would pay off in vastly reduced shipping costs down the line.
--
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Neither [B] nor [C] apply. Of course the number of rail-capable vehicles begins at a very low number. The rail system would attract users incrementally, not in huge lumps. Insofar as these users stop using the in-city Interstates (as opposed to bypasses), this reduces or eliminates the need to expand them. If the rail system became congested right away, people would probably stop their move away from using road vehicles. It's a question of where the new users are going to appear, and shifts in user preference over time; the number of early adopters is small compared to the people who take a wait-and-see attitude.
--
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What I want to know is if any carbon and nitrogen (from CO, CO2, NH3) got captured along with the water; that would give you most of the building blocks of food along with rocket fuel, and eliminate the need to import most things from Earth.
--
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