Getting to Mars is, in some was, easier than getting to an asteroid, because you can stop for free at Mars. Getting home again is much harder. There's no cheap way OFF Mars.
Emotionally, I agree with you completely. Logically, I think we get to go to the stars better, and probably sooner, by not spending buckets of money addressing a an artificial challenge like flags and footprints on Mars in the next couple of decades. We did something a lot like that already with Apollo and it pushed a lot of interesting technologies, but I think we need to find a different kind of challenge next to push a different set of technologies -- curing cancer, maybe or resolving religious and ethnic differences without killing each other -- much more difficult and in different ways than another big engineering project. I'm not convinced that any manned space programme that we can do just now is actually the right challenge for any real purpose. I'd love to be -- I'd love to look forward to phone calls from my grandchildren at University on Mars in 2050, but I don't think I can.
The thing is that it's not one robot vs one geologist. $ for $ it's more like 1000 robots vs one geologist. Also, the geologist can tele-operate the robots (at least on the moon).
I think BP has spent the last 60 days showing the extreme limitations of robots or tele-operated machines in harsh environments. If you want to get anything serious done, send a person.
Ah -- the one thing NOBODY has (credibly) suggested dong about the oil leak. There may be a reason for that. Sure robots are limited, but when you get far enough from home (in any of a variety of senses) humans are (a) also very limited and (b) very, very high maintenance.
The people that want to go to space are not you, and they DO have reasons for wanting to go. A lot of them are even spending their own, hard earned money to do so. Whether you think they should or not is rather beside the point.
Necron69
That's fine. Branson, Cormack and co. are welcome to play about in suborbital rockets. Musk is now running quite heavily on US govt money. At this stage Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could probably get themselves to the Moon by blowing their entire fortunes. When economic growth and/or technical development makes it cheap enough, people will go, and good luck to them but it's not a sensible investment for a government or a corporation just yet.
We've spent one or two billion $ over 30 years on Mars probes, give or take. Some did crash, some did get stuck in stupid ways, none has yet tried to do a sample return, although it has been proposed. On the other hand others have outperformed expectations and given us more photographs and so on than any manned mission likely could.
No one seriously believes we could put a man on Mars for less than $30bn (Zubrin, for a quick cheap flags and footprints mission) and most serious estimates are $100 to $200 bn. For that money we could send a LOT of robots.
I'd like humans in space to make sense for research/exploration, but I can't see the numbers ever adding up.
It would be nice to find a way to reward and motivate Sergey Brin just as much by giving him (say) $100m for all the luxuries he could ever consume and then giving him medals or something instead of the rest.
Seems to me there is really no good reason for a manned spaceflight programme just now.
Research and exploration can pretty clearly be done more cost-effectively by robots. Even if a certain proportion of them get stuck in stupid ways that a human could fix in a minute, they're just so much cheaper per mission than people that you get much more science per $billion from the ones that survive.
Colonization and so on is a great goal, but I suspect the best way to pursue it just now is to simply to grow the economy on Earth and research basic materials science etc., until it becomes more affordable.
So, that leaves bad reasons -- national flag-waving (being first for the sake of being first); and media/political appeal (easier to get $10b to fly an astronaut than $1bn for 5 robot missions).
Makes me a little sad -- I share the "living in space" dream, but I truly can't see anyway it makes sense at the moment.
Took me a while to understand how this can work, but it does. Assume the wind is blowing North to South at 10 m/s.
Change to a frame of reference moving with the air. Now what we have is a volume of stationary air with one surface, the ground, moving South to North at 10 m/s. So our vehicle has to extract as much energy and as little momentum as possible from this moving surface and use it to propel itself North to South. It is the moving surface that defeats most of the arguments that this can't happen.
I think the hazard with the top kill is the amount of pressure needed from the pumps -- there was an acknowledged risk that it might (for instance) shatter the BOP and leave the well completely open.
My meta-suggestion would be to look for an area that has gone out of fashion. My actual suggestion (and it's not my area at all) would be relatively long wavelength radio science. Understanding the ionosphere and it's impact on short-wave radio and so on was a big deal 50 years ago, but is now fairly irrelevant. With modern digital equipment and some electronics skills you should be able to record and analyze a huge amount of data -- measure signal strengths and delays, deconvolve the signal to work out the distribution of path lengths, ultimately map the electronic properties of the lower and middle atmosphere in 4D. There must be some interesting science there. Lots of opportunities for interesting collaboration with people far away as well.
All true. In this part of the world the usual solution is to specify the transferable skills that should come from studying history (critical approach to sources, different kinds of evidence, etc.) and a vague indication of the periods to be covered.
This curriculum seems insanely over-specified (and a but amateur) (and no, I haven't read the whole thing either.
There is a huge difference in the state of Texas spending their own money to educate their children with a curriculum they choose and the United States government taxing every tax paying American to educate all children with a one sided, politically correct/motivated curriculum.
How is this different from the state of Texas taxing every tax paying Texan to educate all children with a one sided, politically (and factually) incorrect/motivated curriculum and the United States spending their (collective) money to educate their children with a curriculum they (collectively) choose?
Honestly, apart from the fact you (presumably) like the choices the Texas School Board is making, I can't see the difference.
I don't know if the navy HAS robotic subs that can go that deep. If they have they've probably already leant them to BP.
Also, having two separate groups trying to operate robot subs in the same bit of pitch black, oily, turbulent water full of scrap iron, a mile down does not seem like a very a good idea.
The Russian wells were in nice solid rock. The nukes flowed the rock to seal a good length of the drill hole permanently shut. As far as I understand, these wells go through thousands of feet of mud or soft rock under a mile of water. No guarantee a nuke there would do anything useful.
BP is not being held responsible. If they were they would be cleaning up every drop of that oil.
They have agreed to do that, in the sense of paying whoever actually does it. There are however, only so many booms and so many detergent sprayers and so on in the world, and cleaning up oil badly is worse than not doing it at all. BP doesn't actually employ that many professional seabird handlers and so on.
The "top kill" only became an option after all other options that allowed them to continue extracting at least a small portion of the oil from the well were utterly exhausted.
That's drivel. BP have said since day 1 that they plan to permanently seal off this well as soon as they can. The basic problem is that you can't set a cement plug over the hole while oil is still flowing fast out of it. The standard solution to this is to fill the hole with a mud sufficiently much denser than oil that its weight stops the flow. The standard way to do this is by drilling relief wells to meet the original well deep underground (deep enough that the mud filling those wells stops oil coming up them). This all takes time, so in the meantime, they were trying to capture as much of the oil (which is probably so contaminated with mud and seawater as to be unsaleable anyway) as they can.
This has failed, so they're going to try riskier ways of temporarily stopping the flow by forcing mud down the well against the pressure of the oil, or even jamming the well with rubbery scrap.
I know modern science is meant to be collaborative, but this paper has more than a page of authors! I note that they are listed alphabetically -- remind me to change my name to Aarons before taking up particle physics.
Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)? Or are the conditions needed for this to happen too extreme to ever take place outside of big bangs and accelerators? Although as I understand some cosmic rays have far greater energies than accelerators.
I think it's a bit more subtle than that -- things like a particle with a magnetic dipole decaying and tending to send the matter particle towards its North pole and the antimatter towards its South pole, but I'm not certain.
All this talk of "Unmanned missions are just as good!" is pretty unconvincing when reports come back that the latest rover mission may be failing because it's stuck on a 3 inch rock and can't wiggle it's way off . ..
Sure, but that rover cost (depending on which one you mean) maybe $200m. I don't think anyone expects to get a man on Mars for less than, say, $200bn and in less than 30 years. For that cost, and time you get 1000 rovers, going through three or four complete design cycles (so if the first batch all have problems with 3" rocks, the second batch is designed from scratch with all the experience from the first one, etc.
c isn't just 1 in sensible units, it really is the number 1. Space and time are the same thing and a speed is really a geometrical measure of the relationship between two inertial reference frames. It would be almost reasonable to describe it as an angle something like tan^-1(v/c), although that is also a bit misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting to Mars is, in some was, easier than getting to an asteroid, because you can stop for free at Mars. Getting home again is much harder. There's no cheap way OFF Mars.
Emotionally, I agree with you completely. Logically, I think we get to go to the stars better, and probably sooner, by not spending buckets of money addressing a an artificial challenge like flags and footprints on Mars in the next couple of decades. We did something a lot like that already with Apollo and it pushed a lot of interesting technologies, but I think we need to find a different kind of challenge next to push a different set of technologies -- curing cancer, maybe or resolving religious and ethnic differences without killing each other -- much more difficult and in different ways than another big engineering project. I'm not convinced that any manned space programme that we can do just now is actually the right challenge for any real purpose. I'd love to be -- I'd love to look forward to phone calls from my grandchildren at University on Mars in 2050, but I don't think I can.
The thing is that it's not one robot vs one geologist. $ for $ it's more like 1000 robots vs one geologist. Also, the geologist can tele-operate the robots (at least on the moon).
I think BP has spent the last 60 days showing the extreme limitations of robots or tele-operated machines in harsh environments. If you want to get anything serious done, send a person.
Ah -- the one thing NOBODY has (credibly) suggested dong about the oil leak. There may be a reason for that. Sure robots are limited, but when you get far enough from home (in any of a variety of senses) humans are (a) also very limited and (b) very, very high maintenance.
The people that want to go to space are not you, and they DO have reasons for wanting to go. A lot of them are even spending their own, hard earned money to do so. Whether you think they should or not is rather beside the point.
Necron69
That's fine. Branson, Cormack and co. are welcome to play about in suborbital rockets. Musk is now running quite heavily on US govt money. At this stage Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could probably get themselves to the Moon by blowing their entire fortunes. When economic growth and/or technical development makes it cheap enough, people will go, and good luck to them but it's not a sensible investment for a government or a corporation just yet.
We've spent one or two billion $ over 30 years on Mars probes, give or take. Some did crash, some did get stuck in stupid ways, none has yet tried to do a sample return, although it has been proposed. On the other hand others have outperformed expectations and given us more photographs and so on than any manned mission likely could.
No one seriously believes we could put a man on Mars for less than $30bn (Zubrin, for a quick cheap flags and footprints mission) and most serious estimates are $100 to $200 bn. For that money we could send a LOT of robots.
I'd like humans in space to make sense for research/exploration, but I can't see the numbers ever adding up.
It would be nice to find a way to reward and motivate Sergey Brin just as much by giving him (say) $100m for all the luxuries he could ever consume and then giving him medals or something instead of the rest.
Seems to me there is really no good reason for a manned spaceflight programme just now.
Research and exploration can pretty clearly be done more cost-effectively by robots. Even if a certain proportion of them get stuck in stupid ways that a human could fix in a minute, they're just so much cheaper per mission than people that you get much more science per $billion from the ones that survive.
Colonization and so on is a great goal, but I suspect the best way to pursue it just now is to simply to grow the economy on Earth and research basic materials science etc., until it becomes more affordable.
So, that leaves bad reasons -- national flag-waving (being first for the sake of being first); and media/political appeal (easier to get $10b to fly an astronaut than $1bn for 5 robot missions).
Makes me a little sad -- I share the "living in space" dream, but I truly can't see anyway it makes sense at the moment.
Took me a while to understand how this can work, but it does. Assume the wind is blowing North to South at 10 m/s.
Change to a frame of reference moving with the air. Now what we have is a volume of stationary air with one surface, the ground, moving South to North at 10 m/s. So our vehicle has to extract as much energy and as little momentum as possible from this moving surface and use it to propel itself North to South. It is the moving surface that defeats most of the arguments that this can't happen.
I think the hazard with the top kill is the amount of pressure needed from the pumps -- there was an acknowledged risk that it might (for instance) shatter the BOP and leave the well completely open.
My meta-suggestion would be to look for an area that has gone out of fashion. My actual suggestion (and it's not my area at all) would be relatively long wavelength radio science. Understanding the ionosphere and it's impact on short-wave radio and so on was a big deal 50 years ago, but is now fairly irrelevant. With modern digital equipment and some electronics skills you should be able to record and analyze a huge amount of data -- measure signal strengths and delays, deconvolve the signal to work out the distribution of path lengths, ultimately map the electronic properties of the lower and middle atmosphere in 4D. There must be some interesting science there. Lots of opportunities for interesting collaboration with people far away as well.
All true. In this part of the world the usual solution is to specify the transferable skills that should come from studying history (critical approach to sources, different kinds of evidence, etc.) and a vague indication of the periods to be covered.
This curriculum seems insanely over-specified (and a but amateur) (and no, I haven't read the whole thing either.
There is a huge difference in the state of Texas spending their own money to educate their children with a curriculum they choose and the United States government taxing every tax paying American to educate all children with a one sided, politically correct/motivated curriculum.
How is this different from the state of Texas taxing every tax paying Texan to educate all children with a one sided, politically (and factually) incorrect/motivated curriculum and the United States spending their (collective) money to educate their children with a curriculum they (collectively) choose?
Honestly, apart from the fact you (presumably) like the choices the Texas School Board is making, I can't see the difference.
All true, but their world-wide and US reputation is worth a lot to them.
Probably more than the clean-up costs.
I don't know if the navy HAS robotic subs that can go that deep. If they have they've probably already leant them to BP.
Also, having two separate groups trying to operate robot subs in the same bit of pitch black, oily, turbulent water full of scrap iron, a mile down does not seem like a very a good idea.
The Russian wells were in nice solid rock. The nukes flowed the rock to seal a good length of the drill hole permanently shut. As far as I understand, these wells go through thousands of feet of mud or soft rock under a mile of water. No guarantee a nuke there would do anything useful.
They have very publically said that they do not intend to rely on this law.
BP is not being held responsible. If they were they would be cleaning up every drop of that oil.
They have agreed to do that, in the sense of paying whoever actually does it. There are however, only so many booms and so many detergent sprayers and so on in the world, and cleaning up oil badly is worse than not doing it at all. BP doesn't actually employ that many professional seabird handlers and so on.
The "top kill" only became an option after all other options that allowed them to continue extracting at least a small portion of the oil from the well were utterly exhausted.
That's drivel. BP have said since day 1 that they plan to permanently seal off this well as soon as they can. The basic problem is that you can't set a cement plug over the hole while oil is still flowing fast out of it. The standard solution to this is to fill the hole with a mud sufficiently much denser than oil that its weight stops the flow. The standard way to do this is by drilling relief wells to meet the original well deep underground (deep enough that the mud filling those wells stops oil coming up them). This all takes time, so in the meantime, they were trying to capture as much of the oil (which is probably so contaminated with mud and seawater as to be unsaleable anyway) as they can.
This has failed, so they're going to try riskier ways of temporarily stopping the flow by forcing mud down the well against the pressure of the oil, or even jamming the well with rubbery scrap.
I know modern science is meant to be collaborative, but this paper has more than a page of authors! I note that they are listed alphabetically -- remind me to change my name to Aarons before taking up particle physics.
Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)? Or are the conditions needed for this to happen too extreme to ever take place outside of big bangs and accelerators? Although as I understand some cosmic rays have far greater energies than accelerators.
I think it's a bit more subtle than that -- things like a particle with a magnetic dipole decaying and tending to send the matter particle towards its North pole and the antimatter towards its South pole, but I'm not certain.
They could STOP the flow if they wanted, .
How exactly?
All this talk of "Unmanned missions are just as good!" is pretty unconvincing when reports come back that the latest rover mission may be failing because it's stuck on a 3 inch rock and can't wiggle it's way off . . .
Sure, but that rover cost (depending on which one you mean) maybe $200m. I don't think anyone expects to get a man on Mars for less than, say, $200bn and in less than 30 years. For that cost, and time you get 1000 rovers, going through three or four complete design cycles (so if the first batch all have problems with 3" rocks, the second batch is designed from scratch with all the experience from the first one, etc.
c isn't just 1 in sensible units, it really is the number 1. Space and time are the same thing and a speed is really a geometrical measure of the relationship between two inertial reference frames. It would be almost reasonable to describe it as an angle something like tan^-1(v/c), although that is also a bit misleading.
drag. Plus the fact that at supersonic speeds things don't always do what you expect.
What they really mean is that the current land speed record is 1227 Km/h and they're trying to reach 1609 Km/h. Now, that's better.
No, no, no.
The current land speed record is 0.000001136 (of the speed of light, so it's a dimensionless number) and they want to get up to 0.00000149
No units are involved, space and time are the same thing.