I don't know why this got modded as "offtopic". Granted it's flippant and not serious but if we terraform Mars or Venus, we'll need to do pretty much what this post says.
Granted, we don't have the tech to do it right this minute but by the time any terraforming effort is undertaken, the technology will either exist or it will become reasonable to develop it.
Not only does this object have water, but it probably has (literally) tons of ammonia and other useful compounds and elements. If that can be deposited into the Martian atmosphere, it will generate heat on entry, add pressure to the atmosphere and deliver the raw materials to manufacture some of the super-greenhouse gasses that will be needed.
Check out this if you want to see more about this and other proposed terraforming tech.
NASA has been spinning its wheels ever since the end of the Apollo program. Mars Direct is a proposed path to get humans on Mars in 10 years. It's technicaly feasable, not any more expensive than the current low Earth orbit (LEO) NASA budget, and it would turn mankind into an honest to goodness spacefaring species.
Want to do something about the current lack of direction that NASA has? Check out this previous post.
I disagree. Check out this testomony. During the Apollo program, the NASA budget was onlu 10% higher than today and they accomplished orders of magnitude what they are today. It's a problem with culture not money. If we get the proper culture though, more money can get us cool stuff like terraforming equiptment.
What "had been" a second world country? Unlike first world and third world denominations which depend on how industrialized you are, "second world" just means a socialist or communist state. They can be the most successful country on the planet and still be a second world country if they're communist, so I don't think that particular denomination will shame NASA.
True enough but they're jumping on the capitalism bandwagon so fast, it won't be long until they are a de facto capitalist state. Elections will probably still be rigged or non existent for a while but it's definitely not good old Soviet style second world anymore.
It worked well during the cold war, because there was the whole "capitalism must win over communism before communists take over the world" mindset. Today, if China does a good job, the most change that you'll see happen will be NASA buying more chinese components.
Good point but the space race during the Cold War was more about one-upping each other on proof of concept missions. If the Moon and Mars (hell Venus, Europa...) are now viewed as land and resources to grab (which they are), that might foster a different but equally powerful competitive spirit.
I don't really care if NASA gets parts from North Korea (functional and safe of course) so long as it gets moving on something like Mars Direct.
This is exactly what NASA needs right now. A kick in their complacent, idle butts. As you can read in my previous post,I think that NASA needs to have a similar goal-oriented approach to their mission. Perhaps if we get shown up by what had been a second world country, we will get back into the Apollo mindset again.
I'm kind of disappointed that the article didn't mention the idea of collection mirrors. building a solar array on the moon is cool and all but consider the gains of putting a Mylar sail in orbit to magnify the amount of light that the cells would collect. Last time I checked, a square foot of Mylar was a lot cheaper than a square foot of photogalvanic cells and you could double, triple,... n-tuple the amount of light hitting the cells.
That would also lead to the development of solar sails for propulsion and they would come in pretty handy if we ever terraform Mars or Venus.
Re:The Moon doesn't offer much, but Mars...
on
The Case for the Moon
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's too much of a gravity well to make strip-mining profitable.
This is a reason not to go only if your primary reason is to strip mine Mars. Besides, by the time a strip mining opperation was mature, space elevator technology would probably allow you to do a run-around of the gravity well.
The barriers to human survival in that environment make it just as costly to live there as on the moon.
Not so. Mars has a thin but existant atmosphere. With a few stowed chemicals and a little 19th century chemical engineering, humans would be able to create quite a bit out of thin air. Don't forget the vast ice caps and higher gravity that Mars provides.
Travel times are a bitch.
And yet exploration happened before jet propulsion was invented...
And terraforming just AIN'T GONNA WORK.
Have you tried or done any research? There are plenty of researchers who disagree with you. Also, what are the timescales of this atmospheric stripping? Is it on the order of decades or millennia? If we could bring the atmosphere up to 500 mb in a thousand years and it takes a million to bring it back down to 50mb, I would see this as a maintenance task rather than a show stopping obstacle. There is still a lot that we don't know but that's not a reason to just throw up our hands and give up.
Re:Mars is far and as inhabitable as Moon
on
The Case for the Moon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Who said I was anti-terraforming. The fact is that any settlement on Mars will need to be prefaced by very small missions.
There's no point waiting for warp drives to make the distance shorter because there's no telling if they will ever happen. Ask any physics professor and they'll say probably not.
Terraforming the Moon is basicaly impossible from what I've read. Mars however has most of the raw materials to do it. The timescale is long from landing on Mars in a tin can to playing frizbee in a Martian prarie but there is no better time to start than now.
The point is that if NASA and the nation have a focused goal, the payoff won't just be a Settlement on Mars or the Moon but new tech developed to get us there and millions of new engineers and scientists.
Re:The Moon doesn't offer much, but Mars...
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Glad that we are both on the same page about Mars but I would say that both could be done in parallel. Getting to Mars actually takes less energy that getting to the Moon so I don't see much of a gain as using the Moon as a stepping stone. The Moon and Earth are pretty much as the same point on the scale of the solar system.
Waiting for a functional moon base before going to Mars would lead to the kind of thinking that's killing NASA right now. They've been spending decades "preparing" for some grand mission as if it's going to be assigned by God. What they need to realize is that if they plan to go now the technology will follow just as it did with the Apollo missions.
I would also think that things we learn from parallel Moon and Mars settlement would have simultaneous positive feedback technologically.
The Moon doesn't offer much, but Mars...
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Mars is where we need to go. I agree that NASA does need some goal if they are ever going to do anything useful again but if they're going to set a goal, it should at least set a potentially habitable planet as a goal with the Moon as a sub goal or a proof of concept.
Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics and founder of the Mars Society has called for the mobilization of Mars exploration proponents to write their representatives on the future of post-Columbia NASA. From his announcement: 'This debate will play out over the next six months, and the result could determine the future of the American space program in our generation. Now is the time when anyone who cherishes hopes for a spacefaring future for humanity must step forward and speak up.'
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
I work for an automotive software vendor. Ford is one of our biggest customers and they require that our development and releases be done on HPUX. We all hate HPUX around here but if the customer wants it, they get it.
I'm anxious to know if this Linux adoption will switch their engineering requirements. I guess only time will tell.
I'm an applications admin. ClearCase and ClearQuest specifically. I also support a host of other engineering applications. Most of those apps were never and probably will never be ported to the Mac and I'm willing to bet that other engineering shops are in the same boat.
Sure, I figure that Macs might have a place in a business or accounting context but not for engineering. Anyone got a counter-example?
I live in the Chicagoland area where the two seasons are winter and construction. Our roads are regularly ground down to their component elements and reconstituted in a shoddy manner that necessitates their annual replacement.
I can only assume that this pattern will continue indefinitely rubber in the roads or not. It should be business as usual for the shovel-leaners around here.
The law forces the kids to be there, so they should not have to give up all their rights in exchange for a mandated thing!
I just read through the Bill of Rights yesterday and I couldn't find that right to which you are referring. Please clarify. If being taped in a public place was illegal, security cameras would be outlawed.
I hope you have the same attidude the first time you get a body cavity search when you turn on a public access channel on your TV.
Well, you are getting it for free, aren't you? How can you object?
If someone came into my house to do that they would get a swift baseball bat to the head. You're mixing up the concepts of privacy on public property and private property. All broadcast signals are in the public domain anyway so anyone can view them without consequence.
Oh, and from that day, your TV ALWAYS comes on tuned to the free ones!
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. Please feel free to try again.
I have a feeling that everyone's going to be up in arms about privacy but I'm actually ok with this. As long as the teachers are on the clock, their employer owns their time and are within their rights to know what they are doing.
I'm not sure but I believe that schools qualify as public property so the kids aren't being invaded.
I'm all about transparency in stuff that taxpayers pay for and maybe this will actually improve the quality of teaching. No more filmstrips 4 days a week if their bosses can see.
Re:If all content could be encrypted ....
on
Freenet 0.5.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Bruce Schneier said something to the effect of "encryption isn't just some fairy dust that you can sprinkle here and there and expect things to be secure". Even if there were hardware level encryption, there would need to be an infrastructure set up to make everything work together securely.
That would require everything from the read/write head of a disk to a DNS server to a java app to communicate with each other. If there is any error in implementation, nothing will be able to talk to anything else. If there are any weak security links, well, you know how chains work.
I'm not saying it can't be done, it would just require no less than a full overhaul of pretty much all computing hardware and software to conform to a complex set of security protocols. Anything less would be insecure.
The knitting machine is the digital recorder which loads the connected function to broadband network the HDD and the DVD of the 80GB - the RW / - in addition to the R recorder.
Except for that nasty using-up-all-the-oxygen thing... ah well. I'm sure we can adapt. Nitrogen works, right?:)
I'm guessing this is a troll but I'll point this out anyway:
1) To get 2H, you crack H2O
2) You store the H and the O flys off somewhere
3) When you burn the H, you use the O (or one just like it) that you let fly off in 1)
Is there some documentation on this fine? Does the caller have to hang up without giving the URL or 800 number or does the call simply have to end without that information (ie: I hang up).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why this got modded as "offtopic". Granted it's flippant and not serious but if we terraform Mars or Venus, we'll need to do pretty much what this post says.
Granted, we don't have the tech to do it right this minute but by the time any terraforming effort is undertaken, the technology will either exist or it will become reasonable to develop it.
Not only does this object have water, but it probably has (literally) tons of ammonia and other useful compounds and elements. If that can be deposited into the Martian atmosphere, it will generate heat on entry, add pressure to the atmosphere and deliver the raw materials to manufacture some of the super-greenhouse gasses that will be needed.
Check out this if you want to see more about this and other proposed terraforming tech.
Straight up.
NASA has been spinning its wheels ever since the end of the Apollo program. Mars Direct is a proposed path to get humans on Mars in 10 years. It's technicaly feasable, not any more expensive than the current low Earth orbit (LEO) NASA budget, and it would turn mankind into an honest to goodness spacefaring species.
Want to do something about the current lack of direction that NASA has? Check out this previous post.
That 10% more figure already adjusts for inflation.
I disagree. Check out this testomony. During the Apollo program, the NASA budget was onlu 10% higher than today and they accomplished orders of magnitude what they are today. It's a problem with culture not money. If we get the proper culture though, more money can get us cool stuff like terraforming equiptment.
What "had been" a second world country? Unlike first world and third world denominations which depend on how industrialized you are, "second world" just means a socialist or communist state. They can be the most successful country on the planet and still be a second world country if they're communist, so I don't think that particular denomination will shame NASA.
True enough but they're jumping on the capitalism bandwagon so fast, it won't be long until they are a de facto capitalist state. Elections will probably still be rigged or non existent for a while but it's definitely not good old Soviet style second world anymore.
It worked well during the cold war, because there was the whole "capitalism must win over communism before communists take over the world" mindset. Today, if China does a good job, the most change that you'll see happen will be NASA buying more chinese components.
Good point but the space race during the Cold War was more about one-upping each other on proof of concept missions. If the Moon and Mars (hell Venus, Europa...) are now viewed as land and resources to grab (which they are), that might foster a different but equally powerful competitive spirit.
I don't really care if NASA gets parts from North Korea (functional and safe of course) so long as it gets moving on something like Mars Direct.
This is exactly what NASA needs right now. A kick in their complacent, idle butts. As you can read in my previous post ,I think that NASA needs to have a similar goal-oriented approach to their mission. Perhaps if we get shown up by what had been a second world country, we will get back into the Apollo mindset again.
I'm kind of disappointed that the article didn't mention the idea of collection mirrors. building a solar array on the moon is cool and all but consider the gains of putting a Mylar sail in orbit to magnify the amount of light that the cells would collect. Last time I checked, a square foot of Mylar was a lot cheaper than a square foot of photogalvanic cells and you could double, triple, ... n-tuple the amount of light hitting the cells.
That would also lead to the development of solar sails for propulsion and they would come in pretty handy if we ever terraform Mars or Venus.
There's too much of a gravity well to make strip-mining profitable.
This is a reason not to go only if your primary reason is to strip mine Mars. Besides, by the time a strip mining opperation was mature, space elevator technology would probably allow you to do a run-around of the gravity well.
The barriers to human survival in that environment make it just as costly to live there as on the moon.
Not so. Mars has a thin but existant atmosphere. With a few stowed chemicals and a little 19th century chemical engineering, humans would be able to create quite a bit out of thin air. Don't forget the vast ice caps and higher gravity that Mars provides.
Travel times are a bitch.
And yet exploration happened before jet propulsion was invented...
And terraforming just AIN'T GONNA WORK.
Have you tried or done any research? There are plenty of researchers who disagree with you. Also, what are the timescales of this atmospheric stripping? Is it on the order of decades or millennia? If we could bring the atmosphere up to 500 mb in a thousand years and it takes a million to bring it back down to 50mb, I would see this as a maintenance task rather than a show stopping obstacle. There is still a lot that we don't know but that's not a reason to just throw up our hands and give up.
Who said I was anti-terraforming. The fact is that any settlement on Mars will need to be prefaced by very small missions.
There's no point waiting for warp drives to make the distance shorter because there's no telling if they will ever happen. Ask any physics professor and they'll say probably not.
Terraforming the Moon is basicaly impossible from what I've read. Mars however has most of the raw materials to do it. The timescale is long from landing on Mars in a tin can to playing frizbee in a Martian prarie but there is no better time to start than now.
The point is that if NASA and the nation have a focused goal, the payoff won't just be a Settlement on Mars or the Moon but new tech developed to get us there and millions of new engineers and scientists.
Glad that we are both on the same page about Mars but I would say that both could be done in parallel. Getting to Mars actually takes less energy that getting to the Moon so I don't see much of a gain as using the Moon as a stepping stone. The Moon and Earth are pretty much as the same point on the scale of the solar system.
Waiting for a functional moon base before going to Mars would lead to the kind of thinking that's killing NASA right now. They've been spending decades "preparing" for some grand mission as if it's going to be assigned by God. What they need to realize is that if they plan to go now the technology will follow just as it did with the Apollo missions.
I would also think that things we learn from parallel Moon and Mars settlement would have simultaneous positive feedback technologically.
Mars is where we need to go. I agree that NASA does need some goal if they are ever going to do anything useful again but if they're going to set a goal, it should at least set a potentially habitable planet as a goal with the Moon as a sub goal or a proof of concept.
.pdf) and the proposed Bill from Congressman Nick Lampson TX to restore Mars as a goal and put NASA on a schedule. Here are a few sample letters if you want to write your congressman.
Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics and founder of the Mars Society has called for the mobilization of Mars exploration proponents to write their representatives on the future of post-Columbia NASA. From his announcement: 'This debate will play out over the next six months, and the result could determine the future of the American space program in our generation. Now is the time when anyone who cherishes hopes for a spacefaring future for humanity must step forward and speak up.'
This is happening alongside the recent testimony Zubrin gave to the full Senate Commerce Committee on Oct 29th (audio files here and the
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by
small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
So who wants to take bets on who turns us into pets first: The kung-Fu Robots or the Dolphins with Thumbs.
I work for an automotive software vendor. Ford is one of our biggest customers and they require that our development and releases be done on HPUX. We all hate HPUX around here but if the customer wants it, they get it.
I'm anxious to know if this Linux adoption will switch their engineering requirements. I guess only time will tell.
I'm an applications admin. ClearCase and ClearQuest specifically. I also support a host of other engineering applications. Most of those apps were never and probably will never be ported to the Mac and I'm willing to bet that other engineering shops are in the same boat.
Sure, I figure that Macs might have a place in a business or accounting context but not for engineering. Anyone got a counter-example?
I live in the Chicagoland area where the two seasons are winter and construction. Our roads are regularly ground down to their component elements and reconstituted in a shoddy manner that necessitates their annual replacement.
I can only assume that this pattern will continue indefinitely rubber in the roads or not. It should be business as usual for the shovel-leaners around here.
God, I hate people like you.
Good start
The law forces the kids to be there, so they should not have to give up all their rights in exchange for a mandated thing!
I just read through the Bill of Rights yesterday and I couldn't find that right to which you are referring. Please clarify. If being taped in a public place was illegal, security cameras would be outlawed.
I hope you have the same attidude the first time you get a body cavity search when you turn on a public access channel on your TV.
Well, you are getting it for free, aren't you? How can you object?
If someone came into my house to do that they would get a swift baseball bat to the head. You're mixing up the concepts of privacy on public property and private property. All broadcast signals are in the public domain anyway so anyone can view them without consequence.
Oh, and from that day, your TV ALWAYS comes on tuned to the free ones!
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. Please feel free to try again.
I have a feeling that everyone's going to be up in arms about privacy but I'm actually ok with this. As long as the teachers are on the clock, their employer owns their time and are within their rights to know what they are doing.
I'm not sure but I believe that schools qualify as public property so the kids aren't being invaded.
I'm all about transparency in stuff that taxpayers pay for and maybe this will actually improve the quality of teaching. No more filmstrips 4 days a week if their bosses can see.
Bruce Schneier said something to the effect of "encryption isn't just some fairy dust that you can sprinkle here and there and expect things to be secure". Even if there were hardware level encryption, there would need to be an infrastructure set up to make everything work together securely.
That would require everything from the read/write head of a disk to a DNS server to a java app to communicate with each other. If there is any error in implementation, nothing will be able to talk to anything else. If there are any weak security links, well, you know how chains work.
I'm not saying it can't be done, it would just require no less than a full overhaul of pretty much all computing hardware and software to conform to a complex set of security protocols. Anything less would be insecure.
I would be interested to know if the 15% drop in Kazaa activity was met with a 15% increase of activity on Blubster Freenet or OpenNap.
The knitting machine is the digital recorder which loads the connected function to broadband network the HDD and the DVD of the 80GB - the RW / - in addition to the R recorder.
"They're years ahead of us!" - Homer Simpson
Except for that nasty using-up-all-the-oxygen thing ... ah well. I'm sure we can adapt. Nitrogen works, right? :)
I'm guessing this is a troll but I'll point this out anyway:
1) To get 2H, you crack H2O
2) You store the H and the O flys off somewhere
3) When you burn the H, you use the O (or one just like it) that you let fly off in 1)
That's just conservation of matter man.
Is there some documentation on this fine? Does the caller have to hang up without giving the URL or 800 number or does the call simply have to end without that information (ie: I hang up).
$500 is a lot of food.
Thanks!
A duck flies up and the first one takes a shot but shoots way too high.
Another duck flies up and the second one takes a shot that goes too low.
The third one shouts, "We got him!"
My bad. I forgot that baryons are normal matter.
Still, with only 4.4%, I stand by my original "that's not a lot" statement.