Re:Yes but what about the ants?
on
Solder in Space
·
· Score: 1
We know from decades of time on Mir, Skylab, Shuttle missions and others about microgravity on humans. Conclusion? It's bad for you if you're exposed for a long, long time. How long? I seem to remember a cosmonaut coming down from over a year on Mir and playing tennis after a day of recovery. How many more years and billions should we spend to rediscover what we already know? Take your vitamins and exercise. That should have been the conclusion of microgravity research years ago.
I'm not sure if we need to learn anything more for interplanetary missions. The time to get to Mars is shorter than the longest amount of time spent on a space station so it seems to me that we're set to go on that point.
I'm still waiting on an experiment that must be done in microgravity by a human in person. As for tourism, unless you charge a billion dollars per trip and do at least a trip per month, it's unlikely that it will have any significant effect on the ISS budget. A few million dollars every couple years isn't going to pay for much more than the freeze-dried ice cream.
If NASA wanted good public exposure, it would be stepping up it's manned planetary agenda. ISS is a political miscarriage of a mission and it's public relation benefits are marginal. Ask a kid if they'd rather be an astronaut and go to the Moon or Mars or if they'd want to be an astronaut and go to the space station for a few weeks. I'll bet you anything that the space station looses out.
Besides, it's not like artificial gravity is impossible. just spin the craft. The coriolis forces are not much worse than getting used to your sea legs. This is like when high altitude fighter pilots were first encountering problems breathing in the low pressure of the high atmosphere. Some said they should wear oxygen masks as they do now. Others said that drugs should be developed to slow the metabolism of the pilot so that they wouldn't need as much oxygen. As ludicrous as that sounds, a lot of time and effort was wasted to study that. It's the same now. Rather than taking the obvious countermeasures against 0g exposure (exercise, good diet, spinning the craft), we're wasting time and money re-learning the same stuff.
Re:Yes but what about the ants?
on
Solder in Space
·
· Score: 1
I'm only half sarcastic. If you check here you'll see that this soldering thing has become an actual project on the station.
after looking at the list of projects going on on the ISS, I still am left wondering what they are doing to justify the crippling cost of building an orbital manned habitat. How many of these things are practically automated anyway? What is the justification of putting humans in this station when they are completely dependent on re-supply missions? How much time and money is spent on building, maintaining and expanding the thing as opposed to doing science?
I'm all for manned space exploration but only if it can lead to self sufficiency. ISS will never have any hope of being cut free of earth based support. I have yet to see a convincing argument that ISS is uniquely suited to any experiment that could be done by machine, on earth, on another world or in transit to another world.
ISS is a dead end and everything being done on it could be done while on the way to settling space in a more practical manner. Please cite some examples if you disagree.
Another theory is that a lot of the hydrogen got stripped from the water by UV radiation and knocked out of the atmosphere by soler wind. The lack of a strong, uniform magnetosphere could account for that.
I'm hoping it's all in permafrost though. It would make terraforming a lot easier.
Yes but what about the ants?
on
Solder in Space
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Did we get results yet on their screw sorting capabilities?
$100 billion dollar space station and this is the kind of results we get? This is almost as pathetic as this.
Not a whole lot in the short term but it's very important in the long term.
Thin film reflective objects in space aren't only potentially useful as a means of propulsion but also as just plain old mirrors.
The Russians tried to deploy a mirror back in 1999. It didn't work but part of the intention was to put a bright "star" in the sky for Siberia so they would have more daylight. Not too bad of an idea if you ask me.
Don't forget the idea of space based solar power generation. You can buy a lot more Mylar for the dollar than solar panel. If you can collect and focus square kilometers of sunlight on a collector, you've just boosted your productivity on the cheap.
Consider the usefulness of being able to redirect large amounts of sunlight in space. With a large enough film at the Earth/Sun L1 point, you could block some of the incoming heat and mitigate global warming if it ever becomes an urgent problem.
A large shade in front of Venus is pretty well agreed upon as a starting measure for terraforming that planet.
You know how Mars is all distant from the sun which makes it so damn cold? Put a reflector in orbit and you can add terawatts of power to the surface to heat things up.
In the much more distant future, large (very large) sheets of reflective material can be used to influence the life of a star by reflecting energy back into it.
Another far out idea is the Dyson Sphere. One of the models for that is just a bunch of thin film reflectors/collectors that enclose the sun to harness all the power it's producing.
Robert Zubrin speculated that thin film reflectors are probably going to be the most important technology for a space-faring civilization.
Well it sounds like Apple did the right thing by using AES and RSA which are both industry standard and not some crazy "applecrypt" or something. Must be a really weak key or poor implementation or the protocol.
Right but I doubt there's anything to be done about it besides move people away from it. I doubt it will come anywhere close to wiping out the species. The population is so large and far-reaching, it would take nothing less than the destruction of the planet to wipe us out.
Asteroids however can be avoided with the proper technology.
In any case, no government will spend money on opposing a threat that might be ten thousand years off.
Yellowstone erupts on a 640,000 cycle, give or take a few ten thousand years.
It's about 20,000 years overdue to erupt.
Meaning that it could be a few more tens of thousands of years before it blows up? I think I'll stick to worrying about other stuff rather than an explosion that might happen in the year 32,789 A.D.
Lucky for the Native Americans, they don't live on the Moon and Mars. The downside of expansion goes to the native people. Since there are no humans in space yet, landing on dead rock poses no moral dilemma. In fact, I'd say it's immoral not to expand the reach of the human race and earth life.
Yeah, yeah, possible Martian life. Listen, when it becomes immoral to kill bacteria, call me. Until then I'll continue to wash my hands and take anti-biotics when I'm sick.
I was under the impression that the oceans are overwhelming larger carbon sinks than surface forests. Wasn't that part of the reason that carbon credit trading was scoffed at by some scientists?
Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the sheer volume of the oceans supports the idea. Between the plant life filling that volume and the fact that the water itself dissolves a good deal of CO2, it seems like promoting artificial blooms of plankton and algae would sink a lot more carbon.
While I don't agree with the grandparent's assertion that India is some kind of terrorist hot-spot, the poster has a point.
The US already forbids a host of technologies that are military of nature. At my last job, whenever we had to duplicate a database to one of our overseas sites, we had to ask the project owner if it contained any contraband for legal reasons. Laser tech, strong encryption, missile tech, certain kinds of advanced computing and electronic tech are all forbidden from leaving the country's borders along with a few dozen other things.
While India isn't a hotbed of terrorism, we have no control of what happens to software once it's being worked on over there. For a few thousand rupees, a foreign programmer might be very tempted to burn a disk of bank software to the highest bidder. Lax foreign laws and lack of realistic enforcement would make that much more likely in developing countries than within the US.
I think that the government should consider the fact that there is a greater danger posed to the citizens of this country from hijacked personal information and security systems than from missiles. This is another part of national security that should be retooled now that the cold war has been over for more than a decade.
So you're saying that we should give the brits credit because of Neuton's contributions? Should we also make consesions the the Mayans for inventing zero? It took american brains to take existing technology, improve it and shape it to the needs of a moon landing.
And who built the Atlas rockets? those were from the US air force.
Roketry was only a part of the space program and Van Braun didn't really contribute much more than rocketry.
Van Braun might have been a good rocket scientist but his ideas for space exploration were unworkable. His single craft plan for the Moon mission was thrown out. His plan for a Mars mission was backwards. In fact it's because of his Mars plan that any Mars mission is automatically labeled with a trillion dollar price tag by the press.
Well, I'm not personally but I'm fully behind the US manned program and I'm very hopeful for Aurora. I hope that they both stay separate programs though. if ISS has taught us anything, it's that international collaboration is not as productive as it might appear. Politics and bureaucrats gunk things up.
Please read your history. The NASA program did employ Werner Van Braun but he was a black sheep to some extent and didn't really contribute as much as people tend to think.
The rockets were surplus US Air force ICBMs for Mercury and Gemini and Apollo was launched on American rockets so I'm not sure how the German rocket thing holds up.
As for British brains, who were these brits that the US hired?
A capacity for quotation is not the same as forming an argument.
Seriously, why shouldn't the US plant a flag there? Spare me the namby-pamby citizen-of-the-world crap. We invested billions into the project. We had our best minds working on it and it took the bravery of not only the astronauts to sit on top of a bomb but the fortitude of an entire nation to support it to the end.
I'm sorry everyone else but this is a clear instance of the US setting a noble goal and kicking ass at it. We deserve to be proud and make note of who it was who did it.
Um, it didn't cost the country trillions even if you adjust for inflation. the Mercury - Apollo programs cost something like $200-250 billion in today's dollars.
That's still a shitload but trillions it's not. If it were trillions, we would have spent every single dollar we had as the US is around a $10 trillion dollar economy today. Clearly we did not.
The US administration had a whole lot more to loose if the Soviets got there first. Not only would it have been embarrassing but if they had established military dominance in space, well, it could have been bad for the US.
As for presidents taking a chance like that today, how about Bush? Now before everyone yells at me that it's a political stunt consider this: Announcing any kind of space imitative has never been a political winner. Even Kennedy took flack for announcing such a ridiculous goal. He only started getting benefits from it years after the announcement.
Bush Sr. took hits for his Mars push and ISS, Reagan for Star Wars and Clinton for the continued ISS support. It may appear that Bush is some bumpkin but he and his advisors are not stupid. They know a political lemon when they see it and they would not have announced a Moon/Mars push if they didn't really believe it would be good for the country.
Slashdot Mirror
We know from decades of time on Mir, Skylab, Shuttle missions and others about microgravity on humans. Conclusion? It's bad for you if you're exposed for a long, long time. How long? I seem to remember a cosmonaut coming down from over a year on Mir and playing tennis after a day of recovery. How many more years and billions should we spend to rediscover what we already know? Take your vitamins and exercise. That should have been the conclusion of microgravity research years ago.
I'm not sure if we need to learn anything more for interplanetary missions. The time to get to Mars is shorter than the longest amount of time spent on a space station so it seems to me that we're set to go on that point.
I'm still waiting on an experiment that must be done in microgravity by a human in person. As for tourism, unless you charge a billion dollars per trip and do at least a trip per month, it's unlikely that it will have any significant effect on the ISS budget. A few million dollars every couple years isn't going to pay for much more than the freeze-dried ice cream.
If NASA wanted good public exposure, it would be stepping up it's manned planetary agenda. ISS is a political miscarriage of a mission and it's public relation benefits are marginal. Ask a kid if they'd rather be an astronaut and go to the Moon or Mars or if they'd want to be an astronaut and go to the space station for a few weeks. I'll bet you anything that the space station looses out.
Besides, it's not like artificial gravity is impossible. just spin the craft. The coriolis forces are not much worse than getting used to your sea legs. This is like when high altitude fighter pilots were first encountering problems breathing in the low pressure of the high atmosphere. Some said they should wear oxygen masks as they do now. Others said that drugs should be developed to slow the metabolism of the pilot so that they wouldn't need as much oxygen. As ludicrous as that sounds, a lot of time and effort was wasted to study that. It's the same now. Rather than taking the obvious countermeasures against 0g exposure (exercise, good diet, spinning the craft), we're wasting time and money re-learning the same stuff.
I'm only half sarcastic. If you check here you'll see that this soldering thing has become an actual project on the station.
after looking at the list of projects going on on the ISS, I still am left wondering what they are doing to justify the crippling cost of building an orbital manned habitat. How many of these things are practically automated anyway? What is the justification of putting humans in this station when they are completely dependent on re-supply missions? How much time and money is spent on building, maintaining and expanding the thing as opposed to doing science?
I'm all for manned space exploration but only if it can lead to self sufficiency. ISS will never have any hope of being cut free of earth based support. I have yet to see a convincing argument that ISS is uniquely suited to any experiment that could be done by machine, on earth, on another world or in transit to another world.
ISS is a dead end and everything being done on it could be done while on the way to settling space in a more practical manner. Please cite some examples if you disagree.
Another theory is that a lot of the hydrogen got stripped from the water by UV radiation and knocked out of the atmosphere by soler wind. The lack of a strong, uniform magnetosphere could account for that.
I'm hoping it's all in permafrost though. It would make terraforming a lot easier.
Did we get results yet on their screw sorting capabilities?
$100 billion dollar space station and this is the kind of results we get? This is almost as pathetic as this.
Not a whole lot in the short term but it's very important in the long term.
Thin film reflective objects in space aren't only potentially useful as a means of propulsion but also as just plain old mirrors.
The Russians tried to deploy a mirror back in 1999. It didn't work but part of the intention was to put a bright "star" in the sky for Siberia so they would have more daylight. Not too bad of an idea if you ask me.
Don't forget the idea of space based solar power generation. You can buy a lot more Mylar for the dollar than solar panel. If you can collect and focus square kilometers of sunlight on a collector, you've just boosted your productivity on the cheap.
Consider the usefulness of being able to redirect large amounts of sunlight in space. With a large enough film at the Earth/Sun L1 point, you could block some of the incoming heat and mitigate global warming if it ever becomes an urgent problem.
A large shade in front of Venus is pretty well agreed upon as a starting measure for terraforming that planet.
You know how Mars is all distant from the sun which makes it so damn cold? Put a reflector in orbit and you can add terawatts of power to the surface to heat things up.
In the much more distant future, large (very large) sheets of reflective material can be used to influence the life of a star by reflecting energy back into it.
Another far out idea is the Dyson Sphere. One of the models for that is just a bunch of thin film reflectors/collectors that enclose the sun to harness all the power it's producing.
Robert Zubrin speculated that thin film reflectors are probably going to be the most important technology for a space-faring civilization.
Just wondering, where did you get the metric of 25% of oil going toward cars and 75% percent going into plastics etc.?
Well it sounds like Apple did the right thing by using AES and RSA which are both industry standard and not some crazy "applecrypt" or something. Must be a really weak key or poor implementation or the protocol.
Right but I doubt there's anything to be done about it besides move people away from it. I doubt it will come anywhere close to wiping out the species. The population is so large and far-reaching, it would take nothing less than the destruction of the planet to wipe us out.
Asteroids however can be avoided with the proper technology.
In any case, no government will spend money on opposing a threat that might be ten thousand years off.
Yellowstone erupts on a 640,000 cycle, give or take a few ten thousand years.
It's about 20,000 years overdue to erupt.
Meaning that it could be a few more tens of thousands of years before it blows up? I think I'll stick to worrying about other stuff rather than an explosion that might happen in the year 32,789 A.D.
Lucky for the Native Americans, they don't live on the Moon and Mars. The downside of expansion goes to the native people. Since there are no humans in space yet, landing on dead rock poses no moral dilemma. In fact, I'd say it's immoral not to expand the reach of the human race and earth life.
Yeah, yeah, possible Martian life. Listen, when it becomes immoral to kill bacteria, call me. Until then I'll continue to wash my hands and take anti-biotics when I'm sick.
I was under the impression that the oceans are overwhelming larger carbon sinks than surface forests. Wasn't that part of the reason that carbon credit trading was scoffed at by some scientists?
Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that the sheer volume of the oceans supports the idea. Between the plant life filling that volume and the fact that the water itself dissolves a good deal of CO2, it seems like promoting artificial blooms of plankton and algae would sink a lot more carbon.
From the link:
Triple DES is simply another mode of DES operation. It takes three 64-bit keys, for an overall key length of 192 bits.
I'm not sure if they are misunderstanding it but that's where I got the 192 number from.
I thought that DES3 solved the key length problem by bumping it up to 192 bits. Of course it runs 3 times as slow.
Not that I'm saying we should cling to DES for the next hundred years. I'm all about AES.
Linux
While I don't agree with the grandparent's assertion that India is some kind of terrorist hot-spot, the poster has a point.
The US already forbids a host of technologies that are military of nature. At my last job, whenever we had to duplicate a database to one of our overseas sites, we had to ask the project owner if it contained any contraband for legal reasons. Laser tech, strong encryption, missile tech, certain kinds of advanced computing and electronic tech are all forbidden from leaving the country's borders along with a few dozen other things.
While India isn't a hotbed of terrorism, we have no control of what happens to software once it's being worked on over there. For a few thousand rupees, a foreign programmer might be very tempted to burn a disk of bank software to the highest bidder. Lax foreign laws and lack of realistic enforcement would make that much more likely in developing countries than within the US.
I think that the government should consider the fact that there is a greater danger posed to the citizens of this country from hijacked personal information and security systems than from missiles. This is another part of national security that should be retooled now that the cold war has been over for more than a decade.
Oh come on...
So you're saying that we should give the brits credit because of Neuton's contributions? Should we also make consesions the the Mayans for inventing zero? It took american brains to take existing technology, improve it and shape it to the needs of a moon landing.
And who built the Atlas rockets? those were from the US air force.
Roketry was only a part of the space program and Van Braun didn't really contribute much more than rocketry.
Van Braun might have been a good rocket scientist but his ideas for space exploration were unworkable. His single craft plan for the Moon mission was thrown out. His plan for a Mars mission was backwards. In fact it's because of his Mars plan that any Mars mission is automatically labeled with a trillion dollar price tag by the press.
Well, I'm not personally but I'm fully behind the US manned program and I'm very hopeful for Aurora. I hope that they both stay separate programs though. if ISS has taught us anything, it's that international collaboration is not as productive as it might appear. Politics and bureaucrats gunk things up.
Please read your history. The NASA program did employ Werner Van Braun but he was a black sheep to some extent and didn't really contribute as much as people tend to think.
The rockets were surplus US Air force ICBMs for Mercury and Gemini and Apollo was launched on American rockets so I'm not sure how the German rocket thing holds up.
As for British brains, who were these brits that the US hired?
A capacity for quotation is not the same as forming an argument.
Seriously, why shouldn't the US plant a flag there? Spare me the namby-pamby citizen-of-the-world crap. We invested billions into the project. We had our best minds working on it and it took the bravery of not only the astronauts to sit on top of a bomb but the fortitude of an entire nation to support it to the end.
I'm sorry everyone else but this is a clear instance of the US setting a noble goal and kicking ass at it. We deserve to be proud and make note of who it was who did it.
even the light side gets hit by shadow when it the earth eclipses the sun.
Um, it didn't cost the country trillions even if you adjust for inflation. the Mercury - Apollo programs cost something like $200-250 billion in today's dollars.
That's still a shitload but trillions it's not. If it were trillions, we would have spent every single dollar we had as the US is around a $10 trillion dollar economy today. Clearly we did not.
The US administration had a whole lot more to loose if the Soviets got there first. Not only would it have been embarrassing but if they had established military dominance in space, well, it could have been bad for the US.
As for presidents taking a chance like that today, how about Bush? Now before everyone yells at me that it's a political stunt consider this: Announcing any kind of space imitative has never been a political winner. Even Kennedy took flack for announcing such a ridiculous goal. He only started getting benefits from it years after the announcement.
Bush Sr. took hits for his Mars push and ISS, Reagan for Star Wars and Clinton for the continued ISS support. It may appear that Bush is some bumpkin but he and his advisors are not stupid. They know a political lemon when they see it and they would not have announced a Moon/Mars push if they didn't really believe it would be good for the country.
I was thinking it was going to be something like this:
1. Turn off PC
2. Climb stairs out of basement
3. Go out into sunlight
Good call