it is considered so taboo to say that maybe, just MAYBE, men are discrimnated against
I agree that it's taboo, but there happens to be a very good reason why evolution would predispose us to discriminate against males and to find discussion of that discrimination distasteful, even offensive. It comes down to the simple fact that females are considerably more valuable* to the species than are males. We may not like it, but that's the way it is and that's the foundation for all of our instinctive emotional reactions. A woman's problem is a problem for the whole tribe and they take it seriously. A male's problem is a sign of weakness and the tribe will be better off without him. And any tribe whose members do not have these instinctive reactions will be selected for extinction.
That's just the way the world works. If you keep this simple principle in mind while observing any sort of social behavior, you'll find that suddenly the behavior makes a lot more sense.
*valuable in this context means the ability to have children. If a tribe has 20 males and 20 females, and 10 of the males are killed, the tribe will completely recover in just one generation. But if 10 of the females are killed, it make take many generations to recover. Thus, we might imagine many tribes of humans competing with each other. If any of them have instincts that cause them to prefer and protect males (say, if there's a flood and you have a choice to rescue a male or a female, and you choose the male) that tribe will be out competed by the tribes that have the instinct to prefer and protect females. 100,000 years later, we carry the instincts of those successful ancestors.
Note also that this predicts that we'd have a negative instinctive emotional reaction to any woman that doesn't want children, since we instinctively associate "value" with reproductive fitness. So, this explains the discrimination that career women face.
If you find a lost child, you take them to customer service
Which, unfortunately, is in the back of the store right next to the bathrooms. What's very likely to happen is that the paranoid soccer mom is going to see you walking away, hand in hand with her precious snowflake, and she is going absolutely flip out. Just pray she doesn't have a tazer.
most of the "gender differences" we see are primarily nurture, not nature.
In order to say that *most* differences are the result of culture, we'd have to compile a comprehensive list of differences and decide the cause of each one. Since you don't have that list, I don't think you can say that most of them are culture. For my own part, I am prepared to say that some of them are not culture, but are biologically determined, and that some of these appear to be very important differences. For whatever reason, even that statement is taboo in certain circles, where it is said that any and every behavioral difference must be the result of culture and there can be no other possible reason and to suggest otherwise is sexist blasphemy.
Yeah, let me just stop you right there. Your anecdote does not disprove a statistic. For example, human males tend to be taller than human females. It's a well-established fact. If we have a slashdot thread full of people saying, "bullshit! My wife is taller than me!" does that disprove the statistic? No, it certainly does not. That's a slashdot thread full of selection bias - the only people who care to post are these who disagree.
Congrats on your daughter. Maybe she is unusual, or maybe you can condition her away from her biological norm. Either way, she's an anecdote and does not disprove the statistic.
I think that science isn't popular because all that we see of it is stuff that's depressing. Kids today are bombarded by the message that we've ruined the world, destroyed the planet, and can't do anything right. Why should they get motivated after hearing all of that?
If you want to see a contrast, find some of the old Mr. Wizard videos on youtube or wherever you can find them. The undercurrent that I see in those videos is that everything is knowable, all problems are solvable. That's the mantra that was taught to the generation that landed on the Moon.
The subsequent generation was very much a downer. Now, I'm not blind to the facts. I know that there is a lot of bad news out there. But it seems to me that what we tell kids today is simply, "omfg global warming!" "omfg extinction!" "omfg pacific garbage patch!" And that's all we tell them. We don't follow it up with optimism of any kind, so they come away with the attitude, "fuck this! what's the point of school when we're all going to die?"
Most anybody who was left at the end of the 70s was fired by Reagan
Got a citation for that? Reagan's administration began in 1981 and according to this wiki article, NASA's budget for that year was $11.2 billion, and steadily increased (in real dollars, adjusted for inflation - these are real increases) except for one year, 1985. There was a one-time spike in the budget in 1987 when they got extra money to replace Challenger.
I haven't heard that Reagan fired engineers, and I'd love to see your source
I have to tell you, I think your first post was OK, but I think that planesdragon made a better case and I think that your response to him was way off base. You lost this one.
The very definition of gender is cultural, subjective, and very much not scientific.
No, I'm afraid not. It takes about twenty words and two seconds to prove that gender (that is to say, sex-correlated behavior) is not entirely cultural or subjective. Oh sure, there are cultural components like "women wear dresses" but it's not all, or even mostly culture.
You're attempting to use science to advance your own religious or personal beliefs about how the world "should be", not how it is
The dripping irony here is that you have been told that gender is entirely cultural and subjective. It's your own religious or personal belief about how the world "should be" - and I'm sorry to say, you're wrong.
I'm pretty sure that factoring OF primes is easy. I think you mean to say either factoring large polynomials or factoring DOWN TO primes. Specifically (as you probably know) cryptographic keys are usually the products of two large primes. So the factors of the key are exactly two numbers that were non-trivial to compute.
if the source of that sweet, sweet sugar is more convenient to the hive than the flowers (and it would have to be, if it is intended to help the bees get to the flowers) then why go to the flowers?
Bees collect pollen and stick it to their legs to carry back to the hive. Can they carry sugar water on their legs? No? Then they'll still have to go to the flowers.
That isn't true either. Even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios, the Earth will remain habitable by humans.
It's our civilization that is fragile. Something as simple as lack of easily obtainable fresh water will destroy our civilization. And the scariest part is, we may never be able to rebuild it this time. Our civilization was built on cheap oil - the cheap (easy to get to) oil is gone now. That fundamentally limits the size of any civilization that can grow to replace us, and that essentially condemns our descendants to (at best) city-states where life will revolve around the toil of growing food, and occasional warfare.
We have a very short window during which we can access the resources of space - for all practical purposes, limitless resources. But if we screw it up, I can't see how we could get into space again.
Keep in mind, intelligence doesn't necessarily lead to technology. For two easy examples, consider the aboriginal people of Australia. When the made it to Australia, they went farther than any other humans alive at that time - they were by definition the most advanced culture on Earth. Some 60,000 years later, their highest mathmatics had five "numbers": 1,2,3,4 and "a lot" They were stuck in an evolutionary cul de sac. Something similar happened in the Americas.
Bottom line, humans will survive global warming, but we will remain at a level that, today we would consider laughably primative, until the sun finally destroys all life on Earth. And that will be the story of us.
If you want to prevent it, the most important thing we should be doing is exploiting resources in space. That's more important than everything else - more important than healthcare or education, more important than everything.
"NOES! They'll destroy the historic bootprints!" - Idiot who thinks there was only one Apollo landing, or that the robot will necessarily visit Apollo 11's site.
The robots will likely be sent to the site of Apollo 17. After all, that's the one for which we have the most and the best photographs. Therefore, a second expedition to that site would be the most valuable. You can say, "here's a picture of this rock from 50 years ago, and here's a picture today" and make some kind of sciency discovery that way. Also, that was the only Apollo mission to include an actual scientist, a geologist to be exact, and the use a hammer to break open a few rocks. It might be interesting to go back and have a second look at those rocks.
I can't understand the people in this thread who assume the robot will go to Apollo 11's landing site. That was the shortest mission and it was in one of the most boring (but easiest to land on) areas of the moon.
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
It is not the business of scientists to decide what must be done at "any" cost. Economists decide cost/benefit situations. I invite you to watch this TED talk that echos my point quite well.
Bottom line: scientists study and discover facts and principals about how the universe works. Economists decide how best to prioritize resources. If we did it your way and let scientsts decide what "must" be done at "any" cost then every scientists is going to say that their field is the most important.
I've been researching this on my own over the weekend. Here are the conclusions I've come to:
1. the Delta IV can't fly what's called a depressed trajectory. It *will* need a new upper stage.
2. the high cost of the Ares I is in part due to the fact that they are designing in commonality with Ares V. For example, the same six-segment SRB will be used on both. The same J2X engine will be used on the upper stages of both. Translation: if you scrap Ares I you *still* have to pay for this development unless you also scrap Ares V.
Neither the delta IV nor the Atlas has (or will ever have) the launch capacity to support a moon mission. So if you scrap the Ares V, you condemn the US space program to LEO for another 50 years.
3. Boeing is promising a lot of great stuff, but it's easy to promise stuff. It's harder to deliver. It may be true that the Delta IV-H is cheaper than Ares I, but Delta IV-H plus Ares V is likely more expensive than Ares I plus Ares V.
You might be interested in heading over to the bad astronomy board. There is a lot of discussion over there (some of the people are even rocket scientists) and the consensus seems to be developing that scrapping Ares I would be a bad idea. nasaspaceflight.com also has a lively discussion.
The Ares I currently has a projected cost of $35 billion (and rising). There's absolutely no way it would cost that much to reliably transport humans on a Delta IV.
That certainly does sound insane. What exactly are they spending all that money on? It looks like such a simple design.
I think the Delta IV heavy is a great launcher, but wouldn't you still need a new upper stage if you used it launch Orion? I'm wondering if the Delta IV would mostly just be a replacement for Ares I's SRB stage - meaning, we'd still need to spend how many ever billions it's taking to develop the Ares I's second stage.
Also, wikipedia claims that Ares I can deliver 55,000lb to LEO, while the Delta IV heavy can only deliver 50,000lb. So, (baring a magical upper stage) it sounds like you'd have to either scale back the Orion to the point of making it useless, or spend a lot more money redesigning the D IV.
You seem to know more about this than I do, so I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
When an actual scientist tells me that CFCs are bad or whatever, then I listen. But if some random joe says he's afraid that there may possibly be some unknown danger that nobody has thought of, I think he's just a fear monger. What pisses me off is that every new idea that appears on Slashdot is met with legions of random Joes. I'm starting to burn out from all this cynicism. Why can't people say, "that's an interesting idea, let's test it out." Why must there always be multiple posts about how it may be bad.
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"
Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.
I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities
All the possibilities huh. There's a difference between rational consideration and the constant cynical sniping that is so common today. We can't suggest *anything* without people leaping over themselves to suggest a doomsday scenario associated with it. Those are the people (and you're in that group) that need to STFU. If there's a scientist or an engineer who says, "wait a minute" then I'll listen. Everyone else is just being attention whores.
Someone proposes wind power. Response:whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Low frequency noise from the blades could cause earthquakes!!
Someone proposes creating an "internet" Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Haven't you read 1984??
GPS. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Those satelites contain nuclear clocks. NUCLEAR! If they crash, they'll explode and kill all life on earth!
Electric cars. Response: whoa whoa whoa, batteries contain toxic chemicals!
Millions of years ago in Africa: hey, let's get the fuck out of here and move North. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities.
All I'm saying is that I'm tired of people like you that think it's your duty to imagine some scary consequence. If there were a few of you, it wouldn't bother me, but you're legion. It pisses me off. Your attitude should be, let's try something new and keep our eyes and minds open to see how it works. Once we have at least one of these stations working, THEN we talk about what it's doing to the environment. If it's bad, we shut it down or work to fix it. Sitting back in your chair criticizing proposals by actual smart people just pisses me off - it's a bit like that scene in Cryptonomicon where the snooty academic says, "how many neighborhoods will be bulldoze to build this information superhighway." The guy thought he was being clever, but actually he was just making a fool of himself. He didn't understand the technology - he should STFU.
Please remind me, how many times have YOU subjected an ecosystem to increased concentrations of directed microwave emissions?
LOL. Every time I've used bluetooth device, an AM/FM radio, or a cell phone.
Question: Why are arguments from the position of ignorance even allowed on slashdot? You are just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution or saying that the apollo landings never happened. Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer.
See, I think that your comment is FUD. I think that if these microwaves are at the right frequency to excite water molecules (and thus hurt animals) that they'd also be absorbed by the atmosphere and thus not useful for the transmission of power. But every time this story comes up, someone makes a post based on fear. How sad.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines.
Quite true. One moderately sized asteroid contains more nickle and more iron that has ever been mined on Earth - ever, in the history of our planet. Most of the world's nickle comes from a site in Canada where an asteroid hit. Most of our iron comes from banded iron formations and to get at them, we dig giant open pits that we can never refill and that eventually become toxic to the environment.
Imagine a future where mining on Earth was illegal. Imagine a future where the Earth is like a nature preserve where people live or go on vacation, where all of our destructive and polluting industry, power generation, and resource collection happens in space. All of that is possible, but we wont do it because we'd rather spend money on short-term problems (like health care for example, but also wars).
Space is to our generation what Europe was to the first humans. They stood on the north coast of Africa and could just barely see that there was another world out there. But they had other problems. They were always hungry, they were being eaten by lions. I'm sure some people said, "whoa whoa whoa you want to try and swim over to Europe? No way! We have to solve ALL of our problems here in Africa first. We need to invest in domesticating zebras and concentrate on trying to grow crops here in the desert. Then, when we've got all that worked out, then you can go to Europe." But see, that's just short-sighted. If you go to Europe all of those problems take care of themsevles eventually. You find better land for crops, a better environment, better animals for domestication.
If we really commit ourselves to space, we'll find that the benefits of doing that solve most of the problems that we use today as excuses to not go into space. The reason is simple: more resources, more riches, will benefit everyone - sometimes in ways that we can't even imagine. You're sitting, wherever you're sitting, in a nice air conditioned room. All of the technology and infrastructure that insulates you from the heat outside is made possible by the resource, "oil" that flows into your economy. The first person to discover coal or oil couldn't have imagined air conditioning or the internet or synthetic fertilizer, just like we can't imagine how the "gold mine" as you put it, in space, will change our future.
But alas, we wont do it because people are too shortsighted.
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The "less pleasurable" - that part is in your head.
Hypothesis: "less pleasurable" is not real, but imagined. Prediction: A person who does not know if he is wearing a condom cannot feel that he is or is not wearing one. Test: Can you tell if a condom breaks? Answer: yes. I've had several break (it happens in cold climates if you're dumb enough to leave your wallet in the car)
Result: your claim is rejected. "less pleasurable" *is* real.
That is also the most used line I heard from my friends and acquaintances over the years.
Completely irrelevant.
Most of them were either those guys who couldn't hold on to a relationship longer than a month if their life depended on it, or utter and complete jerks.
Logical fallacy: Poisoning the Well.
Can't be embarrassed for buying something you don't buy or use.
Another logical fallacy: Affirming the Consequent, but I'll address it anyway. You're saying that the real reason people don't buy condoms is not that they have a legitimate reason for disliking them, but simply that they're embarrassed. I don't know if you're posting through a time machine from 1970, but in 2009 there are two kinds of people, those who realize it's no big deal to buy condoms, and those who can use the internet to buy them from drugstore.com.
Your opinions are based on either irrelevant facts, fallacious logic, or are outright wrong, as I have demonstrated.
So you are one of those guys who goes around claiming that he doesn't wear condoms because they are all way too tight?
wow, you just proved mewsenews' point. You've never worn a condom. If you had, you would know that the problem isn't that they're too tight. The problem is the (lack of) feeling.
For one-night-stands where you need to protect yourself against STDs, people will keep using condoms. But in a steady relationship, condoms are horrible, and you're gong to want an alternative. Some women's bodies can't handle the pill (or maybe you just want to take responsibility yourself) in which case, this shot will be a god-send. You'll be able to enjoy sex without having children.
Slashdot Mirror
it is considered so taboo to say that maybe, just MAYBE, men are discrimnated against
I agree that it's taboo, but there happens to be a very good reason why evolution would predispose us to discriminate against males and to find discussion of that discrimination distasteful, even offensive. It comes down to the simple fact that females are considerably more valuable* to the species than are males. We may not like it, but that's the way it is and that's the foundation for all of our instinctive emotional reactions. A woman's problem is a problem for the whole tribe and they take it seriously. A male's problem is a sign of weakness and the tribe will be better off without him. And any tribe whose members do not have these instinctive reactions will be selected for extinction.
That's just the way the world works. If you keep this simple principle in mind while observing any sort of social behavior, you'll find that suddenly the behavior makes a lot more sense.
*valuable in this context means the ability to have children. If a tribe has 20 males and 20 females, and 10 of the males are killed, the tribe will completely recover in just one generation. But if 10 of the females are killed, it make take many generations to recover. Thus, we might imagine many tribes of humans competing with each other. If any of them have instincts that cause them to prefer and protect males (say, if there's a flood and you have a choice to rescue a male or a female, and you choose the male) that tribe will be out competed by the tribes that have the instinct to prefer and protect females. 100,000 years later, we carry the instincts of those successful ancestors.
Note also that this predicts that we'd have a negative instinctive emotional reaction to any woman that doesn't want children, since we instinctively associate "value" with reproductive fitness. So, this explains the discrimination that career women face.
See? It really does explain everything.
If you find a lost child, you take them to customer service
Which, unfortunately, is in the back of the store right next to the bathrooms. What's very likely to happen is that the paranoid soccer mom is going to see you walking away, hand in hand with her precious snowflake, and she is going absolutely flip out. Just pray she doesn't have a tazer.
most of the "gender differences" we see are primarily nurture, not nature.
In order to say that *most* differences are the result of culture, we'd have to compile a comprehensive list of differences and decide the cause of each one. Since you don't have that list, I don't think you can say that most of them are culture. For my own part, I am prepared to say that some of them are not culture, but are biologically determined, and that some of these appear to be very important differences. For whatever reason, even that statement is taboo in certain circles, where it is said that any and every behavioral difference must be the result of culture and there can be no other possible reason and to suggest otherwise is sexist blasphemy.
My daughter
Yeah, let me just stop you right there. Your anecdote does not disprove a statistic. For example, human males tend to be taller than human females. It's a well-established fact. If we have a slashdot thread full of people saying, "bullshit! My wife is taller than me!" does that disprove the statistic? No, it certainly does not. That's a slashdot thread full of selection bias - the only people who care to post are these who disagree.
Congrats on your daughter. Maybe she is unusual, or maybe you can condition her away from her biological norm. Either way, she's an anecdote and does not disprove the statistic.
science can be inconvenient.
I think that science isn't popular because all that we see of it is stuff that's depressing. Kids today are bombarded by the message that we've ruined the world, destroyed the planet, and can't do anything right. Why should they get motivated after hearing all of that?
If you want to see a contrast, find some of the old Mr. Wizard videos on youtube or wherever you can find them. The undercurrent that I see in those videos is that everything is knowable, all problems are solvable. That's the mantra that was taught to the generation that landed on the Moon.
The subsequent generation was very much a downer. Now, I'm not blind to the facts. I know that there is a lot of bad news out there. But it seems to me that what we tell kids today is simply, "omfg global warming!" "omfg extinction!" "omfg pacific garbage patch!" And that's all we tell them. We don't follow it up with optimism of any kind, so they come away with the attitude, "fuck this! what's the point of school when we're all going to die?"
Most anybody who was left at the end of the 70s was fired by Reagan
Got a citation for that? Reagan's administration began in 1981 and according to this wiki article, NASA's budget for that year was $11.2 billion, and steadily increased (in real dollars, adjusted for inflation - these are real increases) except for one year, 1985. There was a one-time spike in the budget in 1987 when they got extra money to replace Challenger.
I haven't heard that Reagan fired engineers, and I'd love to see your source
I have to tell you, I think your first post was OK, but I think that planesdragon made a better case and I think that your response to him was way off base. You lost this one.
The very definition of gender is cultural, subjective, and very much not scientific.
No, I'm afraid not. It takes about twenty words and two seconds to prove that gender (that is to say, sex-correlated behavior) is not entirely cultural or subjective. Oh sure, there are cultural components like "women wear dresses" but it's not all, or even mostly culture.
You're attempting to use science to advance your own religious or personal beliefs about how the world "should be", not how it is
The dripping irony here is that you have been told that gender is entirely cultural and subjective. It's your own religious or personal belief about how the world "should be" - and I'm sorry to say, you're wrong.
citation needed
It's to do with quick factorization of primes
I'm pretty sure that factoring OF primes is easy. I think you mean to say either factoring large polynomials or factoring DOWN TO primes. Specifically (as you probably know) cryptographic keys are usually the products of two large primes. So the factors of the key are exactly two numbers that were non-trivial to compute.
if the source of that sweet, sweet sugar is more convenient to the hive than the flowers (and it would have to be, if it is intended to help the bees get to the flowers) then why go to the flowers?
Bees collect pollen and stick it to their legs to carry back to the hive. Can they carry sugar water on their legs? No? Then they'll still have to go to the flowers.
That isn't true either. Even in the most dark of the global warming scenarios, the Earth will remain habitable by humans.
It's our civilization that is fragile. Something as simple as lack of easily obtainable fresh water will destroy our civilization. And the scariest part is, we may never be able to rebuild it this time. Our civilization was built on cheap oil - the cheap (easy to get to) oil is gone now. That fundamentally limits the size of any civilization that can grow to replace us, and that essentially condemns our descendants to (at best) city-states where life will revolve around the toil of growing food, and occasional warfare.
We have a very short window during which we can access the resources of space - for all practical purposes, limitless resources. But if we screw it up, I can't see how we could get into space again.
Keep in mind, intelligence doesn't necessarily lead to technology. For two easy examples, consider the aboriginal people of Australia. When the made it to Australia, they went farther than any other humans alive at that time - they were by definition the most advanced culture on Earth. Some 60,000 years later, their highest mathmatics had five "numbers": 1,2,3,4 and "a lot" They were stuck in an evolutionary cul de sac. Something similar happened in the Americas.
Bottom line, humans will survive global warming, but we will remain at a level that, today we would consider laughably primative, until the sun finally destroys all life on Earth. And that will be the story of us.
If you want to prevent it, the most important thing we should be doing is exploiting resources in space. That's more important than everything else - more important than healthcare or education, more important than everything.
"NOES! They'll destroy the historic bootprints!" - Idiot who thinks there was only one Apollo landing, or that the robot will necessarily visit Apollo 11's site.
The robots will likely be sent to the site of Apollo 17. After all, that's the one for which we have the most and the best photographs. Therefore, a second expedition to that site would be the most valuable. You can say, "here's a picture of this rock from 50 years ago, and here's a picture today" and make some kind of sciency discovery that way. Also, that was the only Apollo mission to include an actual scientist, a geologist to be exact, and the use a hammer to break open a few rocks. It might be interesting to go back and have a second look at those rocks.
I can't understand the people in this thread who assume the robot will go to Apollo 11's landing site. That was the shortest mission and it was in one of the most boring (but easiest to land on) areas of the moon.
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
It is not the business of scientists to decide what must be done at "any" cost. Economists decide cost/benefit situations. I invite you to watch this TED talk that echos my point quite well.
Bottom line: scientists study and discover facts and principals about how the universe works. Economists decide how best to prioritize resources. If we did it your way and let scientsts decide what "must" be done at "any" cost then every scientists is going to say that their field is the most important.
I've been researching this on my own over the weekend. Here are the conclusions I've come to:
1. the Delta IV can't fly what's called a depressed trajectory. It *will* need a new upper stage.
2. the high cost of the Ares I is in part due to the fact that they are designing in commonality with Ares V. For example, the same six-segment SRB will be used on both. The same J2X engine will be used on the upper stages of both. Translation: if you scrap Ares I you *still* have to pay for this development unless you also scrap Ares V.
Neither the delta IV nor the Atlas has (or will ever have) the launch capacity to support a moon mission. So if you scrap the Ares V, you condemn the US space program to LEO for another 50 years.
3. Boeing is promising a lot of great stuff, but it's easy to promise stuff. It's harder to deliver. It may be true that the Delta IV-H is cheaper than Ares I, but Delta IV-H plus Ares V is likely more expensive than Ares I plus Ares V.
You might be interested in heading over to the bad astronomy board. There is a lot of discussion over there (some of the people are even rocket scientists) and the consensus seems to be developing that scrapping Ares I would be a bad idea. nasaspaceflight.com also has a lively discussion.
The Ares I currently has a projected cost of $35 billion (and rising). There's absolutely no way it would cost that much to reliably transport humans on a Delta IV.
That certainly does sound insane. What exactly are they spending all that money on? It looks like such a simple design.
I think the Delta IV heavy is a great launcher, but wouldn't you still need a new upper stage if you used it launch Orion? I'm wondering if the Delta IV would mostly just be a replacement for Ares I's SRB stage - meaning, we'd still need to spend how many ever billions it's taking to develop the Ares I's second stage.
Also, wikipedia claims that Ares I can deliver 55,000lb to LEO, while the Delta IV heavy can only deliver 50,000lb. So, (baring a magical upper stage) it sounds like you'd have to either scale back the Orion to the point of making it useless, or spend a lot more money redesigning the D IV.
You seem to know more about this than I do, so I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Well then I agree with you.
When an actual scientist tells me that CFCs are bad or whatever, then I listen. But if some random joe says he's afraid that there may possibly be some unknown danger that nobody has thought of, I think he's just a fear monger. What pisses me off is that every new idea that appears on Slashdot is met with legions of random Joes. I'm starting to burn out from all this cynicism. Why can't people say, "that's an interesting idea, let's test it out." Why must there always be multiple posts about how it may be bad.
If you feel a few microwaves will burn ya
What makes you think that I feel a few microwaves will burn me?
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"
Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.
I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities
All the possibilities huh. There's a difference between rational consideration and the constant cynical sniping that is so common today. We can't suggest *anything* without people leaping over themselves to suggest a doomsday scenario associated with it. Those are the people (and you're in that group) that need to STFU. If there's a scientist or an engineer who says, "wait a minute" then I'll listen. Everyone else is just being attention whores.
Someone proposes wind power. Response:whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Low frequency noise from the blades could cause earthquakes!!
Someone proposes creating an "internet" Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Haven't you read 1984??
GPS. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities! Those satelites contain nuclear clocks. NUCLEAR! If they crash, they'll explode and kill all life on earth!
Electric cars. Response: whoa whoa whoa, batteries contain toxic chemicals!
Millions of years ago in Africa: hey, let's get the fuck out of here and move North. Response: whoa whoa whoa, you haven't considered all the possibilities.
All I'm saying is that I'm tired of people like you that think it's your duty to imagine some scary consequence. If there were a few of you, it wouldn't bother me, but you're legion. It pisses me off. Your attitude should be, let's try something new and keep our eyes and minds open to see how it works. Once we have at least one of these stations working, THEN we talk about what it's doing to the environment. If it's bad, we shut it down or work to fix it. Sitting back in your chair criticizing proposals by actual smart people just pisses me off - it's a bit like that scene in Cryptonomicon where the snooty academic says, "how many neighborhoods will be bulldoze to build this information superhighway." The guy thought he was being clever, but actually he was just making a fool of himself. He didn't understand the technology - he should STFU.
Please remind me, how many times have YOU subjected an ecosystem to increased concentrations of directed microwave emissions?
LOL. Every time I've used bluetooth device, an AM/FM radio, or a cell phone.
Question: Why are arguments from the position of ignorance even allowed on slashdot? You are just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution or saying that the apollo landings never happened. Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer.
[citation needed]
See, I think that your comment is FUD. I think that if these microwaves are at the right frequency to excite water molecules (and thus hurt animals) that they'd also be absorbed by the atmosphere and thus not useful for the transmission of power. But every time this story comes up, someone makes a post based on fear. How sad.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines.
Quite true. One moderately sized asteroid contains more nickle and more iron that has ever been mined on Earth - ever, in the history of our planet. Most of the world's nickle comes from a site in Canada where an asteroid hit. Most of our iron comes from banded iron formations and to get at them, we dig giant open pits that we can never refill and that eventually become toxic to the environment.
Imagine a future where mining on Earth was illegal. Imagine a future where the Earth is like a nature preserve where people live or go on vacation, where all of our destructive and polluting industry, power generation, and resource collection happens in space. All of that is possible, but we wont do it because we'd rather spend money on short-term problems (like health care for example, but also wars).
Space is to our generation what Europe was to the first humans. They stood on the north coast of Africa and could just barely see that there was another world out there. But they had other problems. They were always hungry, they were being eaten by lions. I'm sure some people said, "whoa whoa whoa you want to try and swim over to Europe? No way! We have to solve ALL of our problems here in Africa first. We need to invest in domesticating zebras and concentrate on trying to grow crops here in the desert. Then, when we've got all that worked out, then you can go to Europe." But see, that's just short-sighted. If you go to Europe all of those problems take care of themsevles eventually. You find better land for crops, a better environment, better animals for domestication.
If we really commit ourselves to space, we'll find that the benefits of doing that solve most of the problems that we use today as excuses to not go into space. The reason is simple: more resources, more riches, will benefit everyone - sometimes in ways that we can't even imagine. You're sitting, wherever you're sitting, in a nice air conditioned room. All of the technology and infrastructure that insulates you from the heat outside is made possible by the resource, "oil" that flows into your economy. The first person to discover coal or oil couldn't have imagined air conditioning or the internet or synthetic fertilizer, just like we can't imagine how the "gold mine" as you put it, in space, will change our future.
But alas, we wont do it because people are too shortsighted.
"There is a galactic market for maybe five supernovae."
"Your supernova is powerful and well-formed, but in order to earn anything better than a C from me, it must be feasible"
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The "less pleasurable" - that part is in your head.
Hypothesis: "less pleasurable" is not real, but imagined.
Prediction: A person who does not know if he is wearing a condom cannot feel that he is or is not wearing one.
Test: Can you tell if a condom breaks? Answer: yes. I've had several break (it happens in cold climates if you're dumb enough to leave your wallet in the car)
Result: your claim is rejected. "less pleasurable" *is* real.
That is also the most used line I heard from my friends and acquaintances over the years.
Completely irrelevant.
Most of them were either those guys who couldn't hold on to a relationship longer than a month if their life depended on it, or utter and complete jerks.
Logical fallacy: Poisoning the Well.
Can't be embarrassed for buying something you don't buy or use.
Another logical fallacy: Affirming the Consequent, but I'll address it anyway. You're saying that the real reason people don't buy condoms is not that they have a legitimate reason for disliking them, but simply that they're embarrassed. I don't know if you're posting through a time machine from 1970, but in 2009 there are two kinds of people, those who realize it's no big deal to buy condoms, and those who can use the internet to buy them from drugstore.com.
Your opinions are based on either irrelevant facts, fallacious logic, or are outright wrong, as I have demonstrated.
So you are one of those guys who goes around claiming that he doesn't wear condoms because they are all way too tight?
wow, you just proved mewsenews' point. You've never worn a condom. If you had, you would know that the problem isn't that they're too tight. The problem is the (lack of) feeling.
For one-night-stands where you need to protect yourself against STDs, people will keep using condoms. But in a steady relationship, condoms are horrible, and you're gong to want an alternative. Some women's bodies can't handle the pill (or maybe you just want to take responsibility yourself) in which case, this shot will be a god-send. You'll be able to enjoy sex without having children.
and when I say, "you" I mean someone else.