Fine by me that you use a movie as a reference to express a thought. To be specific, I don't believe that one illustrates a solution. Cut down the trees and we now have to produce our own oxygen, filter our own air and water. The structures themselves require maintenance; we are creating more problems and complexity. By the time we are that advanced we might as well be in space. Overpopulation precedes that.
In my reference, I was also alluding to the fact that these are not new ideas, and they lead to a minefield of other issues.
Yes we need to solve the energy problem to go further, perhaps produce food directly from it in the near future. But I don't believe that we need to destroy the planet and the ecosystem to do so. We would be wise to use the technology you mention to reduce our footprint and re-establish a balance.
In that respect I am perhaps more optimistic than you are.
I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.
I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.
As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site."
- Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)
"so what does that tell you...that people are sick of President Obama "
No. It tells me that "some" people are ignorant and racists. I restrain to add stupid as I believe that they are willfully misguiding their intellects for selfish primitive instincts they choose not to to keep in check.
"This has nothing to do with one wrong / many worngs"
This has everything to do with it and how you put forward your argument defending Japan in this "scientific research" hypocrisy scheme. I am not condoning any country breaking international law, and in the case of Japan, every indication is that they are getting away with it as well, so no "DOUBLE STANDARD" here.
"Just because the Japs ain't 'whites'..."
No one is mentioning skin color except you so that should tell you something.
I'm not claiming to know better than NASA but I can speculate for the sake of discussion.
I have doubts about the usefulness of comparing how low gravity affects one of two twins. I suspect that a complex organism is hardly a good baseline for another complex organism. The results are likely going to be more of the same,
I can speculate how they could have used the station as a platform to get further away from the earth - indeed why not launch fuel instead of another astronaut + resupplies and attempt to put part of the station around the moon or in solar orbit (unmanned) instead of burning it in re-entry? That could give us long term data about how a living habitat stands up to a harsher environment than LEO.
Indeed, I don't think the station was ever used for spaceship assembly except for the station itself. They should have done it for the experience alone.
Experiencing the world first hand does mean something. To say that telescopes are sufficient for exploration is just silly. Studying people in LEO can help, but whether NASA always picks the right experiments is another discussion.
I only use my paid copy of Windows 7 on weekends for gaming. Regardless of what you think I deserve I feel entitled to voice my discontent when the vendor is acting as if he owns my machine. If you want to promote people moving off Windows entirely It might eventually happen, but I don't think that you are helping.
Perhaps those cameras that you have 'experience' with use 100BaseTX Ethernet as physical medium. That doesn't mean that they are using the full bandwidth (pretty much guaranteed by design), nor that video cannot stream over the Internet (cell phone video streaming and Netflix). I'm not saying that everything is stored all the time, but the client doesn't necessarily control it. Further, this one just one example of how ubiquitous cameras have become. Cross it off the list, it changes nothing.
To keep things in context, this statement:
"Does any of that really work when massive facial recognition systems exist and cameras are everywhere."
Was replied to by:
"..most of the cameras are privately owned to watch over someone's property.."
You need a good doze of wake the fuck up. There are fixed cameras everywhere; bars, stores, restaurant, street lights, tablets, laptops, possibly your TV... It has also become difficult to go out without someone pointing a cell phone in one's general direction and take a picture, either having coffee or at a restaurant. Even private property owners usually contract out the camera surveillance, most often to their ISPs, and have no control over the feed retention.
But yes, there were people interested in science before; ever since we raised our eyes to the sky wondering about the stars and imagined what it would be like if we could fly like birds.
"doing so quickly enough that the crew doesn't die from radiation exposure once they leave Earth's magnetosphere."
Once they get to their destination they still don't have a magnetosphere. You have to deal with the radiation regardless.
"And you have to carry enough fuel to slow down at Ceres as well.."
You mainly catch up to Ceres. Orbital insertion is fine tuning. The energy expenditure for 'braking' would occur when and if you want to return to Earth. If you need chemical fuel you can get it from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.
"naively means traveling 2.3x faster, which requires 5.3x the energy plus exponential rocketry inefficiencies"
It is easy to make up numbers. Please support them with equations if possible.
"assuming the centrifuge axis is perpendicular to the surface (to avoid gravitational "strobing") "
Now, that would be very bad engineering. Contraptions at any circus are better than that. WTF is "gravitational "strobing"?
"essentially zero support structure, just large mylar "half-bubbles" whose parabolic shape is maintained by the interplay of surface tension and centripetal force."
If that would be worth doing on Mars, why aren't we doing it on Earth? Wouldn't the first storm blow those contraptions to shreds?
"Really, pretty much any dust we find outside an atmosphere is likely to be razor sharp"
That would depend on the material wouldn't it? Spending time on the beach will tell you that water doesn't turn sand into spheres. Further more, Mars will throw that material around, where with a lack of atmosphere you just have to deal with what you stir. Our time on the Moon as shown that this is a manageable issue.
"Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you."
"large distances/delta-V to Earth (~2.3x further than Mars at closest approach, with orbital inclination effectively increasing that even further)"
I don't see that as a major problem. You might want to use more fuel, or have better propulsion than we have today, but you would use more fuel to land and take off on Mars anyway.
"- low solar insolation (~16% of Earth-orbit levels) likely making solar infeasible and low-g nuclear reactors a necessary precursor technology."
You mentioned low gravity nuclear reactors a few times. I would be curious to know why, but this is not a new thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"- 0.029g gravity likely too low to be useful for human health needs, but high enough to make both rotating habitats and spin-stabilized solar concentrators much more difficult. Also not high enough for gravity-anchoring of industrial equipment, but too high to exploit freefall dynamics."
I realize that rotating habitats are not trivial, but one on Ceres also wouldn't have to spin as fast as one in space. I also don't think that you have to spin everything, especially not solar concentrators. Anchoring is achievable in many ways, and you would likely anchor most of what you have on Mars due to the wind.
"- size and appearance suggests it may have the same razor-dust challenges as the Moon. "
I'm really not sure where you would get this from. We do not have the image resolution necessary yet, and size has little to do with it, but if you have references I would be interested to see them.
"resource-wise it's probably rich in useful ecological materials, but not necessarily in easily usable forms. Mineral hydrates and probable frozen subsurface oceans will require l arge industrial deployment to access. Contrast to Mars where you can land near a glacier and have plentiful water and CO2 available practically from day one: 90+% of the material necessary for establishing an ecology."
It is easier on Mars but you still have a radiation problem if you are building on the surface. You can extract oxygen from water, if that is why you were mentioning CO2, but carbon is also very common everywhere.
Perhaps you have a vision of colonizing another planet, where I have one about colonizing space. I think Mars should be studied, but I'm not sure we should bother staying there.
As you pointed out, long term mining; mostly to keep building in space. We already have nuclear technology in some space probes, I'm sure we will be able to scale up.
There are likely more immediate targets (Phobos & Deimos perhaps) but I don' t quite see why do you think Ceres offers the worst challenges of both planetary and asteroid colonization. Unlike small bodies closer to the sun (ie: the Moon), it is likely to have plenty of water. I could be wrong on this but I suspect Ceres also has more manageable sub-surface radiation levels than Europa.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
So what you're saying is that I might as well forget about ever getting that Troll +5, but there is still a slim chance for Troll +4 ?
True.
Everybody is equally entertaining
Perhaps you care too much for something that doesn't really matter.
I got a Troll +1 once (vs Troll -1) and don't even know if that's good or bad.
Troll +5 would be funnier though.
Microsoft Bob please.
You beat me to it, but I was paralyzed trying to choose between Bob and Clippy.
Fine by me that you use a movie as a reference to express a thought. To be specific, I don't believe that one illustrates a solution. Cut down the trees and we now have to produce our own oxygen, filter our own air and water. The structures themselves require maintenance; we are creating more problems and complexity. By the time we are that advanced we might as well be in space. Overpopulation precedes that.
In my reference, I was also alluding to the fact that these are not new ideas, and they lead to a minefield of other issues.
Yes we need to solve the energy problem to go further, perhaps produce food directly from it in the near future. But I don't believe that we need to destroy the planet and the ecosystem to do so. We would be wise to use the technology you mention to reduce our footprint and re-establish a balance.
In that respect I am perhaps more optimistic than you are.
I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.
I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.
As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.
"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site."
- Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)
Overpopulation + 1?
This. Thanks.
"Trump is a bit of a clown"
That is quite an understatement.
"so what does that tell you...that people are sick of President Obama "
No. It tells me that "some" people are ignorant and racists. I restrain to add stupid as I believe that they are willfully misguiding their intellects for selfish primitive instincts they choose not to to keep in check.
"This has nothing to do with one wrong / many worngs"
..."
This has everything to do with it and how you put forward your argument defending Japan in this "scientific research" hypocrisy scheme. I am not condoning any country breaking international law, and in the case of Japan, every indication is that they are getting away with it as well, so no "DOUBLE STANDARD" here.
"Just because the Japs ain't 'whites'
No one is mentioning skin color except you so that should tell you something.
I'm not claiming to know better than NASA but I can speculate for the sake of discussion.
I have doubts about the usefulness of comparing how low gravity affects one of two twins. I suspect that a complex organism is hardly a good baseline for another complex organism. The results are likely going to be more of the same,
I can speculate how they could have used the station as a platform to get further away from the earth - indeed why not launch fuel instead of another astronaut + resupplies and attempt to put part of the station around the moon or in solar orbit (unmanned) instead of burning it in re-entry? That could give us long term data about how a living habitat stands up to a harsher environment than LEO.
Indeed, I don't think the station was ever used for spaceship assembly except for the station itself. They should have done it for the experience alone.
One wrong (or many) does not make another wrong right.
"I need to say that they never betrays anything"
A bias indicator if I have ever seen one.
Experiencing the world first hand does mean something. To say that telescopes are sufficient for exploration is just silly. Studying people in LEO can help, but whether NASA always picks the right experiments is another discussion.
I only use my paid copy of Windows 7 on weekends for gaming. Regardless of what you think I deserve I feel entitled to voice my discontent when the vendor is acting as if he owns my machine. If you want to promote people moving off Windows entirely It might eventually happen, but I don't think that you are helping.
Funny - I heard that over 15 years ago.
TFA lost me here:
"The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces effects on a passenger"
You can pressurize a pilot suit to redirect blood flow in order to mitigate g-forces in a fighter plane, but this is nonsense.
Even the lamest joke can manage to be somewhat funny in the right context.
Since you decided to pick on that one detail, allow me to put minimal effort into it:
https://www.att.com/shop/digit... http://www.bce.ca/news-and-med...
Perhaps those cameras that you have 'experience' with use 100BaseTX Ethernet as physical medium. That doesn't mean that they are using the full bandwidth (pretty much guaranteed by design), nor that video cannot stream over the Internet (cell phone video streaming and Netflix). I'm not saying that everything is stored all the time, but the client doesn't necessarily control it. Further, this one just one example of how ubiquitous cameras have become. Cross it off the list, it changes nothing.
To keep things in context, this statement: "Does any of that really work when massive facial recognition systems exist and cameras are everywhere."
Was replied to by: "..most of the cameras are privately owned to watch over someone's property.."
[CITATION NEEDED] ? Seriously.
You need a good doze of wake the fuck up. There are fixed cameras everywhere; bars, stores, restaurant, street lights, tablets, laptops, possibly your TV... It has also become difficult to go out without someone pointing a cell phone in one's general direction and take a picture, either having coffee or at a restaurant. Even private property owners usually contract out the camera surveillance, most often to their ISPs, and have no control over the feed retention.
Jules Vernes for one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But yes, there were people interested in science before; ever since we raised our eyes to the sky wondering about the stars and imagined what it would be like if we could fly like birds.
This is far more funny than insightful.
"doing so quickly enough that the crew doesn't die from radiation exposure once they leave Earth's magnetosphere."
Once they get to their destination they still don't have a magnetosphere. You have to deal with the radiation regardless.
"And you have to carry enough fuel to slow down at Ceres as well.."
You mainly catch up to Ceres. Orbital insertion is fine tuning. The energy expenditure for 'braking' would occur when and if you want to return to Earth. If you need chemical fuel you can get it from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.
"naively means traveling 2.3x faster, which requires 5.3x the energy plus exponential rocketry inefficiencies"
It is easy to make up numbers. Please support them with equations if possible.
"assuming the centrifuge axis is perpendicular to the surface (to avoid gravitational "strobing") "
Now, that would be very bad engineering. Contraptions at any circus are better than that. WTF is "gravitational "strobing"?
"essentially zero support structure, just large mylar "half-bubbles" whose parabolic shape is maintained by the interplay of surface tension and centripetal force."
If that would be worth doing on Mars, why aren't we doing it on Earth? Wouldn't the first storm blow those contraptions to shreds?
"Really, pretty much any dust we find outside an atmosphere is likely to be razor sharp"
That would depend on the material wouldn't it? Spending time on the beach will tell you that water doesn't turn sand into spheres. Further more, Mars will throw that material around, where with a lack of atmosphere you just have to deal with what you stir. Our time on the Moon as shown that this is a manageable issue.
"Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you."
Sure thing.
And from that, we know that our movie hero really was lobotomized and dreaming about it all.
I think you might have some good points, but;
"large distances/delta-V to Earth (~2.3x further than Mars at closest approach, with orbital inclination effectively increasing that even further)"
I don't see that as a major problem. You might want to use more fuel, or have better propulsion than we have today, but you would use more fuel to land and take off on Mars anyway.
"- low solar insolation (~16% of Earth-orbit levels) likely making solar infeasible and low-g nuclear reactors a necessary precursor technology."
You mentioned low gravity nuclear reactors a few times. I would be curious to know why, but this is not a new thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"- 0.029g gravity likely too low to be useful for human health needs, but high enough to make both rotating habitats and spin-stabilized solar concentrators much more difficult. Also not high enough for gravity-anchoring of industrial equipment, but too high to exploit freefall dynamics."
I realize that rotating habitats are not trivial, but one on Ceres also wouldn't have to spin as fast as one in space. I also don't think that you have to spin everything, especially not solar concentrators. Anchoring is achievable in many ways, and you would likely anchor most of what you have on Mars due to the wind.
"- size and appearance suggests it may have the same razor-dust challenges as the Moon. "
I'm really not sure where you would get this from. We do not have the image resolution necessary yet, and size has little to do with it, but if you have references I would be interested to see them.
"resource-wise it's probably rich in useful ecological materials, but not necessarily in easily usable forms. Mineral hydrates and probable frozen subsurface oceans will require l arge industrial deployment to access. Contrast to Mars where you can land near a glacier and have plentiful water and CO2 available practically from day one: 90+% of the material necessary for establishing an ecology."
It is easier on Mars but you still have a radiation problem if you are building on the surface. You can extract oxygen from water, if that is why you were mentioning CO2, but carbon is also very common everywhere.
Perhaps you have a vision of colonizing another planet, where I have one about colonizing space. I think Mars should be studied, but I'm not sure we should bother staying there.
As you pointed out, long term mining; mostly to keep building in space. We already have nuclear technology in some space probes, I'm sure we will be able to scale up.
There are likely more immediate targets (Phobos & Deimos perhaps) but I don' t quite see why do you think Ceres offers the worst challenges of both planetary and asteroid colonization. Unlike small bodies closer to the sun (ie: the Moon), it is likely to have plenty of water. I could be wrong on this but I suspect Ceres also has more manageable sub-surface radiation levels than Europa.