Re:Space elevator makes *everything* easier...
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Without such a technology, serious space applications are economically infeasible. You will put in far more energy than you get out.
As far as sending light probes around, great, we can still do that with rockets. Colonizing expeditions requiring tremendous amounts of materials would require a new methodology of getting stuff off the planet in order to be feasible.
It turns out that Shuttles are more expensive to operate and maintain than the single use craft of the early space days.
We effectively ended up building a space station that would be launched and recovered every time.
That having been said, why would you want to send a space station to the moon and then bring it back. Why not simply create a single use cargo vehicle.
Regarding getting things on and off either the moon OR earth. The space elevator concept is the cheapest, safest and most effective methodology. We shouldn't even consider moon or mars missions until we can defeat the extraordinary cost of launching vehicles from the earth to orbit.
Sorry I mis-spoke. Mars has no BREATHABLE, LIVABLE atmosphere. I would much rather live in Anarctica then on Mars!!!!! Mars is just as cold but at least you can breat in Antarctica.
So the value to harvest moon materials is creating things in orbit that we don't need so we can harvest more moon materials that are still cheaper to derive from the earth!!!!
Seriously, the resources available in Antarctica dwarf those compared to the moon. It is desolate barren and hostile. It is still MILLIONS of times cheaper to access than the moon. I haven't seen any great commercial effort to harvest antarctica!!!!!
Vast numbers of solar panels could be set up in earth orbit. They would be less expensive.
Vast numbers of solar panels could be setup up on earth. They would be WAY less expensive.
The microwave transmission method that everybody keeps harping on has not been demonstrated to effectively WORK!!! Why isn't it being used today given it would be cheaper than high-tension lines. If it doens't work in earth's atmosphere, how would receive the power??????
I keep hearing this, but somehow no-one has EVER demonstrated a working system. If microwave power transmission is such a panacea, how come we have never seen it done here on earth!!!!!!
AND!!!!!
If it can't work THROUGH in the atmoshpere, how are we supposed to receive it!!!!!!!!
If you haven't noticed, Republicans are now buying into the policies of unlimited immigration. In fact they're partially spearheading efforts to effectively make all illegal immigrants LEGAL.
The internationalists are the one's in the WTO and World Bank who want to colonize the nations of the world with corporate hegemony. They are trying to export all our manufacturing to China so that we can never stand against the great slave state of the East. Ending WTO is the first stage to standing up to the international corporations who are tyring to turn the world into their own fuedal state.
Re:Why we stopped going to the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We must return to the moon. Its natural vacuum and near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing. Deadly plagues and other research requiring isolation could be done easily on our moon with minimal fear of contaminating the earth should their projects go awry. Telescopes on the far side of the moon would give us a new view of the universe uninterrupted by light (and for SETI et. al not so many electronic signals interfereing). If nothing else, the He-3 and solar resources could eventually help reduce our dependence on limited fossil fuels to run our economy. Some of the readers remember the OPEC crisis and no one wants those conditions to return. Finally, the moon serves as a waypoint to exploration of Mars and the Asteroid Belt, both of which contain abundant resources that could satiate our world's demands for resources far beyond the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
I'd like to hear from people who do not want to go back to the moon. Most of the soical programs they advocate funding in place of space exploration have their own difficulties, but maybe there are other reasons they have which get little/no attention.
The value of a resource has a formula attached to it.
If
$value_of_resource > $cost_to_harness_resource Then
Harness() Else
Ignore()
In other words most of those resources have little value to us on earth since we would expend far more resources to obtain them then they're worth.
Of course to space farers, the resource would be less expensive to use. Then this becomes a circular argument. We need to mine asteroids because it makes mining asteroids cheaper.
All the solar resources available on the moon would be inaccessible to us on earth. All the solar resources available on the moon would be accessible from Low Earth Orbit, yet still be inaccessible to us on earth despite being 100 times closer.
All the mineral resources available on the moon, are available here on earth in much greater quantity. The fact that they are much more accessible needs to be stressed despite the obviousness of the proposition.
Antarctica has thousands of times more resources than the moon. Yet despite being a thousand times more accessible, I see no great industrial push to harness mineral and water resources in Antarctica.
I have no problem sending robots to the moon for the sake of basic research. Their is very little that they cannot do in place of a man who is virtually helpless in that environment. I have no problem sending unmanned telescopes into space that collect data for man to analyze. If the moon is a legitamite target, so be it.
However, manned space flight has always been a pre-determined conclusion looking deperately for justification. There is no doubt that these are great adventures, but somehow we must justify the cost and weigh how that money could be spent here on earth.
In the meantime, there is another great effort that could make the journey more cost feasible: the Space Elevator project. The journey from the surface to orbit is by far the most expensive leg. The space elevator would make moving materials from earth to orbit thousands of times cheaper over it's lifetime. Instead of wasting money on planning boondoggle manned missions to Mars or the Moon, put the money into the space elevator that will yield returns across the spectrum of commercial and civil space exploration by both robots AND people.
If we are doomed, it's from greed and arrogance. Why put trillions into space colonization when a simple reorganization of priorities here on Earth would cost less and provide far more benefits.
Once we learn to live in peace and stability here on Earth, then we can turn our eyes to Mars. The effort must not be one of colonization, but of terra-forming. Mars has no atmosphere because it is too light.
Many concepts involve the deployment of vast mirrors to melt the martian icecaps. This will ultimtely fail as the same forces that deprived Mars of it's atmosphere will once again blow precious gases into the vastness of space.
How does one heat mars AND add the mass that will glue a new atmosphere to the planet.
Planetary Bombardment!!!! Nudge masses in the asteroid belt into collision courses with mars. Create automated gas miners on neptune that will syphon off gases, subsequently freeze them into large masses. Then implant fire them (with a orbital cannon) into mars colliding orbits using fuels derived from hydrogen mining.
Repeat for 300 years!!! A side effect of the technology would be to develop and test the infrastructure needed to deflect large Earth Colliding Orbits. The idea that we'll get it right the first time sounds nieve. The cincher is that it becomes a defense project which is always easier to justify (fund) then pure research.
If the Chinese may indeed go to the moon. The irony is that we'll be financing it through purchases at Wal-Mart !!!!!
If you wanna fight the Chinese slave machine, oppose the World Trade Organization. If you wanna oppose WTO support Dennis Kucinich for president. He is the ONLY candidate who has promised to withdraw from both NAFTA and WTO and re-establish national priorities of labor and full employment.
One could simply burn them onto a specified spot of the disc individually. The task may sound daunting, but a specific machine could probably write a few bits pretty fast.
Assuming there aren't any bugs, one thing computers do very well is count, and they do it consistently.
Yes, and if there was an error in the vote counting procedure, it will repeat it for EVERY recount.
Honestly, if I believe that each machine printed ballot should be SCANNED as part of the counting process. The resulting data would be available (via CD) to ANY group that wanted to do their own count of the elections accuracy. That way a counting machine that has been rigged to consistently miscount can be identified.
These are excellent reason for instantaneous runoff balloting. You get to choose the guy you like AND the guy who will do if your horse isn't in the top 2 of initial voting.
Answer:Yes, it's ture, Diebold isn't in anyone's pockets - they are simply incompetent.
The CEO of Diebold is a GW Bush 'Pioneer'. That means he have Bush $100,000 plus. You know he wants a return on investment!!!!
Beyond that he is also the campaign coordinator for the Ohio effort to re-elect George Bush. Geez, that's like the allegory of Florida's chief election officer being the Florida state Bush campaign coordinator... Oh wait, that actually happened;-)
The refusal to admit a partisan bias isn't nieve. It's just plain dumb!!!!
Diebold CEO delivers cash. Bush delivers funding for Diebold machines (and a VERY nice tax break for the rich). Diebold delivers rigged elections for Bush and Republicans. Bush delivers more money so EVERYBODY can use the wonderful machines.
If at some point you REALLY want to eliminate printers and paper, instead of printing out a receipt, but a CD burner in each voting machine and burn each vote to the CD, also giving you an unmodified, recountable trail.
I thought this might be the right way to go at one point. Once the CD-R (not RW) is burned, there is really no way to modify it.
The problem is that a CD-R is not tranparent to the voter. There is no way to tell without aid of the computer that the vote is properly tallied. Hidden/Rogue code could display your choices on the screen and burn a different set of values to the CD-R.
BTW, the paper ballots printed from such a system should be digitally signed (your vote choices would be signed) based on values from secured hardware. Such machines should also be seeded with random number (election workers rolling dice... whatever) at setup to generate serial numbers for ballots. In this way, someone could not pre-generate phony ballots and insert them on election night.
It's common amongst dummies who don't do scalability testing. All they needed to do was spin up a couple thousand clients simulateously on a few machines running tests.
Yes, GW was VERY sure that he had one Florida. He told the press that his brother assured him of it. no joke.
Yeah and don't forget about the 75,000 "felons" that they nixed from the voting roles.
Oh yeah, and Diebold voting system made a debut in that election having effectively removed 18,000 votes from Al Gores totals. They had those votes, then they magically dissapeared from the machine along with the "faulty" memory card that caused the problem.
This is why the Voter News Service got the wrong results. Their polling data was CORRECT. The Bush voting machinery took those votes away without any possible way to audit them.
One presidential election has already been stolen by electronic vote recording. It's time to ban electronic vote recording!!!!!
In fact electronic tallies should NOT be kept while voting. This is effectively the same thing as a 'voice vote' in Congress. They always do it, and it's always challenged.
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Without such a technology, serious space applications are economically infeasible. You will put in far more energy than you get out.
As far as sending light probes around, great, we can still do that with rockets. Colonizing expeditions requiring tremendous amounts of materials would require a new methodology of getting stuff off the planet in order to be feasible.
It turns out that Shuttles are more expensive to operate and maintain than the single use craft of the early space days.
We effectively ended up building a space station that would be launched and recovered every time.
That having been said, why would you want to send a space station to the moon and then bring it back. Why not simply create a single use cargo vehicle.
Regarding getting things on and off either the moon OR earth. The space elevator concept is the cheapest, safest and most effective methodology. We shouldn't even consider moon or mars missions until we can defeat the extraordinary cost of launching vehicles from the earth to orbit.
Sorry I mis-spoke. Mars has no BREATHABLE, LIVABLE atmosphere. I would much rather live in Anarctica then on Mars!!!!! Mars is just as cold but at least you can breat in Antarctica.
So the value to harvest moon materials is creating things in orbit that we don't need so we can harvest more moon materials that are still cheaper to derive from the earth!!!!
Seriously, the resources available in Antarctica dwarf those compared to the moon. It is desolate barren and hostile. It is still MILLIONS of times cheaper to access than the moon. I haven't seen any great commercial effort to harvest antarctica!!!!!
Vast numbers of solar panels could be set up in earth orbit. They would be less expensive.
Vast numbers of solar panels could be setup up on earth. They would be WAY less expensive.
The microwave transmission method that everybody keeps harping on has not been demonstrated to effectively WORK!!! Why isn't it being used today given it would be cheaper than high-tension lines. If it doens't work in earth's atmosphere, how would receive the power??????
I keep hearing this, but somehow no-one has EVER demonstrated a working system. If microwave power transmission is such a panacea, how come we have never seen it done here on earth!!!!!!
AND!!!!!
If it can't work THROUGH in the atmoshpere, how are we supposed to receive it!!!!!!!!
If you haven't noticed, Republicans are now buying into the policies of unlimited immigration. In fact they're partially spearheading efforts to effectively make all illegal immigrants LEGAL.
The internationalists are the one's in the WTO and World Bank who want to colonize the nations of the world with corporate hegemony. They are trying to export all our manufacturing to China so that we can never stand against the great slave state of the East. Ending WTO is the first stage to standing up to the international corporations who are tyring to turn the world into their own fuedal state.
We must return to the moon. Its natural vacuum and near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing. Deadly plagues and other research requiring isolation could be done easily on our moon with minimal fear of contaminating the earth should their projects go awry. Telescopes on the far side of the moon would give us a new view of the universe uninterrupted by light (and for SETI et. al not so many electronic signals interfereing). If nothing else, the He-3 and solar resources could eventually help reduce our dependence on limited fossil fuels to run our economy. Some of the readers remember the OPEC crisis and no one wants those conditions to return. Finally, the moon serves as a waypoint to exploration of Mars and the Asteroid Belt, both of which contain abundant resources that could satiate our world's demands for resources far beyond the lifetimes of anyone reading this.
I'd like to hear from people who do not want to go back to the moon. Most of the soical programs they advocate funding in place of space exploration have their own difficulties, but maybe there are other reasons they have which get little/no attention.
The value of a resource has a formula attached to it.
If
$value_of_resource > $cost_to_harness_resource
Then
Harness()
Else
Ignore()
In other words most of those resources have little value to us on earth since we would expend far more resources to obtain them then they're worth.
Of course to space farers, the resource would be less expensive to use. Then this becomes a circular argument. We need to mine asteroids because it makes mining asteroids cheaper.
All the solar resources available on the moon would be inaccessible to us on earth. All the solar resources available on the moon would be accessible from Low Earth Orbit, yet still be inaccessible to us on earth despite being 100 times closer.
All the mineral resources available on the moon, are available here on earth in much greater quantity. The fact that they are much more accessible needs to be stressed despite the obviousness of the proposition.
Antarctica has thousands of times more resources than the moon. Yet despite being a thousand times more accessible, I see no great industrial push to harness mineral and water resources in Antarctica.
I have no problem sending robots to the moon for the sake of basic research. Their is very little that they cannot do in place of a man who is virtually helpless in that environment. I have no problem sending unmanned telescopes into space that collect data for man to analyze. If the moon is a legitamite target, so be it.
However, manned space flight has always been a pre-determined conclusion looking deperately for justification. There is no doubt that these are great adventures, but somehow we must justify the cost and weigh how that money could be spent here on earth.
In the meantime, there is another great effort that could make the journey more cost feasible: the Space Elevator project. The journey from the surface to orbit is by far the most expensive leg. The space elevator would make moving materials from earth to orbit thousands of times cheaper over it's lifetime. Instead of wasting money on planning boondoggle manned missions to Mars or the Moon, put the money into the space elevator that will yield returns across the spectrum of commercial and civil space exploration by both robots AND people.
If we are doomed, it's from greed and arrogance. Why put trillions into space colonization when a simple reorganization of priorities here on Earth would cost less and provide far more benefits.
Once we learn to live in peace and stability here on Earth, then we can turn our eyes to Mars. The effort must not be one of colonization, but of terra-forming. Mars has no atmosphere because it is too light.
Many concepts involve the deployment of vast mirrors to melt the martian icecaps. This will ultimtely fail as the same forces that deprived Mars of it's atmosphere will once again blow precious gases into the vastness of space.
How does one heat mars AND add the mass that will glue a new atmosphere to the planet.
Planetary Bombardment!!!! Nudge masses in the asteroid belt into collision courses with mars. Create automated gas miners on neptune that will syphon off gases, subsequently freeze them into large masses. Then implant fire them (with a orbital cannon) into mars colliding orbits using fuels derived from hydrogen mining.
Repeat for 300 years!!! A side effect of the technology would be to develop and test the infrastructure needed to deflect large Earth Colliding Orbits. The idea that we'll get it right the first time sounds nieve. The cincher is that it becomes a defense project which is always easier to justify (fund) then pure research.
If the Chinese may indeed go to the moon. The irony is that we'll be financing it through purchases at Wal-Mart !!!!!
If you wanna fight the Chinese slave machine, oppose the World Trade Organization. If you wanna oppose WTO support Dennis Kucinich for president. He is the ONLY candidate who has promised to withdraw from both NAFTA and WTO and re-establish national priorities of labor and full employment.
http://www.kucinich.us/
Was Abe Bigoda and Mark Twain found with him????
One could simply burn them onto a specified spot of the disc individually. The task may sound daunting, but a specific machine could probably write a few bits pretty fast.
What goes up must come down!!!!!
A lot of the matter will fall back to the sun.
People used to think that Nintendo couldn't be pushed out of the console markte. Now Nintendo is a distant third to Playstation and XBox.
The fact of the matter is that Sony is a electronics juggernaut that has the marketing channels to move virtually anything they choose to ship.
BTW, I too think that 7.1 sound is a bit over the top for a handheld system. Though with special headphones, this could be a good feature.
Hehe,
Theres the beauty of the system. You get to sell more proprietary batteries. No doubt the connector will be patented so no one can make knockoffs.
Assuming there aren't any bugs, one thing computers do very well is count, and they do it consistently.
Yes, and if there was an error in the vote counting procedure, it will repeat it for EVERY recount.
Honestly, if I believe that each machine printed ballot should be SCANNED as part of the counting process. The resulting data would be available (via CD) to ANY group that wanted to do their own count of the elections accuracy. That way a counting machine that has been rigged to consistently miscount can be identified.
I think (and saw) many people turn away from voting because of this wait.
;-)
Finally equality in Mississippi. Who would have ever thought that they'd just starting runnin' white people away from the polls as well!!!!
These are excellent reason for instantaneous runoff balloting. You get to choose the guy you like AND the guy who will do if your horse isn't in the top 2 of initial voting.
Answer:Yes, it's ture, Diebold isn't in anyone's pockets - they are simply incompetent.
... Oh wait, that actually happened ;-)
The CEO of Diebold is a GW Bush 'Pioneer'. That means he have Bush $100,000 plus. You know he wants a return on investment!!!!
Beyond that he is also the campaign coordinator for the Ohio effort to re-elect George Bush. Geez, that's like the allegory of Florida's chief election officer being the Florida state Bush campaign coordinator
The refusal to admit a partisan bias isn't nieve. It's just plain dumb!!!!
Diebold CEO delivers cash. Bush delivers funding for Diebold machines (and a VERY nice tax break for the rich). Diebold delivers rigged elections for Bush and Republicans. Bush delivers more money so EVERYBODY can use the wonderful machines.
If at some point you REALLY want to eliminate printers and paper, instead of printing out a receipt, but a CD burner in each voting machine and burn each vote to the CD, also giving you an unmodified, recountable trail.
... whatever) at setup to generate serial numbers for ballots. In this way, someone could not pre-generate phony ballots and insert them on election night.
I thought this might be the right way to go at one point. Once the CD-R (not RW) is burned, there is really no way to modify it.
The problem is that a CD-R is not tranparent to the voter. There is no way to tell without aid of the computer that the vote is properly tallied. Hidden/Rogue code could display your choices on the screen and burn a different set of values to the CD-R.
BTW, the paper ballots printed from such a system should be digitally signed (your vote choices would be signed) based on values from secured hardware. Such machines should also be seeded with random number (election workers rolling dice
It's common amongst dummies who don't do scalability testing. All they needed to do was spin up a couple thousand clients simulateously on a few machines running tests.
Yes, GW was VERY sure that he had one Florida. He told the press that his brother assured him of it. no joke.
Yeah and don't forget about the 75,000 "felons" that they nixed from the voting roles.
Oh yeah, and Diebold voting system made a debut in that election having effectively removed 18,000 votes from Al Gores totals. They had those votes, then they magically dissapeared from the machine along with the "faulty" memory card that caused the problem.
This is why the Voter News Service got the wrong results. Their polling data was CORRECT. The Bush voting machinery took those votes away without any possible way to audit them.
One presidential election has already been stolen by electronic vote recording. It's time to ban electronic vote recording!!!!!
The beauty of scantron is that we have a training program for it: Lottery Forms ;-)
In fact electronic tallies should NOT be kept while voting. This is effectively the same thing as a 'voice vote' in Congress. They always do it, and it's always challenged.
You could write in a candidate and make him choice #1. Obviously, this would have to be hand tallied, but it's very do-able.