It seems to me, though, that setting up a "spacecraft manufacturing facility" (including materials production, fabrication and assembly) on the Moon is a project of many decades.
Yes of course. I'd assume at least a 100-150 year minimum to properly set up such a facility complete with lunar mining, lunar nuclear reactors, probably earth moving equipment manufacturing, smelting and casting and machining. There is so much that would be either necessary or desirable that will take a long long time to get going.
As far as asteroids go I don't think an Orion ship would be able to change the course of any even moderately sized one. Or were you thinking as a means of getting some humans off planet to prevent the extinction of our species? In any case a pulsed nuclear ship big enough to do either of those missions would be prohibitively expensive.
In 20 years? We are nowhere near that now. There would have to be fundamental breakthroughs in AI and probably in neuroscience to have even the slightest chance of that being true. A more realistic time frame would be 2000+ years from now. Millennia rather than decades.
Also if we ever do reach self-aware general AI they will be entities with rights. We could not just make them work without compensating them. That would be slavery. They would become just like mechanical people with some advantages and some disadvantages over the rest of us bio-humans. And they would surely expect to get paid at least as much as us. Maybe more if they have greater strength and stamina and are willing to do boring and physically demanding work. Probably robotics companies will try to give their machines just enough intelligence to follow basic commands but no more. That means any intellectually demanding jobs will remain quite safe.
Companies won't be hiring new workers
I would think robotics companies would be hiring a lot of new workers if what you are saying ever comes to pass. Building millions or billions of sophisticated general purpose robots even without advanced AI requires a lot of humans, both smart and not so smart.
they'll be buying new machines
From whom exactly and how will those companies build those robots? With magic? They will need people for that. Even if they can build the robots with other robots they will at some point need humans to build the robots that make the robots that make the robots... Maybe eventually only the premium most advanced models will require humans to build them, but that point is probably at least 1000 years away.
Low skill jobs the world over are particularly vulnerable this time around.
Well all I can say is those robots better be very cheap indeed because labor in the country where I am living now can be had for as little as $5-$7 per day.
In any case it is called progress. If we followed your logic we'd all still be riding in horse-drawn carriages to get around. Of course horseshoe manufacturers and hay growers would have loved that.
One of the points of Orion was that it provided more than enough power to lift heavy vehicles from Earth's surface.
I never considered that to be one of its primary advantages. It's just too dirty. Not sustainable for multiple launches. It's primary advantage is that it can carry enough fuel with it to actually go somewhere interesting in a reasonable time period. Most propulsion systems cannot. We could just just set up a spacecraft manufacturing facility on the moon and launch from there.
I''ll reiterate that quoting a "speed in which a technology can reach" is meaningless.
Excellent! so then there is no problem getting close to the speed of light via fission fragment propulsion then? Or were there practical engineering limitations you are ignoring with that statement? To me the speed reachable by a spacecraft that we could actually build (budgetary issues aside) today is very much the whole point of the exercise. In theory you probably could build an antimatter rocket with just a few atoms of antimatter, but it would not do very much now would it? And yet in theory it has a VERY high specific impulse, right? For a picosecond. Don't ion drives have excellent specific impulse? But they have barely any thrust and are not (at least not yet) practical means for propelling any serious spacecraft (in terms of mass).
And fission fragment rockets have a much higher ISP than Orion.
So what is the maximum speed reachable by a reasonably sized manned or unmanned spacecraft using fission fragment propulsion? You may say it doesn't matter, but then tell me how long it will take for a non-micro sized ship to get to Proxima Centauri using fission fragment propulsion. Has the math been done? Have you done it?
A rocket that propels itself by firing pingpong balls out the back with an air cannon can reach relativistic speeds
Prove it by building one.
As for the rest it is very interesting, but given the billions or trillions of dollars necessary could we build an interstellar ship with this system today using current tech that could reach Proxima Centauri in half a century? We know that we probably could do exactly that with Dyson's simple spring pusher plate pulsed system. Yes it is untested except at a ridiculously small scale, but it should all work using 1960s tech (and A LOT of money). As in any untested system it would probably fail dramatically the first few times, but at least no new tech is needed and plutonium in the form of bombs has the energy density to actually have enough fuel to reach high speeds. Lack of fuel is really the biggest problem with spacecraft propulsion. Not Isp. If we had infinite quantities of massless fuel we could reach relativisitic speeds easily even with standard chemical rockets. That's why every space enthusiast's dream is some kind of warp drive or space drive or ramjet or solar sail that doesn't require that you bring your fuel with you. What makes Orion or any nuclear pulse drive so special is that you can bring enough fuel with you for practical interstellar missions. I don't care about Isp. I care about the total trip time to various destinations like Proxima or Gliese 581.
They'd just make kind of a mess in the atmosphere on their way up.
Which means you basically have to build them off planet. At a Lagrange point or on the moon or whatever. Yes it would probably add hundreds of years to the project to do that, but the alternative may be to never build an interstellar ship.
and we really don't have anything that can travel fast enough to get us there in less than tens of thousands of years.
Actually we really do. Stop spreading misinformation. We have had nuclear power since the 1940s. A lot of you people seemed to have forgotten this amazing 20th century invention and want to pretend that chemical rockets or ultra-weak ion propulsion are the only options based on current tech. They are not.
using as reference the speed of the fastest man-made space object
Was this 'object' actually designed for interstellar travel? If not then it is irrelevant. It's like saying the fastest bird only flies at 30 mph so what hope do we ever have of breaking the sound barrier. We have aircraft that can travel over 2000 mph because we designed them to do that. We have had the tech to reach around 0.08c since the 1960s. All we would need is the money to build the ship and admittedly it would be very, very, very expensive. Well unless it worked like an open source software project with people donating their time for free, but then of course it would take orders of magnitude longer.
Also: my understanding of the habitable zone of red dwarfs is that they leave their surfaces too irradiated for LAWKI.
It's more complicated than that. Red dwarves vary greatly in size from tiny like Proxima Centauri to something close to half the size of our sun and also vary a great deal in their luminosity variance. Proxima Centauri is highly variable and is what is known as a 'flare star' due to this. Then there is the issue of whether the planet is tidally locked in place or rotates. If it is tidally locked then there will always be a side facing away from the radiation. There are many factors involved.
Incidentally Mars and even Venus may have been genuinely habitable at one time. One theory of the origin of life on earth is that it originated on Mars first when the sun was younger and hotter. Obviously that is pure speculation but it's not impossible that Mars once had a thick enough atmosphere and a high enough temperature to support life.
_If_ humans ever do figure out how to travel between the stars, it will be in the very distant future.
Agreed. It would probably take 200 years just to build the infrastructure, manufacturing facility, and then the ship itself. Then another 50-100 years to make the trip. I'd consider 300 years to the be 'distant future' wouldn't you?
Please explain the tech that we've had since to 50's to allow any complex machine (such as a nuclear reactor) to work unattended for 50 years.
So just to clarify, your argument as to why human beings cannot even travel as far as Proxima Centauri a mere 4 ly away is that our machines are not reliable enough? Seriously that is your argument? Voyager 1 has been operating for nearly 39 years without a problem. Yes it's RTG is winding down but it was never intended to be a true interstellar mission. A longer lasting power supply could have been built even back in 1977. And incidentally that was 1970s tech. Presumably we could build something even more reliable now with all the fancy new tech we have. We could even build an unmanned ship with a robot like this inside to at least try to maybe do some crude repairs. Yes a human onboard would be a huge advantage in terms of reliability, but there are also huge advantages to not having any delicate humans onboard.
Sure. All we need to do is get past this trivial little hurdle of using chemical reaction motors to move things.
Bzzzt. Warp drive is not required to get to Proxima Centauri. The first (experimental) nuclear reactor was built in the early 1940s. Chemical reaction propulsion has not truly been required for something like 75 years. Nearly every machine we make could be powered by nuclear fission instead of heat engines. Note I say could be rather than should, but for spacecraft propulsion nuclear fission is still the best tech we've got.
Party pooper. Yes I think you are right. 0.123 solar masses is just too small I think. The planet would have to be too close. Proxima is also a flare star. Nevertheless if the conditions are right on the planet itself you just never know. Maybe there is some exotic form of life underground somewhere or at the bottom of an ocean. We should still at least send some probes there to check it out. And maybe send some microwave and laser messages over there just in case.
Unfortunately it needs more than just an antenna made out of unobtanium that requires future tech. Interstellar messages based on current tech require high powered microwave or laser devices which are bulky and heavy by micro standards. Not sure about the requirements for a powerful enough laser, but for microwave transmissions you'd need a gyrotron, which is basically a metal tube with a tungsten emitter (electron source) at one end and a particle exhaust at the other with superconducting magnets around it to act as a sort of particle (electrons) accelerator. You'd probably also need a 20 meter parabolic dish as an antenna, but that may be possible to build out of a very fine conductive mesh of some kind. I think a powerful enough laser would also tend to be massive. A little diode laser isn't going to do it. But we don't necessarily have to transmit anything. After gathering its data the probe could head back to us again and we could physically retrieve its data. Or possibly a small solid state transmitter could start transmitting once the probe was back in orbit around the earth again.
The thing about sending a probe though is that it might be more cost-effective to build a bigger telescope to get the same data.
There are physical limitations to how large a mirror we can build, to how perfect we can make its surface. I don't think it *would* be the same data. Apples and oranges. The real problem would be that that little probe would need a hell of a transmitter to relay its data back to us. A big heavy gyrotron with superconducting magnets and a large (at least 20m diameter) radio telescope would most likely be required at those distances. Of course you could try to build a probe which could return home with its data stored in memory for retrieval. Then no transmitter would be necessary. Then maybe you could just get away with a camera and whatever nuclear propulsion the probe is using.
It doesn't have to be. It just has to work. It just has to get us to Proxima Centauri in 50-100 years. Are you saying that fission fragment rockets are current tech? Is it really viable now? I mean at least as compared to Freeman Dyson's old system? I hadn't heard of fission fragment propulsion before. It looks interesting. Has the math been done with respect to interstellar missions? Can it match or exceed the 5-10% c estimates for Orion type propulsion?
We've had the tech to get to Proxima Centauri in half a century since the 1960s. Only reason we don't already have an unmanned probe there is because of financial and political issues. We don't lack the tech. No new tech would be needed for such a mission. I do agree however that an ion drive isn't going to do it. Luckily we have this thing called nuclear fission, a true wonder created way back in the 20th century. Just imagine if our world had had the vision to move forward with Freeman Dyson's propulsion system in a serious way and we had started building the ship 60 years ago. I sometimes wonder if it is capitalism that is to blame for our lack of interest in such missions. After all we humans *could have* build just such a ship. It could have been done *for free* just through volunteer labor. If every engineer had spent all of their free time contributing to the project we might have a live video feed at this newly discovered planet right now.
If we started now, I guess we could build a two-copy redundant probe set in 20-50 years that would take 400-4000 years to get to Proxima using either ion propulsion or nuclear pulse propulsion (Orion type) (assume max roughly 1% light speed).
Where are you getting 1% from? Most estimates including from Freeman Dyson himself are much higher. More like 5-10% of the speed of light. My guess would be more like 50-100 years to build a Lagrange point manufacturing facility, another 100-200 years to build the massive nuclear pulse ship, and then 50-100 years to actually get to Proxima Centauri. Of course if we could launch the ship from earth we could potentially save the time building the massive space based manufacturing facility, but it's unlikely we'd be willing to expel so much radioactive fallout on our little planet.
I always hated Apple, but it seems that they are the least worst option now
You mean aside from Linux? I don't consider buying overpriced hardware just to avoid Microsoft to be a great option even if the industrial design is always top notch. I don't really like the default windows manager in OS X. Linux lets you actually choose what GUI you want both in terms of how it looks and how it works. Now *that* should be the future of mass market OSes. I always wondered why MS and Apple did not emulate that Linux feature and let users actually customize the look and features of the OS. Just stupidity or naked evil and wanting people to suffer as much as possible? Probably the latter.
Wow. That sounds awful. I'm never going to downgrade to Win10 in that case. I will have to wait to see if MS ever releases a real OS again.
The biggest problem is the motherboard manufacturers. Eventually they stop making drivers for old MS OSes. So you can't upgrade to new CPUs. Of course now that Intel fired most of their R&D staff and has dropped their tick-tock strategy maybe upgrading a CPU won't be an issue anymore. Not that it is a major issue now that Moore's Law is mostly dead.
If this continues I hope that some Windows only software devs (like game devs) will consider starting to develop for Linux. Windows should just die imho.
Yes well the biggest difference is the immigration and customs people in the US are generally assholes. The ones in other countries are generally not assholes. This makes a big difference in practice.
Usually the immigration people in other countries are just normal people doing a job and they are not there to cause anyone trouble or pain. Unfortunately law enforcement and really any job with authority over people tends to attract the worst of American society. Sadists and bullies who truly enjoy humiliating and hurting people.
It is too bad that my country treats all who try to enter as either criminals or terrorists by default, but remember that we are basically a giant prison camp in a way with the largest percentage of imprisoned of any country except China.
Am I missing something? What good is reinstalling the OS going to do you? They can just remove your hard drive and access all of your files from their own machines. They might even be able to reset your bios and just boot with a Linux live CD or WinPE. A real dead mans switch would have to either physically destroy the hard drive or somehow have time to overwrite at least the most sensitive data with random bits.
Exactly. You don't normally write something in assembly for the sole purpose of beating compiler functions at their own game,. Although no doubt HLL-is-the-only-way people will continue to make this argument. There are often parts of library functions that can be left out in a particular application especially if it is going into an inner loop that will be executed a few million times. And such functions also don't always do *exactly* what you want. Sometimes it's worth building a hexagonal peg for a hexagonal hole rather than trying to make the square peg fit by pounding it in.
I've never seen a place that would let an unlicensed electrician wire the main power board of a house that is (or will be) connected to the grid.
Actually I think there are a a number of states where unlicensed and uninsured electrical work is allowed whether or not it is connected to the grid. The situation in Wyoming where they also allow unlicensed plumbing and anything else except septic work is quite rare though. If you live in a one of the Building Code Tyranny states as I used to you just may not realize how permissive some other states can be.
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It seems to me, though, that setting up a "spacecraft manufacturing facility" (including materials production, fabrication and assembly) on the Moon is a project of many decades.
Yes of course. I'd assume at least a 100-150 year minimum to properly set up such a facility complete with lunar mining, lunar nuclear reactors, probably earth moving equipment manufacturing, smelting and casting and machining. There is so much that would be either necessary or desirable that will take a long long time to get going.
As far as asteroids go I don't think an Orion ship would be able to change the course of any even moderately sized one. Or were you thinking as a means of getting some humans off planet to prevent the extinction of our species? In any case a pulsed nuclear ship big enough to do either of those missions would be prohibitively expensive.
Instead there are going to be general purpose AIs
In 20 years? We are nowhere near that now. There would have to be fundamental breakthroughs in AI and probably in neuroscience to have even the slightest chance of that being true. A more realistic time frame would be 2000+ years from now. Millennia rather than decades.
Also if we ever do reach self-aware general AI they will be entities with rights. We could not just make them work without compensating them. That would be slavery. They would become just like mechanical people with some advantages and some disadvantages over the rest of us bio-humans. And they would surely expect to get paid at least as much as us. Maybe more if they have greater strength and stamina and are willing to do boring and physically demanding work. Probably robotics companies will try to give their machines just enough intelligence to follow basic commands but no more. That means any intellectually demanding jobs will remain quite safe.
Companies won't be hiring new workers
I would think robotics companies would be hiring a lot of new workers if what you are saying ever comes to pass. Building millions or billions of sophisticated general purpose robots even without advanced AI requires a lot of humans, both smart and not so smart.
they'll be buying new machines
From whom exactly and how will those companies build those robots? With magic? They will need people for that. Even if they can build the robots with other robots they will at some point need humans to build the robots that make the robots that make the robots... Maybe eventually only the premium most advanced models will require humans to build them, but that point is probably at least 1000 years away.
Low skill jobs the world over are particularly vulnerable this time around.
Well all I can say is those robots better be very cheap indeed because labor in the country where I am living now can be had for as little as $5-$7 per day.
In any case it is called progress. If we followed your logic we'd all still be riding in horse-drawn carriages to get around. Of course horseshoe manufacturers and hay growers would have loved that.
One of the points of Orion was that it provided more than enough power to lift heavy vehicles from Earth's surface.
I never considered that to be one of its primary advantages. It's just too dirty. Not sustainable for multiple launches. It's primary advantage is that it can carry enough fuel with it to actually go somewhere interesting in a reasonable time period. Most propulsion systems cannot. We could just just set up a spacecraft manufacturing facility on the moon and launch from there.
I''ll reiterate that quoting a "speed in which a technology can reach" is meaningless.
Excellent! so then there is no problem getting close to the speed of light via fission fragment propulsion then? Or were there practical engineering limitations you are ignoring with that statement? To me the speed reachable by a spacecraft that we could actually build (budgetary issues aside) today is very much the whole point of the exercise. In theory you probably could build an antimatter rocket with just a few atoms of antimatter, but it would not do very much now would it? And yet in theory it has a VERY high specific impulse, right? For a picosecond. Don't ion drives have excellent specific impulse? But they have barely any thrust and are not (at least not yet) practical means for propelling any serious spacecraft (in terms of mass).
And fission fragment rockets have a much higher ISP than Orion.
So what is the maximum speed reachable by a reasonably sized manned or unmanned spacecraft using fission fragment propulsion? You may say it doesn't matter, but then tell me how long it will take for a non-micro sized ship to get to Proxima Centauri using fission fragment propulsion. Has the math been done? Have you done it?
A rocket that propels itself by firing pingpong balls out the back with an air cannon can reach relativistic speeds
Prove it by building one.
As for the rest it is very interesting, but given the billions or trillions of dollars necessary could we build an interstellar ship with this system today using current tech that could reach Proxima Centauri in half a century? We know that we probably could do exactly that with Dyson's simple spring pusher plate pulsed system. Yes it is untested except at a ridiculously small scale, but it should all work using 1960s tech (and A LOT of money). As in any untested system it would probably fail dramatically the first few times, but at least no new tech is needed and plutonium in the form of bombs has the energy density to actually have enough fuel to reach high speeds. Lack of fuel is really the biggest problem with spacecraft propulsion. Not Isp. If we had infinite quantities of massless fuel we could reach relativisitic speeds easily even with standard chemical rockets. That's why every space enthusiast's dream is some kind of warp drive or space drive or ramjet or solar sail that doesn't require that you bring your fuel with you. What makes Orion or any nuclear pulse drive so special is that you can bring enough fuel with you for practical interstellar missions. I don't care about Isp. I care about the total trip time to various destinations like Proxima or Gliese 581.
They'd just make kind of a mess in the atmosphere on their way up.
Which means you basically have to build them off planet. At a Lagrange point or on the moon or whatever. Yes it would probably add hundreds of years to the project to do that, but the alternative may be to never build an interstellar ship.
and we really don't have anything that can travel fast enough to get us there in less than tens of thousands of years.
Actually we really do. Stop spreading misinformation. We have had nuclear power since the 1940s. A lot of you people seemed to have forgotten this amazing 20th century invention and want to pretend that chemical rockets or ultra-weak ion propulsion are the only options based on current tech. They are not.
using as reference the speed of the fastest man-made space object
Was this 'object' actually designed for interstellar travel? If not then it is irrelevant. It's like saying the fastest bird only flies at 30 mph so what hope do we ever have of breaking the sound barrier. We have aircraft that can travel over 2000 mph because we designed them to do that. We have had the tech to reach around 0.08c since the 1960s. All we would need is the money to build the ship and admittedly it would be very, very, very expensive. Well unless it worked like an open source software project with people donating their time for free, but then of course it would take orders of magnitude longer.
Also: my understanding of the habitable zone of red dwarfs is that they leave their surfaces too irradiated for LAWKI.
It's more complicated than that. Red dwarves vary greatly in size from tiny like Proxima Centauri to something close to half the size of our sun and also vary a great deal in their luminosity variance. Proxima Centauri is highly variable and is what is known as a 'flare star' due to this. Then there is the issue of whether the planet is tidally locked in place or rotates. If it is tidally locked then there will always be a side facing away from the radiation. There are many factors involved.
Incidentally Mars and even Venus may have been genuinely habitable at one time. One theory of the origin of life on earth is that it originated on Mars first when the sun was younger and hotter. Obviously that is pure speculation but it's not impossible that Mars once had a thick enough atmosphere and a high enough temperature to support life.
We've had nuclear energy since the 1940s. It would be more like 50 years. Not 20000.
Give up? I'm not even working on space travel
Yes that is coming across.
_If_ humans ever do figure out how to travel between the stars, it will be in the very distant future.
Agreed. It would probably take 200 years just to build the infrastructure, manufacturing facility, and then the ship itself. Then another 50-100 years to make the trip. I'd consider 300 years to the be 'distant future' wouldn't you?
Please explain the tech that we've had since to 50's to allow any complex machine (such as a nuclear reactor) to work unattended for 50 years.
So just to clarify, your argument as to why human beings cannot even travel as far as Proxima Centauri a mere 4 ly away is that our machines are not reliable enough? Seriously that is your argument? Voyager 1 has been operating for nearly 39 years without a problem. Yes it's RTG is winding down but it was never intended to be a true interstellar mission. A longer lasting power supply could have been built even back in 1977. And incidentally that was 1970s tech. Presumably we could build something even more reliable now with all the fancy new tech we have. We could even build an unmanned ship with a robot like this inside to at least try to maybe do some crude repairs. Yes a human onboard would be a huge advantage in terms of reliability, but there are also huge advantages to not having any delicate humans onboard.
Sure. All we need to do is get past this trivial little hurdle of using chemical reaction motors to move things.
Bzzzt. Warp drive is not required to get to Proxima Centauri. The first (experimental) nuclear reactor was built in the early 1940s. Chemical reaction propulsion has not truly been required for something like 75 years. Nearly every machine we make could be powered by nuclear fission instead of heat engines. Note I say could be rather than should, but for spacecraft propulsion nuclear fission is still the best tech we've got.
Not to put a damper on this
Party pooper. Yes I think you are right. 0.123 solar masses is just too small I think. The planet would have to be too close. Proxima is also a flare star. Nevertheless if the conditions are right on the planet itself you just never know. Maybe there is some exotic form of life underground somewhere or at the bottom of an ocean. We should still at least send some probes there to check it out. And maybe send some microwave and laser messages over there just in case.
He's talking about Freeman Dyson's system, AC. Nuclear pulses against a pusher plate.
Unfortunately it needs more than just an antenna made out of unobtanium that requires future tech. Interstellar messages based on current tech require high powered microwave or laser devices which are bulky and heavy by micro standards. Not sure about the requirements for a powerful enough laser, but for microwave transmissions you'd need a gyrotron, which is basically a metal tube with a tungsten emitter (electron source) at one end and a particle exhaust at the other with superconducting magnets around it to act as a sort of particle (electrons) accelerator. You'd probably also need a 20 meter parabolic dish as an antenna, but that may be possible to build out of a very fine conductive mesh of some kind. I think a powerful enough laser would also tend to be massive. A little diode laser isn't going to do it. But we don't necessarily have to transmit anything. After gathering its data the probe could head back to us again and we could physically retrieve its data. Or possibly a small solid state transmitter could start transmitting once the probe was back in orbit around the earth again.
The thing about sending a probe though is that it might be more cost-effective to build a bigger telescope to get the same data.
There are physical limitations to how large a mirror we can build, to how perfect we can make its surface. I don't think it *would* be the same data. Apples and oranges. The real problem would be that that little probe would need a hell of a transmitter to relay its data back to us. A big heavy gyrotron with superconducting magnets and a large (at least 20m diameter) radio telescope would most likely be required at those distances. Of course you could try to build a probe which could return home with its data stored in memory for retrieval. Then no transmitter would be necessary. Then maybe you could just get away with a camera and whatever nuclear propulsion the probe is using.
And Orion is old tech; it's not really that great
It doesn't have to be. It just has to work. It just has to get us to Proxima Centauri in 50-100 years. Are you saying that fission fragment rockets are current tech? Is it really viable now? I mean at least as compared to Freeman Dyson's old system? I hadn't heard of fission fragment propulsion before. It looks interesting. Has the math been done with respect to interstellar missions? Can it match or exceed the 5-10% c estimates for Orion type propulsion?
We've had the tech to get to Proxima Centauri in half a century since the 1960s. Only reason we don't already have an unmanned probe there is because of financial and political issues. We don't lack the tech. No new tech would be needed for such a mission. I do agree however that an ion drive isn't going to do it. Luckily we have this thing called nuclear fission, a true wonder created way back in the 20th century. Just imagine if our world had had the vision to move forward with Freeman Dyson's propulsion system in a serious way and we had started building the ship 60 years ago. I sometimes wonder if it is capitalism that is to blame for our lack of interest in such missions. After all we humans *could have* build just such a ship. It could have been done *for free* just through volunteer labor. If every engineer had spent all of their free time contributing to the project we might have a live video feed at this newly discovered planet right now.
If we started now, I guess we could build a two-copy redundant probe set in 20-50 years that would take 400-4000 years to get to Proxima using either ion propulsion or nuclear pulse propulsion (Orion type) (assume max roughly 1% light speed).
Where are you getting 1% from? Most estimates including from Freeman Dyson himself are much higher. More like 5-10% of the speed of light.
My guess would be more like 50-100 years to build a Lagrange point manufacturing facility, another 100-200 years to build the massive nuclear pulse ship, and then 50-100 years to actually get to Proxima Centauri. Of course if we could launch the ship from earth we could potentially save the time building the massive space based manufacturing facility, but it's unlikely we'd be willing to expel so much radioactive fallout on our little planet.
I always hated Apple, but it seems that they are the least worst option now
You mean aside from Linux? I don't consider buying overpriced hardware just to avoid Microsoft to be a great option even if the industrial design is always top notch. I don't really like the default windows manager in OS X. Linux lets you actually choose what GUI you want both in terms of how it looks and how it works. Now *that* should be the future of mass market OSes. I always wondered why MS and Apple did not emulate that Linux feature and let users actually customize the look and features of the OS. Just stupidity or naked evil and wanting people to suffer as much as possible? Probably the latter.
Wow. That sounds awful. I'm never going to downgrade to Win10 in that case. I will have to wait to see if MS ever releases a real OS again.
The biggest problem is the motherboard manufacturers. Eventually they stop making drivers for old MS OSes. So you can't upgrade to new CPUs. Of course now that Intel fired most of their R&D staff and has dropped their tick-tock strategy maybe upgrading a CPU won't be an issue anymore. Not that it is a major issue now that Moore's Law is mostly dead.
If this continues I hope that some Windows only software devs (like game devs) will consider starting to develop for Linux. Windows should just die imho.
Yes well the biggest difference is the immigration and customs people in the US are generally assholes. The ones in other countries are generally not assholes. This makes a big difference in practice.
Usually the immigration people in other countries are just normal people doing a job and they are not there to cause anyone trouble or pain. Unfortunately law enforcement and really any job with authority over people tends to attract the worst of American society. Sadists and bullies who truly enjoy humiliating and hurting people.
It is too bad that my country treats all who try to enter as either criminals or terrorists by default, but remember that we are basically a giant prison camp in a way with the largest percentage of imprisoned of any country except China.
Am I missing something? What good is reinstalling the OS going to do you? They can just remove your hard drive and access all of your files from their own machines. They might even be able to reset your bios and just boot with a Linux live CD or WinPE. A real dead mans switch would have to either physically destroy the hard drive or somehow have time to overwrite at least the most sensitive data with random bits.
Exactly. You don't normally write something in assembly for the sole purpose of beating compiler functions at their own game,. Although no doubt HLL-is-the-only-way people will continue to make this argument. There are often parts of library functions that can be left out in a particular application especially if it is going into an inner loop that will be executed a few million times. And such functions also don't always do *exactly* what you want. Sometimes it's worth building a hexagonal peg for a hexagonal hole rather than trying to make the square peg fit by pounding it in.
I've never seen a place that would let an unlicensed electrician wire the main power board of a house that is (or will be) connected to the grid.
Actually I think there are a a number of states where unlicensed and uninsured electrical work is allowed whether or not it is connected to the grid. The situation in Wyoming where they also allow unlicensed plumbing and anything else except septic work is quite rare though. If you live in a one of the Building Code Tyranny states as I used to you just may not realize how permissive some other states can be.