The USAF had an ASAT program back in the 80s that was launched from a fighter, but to my knowledge, we're the only country with guidance systems able to make the rendezvous, and even that had and explosive warhead, as I recall, obviating the need for a direct hit.
Not true. The Russians had an operational ASAT system starting in the late 60's. . As you suggested they used the "rendezvous and explode" approach, which is reasonably well suited for taking out satellites in high orbit. However, the rendezvous takes time and can sometimes be avoided. It's not all that hard inherently, though - Kepler worked out the basic math a few hundred years ago, and as long as you keep you units straigh (JPL!), orbital rendezvous is straightforward.
It should be noted that the current U.S. missle defence system, while useless against incoming missles, is a very capable ASAT system against low-orbit satellites such as most spy satellites.
Scoring a direct hit in a head-on approach requires a very fast control loop, good sensors, and a highly reliable spacecraft system. Again, it's something that is not beyond, for instance, the Chinese. However, it isn't necessary to score a direct hit. If you deploy shrapnel (the famous "bucket of gravel") you can accept miss distances in the hundreds of meters - which can be done with pretty simple technology. Better yet, if you use a large nuke you can take out every spacecraft within 1000 km, a miss distance even North Korea could achieve.
Also, you don't have to be going in a couter-rotating orbit. all you have to do is place some gravel in the path of the satellite - it supplies the kinetic energy. A simple sounding rocket can get to 300km, which is where you find spy sats. So it is not beyond the realm of reason (though very unlikely) that you could take out a $1 billion U.S. radar bird using a $10 million sounding rocket launched at the exact right time and place. Very tricky in practice, though.
Where I work we use IBM PC-AT's running Procomm+ as serial terminals to talk to some Heurikon V4F units (Motorola 68040-based CPU's from about 1990). That's pretty old. Of couse, up the hill from us, some guys are still using PDP-11's to control some instrumentation.
That's an interesting point. However, non-GM selective-breeding programs create many different variants as well. Some of them can and have propapgated. I don't hear people arguing against dwarf wheat because of how it was developed. Also, ask yourself how much pesticide was used to grow your precious non-GM crop? (And don't talk to me about organic crops - they can't feed 6 billion+ mouths.) As for the dark hint about the risks in development; let me tell you, most of the stuff done in lab wouldn't survive even if it were released. And even if it did, there is no way you would have some sort of world-ending catastrophy. That is the stuff of eco-thrillers (Neal Stephenson anyone?), not real science. Nature is robust. Hell, it has taken us hundreds of years of dedicated destruction to even begin to dent biodiversity; some accidental gene release won't do squat. Of couse, I'm not arguing that we abandon caution entirely, merely that we weigh benefits and risks in a rational way - in my view the potential benefits of research outweigh the
potential risks. And the guaranteed damage that will occur without GM tech definitely outweighs the potential risks.
I suspect that much of the resitance to GM foods comes from an unthinking "yuck factor" that people have when they're told about "jelly-fish genes spliced into a pig" or some such. There are others who then play up "potential risks of release" etc, making the whole thing very scary. However, it's not clear that GM foods are at all dangerous, even if release occurs. Mutations occur in the wild all the time, as does species transplantation etc. To throw out an entire field of scientific inquiry (one with tremendous potential for improving our quality of life) merely on the basis of rather poorly-founded potential risks is shortsighted and stupid. GM technology, like all technology, has benefits and risks. It should be developed responsibly, not abandoned.
Now, that being said, I do agree with you that certain biotech companies have not been responsible. I think it's downright evil to develop plants that are resistant only to your specific brand of pesticide (even if that is self-defeating in the long run, when nearby weeds gain that resistance). I also am very worried about developments that mimic those in software (patenting of genes (how that is not a discovery escapes me), licencing of seeds, and non-propagating varieties that lock poor farmers in a cycle of economic exploitation). Clearly these sorts of things need to be stopped. However, GM technology, if used well, has the potential to improve nutrition, reduce pesticide use, and provide more efficient (and less polluting) manufacturing techniques. These are real, substantial benefits. Europeans should embrace these positive aspects of GM technology, not run screaming like technophobic luddites to the nearest Green politician who plays on their fear and ignorance.
Look, we have a planet with 6+ billion souls to feed, clothe, house and provide energy for. Doing that will require very advanced technology; no amount of feel-good mumbo-jumbo about biomass energy and vegan foods will provide the standard of living we in the West are used to. If given the choice between living in Green poverty and Texas-style gas-guzzling wealth, most people will choose the latter, even if it means their grandchildren won't have a livable planet. The only rational long-term choice is to develop technology that will allow people that wealth in a sustainable fashion. That will require GM technology.
There is nothing irrational about not wanting GM foods.
It's irrational to avoid GM foods, simply because they are GM. There may be specific instances of GM foods that are bad for you (e.g. if you're allergic to peanuts, and it has a peanut gene spliced in), but to avoid the entire class of food because "it's unnatural" simply shows a lack of biological understanding. Do you avoid all plants that were cross-bred, or selectively bred?
Only in this country would you expect to find people sueing a person/company/organization/etc.. for such trivial nonsense.
I would tend to disagree. There are many cases in Europe where people have many more irrational fears of modern technology; power lines, cell phones (ever noticed how everyone has these shouldder bags with a special pocket for the cell phone, held away from the head?), GM foods, nuclear power, etc etc.
It's true that there is more litigation in the States; but the Luddite fears are as common in Europe.
Sundials only work if it's a clear day. Mars has such a thick layer of clouds that the surface temperature is over 800 degrees due to the greenhouse effect. In fact, the surface of Mars is hotter than the surface of Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the sun. How do they expect a sundial to work?
Just a random question; has anyone thought how a quantum computer might be applied to the Chess problem? Given its ability to calculate many possible states at once, perhaps the lookup table approach (combined with some simple heuristics) might be doable? While a lookup table would have more entries than atoms in the Universe, there might be enough quantum states....
Us of the younger generation learnd to be cold-hearted bastards from those boomer-controlled media empires. In just a few years, we'll pull the plug on their health care, or maybe just their life support.
If there were enough of us (there isn't - they were a "boom", remember?) and enough of us bothered to vote (which we don't).
Most of all, it needs to take a long, hard look at boron/proton fusion, and get busy designing ships that can use it for swift interplanetary travel.
Sound nice. Unfortunately it's looking like that kind of fusion ("advanced aneutronic fuels", because the boron-proton reaction doesn't give off a bunch of neutrons) isn't feasible, for very fundamental reasons. A damned shame, I say.
I agree with your sentiment that NASA needs to change; however, having worked there I'd say what they need most is for Congress and the Prez to provide a good goal/vision, with the $$$ to back it up.
Maybe cuz I grew up in the 60's I can't help but view all these cute Slashdotters falling over themselves to praise China's space 'initiatives' with the same patronizing bemusement I normally reserve for the 14-year-olds...
Maybe that smugness would be justified, IF we could get a guy up right now. Of course, at the moment we're relying on the Russians to keep the space station crewed. So call me sometime at the end of '04.
if someone could just explain what the 'Alt Graph' key does on my Sun keyboard, enlightement would be at hand...
Never mind that one - I want to know what the completely blank key does.(upper left corner, between Help and F1). Auto-destruct? Auto-porn download? Coffee? Oral sex?
we'd just walk 30 miles in the snow to the local light plug....Then we'd run copper wire all the way to our phone, and send some through the line to melt the telco's links between me and them.
You had phones? In my day all we had was a pair of tin cans and some taut string. I had to wake up at 4 am to shovel coal to run the steam-powered computer so I could log in using a 1-baud modem..
One of the things the author touches on, but fails to grasp fully, is that, part of the reason Linux is not now, and won't be for some time, adopted by Joe Sixpack, is that it is a complex PITA to install and run stuff on.
You have a point. As much as I hate working with Windows (I grew up with workstations, and unless I can have about 6 virtual desktops I don't consider the OS to be a useful tool. WHY doesn't Windows provide that?), I have to admit that when it comes to installing new hardware, they have Linux beat. Of course, there are obvious reasons - Microsoft forces hardware vendors to provide drivers that work, the way Linux can't. That notwithstanding, it's hard to argue the appeal of a system where as soon as you plug in a new digital camera it pops up a dialog asking if you want to download the pictures.
I've had a terrible time getting a wireless card to work under Linux; in Windows the driver install comes up trivially. Of course, once it asked if I wanted to connect to the internet to download the driver - to my wireless (and only) network card! Kafkaesque...
It is even cut off of space at the moment, and its best chance to launch anyone would be... in a Chinese capsule:-)
I for one welcome the prospect of going to sleep by the light of a Communist moon.:)
Seriously, though - it's the only way we'd ever get people interested enough to do more than keep NASA barely on life support.
20 BILLIONTHS of a G acceleration over 6 months to get that sort of shift needed to give us a milion miles clearance. This is certainly within the capability of current technology.
We're talking a lot of mass, so I'm not so sure we could actually do this. Lets run the numbers again.
Assume we want to push the asteroid about 10,000km, and we have 15 years warning. 0.5*a*t^2 = 1e7 m gives a = 9e-11 m/s2, or 9.2e-12 G. So you don't need a lot of accelleration. However, lets assume it's a 1 km diameter rock -> a mass of about 1.5 billion tons.
So to get the required acceleration requires 141 N of thrust, for 15 years.
Now, the NSTAR ion thruster on DS1 had a thrust of about 0.09 N, and a rated power of 2 kW. So we'd need something like 3 MW of power. As for propellant consumption, assuming a specific impulse of about 3000 (pretty standard for ion engines); you'd need a total of 2200 tons of e.g. Xenon. For comparison, the international space station has less than 100 KW of power and masses less than 100 tons.
So deflecting an asteroid is actually a rather big project - it's not trivial (as in we're nowehere even close, and it would required Manhattan-project level investment to get there). Maybe we could do it, maybe we couldn't. But that's assuming 15 years warning, and the smallest possible margin. If something popped up with just a few years warning, and more mass, we'd all be utterly screwed.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Oil will run out - there is a finite quantity of it in the ground after all. If we keep burning oil, sooner or later it will run out. In the extreme, even if the whole planet had oceans of oil (Titan anyone?) it could run out. Is that so hard to understand? Or do you think the Earth is so big as to be infinite?
When you make a grand assertion like "never" you have to expect to get called on it. Of course we can argue nuances like "cheap oil" vs. "every drop on the planet", "will run out" vs. "can run out" etc. But the point remains, if we keep burning oil, it will run out. I did not abandon the point, I considered it proven and moved on.
Your point is different; you seem to be saying that it won't run out because we will stop burning it, i.e. it will just get so expensive that we switch to alternatives. In other words, "cheap oil" will run out. In the end there is little difference - in two hundred years we won't have an economy dependent on oil.
Beyond that, I point out that what the economy looks like once there is no more oil depends on the path taken to get there; if we invest in alternatives early we will likely have a better alternative at that point. If we push off investment we may be stuck with nothing but poor choices (coal, intermittent solar (no storage) etc). That is the additional wrinkle to your argument that you either missed or ignored. Remember, the time lag for alternatives to be available may be quite long (50 years for fusion).
This is where we get into a situation where basic economics as tought in first-year courses (ideal markets, perfect information and accurate predictions of the future, supply matching demand at some price etc) can be misleading or wrong. For example, they often don't include the effects of time lag. If you've ever studied servo systems or control theory you'll know that time lag is a great way to introduce oscillations into a system.
If you haven't, look it up.
I don't care to get into an argument about our argument. But I do think it inappropriate to be throwing around the words you did. Behaviour like that belongs in the "-1 Troll" category, which may be where you feel most comfortable. You try to justify your foul mouth with additional personal attacks, but I don't buy it. If you have a problem with my arguments, try and counter them at an adult level. Try also to stick to the argument rather than discuss my rhetorical technique.
Wow, let's get nice a personal, shall we? I really think the debate is lifted to a new level when we throw around words like fuckwit, moron, and crack addict. I never descended to your level - I merely pointed out that your analysis was a bit simplistic. The fact that you respond like a 6th grader tells me all I need to know about you.
Too bad we can't take this outside, though.
The point is that the alternatives, though they exist, are nowhere near as cheap as fossil fuels (at least not at present; much more research is needed before they ever become so). Yes, as oil becomes more expensive they look better by comparison. But in an absolute sense they are more expensive; which means it's more expensive to heat your house, build your car, run your computer etc.
This will drag down the economy. The end result depends on how you got there - did you invest in research early or late? That's path dependence.
In other - simpler - words, we may be so busy chopping down wood to heat our homes that we don't have time to perfect fusion.
Oil will never run out. Consumption will switch to alternative uses as the difference in price rises.
Oh yes it will. There is not an infinite supply (even at infinte price), at least not on this planet. Estimates for how much oil is available at current extraction costs vary hugely, but lie somewhere between 10 and 80 years.
Your nice little first-year econ class example sounds great, but you've neglected what economists call "externalities" and "path dependence" and try to forget. Specifically, it may well be that as oil becomes more scarce, prices rise faster than alternatives can ramp up production, leading to price spikes and economic damage. In fact, many of the alternative energy sources require substantial long-term, sustained R&D investment before they can actually produce economically viable energy. It is quite possible that as economies contract due to rising enery costs they will simply not have the means to develop these alternative sources (Imagine trying to start a crash program to get fusion in five years when oil is at $150/barrel).
Not to mention that it is far from clear that most of the alternatives can even supply the needed energy.
hey were also the first at everything in the space race apart from the manned moon landing... and if you believe that happened you'll believe anything.
Seriously, is anyone still fooled by those dodgy special effects and the lame script writing?
Yes, I damned well belive the Moon landings happened. I've done chemical analysis on the rocks; I've met some of the astronauts; my best friends dad helped build the LEM at Grumman. So yeah, they happened.
I'm not sure what annoys me more: idiots like you who don't think it ever happened, or the idiots in the White House, Congress and the public who didn't think it's important enough to keep funding.
I guess we're living in a society where our greatest achievements lie behind us, rather than ahead of us. In that situation I shouldn't be surprised that there are fools like you who try to make themselves feel better by claiming the achievements of the past never happened.
What're you talking about? We've got 5, no wait, 4 Space planes. How many do you have? Ah ha!
Actually, we have three. And they have an annoying tendency to blow up and kill their crews, and hence they're currently grounded. Not much to be proud of.
You're russian history is incorrect. They have had several mishaps.
In more than 35 years of spaceflight the Russians have had something like 4 fatalities, and 3 (?) accidents (including one where the crew survived a booster failure in mid-flight - the stage didn't separate). In comparison to the U.S. record this is remarkably good. They have also flown more people for longer periods of time.
Since the past 5 years, I'd say that we've probably done about the same number of manned launches.
The same number of launches as the U.S., with a total budget of something like 200 million dollars, a factor of 30 less money. That's pretty impressive. The simple turth is that the U.S. is a second-rate space power.
I know this is slightly off topic, but I figure I have a decent chance of actually getting this read by someone who knows something about cell phones and how the base stations are programmed. So here goes..
I've noticed that when I'm on the phone for more than about 5-10 minutes the probability that I get dropped goes up dramatically (AT&T phone in the Boston area). Even if I don't get dropped, the quality of the link drops, with lots of hash and breakups. After I get dropped, if I immediately call again, the call comes through clear as a bell. That sort of thing has happened at least a dozen times in the last week. I'm not driving or walking when this happens, so it's not a question of getting closer to an antenna.
Do the base stations have a priority listing where they will drop old calls to accept new ones?
He predicted the dot-com burst and was calling for it when the dot-com's were strong.
Whatever. I remember making frequent comments around mid-99 that this dot-com stuff was bogus and wouldn't last. How could yahoo have a larger market cap than Boeing, when they don't make anything? The boom-bust cycle has occurred many times in the past, and is not a difficult prediction to make. In fact, the whole "everything is cyclical" argument is not new (that's why it's called a "business cycle" after all). So that's a pretty meaningless prediction.
A few days or a week before the 9/11 attacks, he made the prediction that a terrorist attack would occur on American soil.
So did many other talking heads and other important people. Including Clintons national security advisor, in a briefing to the current NSA. Again, terrorist attacks had happened before (McVeigh, anyone?) and it's a safe bet to predict that they will happen again.
Prechter also predicts deflation.
Well, that's not hard to predict given that Japan has been seeing deflation for about 5 years now.
Again, it's a definite possibility at the extreme end of the business cycle.
And now a more general comment: why do these "new sciences" always get announced with a big fanfare and the publication of a zillion-page book that almost no-one will actually read (the recent book by that Mathematica-guy comes to mind)? I would have thought that a branch of science will tend to develop over time, and thanks to the effort of many people. It may start with the publication of a few ground-breaking papers (Einstein comes to mind), but then others take the basic principles and run with them (in Quantum we had Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, Feynman, etc etc). It wasn't like one of those guys labored in unappreciated obscurity for 30 years and then emerged from his basement with a finished "new science". That sort of claim should be setting off peoples crank-alarms.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The Russians had an operational ASAT system starting in the late 60's. . As you suggested they used the "rendezvous and explode" approach, which is reasonably well suited for taking out satellites in high orbit. However, the rendezvous takes time and can sometimes be avoided. It's not all that hard inherently, though - Kepler worked out the basic math a few hundred years ago, and as long as you keep you units straigh (JPL!), orbital rendezvous is straightforward.
It should be noted that the current U.S. missle defence system, while useless against incoming missles, is a very capable ASAT system against low-orbit satellites such as most spy satellites.
Scoring a direct hit in a head-on approach requires a very fast control loop, good sensors, and a highly reliable spacecraft system. Again, it's something that is not beyond, for instance, the Chinese. However, it isn't necessary to score a direct hit. If you deploy shrapnel (the famous "bucket of gravel") you can accept miss distances in the hundreds of meters - which can be done with pretty simple technology. Better yet, if you use a large nuke you can take out every spacecraft within 1000 km, a miss distance even North Korea could achieve.
Also, you don't have to be going in a couter-rotating orbit. all you have to do is place some gravel in the path of the satellite - it supplies the kinetic energy. A simple sounding rocket can get to 300km, which is where you find spy sats. So it is not beyond the realm of reason (though very unlikely) that you could take out a $1 billion U.S. radar bird using a $10 million sounding rocket launched at the exact right time and place. Very tricky in practice, though.
Where I work we use IBM PC-AT's running Procomm+ as serial terminals to talk to some Heurikon V4F units (Motorola 68040-based CPU's from about 1990). That's pretty old. Of couse, up the hill from us, some guys are still using PDP-11's to control some instrumentation.
I suspect that much of the resitance to GM foods comes from an unthinking "yuck factor" that people have when they're told about "jelly-fish genes spliced into a pig" or some such. There are others who then play up "potential risks of release" etc, making the whole thing very scary. However, it's not clear that GM foods are at all dangerous, even if release occurs. Mutations occur in the wild all the time, as does species transplantation etc. To throw out an entire field of scientific inquiry (one with tremendous potential for improving our quality of life) merely on the basis of rather poorly-founded potential risks is shortsighted and stupid. GM technology, like all technology, has benefits and risks. It should be developed responsibly, not abandoned.
Now, that being said, I do agree with you that certain biotech companies have not been responsible. I think it's downright evil to develop plants that are resistant only to your specific brand of pesticide (even if that is self-defeating in the long run, when nearby weeds gain that resistance). I also am very worried about developments that mimic those in software (patenting of genes (how that is not a discovery escapes me), licencing of seeds, and non-propagating varieties that lock poor farmers in a cycle of economic exploitation). Clearly these sorts of things need to be stopped. However, GM technology, if used well, has the potential to improve nutrition, reduce pesticide use, and provide more efficient (and less polluting) manufacturing techniques. These are real, substantial benefits. Europeans should embrace these positive aspects of GM technology, not run screaming like technophobic luddites to the nearest Green politician who plays on their fear and ignorance.
Look, we have a planet with 6+ billion souls to feed, clothe, house and provide energy for. Doing that will require very advanced technology; no amount of feel-good mumbo-jumbo about biomass energy and vegan foods will provide the standard of living we in the West are used to. If given the choice between living in Green poverty and Texas-style gas-guzzling wealth, most people will choose the latter, even if it means their grandchildren won't have a livable planet. The only rational long-term choice is to develop technology that will allow people that wealth in a sustainable fashion. That will require GM technology.
It's irrational to avoid GM foods, simply because they are GM. There may be specific instances of GM foods that are bad for you (e.g. if you're allergic to peanuts, and it has a peanut gene spliced in), but to avoid the entire class of food because "it's unnatural" simply shows a lack of biological understanding. Do you avoid all plants that were cross-bred, or selectively bred?
I would tend to disagree. There are many cases in Europe where people have many more irrational fears of modern technology; power lines, cell phones (ever noticed how everyone has these shouldder bags with a special pocket for the cell phone, held away from the head?), GM foods, nuclear power, etc etc.
It's true that there is more litigation in the States; but the Luddite fears are as common in Europe.
s/Mars/Venus
The stick figures were made by the kids of some people on the team. At least that was what I heard via the grapevine.
Just curious.
If there were enough of us (there isn't - they were a "boom", remember?) and enough of us bothered to vote (which we don't).
Sound nice. Unfortunately it's looking like that kind of fusion ("advanced aneutronic fuels", because the boron-proton reaction doesn't give off a bunch of neutrons) isn't feasible, for very fundamental reasons. A damned shame, I say.
I agree with your sentiment that NASA needs to change; however, having worked there I'd say what they need most is for Congress and the Prez to provide a good goal/vision, with the $$$ to back it up.
Maybe that smugness would be justified, IF we could get a guy up right now. Of course, at the moment we're relying on the Russians to keep the space station crewed. So call me sometime at the end of '04.
Never mind that one - I want to know what the completely blank key does.(upper left corner, between Help and F1). Auto-destruct? Auto-porn download? Coffee? Oral sex?
You had phones? In my day all we had was a pair of tin cans and some taut string. I had to wake up at 4 am to shovel coal to run the steam-powered computer so I could log in using a 1-baud modem..
You have a point. As much as I hate working with Windows (I grew up with workstations, and unless I can have about 6 virtual desktops I don't consider the OS to be a useful tool. WHY doesn't Windows provide that?), I have to admit that when it comes to installing new hardware, they have Linux beat. Of course, there are obvious reasons - Microsoft forces hardware vendors to provide drivers that work, the way Linux can't. That notwithstanding, it's hard to argue the appeal of a system where as soon as you plug in a new digital camera it pops up a dialog asking if you want to download the pictures.
I've had a terrible time getting a wireless card to work under Linux; in Windows the driver install comes up trivially. Of course, once it asked if I wanted to connect to the internet to download the driver - to my wireless (and only) network card! Kafkaesque...
I for one welcome the prospect of going to sleep by the light of a Communist moon. :)
Seriously, though - it's the only way we'd ever get people interested enough to do more than keep NASA barely on life support.
We're talking a lot of mass, so I'm not so sure we could actually do this. Lets run the numbers again.
Assume we want to push the asteroid about 10,000km, and we have 15 years warning. 0.5*a*t^2 = 1e7 m gives a = 9e-11 m/s2, or 9.2e-12 G. So you don't need a lot of accelleration. However, lets assume it's a 1 km diameter rock -> a mass of about 1.5 billion tons. So to get the required acceleration requires 141 N of thrust, for 15 years.
Now, the NSTAR ion thruster on DS1 had a thrust of about 0.09 N, and a rated power of 2 kW. So we'd need something like 3 MW of power. As for propellant consumption, assuming a specific impulse of about 3000 (pretty standard for ion engines); you'd need a total of 2200 tons of e.g. Xenon. For comparison, the international space station has less than 100 KW of power and masses less than 100 tons.
So deflecting an asteroid is actually a rather big project - it's not trivial (as in we're nowehere even close, and it would required Manhattan-project level investment to get there). Maybe we could do it, maybe we couldn't. But that's assuming 15 years warning, and the smallest possible margin. If something popped up with just a few years warning, and more mass, we'd all be utterly screwed.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Oil will run out - there is a finite quantity of it in the ground after all. If we keep burning oil, sooner or later it will run out. In the extreme, even if the whole planet had oceans of oil (Titan anyone?) it could run out. Is that so hard to understand? Or do you think the Earth is so big as to be infinite? When you make a grand assertion like "never" you have to expect to get called on it. Of course we can argue nuances like "cheap oil" vs. "every drop on the planet", "will run out" vs. "can run out" etc. But the point remains, if we keep burning oil, it will run out. I did not abandon the point, I considered it proven and moved on.
Your point is different; you seem to be saying that it won't run out because we will stop burning it, i.e. it will just get so expensive that we switch to alternatives. In other words, "cheap oil" will run out. In the end there is little difference - in two hundred years we won't have an economy dependent on oil.
Beyond that, I point out that what the economy looks like once there is no more oil depends on the path taken to get there; if we invest in alternatives early we will likely have a better alternative at that point. If we push off investment we may be stuck with nothing but poor choices (coal, intermittent solar (no storage) etc). That is the additional wrinkle to your argument that you either missed or ignored. Remember, the time lag for alternatives to be available may be quite long (50 years for fusion).
This is where we get into a situation where basic economics as tought in first-year courses (ideal markets, perfect information and accurate predictions of the future, supply matching demand at some price etc) can be misleading or wrong. For example, they often don't include the effects of time lag. If you've ever studied servo systems or control theory you'll know that time lag is a great way to introduce oscillations into a system. If you haven't, look it up.
I don't care to get into an argument about our argument. But I do think it inappropriate to be throwing around the words you did. Behaviour like that belongs in the "-1 Troll" category, which may be where you feel most comfortable. You try to justify your foul mouth with additional personal attacks, but I don't buy it. If you have a problem with my arguments, try and counter them at an adult level. Try also to stick to the argument rather than discuss my rhetorical technique.
Too bad we can't take this outside, though.
The point is that the alternatives, though they exist, are nowhere near as cheap as fossil fuels (at least not at present; much more research is needed before they ever become so). Yes, as oil becomes more expensive they look better by comparison. But in an absolute sense they are more expensive; which means it's more expensive to heat your house, build your car, run your computer etc. This will drag down the economy. The end result depends on how you got there - did you invest in research early or late? That's path dependence.
In other - simpler - words, we may be so busy chopping down wood to heat our homes that we don't have time to perfect fusion.
Oh yes it will. There is not an infinite supply (even at infinte price), at least not on this planet. Estimates for how much oil is available at current extraction costs vary hugely, but lie somewhere between 10 and 80 years.
Your nice little first-year econ class example sounds great, but you've neglected what economists call "externalities" and "path dependence" and try to forget. Specifically, it may well be that as oil becomes more scarce, prices rise faster than alternatives can ramp up production, leading to price spikes and economic damage. In fact, many of the alternative energy sources require substantial long-term, sustained R&D investment before they can actually produce economically viable energy. It is quite possible that as economies contract due to rising enery costs they will simply not have the means to develop these alternative sources (Imagine trying to start a crash program to get fusion in five years when oil is at $150/barrel).
Not to mention that it is far from clear that most of the alternatives can even supply the needed energy.
Yes, I damned well belive the Moon landings happened. I've done chemical analysis on the rocks; I've met some of the astronauts; my best friends dad helped build the LEM at Grumman. So yeah, they happened.
I'm not sure what annoys me more: idiots like you who don't think it ever happened, or the idiots in the White House, Congress and the public who didn't think it's important enough to keep funding.
I guess we're living in a society where our greatest achievements lie behind us, rather than ahead of us. In that situation I shouldn't be surprised that there are fools like you who try to make themselves feel better by claiming the achievements of the past never happened.
Actually, we have three. And they have an annoying tendency to blow up and kill their crews, and hence they're currently grounded. Not much to be proud of.
In more than 35 years of spaceflight the Russians have had something like 4 fatalities, and 3 (?) accidents (including one where the crew survived a booster failure in mid-flight - the stage didn't separate). In comparison to the U.S. record this is remarkably good. They have also flown more people for longer periods of time.
Since the past 5 years, I'd say that we've probably done about the same number of manned launches.
The same number of launches as the U.S., with a total budget of something like 200 million dollars, a factor of 30 less money. That's pretty impressive. The simple turth is that the U.S. is a second-rate space power.
I know this is slightly off topic, but I figure I have a decent chance of actually getting this read by someone who knows something about cell phones and how the base stations are programmed. So here goes..
I've noticed that when I'm on the phone for more than about 5-10 minutes the probability that I get dropped goes up dramatically (AT&T phone in the Boston area). Even if I don't get dropped, the quality of the link drops, with lots of hash and breakups. After I get dropped, if I immediately call again, the call comes through clear as a bell. That sort of thing has happened at least a dozen times in the last week. I'm not driving or walking when this happens, so it's not a question of getting closer to an antenna.
Do the base stations have a priority listing where they will drop old calls to accept new ones?
Whatever. I remember making frequent comments around mid-99 that this dot-com stuff was bogus and wouldn't last. How could yahoo have a larger market cap than Boeing, when they don't make anything? The boom-bust cycle has occurred many times in the past, and is not a difficult prediction to make. In fact, the whole "everything is cyclical" argument is not new (that's why it's called a "business cycle" after all). So that's a pretty meaningless prediction.
A few days or a week before the 9/11 attacks, he made the prediction that a terrorist attack would occur on American soil.
So did many other talking heads and other important people. Including Clintons national security advisor, in a briefing to the current NSA. Again, terrorist attacks had happened before (McVeigh, anyone?) and it's a safe bet to predict that they will happen again.
Prechter also predicts deflation.
Well, that's not hard to predict given that Japan has been seeing deflation for about 5 years now. Again, it's a definite possibility at the extreme end of the business cycle.
And now a more general comment: why do these "new sciences" always get announced with a big fanfare and the publication of a zillion-page book that almost no-one will actually read (the recent book by that Mathematica-guy comes to mind)? I would have thought that a branch of science will tend to develop over time, and thanks to the effort of many people. It may start with the publication of a few ground-breaking papers (Einstein comes to mind), but then others take the basic principles and run with them (in Quantum we had Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, Feynman, etc etc). It wasn't like one of those guys labored in unappreciated obscurity for 30 years and then emerged from his basement with a finished "new science". That sort of claim should be setting off peoples crank-alarms.