Yes. Slow intersteller trips. The ship would probably be passed en route by faster ships. However, it is an easy way to send huge quatities of materials to other stars. .1 C would be nicer for fast manned missions or probes. That would mean 40 years to Alpha Centauri. That is doable, but would require an enormous amount of fuel.
To reach.1 C, you can use several different methods.
1. Fission fragment sail or reactor. Uses thin films of highly fissionable Americium as fuel.
The fission fragments from the nuclear reaction escape at very high velocities, propelling the ship very fast. You can't use plutonium in this setup because it cannot fission when formed into thin films. You need thin films for fission fragment propulsion so the fragments can escape.
This setup can reach a specific impulse of 1,000,000,000. 2,000 times more efficient than chemical rockets. However, this gets too expensive when you scale it up beyond a small probe. Americium is fscking expensive, millions of dollars per ounce.
2. Fusion
Fusion's great. Once power fusion reactors come on line, the fuel will be cheap.
There are several different fusion concepts. The closest to being realized is the ant-matter catalyzed fusion type. It blows up little fusion pellets at it's rear. This uses fusionable pellets of Deuterium and Tritium that are surrounded by uranium. A very small quatity of antimatter is fired at it. This starts the fission which then starts the fusion and causes the whole thing to explode.
This could be built in 20 years. Everything is here except the antimatter. You only need a few micrograms of antimatter. We could be producing that pretty soon. It could theoretically reach 200,000 seconds.
There are other types of fusion rockets that could reach 1 million seconds. These use magnets to confine the fusion plasma. Some is leaked out the back for propulsion. However, it's hard to build a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Plus the magnet weight (1,000 tons) would have to be reduced dramatically to be practical at all. That's about 50 to 70 years away.
3. Antimatter-matter Efficiencies of 10 million seconds A helluva long ways away. We don't know how to begin producing enough anti-matter.
4. Beamed energy
In the distant future, the best thing for fast intersteller flight.
Just a couple decades down the road, we could build Robert Forward's starwisp probe. It would be 6 kilometers wide and be made of a fine mesh. It would weigh 42 grams, if you can believe that. It would be easily propelled to.2 C by a 10 gigawatt beam of microwaves from an orbital power station. Very easy to do, especialy if we have nanotech.
For manned flights, you need gigantic solar arrays around the sun. Here, I'll talk about a project for a Class 2 civilization. That means one able to harness the power of an entire sun. Say, 100 years down the road, we decide to have thin-film photovoltaics constructed around the sun. That would capture around 1 octillion watts. Anyway, autonomous self-constructing robots and nanobots would get the materails off a large asteroid and begin constructing this. Being very thin solar cells, you'd only need maybe 1,000 square miles of materials. After a few years, we would have a working Dyson sphere.
Some of the power, maybe a quintilion watts could be funneled into lasers and broadcasted to a giant gold-foil sail the size of texas or the US or even much larger. The laser would be able to propel it to.9999 C. The gold-foil sail would be only a couple atoms thick, and supported by a scaffolding of nanotubes. The sail would weigh only a few thousand tons. The payload could be a million tons. That sounds fantastic, but an extremely advanced civilization with nanotech and AI could easily do it.
Anyway,
.01 C like you can reach with the VASIMR would be excellent for intersteller resupply, or sending huge numbers of people for colonization.
Anyway, nuclear rockets are a great idea. A better one, you may have heard me harp on this before, is VASIMR. It is a plama rocket with a nuke power source. It will be around ten times as efficient as the nuke rockers. However, the VASIMR, unlike the nuclear rocket, it does not have enough thrust to launch from earth. It is more a slow and steady engine that runs for weeks instead of minutes. But the burnout velocity of a VASIMR can be vastly higher than a chemical rocket.
The nuclear rocket can provide cheap, efficient space launches with not too much radioactive fallout. In fact, if a nuclear rocket using helium as a propelent will produce no fallout at all. Since a nuclear rocket is about twice or three times as efficient as a chemical rocket, the amount of fuel you'd need would be slashed dramatically. A nuke rocket launch might only use 10% or less of the fuel that a conventional booster would.
It's under R&D.
It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That is many times better than the ~1500 seconds you'd get with the nuclear rockets.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development. Read about the VASIMR here --
Yeah. I know the VASIMR is worthless for launches. But I also think this ablative thing is worthless for launches. You would have to have a mega-billion dollar laser to launch it. That would eliminate any cost savings over say, a spaceplane.
I use Mandrake 8.1. It's great. But it's not surprising me that they are having budget problems. It's just hard to make money when you give your software away for free. It aint a good business model. This is a company who recoups the time and money of making a wonderful OS by trying to get people to be members of their club and getting them to buy Linux t-shirts and coffee mugs. I love linux, but I sure as hell wouldn't go into the software business giving my product away for free.
But don't get me wrong. I am very, very, very thankful for what the folks at Mandrake are doing. I just don't think they are going to make the big bucks off of it, though.
Anyway, just do little things for Mandrake to help them along. Join that Mandrake club. Or buy the 8.2 CD pack instead of d/ling the ISO.
A better engine than this one is the VASIMR. It is a plasma engine that is under development. It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. I really don't think that the ablative engine that this article was about would be good to launch vehicles into space. You would need a fscking huge laser to propel the ablative rocket into space. The cost of the giant laser would outweigh the cost savings of not using a huge amount of rocket fuel.
For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That's even better than this ablative engine.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development. Read about the VASIMR here
No. They were developing the bomb. You find a lot of stuff about it. Also, they were developing bio weapons,too. They unleashed the bubonic plague on some city in Manchuria just to test it. They could have easily attacked us with biological weapons, causing as much death as an A-bomb attack. However, the testing of the bomb in Manchuria may or may not have happened. I'd venture to guess it did not.
Second, is using hydrogen (fusion) bombs. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission weapons. After detonation of a fission weapon, there is much more lingering radioactive material with a long half life. Hydrogen bombs, on the other hand, disperse a lot of radiation upon detonation, but they don't scatter a lot of radioactive material. And what is scattered has a short half-life.
You'd be right on that, except H-bombs aren't pure fusion. There is a good amount of plutonium to implode the Deuterium and Tritium to get the fusion reaction started.
On most larger bombs of several megatons, it's even worse. There is a thick layer of U-238 under the skin of most fusion bombs. What happens is that some U-239 implodes, making the D-T explode in a fusion fireball. However, in the intense heat and pressure of a thermonuclear reaction, the layer of U-238, which is usualy not a fissionable isotope, fissions and explodes, dramatically increasing the power of the bomb.
A fusion bomb has more uranium and plutonium than a fission bomb, oddly enough.
However, the bomb blast area is still livible again very quickly. The very radioactive fission products of a bomb decay quickly. An area with a fusion bomb blowing up on it would be liveable again as soon as the fallout cleared.
Look at that nuclear testing area in Nevada. 900 bombs were blown up there over the years. But there is no danger at all if you walked around in the blast zones, provided you aren't shot on sight. (-:
Well, we could have invaded mainland Japan instead, which probably would have ended in a much larger total loss. Civilians would still be killed, as would have many American and Australian soldiers.
I agree.
First of all, do you remember Okinawa? 50,000 Americans dead and about 100,000 Japanese soldiers dead, as well as most of the local populace. That was an outlying island outside of Japan. They fought very fiercely for it.
Can you imagine how they would of defended mainland Japan? These were people who thought their emporer was a god. They would have fought to the very last man to defend their country. They were training women and children to fight the Americans with pointed sticks in preparation for the invasion.
Also, we would have firebombed the shyte out of Japan during the invasion. That alone would have killed over a million.
I've heard estimates of around a 500,000 Americans dying and 15 million Japanese dying had we invaded Japan. That is a far cry from the 450,000 killed by the bombs.
In the closing days of the war, the Japanese were developing the Atomic Bomb. Had we given them another year by invading Japan, they might have dropped the bomb on us!!! They were getting pretty close by the end of the war. There is even some sketchy evidence that points to them testing a very small one in Manchuria.
Also, the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities killed many times more people that the bombs. In one night, I forgot when, they firebombed Tokyo so much that more people died in that one night than in the bombing of Nagasaki.
Anyway, yes the bombs killed a lot of people. But IMHO, nothing compared to what would have happened had we invaded.
First of all, before you call me a Bush brown-noser or troll or idiot or dipshit or anything, I hate nuclear weapons.
They are really the only thing that could send us back to the stone age. A major nuclear war could destroy enough cities to collapse our delicate network of civilzation and send us to the Neolithic. However, the nuclear winter thing is unfounded. And the radiation from a couple hundred bombs would only hurt you if you were in 50 miles. Anyway,
My point is that people think that we are now suddenly changing our policy to allow the use of nuclear weapons at the slightest provocation. This isn't really true.
The DoD is just updating it's nuclear strategy. Political climates are constantly changing. Things today, especialy since 9-11, are much different than 10 years ago during the cold war. They are just updating their strategy for the new threats, such as being hit by a nuclear weapon from a rogue state like Iraq. They do this all the time. This is the first time it's been published, thats all.
It's not the end of the world. Just a change in policy. I don't think it's a bad idea to let N. Korea and Iraq know that we might use nuclear weapons against them if they mess with us or our allies. It's a good deterrent.
I personally think the DoD is just bluffing so China doesn't invade Taiwan, Iraq doesn't attack Israel, etc. I really don't think we would ever use nukes unless someone attacked us.
I also have one more rant: A little known fact, but Taiwan would most likely win if China invaded them.
Taiwan has about 350,000 troops. China has 3 million.
However, China's troops are useless because they wouldn't be able to get more than about 500,000 troops over to Taiwan. They don't have enough landing craft. Also, China's troops are poorly trained. Probably 1 Taiwanese soldier is equal to 4 Chinese soldiers, due to the vastly better training. Less than half have guns. Also, their air force and navy suck. Taiwan has a bigger air force and navy. China only has some ratty 30 year old MIGS. They don't have any aircraft carriers and their destroyers suck.
Compare that to Taiwan: They have 350,000 highly trained troops. They ALL have guns. They have the latest American fighters. They have the best ships that they got from America. Their army would stomp the few Chinese that could get over the Straight of Taiwan. Their navy would completely whop the Chinese.
The invasion of Taiwan would be mainly a sea and air war. Taiwan clearly wins out over China in both respects. And, due to the poor quality of the Chinese army, the Taiwanese would still win out on land, too.
However, the Chonese are increasing their military fast. In a few year they could easily have the capability to invade Taiwan. They just don't now.
1. We need an inexpensive space plane. To get research dollars, stop the ISS and shuttle progranm. Right now, they arent' doing anything usefull, and the shuttle costs $500 million a flight.
2. Use the money we saved to fund the X-42 program. This is a spaceplane that uses a scramjet engine to reach about mach 15, then uses a rocket engine for the rest. It will reduce lauch costs to under $1000 dollars a pound. Which is a factor of 10 improvement over the shuttle.
3. Now that we got our spaceplane, research the mars mission. Research a good engine suitable for the mission. Like the VASIMR hydrogen plasma engine, which is under development. It will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
4. Anyway, now that we have the suitable tech to get to Mars, we can do it. You can have maybe three launches of 50 million dollars each to launch the parts for the spaceship. You could then assemble it in orbit. Then you go on your merry way to Mars, get there in 2 months, stay for a month, and come back.
A VASIMR-powered spacecraft can be reused. After the Mars mission, it would just have to be refueled and resupplied, and it could be sent out again on another mission to Mars or even Saturn or Jupiter, with the addition of extra fuel tanks.
Washington state residents have voted TWICE in a row now to cut taxs seriously.
Yeah, I live in Yakima, WA. Those idiots!
Initiative 695 made all license tab fees go to $35 per year.
Quite a few shortsighted idiots in Washington thought this: "Hey, I pay 200 dollars for my tab! This is going to take it to $35. Wowee!! I don't know where the money for roads, local governments, and subsidies for my job will come from, but who cares, $35!!!"
People seem not to understand that if taxes are cut, the gov't won't be able to provide all the services their used to.
But anyway, no matter how much food we give to africa, a many will still be starving. Just think of what happened in Somalia. Corrupt gov'ts and militias take the food and the people still insist on having a lot of kids. Do you know that there is an average of 6.5 children per woman in Nigeria!! If you live in a famine and drought-stricken nation, you should know that there is not enough food for everyone to have 6 kids!!!!
NASA's budget is tiny compared to our oversized military. They spend a billion dollars on every friggin' stealth bomber! And bush wants to buy 45 more stealth bombers! A series of missions to mars (using the inexpensive Mars Direct plan) would only take 20 billion dollars. That's less than half the cost of Bushes' recent order of stealth bombers! We could easily cut military spending by 1% and that would give NASA plenty of money.
Opera is fast, uses a fraction of the system resources the Moz and IE do (around 4 megs of ram, compared to 20). It almost never crashes. When it does, it automatically takes you to the last page you viewed. Also, no spyware works with it.
However, the mozilla interface is just badass. (^;
Say 1/2 of all suns have a planetary system. (a resonable guess). Around 2/3 of these will probably have some rocky planets orbiting in the Goldilocks Zone. Often, there will be multiple rocky planets. Lets figure l rocky planet per star system, on average.(In our system, that's from Venus to Mars.)
Around 2/3 of these rocky planets will have a stable orbit that is not too elliptical.
Around 1/2 of these will have a thick atmosphere.
Around 1/5 of these will have an atmosphere suited to primordial life.
Around 1/3 of these will have liquid water.
Around 2/3-1/2 of these will have primordial life.
So the chances of any given star system having primitive life is around.7%.
Maybe the chance of finding complex multicellular life is around.1%.
The chance of finding intelligent life is lower still.
I once calculated, with Drake's equation, that there is an average of one technical civilization per cube of space 4000 light-years on a side. So are chances of finding life in other star systems is quite good, but our chances of finding intelligent life is pretty dim.
If we heard a signal, by the time our reply got back the civilization would probably be gone.
On the other hand, I think my.7% estimate of simple life is actually kind of conservative. In our solar system, 1 planet has developed life, while Mars most likely used to have life. So that's two planets in our system alone that have or used to have life.
This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed. The toy is very simple to build, going together in minutes, and is very simple to understand and explain, and yet fascinating to watch and to use.
The photo above shows six frames of video showing this toy in action. Each frame shows 1/30th of a second. In the first frame, a steel ball starts rolling towards a magnet taped to a wooden ruler. In the second frame, a second ball can be seen speeding between the rightmost two magnets. By the third frame, the accelerator has sped up so much that the ball that is seen leaving the left side of the device is just a blur as it smashes into the target. One ball, starting at rest, has caused another ball to leave the device at a very high speed.
Click on image for larger view
The materials are simple. We need a wooden ruler that has a groove in the top in which a steel ball can roll easily. Any piece of wood or aluminum or brass with a groove will work. We chose the ruler because they are easy to find around the house or at school or at a local stationery store.
We need some sticky tape. Again, almost any kind will do. Here we use Scotch brand transparent tape, but vinyl electrical tape works just as well.
We need four magnets. Most any type will do, but the stronger the magnets are, the faster the balls will go. Here we use the super strong gold-plated neodymium-iron-boron magnets we have made available in our catalog for the other projects. They work great.
We will also need nine steel balls, with a diameter that is a close match to the height of the magnets. We use 5/8 inch diameter nickel plated steel balls from our catalog.
The only tool we will need is a sharp knife for trimming the tape.
Click on image for larger view
We start by taping the first magnet to the ruler at the 2.5 inch mark. The distance is somewhat arbitrary -- we wanted to get all four magnets on a one foot ruler. Feel free to experiment with the spacing later.
Click on image for larger view
With the sharp knife, trim off any excess tape. Be careful, since the knife will be strongly attracted to the magnet.
It is very important that you keep the magnets from jumping together. They are made of a brittle sintered material that shatters like a ceramic. Tape the ruler to the table temporarily, so that it doesn't jump up to the next magnet as you tape the second magnet to the ruler.
Click on image for larger view
Continue taping the magnets to the ruler, leaving 2.5 inches between the magnets.
When all four magnets are taped to the ruler, it is time to load the device with the balls.
Click on image for larger view
To the right of each magnet, place two steel balls. Arrange a target to the right of the device, so the ball does not roll down the street and get lost.
To fire the gun, set a steel ball in the groove to the left of the leftmost magnet. Let the ball go. If it is close enough to the magnet, it will start rolling by itself, and hit the magnet.
Click on image for larger view
When the gun fires, it will happen too fast to see. The ball on the right will shoot away from the gun, and hit the target with considerable force. Our one foot long version is designed so the speed is not enough to hurt someone, and you can use your hand or foot as a target.
How does it do that?
When you release the first ball, it is attracted to the first magnet. It hits the magnet with a respectable amount of force, and a kinetic energy we will call "1 unit".
The kinetic energy of the ball is transfered to the magnet, and then to the ball that is touching it on the right, and then to the ball that is touching that one. This transfer of kinetic energy is familiar to billiards players -- when the cue ball hits another ball, the cue ball stops and the other ball speeds off.
The third ball is now moving with a kinetic energy of 1 unit. But it is moving towards the second magnet. It picks up speed as the second magnet pulls it closer. When it hits the second magnet, it is moving nearly twice as fast as the first ball.
The third ball hits the magnet, and the fifth ball starts to move with a kinetic energy of 2 units. It speeds up as it nears the third magnet, and hits with of 3 units of kinetic energy. This causes the seventh ball to speed off towards the last magnet. As it gets drawn to the last magnet, it speeds up to 4 units of kinetic energy.
The kinetic energy is now transfered to the last ball, which speeds off at 4 units, to hit the target.
Another way of looking at the mechanism
When the device is all set up and ready to be triggered, we can see that there are four balls that are touching their magnets. These balls are at what physicists call the "ground state". It takes energy to move them away from the magnets.
But each of these balls has another ball touching it. These second balls are not at the ground state. They are each 5/8ths of an inch from a magnet. They are easier to move than the balls that are touching the magnet.
If we were to take a ball that was touching a magnet, and pull it away from the magnet until it was 5/8ths of an inch away, we would be adding energy to the ball. The ball would be pulling towards the magnet with some considerable force. We could get the energy back by letting the ball go.
After the gun has fired, the situation is different. Now each of the balls is touching a magnet. There is one ball on each side of each magnet. Each ball is in its ground state, and has given up the energy that was stored by being 5/8ths of an inch from a magnet. That energy has gone into the last ball, which uses it to destroy the target.
Speed and kinetic energy
The kinetic energy of an object is defined as its mass times the square of its velocity. As each magnet pulls on a ball, it adds kinetic energy to the ball linearly.
But the speed does not add up linearly. If we have 4 magnets, the kinetic energy is 4, but the speed goes up as the square root of the kinetic energy. As we add more magnets, the speed goes up by a smaller amount each time. But the distance the ball will roll, and the damage it causes to what it hits, is a function of the kinetic energy, and thus a function of how many magnets we use.
We can keep scaling up the gun until the kinetic energy gets so high that the last magnet is shattered by the impact. After that, adding more magnets will not do much good.
Why a circular track will not be a perpetual motion device
I have been getting a lot of mail asking what would happen if we made the track circular. Would we get free energy? Would the balls keep accelerating forever?
I have been tempted to reply with the famous quote: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those who understand the second law of thermodynamics, and those who don't".
However, I am not the kind of person to leave an inquiring mind unsatisfied, and it is more productive (and kind) to explain in a little more depth what is going on.
Suppose you made a circular track, and put two balls after each magnet. When the last ball is released, it encounters a magnet that has two balls at the ground state. There is no energy to be had from this magnet. The ball just bounces back.
Now suppose you had placed three balls after each magnet. When the last ball is released, it hits a ball that is 5/8ths inch from the magnet. It has not gained much momentum, because most of the momentum gained is in the last half inch as the magnet pulls much stronger on things that are closer. But the ball has enough energy from previous accelerations to release the next ball. However, that ball has less energy than the ball that caused it to release. It may have enough energy to release another ball or two, but each ball that is released has less energy than before, and eventually the chain stops.
You can show by inductive logic that no matter how many balls you stack in front of each magnet, eventually the system stops.
To estimate the losses due to heating the balls as they compress when hit, consider a plastic tube standing upright on a table. Place one steel ball at the bottom of the tube. Now drop another ball into the tube, so it hits the ball at the bottom, and bounces back up.
Now measure how high the ball bounced. If it bounces halfway back up, the losses are 50%. Perform the experiment for yourself with the balls from the Gauss Rifle. How high does your ball bounce? Send me mail with your results.
I never ever give out my email address to any website or company. I have a spam hotmail account for when I have to give an email address.
But I use a charter.net email address as my primary account for everything else. I have never gotten any spam.
There are some natural lasers formed by excited gas clouds around the universe. They are monochromatic but have no beam. They just emit light in all directions in one wavelengh
Well that's just dandy. I reformatted my drive the other day. I thougt about burning star office to a CD. Then I thought "Nah, im not wasting a CD. Ill just d/l it again". shit
There are the biologists who planeted fur in the forest to have it protected, but since when does the truth matter? PLEASE, don't bother us with the FACTS! What? What's that? the ice layers at the poles are thickening, not melting?
Thank You! An intelligent post! I'm glad to see someone is not brown-nosing the eco freaks.
Compare Lomborg's minor errors to glaring scientific errors or outright lies commited by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace publications, as well as studies by "Green" scientists.
As an aside, lets just apply Occam's Razor. Here are the two possible alternatives:
Lomborg is wrong
There is a massive (indeed, worldwide) conspiracy of scientists, suppressing their real knowledge, intent only on scare mongering to preserve their funding.
Dont' overapply Occam's Razor. You could say the simplest explanation for you seeing the technological wonder of your computer is that you are hallucinating.
Actually, most scientists, indeed, most people, would agree with Lomborg. The majority of scientists do not agree with Greenpeace.
Also, many environmentalists do have stuff to gain from scare-tactics. Eco-lawyers make money off of enviromental settlements. Heads of Org's such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make tons of money with lawsuits and donations.
Actually, 15,000 scientists signed the Petition Project, which disputes human-caused global warming. Most good scientists think that global warming is not human caused.
If you don't have any kids though, its' great! Pollute all we want. Dump gasoline on lakes and set it on fire, just for fun! Poach grizzly bears! Leave a gray, smoking shell for the strangers that will come after us!
I'm just kidding though.;^) We need to protect the environment. Please, please, don't mod me down!
Actualy, the ozone hole has been disappearing for the past couple of years. We have only been monitoring the ozone layer for a few decades. It's stupid to say that freon emissions, for sure, caused the hole. It is most likely just natural fluctuations. Just saying the ozone is dissapearing from our meager 40 years of studying it is like watching the ocean tide going out and concluding that the ocean is dissapearing.
Which brings me to my next point: Global Warming.
We are having global warming. There is no question of that. The question is what is it caused by. Little known fact, but volcanism emits much more greenhouse gas than industry. More than likely, we're just entering into another warm period. Warm and cool periods (not ice ages or hell ages, much more mild) run in cycles about every 500 years. We entered into the present cool period in the middle ages, so we should be due to come out of it right about now.
Some environmentalists are well meaning. Others like "environmental lawyers", and the Sierra Club and Greenpeace head hanchos, are just in it for the money. A lot of things they do are counter-productive, like their opposition to nuclear power, even though it is cleaner and safer than coal.
Some environmentalists just like to whine about some issue. They may not be well informed about the subject, but they have a strong opinion anyway.
Take nuclear power: It is cheap and produces no pollution. A chernobly-scale meltdown (killing 31 according to the WHO) could not happen in our reactors. Nuclear waste does not last for 30,000 years. The highly radioactive fission byproducts decay in several decades. The rest of the waste is not highly radioactive. It decays to the level of Uranium ore in about 400 years. Also, it's not stored in thin metal drums. With Yucca Mountain, it will stored in thick lead, surrounded by thick steel, all inside a concrete-lined underground cavern. It's not going to contaminate the groundwater. If it somehow did contaminate the groundwater, no worries. Yucca mountain is in the middle of a restricted area where they have blown up hundreds of bombs anyway. Anyway, Plutonium Oxide like you have in nuke waste is not highly toxic. You can eat a few grams of it no problem. It passes right out of your system. Compare that to coal, mountains of arsenic and cyanide laced toxic ash that lasts forever not just 400 years. Also coal kills around 50000 each year in the US. That's like having hundreds of Chernobyls. Little known fact, but according the this Oak Ridge Nat'l Laboratory study here coal power realeases more radiation each year than dozens of reactor fuel loadings.
That is just one example of environmentalists not putting their thinking-caps on.
Another is genetic engineering:
When food is genetically engineered, they put a specific gene in. They know what that gene does! Also, a gene codes for a protein, nothing more. You can't get a mutant killer pig from genetic engineering. This is in contrast to normal crossbreeding with different varieties. Crossbreeding mixes the whole genome. The output is random. Back in the 60's, crossbreeding produced a carrot that was slightly toxic. Genetic Engineering could never make such a mistake. It's not "frankenfood". Yes, BT corn with its nontoxic-to-humans BT insecticide, could kill monarch butterflies. But that's not as bad as spraying highly toxic instecticide from a plane. I'm sure sprayed insecticide kills many more butterflies. Another argument is that GM crops could "contaminate" local populations of plants. The danger is no greater than highly modified regular crops contaminating a wild genepool. Genetic engineering could go a long way toward solving food problems. Theyv
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Yes. Slow intersteller trips. The ship would probably be passed en route by faster ships. However, it is an easy way to send huge quatities of materials to other stars.
.1 C would be nicer for fast manned missions or probes. That would mean 40 years to Alpha Centauri. That is doable, but would require an enormous amount of fuel. .1 C, you can use several different methods.
.2 C by a 10 gigawatt beam of microwaves from an orbital power station. Very easy to do, especialy if we have nanotech. .9999 C. The gold-foil sail would be only a couple atoms thick, and supported by a scaffolding of nanotubes. The sail would weigh only a few thousand tons. The payload could be a million tons. That sounds fantastic, but an extremely advanced civilization with nanotech and AI could easily do it.
.01 C like you can reach with the VASIMR would be excellent for intersteller resupply, or sending huge numbers of people for colonization.
To reach
1. Fission fragment sail or reactor.
Uses thin films of highly fissionable Americium as fuel.
The fission fragments from the nuclear reaction escape at very high velocities, propelling the ship very fast. You can't use plutonium in this setup because it cannot fission when formed into thin films. You need thin films for fission fragment propulsion so the fragments can escape.
This setup can reach a specific impulse of 1,000,000,000. 2,000 times more efficient than chemical rockets. However, this gets too expensive when you scale it up beyond a small probe. Americium is fscking expensive, millions of dollars per ounce.
2. Fusion
Fusion's great. Once power fusion reactors come on line, the fuel will be cheap.
There are several different fusion concepts. The closest to being realized is the ant-matter catalyzed fusion type. It blows up little fusion pellets at it's rear. This uses fusionable pellets of Deuterium and Tritium that are surrounded by uranium. A very small quatity of antimatter is fired at it. This starts the fission which then starts the fusion and causes the whole thing to explode.
This could be built in 20 years. Everything is here except the antimatter. You only need a few micrograms of antimatter. We could be producing that pretty soon. It could theoretically reach 200,000 seconds.
There are other types of fusion rockets that could reach 1 million seconds. These use magnets to confine the fusion plasma. Some is leaked out the back for propulsion. However, it's hard to build a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Plus the magnet weight (1,000 tons) would have to be reduced dramatically to be practical at all. That's about 50 to 70 years away.
3. Antimatter-matter
Efficiencies of 10 million seconds
A helluva long ways away. We don't know how to begin producing enough anti-matter.
4. Beamed energy
In the distant future, the best thing for fast intersteller flight.
Just a couple decades down the road, we could build Robert Forward's starwisp probe. It would be 6 kilometers wide and be made of a fine mesh. It would weigh 42 grams, if you can believe that. It would be easily propelled to
For manned flights, you need gigantic solar arrays around the sun. Here, I'll talk about a project for a Class 2 civilization. That means one able to harness the power of an entire sun. Say, 100 years down the road, we decide to have thin-film photovoltaics constructed around the sun. That would capture around 1 octillion watts. Anyway, autonomous self-constructing robots and nanobots would get the materails off a large asteroid and begin constructing this. Being very thin solar cells, you'd only need maybe 1,000 square miles of materials. After a few years, we would have a working Dyson sphere.
Some of the power, maybe a quintilion watts could be funneled into lasers and broadcasted to a giant gold-foil sail the size of texas or the US or even much larger. The laser would be able to propel it to
Anyway,
Here is a link to that : here
Anyway, nuclear rockets are a great idea. A better one, you may have heard me harp on this before, is VASIMR. It is a plama rocket with a nuke power source. It will be around ten times as efficient as the nuke rockers. However, the VASIMR, unlike the nuclear rocket, it does not have enough thrust to launch from earth. It is more a slow and steady engine that runs for weeks instead of minutes. But the burnout velocity of a VASIMR can be vastly higher than a chemical rocket.
The nuclear rocket can provide cheap, efficient space launches with not too much radioactive fallout. In fact, if a nuclear rocket using helium as a propelent will produce no fallout at all. Since a nuclear rocket is about twice or three times as efficient as a chemical rocket, the amount of fuel you'd need would be slashed dramatically. A nuke rocket launch might only use 10% or less of the fuel that a conventional booster would.
It's under R&D.
It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That is many times better than the ~1500 seconds you'd get with the nuclear rockets.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development.
Read about the VASIMR here
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Yeah. I know the VASIMR is worthless for launches. But I also think this ablative thing is worthless for launches. You would have to have a mega-billion dollar laser to launch it. That would eliminate any cost savings over say, a spaceplane.
I use Mandrake 8.1. It's great. But it's not surprising me that they are having budget problems. It's just hard to make money when you give your software away for free. It aint a good business model. This is a company who recoups the time and money of making a wonderful OS by trying to get people to be members of their club and getting them to buy Linux t-shirts and coffee mugs. I love linux, but I sure as hell wouldn't go into the software business giving my product away for free.
But don't get me wrong. I am very, very, very thankful for what the folks at Mandrake are doing. I just don't think they are going to make the big bucks off of it, though.
Anyway, just do little things for Mandrake to help them along. Join that Mandrake club. Or buy the 8.2 CD pack instead of d/ling the ISO.
A better engine than this one is the VASIMR. It is a plasma engine that is under development. It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. I really don't think that the ablative engine that this article was about would be good to launch vehicles into space. You would need a fscking huge laser to propel the ablative rocket into space. The cost of the giant laser would outweigh the cost savings of not using a huge amount of rocket fuel.
For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That's even better than this ablative engine.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development.
Read about the VASIMR here
No. They were developing the bomb. You find a lot of stuff about it. Also, they were developing bio weapons,too. They unleashed the bubonic plague on some city in Manchuria just to test it. They could have easily attacked us with biological weapons, causing as much death as an A-bomb attack. However, the testing of the bomb in Manchuria may or may not have happened. I'd venture to guess it did not.
I'm sure that an radioactive, lifeless Earth would be very peaceful.
;-)
Yeah! I agree. There would be no wars!
Second, is using hydrogen (fusion) bombs. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission weapons. After detonation of a fission weapon, there is much more lingering radioactive material with a long half life. Hydrogen bombs, on the other hand, disperse a lot of radiation upon detonation, but they don't scatter a lot of radioactive material. And what is scattered has a short half-life.
You'd be right on that, except H-bombs aren't pure fusion. There is a good amount of plutonium to implode the Deuterium and Tritium to get the fusion reaction started.
On most larger bombs of several megatons, it's even worse. There is a thick layer of U-238 under the skin of most fusion bombs. What happens is that some U-239 implodes, making the D-T explode in a fusion fireball. However, in the intense heat and pressure of a thermonuclear reaction, the layer of U-238, which is usualy not a fissionable isotope, fissions and explodes, dramatically increasing the power of the bomb.
A fusion bomb has more uranium and plutonium than a fission bomb, oddly enough.
However, the bomb blast area is still livible again very quickly. The very radioactive fission products of a bomb decay quickly. An area with a fusion bomb blowing up on it would be liveable again as soon as the fallout cleared.
Look at that nuclear testing area in Nevada. 900 bombs were blown up there over the years. But there is no danger at all if you walked around in the blast zones, provided you aren't shot on sight. (-:
Well, we could have invaded mainland Japan instead, which probably would have ended in a much larger total loss. Civilians would still be killed, as would have many American and Australian soldiers.
I agree.
First of all, do you remember Okinawa? 50,000 Americans dead and about 100,000 Japanese soldiers dead, as well as most of the local populace. That was an outlying island outside of Japan. They fought very fiercely for it.
Can you imagine how they would of defended mainland Japan? These were people who thought their emporer was a god. They would have fought to the very last man to defend their country. They were training women and children to fight the Americans with pointed sticks in preparation for the invasion.
Also, we would have firebombed the shyte out of Japan during the invasion. That alone would have killed over a million.
I've heard estimates of around a 500,000 Americans dying and 15 million Japanese dying had we invaded Japan. That is a far cry from the 450,000 killed by the bombs.
In the closing days of the war, the Japanese were developing the Atomic Bomb. Had we given them another year by invading Japan, they might have dropped the bomb on us!!! They were getting pretty close by the end of the war. There is even some sketchy evidence that points to them testing a very small one in Manchuria.
Also, the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities killed many times more people that the bombs. In one night, I forgot when, they firebombed Tokyo so much that more people died in that one night than in the bombing of Nagasaki.
Anyway, yes the bombs killed a lot of people. But IMHO, nothing compared to what would have happened had we invaded.
First of all, before you call me a Bush brown-noser or troll or idiot or dipshit or anything, I hate nuclear weapons.
They are really the only thing that could send us back to the stone age. A major nuclear war could destroy enough cities to collapse our delicate network of civilzation and send us to the Neolithic. However, the nuclear winter thing is unfounded. And the radiation from a couple hundred bombs would only hurt you if you were in 50 miles. Anyway,
My point is that people think that we are now suddenly changing our policy to allow the use of nuclear weapons at the slightest provocation. This isn't really true.
The DoD is just updating it's nuclear strategy. Political climates are constantly changing. Things today, especialy since 9-11, are much different than 10 years ago during the cold war. They are just updating their strategy for the new threats, such as being hit by a nuclear weapon from a rogue state like Iraq. They do this all the time. This is the first time it's been published, thats all.
It's not the end of the world. Just a change in policy. I don't think it's a bad idea to let N. Korea and Iraq know that we might use nuclear weapons against them if they mess with us or our allies. It's a good deterrent.
I personally think the DoD is just bluffing so China doesn't invade Taiwan, Iraq doesn't attack Israel, etc. I really don't think we would ever use nukes unless someone attacked us.
I also have one more rant: A little known fact, but Taiwan would most likely win if China invaded them.
Taiwan has about 350,000 troops.
China has 3 million.
However, China's troops are useless because they wouldn't be able to get more than about 500,000 troops over to Taiwan. They don't have enough landing craft. Also, China's troops are poorly trained. Probably 1 Taiwanese soldier is equal to 4 Chinese soldiers, due to the vastly better training. Less than half have guns. Also, their air force and navy suck. Taiwan has a bigger air force and navy. China only has some ratty 30 year old MIGS. They don't have any aircraft carriers and their destroyers suck.
Compare that to Taiwan: They have 350,000 highly trained troops. They ALL have guns. They have the latest American fighters. They have the best ships that they got from America. Their army would stomp the few Chinese that could get over the Straight of Taiwan. Their navy would completely whop the Chinese.
The invasion of Taiwan would be mainly a sea and air war. Taiwan clearly wins out over China in both respects. And, due to the poor quality of the Chinese army, the Taiwanese would still win out on land, too.
However, the Chonese are increasing their military fast. In a few year they could easily have the capability to invade Taiwan. They just don't now.
Here's what we do to get to Mars:
1. We need an inexpensive space plane. To get research dollars, stop the ISS and shuttle progranm. Right now, they arent' doing anything usefull, and the shuttle costs $500 million a flight.
2. Use the money we saved to fund the X-42 program. This is a spaceplane that uses a scramjet engine to reach about mach 15, then uses a rocket engine for the rest. It will reduce lauch costs to under $1000 dollars a pound. Which is a factor of 10 improvement over the shuttle.
3. Now that we got our spaceplane, research the mars mission. Research a good engine suitable for the mission. Like the VASIMR hydrogen plasma engine, which is under development. It will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
4. Anyway, now that we have the suitable tech to get to Mars, we can do it. You can have maybe three launches of 50 million dollars each to launch the parts for the spaceship. You could then assemble it in orbit. Then you go on your merry way to Mars, get there in 2 months, stay for a month, and come back.
A VASIMR-powered spacecraft can be reused. After the Mars mission, it would just have to be refueled and resupplied, and it could be sent out again on another mission to Mars or even Saturn or Jupiter, with the addition of extra fuel tanks.
Read about the VASIMR here
Washington state residents have voted TWICE in a row now to cut taxs seriously.
Yeah, I live in Yakima, WA. Those idiots!
Initiative 695 made all license tab fees go to $35 per year.
Quite a few shortsighted idiots in Washington thought this: "Hey, I pay 200 dollars for my tab! This is going to take it to $35. Wowee!! I don't know where the money for roads, local governments, and subsidies for my job will come from, but who cares, $35!!!"
People seem not to understand that if taxes are cut, the gov't won't be able to provide all the services their used to.
But anyway, no matter how much food we give to africa, a many will still be starving. Just think of what happened in Somalia. Corrupt gov'ts and militias take the food and the people still insist on having a lot of kids. Do you know that there is an average of 6.5 children per woman in Nigeria!! If you live in a famine and drought-stricken nation, you should know that there is not enough food for everyone to have 6 kids!!!!
NASA's budget is tiny compared to our oversized military. They spend a billion dollars on every friggin' stealth bomber! And bush wants to buy 45 more stealth bombers! A series of missions to mars (using the inexpensive Mars Direct plan) would only take 20 billion dollars. That's less than half the cost of Bushes' recent order of stealth bombers! We could easily cut military spending by 1% and that would give NASA plenty of money.
I use Opera and Mozilla.
Opera is fast, uses a fraction of the system resources the Moz and IE do (around 4 megs of ram, compared to 20). It almost never crashes. When it does, it automatically takes you to the last page you viewed. Also, no spyware works with it.
However, the mozilla interface is just badass. (^;
I have 2 words to say about IE: It blows.
What do you think would have happened if we invaded Japan?
They were going to fight to the last man. The devastation would have killed many more people.
Also, did you know that in one day, we killed more people fire-bombing Tokyo than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Say 1/2 of all suns have a planetary system. (a resonable guess). Around 2/3 of these will probably have some rocky planets orbiting in the Goldilocks Zone. Often, there will be multiple rocky planets. Lets figure l rocky planet per star system, on average.(In our system, that's from Venus to Mars.)
.7%. .1%. .7% estimate of simple life is actually kind of conservative. In our solar system, 1 planet has developed life, while Mars most likely used to have life. So that's two planets in our system alone that have or used to have life.
Around 2/3 of these rocky planets will have a stable orbit that is not too elliptical.
Around 1/2 of these will have a thick atmosphere.
Around 1/5 of these will have an atmosphere suited to primordial life.
Around 1/3 of these will have liquid water.
Around 2/3-1/2 of these will have primordial life.
So the chances of any given star system having primitive life is around
Maybe the chance of finding complex multicellular life is around
The chance of finding intelligent life is lower still.
I once calculated, with Drake's equation, that there is an average of one technical civilization per cube of space 4000 light-years on a side. So are chances of finding life in other star systems is quite good, but our chances of finding intelligent life is pretty dim.
If we heard a signal, by the time our reply got back the civilization would probably be gone.
On the other hand, I think my
The Gauss Rifle:
A Magnetic Linear Accelerator
This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed. The toy is very simple to build, going together in minutes, and is very simple to understand and explain, and yet fascinating to watch and to use.
The photo above shows six frames of video showing this toy in action. Each frame shows 1/30th of a second. In the first frame, a steel ball starts rolling towards a magnet taped to a wooden ruler. In the second frame, a second ball can be seen speeding between the rightmost two magnets. By the third frame, the accelerator has sped up so much that the ball that is seen leaving the left side of the device is just a blur as it smashes into the target. One ball, starting at rest, has caused another ball to leave the device at a very high speed.
Click on image for larger view
The materials are simple. We need a wooden ruler that has a groove in the top in which a steel ball can roll easily. Any piece of wood or aluminum or brass with a groove will work. We chose the ruler because they are easy to find around the house or at school or at a local stationery store.
We need some sticky tape. Again, almost any kind will do. Here we use Scotch brand transparent tape, but vinyl electrical tape works just as well.
We need four magnets. Most any type will do, but the stronger the magnets are, the faster the balls will go. Here we use the super strong gold-plated neodymium-iron-boron magnets we have made available in our catalog for the other projects. They work great.
We will also need nine steel balls, with a diameter that is a close match to the height of the magnets. We use 5/8 inch diameter nickel plated steel balls from our catalog.
The only tool we will need is a sharp knife for trimming the tape.
Click on image for larger view
We start by taping the first magnet to the ruler at the 2.5 inch mark. The distance is somewhat arbitrary -- we wanted to get all four magnets on a one foot ruler. Feel free to experiment with the spacing later.
Click on image for larger view
With the sharp knife, trim off any excess tape. Be careful, since the knife will be strongly attracted to the magnet.
It is very important that you keep the magnets from jumping together. They are made of a brittle sintered material that shatters like a ceramic. Tape the ruler to the table temporarily, so that it doesn't jump up to the next magnet as you tape the second magnet to the ruler.
Click on image for larger view
Continue taping the magnets to the ruler, leaving 2.5 inches between the magnets.
When all four magnets are taped to the ruler, it is time to load the device with the balls.
Click on image for larger view
To the right of each magnet, place two steel balls. Arrange a target to the right of the device, so the ball does not roll down the street and get lost.
To fire the gun, set a steel ball in the groove to the left of the leftmost magnet. Let the ball go. If it is close enough to the magnet, it will start rolling by itself, and hit the magnet.
Click on image for larger view
When the gun fires, it will happen too fast to see. The ball on the right will shoot away from the gun, and hit the target with considerable force. Our one foot long version is designed so the speed is not enough to hurt someone, and you can use your hand or foot as a target.
How does it do that?
When you release the first ball, it is attracted to the first magnet. It hits the magnet with a respectable amount of force, and a kinetic energy we will call "1 unit".
The kinetic energy of the ball is transfered to the magnet, and then to the ball that is touching it on the right, and then to the ball that is touching that one. This transfer of kinetic energy is familiar to billiards players -- when the cue ball hits another ball, the cue ball stops and the other ball speeds off.
The third ball is now moving with a kinetic energy of 1 unit. But it is moving towards the second magnet. It picks up speed as the second magnet pulls it closer. When it hits the second magnet, it is moving nearly twice as fast as the first ball.
The third ball hits the magnet, and the fifth ball starts to move with a kinetic energy of 2 units. It speeds up as it nears the third magnet, and hits with of 3 units of kinetic energy. This causes the seventh ball to speed off towards the last magnet. As it gets drawn to the last magnet, it speeds up to 4 units of kinetic energy.
The kinetic energy is now transfered to the last ball, which speeds off at 4 units, to hit the target.
Another way of looking at the mechanism
When the device is all set up and ready to be triggered, we can see that there are four balls that are touching their magnets. These balls are at what physicists call the "ground state". It takes energy to move them away from the magnets.
But each of these balls has another ball touching it. These second balls are not at the ground state. They are each 5/8ths of an inch from a magnet. They are easier to move than the balls that are touching the magnet.
If we were to take a ball that was touching a magnet, and pull it away from the magnet until it was 5/8ths of an inch away, we would be adding energy to the ball. The ball would be pulling towards the magnet with some considerable force. We could get the energy back by letting the ball go.
After the gun has fired, the situation is different. Now each of the balls is touching a magnet. There is one ball on each side of each magnet. Each ball is in its ground state, and has given up the energy that was stored by being 5/8ths of an inch from a magnet. That energy has gone into the last ball, which uses it to destroy the target.
Speed and kinetic energy
The kinetic energy of an object is defined as its mass times the square of its velocity. As each magnet pulls on a ball, it adds kinetic energy to the ball linearly.
But the speed does not add up linearly. If we have 4 magnets, the kinetic energy is 4, but the speed goes up as the square root of the kinetic energy. As we add more magnets, the speed goes up by a smaller amount each time. But the distance the ball will roll, and the damage it causes to what it hits, is a function of the kinetic energy, and thus a function of how many magnets we use.
We can keep scaling up the gun until the kinetic energy gets so high that the last magnet is shattered by the impact. After that, adding more magnets will not do much good.
Why a circular track will not be a perpetual motion device
I have been getting a lot of mail asking what would happen if we made the track circular. Would we get free energy? Would the balls keep accelerating forever?
I have been tempted to reply with the famous quote: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those who understand the second law of thermodynamics, and those who don't".
However, I am not the kind of person to leave an inquiring mind unsatisfied, and it is more productive (and kind) to explain in a little more depth what is going on.
Suppose you made a circular track, and put two balls after each magnet. When the last ball is released, it encounters a magnet that has two balls at the ground state. There is no energy to be had from this magnet. The ball just bounces back.
Now suppose you had placed three balls after each magnet. When the last ball is released, it hits a ball that is 5/8ths inch from the magnet. It has not gained much momentum, because most of the momentum gained is in the last half inch as the magnet pulls much stronger on things that are closer. But the ball has enough energy from previous accelerations to release the next ball. However, that ball has less energy than the ball that caused it to release. It may have enough energy to release another ball or two, but each ball that is released has less energy than before, and eventually the chain stops.
You can show by inductive logic that no matter how many balls you stack in front of each magnet, eventually the system stops.
To estimate the losses due to heating the balls as they compress when hit, consider a plastic tube standing upright on a table. Place one steel ball at the bottom of the tube. Now drop another ball into the tube, so it hits the ball at the bottom, and bounces back up.
Now measure how high the ball bounced. If it bounces halfway back up, the losses are 50%. Perform the experiment for yourself with the balls from the Gauss Rifle. How high does your ball bounce? Send me mail with your results.
I never ever give out my email address to any website or company. I have a spam hotmail account for when I have to give an email address.
But I use a charter.net email address as my primary account for everything else. I have never gotten any spam.
There are some natural lasers formed by excited gas clouds around the universe. They are monochromatic but have no beam. They just emit light in all directions in one wavelengh
Well that's just dandy. I reformatted my drive the other day. I thougt about burning star office to a CD. Then I thought "Nah, im not wasting a CD. Ill just d/l it again". shit
There are the biologists who planeted fur in the forest to have it protected, but since when does the truth matter? PLEASE, don't bother us with the FACTS! What? What's that? the ice layers at the poles are thickening, not melting?
Thank You! An intelligent post!
I'm glad to see someone is not brown-nosing the eco freaks.
Compare Lomborg's minor errors to glaring scientific errors or outright lies commited by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace publications, as well as studies by "Green" scientists.
As an aside, lets just apply Occam's Razor. Here are the two possible alternatives:
Lomborg is wrong
There is a massive (indeed, worldwide) conspiracy of scientists, suppressing their real knowledge, intent only on scare mongering to preserve their funding.
Dont' overapply Occam's Razor. You could say the simplest explanation for you seeing the technological wonder of your computer is that you are hallucinating.
Actually, most scientists, indeed, most people, would agree with Lomborg. The majority of scientists do not agree with Greenpeace.
Also, many environmentalists do have stuff to gain from scare-tactics. Eco-lawyers make money off of enviromental settlements. Heads of Org's such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make tons of money with lawsuits and donations.
Actually, 15,000 scientists signed the Petition Project, which disputes human-caused global warming. Most good scientists think that global warming is not human caused.
If you don't have any kids though, its' great! Pollute all we want. Dump gasoline on lakes and set it on fire, just for fun! Poach grizzly bears! Leave a gray, smoking shell for the strangers that will come after us! ;^) We need to protect the environment. Please, please, don't mod me down!
I'm just kidding though.
Actualy, the ozone hole has been disappearing for the past couple of years. We have only been monitoring the ozone layer for a few decades. It's stupid to say that freon emissions, for sure, caused the hole. It is most likely just natural fluctuations. Just saying the ozone is dissapearing from our meager 40 years of studying it is like watching the ocean tide going out and concluding that the ocean is dissapearing.
Which brings me to my next point: Global Warming.
We are having global warming. There is no question of that. The question is what is it caused by. Little known fact, but volcanism emits much more greenhouse gas than industry. More than likely, we're just entering into another warm period. Warm and cool periods (not ice ages or hell ages, much more mild) run in cycles about every 500 years. We entered into the present cool period in the middle ages, so we should be due to come out of it right about now.
Some environmentalists are well meaning. Others like "environmental lawyers", and the Sierra Club and Greenpeace head hanchos, are just in it for the money. A lot of things they do are counter-productive, like their opposition to nuclear power, even though it is cleaner and safer than coal.
Some environmentalists just like to whine about some issue. They may not be well informed about the subject, but they have a strong opinion anyway.
Take nuclear power: It is cheap and produces no pollution. A chernobly-scale meltdown (killing 31 according to the WHO) could not happen in our reactors. Nuclear waste does not last for 30,000 years. The highly radioactive fission byproducts decay in several decades. The rest of the waste is not highly radioactive. It decays to the level of Uranium ore in about 400 years. Also, it's not stored in thin metal drums. With Yucca Mountain, it will stored in thick lead, surrounded by thick steel, all inside a concrete-lined underground cavern. It's not going to contaminate the groundwater. If it somehow did contaminate the groundwater, no worries. Yucca mountain is in the middle of a restricted area where they have blown up hundreds of bombs anyway. Anyway, Plutonium Oxide like you have in nuke waste is not highly toxic. You can eat a few grams of it no problem. It passes right out of your system. Compare that to coal, mountains of arsenic and cyanide laced toxic ash that lasts forever not just 400 years. Also coal kills around 50000 each year in the US. That's like having hundreds of Chernobyls. Little known fact, but according the this Oak Ridge Nat'l Laboratory study here coal power realeases more radiation each year than dozens of reactor fuel loadings.
That is just one example of environmentalists not putting their thinking-caps on.
Another is genetic engineering:
When food is genetically engineered, they put a specific gene in. They know what that gene does! Also, a gene codes for a protein, nothing more. You can't get a mutant killer pig from genetic engineering. This is in contrast to normal crossbreeding with different varieties. Crossbreeding mixes the whole genome. The output is random. Back in the 60's, crossbreeding produced a carrot that was slightly toxic. Genetic Engineering could never make such a mistake. It's not "frankenfood". Yes, BT corn with its nontoxic-to-humans BT insecticide, could kill monarch butterflies. But that's not as bad as spraying highly toxic instecticide from a plane. I'm sure sprayed insecticide kills many more butterflies. Another argument is that GM crops could "contaminate" local populations of plants. The danger is no greater than highly modified regular crops contaminating a wild genepool. Genetic engineering could go a long way toward solving food problems. Theyv