You got nuke power all wrong. Fission does not pollute. All radioactive waste ever created in all power plants would fit into a high scool gym. The rad waste is not as toxic as people say either. You could eat a few grams of plutonium with no ill effects. Also, believe it or not, coal power realeases more radioactivity than if we just dumped all of our nuke waste on the ground somewhere. Coal power realeases a grand total of about three million tons of uranium and thorium a year.Read the Oak Ridge National Lab report on this here.
Meltdowns aren't as big of deals as people say either. Chernobyl only killed 31 people according to the World Health Organization. By comparison, coal power kills about ~50,000 people every year in the U.S. alone! Three Mile Island didn't kill or hurt anyone. A Chernobyl-type meltdown cannot happen in a US reactor. Our reactors have thick containment buildings designed to withstand a 747 impact. If there is a core meltdown, the radiation is contained. Chernobyl was a bad commie RBMK reactor that could meltdown easily. Also, it had no containment building, so the rad materials could escape fairly easily.
With radioactive waste, I think most people have the conception of thin-metal barrels full of green sludge being callously dropped into the Yucca Mountain repository. It's not like that. First of all, the Yucca Mountain walls are of thick concrete. The waste itself is stored in thick metal, double walled containers. It's not going anywhere. Also, it's not leaky green sludge. It's metal! Not liquid or sludgy at all. If a magnitude 20 earthquake occured, the waste containers broke, and the metal burrowed all by itself 2000 feet through solid rock intil it hit the water table, it still wouldn't hurt anything. If taken in orally, as it would if it leaked into the water, plutonium is less toxic than aspirin. You'd have to drink several grams to hurt you. Radioactive waste declines in radioactivity by half in a few decades, and it decays down to the normal radioactivity of Uranium Ore in 500 years. If we reproccesed our fuel and used breeder reactors, the waste would be reduced by 2 orders of magnitude, and it would only last for 50 years.
As for Fusion, the only radioactive thing is Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. It has a half life of I think about 11 years or somthing. It is produced inside of the reactor as neutrons strike the lithium outer walls of the reactor. Tritium is not that dangerous. In the most horrific Fusion accident envisionable, the radioactivity realeased wouldn't even mean nearby houses would need to be evacuated. However, practical, cheap fusion is about 50 years off.
For now, the best thing for our energy needs is hydrogen produced by fission power. It's cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute. Don't listen to the Sierra Club
I have netscape, ie, and opera on my windows partition. Netscape 6.1 is unstable and slow. IE is pretty fast and fairly stable.
Opera is wonderful. It is endlessly customizable, very stable (it has never crashed on me!) and it is much faster than any competing browser. It blocks pop-up ads and stores your info for when you have to fill out forms. What I like about it is that you can put on skins, or even make your own, without messing with that hotbar crap like on IE. You can also put any pictures you like for the background. Also, most spyware doesn't work on Opera.
I also like how you can put links at a bar on the bottom. It even has a built-in Google search on the adress bar. It also has a very nice mail and news client built in. Another thing I like is that on the Adress bar, it has a button for a make a new browser window. I love that. Now I don't have to go file, new, window
One more thing: IE and Netscape are bloatware. They both take up around 20 megs. They hog a lot of RAM and take a long time to load. Opera uses only about 4 megabytes of hard disk space, and it does much more than IE and Netscape combined.
Opera is so great everyone should download it. It's way better than Mozilla. Opera is available for Windoze, *NIX, Symbian, OS/2, MacOS, BeOS, and QNX.
Quantum gravity theory could ultimately be one of the most important discoveries ever made, with implications for warp travel, as well as other things.
A chernobyl scale realease could not happen in our type of pressurized water reactor. Unlike Chernobyl, we have a containment building to keep the radiation in during a meltdown.
Nuclear power is not inneficient. A nuke plant only requires 15,000 pounds of fuel a year. That would fit into a 4x4x4 foot area. It is cheaper than coal and pollution free. Don't succumb to fear mongering.
This may seem a bit far-fetched, but it is very possible in the next 50 years. Moores law will run out of steam in about 15 to 20 years. Probably, to keep increasing computer speeds, we will need to switch to something like quantum computers or carbon nanotube molecular computers. Both are in development right now.
Quantum computing is where you take several atoms, entangle them, and shoot a laser or radio waves at them, and analyze the spin to compute stuff. The power increases exponetialy as you add more atoms to be entangled. Right now they've got a quantum computer to use nine atoms. That means you can process 128 bits of information on every cycle. If we had 900 atoms computing, we would be able to crunch more numbers in one second than there are atoms in the universe. But, don't hold your breath, thats a little ways off. You have problems of decoherence and other things that will probably mean computers of this power are a good 40 years off, if they are even possible at all.
Carbon nanotube computers will definitely pan out, however. They may not be as powerful as the quantum computers, but they're still pretty damn powerful. Right now, they've made working logic circuits thousands of times smaller that on an Athlon XP with carbon nanotubes. In fact, making logic circiuts with carbon nanotubes was named as the best breakthrough of the year by Science magazine.
I think in about 50 years, we will probably have the capability to become cyborgs. It's nothing to be afraid of. If you gradualy transformed yourself from a pure human to a robot as you aged, you could be immortal.
Also, nanobots are probably only about 40 years off. Nanobot research is getting more funding than nuclear fusion, so progress is coming along quite nicely. They have made molecular-sized robot arms and motors. The only thing that's missing is the nanotube computer component of the nanobot.
Nanotech probably has the most profound implications of about anything. Nanobots would be able to replicate themselves. They could rip apart molecules and build stuff out of raw materials. With nanobots, it would be possible to use them to form a 10 mile tall diamond-supported skyscraper out of any carbon-based material,like garbage. They just rip apart the organic molecules to get the pure carbon, and assemble the carbon into a crystal diamond lattice.
Also, nanobots would be able to patrol our bloodstream for tumors and lodge themselves in our brain to provide super-intelligence, or shut off external stimuli for realistic artificial reality. As you get older, as your neurons die, they could be replaced by nanobots with the exact same nerve connections. This way, over time, you could get a nanobot brain that lasts forever.
This would obviosly be good for our armys if we perfected the power supply, probably compact fuel cells.
On the other hand, maybe a little farther off, this could be incorporated into a cyborg. Maybe 50 years from now, you could have your intelligence supplemented by a high-power quanum computer or molecular dot computer. You could have a "second skin" made out of high-strength carbon nanotubes. For those not in the know, nanotubes are thin molecule-sized tubes of carbon that are about 50 times as strong as steel. They are amazing. They can act as computer circiuts (they may replace silicon) and artificial muscles.
Anyway, you could have an exoskeleton of carbon nanotubes that interfaces with your brain via the quantum computer. The nanotubes could greatly supplement your strengh by acting as muscle and protect you from injury. A bullet would have no way of penetrating a nanotube "second skin". The exoskeleton may even be able to be made to inflate in an emergency, allowing you to survive things like plane crashes.
>>That said, as for your: I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition
Why? What's so good about having people there? I say go after the Earth-based problems, and don't do things like spend three percent of our government's money on a trillion-dollar program just to get humans in a place they aren't very suited for being in the first place. When we've got the luxury of having solved most Earth-based problems, then you go after the extraneous stuff like that.
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That argument is not valid. When you think about how much money the government blows on stupid crap, who cares about NASA? The world's problems will never be solved, even if we do get rid of NASA. I think the point of not spending money on space because of the problems here is not valid. Applying the same argument to you, I could say you bought that computer with the money you could of used to save 10 people's lives in Somalia. If we cancel NASA because we have problems here on earth, that would just be dumb.
A better place to cut the budget would be the department of defense. Remember that the money they spend on a squadron of stealth bombers is as large as the NASA budget. Things at the DOD could be cut down. Look at Afganistan: We sent just an infestimally small percentage of our air force and we still blew the shit out of them. If we cut DOD spending by a third, we'd still be the most powerful country by far and we'd save hundreds of billions.
The ICANN-2 antimatter-fusion engine is pulsed. It gives a large amount of thrust for a short period of time. It would not be a comfy ride. The ship would constantly be jolted by the fusion pellet explosions at the craft's rear. This engine would only run at most for an hour or two during a mission. The rest of the time it would be coasting. Also, I recently found out that the ICANN is limited to about 11,000 seconds.
I think a better engine for interplanetary travel is the VASIMR plasma drive. It uses extremely hot plasma accelerated by magnetic fields to provide an ISP of 30,000 seconds. That's enough for slow manned intersteller missions. Its more efficient, and it gives a slow steady thrust to provide a tad bit of gravity. Plus the fuel would be cheaper: Just plain hydrogen, not ultra-expensive enriched uranium, tritium and deuterium.
The second concept I mentioned before, the fission sail, would give very very very low thrust over a period of a couple years to reach an ungodly velocity. It's not suitable for manned interplanetary travel or manned intersteller travel because you'd just need to damned much Californium.
Specific impulse of a rocket engine is measured in seconds. It means how many second a pound of fuel could produce a pound of thrust. The shuttles fuel gets about 450 seconds, that is, a lb. of hydorgen and O2 will produce one pound of thrust for 450 sec. The ICANN concept he described would be a few hundred times more effiecient than the shuttle's engine, meaning it would allow travel to another star system.
By the way, Anti-Matter Catylzed Fusion is being heavily researched by NASA. It is probably in the shorter term than pure antimatter or pure fusion. It uses quatities of antimatter that can be easily produced in about 20 years. The rest of the tecnology for this concept already exists.
If you ask me, I think the best way to have intersteller travel is with a Fission Fragment Sail. This is something that could be built today, if NASA had some money to blow. All that it is is a regular solar sail maybe 100 meters wide, and made of that new ultra-light gossamer carbon fiber material that NASA has developed for solar sails. On this sail is a highly fissionable element such as Californium. Since this synthetic element has a much lower critical mass than Plutonium or Uranium, it can fission when formed into a foil. When the Californium fissions, it sends high-speed fission fragments out. These fragments are normally stopped in a reactor pretty quick, but since this is a foil, the fragments escape. The fragments either propel by hitting the carbon fiber and pushing it forward, or they just travel out back and propel it forward. THIS WOULD ALLOW AN IMPULSE OF ONE MILLION SECONDS. This would easily allow a craft to reach a third of the speed of light.
The only problem is that Californium costs about 10 million dollars a kilo. This cost would be greatly reduced to less than a million if we reprocessed nuclear waste. But anyway, you wold need around 25 kg. of it to propel a 1 kg. payload to a third of the speed of light. Yes, especialy with advances in lasers, CMOS electronic eyes, and thin photovoltaic cells, we could get a usefull payload down to a Kilogram.
Such an intersteller probe would use CMOS electonic eyes to see stuff. It would use thin PV cells to get it's power as it neared the target star. It would communicate back by sending microwaves via MASERS. A maser is a microwave laser. If you had a 2 watt maser, its signal could be detected 4 light-years away at Alpha Centauri by a large radiotelescope, like Arecibo.
Such a mission would only cost 1 or 2 billion dollars and it could be launched tomorrow.
GM foods are nothing to be concerned about. If you are crying NO FRANKENFOODS! then you don't understand genetics. I know quite a bit about the subject. All that DNA does is code for proteins. Thats it. DNA has four different kinds of bases, Thymine, Adenine, Guanine, and Cytosine. Three of these bases get grouped together into codons. A codon, through a complicated process involving mRNA
and many other things, makes an particular amino acid.
A whole bunch of these DNA codons will produce a protein. A protein is multiple amino acids linked.
If you insert a gene to produce the Vitamin A protein into a wheat plant, the wheat plant will produce Vitamin A along with everything else. A gene that codes for Vitamin A codes for Vitamin A, nothing else. It won't produce cyanide or anything else that you may be afraid of. One of the things about gm foods is that YOU KNOW WHAT THESE GENES DO. By contrast interbreeding mixes the genomes of two plants and you don't know what will happen.
One of the persistant arguments I hear is that BT corn (that is, corn with the safe, natural BT insecticide) kills monarch butterflies. I'm sure it does kill monarch butterflies. But it probably kills less monarchs that spraying a highly toxic insecticide from a plane.
Another argument is that it's not natural and your'e tampering with millions of years of evolution. I got a reality check. The plants that we eat did not evolve for our benefit. They are random products of evolution designed to spread their seeds around better than other plants.
Take rice, for example. For millions of years, it was a sucessful swampy-area plant. It did not bother wasting energy to meet the nutritional requirements of other animals eating it. Then, around 10,000 years ago, man comes along and finds that rice makes pretty good eatin' and decides to farm it. Unfortunately, this random product of evolution wasn't very nutritious for man, and he got Vitamin A from only eating rice. A few years ago, some people said "Hey, all these people in Vietnam and Laos are starving because they don't get enough Vitamin A in their rice diet. Lets engineer some rice to have vitamin A so they don't die." They did that and that's how we got golden rice, a vitamin A rich rice that's carrot orange from all the Vitamin A in it. That is an excellent example of how we improved on nature.
The thing with radioactive waste is that the most radioactive things have much shorter half lives. This means that after a few year radioactivity drops consistently. In a few decades, the radiation drops by half. In 500 years, it drops to the level of Uranium ore, making it as safe as the fiesta ware you might have in your kitchen. The fears are overblown. Also, plutonium is not nearly as radioactive as greenpeace says.
I just thought of some more stuff. The Yucca mountain area has had many underground nuclear bombs go off anyway. Whats the problem with putting waste there.
What we should really do is reprocess the fuel. Presently, the total amount of nuclear waste produced for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoe box. If we reprocessed the fuel it would fit in a pill box. The total amount of nuclear waste ever produced would fit in a high school gym. Theres not huge mountains of it as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace would have you believe. And it's not sludge either, it's metal.
Also, another claim I hear persistantly is that plutonium is the most toxic substance. It isn't, not by a longshot. If they had an eathquake at Yucca that registered 10.0 on the richter scale, and suddenly broke open the five-foot thick cement and steel walls, and the solid metal burrowed by itself 1.8 miles though solid rock until it hit the water table, the environmental damage would not be severe.
A person could eat several grams of plutonium without suffering too much radiation or other ill effects. It just passes out of your system. THIS MAKES PLUTONIUM LESS TOXIC THAN ASPIRIN.
I think we should phase out dirty coal power and replace it with nuclear. Nuclear is getting so cheap that most of the time it's as cheap or cheaper than coal.
We really should reprocess our fuel. It would make it a lot cheaper, and much less waste would need to be buried.
Anyway, the Yucca mountain facility is 1000 feet below the surface in ultra-reinforced containers in a huge restricted area. Its not going anywhere. Anyway, they blew up over a hundred nuclear bombs over in the area. Virtually no radiation would escape. If you stood on the surface above the facility, you would get pore radiation from a Potassium isotope in your body than you would the waste. The radition would be almost undectable from background.
Remember that nuclear power has a very good safety record in the US. A Chernobyl type of realease is not possible in our type of reactors. In the event of a meltdown, the containment building would contain almost all of the radiation. Three Mile Island did not kill or injure anyone. Chernobyl killed 30 people, but that had a crappy Commie reactor with no containment.
Also, remember the tens of thousands in the U.S. that are killed by pollution from coal power every year. Nuclear does not realease air pollution.
One interesting fact is that radioactive materials in coal realease hundreds of tons of highly radioactive radium, thorium and uranium every year. Nuclear does not realease nuclear materials like this.
Also,
For americans, Socialism is synomomous with Communism. When people think of socialism, they think of the U.S.S.R. or Cuba. We think of your type of government as a "welfare state", somthing completely different and not at all bad
You could superheat some water under pressure. When you let the pressure off, the water explodes into steam. This ultra-high pressure steam could be directed down a long barrel to propel a rocket forward. You could reach fairly high speeds with this method at a much lower cost than superconducting magnets.
Most concepts of mass drivers had their location on largish asteroids. If you put your mass driver on a half-mile wide iron asteroid,and launch your spacecraft off of it, the recoil isn't going to send the asteriod flying off into the sun.
No, a mass driver on the ISS wouldn't work. One on the moon might work OK.
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You got nuke power all wrong. Fission does not pollute. All radioactive waste ever created in all power plants would fit into a high scool gym. The rad waste is not as toxic as people say either. You could eat a few grams of plutonium with no ill effects. Also, believe it or not, coal power realeases more radioactivity than if we just dumped all of our nuke waste on the ground somewhere. Coal power realeases a grand total of about three million tons of uranium and thorium a year.Read the Oak Ridge National Lab report on this here. Meltdowns aren't as big of deals as people say either. Chernobyl only killed 31 people according to the World Health Organization. By comparison, coal power kills about ~50,000 people every year in the U.S. alone! Three Mile Island didn't kill or hurt anyone. A Chernobyl-type meltdown cannot happen in a US reactor. Our reactors have thick containment buildings designed to withstand a 747 impact. If there is a core meltdown, the radiation is contained. Chernobyl was a bad commie RBMK reactor that could meltdown easily. Also, it had no containment building, so the rad materials could escape fairly easily. With radioactive waste, I think most people have the conception of thin-metal barrels full of green sludge being callously dropped into the Yucca Mountain repository. It's not like that. First of all, the Yucca Mountain walls are of thick concrete. The waste itself is stored in thick metal, double walled containers. It's not going anywhere. Also, it's not leaky green sludge. It's metal! Not liquid or sludgy at all. If a magnitude 20 earthquake occured, the waste containers broke, and the metal burrowed all by itself 2000 feet through solid rock intil it hit the water table, it still wouldn't hurt anything. If taken in orally, as it would if it leaked into the water, plutonium is less toxic than aspirin. You'd have to drink several grams to hurt you. Radioactive waste declines in radioactivity by half in a few decades, and it decays down to the normal radioactivity of Uranium Ore in 500 years. If we reproccesed our fuel and used breeder reactors, the waste would be reduced by 2 orders of magnitude, and it would only last for 50 years. As for Fusion, the only radioactive thing is Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. It has a half life of I think about 11 years or somthing. It is produced inside of the reactor as neutrons strike the lithium outer walls of the reactor. Tritium is not that dangerous. In the most horrific Fusion accident envisionable, the radioactivity realeased wouldn't even mean nearby houses would need to be evacuated. However, practical, cheap fusion is about 50 years off. For now, the best thing for our energy needs is hydrogen produced by fission power. It's cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute. Don't listen to the Sierra Club
I've done that. Use a gas can and do it outside. Damn 2 minute lameness filter.
O2 + H2 is not dihydrogen moxoxide. It's H2O. Don't worry about it being near an oxygen tank. The oxygen in an oxygen tank is regular old 02.
Redmond is a suburb of seattle. Its seattle.
Download Opera here before Prostentic Vogon Jeltz blows up the Earth!
Opera is wonderful. It is endlessly customizable, very stable (it has never crashed on me!) and it is much faster than any competing browser. It blocks pop-up ads and stores your info for when you have to fill out forms. What I like about it is that you can put on skins, or even make your own, without messing with that hotbar crap like on IE. You can also put any pictures you like for the background. Also, most spyware doesn't work on Opera.
I also like how you can put links at a bar on the bottom. It even has a built-in Google search on the adress bar. It also has a very nice mail and news client built in. Another thing I like is that on the Adress bar, it has a button for a make a new browser window. I love that. Now I don't have to go file, new, window
One more thing: IE and Netscape are bloatware. They both take up around 20 megs. They hog a lot of RAM and take a long time to load. Opera uses only about 4 megabytes of hard disk space, and it does much more than IE and Netscape combined.
Opera is so great everyone should download it. It's way better than Mozilla. Opera is available for Windoze, *NIX, Symbian, OS/2, MacOS, BeOS, and QNX.
It's great that they detected somthing so weak like gravity at a quantum level. This may finally help us understand what is it's like in a black hole.
Quantum gravity theory could ultimately be one of the most important discoveries ever made, with implications for warp travel, as well as other things.
Oracle 9i, for databases as large as Larry Ellison's ego!
People in my high school c++ class change stuff around like couts and function names when they copy programs.
We should also get rid of coal power
Chernobly: Deaths:31
Coal power: ~50,000 per year
A chernobyl scale realease could not happen in our type of pressurized water reactor. Unlike Chernobyl, we have a containment building to keep the radiation in during a meltdown.
Nuclear power is not inneficient. A nuke plant only requires 15,000 pounds of fuel a year. That would fit into a 4x4x4 foot area. It is cheaper than coal and pollution free. Don't succumb to fear mongering.
Oh yeah, I always forget to include more stuff.
This may seem a bit far-fetched, but it is very possible in the next 50 years. Moores law will run out of steam in about 15 to 20 years. Probably, to keep increasing computer speeds, we will need to switch to something like quantum computers or carbon nanotube molecular computers. Both are in development right now.
Quantum computing is where you take several atoms, entangle them, and shoot a laser or radio waves at them, and analyze the spin to compute stuff. The power increases exponetialy as you add more atoms to be entangled. Right now they've got a quantum computer to use nine atoms. That means you can process 128 bits of information on every cycle. If we had 900 atoms computing, we would be able to crunch more numbers in one second than there are atoms in the universe. But, don't hold your breath, thats a little ways off. You have problems of decoherence and other things that will probably mean computers of this power are a good 40 years off, if they are even possible at all.
Carbon nanotube computers will definitely pan out, however. They may not be as powerful as the quantum computers, but they're still pretty damn powerful. Right now, they've made working logic circuits thousands of times smaller that on an Athlon XP with carbon nanotubes. In fact, making logic circiuts with carbon nanotubes was named as the best breakthrough of the year by Science magazine.
I think in about 50 years, we will probably have the capability to become cyborgs. It's nothing to be afraid of. If you gradualy transformed yourself from a pure human to a robot as you aged, you could be immortal.
Also, nanobots are probably only about 40 years off. Nanobot research is getting more funding than nuclear fusion, so progress is coming along quite nicely. They have made molecular-sized robot arms and motors. The only thing that's missing is the nanotube computer component of the nanobot.
Nanotech probably has the most profound implications of about anything. Nanobots would be able to replicate themselves. They could rip apart molecules and build stuff out of raw materials. With nanobots, it would be possible to use them to form a 10 mile tall diamond-supported skyscraper out of any carbon-based material,like garbage. They just rip apart the organic molecules to get the pure carbon, and assemble the carbon into a crystal diamond lattice.
Also, nanobots would be able to patrol our bloodstream for tumors and lodge themselves in our brain to provide super-intelligence, or shut off external stimuli for realistic artificial reality. As you get older, as your neurons die, they could be replaced by nanobots with the exact same nerve connections. This way, over time, you could get a nanobot brain that lasts forever.
This would obviosly be good for our armys if we perfected the power supply, probably compact fuel cells.
On the other hand, maybe a little farther off, this could be incorporated into a cyborg. Maybe 50 years from now, you could have your intelligence supplemented by a high-power quanum computer or molecular dot computer. You could have a "second skin" made out of high-strength carbon nanotubes. For those not in the know, nanotubes are thin molecule-sized tubes of carbon that are about 50 times as strong as steel. They are amazing. They can act as computer circiuts (they may replace silicon) and artificial muscles.
Anyway, you could have an exoskeleton of carbon nanotubes that interfaces with your brain via the quantum computer. The nanotubes could greatly supplement your strengh by acting as muscle and protect you from injury. A bullet would have no way of penetrating a nanotube "second skin". The exoskeleton may even be able to be made to inflate in an emergency, allowing you to survive things like plane crashes.
>>That said, as for your: I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition
Why? What's so good about having people there? I say go after the Earth-based problems, and don't do things like spend three percent of our government's money on a trillion-dollar program just to get humans in a place they aren't very suited for being in the first place. When we've got the luxury of having solved most Earth-based problems, then you go after the extraneous stuff like that.
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That argument is not valid. When you think about how much money the government blows on stupid crap, who cares about NASA? The world's problems will never be solved, even if we do get rid of NASA. I think the point of not spending money on space because of the problems here is not valid. Applying the same argument to you, I could say you bought that computer with the money you could of used to save 10 people's lives in Somalia. If we cancel NASA because we have problems here on earth, that would just be dumb.
A better place to cut the budget would be the department of defense. Remember that the money they spend on a squadron of stealth bombers is as large as the NASA budget. Things at the DOD could be cut down. Look at Afganistan: We sent just an infestimally small percentage of our air force and we still blew the shit out of them. If we cut DOD spending by a third, we'd still be the most powerful country by far and we'd save hundreds of billions.
The ICANN-2 antimatter-fusion engine is pulsed. It gives a large amount of thrust for a short period of time. It would not be a comfy ride. The ship would constantly be jolted by the fusion pellet explosions at the craft's rear. This engine would only run at most for an hour or two during a mission. The rest of the time it would be coasting. Also, I recently found out that the ICANN is limited to about 11,000 seconds.
I think a better engine for interplanetary travel is the VASIMR plasma drive. It uses extremely hot plasma accelerated by magnetic fields to provide an ISP of 30,000 seconds. That's enough for slow manned intersteller missions. Its more efficient, and it gives a slow steady thrust to provide a tad bit of gravity. Plus the fuel would be cheaper: Just plain hydrogen, not ultra-expensive enriched uranium, tritium and deuterium.
The second concept I mentioned before, the fission sail, would give very very very low thrust over a period of a couple years to reach an ungodly velocity. It's not suitable for manned interplanetary travel or manned intersteller travel because you'd just need to damned much Californium.
Specific impulse of a rocket engine is measured in seconds. It means how many second a pound of fuel could produce a pound of thrust. The shuttles fuel gets about 450 seconds, that is, a lb. of hydorgen and O2 will produce one pound of thrust for 450 sec. The ICANN concept he described would be a few hundred times more effiecient than the shuttle's engine, meaning it would allow travel to another star system.
By the way, Anti-Matter Catylzed Fusion is being heavily researched by NASA. It is probably in the shorter term than pure antimatter or pure fusion. It uses quatities of antimatter that can be easily produced in about 20 years. The rest of the tecnology for this concept already exists.
If you ask me, I think the best way to have intersteller travel is with a Fission Fragment Sail. This is something that could be built today, if NASA had some money to blow. All that it is is a regular solar sail maybe 100 meters wide, and made of that new ultra-light gossamer carbon fiber material that NASA has developed for solar sails. On this sail is a highly fissionable element such as Californium. Since this synthetic element has a much lower critical mass than Plutonium or Uranium, it can fission when formed into a foil. When the Californium fissions, it sends high-speed fission fragments out. These fragments are normally stopped in a reactor pretty quick, but since this is a foil, the fragments escape. The fragments either propel by hitting the carbon fiber and pushing it forward, or they just travel out back and propel it forward. THIS WOULD ALLOW AN IMPULSE OF ONE MILLION SECONDS. This would easily allow a craft to reach a third of the speed of light.
The only problem is that Californium costs about 10 million dollars a kilo. This cost would be greatly reduced to less than a million if we reprocessed nuclear waste. But anyway, you wold need around 25 kg. of it to propel a 1 kg. payload to a third of the speed of light. Yes, especialy with advances in lasers, CMOS electronic eyes, and thin photovoltaic cells, we could get a usefull payload down to a Kilogram.
Such an intersteller probe would use CMOS electonic eyes to see stuff. It would use thin PV cells to get it's power as it neared the target star. It would communicate back by sending microwaves via MASERS. A maser is a microwave laser. If you had a 2 watt maser, its signal could be detected 4 light-years away at Alpha Centauri by a large radiotelescope, like Arecibo.
Such a mission would only cost 1 or 2 billion dollars and it could be launched tomorrow.
GM foods are nothing to be concerned about. If you are crying NO FRANKENFOODS! then you don't understand genetics. I know quite a bit about the subject. All that DNA does is code for proteins. Thats it. DNA has four different kinds of bases, Thymine, Adenine, Guanine, and Cytosine. Three of these bases get grouped together into codons. A codon, through a complicated process involving mRNA
and many other things, makes an particular amino acid.
A whole bunch of these DNA codons will produce a protein. A protein is multiple amino acids linked.
If you insert a gene to produce the Vitamin A protein into a wheat plant, the wheat plant will produce Vitamin A along with everything else. A gene that codes for Vitamin A codes for Vitamin A, nothing else. It won't produce cyanide or anything else that you may be afraid of. One of the things about gm foods is that YOU KNOW WHAT THESE GENES DO. By contrast interbreeding mixes the genomes of two plants and you don't know what will happen.
One of the persistant arguments I hear is that BT corn (that is, corn with the safe, natural BT insecticide) kills monarch butterflies. I'm sure it does kill monarch butterflies. But it probably kills less monarchs that spraying a highly toxic insecticide from a plane.
Another argument is that it's not natural and your'e tampering with millions of years of evolution. I got a reality check. The plants that we eat did not evolve for our benefit. They are random products of evolution designed to spread their seeds around better than other plants.
Take rice, for example. For millions of years, it was a sucessful swampy-area plant. It did not bother wasting energy to meet the nutritional requirements of other animals eating it. Then, around 10,000 years ago, man comes along and finds that rice makes pretty good eatin' and decides to farm it. Unfortunately, this random product of evolution wasn't very nutritious for man, and he got Vitamin A from only eating rice. A few years ago, some people said "Hey, all these people in Vietnam and Laos are starving because they don't get enough Vitamin A in their rice diet. Lets engineer some rice to have vitamin A so they don't die." They did that and that's how we got golden rice, a vitamin A rich rice that's carrot orange from all the Vitamin A in it. That is an excellent example of how we improved on nature.
The thing with radioactive waste is that the most radioactive things have much shorter half lives. This means that after a few year radioactivity drops consistently. In a few decades, the radiation drops by half. In 500 years, it drops to the level of Uranium ore, making it as safe as the fiesta ware you might have in your kitchen. The fears are overblown. Also, plutonium is not nearly as radioactive as greenpeace says.
I just thought of some more stuff. The Yucca mountain area has had many underground nuclear bombs go off anyway. Whats the problem with putting waste there.
What we should really do is reprocess the fuel. Presently, the total amount of nuclear waste produced for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoe box. If we reprocessed the fuel it would fit in a pill box. The total amount of nuclear waste ever produced would fit in a high school gym. Theres not huge mountains of it as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace would have you believe. And it's not sludge either, it's metal.
Also, another claim I hear persistantly is that plutonium is the most toxic substance. It isn't, not by a longshot. If they had an eathquake at Yucca that registered 10.0 on the richter scale, and suddenly broke open the five-foot thick cement and steel walls, and the solid metal burrowed by itself 1.8 miles though solid rock until it hit the water table, the environmental damage would not be severe.
A person could eat several grams of plutonium without suffering too much radiation or other ill effects. It just passes out of your system. THIS MAKES PLUTONIUM LESS TOXIC THAN ASPIRIN.
I think we should phase out dirty coal power and replace it with nuclear. Nuclear is getting so cheap that most of the time it's as cheap or cheaper than coal.
Hey, we live right next door! Im from Yakima.
We really should reprocess our fuel. It would make it a lot cheaper, and much less waste would need to be buried.
Anyway, the Yucca mountain facility is 1000 feet below the surface in ultra-reinforced containers in a huge restricted area. Its not going anywhere. Anyway, they blew up over a hundred nuclear bombs over in the area. Virtually no radiation would escape. If you stood on the surface above the facility, you would get pore radiation from a Potassium isotope in your body than you would the waste. The radition would be almost undectable from background.
Remember that nuclear power has a very good safety record in the US. A Chernobyl type of realease is not possible in our type of reactors. In the event of a meltdown, the containment building would contain almost all of the radiation. Three Mile Island did not kill or injure anyone. Chernobyl killed 30 people, but that had a crappy Commie reactor with no containment.
Also, remember the tens of thousands in the U.S. that are killed by pollution from coal power every year. Nuclear does not realease air pollution.
One interesting fact is that radioactive materials in coal realease hundreds of tons of highly radioactive radium, thorium and uranium every year. Nuclear does not realease nuclear materials like this.
Also,
For americans, Socialism is synomomous with Communism. When people think of socialism, they think of the U.S.S.R. or Cuba. We think of your type of government as a "welfare state", somthing completely different and not at all bad
You could superheat some water under pressure. When you let the pressure off, the water explodes into steam. This ultra-high pressure steam could be directed down a long barrel to propel a rocket forward. You could reach fairly high speeds with this method at a much lower cost than superconducting magnets.
Solar panels wouldn't be suited to produce such a massive amount of power (they could, it just wouldn't be practical). You'd need a reactor instead.
Most concepts of mass drivers had their location on largish asteroids. If you put your mass driver on a half-mile wide iron asteroid,and launch your spacecraft off of it, the recoil isn't going to send the asteriod flying off into the sun. No, a mass driver on the ISS wouldn't work. One on the moon might work OK.