1) Wear suits to protect us from the poisonous atmosphere and lack of oxygen.
This is why you stay inside your comfortable, exceedingly roomy (it has to be, to stay up), floating city.
2) Stay under cover to protect us from the various radiation (no magnetic field as I understand it).
Venus's atmosphere is more than sufficient to protect you from radiation.
3) Keep a complex life support system functioning in a complex artificial environment where failure means death.
This part is true. But it's got some benefits that a Moon, Mars, or space colony lacks. Like, pressure is free, and if you breach the hull, you've got a slow leak with probably a few days to fix it before you start sinking dangerously, and possibly a CO2 poisoning risk if it's a really huge leak. And breathable air is cheap and readily available (just electrolyze CO2- don't even need to pressurize it like you do on Mars), unlike the Moon (where you need to crack it out of rocks or bring it with you) or space (where you just have to bring it with you).
No need for a fusion powered pump. Block up the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez, and the Mediterranean will drain itself by evaporation without the inflow of sewater from the Atlantic.
Wormhole Induction Propulsion:
http://www.nidsci.org/articles/davis/wormhole_indu ction.html
As far as I can tell, the physics required for WHIP is not so speculative as for this magnetic warp dirve concept, although it's still far from actually being proven to be feasible. It's basically just using extreme high intensity magnetic or electrical fields to manipulate the energy density (which will create gravity wells just as well as solid matter) in regions of space. In this case, for the pupose of curving spacetime into a hypercylinder to induce the formation of a wormhole.
Not New News, if you've been keeping up
on
Writing Genetic Code
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· Score: 2, Informative
Because that is not how it is done. When such a discovery is made, one does not immediately announce it, partially (although it is not the only reason) in case one turns out to have made a mistake in one's observations. Instead, one carefully documents and verifies the discover, then submits (a) paper(s) to scientific journal(s), to allow other scientists to verify one's work, and then one announces it publicly if it's the sort of discovery that warants public announcement. All of that all can sometimes take a rather long time.
The argument might be made that as soon as a new object is confirmed to exist, it should be announced so that everyone else can help with the studying of it. That, however, rather kills most of the fun of having made a new discovery- if one doesn't even get the chance to be the first one to study it in-depth, what's the point?
Re:Can we moderate the submission itself
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 1
Whether the global economy can afford it or not is debatable.
Given the amount of money spent on the military versus the amount of money spent on space exploration, it looks to me to be far more a matter of politics than funding.
Your argument for the memories not being artificial is that they are in first person... However, I find that, when I have enough knowledge of my surroundings at the time of a memory, I can project a mental image of the memory from nearly any viewpoint or angle that I choose. Aside from this, can anyone else generate tastes, smells, and feelings mentally? (Either from imagination or memory recall.) I seem to be the only person I know with anything more than visual and audio recall. Also, I have extreme difficulty in generating mental images of faces.
"Finally, the LEGO trademark should always appear with a ® symbol each time it is used." I don't see that happening at all, and it's not all that hard.
Yes, that is a problem, and Mike (the Chief Editor) is (I think) working on it.
About the disclaimer, in the top left corner is a link that states "Read the Disclaimer". I know it's small, but I can't controll that. I will point it out to Mike, though.
I was once writing a quasi-shell program that had a "code window" in which commands would be typed, and then the whole block of text would be parsed into separate instructions, ordered, memory allocated, etc, and then the program would automatically carry out whatever functions were required without the user having to navigate through endless menus. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details for why it was done this way, and why the certain feature that had the bug to be described was needed, because that's irrelevant, and it's a long story anyway. It was there, and that's all you need to know. Anyway, onto the bug itself: the sort-of-script-language that was developed for this had a basic implementation of variables. Now, figuring out how to store and retrieve user-defined-at-runtime variables, in VB, [Hey, I had no choice! I use MS, I don't have to like it.] was hard enough. [I eventually had to use a library.ocx object that I found somewhere on my harddrive that acted sort of like a hash.] But then I was faced with the problem of having the parser recognize the variables when they came up in the code, AND having to integrate the same variable recognition PLUS replacement in the math engine. I ended up with a very convoluted string of crazy Regular Expressions [How I wish i could've used Perl!] to find the variables and chop out whitespace, and replace them with their current values retrieved from the library object, which itself was not an easy task, with some VB string handling functions thrown in for a bit of clarity. But, for some weird reason, and in mathematical expresions only, it wouldn't find variables at the end of a line, or sometimes it would see "foo" at the end of one line, and "bar" at the beginning of the next, and think that it was one variable named "foobar". Of course, this led to lots of "undefined variable" errors in the latter case, and lots of syntax errors in the former. I then had to look through EVERY regular expression that had anything to do with parsing variables, in the entire program, due to the fact that some of the variable matching for the math engine was contained in the main parser, so a problem in the main parser would also cause problems with the math engine. Eventually, after 3 [or maybe it was only 2...] days, I discovered one single misplaced ^ in a regular expression that determined when to hand off control to the math engine! Man, was I mad. And don't get me started on the virtual memory stack I had to write all the code for...
Disregarding the fact that half of what you just said was wrong, as has been pointed out already, you have caused a great thought to come forth in my mind: Would negative masses have antigrav properties?
By Eru! That has got to be the coolest vehicle I've ever seen! How come that doesn't get much publicity? I didn't think any commercial/industrial grade walking vehicles existed! Flippin' Dustpuppies, you bet Thinkgeek should carry these!
The first has already been mentioned, and that is that Charon and Pluto are closer in size than the Earth and Moon. The second I don't think has been mentioned yet: the moon does not have "a cold, solid core". The August issue of Discover magazine points out a few reasons why we beleive that the Moons core is at least partially molten in the article "Nuclear Planet" (well, something like that, the title may have been a bit different).
Somehow, this has me worried. Dr. Who is cool, but writing all-new episodes just doesn't sit right with me (especially if they're using a script-writer from Buffy). They'll probably make it all state-of-the-art computer graphics and stuff, and end up ruining it. Ah, well, I hope I'm wrong. We'll just have to wait and see.
Assuming that your 35-mile launch is succesful (which I dearly hope that it is, for many reasons, including the preservation of your life), do you plan on going for The X-prize? In any case, what do you think would be different about an X-prize attempt? Would it be more difficult legally?
In "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien", JRRT states that he decided to go with that title BECAUSE it was ambiguous(sp?) and could refer to many different things.
I'm not disputing that, I'm just thinking that since they can't see it anyway, wouldn't it be easier just to keep it in their imaginations. But then this dude changed my mind. And I suppose there is the "brag factor" (showing other people what you made). I also suppose I should pay more attention to my own.sig.;}
That's really neat and all, and it's a good idea, and a lot of people are probably going to try it out, but..... If they're "visually impaired", how are they going to enjoy their own work?
ironic considering that NASA took something that wasn't under U.S. jurisdiction
Not so much. It's the same idea as explorers in the 1600's searching for gold in America. It's no ones jurisdiction, so they can do what they darn well please and claim the land for their own afterwards (or before). Except, in this case, we have that pesky Outer Space Treaty in the way of actually claiming the Land, but I'm not sure about the stuff FOUND on the land. Someone fill me in.
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1) Wear suits to protect us from the poisonous atmosphere and lack of oxygen.
This is why you stay inside your comfortable, exceedingly roomy (it has to be, to stay up), floating city.
2) Stay under cover to protect us from the various radiation (no magnetic field as I understand it).
Venus's atmosphere is more than sufficient to protect you from radiation.
3) Keep a complex life support system functioning in a complex artificial environment where failure means death.
This part is true. But it's got some benefits that a Moon, Mars, or space colony lacks. Like, pressure is free, and if you breach the hull, you've got a slow leak with probably a few days to fix it before you start sinking dangerously, and possibly a CO2 poisoning risk if it's a really huge leak. And breathable air is cheap and readily available (just electrolyze CO2- don't even need to pressurize it like you do on Mars), unlike the Moon (where you need to crack it out of rocks or bring it with you) or space (where you just have to bring it with you).
No need for a fusion powered pump. Block up the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez, and the Mediterranean will drain itself by evaporation without the inflow of sewater from the Atlantic.
Wormhole Induction Propulsion: http://www.nidsci.org/articles/davis/wormhole_indu ction.html
As far as I can tell, the physics required for WHIP is not so speculative as for this magnetic warp dirve concept, although it's still far from actually being proven to be feasible. It's basically just using extreme high intensity magnetic or electrical fields to manipulate the energy density (which will create gravity wells just as well as solid matter) in regions of space. In this case, for the pupose of curving spacetime into a hypercylinder to induce the formation of a wormhole.
The article does not seem to contain mention of just when this all started. The Globe & Mail is a bit behind- Discover magazine reported on the project in 2001: http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-01/features/fea tsimple/
Because that is not how it is done. When such a discovery is made, one does not immediately announce it, partially (although it is not the only reason) in case one turns out to have made a mistake in one's observations. Instead, one carefully documents and verifies the discover, then submits (a) paper(s) to scientific journal(s), to allow other scientists to verify one's work, and then one announces it publicly if it's the sort of discovery that warants public announcement. All of that all can sometimes take a rather long time. The argument might be made that as soon as a new object is confirmed to exist, it should be announced so that everyone else can help with the studying of it. That, however, rather kills most of the fun of having made a new discovery- if one doesn't even get the chance to be the first one to study it in-depth, what's the point?
Whether the global economy can afford it or not is debatable.
Given the amount of money spent on the military versus the amount of money spent on space exploration, it looks to me to be far more a matter of politics than funding.
Your argument for the memories not being artificial is that they are in first person... However, I find that, when I have enough knowledge of my surroundings at the time of a memory, I can project a mental image of the memory from nearly any viewpoint or angle that I choose. Aside from this, can anyone else generate tastes, smells, and feelings mentally? (Either from imagination or memory recall.) I seem to be the only person I know with anything more than visual and audio recall. Also, I have extreme difficulty in generating mental images of faces.
About the disclaimer, in the top left corner is a link that states "Read the Disclaimer". I know it's small, but I can't controll that. I will point it out to Mike, though.
I'm guessing much longer. We have tried to comply as completely as possible with LEGO's Fairplay Document.
*We do not display the red LEGO logo.
*We have a disclaimer posted that denies any endorsement or support from TLG.
*We do not overly emphasize the LEGO trademark.
*Neither the words LEGO or MindStorms appear in our web address. (That was a major legal point a while back.)
*We do not use the LEGO trademark commercially.
*We do not not display any LEGO publications without permission or under false pretenses.
I was once writing a quasi-shell program that had a "code window" in which commands would be typed, and then the whole block of text would be parsed into separate instructions, ordered, memory allocated, etc, and then the program would automatically carry out whatever functions were required without the user having to navigate through endless menus. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details for why it was done this way, and why the certain feature that had the bug to be described was needed, because that's irrelevant, and it's a long story anyway. It was there, and that's all you need to know. Anyway, onto the bug itself: the sort-of-script-language that was developed for this had a basic implementation of variables. Now, figuring out how to store and retrieve user-defined-at-runtime variables, in VB, [Hey, I had no choice! I use MS, I don't have to like it.] was hard enough. [I eventually had to use a library.ocx object that I found somewhere on my harddrive that acted sort of like a hash.] But then I was faced with the problem of having the parser recognize the variables when they came up in the code, AND having to integrate the same variable recognition PLUS replacement in the math engine. I ended up with a very convoluted string of crazy Regular Expressions [How I wish i could've used Perl!] to find the variables and chop out whitespace, and replace them with their current values retrieved from the library object, which itself was not an easy task, with some VB string handling functions thrown in for a bit of clarity. But, for some weird reason, and in mathematical expresions only, it wouldn't find variables at the end of a line, or sometimes it would see "foo" at the end of one line, and "bar" at the beginning of the next, and think that it was one variable named "foobar". Of course, this led to lots of "undefined variable" errors in the latter case, and lots of syntax errors in the former. I then had to look through EVERY regular expression that had anything to do with parsing variables, in the entire program, due to the fact that some of the variable matching for the math engine was contained in the main parser, so a problem in the main parser would also cause problems with the math engine. Eventually, after 3 [or maybe it was only 2...] days, I discovered one single misplaced ^ in a regular expression that determined when to hand off control to the math engine! Man, was I mad. And don't get me started on the virtual memory stack I had to write all the code for...
Disregarding the fact that half of what you just said was wrong, as has been pointed out already, you have caused a great thought to come forth in my mind: Would negative masses have antigrav properties?
By Eru! That has got to be the coolest vehicle I've ever seen! How come that doesn't get much publicity? I didn't think any commercial/industrial grade walking vehicles existed! Flippin' Dustpuppies, you bet Thinkgeek should carry these!
The first has already been mentioned, and that is that Charon and Pluto are closer in size than the Earth and Moon. The second I don't think has been mentioned yet: the moon does not have "a cold, solid core". The August issue of Discover magazine points out a few reasons why we beleive that the Moons core is at least partially molten in the article "Nuclear Planet" (well, something like that, the title may have been a bit different).
First you must understand that under no conditions will users read the manual. Ever. Save yourself the cost and don't even bother printing one.
Then there are those people who will not touch a SINGLE PART of X product unless the manual EXPLICITLY tells them to do so. Like my dad.
But Linux geeks don't senslessly and randomly murder large groups of people. And all of those except for 1 and 4 could be applied to Sci-fi fanatics.
Somehow, this has me worried. Dr. Who is cool, but writing all-new episodes just doesn't sit right with me (especially if they're using a script-writer from Buffy). They'll probably make it all state-of-the-art computer graphics and stuff, and end up ruining it. Ah, well, I hope I'm wrong. We'll just have to wait and see.
Assuming that your 35-mile launch is succesful (which I dearly hope that it is, for many reasons, including the preservation of your life), do you plan on going for The X-prize? In any case, what do you think would be different about an X-prize attempt? Would it be more difficult legally?
In "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien", JRRT states that he decided to go with that title BECAUSE it was ambiguous(sp?) and could refer to many different things.
I'm not disputing that, I'm just thinking that since they can't see it anyway, wouldn't it be easier just to keep it in their imaginations. But then this dude changed my mind. And I suppose there is the "brag factor" (showing other people what you made). I also suppose I should pay more attention to my own .sig. ;}
Hm. I stand corrected. Didn't think o' that... Thankyouverymuch for enlightening me.
That's really neat and all, and it's a good idea, and a lot of people are probably going to try it out, but..... If they're "visually impaired", how are they going to enjoy their own work?
I can't believe these haven't been mentioned yet- Duncan & Ramirez (not sure about the spellings...)
I don't have to mind, because there aren't any current inhabitants of the moon.
Actually, it's the territory of the Lunar Embassy.
ironic considering that NASA took something that wasn't under U.S. jurisdiction
Not so much. It's the same idea as explorers in the 1600's searching for gold in America. It's no ones jurisdiction, so they can do what they darn well please and claim the land for their own afterwards (or before). Except, in this case, we have that pesky Outer Space Treaty in the way of actually claiming the Land, but I'm not sure about the stuff FOUND on the land. Someone fill me in.