Be nice to zogger. I've been following his posts off and on for around a year and I don't think that English is his native language. He has a lot to say. He's definitely not an asshole - just frustrated and doesn't have access to the kind of resources a lot of us do. Flaming him (however mildly) for his english is not constructive, eh?
I ain't mad, I'm just giving up on this project, I will finish out giving away the boxes I have, with windows on them, and someone else can be the linux evangelist, I won't be doing it anymore, too frustrating.
I know of what you speak. I was the linux "evangelist" in a little dinky town in northern minnesota where nobody had heard of it at all. Made a few converts here and there...
See? I get responses, I appreciate it,but they haven't answered my questions.
In all honesty, zogger, what you need is a friend who you can share these experiences with and is willing to help; posting on slashdot is not the answer. Not flaming, being serious. Slashdot is not a help forum - it happens, but it's not. (for that matter most of usenet is useless the same way nowadays, but that's another rant). See my other response.
that MS is gonna arrive on those machines and stay on 99% of those machines, too.
On the machines you describe, it'll be W95 and W98; and not to offend, but you'll be opening these people up to more problems than they can deal with, given the age of the OS and lack of real security fixes. Some of that might account for the huge rise of zombied windows machines lately (not you, just the increased use of older win). I know that doesn't affect the short term where you are at, but long term can be much, much worse (I know, I was a win9Xtech for years).
As to hideous installs; see my other post. It's not all ground zero:)
Can't say as to what you are dealing with WRT to your users; but I know well the trials of getting linux installed on old systems with minimal support. Dialup on old phone lines from buttfuck minnesota:) Forums? hehe. Usenet? *snort*. IRC? who kidding...
and getting after market RAM sticks is extremely cost prohibitive, and a lot of these older machines take very precise sticks
God, Zogger... wish I'd known. I just sold a 8 lb box of 486/PI/II ram - a lot from prop machines like IBMs and gateways - on ebay. If I'd known you were looking I'd have just shipped it to you (didn't get enough money to pay for my time, only about fifty bucks)
Hey, man, don't feel bad. Before I moved I had tons of old equipment around, and that's how I learned to do stuff. Think of it as an education - in frustration - which is often the best teacher *grin* but seriously, sometimes just doing install after install on various machines is the best way to learn it. I'm biased - that's how I did it - but hey:)
That said, for a lot of older systems, you might try Damn Small Linux - which I use on my 486 laptop and which works quite well. It's a massively shrunken (50 mb image) version of Knoppix which is geared for min memory and cpu - and still has the hardware autodetect. Works pretty well (just doesn't update well, it's a mix of Debian stable, unstable and testing - so one has to be careful:) (see below)
You don't need a CDrom, either - if you can get the 50mb image on the hard drive, even if it's in a DOS partition, you can boot it from a DSL boot floppy, or with tomsrblt you can boot it over NFS if the network card is supported (takes a little tweaking tho in some configs)
DSL boots with fluxbox and a fb X and even on my 486 33mhz laptop is quite usable (I use the 486 to monitor the big machines from bed and surf slashdot occasionally:)
DSL is also quite nice for doing chroot to a debian install without having to go thru the crap of loading floppies - read the howtos there (too long to get into in this post)
BTW, none of the machines I've used DSL on have more than 16mb ram - more helps, but it's very usable without them, as long as you aren't using modern browsers (ram-hungry) or things like Open Office. To boot DSL requires only 8 mb ram if you're willing to deal with a lot of HD swap. Installation is easy - there's a script in the image that is really easy to run thru, all you need to know is what partition it needs to be on. Oh, and it pretty much installs and runs itself. Give it a try. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences (no, I'm not affiliated, I just think that Damn Small Linux rocks!)
Hey, good luck, man - seriously. Don't have time to play like that anymore, and I kind of miss it. If you'd like some non-RTFM help, post back - and we'll figure out a contact. I can't promise FT replies but I'll damn sure help you out - I'd consider it payback for those who helped me learning this.
Friends of mine can tell you what chopper is coming just by the sound from the blades.
Me too. There are distinct differences in the beat patterns and harmonics produced. Does take some experience (I'm always running outside with the camera to get a pix of a military chopper, but the local Medivac, no - but I lived near a couple military airbases during my life; one gets to know the difference if you have a good ear and observe what's passing over to have something to associate it with).
Same thing with jet aircraft. I see a lot of F-4s here, and the occasional B1, and some 16s; and they are always easy to tell apart from commercial aircraft. Distinctly different sounds.
Living near a miliary AB, tho - you *always* know when the F4s are taking off; things fall off the walls. Afterburners from hell!:) Makes me want to run outside and watch:)
Of course a good ear for sound/music runs in the family; so I know I'm not average (tho I'm not sure exactly where I am in the ability to distinguish different sounds)
There's only one section I can find there where you can get any idea of how loud it is (the comentary/background music buries it) but even at high volume, it didn't sound as annoying as the sounds of tractor-trailer units on an interstate in the US (which can be quite loud on some sections of roadway).
I live within a half mile of I90 and the traffic noise can be quite annoying nowadays. Quite a difference from when I was growing up (near a different and busier section of I90) and used to regard the *occasional* semi passing by as sort of a lonely-road traveling sound...but that was a long time ago. That section of I90 where I grew up is now constant noise.
How will they keep marine life from growing on it? Most current techniques involve painting things with bio-toxins.
That's an excellent question, particularly WRT to barnacles. Also, painting biotoxins on something like this might not be a good idea, unless you can limit the lifetime of the toxin in question. Then again, most rivers dump enormous amounts of toxins into the ocean environment, so it's likely that even on a large scale these would be just a very small fraction of what's already entering that ecosystem.
How will this effect the local currents?
Very little if at all, unless it's deployed on a truly huge scale. There's a helluva lot of momentum/inertia in ocean currents - think of how large they are, the mass they contain and the forces "powering" them. I doubt that even thousands of these units would affect most ocean currents more than a fraction of, say, what a fjord tidal harnessing system does in it's local environment.
Maintenance, I suspect, would be a real headache in a large system. But it'd create lots of jobs:)
Snopes says they "think" it's an urban legend, because there are no researchable news items. Doesn't mean it is.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere had done it. It'd be damned hard to trace and if no arrests/indictments were issued, probably wouldn't make even the local news.
It's just too obvious a prank (and way too tempting for some folks I used to know:)
That's also a great way of looking at it; although by "will" I meant public interest in kicking our space program into high gear, you make very good points.
Guess I don't belong to that "collective we", tho; I've never lived outside of what I need to live and a couple of relatively inexpensive hobbies (computers and hiking). I'm what my depression-era Grandmother calls "frugal":) Out of debt, live on as little as possible, and don't care for nor need a huge house, expensive toys, or three DVD players (?)
Funny thing about my family is, while my grandparents were always very frugal, the generation after them weren't, but all my siblings and nearly all my cousins are frugal, although most of them have college educations and pretty decent jobs. We often wonder what that means...
I admit to some bewilderment at people who need need need to have the latest, greatest, and biggest, and pour themselves into debt hell to get it. Some I've met (PT carpenter, work on some of those houses) express amazement when I tell them how I live. *shrug* I tell them (tactfully) that I think they're crazy to put themselves in debt like that, and amazingly, many of them agree with me.
Like you said, it's all in one's priorities.
As to giving up something for space; well, I donate time trying to teach people about astronomy and posting on forums; and I donate the rough equivalent of 40 cases of beer every year dollar wise. So... although I make much less than most of those people (lower middle income, by choice, I went to college), I see no reason why they couldn't contribute - if they wanted to. So there's the public will part.
In truth the most pleasure I get out of life is helping people fix things in their homes that they can't fix themselves - sometimes for as little as a smile and a "thank you".
I'll be giving my charity dollars this year to Rutan, methinks:) - in addition to our local library and the Salvation Army.
A couple weeks ago I pulled two TVs out of the dumpster down the street - cleaned them up, replaced the power cord on one, and sold them for thirty bucks each. Still don't know why they got tossed.
Not a new thing with TVs, either. Back in college circa '87 my TV was a 19" color set that a student threw out because she couldn't fit it in her car when she was moving. It was in perfect working order. Man, those things were *expensive* back then! I told her I thought she was out of her mind for not at least trying to *sell* it - and she just shrugged. Appalling.
GREAT posts. I think you're right on the mark about how computer design has allowed massive cost shavings (and brought the lifetime of most products down, too far IMO)
I get a lot of odd looks from people when I talk about how I fixed/recycled this or that old thing (nearly everything mechanical/electronic I own is repaired stuff that someone else threw away; even the 21" monitor on the desktop:) I don't have much in computer carcassas around -- moved last year and pitched most of it - but I have a couple boxes full of parts and get the occasional call from a local computer store wondering if I have this or that (last one was looking for 486 ram strips:0
I'll never understand this "buy new always" disposable attitude those people have. Of course I spent a great deal of time learning how to fix TVs/VCRs when I was young - thought it'd be a good skill to have - natch!:) so I'm a bit biased...
Old Dodge trucks...yeah. Lovely beasts to work on. The Slant6 is a great motor, too - proper care and they run forever. My favorite car ever was a beat-up old Duster I bought for $25 because the carb was screwed - all it needed was a kit and tuneup...
So to, to travel to the suburbs of your city, it was logical to travel across the country and then come back to the suburb? No the pioneers would say to take the shortest, and least costly routely.
Huh? What the hell are you talking about?
No, to travel halfway across the country, they had way-stations. I do not understand where you get this there and back again thing. It makes no sense at all. I'm talking about using the Moon as a way-station - you don't travel "3000 miles out and then come back to do 100 miles" - sorry dude, but that sentence was nonsense.
As an example, instead of shipping all the fuel for a Mars mission out of Earth's deep gravity well, we could produce it on the moon (all the necessary elements are there, just need equipment) and launch it on EM railguns into lunar orbit (FAR cheaper than shipping it up from Earth). Hell, we could even build the spacecraft a lot cheaper there once the infrastructure is in place.
Problem with a laser powerful enough to vaporize (NOT BURN) rock is that it's an energy hog and highly maintenance intensive, not to mention the parts can't be milled out in a simple machine shop, unlike a mechanical mining device. A laser mining machine for the moon is a good idea, but I highly doubt it'll be used for quite a while until the technology is mature.
Well, not to ni! again:) but you don't have to do a hundred million tons at a time...not sure on expense, but I'm sure we could cobble up machinery to do it. Expense isn't really going to be an issue, anyway - it's gonna cost like hell just to ship it there, so one would ship the best equipment one could build.
I've always thought that the most inexpensive way to start a moonbase would be a set off a few underground nukes - as clean as possible - and when the caverns formed had cooled build in those. Sure beats hell out of pushing dirt on top of canisters.
As for my nitpick, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew there was plenty of hydrogen there, also.
Man, I just don't get it. All those resources waiting to be used there and we're wasting money on the ISS. *bangs head on wall*
Yup, exactly (read my posting history on this article and other space related)
NZ, if you "Aussies" -:)- get a serious program going, I'm moving. This country (US) is too busy contemplating it's navel. Be it's death...
If you'd like to share wrt to space, respond to this to share email.
The point in time when the human race could open up a new frontier, and we're contemplating our navels. Nothing learned there from history, nosirree. F'A
Going to the moon, and then using it as a launch pad to mars is total bunk. It would be similar to doing a trip 100 miles away by taking the first leg of the trip 3000 miles away and then coming back.
Perhaps you should go back in time and tell the pioneers who opened the western parts of the US that. I'm sure they'd agree with you
/sarcasm
Lasers? Why? What benefit would there be shipping up hard to replace technology when we can already do it with mechanical technology, which we already have a lot of experience building and making work? (and which would be much easier to adapt to vacuum conditions than something which isn't used on a widespread basis here?)
I do agree with the rest of your post, tho. Stepping stones... and our primary step that way should be developing and implementing the technology to build the base ahead of the inhabitants.
But we're not doing that, are we?
Oh, fuck it, I don't know why I'm even posting to this article anymore.
Not to mention that the grandparent poster doesn't seem to realize how impurities in glass can be used to filter and polarize sunlight.
Gah. You'd think that he'd never worn a pair of polarizing sunglasses.
I'm not even going to address the grandparents' arguments about power, he seems to be assuming we'd put a base on the moon at the friccin lunar equator, rather than at the poles where there is nearly 100% sunlight.
How do these guys get modded up? Ignorance running rampant...well, not everyone is as interested in this as we are, I guess.
Great post, b-baggins. Been to Death Valley, once.:) Although for some plants (IIRC tomatoes & some legumes) it's closer to 60 watts/m^2. But that's just being pedantic:) (Oh, and peppers...can't live life without peppers...:)
The lunar regolith is full of oxygen bound up in various metals (aluminum oxides being one) and also full of bound and unbound hydrogen (mostly H3 from the solar wind). On Luna we also have a higher percentage of sunlight ( closer, no atmospheric attenuation, plus we could build a base near the poles to take advantage of nearly fulltime solar energy to power machinery and crack the elements out of the minerals).
On Mars we have... chemically bound materials in rocks, and a extremely small amount of oxy available from the atmosphere.
However, a Mars expedition is much more mass-intensive - it's much longer and has a lot higher logistics requirements. As to supply regeneration, the moon has just as much to offer as Mars does, it's just different engineering (producing oxygen from the regolith opposed to producing it from atmosphere - debatable both ways)
What the Moon costs us is the ability to use artificial gravity to reduce muscular and skeletal deterioration. Again, an expensive diversion.
That argument is moot when you consider the travel times (~3 days versus 6 months or so). If you're arguing surface gravity, Mars has only twice what the moon does; and the travel loss penalties far outweigh the surface benefits.
full of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, heavily oxidized materials and differentiated mineral deposits including hematite. The experience gained on one isn't transferrable to the other.
There is very little oxygen in Mars' atmosphere. There is, however, a lot in the lunar regolith. Sure, it's a little harder to liberate it; but the quantity bound on Luna (aluminum oxides) is higher.
nd the hardware designs necessary for conditions of hard vacuum and a 28-day sol are very different from airborne dust and a sub-25-hour sol.
Mars isn't that far from a hard vacuum, either. Plus Mars has other problems that counteract hard vacuum welding of moving parts - notably dust fines getting into the machinery.
The solar factor actually works to an advantage on the Moon - more sun, for longer times, and if we put our base near the poles, nearly constant sunshine.
As to your last sentence, I would think that if we could go to the Moon and make a colony work there, then Mars would actually be easier, because we'd have developed tech (and people) which/who could survive in a harsher environment. Yes, they are different problems - but Luna being harsher would make it a better test.
You also missed one point; Lunar colonies would be easier to help out, if needed, given the shorter travel times, than a Mars effort. If something went seriously wrong with a Mars expedition, Earth would be helpless as far as sending help; but we could boost emergency supplies to Luna a lot quicker than Mars (and within a day and a half or so if we were willing to spend the propellant)
Columbus had a viable technological solution at the time.
Huh? On frail wooden ships subject to destruction by storms, crewmen subject to scurvy and mutiny; on a voyage with no definable destination other than the idea that one could reach India (which was wrong, and if C's backers had understood what the Greeks had shown about the circumference of the earth, he would never have been funded for it!)
No.
So did Oook and Eeek.
Bad analogy from the beginning in the other post. It wasn't about risk or exploration, back then, it was about survival and there was no thought about risk or discovery or riches or anything else. Eeek.
Of course not. But the money should not be spent today on a glory shot.
THAT I agree with. We need to build our infrastructure in space on step at a time - and I don't think that an orbital station is really all that useful when it comes to solar system exploration, except as a staging point to assemble spacecraft - which the ISS is not. A serious lunar base could be a great staging point, tho - mainly by giving us a resource point that doesn't have the depth of Earth's gravity well.
Sure, it's expensive. Opening a new frontier will always be...but in the past such costs have been more distributed, and right now we're putting our eggs in too few baskets.
Slashdot Mirror
Be nice to zogger. I've been following his posts off and on for around a year and I don't think that English is his native language. He has a lot to say. He's definitely not an asshole - just frustrated and doesn't have access to the kind of resources a lot of us do. Flaming him (however mildly) for his english is not constructive, eh?
SB
I ain't mad, I'm just giving up on this project, I will finish out giving away the boxes I have, with windows on them, and someone else can be the linux evangelist, I won't be doing it anymore, too frustrating.
:)
:) Forums? hehe. Usenet? *snort*. IRC? who kidding...
I know of what you speak. I was the linux "evangelist" in a little dinky town in northern minnesota where nobody had heard of it at all. Made a few converts here and there...
See? I get responses, I appreciate it,but they haven't answered my questions.
In all honesty, zogger, what you need is a friend who you can share these experiences with and is willing to help; posting on slashdot is not the answer. Not flaming, being serious. Slashdot is not a help forum - it happens, but it's not. (for that matter most of usenet is useless the same way nowadays, but that's another rant). See my other response.
that MS is gonna arrive on those machines and stay on 99% of those machines, too.
On the machines you describe, it'll be W95 and W98; and not to offend, but you'll be opening these people up to more problems than they can deal with, given the age of the OS and lack of real security fixes. Some of that might account for the huge rise of zombied windows machines lately (not you, just the increased use of older win). I know that doesn't affect the short term where you are at, but long term can be much, much worse (I know, I was a win9Xtech for years).
As to hideous installs; see my other post. It's not all ground zero
Can't say as to what you are dealing with WRT to your users; but I know well the trials of getting linux installed on old systems with minimal support. Dialup on old phone lines from buttfuck minnesota
Good luck to you...
SB
and getting after market RAM sticks is extremely cost prohibitive, and a lot of these older machines take very precise sticks
:)
:) (see below)
:)
God, Zogger... wish I'd known. I just sold a 8 lb box of 486/PI/II ram - a lot from prop machines like IBMs and gateways - on ebay. If I'd known you were looking I'd have just shipped it to you (didn't get enough money to pay for my time, only about fifty bucks)
Hey, man, don't feel bad. Before I moved I had tons of old equipment around, and that's how I learned to do stuff. Think of it as an education - in frustration - which is often the best teacher *grin* but seriously, sometimes just doing install after install on various machines is the best way to learn it. I'm biased - that's how I did it - but hey
That said, for a lot of older systems, you might try Damn Small Linux - which I use on my 486 laptop and which works quite well. It's a massively shrunken (50 mb image) version of Knoppix which is geared for min memory and cpu - and still has the hardware autodetect. Works pretty well (just doesn't update well, it's a mix of Debian stable, unstable and testing - so one has to be careful
You don't need a CDrom, either - if you can get the 50mb image on the hard drive, even if it's in a DOS partition, you can boot it from a DSL boot floppy, or with tomsrblt you can boot it over NFS if the network card is supported (takes a little tweaking tho in some configs)
DSL boots with fluxbox and a fb X and even on my 486 33mhz laptop is quite usable (I use the 486 to monitor the big machines from bed and surf slashdot occasionally
DSL is also quite nice for doing chroot to a debian install without having to go thru the crap of loading floppies - read the howtos there (too long to get into in this post)
BTW, none of the machines I've used DSL on have more than 16mb ram - more helps, but it's very usable without them, as long as you aren't using modern browsers (ram-hungry) or things like Open Office. To boot DSL requires only 8 mb ram if you're willing to deal with a lot of HD swap. Installation is easy - there's a script in the image that is really easy to run thru, all you need to know is what partition it needs to be on. Oh, and it pretty much installs and runs itself. Give it a try. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences (no, I'm not affiliated, I just think that Damn Small Linux rocks!)
Hey, good luck, man - seriously. Don't have time to play like that anymore, and I kind of miss it. If you'd like some non-RTFM help, post back - and we'll figure out a contact. I can't promise FT replies but I'll damn sure help you out - I'd consider it payback for those who helped me learning this.
Cheers!
SB
Train horns...
:)
I miss that sound...guess there's a little hobo in me (k, maybe more than a little
SB
Friends of mine can tell you what chopper is coming just by the sound from the blades.
:) Makes me want to run outside and watch :)
Me too. There are distinct differences in the beat patterns and harmonics produced. Does take some experience (I'm always running outside with the camera to get a pix of a military chopper, but the local Medivac, no - but I lived near a couple military airbases during my life; one gets to know the difference if you have a good ear and observe what's passing over to have something to associate it with).
Same thing with jet aircraft. I see a lot of F-4s here, and the occasional B1, and some 16s; and they are always easy to tell apart from commercial aircraft. Distinctly different sounds.
Living near a miliary AB, tho - you *always* know when the F4s are taking off; things fall off the walls. Afterburners from hell!
Of course a good ear for sound/music runs in the family; so I know I'm not average (tho I'm not sure exactly where I am in the ability to distinguish different sounds)
Cheers!
SB
Nice link, thanks.
There's only one section I can find there where you can get any idea of how loud it is (the comentary/background music buries it) but even at high volume, it didn't sound as annoying as the sounds of tractor-trailer units on an interstate in the US (which can be quite loud on some sections of roadway).
I live within a half mile of I90 and the traffic noise can be quite annoying nowadays. Quite a difference from when I was growing up (near a different and busier section of I90) and used to regard the *occasional* semi passing by as sort of a lonely-road traveling sound...but that was a long time ago. That section of I90 where I grew up is now constant noise.
Interesting how one's perceptions change.
SB
How will they keep marine life from growing on it? Most current techniques involve painting things with bio-toxins.
:)
That's an excellent question, particularly WRT to barnacles. Also, painting biotoxins on something like this might not be a good idea, unless you can limit the lifetime of the toxin in question. Then again, most rivers dump enormous amounts of toxins into the ocean environment, so it's likely that even on a large scale these would be just a very small fraction of what's already entering that ecosystem.
How will this effect the local currents?
Very little if at all, unless it's deployed on a truly huge scale. There's a helluva lot of momentum/inertia in ocean currents - think of how large they are, the mass they contain and the forces "powering" them. I doubt that even thousands of these units would affect most ocean currents more than a fraction of, say, what a fjord tidal harnessing system does in it's local environment.
Maintenance, I suspect, would be a real headache in a large system. But it'd create lots of jobs
SB
Read the Snopes article.
:)
Snopes says they "think" it's an urban legend, because there are no researchable news items. Doesn't mean it is.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere had done it. It'd be damned hard to trace and if no arrests/indictments were issued, probably wouldn't make even the local news.
It's just too obvious a prank (and way too tempting for some folks I used to know
SB
That's also a great way of looking at it; although by "will" I meant public interest in kicking our space program into high gear, you make very good points.
:) Out of debt, live on as little as possible, and don't care for nor need a huge house, expensive toys, or three DVD players (?)
:) - in addition to our local library and the Salvation Army.
Guess I don't belong to that "collective we", tho; I've never lived outside of what I need to live and a couple of relatively inexpensive hobbies (computers and hiking). I'm what my depression-era Grandmother calls "frugal"
Funny thing about my family is, while my grandparents were always very frugal, the generation after them weren't, but all my siblings and nearly all my cousins are frugal, although most of them have college educations and pretty decent jobs. We often wonder what that means...
I admit to some bewilderment at people who need need need to have the latest, greatest, and biggest, and pour themselves into debt hell to get it. Some I've met (PT carpenter, work on some of those houses) express amazement when I tell them how I live. *shrug* I tell them (tactfully) that I think they're crazy to put themselves in debt like that, and amazingly, many of them agree with me.
Like you said, it's all in one's priorities.
As to giving up something for space; well, I donate time trying to teach people about astronomy and posting on forums; and I donate the rough equivalent of 40 cases of beer every year dollar wise. So... although I make much less than most of those people (lower middle income, by choice, I went to college), I see no reason why they couldn't contribute - if they wanted to. So there's the public will part.
In truth the most pleasure I get out of life is helping people fix things in their homes that they can't fix themselves - sometimes for as little as a smile and a "thank you".
I'll be giving my charity dollars this year to Rutan, methinks
Political will is a whole 'nother matter...
Cheers
SB
TVs, indeed.
A couple weeks ago I pulled two TVs out of the dumpster down the street - cleaned them up, replaced the power cord on one, and sold them for thirty bucks each. Still don't know why they got tossed.
Not a new thing with TVs, either. Back in college circa '87 my TV was a 19" color set that a student threw out because she couldn't fit it in her car when she was moving. It was in perfect working order. Man, those things were *expensive* back then! I told her I thought she was out of her mind for not at least trying to *sell* it - and she just shrugged. Appalling.
SB
GREAT posts. I think you're right on the mark about how computer design has allowed massive cost shavings (and brought the lifetime of most products down, too far IMO)
:) I don't have much in computer carcassas around -- moved last year and pitched most of it - but I have a couple boxes full of parts and get the occasional call from a local computer store wondering if I have this or that (last one was looking for 486 ram strips :0
:) so I'm a bit biased...
I get a lot of odd looks from people when I talk about how I fixed/recycled this or that old thing (nearly everything mechanical/electronic I own is repaired stuff that someone else threw away; even the 21" monitor on the desktop
I'll never understand this "buy new always" disposable attitude those people have. Of course I spent a great deal of time learning how to fix TVs/VCRs when I was young - thought it'd be a good skill to have - natch!
Old Dodge trucks...yeah. Lovely beasts to work on. The Slant6 is a great motor, too - proper care and they run forever. My favorite car ever was a beat-up old Duster I bought for $25 because the carb was screwed - all it needed was a kit and tuneup...
Cheers!
SB
I FINALLY got that stupid song out of my head, and you.... you...
You insensitive clod!
SB
Now, if you'd said anecdotal evidence rather than empirical, I might agree with you...
SB
So to, to travel to the suburbs of your city, it was logical to travel across the country and then come back to the suburb? No the pioneers would say to take the shortest, and least costly routely.
Huh? What the hell are you talking about?
No, to travel halfway across the country, they had way-stations. I do not understand where you get this there and back again thing. It makes no sense at all. I'm talking about using the Moon as a way-station - you don't travel "3000 miles out and then come back to do 100 miles" - sorry dude, but that sentence was nonsense.
As an example, instead of shipping all the fuel for a Mars mission out of Earth's deep gravity well, we could produce it on the moon (all the necessary elements are there, just need equipment) and launch it on EM railguns into lunar orbit (FAR cheaper than shipping it up from Earth). Hell, we could even build the spacecraft a lot cheaper there once the infrastructure is in place.
Problem with a laser powerful enough to vaporize (NOT BURN) rock is that it's an energy hog and highly maintenance intensive, not to mention the parts can't be milled out in a simple machine shop, unlike a mechanical mining device. A laser mining machine for the moon is a good idea, but I highly doubt it'll be used for quite a while until the technology is mature.
SB
Well, not to ni! again :) but you don't have to do a hundred million tons at a time...not sure on expense, but I'm sure we could cobble up machinery to do it. Expense isn't really going to be an issue, anyway - it's gonna cost like hell just to ship it there, so one would ship the best equipment one could build.
I've always thought that the most inexpensive way to start a moonbase would be a set off a few underground nukes - as clean as possible - and when the caverns formed had cooled build in those. Sure beats hell out of pushing dirt on top of canisters.
As for my nitpick, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew there was plenty of hydrogen there, also.
Man, I just don't get it. All those resources waiting to be used there and we're wasting money on the ISS. *bangs head on wall*
SB
Yup, exactly (read my posting history on this article and other space related)
NZ, if you "Aussies" -:)- get a serious program going, I'm moving. This country (US) is too busy contemplating it's navel. Be it's death...
If you'd like to share wrt to space, respond to this to share email.
The point in time when the human race could open up a new frontier, and we're contemplating our navels. Nothing learned there from history, nosirree. F'A
*disgust*
SB
Perhaps you should go back in time and tell the pioneers who opened the western parts of the US that. I'm sure they'd agree with you
/sarcasm
Lasers? Why? What benefit would there be shipping up hard to replace technology when we can already do it with mechanical technology, which we already have a lot of experience building and making work? (and which would be much easier to adapt to vacuum conditions than something which isn't used on a widespread basis here?)
I do agree with the rest of your post, tho. Stepping stones... and our primary step that way should be developing and implementing the technology to build the base ahead of the inhabitants.
But we're not doing that, are we?
Oh, fuck it, I don't know why I'm even posting to this article anymore.
SB
"There's no economic case for mining uranium until there's a working fission reactor"
Shortsightnedness is going to be the death of this country, I swear.
SB
going to the Moon to repair a telescope there is far more expensive and dangerous.
:) with a machine shop and radio links to earthside engineers... remember why Hubble is being killed, here.
Not if you have onsite techs
SB
Since about 100 million tons of regolith must be heated to about 1400 deg. F to get one ton of helium 3,,,4000 tons of hydrogen, 10,000 tons of nitrogen, 20,000 tons of carbon and 54,000 tons of sulfur will also be obtained.
The regolith contains 4 thousand times as much hydrogen as helium3
Get your own facts straight.
Oh, and nitrogen, even. Useful in greenhouses and as atmosphere mix
SB
Mod parent up.
:) Although for some plants (IIRC tomatoes & some legumes) it's closer to 60 watts/m^2. But that's just being pedantic :) (Oh, and peppers...can't live life without peppers... :)
Not to mention that the grandparent poster doesn't seem to realize how impurities in glass can be used to filter and polarize sunlight.
Gah. You'd think that he'd never worn a pair of polarizing sunglasses.
I'm not even going to address the grandparents' arguments about power, he seems to be assuming we'd put a base on the moon at the friccin lunar equator, rather than at the poles where there is nearly 100% sunlight.
How do these guys get modded up? Ignorance running rampant...well, not everyone is as interested in this as we are, I guess.
Great post, b-baggins. Been to Death Valley, once.
SB
You deserved an Informative mod for that.
:(
Bottom line, we don't have the ability to pull off another Apollo type engineering miracle.
We do, it's just being diverted to other things...
But Sagan put it really well: "Small moves..."
SB
Huh?
The lunar regolith is full of oxygen bound up in various metals (aluminum oxides being one) and also full of bound and unbound hydrogen (mostly H3 from the solar wind). On Luna we also have a higher percentage of sunlight ( closer, no atmospheric attenuation, plus we could build a base near the poles to take advantage of nearly fulltime solar energy to power machinery and crack the elements out of the minerals).
On Mars we have... chemically bound materials in rocks, and a extremely small amount of oxy available from the atmosphere.
SB
More delta-V, yes. But not by much.
However, a Mars expedition is much more mass-intensive - it's much longer and has a lot higher logistics requirements. As to supply regeneration, the moon has just as much to offer as Mars does, it's just different engineering (producing oxygen from the regolith opposed to producing it from atmosphere - debatable both ways)
What the Moon costs us is the ability to use artificial gravity to reduce muscular and skeletal deterioration. Again, an expensive diversion.
That argument is moot when you consider the travel times (~3 days versus 6 months or so). If you're arguing surface gravity, Mars has only twice what the moon does; and the travel loss penalties far outweigh the surface benefits.
full of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, heavily oxidized materials and differentiated mineral deposits including hematite. The experience gained on one isn't transferrable to the other.
There is very little oxygen in Mars' atmosphere. There is, however, a lot in the lunar regolith. Sure, it's a little harder to liberate it; but the quantity bound on Luna (aluminum oxides) is higher.
nd the hardware designs necessary for conditions of hard vacuum and a 28-day sol are very different from airborne dust and a sub-25-hour sol.
Mars isn't that far from a hard vacuum, either. Plus Mars has other problems that counteract hard vacuum welding of moving parts - notably dust fines getting into the machinery.
The solar factor actually works to an advantage on the Moon - more sun, for longer times, and if we put our base near the poles, nearly constant sunshine.
As to your last sentence, I would think that if we could go to the Moon and make a colony work there, then Mars would actually be easier, because we'd have developed tech (and people) which/who could survive in a harsher environment. Yes, they are different problems - but Luna being harsher would make it a better test.
You also missed one point; Lunar colonies would be easier to help out, if needed, given the shorter travel times, than a Mars effort. If something went seriously wrong with a Mars expedition, Earth would be helpless as far as sending help; but we could boost emergency supplies to Luna a lot quicker than Mars (and within a day and a half or so if we were willing to spend the propellant)
Cheers!!!
SB
I agree with most of your post, but Holy Cow...
Columbus had a viable technological solution at the time.
Huh? On frail wooden ships subject to destruction by storms, crewmen subject to scurvy and mutiny; on a voyage with no definable destination other than the idea that one could reach India (which was wrong, and if C's backers had understood what the Greeks had shown about the circumference of the earth, he would never have been funded for it!)
No.
So did Oook and Eeek.
Bad analogy from the beginning in the other post. It wasn't about risk or exploration, back then, it was about survival and there was no thought about risk or discovery or riches or anything else. Eeek.
Of course not. But the money should not be spent today on a glory shot.
THAT I agree with. We need to build our infrastructure in space on step at a time - and I don't think that an orbital station is really all that useful when it comes to solar system exploration, except as a staging point to assemble spacecraft - which the ISS is not. A serious lunar base could be a great staging point, tho - mainly by giving us a resource point that doesn't have the depth of Earth's gravity well.
Sure, it's expensive. Opening a new frontier will always be...but in the past such costs have been more distributed, and right now we're putting our eggs in too few baskets.
Great post, BTW.
SB