At 7000 miles per second (11,000 km / sec, or 4% of the speed of light), you would expect a strong emission of 1 MeV gamma rays and an energy release in the megaton range for a 100 kg payload; basically you would have created the kinetic equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
At 7000 miles _per hour_, not so much. Project HARP fired 8000 miles per hour payloads in the 1960's.
There have been experiments to shoot things into space using cannon (for research) since at least Project Harp of the 1960's. They tended to have funding problems, leading Gerald Bull (their chief proponent) to accept money from Saddam Hussein to build a supergun using the same technology, which lead to his assassination.
Well, you would have to pump it into the rocket at some point.
Here, however, is another way to think of it. If you are going to do orbital fuel storage in LEO, you will have to send up the tanks, pumps, etc. - they are not at station now. So, then, you have to ask, where, exactly, should they be sent, and (for us) the answer won't be the ISS (for the reasons I gave).
Note that if the Russians ever started thinking again about sending people into deep space, they would come to different conclusions, and could well want to use the ISS for staging.
- The ISS is in an orbit to suit the (latitude of the) Russians. We would waste energy sending a deep space mission (equipment or crew) to the ISS (unless we were also using Russian lift capacity or equipment, for which there are no plans at present).
- The ISS is no place to be storing large amounts of rocket fuel. You would want to keep that well away from a crewed facility.
- It is energetically much more efficient to burn off your delta V in the atmosphere when you return than to carry rockets and fuel all the way to Mars (say) and back just to get into LOW Earth orbit.
Now, if we had a base in high lunar orbit, the first objection is irrelevant and the third is no longer true (it's energetically easy to get to a Lagrange point or a high retrograde lunar orbit from a Mars or asteroid return orbit, and you could still use an atmospheric re-entry for the last bit of the return) and the third could be dealt with especially _if the fuel was made in space_, but such a base will take a while to realize. (If you think about it, the Asteroid Return Mission is the first step in doing that, even if it isn't talked about as such.)
There is a long history here - from (for some major examples) the early Canals, to the Trans-Continental Railroad and the Geological Surveys of the West, followed by Air Mail and then the first communications satellites - of the Government (actually, of many governments) putting money either into R&D for or direct support of early-stage commercial ventures, in order to get them on their feet. It wouldn't be the first time NASA has done this by a long, long shot. In fact, US support of Aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) has always been in part explicitly in support of commercial developments, going from back to the NACA days, before NASA was even founded.
The trouble with sending a mission (manned or unmanned) to a very small (5 meter class) asteroid in the near future is that we don't know their orbits well enough. At all. Out of 374 very small near Earth asteroids known, exactly 2 have decently determined orbits. The chances of finding a candidate 5 meter asteroid in time to send a mission to it, and having a good enough determination of its orbit to have a mission get to it, is basically nill without a dedicated space telescope such as the B612 Foundations Sentinel mission. So, unless we are willing to wait for an extra 5+ years to build and fly an asteroid finder, that means we have to carve off a piece of a bigger asteroid (more are known, and they tend to have better orbit determinations). As it happens, that is also what the asteroid mining people want NASA to demonstrate, as that fits their view of how asteroid mining will be done, and it will make the asteroid geologists happier as well, so this seems like a win-win all around.
If you are relying on a service with a master key for security, you have no security. This is true regardless of whether the government has access to those keys.
Proposals and discussions about "weaponizing the weather [salon.com]" go back (in the US) to the 1950's. I can even remember the Castro regime complaining about US manipulation of hurricanes (to hit Cuba).
The Internet is mostly based on RAND, which may appear to be open source, but isn't. (In some ways I would argue that RAND is better than strict open source; that, to put it mildly, is a matter for debate.)
At their peak, just before they blow, these "screams" get to a high enough frequency that humans could hear them. Of course, to us it would sound like a low frequency rumble.
In other words, if you are standing on a volcano, and start to hear it grumble, get away. Fast.
You do realize that when you go into the kitchen to get a beer, you change either the rotation rate of the Earth, or its polar motion, or (more likely) both?
The question is not whether or not it happens, the question is whether it is big enough to be detected observationally. Today, with GPS and VLBI, pretty small changes can be detected (although, I will grant, not you going into the kitchen). (Yet.)
I did calculate once the rotational effect of everyone going back and forth to work in LA; maybe it's time to redo those calculations.
It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art.
The end result of this will be to destroy copyright. I give it 10 years.
I think that Evo Morales, the Bolivian President, was the "designated drunk" in this case. My guess is that Morales didn't know anything and that someone is playing a deep game, leaking misinformation (about Snowden being on Morales's plane) to the CIA so that the CIA could destroy its credibility and cause a diplomatic debacle by asking Spain (and others) to stop the flight.
You can bet that the next South American leader flying out of Moscow will not have their plane stopped. That is so convenient for certain parties that I have to feel that it was not accidental.
Cuba Flight 455 blown up, 78 people killed, Posada Carriles (who, BTW, was trained by the CIA at Fort Benning) escaped Venezuela to the US, and currently lives in Miami after the US refused Venezuelan extradition, on the grounds that he could be tortured if extradited. (Judges generally don't do irony.) He was tried, and acquitted, in the US for entering the country illegally, in the course of the trial his lawyers made the interesting statement that ""The Defendant's CIA relationship, stemming from his work against the Castro regime through his anti-communist activities in Venezuela and Central America, are relevant and admissible to his defense."
Although you will find barely a mention of the connection in the English language press, Juan Cole connects the dots.
You write as if a few billion words was a lot, but I don't think it really is. (Not that I am really proposing this, but it can be fun to work through the math.) We could do this, if we really wanted to. Heck, the ancient Egyptians could have done it, if there had been an ancient Jimmy Wales to prod them.
Let's say that the average Wikipedia word was about 8 letters, so we need to write 10 billion characters, exactly. Let's also suppose we will use 10 points, so that each character requires a 4.2 mm x 4.2 mm square or 18 mm^2. So, a square meter would hold 56,206 characters, and wikipedia would require 1.8 million square meters. Suppose that we want to put them on the sides of stone cubes, 1 meter on a side, with nothing on the top or bottom. Then each cube provides 4 m^2 of area, and thus this would require less than 450,000 m^3 of stone, or the same number of such cubes.
Now the Great Pyramid required 2.4 million m^3 of stone, or 5 times as this "Wikihenge" scheme, which is why I think the ancient Egyptians could have done this (although the inscribing might have taken generations). There are obviously lots of room in a lot of deserts for another pyramid. Even if a true Stonehenge type solution was adopted (say with two blocks on top of each other, separated by 2 meters of open space), this would only take about 2 km^2 of open space; again, there's a lot of room for such an installation in the deserts of the world.
May I commend to you incised letters on stone? This has a long history of working, at least for human notions of permanent. You can go to places like Egypt , and bring back inscriptions from 3000+ years ago which you can read without trouble (well, at least if you know the language, which is another problem).
As far true permanence, and surviving things like the decay of protons in 10^35 years, you are on your own.
I am not even going to waste electrons describing why Google DataMine (the "data" is silent) is a bad idea. These reasons will have already occurred to anyone intelligent enough to bother discussing them with.
Slashdot Mirror
And, somehow, the last one as well : http://xkcd.com/1243/
At 7000 miles per second (11,000 km / sec, or 4% of the speed of light), you would expect a strong emission of 1 MeV gamma rays and an energy release in the megaton range for a 100 kg payload; basically you would have created the kinetic equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
At 7000 miles _per hour_, not so much. Project HARP fired 8000 miles per hour payloads in the 1960's.
There have been experiments to shoot things into space using cannon (for research) since at least Project Harp of the 1960's. They tended to have funding problems, leading Gerald Bull (their chief proponent) to accept money from Saddam Hussein to build a supergun using the same technology, which lead to his assassination.
Wernher von Braun never had these problems...
Well, you would have to pump it into the rocket at some point.
Here, however, is another way to think of it. If you are going to do orbital fuel storage in LEO, you will have to send up the tanks, pumps, etc. - they are not at station now. So, then, you have to ask, where, exactly, should they be sent, and (for us) the answer won't be the ISS (for the reasons I gave).
Note that if the Russians ever started thinking again about sending people into deep space, they would come to different conclusions, and could well want to use the ISS for staging.
Problems with that are
- The ISS is in an orbit to suit the (latitude of the) Russians. We would waste energy sending a deep space mission (equipment or crew) to the ISS (unless we were also using Russian lift capacity or equipment, for which there are no plans at present).
- The ISS is no place to be storing large amounts of rocket fuel. You would want to keep that well away from a crewed facility.
- It is energetically much more efficient to burn off your delta V in the atmosphere when you return than to carry rockets and fuel all the way to Mars (say) and back just to get into LOW Earth orbit.
Now, if we had a base in high lunar orbit, the first objection is irrelevant and the third is no longer true (it's energetically easy to get to a Lagrange point or a high retrograde lunar orbit from a Mars or asteroid return orbit, and you could still use an atmospheric re-entry for the last bit of the return) and the third could be dealt with especially _if the fuel was made in space_, but such a base will take a while to realize. (If you think about it, the Asteroid Return Mission is the first step in doing that, even if it isn't talked about as such.)
There is a long history here - from (for some major examples) the early Canals, to the Trans-Continental Railroad and the Geological Surveys of the West, followed by Air Mail and then the first communications satellites - of the Government (actually, of many governments) putting money either into R&D for or direct support of early-stage commercial ventures, in order to get them on their feet. It wouldn't be the first time NASA has done this by a long, long shot. In fact, US support of Aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) has always been in part explicitly in support of commercial developments, going from back to the NACA days, before NASA was even founded.
The trouble with sending a mission (manned or unmanned) to a very small (5 meter class) asteroid in the near future is that we don't know their orbits well enough. At all. Out of 374 very small near Earth asteroids known, exactly 2 have decently determined orbits. The chances of finding a candidate 5 meter asteroid in time to send a mission to it, and having a good enough determination of its orbit to have a mission get to it, is basically nill without a dedicated space telescope such as the B612 Foundations Sentinel mission. So, unless we are willing to wait for an extra 5+ years to build and fly an asteroid finder, that means we have to carve off a piece of a bigger asteroid (more are known, and they tend to have better orbit determinations). As it happens, that is also what the asteroid mining people want NASA to demonstrate, as that fits their view of how asteroid mining will be done, and it will make the asteroid geologists happier as well, so this seems like a win-win all around.
If you are relying on a service with a master key for security, you have no security. This is true regardless of whether the government has access to those keys.
Talk to your lawyer. If you don't have one, get one.
Most of what is viewed as "needed" outdoor lighting isn't. Separating need from emotional desires would go a long way to stopping light pollution.
Status: This quotation has not been found in any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
Proposals and discussions about "weaponizing the weather [salon.com]" go back (in the US) to the 1950's. I can even remember the Castro regime complaining about US manipulation of hurricanes (to hit Cuba).
The Internet is mostly based on RAND, which may appear to be open source, but isn't. (In some ways I would argue that RAND is better than strict open source; that, to put it mildly, is a matter for debate.)
At their peak, just before they blow, these "screams" get to a high enough frequency that humans could hear them. Of course, to us it would sound like a low frequency rumble.
In other words, if you are standing on a volcano, and start to hear it grumble, get away. Fast.
You do realize that when you go into the kitchen to get a beer, you change either the rotation rate of the Earth, or its polar motion, or (more likely) both?
The question is not whether or not it happens, the question is whether it is big enough to be detected observationally. Today, with GPS and VLBI, pretty small changes can be detected (although, I will grant, not you going into the kitchen). (Yet.)
I did calculate once the rotational effect of everyone going back and forth to work in LA; maybe it's time to redo those calculations.
Nice to get that cleared up.
The end result of this will be to destroy copyright. I give it 10 years.
And Spain's Foreign Minister has said that Spain was told that Edward Snowden was aboard the Bolivian presidential jet, and that that was why the plane was diverted.
I think that Evo Morales, the Bolivian President, was the "designated drunk" in this case. My guess is that Morales didn't know anything and that someone is playing a deep game, leaking misinformation (about Snowden being on Morales's plane) to the CIA so that the CIA could destroy its credibility and cause a diplomatic debacle by asking Spain (and others) to stop the flight.
You can bet that the next South American leader flying out of Moscow will not have their plane stopped. That is so convenient for certain parties that I have to feel that it was not accidental.
Cuba Flight 455 blown up, 78 people killed, Posada Carriles (who, BTW, was trained by the CIA at Fort Benning) escaped Venezuela to the US, and currently lives in Miami after the US refused Venezuelan extradition, on the grounds that he could be tortured if extradited. (Judges generally don't do irony.) He was tried, and acquitted, in the US for entering the country illegally, in the course of the trial his lawyers made the interesting statement that ""The Defendant's CIA relationship, stemming from his work against the Castro regime through his anti-communist activities in Venezuela and Central America, are relevant and admissible to his defense."
Although you will find barely a mention of the connection in the English language press, Juan Cole connects the dots.
'Elysium' Trailer, 33 seconds in.
You write as if a few billion words was a lot, but I don't think it really is. (Not that I am really proposing this, but it can be fun to work through the math.) We could do this, if we really wanted to. Heck, the ancient Egyptians could have done it, if there had been an ancient Jimmy Wales to prod them.
Let's say that the average Wikipedia word was about 8 letters, so we need to write 10 billion characters, exactly. Let's also suppose we will use 10 points, so that each character requires a 4.2 mm x 4.2 mm square or 18 mm^2. So, a square meter would hold 56,206 characters, and wikipedia would require 1.8 million square meters. Suppose that we want to put them on the sides of stone cubes, 1 meter on a side, with nothing on the top or bottom. Then each cube provides 4 m^2 of area, and thus this would require less than 450,000 m^3 of stone, or the same number of such cubes.
Now the Great Pyramid required 2.4 million m^3 of stone, or 5 times as this "Wikihenge" scheme, which is why I think the ancient Egyptians could have done this (although the inscribing might have taken generations). There are obviously lots of room in a lot of deserts for another pyramid. Even if a true Stonehenge type solution was adopted (say with two blocks on top of each other, separated by 2 meters of open space), this would only take about 2 km^2 of open space; again, there's a lot of room for such an installation in the deserts of the world.
May I commend to you incised letters on stone? This has a long history of working, at least for human notions of permanent. You can go to places like Egypt , and bring back inscriptions from 3000+ years ago which you can read without trouble (well, at least if you know the language, which is another problem).
As far true permanence, and surviving things like the decay of protons in 10^35 years, you are on your own.
The same sort of people who accept join/friend requests from all sorts of people they don't actually know on their social media sites.
On the other side, they are called "marks."
I am not even going to waste electrons describing why Google DataMine (the "data" is silent) is a bad idea. These reasons will have already occurred to anyone intelligent enough to bother discussing them with.