Fortunately for the universe, nature has made the possibility of human space colonization well beyond our foreseeable capabilities. The best man could do currently is build a sophisticated coffin and propel it out of the solar system. The occupants might be able to breed, but those offspring would die in tansit.
Or colonize the wide variety of Solar System bodies out there. That seems a bit more practical than sending coffins out of the Solar System.
But having said that, you have an interesting business model for a future funeral service. It wouldn't be too hard to send corpses or cremated remains out of the Solar System, say to impact with another star.
Given the state of scientific concensus on the short term prognosis for earth's ecosphere, the dream of turning suborbital space into an amusement park for the wealthy and privileged is reserved for the socioapathetic.
Funny how on Slashdot, the term "sociopathic" has devolved to merely mean "people I don't like" or maybe "rich people". Words should mean things, not merely be devalued to be an doublespeak, throwaway phrase to indicate disapproval.
But the developed world has already solved the pollution problem. Suborbital flight turns out to be irrelevant to the matter.
The wealth being squandered on the goal of commercial space 'flight' is better invested in overcoming the near term challenges that could lead biological collapse down here on the surface of the planet.
Not at all. The countries with the actual pollution problems already can solve their problems. They just choose not to. Throwing wealth at that isn't going to change things that wouldn't change anyway.
And space tourism is a stepping stone to space colonization which has considerable relevance to any sort of sustainable living. When you have to manage and recycle virtually everything to a very high level including the water you drink and the air you breathe, just to survive in space, that gives you both massive incentive to develop technologies relevant to reducing humanity's impact on Earth and a real appreciation for environmentalism and conservation.
If that observation turns to be relevant, then it might be because a large chunk of fuel broke off and plugged up the rocket nozzle. That's the sort of failure mode you can see in hybrid motors when they first pour new formulations. I would expect that the new fuel was tested repeatedly in test firings on the ground though.
Well, your link has some pretty pictures, but it's a poor argument. I'm not going to buy that "Space Tourism isn't worth dying for" just because an Adam Rogers says so. I find this sort of argument tiresome because rich people spending money isn't exactly a new thing. At least, by spending it on space tourism rather than on a new yacht or house, they're actually pushing new ground and contributing to open up the universe to us.
Nor is life particularly valuable in itself. I find Rogers's theatrical concerns about the single life lost in the pursuit of rich people in space to be unworthy of my time spent reading the article.
I know what the market for suborbital is - and the difference between suborbital and the usual meaning of "cheap access to space". Unlike the fanboi's, I debase the meaning so I can sneak SpaceShip Two in.
My point remains. If you don't need orbit, but merely high enough for a few minutes, then SpaceShipTwo would provide a remarkably cheap access to space.
Since they haven't designed and built an aircraft with anything even remotely resembling those performance characteristics...
SpaceShipOne being the obvious counterexample. In the highest flights, it achieved about a quarter of the delta v needed to reach space, reached a vacuum good enough that it effectively had no drag/lift, and had a rudimentary system for reentering the Earth's atmosphere. Yes, that's not orbital capability, but that is a demonstration that they have the ability to design and build such things. It certainly achieves the "remotely resembling" threshold here.
I suppose I just get annoyed by the exaggerated FUD you routinely bring to the table.
Absent several technological breakthroughs that are each tantamount to magic
The SpaceShipTwo design already is cheap access to space for researchers who want to run experiments above 100 km. And for the thrill ride. Don't need new technology development beyond what's already been done (except it sounds like they might need a more reliable rocket).
I think you ought to learn more about what the market is for suborbital before telling us about all the magic that needs to be done.
Sure, they'll need to greatly modify the design in order to get an orbital vehicle with viable thermal protection system for return to Earth. But so what? As I've noted before, Scaled Composites has demonstrated that they can design and build such things,
The fun part is that the goverment wanted to put an tax on wood. So it was struck down because it was campained agains as a tax for citizens and their small furnace/ovens in their home.
But in reality Danish Oil and Natural Gas(the national company recently sold to goldman sachs) are retooling some powerplants to run on wood from the USA instead of coal. So they wanted to help goldman avoid this tax and got people all angry.
It's communication 101. In order to convince someone to your point of view, you appeal to their interests not your own. The auto repair person doesn't convince you to get your brakes replaced by telling you he needs more spending money. Here, the accusation was true. It was a tax on all those wood burner stoves.
funny how politicians can play people.
This is straightforward politics. A party doesn't like a policy, allies with politically powerful constituents who have the same common interest, and gets the policy reversed.
The quarantine is not onerous and Ebola is extremely dangerous.
You keep claiming that such a quarantine is against the US Constitution even though both state and federal governments have the necessary authority. It's worth noting that quarantine actually is defined as isolation of people who are exposed to disease but aren't yet sick:
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
while
Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
And at the federal level authority for this is derived from the Commerce Clause which actually is a valid use of the Commerce Clause. States have even broader legal justification for use of quarantines. Note that at the above link, "viral hemorrhagic fevers" such as Ebola are explicitly one of the diseases that has been authorized for quarantine.
Moving on, not only do we have a valid legal and medical basis for quarantining medical workers who return from treating Ebola patients, we have the US Government quarantining US soldiers even though they could have done the same thing that was alleged to have been done for the nurses (and may well have), namely, test for the presence of Ebola and note the absence of symptoms.
Why do you think Denmark will be able to achieve that target? They're already paying double for electricity compared to most of the rest of Europe. 30 years of that won't look pretty IMHO.
I routinely misplace my watch for more than a day at a time. Having a battery life of several years means I never have to set the time.except in the rare situations when I move time zones or the battery runs out. And it has an alarm function as well.
You have to show first that it was quoted out of context.
For all you know that sentence read
Stop wasting my time. The whole email was quoted in full in one of the links I gave.
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
It's not high drama, he's just sending over some data per request. But "Mike's trick" involves replacing or averaging near past temperature proxy data with temperature data. In particular, Jones states he's applying it to problematic tree ring data ("Keith's" series which moves counter to temperature after 1960). That means losing data and hence, why I called it "scientifically dubious".
Also keep in mind that for purposes of evaluating the ability of these various series to approximate global mean temperature is solely dependent on the narrow spread of time where we have overlapping both the recent past paleoclimate data and modern instrument and satellite data. Taking twenty years off such a series removes almost all of its correlation with satellite data. Similarly, losing 40 years (at the time) of tree ring data chops a significant amount off of the 150 or so years of instrument data as well as the entire satellite record.
I was disagreeing on whether delaying or refusing payment means they weren't honoring contracts.
Ok, so you disagree, It's still a breech of contract to systematically use terms of the contract to delay or avoid honoring terms of the contract. Proving it in court is a different matter and I gather that is just as hard to do today as it has ever been.
I see that you don't bother to argue scientifically either. In those Climategate emails, Phil Jones, the former head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, admits to two crimes, obstructing a legitimate FOIA request and tax evasion for a payment to a colleague in Russia (though that would only be a crime in Russia not in the UK where Phil Jones resides). That's two more crimes than you'll find rummaging around in my emails.
Then there's the "Hiding the decline" remark and "Mike's Nature trick". While there's a lot of spin claiming the two aren't related, it remains that Jones reused a scientifically dubious method pioneered by his associate, Mann, and not only did this hide divergent tree ring data (which drops sharply downward after 1960), it also found its way into the next IPCC report.
Yes, but you seem to be suggesting a conspiracy dating back to the start of climate science in the 1800s which if true involves millions of scientists
Of which, a few dozen at a few government-funded research institutes are the only ones who need be corrupted.
Your post is kind of like claiming that NSA spying couldn't have happened because it would require a conspiracy of billions of people, including the people being spied upon, while ignoring that the spying need only be done by a few NSA contractors - the rest of the participants need not even know that it exists.
And when one looks at the blatant politicization of climate research even to the point of using propaganda terms like "climate change" or "climate disruption" in scientific communication and media reports, one has to ask, why wouldn't the politicians who control funding for climate research and who benefit so greatly from public hysteria generated by climate research claims, not buy the research they want?
I think what is saddest about the "climate change" debate is the misappropriation of "climate change" for a specific and small part, anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Just sitting here I can come up with three far bigger climate change problems.
Overpopulation:
Human-induced climate change of any sort would not be noticeable at all, if it weren't for the massive number of people living on Earth.
Mismanagement of resources:
If global civilization collapses in 2093, it will be because of "poor agricultural practices" not because of AGW. That is the real civilization-ender. My view on this is that if everyone on the planet started implementing good agricultural practices, then it would be very hard to notice the effects of AGW which would slightly impair a good situation. OTOH, if we focus on AGW and fix that utterly while letting agricultural policy languige, then we're slightly mitigated a global civilization-ending catastrophe.
Habitat destruction:
The relatively large amount of species extinctions are occasionally attributed to AGW or related phenomena (particularly, ocean acidification), but the dominant role of habitat destruction is routinely ignored. Even plants are mobile over the time scales that AGW happens at. But mobility doesn't matter, if you don't have anywhere to flee to.
Sure, in each case, one can argue that AGW does make the effects of each of these worse, but addressing these three while completely ignoring AGW is a far better world than addressing AGW while neglecting these three. And in my view, current proposals for dealing with AGW (by curbing economic activity associated with the release of greenhouse gases) worsen a key common contributing factor in each of the above three problems, global poverty. Poor people make more poor people, can't implement resource best practices, and use habitat inefficiently. How's that supposed to help us?
I think what is foolish here is ignoring that "poor agricultural processes" are the number one climate problem in the world. That problem is what will break humanity in the next century, if it's not fixed well enough. Overpopulation is the next problem. Global warming isn't even on the radar.
It's worth noting that US soldiers are quarantined for three weeks under these circumstances and they have less exposure to Ebola than the nurse has.
And FYI, I'm not opposed to any form of quarantine, but doing so only with circumstantial evidence would be a Bad Thing.
The evidence is in your face. She worked with Ebola patients not just someone who happened to be in the country.
So you're saying that people should be quarantined without any evidence of infection?
Sounds like he is. Let us also keep in mind that quarantines work a whole lot better than their absence does. And would it really be better to endure the privations of a two or three Ebola epidemic in the States, for example, than impose a quarantine on everyone who enters the US from affected regions? I strongly doubt that.
An epidemic of Ebola in an outside country would be a "waste of resources" too. And how does restricting outgoing traffic make matters worse?
Having said that, the current level of quarantine does seem to be working for now. I'd worry about the rest of Africa getting this disease before I'd worry about it getting established in a developed world country.
My view is that a real quarantine will be imposed sooner or later unless the exponential growth of the disease is reversed in the near future. There's too much harm possible from a long duration Ebola epidemic to risk spreading it to your own country.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The computer projection is for number of cases, not number of confirmed or suspected cases. There's good reason to believe the actually number of cases is underreported.
Slashdot Mirror
Because doing that would never massively backfire.
Fortunately for the universe, nature has made the possibility of human space colonization well beyond our foreseeable capabilities. The best man could do currently is build a sophisticated coffin and propel it out of the solar system. The occupants might be able to breed, but those offspring would die in tansit.
Or colonize the wide variety of Solar System bodies out there. That seems a bit more practical than sending coffins out of the Solar System.
But having said that, you have an interesting business model for a future funeral service. It wouldn't be too hard to send corpses or cremated remains out of the Solar System, say to impact with another star.
Given the state of scientific concensus on the short term prognosis for earth's ecosphere, the dream of turning suborbital space into an amusement park for the wealthy and privileged is reserved for the socioapathetic.
Funny how on Slashdot, the term "sociopathic" has devolved to merely mean "people I don't like" or maybe "rich people". Words should mean things, not merely be devalued to be an doublespeak, throwaway phrase to indicate disapproval.
But the developed world has already solved the pollution problem. Suborbital flight turns out to be irrelevant to the matter.
The wealth being squandered on the goal of commercial space 'flight' is better invested in overcoming the near term challenges that could lead biological collapse down here on the surface of the planet.
Not at all. The countries with the actual pollution problems already can solve their problems. They just choose not to. Throwing wealth at that isn't going to change things that wouldn't change anyway.
And space tourism is a stepping stone to space colonization which has considerable relevance to any sort of sustainable living. When you have to manage and recycle virtually everything to a very high level including the water you drink and the air you breathe, just to survive in space, that gives you both massive incentive to develop technologies relevant to reducing humanity's impact on Earth and a real appreciation for environmentalism and conservation.
If that observation turns to be relevant, then it might be because a large chunk of fuel broke off and plugged up the rocket nozzle. That's the sort of failure mode you can see in hybrid motors when they first pour new formulations. I would expect that the new fuel was tested repeatedly in test firings on the ground though.
Well, your link has some pretty pictures, but it's a poor argument. I'm not going to buy that "Space Tourism isn't worth dying for" just because an Adam Rogers says so. I find this sort of argument tiresome because rich people spending money isn't exactly a new thing. At least, by spending it on space tourism rather than on a new yacht or house, they're actually pushing new ground and contributing to open up the universe to us.
Nor is life particularly valuable in itself. I find Rogers's theatrical concerns about the single life lost in the pursuit of rich people in space to be unworthy of my time spent reading the article.
I know what the market for suborbital is - and the difference between suborbital and the usual meaning of "cheap access to space". Unlike the fanboi's, I debase the meaning so I can sneak SpaceShip Two in.
My point remains. If you don't need orbit, but merely high enough for a few minutes, then SpaceShipTwo would provide a remarkably cheap access to space.
Since they haven't designed and built an aircraft with anything even remotely resembling those performance characteristics...
SpaceShipOne being the obvious counterexample. In the highest flights, it achieved about a quarter of the delta v needed to reach space, reached a vacuum good enough that it effectively had no drag/lift, and had a rudimentary system for reentering the Earth's atmosphere. Yes, that's not orbital capability, but that is a demonstration that they have the ability to design and build such things. It certainly achieves the "remotely resembling" threshold here.
I suppose I just get annoyed by the exaggerated FUD you routinely bring to the table.
Absent several technological breakthroughs that are each tantamount to magic
The SpaceShipTwo design already is cheap access to space for researchers who want to run experiments above 100 km. And for the thrill ride. Don't need new technology development beyond what's already been done (except it sounds like they might need a more reliable rocket).
I think you ought to learn more about what the market is for suborbital before telling us about all the magic that needs to be done.
Sure, they'll need to greatly modify the design in order to get an orbital vehicle with viable thermal protection system for return to Earth. But so what? As I've noted before, Scaled Composites has demonstrated that they can design and build such things,
You are comparing the cost with taxes.
No, I'm comparing the cost of electricity in Denmark with the cost of electricity in other countries.
The fun part is that the goverment wanted to put an tax on wood. So it was struck down because it was campained agains as a tax for citizens and their small furnace/ovens in their home. But in reality Danish Oil and Natural Gas(the national company recently sold to goldman sachs) are retooling some powerplants to run on wood from the USA instead of coal. So they wanted to help goldman avoid this tax and got people all angry.
It's communication 101. In order to convince someone to your point of view, you appeal to their interests not your own. The auto repair person doesn't convince you to get your brakes replaced by telling you he needs more spending money. Here, the accusation was true. It was a tax on all those wood burner stoves.
funny how politicians can play people.
This is straightforward politics. A party doesn't like a policy, allies with politically powerful constituents who have the same common interest, and gets the policy reversed.
A "relatively young industry" that has been kicking around since the 60s.
The quarantine is not onerous and Ebola is extremely dangerous.
You keep claiming that such a quarantine is against the US Constitution even though both state and federal governments have the necessary authority. It's worth noting that quarantine actually is defined as isolation of people who are exposed to disease but aren't yet sick:
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
while
Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
And at the federal level authority for this is derived from the Commerce Clause which actually is a valid use of the Commerce Clause. States have even broader legal justification for use of quarantines. Note that at the above link, "viral hemorrhagic fevers" such as Ebola are explicitly one of the diseases that has been authorized for quarantine.
Moving on, not only do we have a valid legal and medical basis for quarantining medical workers who return from treating Ebola patients, we have the US Government quarantining US soldiers even though they could have done the same thing that was alleged to have been done for the nurses (and may well have), namely, test for the presence of Ebola and note the absence of symptoms.
I don't remember reading that in any discussions either.
Why do you think Denmark will be able to achieve that target? They're already paying double for electricity compared to most of the rest of Europe. 30 years of that won't look pretty IMHO.
Where are they going to get enough biomass? Farms aren't going to grow low value biomass instead of high value food.
Sorry. I don't buy it. The quarantine is not onerous and Ebola is extremely dangerous.
Exposure is irrelevant to rights.
No, it's not. Quarantine for disease is a well known case where rights can be legally violated.
I routinely misplace my watch for more than a day at a time. Having a battery life of several years means I never have to set the time.except in the rare situations when I move time zones or the battery runs out. And it has an alarm function as well.
Quoting somebody out of context is a fallacy
You have to show first that it was quoted out of context.
For all you know that sentence read
Stop wasting my time. The whole email was quoted in full in one of the links I gave.
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
It's not high drama, he's just sending over some data per request. But "Mike's trick" involves replacing or averaging near past temperature proxy data with temperature data. In particular, Jones states he's applying it to problematic tree ring data ("Keith's" series which moves counter to temperature after 1960). That means losing data and hence, why I called it "scientifically dubious".
Also keep in mind that for purposes of evaluating the ability of these various series to approximate global mean temperature is solely dependent on the narrow spread of time where we have overlapping both the recent past paleoclimate data and modern instrument and satellite data. Taking twenty years off such a series removes almost all of its correlation with satellite data. Similarly, losing 40 years (at the time) of tree ring data chops a significant amount off of the 150 or so years of instrument data as well as the entire satellite record.
I was disagreeing on whether delaying or refusing payment means they weren't honoring contracts.
Ok, so you disagree, It's still a breech of contract to systematically use terms of the contract to delay or avoid honoring terms of the contract. Proving it in court is a different matter and I gather that is just as hard to do today as it has ever been.
I see that you don't bother to argue scientifically either. In those Climategate emails, Phil Jones, the former head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, admits to two crimes, obstructing a legitimate FOIA request and tax evasion for a payment to a colleague in Russia (though that would only be a crime in Russia not in the UK where Phil Jones resides). That's two more crimes than you'll find rummaging around in my emails.
Then there's the "Hiding the decline" remark and "Mike's Nature trick". While there's a lot of spin claiming the two aren't related, it remains that Jones reused a scientifically dubious method pioneered by his associate, Mann, and not only did this hide divergent tree ring data (which drops sharply downward after 1960), it also found its way into the next IPCC report.
Yes, but you seem to be suggesting a conspiracy dating back to the start of climate science in the 1800s which if true involves millions of scientists
Of which, a few dozen at a few government-funded research institutes are the only ones who need be corrupted.
Your post is kind of like claiming that NSA spying couldn't have happened because it would require a conspiracy of billions of people, including the people being spied upon, while ignoring that the spying need only be done by a few NSA contractors - the rest of the participants need not even know that it exists.
And when one looks at the blatant politicization of climate research even to the point of using propaganda terms like "climate change" or "climate disruption" in scientific communication and media reports, one has to ask, why wouldn't the politicians who control funding for climate research and who benefit so greatly from public hysteria generated by climate research claims, not buy the research they want?
I think what is saddest about the "climate change" debate is the misappropriation of "climate change" for a specific and small part, anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Just sitting here I can come up with three far bigger climate change problems.
Overpopulation:
Human-induced climate change of any sort would not be noticeable at all, if it weren't for the massive number of people living on Earth.
Mismanagement of resources:
If global civilization collapses in 2093, it will be because of "poor agricultural practices" not because of AGW. That is the real civilization-ender. My view on this is that if everyone on the planet started implementing good agricultural practices, then it would be very hard to notice the effects of AGW which would slightly impair a good situation. OTOH, if we focus on AGW and fix that utterly while letting agricultural policy languige, then we're slightly mitigated a global civilization-ending catastrophe.
Habitat destruction:
The relatively large amount of species extinctions are occasionally attributed to AGW or related phenomena (particularly, ocean acidification), but the dominant role of habitat destruction is routinely ignored. Even plants are mobile over the time scales that AGW happens at. But mobility doesn't matter, if you don't have anywhere to flee to.
Sure, in each case, one can argue that AGW does make the effects of each of these worse, but addressing these three while completely ignoring AGW is a far better world than addressing AGW while neglecting these three. And in my view, current proposals for dealing with AGW (by curbing economic activity associated with the release of greenhouse gases) worsen a key common contributing factor in each of the above three problems, global poverty. Poor people make more poor people, can't implement resource best practices, and use habitat inefficiently. How's that supposed to help us?
I think what is foolish here is ignoring that "poor agricultural processes" are the number one climate problem in the world. That problem is what will break humanity in the next century, if it's not fixed well enough. Overpopulation is the next problem. Global warming isn't even on the radar.
And FYI, I'm not opposed to any form of quarantine, but doing so only with circumstantial evidence would be a Bad Thing.
The evidence is in your face. She worked with Ebola patients not just someone who happened to be in the country.
So you're saying that people should be quarantined without any evidence of infection?
Sounds like he is. Let us also keep in mind that quarantines work a whole lot better than their absence does. And would it really be better to endure the privations of a two or three Ebola epidemic in the States, for example, than impose a quarantine on everyone who enters the US from affected regions? I strongly doubt that.
An epidemic of Ebola in an outside country would be a "waste of resources" too. And how does restricting outgoing traffic make matters worse?
Having said that, the current level of quarantine does seem to be working for now. I'd worry about the rest of Africa getting this disease before I'd worry about it getting established in a developed world country.
My view is that a real quarantine will be imposed sooner or later unless the exponential growth of the disease is reversed in the near future. There's too much harm possible from a long duration Ebola epidemic to risk spreading it to your own country.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The computer projection is for number of cases, not number of confirmed or suspected cases. There's good reason to believe the actually number of cases is underreported.