Wouldn't that research have to be valuable first in order for the strategy to even have meaning? Look at the ISS. $100 billion burned so that we can do the same research that an oh, $5 billion MIR-class station could do. Further, the research isn't worth stealing even if it weren't all open in the first place.
Well, I recall the price of reaching the Moon about ten years ago was considered to be $100k per kg and Mars was ten times that much. I was basing my estimate off that recollection.
You need way more than that to have ISRU equipment *and the in-place industrial capacity to maintain it*.
Sure. That's why you use ISRU so that the Moon's resources provides most of that mass.
Do yourself a favor and walk through a machine shop attached to a college lab or a chemical plant or something and do a mass budget before you start declaring stuff feasible with current tech for reasonable cost.
I already have. All those machines can be scaled down. You could probably put a full spread of basic machine shop tools (forge, lathe, mill, press, 3D printer, etc) up there for tens of kilograms. You can then on the Moon build larger versions to do real world machine shop stuff. It's not fast like dumping hundreds of tons of stuff on the Moon, but it gets around the need for lots of mass from Earth.
Launching something huge - for example, anything even close to the size of the ISS, much less anything bigger - will require either an extraordinary breakthrough in rocketry or a completely new launch system.
No, it doesn't. The ISS wasn't launched or assembled that way and any other large space station isn't going to be launched in one piece either. Existing rockets can easily launch something like the ISS, piece by piece.
And the price of putting something in orbit has already dropped a considerable amount. Shuttle was crazy expensive, I gather something like $20k per kg for an optimal payload. Falcon 9 is something like $3k per kg.
Further, chemical rockets make a great technological stepping stone to other launch technologies. First, they can create and prove a market for fancier infrastructure. You don't have to do the "build it and they will come" assumption, hoping that your space elevator or whatever will have enough business to justify its existence when there's a thriving rocket market to point to.
They also can be used to launch the initial infrastructure you may need for other approaches or launch stuff that increases demand for more launch infrastructure.
it isn't just rockets in space that is the problem. when you need 20 pounds of fuel to carry every pound of material to orbit you have a design limitation that needs to be changed.
What is the design limitation that needs to be changed? If you need 20 parts propellant to 1 part payload, then just use the 20 parts of propellant. It's not particularly costly.
You do realize that a thousand Falcon 9 flights would fall well short of 100 billion dollars at current prices? That would be enough launch capability to get a modest number of people or gear to Mars and about an order of magnitude more to the Moon. Most of that mass would be propellant, water, and air/food, meaning little additional cost beyond the launch costs for significant parts of the missions.
What will enable exploration and development on a modest budget scale is use of local resources or (ISRU - In Situ Resource Utilization). For example, once the local infrastructure is in place to extract propellant, you don't need to bring your own return trip propellant.
Drop a link and maybe we can help you out right now. I don't think you have post-scarcity realized, sorry, but if you have interesting gear or literature, I might be up for a purchase.
Rockets are reasonable in themselves. I don't know why there's this obsession to improve propulsion when that's not the biggest obstacle. The economics of doing stuff in space are. Sure, nuclear propulsion would be nice and useful, but it's not essential.
What's up with all the sudden, unsolicited advice? Obviously, the best leadership approach here is to built a throne out of the skulls of your enemies. Duh.
Corporate personhood != personhood and the use of corporate personhood has to been to provide constitutional rights to the people who comprise the corporation. Your approach won't work since corporations aren't treated as people and labor laws aren't part of fundamental rights in the US Constitution.
I think here the matter would be regulation of interstate commerce, an area over which the federal government has jurisdiction.
My view is quite simple: vertical monopolies are bad.
"Vertical monopoly" is just a nonsense phrase, like a "pink monopoly". Tesla has no monopolies, vertical, pink, or otherwise.
What Tesla has is vertical integration which is an approach that Elon Musk has used before (with SpaceX).
Stop assuming everyone who doesn't agree with you is on the take, guys.
It's pretty clear in this case that a lot of legislators are on the take here. It's pure rent seeking to protect car dealerships and has no value to the public.
The math says there are at least fifty infected traveling around the country right this minute, two and a half weeks after his arrival.
And the real world evidence says none of them have come down with the disease yet, which is a strong indication that they aren't actually infected. Math isn't much use when your assumptions are wrong.
"Conflict of interest"? This is a friggin' blog about games. We're not talking about The New York Times here. It's a blog. If they want to write about how good their mom's apple cobbler is, it does not violate any "journalistic ethics".
Thank you for pointing out once again the problem with your reasoning. It's a "blog" is completely irrelevant to whether a conflict of interest exists.
khallow, I knew you'd pop up on the side of #gamergators.
And once again, no matter what side of the argument you fall on, you come up with something that makes rational people squirm.
I'm sure you know that the article which "featured" Quinn was about a reality TV show and not a review of a game or of Quinn.
Amazing. There's a conflict of interest right there and you just don't get it because it doesn't precisely fit the mold of whatever you think a conflict of interest is.
Kind of like claiming bribery isn't bribery, if you pay for the bribe with a credit card rather than the stereotypical suitcase of cash. Because crooks only pay for bribes with suitcases of cash. Seriously.
Well, sure. But I won't be able to show that the changes in transmission already mentioned are due to mutation or some other cause. But they did happen. And it's worth noting that viruses mutate often (and mutations happen more frequently when there are a lot of infections) and that Ebola has transitioned to an airborne mode before (the Reston virus case and a later experiment in 2012).
The Earth's water vapour content has risen by roughly 5% since 1980 due the the warmer climate
I missed that bit of bullshit. A 1 C rise in water temperature results in about a 4% increase in maximum water vapor pressure. At best, atmospheric mean global temperatures have increased a bit shy of 1 C since the beginning of the industrial age. The claim is nonsense.
Such an assumption ignores weather. Thunderstorms, cyclones, and other such things are very efficient at transporting heat to a higher altitude. Venus doesn't have water.
You've yet to present a case where a virus mutates and expands the ways in which it is transmitted. None of your examples accomplished that
Notice how you morphed the discussion from viruses changing modes of transmission to being about showing explicitly that there was a mutation causing the change in mode. I merely showed the former and consider the counterexample satisfied. I don't know nor have a capability to show how often these diseases have mutated or when those mutations have caused changes in transmission.
And what do you base that claim on? I note that none of these organisms are native to humanity and have come since the advent of civilization, a relatively recent period for humanity. They've mutated just to jump from their normal animal reservoir to humans.
Slashdot Mirror
One could probably factory-produce a hundred Curiosity rovers and mass launch/land them in every corner of Mars for the cost of one manned mission
I'd say more like ten or so Curiosity rovers. Those things aren't that cheap and manned missions aren't that expensive.
Wouldn't that research have to be valuable first in order for the strategy to even have meaning? Look at the ISS. $100 billion burned so that we can do the same research that an oh, $5 billion MIR-class station could do. Further, the research isn't worth stealing even if it weren't all open in the first place.
but 22 TW could be captured using very little acreage
For an hour around noon. You would need more plus storage to make a viable system that provides energy even when the Sun isn't shining.
Well, I recall the price of reaching the Moon about ten years ago was considered to be $100k per kg and Mars was ten times that much. I was basing my estimate off that recollection.
You need way more than that to have ISRU equipment *and the in-place industrial capacity to maintain it*.
Sure. That's why you use ISRU so that the Moon's resources provides most of that mass.
Do yourself a favor and walk through a machine shop attached to a college lab or a chemical plant or something and do a mass budget before you start declaring stuff feasible with current tech for reasonable cost.
I already have. All those machines can be scaled down. You could probably put a full spread of basic machine shop tools (forge, lathe, mill, press, 3D printer, etc) up there for tens of kilograms. You can then on the Moon build larger versions to do real world machine shop stuff. It's not fast like dumping hundreds of tons of stuff on the Moon, but it gets around the need for lots of mass from Earth.
Launching something huge - for example, anything even close to the size of the ISS, much less anything bigger - will require either an extraordinary breakthrough in rocketry or a completely new launch system.
No, it doesn't. The ISS wasn't launched or assembled that way and any other large space station isn't going to be launched in one piece either. Existing rockets can easily launch something like the ISS, piece by piece.
And the price of putting something in orbit has already dropped a considerable amount. Shuttle was crazy expensive, I gather something like $20k per kg for an optimal payload. Falcon 9 is something like $3k per kg.
Further, chemical rockets make a great technological stepping stone to other launch technologies. First, they can create and prove a market for fancier infrastructure. You don't have to do the "build it and they will come" assumption, hoping that your space elevator or whatever will have enough business to justify its existence when there's a thriving rocket market to point to.
They also can be used to launch the initial infrastructure you may need for other approaches or launch stuff that increases demand for more launch infrastructure.
it isn't just rockets in space that is the problem. when you need 20 pounds of fuel to carry every pound of material to orbit you have a design limitation that needs to be changed.
What is the design limitation that needs to be changed? If you need 20 parts propellant to 1 part payload, then just use the 20 parts of propellant. It's not particularly costly.
You do realize that a thousand Falcon 9 flights would fall well short of 100 billion dollars at current prices? That would be enough launch capability to get a modest number of people or gear to Mars and about an order of magnitude more to the Moon. Most of that mass would be propellant, water, and air/food, meaning little additional cost beyond the launch costs for significant parts of the missions.
What will enable exploration and development on a modest budget scale is use of local resources or (ISRU - In Situ Resource Utilization). For example, once the local infrastructure is in place to extract propellant, you don't need to bring your own return trip propellant.
Drop a link and maybe we can help you out right now. I don't think you have post-scarcity realized, sorry, but if you have interesting gear or literature, I might be up for a purchase.
Rockets are reasonable in themselves. I don't know why there's this obsession to improve propulsion when that's not the biggest obstacle. The economics of doing stuff in space are. Sure, nuclear propulsion would be nice and useful, but it's not essential.
What's up with all the sudden, unsolicited advice? Obviously, the best leadership approach here is to built a throne out of the skulls of your enemies. Duh.
Corporate personhood != personhood and the use of corporate personhood has to been to provide constitutional rights to the people who comprise the corporation. Your approach won't work since corporations aren't treated as people and labor laws aren't part of fundamental rights in the US Constitution.
I think here the matter would be regulation of interstate commerce, an area over which the federal government has jurisdiction.
My view is quite simple: vertical monopolies are bad.
"Vertical monopoly" is just a nonsense phrase, like a "pink monopoly". Tesla has no monopolies, vertical, pink, or otherwise.
What Tesla has is vertical integration which is an approach that Elon Musk has used before (with SpaceX).
Stop assuming everyone who doesn't agree with you is on the take, guys.
It's pretty clear in this case that a lot of legislators are on the take here. It's pure rent seeking to protect car dealerships and has no value to the public.
The math says there are at least fifty infected traveling around the country right this minute, two and a half weeks after his arrival.
And the real world evidence says none of them have come down with the disease yet, which is a strong indication that they aren't actually infected. Math isn't much use when your assumptions are wrong.
"Conflict of interest"? This is a friggin' blog about games. We're not talking about The New York Times here. It's a blog. If they want to write about how good their mom's apple cobbler is, it does not violate any "journalistic ethics".
Thank you for pointing out once again the problem with your reasoning. It's a "blog" is completely irrelevant to whether a conflict of interest exists.
khallow, I knew you'd pop up on the side of #gamergators.
And once again, no matter what side of the argument you fall on, you come up with something that makes rational people squirm.
Public opinion always matters.
No amount of public opinion will hold the tide back.
I'm sure you know that the article which "featured" Quinn was about a reality TV show and not a review of a game or of Quinn.
Amazing. There's a conflict of interest right there and you just don't get it because it doesn't precisely fit the mold of whatever you think a conflict of interest is.
Kind of like claiming bribery isn't bribery, if you pay for the bribe with a credit card rather than the stereotypical suitcase of cash. Because crooks only pay for bribes with suitcases of cash. Seriously.
Source: talking to people who don't know shit.
FIFY. I suggest using better sources. Tax evasion has a specific legal meaning. It truly doesn't matter what the ignorant think it means.
Well, sure. But I won't be able to show that the changes in transmission already mentioned are due to mutation or some other cause. But they did happen. And it's worth noting that viruses mutate often (and mutations happen more frequently when there are a lot of infections) and that Ebola has transitioned to an airborne mode before (the Reston virus case and a later experiment in 2012).
The Earth's water vapour content has risen by roughly 5% since 1980 due the the warmer climate
I missed that bit of bullshit. A 1 C rise in water temperature results in about a 4% increase in maximum water vapor pressure. At best, atmospheric mean global temperatures have increased a bit shy of 1 C since the beginning of the industrial age. The claim is nonsense.
Such an assumption ignores weather. Thunderstorms, cyclones, and other such things are very efficient at transporting heat to a higher altitude. Venus doesn't have water.
Or maybe they're doing the Bush administration thing where they're using anonymous leaks to propagate lies.
Money is a good one to start with. And there's always other rationalizations, if that's not good enough for some reason.
You've yet to present a case where a virus mutates and expands the ways in which it is transmitted. None of your examples accomplished that
Notice how you morphed the discussion from viruses changing modes of transmission to being about showing explicitly that there was a mutation causing the change in mode. I merely showed the former and consider the counterexample satisfied. I don't know nor have a capability to show how often these diseases have mutated or when those mutations have caused changes in transmission.
And what do you base that claim on? I note that none of these organisms are native to humanity and have come since the advent of civilization, a relatively recent period for humanity. They've mutated just to jump from their normal animal reservoir to humans.