The Laws of Thermodynamics show that you are wrong. The energy has to go somewhere. Two rocks that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
You can claim that the exhaust will cool down to below the background radiation level of the universe within seconds but you cannot explain how that would happen.
There is no energy lost from expansion of a relatively dense, higher temperature plume of gas into a vacuum. Thermal energy or heat transforms into translational energy.
Else you have to account for the energy of both the high temperature of the gas and the motion of the expanding gas cloud in space - energy is being created, if the cloud isn't cooling.
Humans are omnivores.
Vegetarians deny their humanness, which is a lie.
The second claim doesn't follow from the first. After all, if humans are omnivores, then they eat plants. Since vegetarians by definition eat plants, then they would be upholding their "humanness" and staying alive to boot.
Read the article. They don't credit Nixon with starting Apollo. They don't even credit him with ending Apollo though he had some say in what final missions flew or didn't. What they credit him with is the basic policies and strategies NASA has followed for the last forty years as well as it's current status as yet another domestic program.
And pointing out that the Laws of Thermodynamics contradict you is not the same as exaggerating your position.
Only if you are correct in doing so. Appeals to physics don't work when you are wrong as is the case here.
Two atoms that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
You don't understand what temperature is. The principle components at the above temperatures are random motion between molecules/free atoms and the vibration energy of molecules. And atoms and molecules quickly radiate heat. The usual problem is that they're normally part of a larger whole and quickly regain energy either by intercepting photons or direct EM interactions (like collisions) with neighboring atoms.
Neither heat retention mechanism is as much of an issue in space. The atoms that are two meters or more apart will not collided with each other and thermally generated photons are more likely to escape to space.
Further, it's painfully clear that you don't understand how expansion of a plume of gas cools it in space. I don't believe there is much point to continuing this discussion until you try to understand my argument and the actual physics described here.
But I'll summarize my arguments in this thread:
1) Stealth is not perfect invisibility or undetectability.
2) Everything is detectable with sufficient resources thrown at the problem. Even the presence of a "horizon" doesn't change that.
3) It is not actually that easy to detect things before they get close enough to cause you problems in a military sense. I think it's telling here that the "no such thing as stealth" crowd hasn't bothered to do the math on what sort of detectors would be needed to see potential objects in space and how a high gee spacecraft would interact with these detectors in order to target stealthed spacecraft.
4) Examples given of the supposed ease of detecting stealthed objects are terrible and there's a lot of ignorance of physics and routine tactics of stealth.
5) If you're going to appeal to physics as the basis of your argument, you need to get the physics right.
What makes "people" (by which I gather you mean humans) special so that you won't eat them? I see two possibilities. One, that you don't want to pick up the various parasites and diseases that a human can have. Second, that you might think that for whatever reasons it is better on principle to have a living human than a few tens of kilograms of protein.
The latter is what provides the ethical argument for treating anything that we can consider "near" human as human for various purposes such as whether to eat them. If we're so considerate of ourselves that cannibalism is usually considered a grievous crime, then maybe we should be a bit more considerate of animals that approach us in intellect.
while the rebels may have captured a BUK unit, it had no radar.
Unless of course, the system actually had a radar contrary to your assertion. For example, they could have gotten a radar from their buddies in Russia and maybe a few trainers too. It's worth noting here that there weren't problems with airliners getting shot down by BUK SAMs until the rebels got a hold of one. Maybe they got framed, but maybe a poorly trained SAM crew killed 298 innocent people.
Then there's the interference with the crash site by the rebel side. You'd think they'd be more forthcoming, if they hadn't destroyed the plane.
A butcher contaminating himself with animal blood as a means of accepting a viable mutation is a much less likely lottery 'win'.
But people do win the lottery. And it's worth noting here that HIV crossed over numerous times some well before the 60s. It's not like it only happened once.
Again, learn what a straw man is. Explaining that the Laws of Thermodynamics contradict you is not a straw man.
Again learn what a strawman is. It's when you exaggerate an opponent's position in order to win an argument. Here, the exaggeration is two-fold, first claiming that stealth means undetectability and then second, insisting that it's a law of thermodynamics that backs your opinion on what stealth means.
Two rocks that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
A shitty analogy since the surface area of the rocks doesn't change measurably by moving two meters apart. But if a cylinder shaped plume of monoatomic gas 10 meters in radius and at the above temperature were to spread out another meter in radius, that would both increase the surface area by 10% and drop the temperature from 1000K to 910K roughly. A gas plume has vastly different thermodynamic properties than a pair of rocks.
But since we're speaking of rocks, there's the mass driver which neatly gets around the problem of having a high temperature exhaust plume in the first place. It also doubles as a weapon.
In space, you have line of sight to everything. Therefore, the radiation given off by your ship is detectable.
And there's the straw man again. This makes a third time since you said that you weren't doing straw man arguments that you conflate stealth with undetectability in a straw man argument. It is not.
Okay, the problem is that you are confusing DISTANCE with HEAT.
Because the exhaust is taking up 2x the volume does not mean that the exhaust is 2x cooler.
I guess you need to learn some physics before we continue this discussion. It's 4x the volume BTW. The temperature is not decreasing because of a change in volume, but because molecules moving in different directions in an exhaust plume rapidly end up far apart. This expansion results in a transition of random thermal movement into translation movement as only particles moving in the same direction stay near one another. And that's how you can actually have a monoatomic exhaust plume cooler than the cosmic microwave background.
Anyway, what would be the difference between a big corporation doing that by mistake or not, or terrorists announcing that they did exactly the same?
The terrorists would probably not be dumb enough to dumb that into a sewage treatment plant. After all, what's the point of killing off most of your weapon before it even gets to water?
We are giving more and more rights to the corporations, equating money with speech and even religious beliefs to corporations. But when it comes to criminal penalties they get to use limited liability corporation laws. Do not go after the underlings. Top management should not be able to create policy documents on one hand, then create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, "Well, that employee violated our own established policy. It is her fault. Don't you think of touching my bonus!". Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed. Their performance review policies should be reviewed, and if they have practices that create perverse incentives to violate their own corporate policies, even harsher penalties are in order.
Let us not overreact. Note first that this paragraph is completely irrelevant to whether someone dumps polio virus into a waste treatment pond or not. Second, note that corporate personhood was a non-issue for over a century, until the US Supreme Court used the mechanism to uphold the US Constitution in a politically charged case.
Third, note that the "extraordinary penalties" are insane. No one with anything to lose in the private world will touch anything risky with that kind of penalty around. That devolves risk to the public sector which has shown both a considerable ineptitude and callousness to risk that dwarfs its counterpart in the private world. Do you really want your dumpers of polio virus to be able to hide behind sovereign immunity? That's what will happen, if sensible regulation and penalties aren't used.
Funny how you put in "the rest of the world" there. Because, as I pointed out, stealth only works the way you claim when there is an horizon to hide behind.
We aren't getting anywhere due to this bizarre, irrelevant, and incorrect insistence on your part. The Earth-side counterpart doesn't depend on horizons to employ stealth technologies. Instead, they're doing things like camouflage, smaller radar signatures, and masking the heat output from jet engines.
Once again, your insistence on perfect undetectability is the huge straw man that you keep using in this thread.
Then I have gotten one fact through to you.
A fact you didn't get.
So you are claiming that rocket exhaust will cool to background radiation levels in less than a day.
When it took the rest of the universe billions and billions of years to cool that much.
I guess a few seconds is a bit less than a day. Let's fix your grotesque ignorance of physics. For example, water vapor (a common exhaust component) at 3000K has a mean velocity of its molecules around several kilometers per second. Let's say that our stealth ship has an continuous exhaust plume of water vapor that starts at 3000 K and 10 meters radius.
We'll crudely treat this as an expanding cone. That means only about 70% of the thermal motion is going to be in the direction of expansion (there will be some motion along the axis of the cylinder, but this can be estimated by dividing by the square root of 2 (giving the 70%). But at least, we'll have our plume expanding outward at least 1 km/s. One second later, the plume has a radius of 1km. At this point, the motion of the particles are highly correlated. I believe the correlation in velocity is linear to distance traveled, so at this point, our temperature has dropped from 3000K to 30K not including at all radiation to space. The surface area which radiates to space has also increased by a factor of 100. Steam being a molecule would have internal energy which is also radiating to space, but at increasing efficiency as the plume expands.
By this mechanism, it is possible to actually achieve, temporarily, lower temperatures than cosmic background, assuming you started with a dense enough monoatomic exhaust stream to resist the pressure of the Solar wind. That would also be about 10 seconds for the calculation I'm running which yes, is less than a day.
Notice that while lower temperature exhaust takes longer to expand to that point, it's still a pretty fast drop to 3K, unless you were already close to 3K to begin with.
There are various ways to improve this further. One is to accelerate in pulses. Instead of a cone-shaped plume, you would have a more spherical shaped plume which more efficiently radiates heat to space (higher surface area per unit mass of propellant). Second, you can reduce the heat left in the plume by allowing it to expand more before it leaves the bell of your rocket nozzle. And of course, exhaust products that have less internal degrees of freedom drop in temperature faster (eg, monoatomic rather than complex molecules in the exhaust).
A heat sink works by convection/conduction cooling. There is nothing in space to transfer the heat to. All the heat must be radiated away.
Radiation being the usual third way here that heat can be transferred to a heat sink. I also see that you have no answer for the slow rate of expansion of the universe. If it took 14 billion years for my exhaust plume to expand in one spatial direction 1000 times, then you might have a point. Instead, it takes seconds.
I ask again, why should it be illegal? You are putting forth arguments that sound a lot to me like the opposite. If I and 800,000 of my closest friends on the intarwebs want to bulk mail government representatives, then making it so I can "petition" but they can't listen without breaking a law (and how would you enforce something like that anyway?) doesn't sound like petitioning to me.
As to bribery and similar games, it is illegal for me to offer the bribe (at least when the bribe is considered a bribe).I don't recall advocating "petitioning government in any way including bribery", but of course, you would be in a better position to know what I actually wrote than anyone else.
You're claiming that the Laws of Thermodynamics are straw men.
Physics shows that you are wrong.
No law of thermodynamics defines "stealth" as "perfect undetectability". You do. I don't (nor does the rest of the world). Please come up with a real argument rather than this fallacy.
You can when there is a planet between you. That is why stealth works on Earth.
A planet doesn't make you undetectable. After all, I can just send a sensor around to get line of sight and now, you're detected.
Who said it had to be perfect? I'm pointing out that your exhaust will be radiating heat in all directions. Over billions of kilometers. Maybe trillions of kilometers.
You do on numerous occasions. I can quote them, if you'd like your nose rubbed in it.
Also, your heat radiation above stops being radiated only when something intercepts it. That means there's no real limit in any direction that is black sky. Even I get that. Interception of radiation by intervening bodies is not how I propose to get stealth in space.
No you have not. You just keep repeating that it will.
That's because I already explained it. Gas expands and the motion of the molecules in the gas become highly correlated (basically the random motion of the relatively dense initial plume transforms into outwardly translation motion of the shell of a sphere or cylinder of the expanding plume at later time). That cools the gas off quickly right there. Meanwhile the increased surface area of the exhaust plume radiates heat out more efficiently.
Also, and this is a really obvious point I shouldn't have to make, the thermodynamics of an exhaust plume are vastly different than for the universe. It's a near point source which is dumping heat to a 3K heat sink while there's no outer edge to the universe to dump heat. Nor does the exhaust plume have gravitational collapse and the resulting stars and quasars to heat up the universe. And the exhaust plume expands rapidly in seconds while it took almost 14 billion years for the universe to expand to its current extent.
It's worth noting that some if not most people who are infected with a normal flu are asymptomatic. The H1N1 flu apparently had an unusually high rate of asymptomatic infections. For example, this report implies infections were at least a factor of three higher than symptomatic infections due to the increased presence of antibodies.
Wait... are you prepared to acknowledge that some third world countries have better health care systems than the US?
Because otherwise I don't see how which third world country is relevant.
What's the point of this grandstanding? A claim was made. Back it up. Name the country that is mentioned in this statement: "In contrast, in a third world country with a decent health care system, the infection rate was 1 in 1000."
Note that Europe didn't have significantly different infection rates than the US.
And health care systems are relevant because that's how you educate people about transmission vectors and what can be done to prevent spreading the disease. When your health care system is almost disconnected from the government by design, then your public education campaigns do become a lot more difficult, because instead of a single coordinated effort, you end up with a myriad of private entities all communicating something slightly different. Right now, in Texas, people think they can get ebola from watching news about the case. You cannot get more disinformed than that.
You do realize that there are public health services doing public education campaigns in the US? Your premises are wrong.
The whole point of this is that there is no horizon to hide behind in space so stealth does not exist because there is no way to be undetectable.
Here's another example of the straw man. First, a straw man argument is an exaggeration of another's argument in order to defeat that position. The exaggeration here is that stealth is undetectability which is an impossible condition to achieve under any non-fictional context (aside from not existing in the first place, eg, a "snipe hunt").
Sure, you can't make a detectable object perfectly undetectable by definition. But that never has been what stealth is about as I've repeatedly said. It's about being much harder to detect so that various militarily-useful activities can be conducted such as sneaking up on some target and shooting it.
You are claiming that the exhaust will cool to background radiation levels. That is, the temperature of the rest of the universe that has been cooling for billions and billions of years. You cannot explain how it will cool that fast.
So then you say that it doesn't have to be perfect, as long as everyone is blind. That's not stealth. That's blindness. You aren't invisible because a blind person cannot see you.
This is probably the best example of the ridiculousness of your argument. There is no such thing as a perfect detector - among other things it would need infinite area both to observe perfectly and to store the infinite amount of information it received. Thus, everyone has something they can't detect and hence, by your perversion of the meaning of "blind" above (and I'm not going to accept a definition shift of "blind", that's a lazy fallacy), everyone is blind. So as long as everyone is "blind", which is always the case, there is a way to be "invisible", making your argument pointless.
And I already explained how rocket exhaust can cool that fast. For someone who claims to have physics on their side, you aren't keeping up.
Unless it a) is not an actual increment in safety, and b) is not the only imposition the FAA makes. There's also c) the estimate is a wild underestimate of the true cost (the FAA has an incentive to underestimate cost). Given that the air carriers are complaining so much, I think the FAA is probably low balling the cost and maybe exaggerating the benefit as well.
Look at some videos of Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Their suits would weigh about twice as much on Mars, but aside from that, it's pretty much the same environment.
Slashdot Mirror
The Laws of Thermodynamics show that you are wrong. The energy has to go somewhere. Two rocks that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
You can claim that the exhaust will cool down to below the background radiation level of the universe within seconds but you cannot explain how that would happen.
There is no energy lost from expansion of a relatively dense, higher temperature plume of gas into a vacuum. Thermal energy or heat transforms into translational energy.
Else you have to account for the energy of both the high temperature of the gas and the motion of the expanding gas cloud in space - energy is being created, if the cloud isn't cooling.
Humans are omnivores.
Vegetarians deny their humanness, which is a lie.
The second claim doesn't follow from the first. After all, if humans are omnivores, then they eat plants. Since vegetarians by definition eat plants, then they would be upholding their "humanness" and staying alive to boot.
Read the article. They don't credit Nixon with starting Apollo. They don't even credit him with ending Apollo though he had some say in what final missions flew or didn't. What they credit him with is the basic policies and strategies NASA has followed for the last forty years as well as it's current status as yet another domestic program.
And pointing out that the Laws of Thermodynamics contradict you is not the same as exaggerating your position.
Only if you are correct in doing so. Appeals to physics don't work when you are wrong as is the case here.
Two atoms that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
You don't understand what temperature is. The principle components at the above temperatures are random motion between molecules/free atoms and the vibration energy of molecules. And atoms and molecules quickly radiate heat. The usual problem is that they're normally part of a larger whole and quickly regain energy either by intercepting photons or direct EM interactions (like collisions) with neighboring atoms.
Neither heat retention mechanism is as much of an issue in space. The atoms that are two meters or more apart will not collided with each other and thermally generated photons are more likely to escape to space.
Further, it's painfully clear that you don't understand how expansion of a plume of gas cools it in space. I don't believe there is much point to continuing this discussion until you try to understand my argument and the actual physics described here.
But I'll summarize my arguments in this thread:
1) Stealth is not perfect invisibility or undetectability.
2) Everything is detectable with sufficient resources thrown at the problem. Even the presence of a "horizon" doesn't change that.
3) It is not actually that easy to detect things before they get close enough to cause you problems in a military sense. I think it's telling here that the "no such thing as stealth" crowd hasn't bothered to do the math on what sort of detectors would be needed to see potential objects in space and how a high gee spacecraft would interact with these detectors in order to target stealthed spacecraft.
4) Examples given of the supposed ease of detecting stealthed objects are terrible and there's a lot of ignorance of physics and routine tactics of stealth.
5) If you're going to appeal to physics as the basis of your argument, you need to get the physics right.
Humans would easily fall into that category too. Can't issue a cease and desist when you're digesting nicely.
What makes "people" (by which I gather you mean humans) special so that you won't eat them? I see two possibilities. One, that you don't want to pick up the various parasites and diseases that a human can have. Second, that you might think that for whatever reasons it is better on principle to have a living human than a few tens of kilograms of protein.
The latter is what provides the ethical argument for treating anything that we can consider "near" human as human for various purposes such as whether to eat them. If we're so considerate of ourselves that cannibalism is usually considered a grievous crime, then maybe we should be a bit more considerate of animals that approach us in intellect.
while the rebels may have captured a BUK unit, it had no radar.
Unless of course, the system actually had a radar contrary to your assertion. For example, they could have gotten a radar from their buddies in Russia and maybe a few trainers too. It's worth noting here that there weren't problems with airliners getting shot down by BUK SAMs until the rebels got a hold of one. Maybe they got framed, but maybe a poorly trained SAM crew killed 298 innocent people.
Then there's the interference with the crash site by the rebel side. You'd think they'd be more forthcoming, if they hadn't destroyed the plane.
A butcher contaminating himself with animal blood as a means of accepting a viable mutation is a much less likely lottery 'win'.
But people do win the lottery. And it's worth noting here that HIV crossed over numerous times some well before the 60s. It's not like it only happened once.
Again, learn what a straw man is. Explaining that the Laws of Thermodynamics contradict you is not a straw man.
Again learn what a strawman is. It's when you exaggerate an opponent's position in order to win an argument. Here, the exaggeration is two-fold, first claiming that stealth means undetectability and then second, insisting that it's a law of thermodynamics that backs your opinion on what stealth means.
Two rocks that are 1,000 K at 1 meter apart do not cool to 500 K because they move 2 meters apart.
A shitty analogy since the surface area of the rocks doesn't change measurably by moving two meters apart. But if a cylinder shaped plume of monoatomic gas 10 meters in radius and at the above temperature were to spread out another meter in radius, that would both increase the surface area by 10% and drop the temperature from 1000K to 910K roughly. A gas plume has vastly different thermodynamic properties than a pair of rocks.
But since we're speaking of rocks, there's the mass driver which neatly gets around the problem of having a high temperature exhaust plume in the first place. It also doubles as a weapon.
In space, you have line of sight to everything. Therefore, the radiation given off by your ship is detectable.
And there's the straw man again. This makes a third time since you said that you weren't doing straw man arguments that you conflate stealth with undetectability in a straw man argument. It is not.
Okay, the problem is that you are confusing DISTANCE with HEAT.
Because the exhaust is taking up 2x the volume does not mean that the exhaust is 2x cooler.
I guess you need to learn some physics before we continue this discussion. It's 4x the volume BTW. The temperature is not decreasing because of a change in volume, but because molecules moving in different directions in an exhaust plume rapidly end up far apart. This expansion results in a transition of random thermal movement into translation movement as only particles moving in the same direction stay near one another. And that's how you can actually have a monoatomic exhaust plume cooler than the cosmic microwave background.
Anyway, what would be the difference between a big corporation doing that by mistake or not, or terrorists announcing that they did exactly the same?
The terrorists would probably not be dumb enough to dumb that into a sewage treatment plant. After all, what's the point of killing off most of your weapon before it even gets to water?
Let us not underreact
We are giving more and more rights to the corporations, equating money with speech and even religious beliefs to corporations. But when it comes to criminal penalties they get to use limited liability corporation laws. Do not go after the underlings. Top management should not be able to create policy documents on one hand, then create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, "Well, that employee violated our own established policy. It is her fault. Don't you think of touching my bonus!". Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed. Their performance review policies should be reviewed, and if they have practices that create perverse incentives to violate their own corporate policies, even harsher penalties are in order.
Let us not overreact. Note first that this paragraph is completely irrelevant to whether someone dumps polio virus into a waste treatment pond or not. Second, note that corporate personhood was a non-issue for over a century, until the US Supreme Court used the mechanism to uphold the US Constitution in a politically charged case.
Third, note that the "extraordinary penalties" are insane. No one with anything to lose in the private world will touch anything risky with that kind of penalty around. That devolves risk to the public sector which has shown both a considerable ineptitude and callousness to risk that dwarfs its counterpart in the private world. Do you really want your dumpers of polio virus to be able to hide behind sovereign immunity? That's what will happen, if sensible regulation and penalties aren't used.
No, it doesn't. Russia in particular has launched a number of nuclear reactors into space without violating the treaty.
Funny how you put in "the rest of the world" there. Because, as I pointed out, stealth only works the way you claim when there is an horizon to hide behind.
We aren't getting anywhere due to this bizarre, irrelevant, and incorrect insistence on your part. The Earth-side counterpart doesn't depend on horizons to employ stealth technologies. Instead, they're doing things like camouflage, smaller radar signatures, and masking the heat output from jet engines.
Once again, your insistence on perfect undetectability is the huge straw man that you keep using in this thread.
Then I have gotten one fact through to you.
A fact you didn't get.
So you are claiming that rocket exhaust will cool to background radiation levels in less than a day.
When it took the rest of the universe billions and billions of years to cool that much.
I guess a few seconds is a bit less than a day. Let's fix your grotesque ignorance of physics. For example, water vapor (a common exhaust component) at 3000K has a mean velocity of its molecules around several kilometers per second. Let's say that our stealth ship has an continuous exhaust plume of water vapor that starts at 3000 K and 10 meters radius.
We'll crudely treat this as an expanding cone. That means only about 70% of the thermal motion is going to be in the direction of expansion (there will be some motion along the axis of the cylinder, but this can be estimated by dividing by the square root of 2 (giving the 70%). But at least, we'll have our plume expanding outward at least 1 km/s. One second later, the plume has a radius of 1km. At this point, the motion of the particles are highly correlated. I believe the correlation in velocity is linear to distance traveled, so at this point, our temperature has dropped from 3000K to 30K not including at all radiation to space. The surface area which radiates to space has also increased by a factor of 100. Steam being a molecule would have internal energy which is also radiating to space, but at increasing efficiency as the plume expands.
By this mechanism, it is possible to actually achieve, temporarily, lower temperatures than cosmic background, assuming you started with a dense enough monoatomic exhaust stream to resist the pressure of the Solar wind. That would also be about 10 seconds for the calculation I'm running which yes, is less than a day.
Notice that while lower temperature exhaust takes longer to expand to that point, it's still a pretty fast drop to 3K, unless you were already close to 3K to begin with.
There are various ways to improve this further. One is to accelerate in pulses. Instead of a cone-shaped plume, you would have a more spherical shaped plume which more efficiently radiates heat to space (higher surface area per unit mass of propellant). Second, you can reduce the heat left in the plume by allowing it to expand more before it leaves the bell of your rocket nozzle. And of course, exhaust products that have less internal degrees of freedom drop in temperature faster (eg, monoatomic rather than complex molecules in the exhaust).
A heat sink works by convection/conduction cooling. There is nothing in space to transfer the heat to. All the heat must be radiated away.
Radiation being the usual third way here that heat can be transferred to a heat sink. I also see that you have no answer for the slow rate of expansion of the universe. If it took 14 billion years for my exhaust plume to expand in one spatial direction 1000 times, then you might have a point. Instead, it takes seconds.
I ask again, why should it be illegal? You are putting forth arguments that sound a lot to me like the opposite. If I and 800,000 of my closest friends on the intarwebs want to bulk mail government representatives, then making it so I can "petition" but they can't listen without breaking a law (and how would you enforce something like that anyway?) doesn't sound like petitioning to me.
As to bribery and similar games, it is illegal for me to offer the bribe (at least when the bribe is considered a bribe).I don't recall advocating "petitioning government in any way including bribery", but of course, you would be in a better position to know what I actually wrote than anyone else.
But ideally it should be recognised for the corruption it is and prosecuted.
So why should it be illegal rather than just something I shouldn't approve of?
You're claiming that the Laws of Thermodynamics are straw men.
Physics shows that you are wrong.
No law of thermodynamics defines "stealth" as "perfect undetectability". You do. I don't (nor does the rest of the world). Please come up with a real argument rather than this fallacy.
You can when there is a planet between you. That is why stealth works on Earth.
A planet doesn't make you undetectable. After all, I can just send a sensor around to get line of sight and now, you're detected.
Who said it had to be perfect? I'm pointing out that your exhaust will be radiating heat in all directions. Over billions of kilometers. Maybe trillions of kilometers.
You do on numerous occasions. I can quote them, if you'd like your nose rubbed in it.
Also, your heat radiation above stops being radiated only when something intercepts it. That means there's no real limit in any direction that is black sky. Even I get that. Interception of radiation by intervening bodies is not how I propose to get stealth in space.
No you have not. You just keep repeating that it will.
That's because I already explained it. Gas expands and the motion of the molecules in the gas become highly correlated (basically the random motion of the relatively dense initial plume transforms into outwardly translation motion of the shell of a sphere or cylinder of the expanding plume at later time). That cools the gas off quickly right there. Meanwhile the increased surface area of the exhaust plume radiates heat out more efficiently.
Also, and this is a really obvious point I shouldn't have to make, the thermodynamics of an exhaust plume are vastly different than for the universe. It's a near point source which is dumping heat to a 3K heat sink while there's no outer edge to the universe to dump heat. Nor does the exhaust plume have gravitational collapse and the resulting stars and quasars to heat up the universe. And the exhaust plume expands rapidly in seconds while it took almost 14 billion years for the universe to expand to its current extent.
For example, Belgium, Spain, and Germany seemed to be hit pretty hard by H1N1 flu with higher "confirmed cases" per capita than the US.
It's worth noting that some if not most people who are infected with a normal flu are asymptomatic. The H1N1 flu apparently had an unusually high rate of asymptomatic infections. For example, this report implies infections were at least a factor of three higher than symptomatic infections due to the increased presence of antibodies.
Wait... are you prepared to acknowledge that some third world countries have better health care systems than the US?
Because otherwise I don't see how which third world country is relevant.
What's the point of this grandstanding? A claim was made. Back it up. Name the country that is mentioned in this statement: "In contrast, in a third world country with a decent health care system, the infection rate was 1 in 1000."
Note that Europe didn't have significantly different infection rates than the US.
And health care systems are relevant because that's how you educate people about transmission vectors and what can be done to prevent spreading the disease. When your health care system is almost disconnected from the government by design, then your public education campaigns do become a lot more difficult, because instead of a single coordinated effort, you end up with a myriad of private entities all communicating something slightly different. Right now, in Texas, people think they can get ebola from watching news about the case. You cannot get more disinformed than that.
You do realize that there are public health services doing public education campaigns in the US? Your premises are wrong.
The whole point of this is that there is no horizon to hide behind in space so stealth does not exist because there is no way to be undetectable.
Here's another example of the straw man. First, a straw man argument is an exaggeration of another's argument in order to defeat that position. The exaggeration here is that stealth is undetectability which is an impossible condition to achieve under any non-fictional context (aside from not existing in the first place, eg, a "snipe hunt").
Sure, you can't make a detectable object perfectly undetectable by definition. But that never has been what stealth is about as I've repeatedly said. It's about being much harder to detect so that various militarily-useful activities can be conducted such as sneaking up on some target and shooting it.
You are claiming that the exhaust will cool to background radiation levels. That is, the temperature of the rest of the universe that has been cooling for billions and billions of years. You cannot explain how it will cool that fast.
So then you say that it doesn't have to be perfect, as long as everyone is blind. That's not stealth. That's blindness. You aren't invisible because a blind person cannot see you.
This is probably the best example of the ridiculousness of your argument. There is no such thing as a perfect detector - among other things it would need infinite area both to observe perfectly and to store the infinite amount of information it received. Thus, everyone has something they can't detect and hence, by your perversion of the meaning of "blind" above (and I'm not going to accept a definition shift of "blind", that's a lazy fallacy), everyone is blind. So as long as everyone is "blind", which is always the case, there is a way to be "invisible", making your argument pointless.
And I already explained how rocket exhaust can cool that fast. For someone who claims to have physics on their side, you aren't keeping up.
That's 61M cases and 12.5k deaths just in the US. Most of the rest of the world vastly underreports such things.
First off, you don't know what a "straw man" is.
Such as portraying stealth as perfect invisibility? Yes, that's a straw man.
Unless it a) is not an actual increment in safety, and b) is not the only imposition the FAA makes. There's also c) the estimate is a wild underestimate of the true cost (the FAA has an incentive to underestimate cost). Given that the air carriers are complaining so much, I think the FAA is probably low balling the cost and maybe exaggerating the benefit as well.
Look at some videos of Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Their suits would weigh about twice as much on Mars, but aside from that, it's pretty much the same environment.