So the universe is compared to a human body? There's one little problem with that. The human body is living. No one has any evidence to support a claim that the universe is similarly living or that having a lot of humans would harm the universe in any way as such a living entity.
I think that idiots and their "proper" ways to address environmental issues are one of the problems that we can solve by moving into space. There won't be any natural biospheres in most of space to interfere with human endeavors. And we can work out the environmental issues there without input from the people who think we should do that in only a particular way.
For example, we can continue to have century after century of bad ideas on how to deal with human population on Earth - things like divine providence, eugenics, dictatorship of the proletariat, urban planned development, arcologies, etc. In space settlements, you have to get most of that right or you die.
So what is better, a comfortable place where we can continue to goof around for many lifetimes to come (that is the true "heavy lid" of which you speak), or a tough environment that forces us to be better? To actually solve the problems that you apparently care about?
The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers.
Now he might occasionally live in the US, since the summary claims that he's a "Chinese-born American". But the only evidence for that citizenship is a claim made by Jack Wang himself.
I imagine anyone in China who can just drop $2.3 million on a piece of medal has some sort of connection with the brass, if only because they do business with state and crony-owned firms.
Racists don't automatically have a hate on for China. That's like saying conspiracy theorists agree on how many shots were fired from the Grassy Knoll.
When he went gone, the US program stalled and is still limping about with small toys. Ah, and the Musk joke of a spacecraft.
Which still beats the pants off of anything that von Braun did for NASA. The problem with the work that von Braun did for NASA is that it was way overpriced for commercial work. SpaceX and its competitors worldwide will fundamentally change the economics of getting into space so that one can actually make money unsubsidized from putting things in space in large volume.
Once you have volume you have the economics to push all those crazy launch technologies like reusable launch vehicles, space guns, magnetic rail, space tethers, etc that didn't make sense in the old days. You also will have far cheaper access to space, meaning a lot of stuff like space tourism, private exploration, space mining, etc become economical.
Well, they've announced all sorts of plans over the years. In the past, they wouldn't even bother hanging a price on the scheme. So actually giving a price tag is a considerable step forward.
On the other hand, the US didn't cut those things because it wanted a freer market, but because it wanted to implement a stricter, more centrally planned system that maximizes war production.
Even they wont get human certification until the late part of this decade at the earliest.
As to that, they'll probably have one or more manned missions under their belt by the time they get human certified. And if they happen to get certified before their competitors do, they will also be the first in history to be human certified.
NASA internal shuttle replacement has slipped from 2014 to 2018 already. If I was a betting man, I'd double the time again.
I wouldn't bet on NASA ever completing a Shuttle replacement. And I am on occasion a betting man. I think by 2018, we're going to see performance deterioration with the Space Launch System (SLS) like was seen with the Ares I rocket design. Politically driven paper rockets suffer greatly when real engineers start looking at the design and someone actually starts to bend metal for them.
For example, they're still chained to ATK's solid rocket motors. I don't think they'll see thrust oscillation issues like the Ares I had (they're using the same trick that the Shuttle used to limit thrust oscillation), but they still have at least two big problems - the mass and risk of solid rocket motors.
That leads to several major infrastructure issues. First, expensive vehicle integration facilities are exposed to considerably more risk. If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites on a launchpad, you probably will be able to recover most of the pad. If not you can always have a back up one ready to keep the launch tempo going.
If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites in the Vehicle Assembly Building, you just lost a key part of your launch infrastructure and can't do anything until you make a new one in a few years. That incidentally should give you a good idea of how screwy NASA can be about risk management.
If that solid rocket motor ruptures shortly after launch, it will create a hotter and more dangerous fireball than a liquid fuel equivalent. Any crew on board would have to have a faster escape system to get further away from the fireball. That means more mass taken away from a payload and more risk to the crew. It also puts deeper constraints on launch trajectories to achieve that "manned certificate".
As I mentioned solid rocket motors are heavy. Because they are mounted in vehicle integration, they have to be carried as part of the vehicle stack all the way to the launch pad. You add at least 1,000 tons to the mass of the resulting vehicle and much more than double the weight you have to move (liquid propellants are pumped in on the pad). But if you had used liquid fueled rockets all the way, you could wheel it up on a heavy duty rail, faster and cheaper.
Similarly, they have lower ISP than liquid fuel rockets (though a bit more thrust). You need a higher mass fraction and hence more propellant mass overall for the same dry and payload mass.
Another traditional area of performance deterioration is cost per launch. Currently, I believe they are claiming half a billion per launch. I think, once you include fixed costs per year and the really low launch frequency of three a year, that the revised estimate per launch will end being well on the other side of a billion dollars - and they'll still be at least years away from launching.
By that time, we should have a working Falcon Heavy rocket which puts 50 metric tons in LEO for far less per kg than the SLS can ever manage. I think the SLS at that point will make so little sense politically, economically, and financially, that they'll deep six it.
At least one manned launch a year for next four years. One more to their current space station. Then a new, larger three part space station.
Where are these "ambitious plans"? They could have done the above in the 90s. Sure, it does look a bit more ambitious than NASA's plans (especially when one considers the relative budgets of each), but I'd point to SpaceX for someone with actual ambitious plans. Falcon Heavy is scheduled for later this year. 50 metric tons to LEO!
SpaceX incidentally plans the first manned Dragon capsule mission in 2015 for NASA which would be this decade.
And that's why everyone on this website is crazy like a loon. Either you started that way and Slashdot autocorrect is normal operation for you, or you end up that way.
Either way, economic collapse seems rather unlikely because (a) most businesses can still keep operating no matter how defunct the US government becomes and they're the driving force of the economy and (b) as much as that sort of failure of the US government would still have a lot of ripple effects through the economy, it's hard to believe that it would be any worse than the Great Depression which, as horrible as it was, is a survivable circumstance. Of course, another Great Depression is unlikely precisely because of all those social programs.
The Great Depression was an example of economic collapse. And why don't you think it couldn't get worse? If the Second World War hadn't happened, then there would have been no incentive, perhaps for decades, for the US to remove the worst excesses of the Great Depression such as high tarriffs, state-enforced oligopolies, and out of control government bureaucrats and labor unions.
We can see people voting against their best interests distributed evenly across the political spectrum (including so-called libertarian).
This mysterious conundrum can easily be explained once one realizes that people vote for their perceived best interests, which often actually are their best interests.
Over the course of 50 million years, the galaxy just isn't that big.
Yes we can invest money in anything instead of building f35 but even this silly project has some benefits for humanity in that it increases our knowledge about things. Now I can imagine investing in asteroid detection and analysis of deflection capability is doing something good for our science and engineering. I think it is better than giving money to the banks that are too big too fail.
And you might have a point, had I ever advocated those sort of rent seeking diversions. Investment is a powerful thing, especially when done over those time frames.
Why have a "smart charger" at a service station? That would probably be always on due to the high demand and fast charge times required. I think what they're talking about is individual chargers in homes and businesses. You'd plug it in overnight and take advantage of relatively cheap night power.
Let's say in the US that a few hundred million of such chargers in a "smart grid" decided to pull current at the same time, that would probably trigger most current restricting safeties on the entire national grid.
A smart foe might even figure out how to worsen it by destroying hard to replace grid equipment or depleting consumables (like fuses). If you suddenly need an order of magnitude more high voltage transformers than are made worldwide in a year, that's going to suck, especially given how dependent your transportation infrastructure is due to the initial conditions of the scenario.
From a human (or mammal for that matter) perspective it is.
No. And for the reasons you demonstrate.
not investing in this is not bordering on, but actually well past the border of insane.
Why? We have other things we can be investing in. Consider this. Suppose such an asteroid comes on average once every 50 million years. If instead of spending that money on asteroid detection and deflection technologies now, we invested it - just invested it.
Then we could have colonized a good portion of galaxy in the expected time before we get hit with such an asteroid. That in turn would provide far better insurance than maintaining some sort of asteroid deflection scheme now.
If I have a computing resource that could produce 1 BTC every hour, but I could use it for something which I value far more than a BTC, then why would I use it for a BTC? This is the problem, the BTC standard provides a maximum value for BTC in terms of computing power and electricity, but not the other way. I am not guaranteed to be able to buy any computing power with a BTC.
Slashdot Mirror
So the universe is compared to a human body? There's one little problem with that. The human body is living. No one has any evidence to support a claim that the universe is similarly living or that having a lot of humans would harm the universe in any way as such a living entity.
I'm sorry, but it's quite obvious that my kind of man is what is meant to be preserved.
I think that idiots and their "proper" ways to address environmental issues are one of the problems that we can solve by moving into space. There won't be any natural biospheres in most of space to interfere with human endeavors. And we can work out the environmental issues there without input from the people who think we should do that in only a particular way.
For example, we can continue to have century after century of bad ideas on how to deal with human population on Earth - things like divine providence, eugenics, dictatorship of the proletariat, urban planned development, arcologies, etc. In space settlements, you have to get most of that right or you die.
So what is better, a comfortable place where we can continue to goof around for many lifetimes to come (that is the true "heavy lid" of which you speak), or a tough environment that forces us to be better? To actually solve the problems that you apparently care about?
The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers.
Now he might occasionally live in the US, since the summary claims that he's a "Chinese-born American". But the only evidence for that citizenship is a claim made by Jack Wang himself.
I imagine anyone in China who can just drop $2.3 million on a piece of medal has some sort of connection with the brass, if only because they do business with state and crony-owned firms.
I think you're the kind of optimist who, when I piss on your grave, would say "Ha, ha, now you're dehydrated!"
I imagine he wouldn't say anything at all. Being dead and all.
Racists don't automatically have a hate on for China. That's like saying conspiracy theorists agree on how many shots were fired from the Grassy Knoll.
Well, he now has $2.3 million less in his hands due to the miracle of the marketplace.
When he went gone, the US program stalled and is still limping about with small toys. Ah, and the Musk joke of a spacecraft.
Which still beats the pants off of anything that von Braun did for NASA. The problem with the work that von Braun did for NASA is that it was way overpriced for commercial work. SpaceX and its competitors worldwide will fundamentally change the economics of getting into space so that one can actually make money unsubsidized from putting things in space in large volume.
Once you have volume you have the economics to push all those crazy launch technologies like reusable launch vehicles, space guns, magnetic rail, space tethers, etc that didn't make sense in the old days. You also will have far cheaper access to space, meaning a lot of stuff like space tourism, private exploration, space mining, etc become economical.
Yet the socialist planning was still on the grounds of the capitalist basis
You do realize that the word, "capitalism" started as a Marxist concept?
did this actually occurred?
Of course, it happened! Those Nigerian princes would crack down hardcore if anyone tried anything, you know, shady on the internet.
Well, they've announced all sorts of plans over the years. In the past, they wouldn't even bother hanging a price on the scheme. So actually giving a price tag is a considerable step forward.
On the other hand, the US didn't cut those things because it wanted a freer market, but because it wanted to implement a stricter, more centrally planned system that maximizes war production.
Motive is rarely pure.
Even they wont get human certification until the late part of this decade at the earliest.
As to that, they'll probably have one or more manned missions under their belt by the time they get human certified. And if they happen to get certified before their competitors do, they will also be the first in history to be human certified.
NASA internal shuttle replacement has slipped from 2014 to 2018 already. If I was a betting man, I'd double the time again.
I wouldn't bet on NASA ever completing a Shuttle replacement. And I am on occasion a betting man. I think by 2018, we're going to see performance deterioration with the Space Launch System (SLS) like was seen with the Ares I rocket design. Politically driven paper rockets suffer greatly when real engineers start looking at the design and someone actually starts to bend metal for them.
For example, they're still chained to ATK's solid rocket motors. I don't think they'll see thrust oscillation issues like the Ares I had (they're using the same trick that the Shuttle used to limit thrust oscillation), but they still have at least two big problems - the mass and risk of solid rocket motors.
That leads to several major infrastructure issues. First, expensive vehicle integration facilities are exposed to considerably more risk. If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites on a launchpad, you probably will be able to recover most of the pad. If not you can always have a back up one ready to keep the launch tempo going.
If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites in the Vehicle Assembly Building, you just lost a key part of your launch infrastructure and can't do anything until you make a new one in a few years. That incidentally should give you a good idea of how screwy NASA can be about risk management.
If that solid rocket motor ruptures shortly after launch, it will create a hotter and more dangerous fireball than a liquid fuel equivalent. Any crew on board would have to have a faster escape system to get further away from the fireball. That means more mass taken away from a payload and more risk to the crew. It also puts deeper constraints on launch trajectories to achieve that "manned certificate".
As I mentioned solid rocket motors are heavy. Because they are mounted in vehicle integration, they have to be carried as part of the vehicle stack all the way to the launch pad. You add at least 1,000 tons to the mass of the resulting vehicle and much more than double the weight you have to move (liquid propellants are pumped in on the pad). But if you had used liquid fueled rockets all the way, you could wheel it up on a heavy duty rail, faster and cheaper.
Similarly, they have lower ISP than liquid fuel rockets (though a bit more thrust). You need a higher mass fraction and hence more propellant mass overall for the same dry and payload mass.
Another traditional area of performance deterioration is cost per launch. Currently, I believe they are claiming half a billion per launch. I think, once you include fixed costs per year and the really low launch frequency of three a year, that the revised estimate per launch will end being well on the other side of a billion dollars - and they'll still be at least years away from launching.
By that time, we should have a working Falcon Heavy rocket which puts 50 metric tons in LEO for far less per kg than the SLS can ever manage. I think the SLS at that point will make so little sense politically, economically, and financially, that they'll deep six it.
At least one manned launch a year for next four years. One more to their current space station. Then a new, larger three part space station.
Where are these "ambitious plans"? They could have done the above in the 90s. Sure, it does look a bit more ambitious than NASA's plans (especially when one considers the relative budgets of each), but I'd point to SpaceX for someone with actual ambitious plans. Falcon Heavy is scheduled for later this year. 50 metric tons to LEO!
SpaceX incidentally plans the first manned Dragon capsule mission in 2015 for NASA which would be this decade.
And that's why everyone on this website is crazy like a loon. Either you started that way and Slashdot autocorrect is normal operation for you, or you end up that way.
Either way, economic collapse seems rather unlikely because (a) most businesses can still keep operating no matter how defunct the US government becomes and they're the driving force of the economy and (b) as much as that sort of failure of the US government would still have a lot of ripple effects through the economy, it's hard to believe that it would be any worse than the Great Depression which, as horrible as it was, is a survivable circumstance. Of course, another Great Depression is unlikely precisely because of all those social programs.
The Great Depression was an example of economic collapse. And why don't you think it couldn't get worse? If the Second World War hadn't happened, then there would have been no incentive, perhaps for decades, for the US to remove the worst excesses of the Great Depression such as high tarriffs, state-enforced oligopolies, and out of control government bureaucrats and labor unions.
We can see people voting against their best interests distributed evenly across the political spectrum (including so-called libertarian).
This mysterious conundrum can easily be explained once one realizes that people vote for their perceived best interests, which often actually are their best interests.
colonize galaxy - with warp drive I suppose?
Over the course of 50 million years, the galaxy just isn't that big.
Yes we can invest money in anything instead of building f35 but even this silly project has some benefits for humanity in that it increases our knowledge about things. Now I can imagine investing in asteroid detection and analysis of deflection capability is doing something good for our science and engineering. I think it is better than giving money to the banks that are too big too fail.
And you might have a point, had I ever advocated those sort of rent seeking diversions. Investment is a powerful thing, especially when done over those time frames.
Why have a "smart charger" at a service station? That would probably be always on due to the high demand and fast charge times required. I think what they're talking about is individual chargers in homes and businesses. You'd plug it in overnight and take advantage of relatively cheap night power.
Let's say in the US that a few hundred million of such chargers in a "smart grid" decided to pull current at the same time, that would probably trigger most current restricting safeties on the entire national grid.
A smart foe might even figure out how to worsen it by destroying hard to replace grid equipment or depleting consumables (like fuses). If you suddenly need an order of magnitude more high voltage transformers than are made worldwide in a year, that's going to suck, especially given how dependent your transportation infrastructure is due to the initial conditions of the scenario.
From a human (or mammal for that matter) perspective it is.
No. And for the reasons you demonstrate.
not investing in this is not bordering on, but actually well past the border of insane.
Why? We have other things we can be investing in. Consider this. Suppose such an asteroid comes on average once every 50 million years. If instead of spending that money on asteroid detection and deflection technologies now, we invested it - just invested it.
Then we could have colonized a good portion of galaxy in the expected time before we get hit with such an asteroid. That in turn would provide far better insurance than maintaining some sort of asteroid deflection scheme now.
You even admitted that you were wrong, back a few posts ago...
Eh, guess I'll have to disagree. Well, good night.
That depends on how much cost you assign to total destruction. There's no reason to make it infinite. It becomes a broken Pascal's wager problem then.
If I have a computing resource that could produce 1 BTC every hour, but I could use it for something which I value far more than a BTC, then why would I use it for a BTC? This is the problem, the BTC standard provides a maximum value for BTC in terms of computing power and electricity, but not the other way. I am not guaranteed to be able to buy any computing power with a BTC.