Sorry, I think Kartu and Guzzirider are correct, going to Mars is AT LEAST 10x harder than going to the Moon, and may well be 100x harder.
So what? Hardness doesn't correlate with cost.
The COMMERCIAL ventures, like SpaceX, are simply riding the coat tails of 1000's of man lifetimes of work done by NASA.
So what? I imagine you can credit a few thousand lifetimes of work here and there to ancient empires and cultures as well. It's a sunk cost. Might as well use that work rather than let it wither under vastly overpriced government programs.
I think it could be possible in the late 21st Century, but it may still slip into the 22nd. Frankly Mars isn't going away. There's no specific time constraint.
Procrastination and your own limited life spans makes their own "time constraints". The same argument could hold now or a few million years from now. But we might not have any descendants kicking around in a few million years.
There is a simple solution here that fixes the issue. The professor simply blows this whole thing off and as a result doesn't have to put in four hours of uncompensated work.
I don't believe that a manned mission to mars could ever be achieved from international competition. It would require international cooperation on a massive scale.
International cooperation hasn't proven that valuable.
Costly, expensive does not even begin to cover it. A program for a manned mission to Mars is at least a magnitude of order more difficult than the Apollo program. A starting guess would be 10x of the cost of the Apollo program in adjusted dollars for inflation. One figure I found was $135-billion in 2005 Dollars (cost of the Apollo program).
Now if it is 10x harder to do mars, are we talking about 1.3 Trillion?
If we are talking over a trillion dollars, then it's not worth doing whether as a rich dude project or an international cooperation project. Fortunately, there's no reason it would have to cost that much. Cut two to three orders of magnitude off that price and you'll have a viable project which doesn't need the veneer of international cooperation in order to work.
This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980â"2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles
This should be a warning sign for you. Small data sets(and here, over short time scales) can indicate correct results, but they can also be highly misleading.
One day, the petroleum's going to run out. Unfortunately, our environment will also be completely fucked up. We will be dealing with much worse droughts, heat-waves, harsher winters, completely dead, acidified oceans, destructive storms, probably no ability to have natural pollinating insects, or even to fight invasive weeds, and no way to obtain increasingly rare soil enriching potassium and other minerals and fertilizers. It will be much harder to grow biofuel crops. But it will be our only choice - so it will be the ONLY choice that makes sense, and these "economists" can go suck it.
Nonsense. Let's start with AGW. It's not predicted to cause that degree of harm. Second, we haven't in practice actually had a problem generating soil. If you really do want to generate biofuels, then corn just isn't the crop. There are a variety of crops that give several times more energy output for the human-side energy input.
Finally, if you're tilting at the windmill of "economists" then that's a solid indication that you are in the wrong. Economics is going to be in any rational discussion of what's going on.
Well then let them manufacture and excuse, don't provide it.
I explained why this is a waste of time. It's one thing to go Guy Fawkes, to deliberately provide a huge provocation (such as planting gunpowder in the basement of Parliament). It's another to curb behavior merely because it might be perceived as something provocative.
As I see it, the behavior of a free person is always provocative merely by being free. Might as well do what you want, subject to sensible constraints such as not doing harm to others.
Then I guess we need to get rid of that pesky free speech thing. The exercise is useless. Tyrants will always have an excuse, even if they have to manufacture it themselves.
Make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others
If you want good examples of things that do that, betting on sports is a great example. Lotteries can be as well, depending on what the money gained from the lottery is spent on. It's fairly common for public funds to be squandered on cronies and other sorts of corruption.
I'd believe it if they rallied against the 10-54 billion (depending on how you count) subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies, who rake in trillions in profits. Half-billion to a failed solar company is bad, but not as bad as 10+ billion to already established, ridiculously-profitable industries.
The failed solar company had access to most of those subsidies (since most of the subsidies aren't specific to the fossil fuel industry) as well.
So North Korea doesn't get on a list of "great evil" because nobody is willing to do anything about it? Why have a list of "great evil" in the first place?
Stock markets, particularly with respect to stock options, are also prediction markets. Sure you may be right that it is betting for snobs. But there are a bunch of incredibly rich snobs as a result.
Yeah, so? People got rich in all sorts of ways, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea or something we should want as a society. 'Make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others' doesn't fit my idea of 'useful'.
Ok, so you don't understand the value of stock markets. They don't operate that way. Instead, they are very efficient at providing capital to public corporations. I have yet to see this "make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others".
Similarly, prediction markets would be relatively efficient (as in, you're not going to find a better process out there) at evaluating the likelihood of events traded on the market. If the events aren't particularly valuable (such as numbers in a lottery or which sports team wins), then the market isn't particularly valuable.
But on the other hand, if you're trading in stuff that has real world impact such as elections, development of technologies, world events, etc, then you have something of value, even to those who don't participate in the market.
You have to consider the mass of the power source for the LED. Even 100% efficient LEDs would still have the problem of extremely low thrust to weight as a result.
Merely pushing against the universe as he claims doesn't heat anything up
Why wouldn't it? After all, that's what the windmill is doing too.
Among other things, it's not going to be a uniform push due to speed of light and distance from the thruster in question. There are probably other asymmetries in how the force in question acts. Such variation can lead to heating effects. As you note, Woodward glosses over that particular issue.
But even with that crazy amount (what market is going to cover your hundred billion dollar bet?) I contend you can still gain more money through corporate subsidies, defense contracts, military action, MFN status, etc. by controlling who gets in to the White House.
Ok, how about a trillion dollars? The amounts can get crazier. At some point, the stake is going to become big enough to justify the loss of power. In open ended markets, the potential is there for really crazy maneuvers, should the stakes get big enough.
This is why stock options are capped markets, BTW. Because otherwise the market could build up to the point where it becomes worth someone's while to do something crazy (say like blowing up the company headquarters or faking a ridiculous takeover bid) in order to throw the price of the options.
It's also why Intrade says it'll roll back transactions on its election contracts, if a candidate is assassinated (or similar shenanigans happen). Else someone might do something crazy, like shoot candidates, because they have money riding on it.
Well, if that's an issue to you hold the elections a week earlier.
Then all the problems just get moved up a week. Unless you do all elections for the rest of time right now, there's always going to be someone wondering what the result of an election which hasn't happened yet. And a prediction market is a good way to answer those questions.
Agreed, but it is what prediction markets are, a way to bet on something. All the talk about it is just people trying to pretend their betting somehow isn't the useless shit it really is. Prediction markets is betting for snobs, nothing more.
Stock markets, particularly with respect to stock options, are also prediction markets. Sure you may be right that it is betting for snobs. But there are a bunch of incredibly rich snobs as a result.
Yes. All of the Newtonian conservation laws of mass, energy, momentum, and angular momentum all are conserved in general relativity as somewhat more general conservation laws of the "stress-energy tensor" a field whose components, when approximated by special relativity or Newtonian mechanics, yield all the above quantities.
At least with the Woodward device, there is a mechanism for conserving energy and momentum, namely, that gravitational energy is the propellant of sorts.
I don't have an understanding of how much power the device needs (under very ideal circumstances) for a given level of thrust. It may well be that a single color LED would be more efficient as a thruster (using emitted photons from the LED as propellant). But at least, it appears to be something that works to a measurable degree.
1) that just says that he didn't actually lose enough money to manipulate the market.
We need to keep in mind here that market manipulation of this sort loses money. The goal is to create a perception that is more valuable to the manipulator than the money they have lost. Which is why point 2) is so important. The guy lost $1.5 million. He could have chosen to lose a lot more. But where is the gain for that effort?
Plus, how many ways would he have to split that $100? I think I'd be lucky to get two cents out of the deal. I suppose I could put that to my next death star.
Slashdot Mirror
However it would be necessary to overcome that to achieve a meaningful mars mission.
It's never been necessary in the past.
Mars is not the moon, you can't go there and hang out for 3 days and go home.
I guess we'll have to hang out longer then.
To be cost effective, may need to look to China as a resource.
To be cost effective, one needs to look to economies of scale. China has some nice ones, but so do most other countries.
Again it would not be an easy road to achieve International cooperation
Hence, why we don't make that a requirement for going to Mars.
Sorry, I think Kartu and Guzzirider are correct, going to Mars is AT LEAST 10x harder than going to the Moon, and may well be 100x harder.
So what? Hardness doesn't correlate with cost.
The COMMERCIAL ventures, like SpaceX, are simply riding the coat tails of 1000's of man lifetimes of work done by NASA.
So what? I imagine you can credit a few thousand lifetimes of work here and there to ancient empires and cultures as well. It's a sunk cost. Might as well use that work rather than let it wither under vastly overpriced government programs.
I think it could be possible in the late 21st Century, but it may still slip into the 22nd. Frankly Mars isn't going away. There's no specific time constraint.
Procrastination and your own limited life spans makes their own "time constraints". The same argument could hold now or a few million years from now. But we might not have any descendants kicking around in a few million years.
There is a simple solution here that fixes the issue. The professor simply blows this whole thing off and as a result doesn't have to put in four hours of uncompensated work.
I don't believe that a manned mission to mars could ever be achieved from international competition. It would require international cooperation on a massive scale.
International cooperation hasn't proven that valuable.
Costly, expensive does not even begin to cover it. A program for a manned mission to Mars is at least a magnitude of order more difficult than the Apollo program. A starting guess would be 10x of the cost of the Apollo program in adjusted dollars for inflation. One figure I found was $135-billion in 2005 Dollars (cost of the Apollo program). Now if it is 10x harder to do mars, are we talking about 1.3 Trillion?
If we are talking over a trillion dollars, then it's not worth doing whether as a rich dude project or an international cooperation project. Fortunately, there's no reason it would have to cost that much. Cut two to three orders of magnitude off that price and you'll have a viable project which doesn't need the veneer of international cooperation in order to work.
One thing is for sure, a re-unification would take the wind out of the sails of Korea's economy for at least two decedes.
Germany didn't see a similar drop in its economy. To the contrary, it's done very well compared to the rest of the EU.
This Letter reports reliable satellite data in the period of 1980â"2007 covering two full 11-yr cosmic ray (CR) cycles
This should be a warning sign for you. Small data sets(and here, over short time scales) can indicate correct results, but they can also be highly misleading.
One day, the petroleum's going to run out. Unfortunately, our environment will also be completely fucked up. We will be dealing with much worse droughts, heat-waves, harsher winters, completely dead, acidified oceans, destructive storms, probably no ability to have natural pollinating insects, or even to fight invasive weeds, and no way to obtain increasingly rare soil enriching potassium and other minerals and fertilizers. It will be much harder to grow biofuel crops. But it will be our only choice - so it will be the ONLY choice that makes sense, and these "economists" can go suck it.
Nonsense. Let's start with AGW. It's not predicted to cause that degree of harm. Second, we haven't in practice actually had a problem generating soil. If you really do want to generate biofuels, then corn just isn't the crop. There are a variety of crops that give several times more energy output for the human-side energy input.
Finally, if you're tilting at the windmill of "economists" then that's a solid indication that you are in the wrong. Economics is going to be in any rational discussion of what's going on.
Well then let them manufacture and excuse, don't provide it.
I explained why this is a waste of time. It's one thing to go Guy Fawkes, to deliberately provide a huge provocation (such as planting gunpowder in the basement of Parliament). It's another to curb behavior merely because it might be perceived as something provocative.
As I see it, the behavior of a free person is always provocative merely by being free. Might as well do what you want, subject to sensible constraints such as not doing harm to others.
Then I guess we need to get rid of that pesky free speech thing. The exercise is useless. Tyrants will always have an excuse, even if they have to manufacture it themselves.
Make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others
If you want good examples of things that do that, betting on sports is a great example. Lotteries can be as well, depending on what the money gained from the lottery is spent on. It's fairly common for public funds to be squandered on cronies and other sorts of corruption.
Evidence for whether or not a creator exists can only be found in logic.
That's not evidence then. Evidence is something that can be observed and confirmed.
I'd believe it if they rallied against the 10-54 billion (depending on how you count) subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies, who rake in trillions in profits. Half-billion to a failed solar company is bad, but not as bad as 10+ billion to already established, ridiculously-profitable industries.
The failed solar company had access to most of those subsidies (since most of the subsidies aren't specific to the fossil fuel industry) as well.
So North Korea doesn't get on a list of "great evil" because nobody is willing to do anything about it? Why have a list of "great evil" in the first place?
Stock markets, particularly with respect to stock options, are also prediction markets. Sure you may be right that it is betting for snobs. But there are a bunch of incredibly rich snobs as a result.
Yeah, so? People got rich in all sorts of ways, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea or something we should want as a society. 'Make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others' doesn't fit my idea of 'useful'.
Ok, so you don't understand the value of stock markets. They don't operate that way. Instead, they are very efficient at providing capital to public corporations. I have yet to see this "make a few people rich at the expense of a lot of others".
Similarly, prediction markets would be relatively efficient (as in, you're not going to find a better process out there) at evaluating the likelihood of events traded on the market. If the events aren't particularly valuable (such as numbers in a lottery or which sports team wins), then the market isn't particularly valuable.
But on the other hand, if you're trading in stuff that has real world impact such as elections, development of technologies, world events, etc, then you have something of value, even to those who don't participate in the market.
Given your concerns, if you choose not to use localization, at least consider using simple English words as much as possible.
You have to consider the mass of the power source for the LED. Even 100% efficient LEDs would still have the problem of extremely low thrust to weight as a result.
Merely pushing against the universe as he claims doesn't heat anything up
Why wouldn't it? After all, that's what the windmill is doing too.
Among other things, it's not going to be a uniform push due to speed of light and distance from the thruster in question. There are probably other asymmetries in how the force in question acts. Such variation can lead to heating effects. As you note, Woodward glosses over that particular issue.
But even with that crazy amount (what market is going to cover your hundred billion dollar bet?) I contend you can still gain more money through corporate subsidies, defense contracts, military action, MFN status, etc. by controlling who gets in to the White House.
Ok, how about a trillion dollars? The amounts can get crazier. At some point, the stake is going to become big enough to justify the loss of power. In open ended markets, the potential is there for really crazy maneuvers, should the stakes get big enough.
This is why stock options are capped markets, BTW. Because otherwise the market could build up to the point where it becomes worth someone's while to do something crazy (say like blowing up the company headquarters or faking a ridiculous takeover bid) in order to throw the price of the options.
It's also why Intrade says it'll roll back transactions on its election contracts, if a candidate is assassinated (or similar shenanigans happen). Else someone might do something crazy, like shoot candidates, because they have money riding on it.
Well, if that's an issue to you hold the elections a week earlier.
Then all the problems just get moved up a week. Unless you do all elections for the rest of time right now, there's always going to be someone wondering what the result of an election which hasn't happened yet. And a prediction market is a good way to answer those questions.
Agreed, but it is what prediction markets are, a way to bet on something. All the talk about it is just people trying to pretend their betting somehow isn't the useless shit it really is. Prediction markets is betting for snobs, nothing more.
Stock markets, particularly with respect to stock options, are also prediction markets. Sure you may be right that it is betting for snobs. But there are a bunch of incredibly rich snobs as a result.
Yes. All of the Newtonian conservation laws of mass, energy, momentum, and angular momentum all are conserved in general relativity as somewhat more general conservation laws of the "stress-energy tensor" a field whose components, when approximated by special relativity or Newtonian mechanics, yield all the above quantities.
At least with the Woodward device, there is a mechanism for conserving energy and momentum, namely, that gravitational energy is the propellant of sorts.
I don't have an understanding of how much power the device needs (under very ideal circumstances) for a given level of thrust. It may well be that a single color LED would be more efficient as a thruster (using emitted photons from the LED as propellant). But at least, it appears to be something that works to a measurable degree.
If we want to know the outcome of elections, can't we just count the votes?
Because the election hasn't happened yet? And it's an important decision that affects a lot of us?
And if we want to loose money placing bets can't we just bet on sports games or buy lottery tickets?
Because that is useless shit?
1) that just says that he didn't actually lose enough money to manipulate the market.
We need to keep in mind here that market manipulation of this sort loses money. The goal is to create a perception that is more valuable to the manipulator than the money they have lost. Which is why point 2) is so important. The guy lost $1.5 million. He could have chosen to lose a lot more. But where is the gain for that effort?
Media companies have a vested interest in portraying an election is as contested as possible until the end.
Plus, how many ways would he have to split that $100? I think I'd be lucky to get two cents out of the deal. I suppose I could put that to my next death star.