A completely irrelevant observation since not every net cafe and ISP would employ me at the very same time. It's also worth noting that virtually no ISPs censor anyone except in places where they are required to.
Censorship is censorship no matter if a private employer does it, or a government does it.
A remarkably flawed assertion. Censorship of a private employer is easily circumvented in ways I already mentioned which usual involve a few minutes of travel. Censorship of a government, which is backed by true power, the barrel of the gun, well that's much harder to circumvent, usually involving leaving the country or doing something illegal. So government censorship is of a much different quality than censorship by an employer.
It's like claiming that because you've figured out how to feed one person, then feeding one trillion people is not significantly harder, because it is just a matter of scale.
No, you don't understand context. Feeding people is a completely different problem as network (Internet) censorship.
It's an analogy. It doesn't have to be exactly identical in order to apply. You were asserting that scale didn't matter. We see from this analogy alone that yes, it does.
The solution to this problem is the same for employees and populations: flee, or submit (or fight, but that would be irrational given the circumstances)
No, it's not. The employee can always just drive to a place where they can access that content and then return to work with no one caring in the least. A small inconvenience. While engaging in rebellion just to access content? Or leaving the country just to access content? Scale matters.
If Gaza wanted to deploy something militarily useful, a democratic, peaceful government would be far more effective than a missile defense that would blow up the moment it became militarily inconvenient for Israel.
And yet, so many physicists have no idea how important self-consistency is in their physics.
You base this on what? Your claims about assumptions on time are addressed both by actual observation of the dimension of time (confirming the validity of the space-time model at the scale in which it is used) and by the procedure of change of coordinates (which provides the consistency you claim is missing from discussion of time).
The actual order of events in which they actually happen is constant for any observer.
But the order of events is subjective, dependent on where the observer is, and how they are moving with respect to those events. That's what makes it ill-defined.
The fact that they don't see its image yet doesn't mean it didn't happen yet.
Nor does it mean that it did happen yet. Only when they observe the event, can one say that it did happen.
Please, I think you are both too small and too slow to see it for what it really is when you look at a clock.
Not at all. Watching a clock is something everyone can do. Evidence trumps philosophy.
You assume it is a dimension as we all do, since for our scale of things, this works pretty well.
And I'm right too. And yes, you may be right as well about smaller (Planck) scales not having a time dimension.
When I say in this circumstance, time "itself" is static, I mean to say that if it can be reversed along with physical actions and you get back what you started with, then it is independent and unchanging
With respect to what? Static implies constant with respect to time which is itself. But it's not. Predetermination or its absence would not change that.
This isn't at all a problem. After all, we can already observe in every unit of space, time moving forward or backwards as we see it.
No. I'll stop here. This is just wrong, so I won't go any further with it.
Why stop here? There may be some part of the universe which doesn't have a time coordinate, but we don't observe it. What we do observe can have time moving forward or backwards. We just have to make a change of coordinates (or when making any other change of frame of reference) on all physical observables in the system, such as swapping sign of charge and parity when we flip the direction of time (in order to preserve CPT).
Your basic objections on time are addressed by the change of coordinates procedure. It provides consistency across arbitrary viewpoints of the universe.
It's apparent that she thinks it's her data because she would benefit from access to that data. Basically I should own something because I want it. I can't see how that rule could possibly be abused.
Where philosophy intersects with physics, it is called "physics".
Conclusion without any need for experiments: If you believe reality is consistent, time does not travel in 2 directions in 1 universe.
We've never managed to go without need for experiments. It's worth noting here that there is an odd sort of higher order of empiricism over general philosophy. One can observe systems which model philosophical arguments. We are such. But there aren't purely philosophical arguments which say concrete things about reality. One needs empirical priors.
For a start, let's assume that time is a dimension
We don't have to assume it. We can observe the dimension of time with a clock. If we start moving the clock a bit then we change the axis which the clock is measuring. This indicates that the dimension of time exists, but isn't unique due to how we can change frame of reference.
it could this far along and a sequence of actions moved it in this direction, reversing all the actions perfectly moves everything the other way.
Sequence of actions isn't well defined. It is quite possible to observe different sequences of events based on where you are and how fast you are moving. One event follows another only if the second event is in the future cone of the first event (assuming events are points in space-time). This is equivalent to the first event being in the past cone of the second event.
Of course, even if this were definitely true, you would still be faced with the dual direction problem - i.e. it looks like if time is a dimension, then it runs the same way forward as backward - as long as actions are reversible. This is just another way to say that time itself is static
No, it's not. Something is static if it doesn't change with respect to time. Any parameter changes with respect to itself at rate 1.
What I'm really saying here is that if time is a dimension, then the real problem is having a universe where time runs both forwards and backwards in different regions of space and that it would be possible to observe one from the other.
This isn't at all a problem. After all, we can already observe in every unit of space, time moving forward or backwards as we see it. The trick is to have a consistent change of coordinates between the differing viewpoints. They are different frames of reference for the same space and every frame of reference has this consistent transformation to another frame of reference for the same space (so changing the direction of time is not even a unique transformation of the space, but part of a much larger set of transformations).
Every physical property dependent on space-time coordinates can thus be transformed via change of coordinates.
The sequence of events is not a neat linear ordering with everything happening in a strict sequence, but a sort of "partial ordering" where somethings happen after others, while others are incomparable either because they could happen before or after, depending on your frame of reference, or because they'll never affect each others' future timeline (say due to an expanding universe stretching space infinitely much between them).
Finally, there are words you use, such as "static", "dynamic", and "interact" that require time to exist in order to make sense. So saying
Time is the result of a universe struggling with a paradox of it being one solid indivisible thing, or a multitude of things that appear to interact.
You can't "appear to interact" without some sort of time coordinate along which the interaction occurs.
In contrast, I don't see a political "futures market" providing any more economic benefit than betting on sports teams or horse races. I don't think it will make political pundits any more accountable than sports betting makes sports commentators accountable.
To the contrary, the Intrade betting market warned me for many months that Obama was likely to win. That was economic value to me. There's not much use to taking big job or stock market-related risks, if things aren't going to improve for at least a couple of years.
And guess what? *I* am not so fucking shortsighted as to complain that my taxes are going to things that help the country, and help the environment.
I'd say the problem here is that you don't complain about things that don't help the country. What's the point of paying a lot in taxes, if they aren't to our collective benefit?
If SpaceX could throttle their motors like modern launchers can then they could avoid this fuel transfer problem but more sophisticated engines would mean costlier launches.
That's not the point of cross-feed. The point is that the Falcon 9 heavy launches with three side by side "cores" (first stages) and engines on the bottom of every one of those cores. By emptying the two on the outside first before even touching the propellant stored in the core in the center, the rocket minimizes the time that it is burning fuel to lift those two heavy outer cores (which aren't going to space).
And it efficiently uses all available rockets on the base of all of the cores. When it has three times the mass of the first stage, it has three times the propulsion power. You could develop a engine (or engine cluster) that can throttle back to under a third of its original thrust, but what would be the point of that when you can have three such engines one each on the base of each core?
That means a better mass fraction and more mass to orbit.
Even with far more sophisticated engines, the advantage of cross-feed remains, namely, that the dead weight of the two empty side cores comes off earlier than it would in the absence of cross-feed, and every rocket is used in the first few minutes of liftoff.
No, I'm saying scale is not a good and huge reason at all.
And I'm merely pointing out the foolishness of that opinion.
How is that trivial? You're assuming every single part of the country is within a few minutes of travel to a connection (by what? Foot? Car? Now you're assuming everybody has cars or access to one), and that connection doesn't censor, using an ISP that doesn't censor.
When I first posted in this thread, I thought the story was about censoring by software in a employer's servers. At that point, one merely goes to machines that aren't part of that network. My assumption holds almost everywhere in the developed world where an uncensored internet exists.
Sure, one can with considerable effort contrive a situation where one can't access a non-censored part of the network (maybe you're on an oil platform deep in the ocean or something and completely beholden to your employer), but it's not going to hold for the vast majority of the developed world.
That's the same in your "trivial" case. Again, what if that Internet cafe censors too? What if your ISP at home censors? Censoring can happen anywhere along the line which you do not control.
Then there's no opportunity for your employer or whatever to be a hypocrite and we're well into the second case where the country is alleged to censor your internet access.
The complexity of the problem doesn't change with scale.
No, we see the contrary, that scale matters. But some of us choose not to recognize the difficulties and challenges that problems of large scale present over problems of small scale. It's like claiming that because you've figured out how to feed one person, then feeding one trillion people is not significantly harder, because it is just a matter of scale.
It will help the people who want to build rockets. IMHO the latter industry is the more important one
No, it isn't. The launch industry is completely irrelevant without something to launch. That's what happened with the Space Shuttle. NASA made a huge vehicle with no need for the vehicle and then spent many decades rationalizing the decision rather than do actual space development. If Arianespace and the ESA go that route, then what are they going to launch on this platform? Makework that has no value to anyone other than the people skimming off of it.
Development of a capsule system that could keep people alive for 18 months to two years for the round trip to and from Mars.. Part of that development time would be taken up by a full-dress unmanned rehearsal flight under remote control before risking human beings -- that would take about two years total after maybe ten years development work.
Here's part of the problem. Bogus and excessive testing procedures. What's the point of not having people on such a mission? It's not a full-dress rehearsal flight without people anyway. Might as well put some people on board and hit the Martian moons while you're out there. And maybe land on Mars for a couple of years while you're at it.
Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.
Or get your propellant from Mars and cut that payload requirement in half or more right there.
A worked example is the ISS -- 400 tonnes of modules, none of which massed more than 20 tonnes on the pad before launch. From proposal to completion took well over a decade, funding was trimmed and restored, corners were cut and major revisions made as it was built. For 150 billion dollars we ended up with a large spacecraft that can only go round in circles and if a really serious problem ever occurred then the crew could be rescued in theory since a compatible biosphere is only 400 km away. A manned Mars mission is going to cost a lot more than that, and the launch costs are a minor part of the time and money budgets.
And if there was more funding lying on the table, it would have cost even more than it did. It is foolish to take the ISS as a serious spacecraft rather than a convenient white elephant for transferring money from taxpayers to political merchants.
This is about the big technology companies that run the major sites used throughout the world: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, Amazon, and how they used filters and censorship on the customer facing side of their network (not their internal networks), despite their vocal public appeals for the net to be free and open. I don't see how you can possibly miss the hypocrisy.
Very easily it seems. There is no hypocrisy to see and I think this whole argument is quite phony.
I support adult entertainment in the real world. But I don't run a brothel or adult bookstore nor even shop at such places. Nor would I permit such facilities in my sandbox, should they become as unrestricted as I would like. Does that mean I'm a hypocrite?
Look Facebook and all those other businesses have sandboxes. It's reasonable that they exercise such controls on that as they see fit. And it's certainly compatible with their beliefs about the net being free and open, since the internet is not their sandboxes. There's no inconsistency here for hypocrisy to take root in.
I don't see any difference. Employees can go home. Populations can migrate. It's only a matter of scale.
Ok, so you don't see "scale" as a difference even though that happens to be a good and huge reason why they're different. In the first case, it's a trivial matter to look at the content in a different place. A few minutes of travel, say, to an internet cafe or whatever. In the latter case, you're equivocating that modest burden with moving out of the country (and it would have to be to a country that would allow you to see that content).
Modern cryogenic engine designs like the Vulcain-1, the RS-68A and even the venerable RS-25 Block 2 have throttle-down capability so they don't need to use the venerable clustered-motor system SpaceX has adopted from Soyuz.
In other words, they need a throttle down system because they haven't adopted the venerable clustered-motor system. As it turns out, the Merlin engine can be throttled between 60% and 100% (which is handy for the second stage), but they don't need that for the first stage.
Building and testing the fleet of fuel tanker/motor modules, landers, ascent stages, Mars orbiter transfer vehicles, supply landers etc. is where the rest of the trillion bucks goes.
Well, if that's too much, then spend less. I don't take the trillion dollar estimate seriously. If we launch 1000 tons, including the four person crew, to LEO, at $3000 per ton on the Falcon 9 Heavy (in 20 ton lots) or $2000 per ton on the Falcon Heavy (in 50 ton lots), then that's only $2-3 billion in launch costs.
It's also the giant suck of time, the years that would stretch into decades since all of it would have to be built and working before the first crew gets into their Soyuz or Dragon capsule on their ride to orbit.
What would take so long? Obviously, there's nothing going on now (with NASA doing psychological experiments, of all things) so it would take some time to ramp up. But we made rapid progress before, going from the first orbital launches to a person on the Moon in twelve years. The claim that it would take decades isn't based on actual history of manned space flight.
Transferring fuel and oxidiser sideways between tankage sections under 3-4 gees of thrust and vibration is, as far as I am aware, going to be a first in rocketry. It takes plumbing, pumps, valve gear etc. meaning major changes to the core and strap-on sections which add to the vehicle weight as well as the cost of manufacture since the cores are no longer physically identical. In contrast the Delta 4 Heavy strap-ons are pretty nearly identical to the core; the central engine just runs throttled down so that when the strap-ons separate it has enough propellant left to continue to orbit without the extra parasitic weight of transfer pumps etc. I don't know why this option isn't available to SpaceX; do the Merlin engines have a throttle-down and/or in-flight start capability?
Just because something is new doesn't mean it is a "kludge". Also, they have natural ways to throttle down arrays of engines. Just shut down some of the rocket engines as you no longer need the thrust.
The major cost of a manned Moon or Mars mission isn't the launch vehicles, it's the crew vehicle design and testing and construction.
No, there is a genuine bottleneck in the cost of getting it into space. Every kg you use adds cost to the mission. As a result, mission cost generally is five to ten times the launch costs. So shaving $50 billion in launch costs yields a additional $200-450 billion reduction in total costs.
What makes it hypocrisy? There's this thing called "context". Blocking sexual images is a cheap way to reduce porn surfing on company computers.
And there's a huge difference between "censorship" on a business's private machines which blocks what its employees are allowed to view only on those machines and "censorship" which blocks or removes content for anyone in an entire population. In the former case, the employee can always go home to view the content in question.
So I don't think there is hypocrisy here. And I sure don't believe there is a conversation worth having here.
That time was before Slashdot existed. And believe it or not, it was longer than you'd think. At least five years. I kid you not. Then the universe was created.
Slashdot Mirror
And every net cafe, every ISP is an employer.
A completely irrelevant observation since not every net cafe and ISP would employ me at the very same time. It's also worth noting that virtually no ISPs censor anyone except in places where they are required to.
Censorship is censorship no matter if a private employer does it, or a government does it.
A remarkably flawed assertion. Censorship of a private employer is easily circumvented in ways I already mentioned which usual involve a few minutes of travel. Censorship of a government, which is backed by true power, the barrel of the gun, well that's much harder to circumvent, usually involving leaving the country or doing something illegal. So government censorship is of a much different quality than censorship by an employer.
It's like claiming that because you've figured out how to feed one person, then feeding one trillion people is not significantly harder, because it is just a matter of scale.
No, you don't understand context. Feeding people is a completely different problem as network (Internet) censorship.
It's an analogy. It doesn't have to be exactly identical in order to apply. You were asserting that scale didn't matter. We see from this analogy alone that yes, it does.
The solution to this problem is the same for employees and populations: flee, or submit (or fight, but that would be irrational given the circumstances)
No, it's not. The employee can always just drive to a place where they can access that content and then return to work with no one caring in the least. A small inconvenience. While engaging in rebellion just to access content? Or leaving the country just to access content? Scale matters.
Sounds like he was also one of the guys responsible for breaking those cease fires.
How do you choose not to need something like Iron Dome? Short of just wiping out Gaza and Hamas, I don't see that answer.
If Gaza wanted to deploy something militarily useful, a democratic, peaceful government would be far more effective than a missile defense that would blow up the moment it became militarily inconvenient for Israel.
And yet, so many physicists have no idea how important self-consistency is in their physics.
You base this on what? Your claims about assumptions on time are addressed both by actual observation of the dimension of time (confirming the validity of the space-time model at the scale in which it is used) and by the procedure of change of coordinates (which provides the consistency you claim is missing from discussion of time).
The actual order of events in which they actually happen is constant for any observer.
But the order of events is subjective, dependent on where the observer is, and how they are moving with respect to those events. That's what makes it ill-defined.
The fact that they don't see its image yet doesn't mean it didn't happen yet.
Nor does it mean that it did happen yet. Only when they observe the event, can one say that it did happen.
Please, I think you are both too small and too slow to see it for what it really is when you look at a clock.
Not at all. Watching a clock is something everyone can do. Evidence trumps philosophy.
You assume it is a dimension as we all do, since for our scale of things, this works pretty well.
And I'm right too. And yes, you may be right as well about smaller (Planck) scales not having a time dimension.
When I say in this circumstance, time "itself" is static, I mean to say that if it can be reversed along with physical actions and you get back what you started with, then it is independent and unchanging
With respect to what? Static implies constant with respect to time which is itself. But it's not. Predetermination or its absence would not change that.
This isn't at all a problem. After all, we can already observe in every unit of space, time moving forward or backwards as we see it.
No. I'll stop here. This is just wrong, so I won't go any further with it.
Why stop here? There may be some part of the universe which doesn't have a time coordinate, but we don't observe it. What we do observe can have time moving forward or backwards. We just have to make a change of coordinates (or when making any other change of frame of reference) on all physical observables in the system, such as swapping sign of charge and parity when we flip the direction of time (in order to preserve CPT).
Your basic objections on time are addressed by the change of coordinates procedure. It provides consistency across arbitrary viewpoints of the universe.
Your car is nicer than my PoS. I'll return it some day when you want it more. Maybe.
It's apparent that she thinks it's her data because she would benefit from access to that data. Basically I should own something because I want it. I can't see how that rule could possibly be abused.
Conclusion without any need for experiments: If you believe reality is consistent, time does not travel in 2 directions in 1 universe.
We've never managed to go without need for experiments. It's worth noting here that there is an odd sort of higher order of empiricism over general philosophy. One can observe systems which model philosophical arguments. We are such. But there aren't purely philosophical arguments which say concrete things about reality. One needs empirical priors.
For a start, let's assume that time is a dimension
We don't have to assume it. We can observe the dimension of time with a clock. If we start moving the clock a bit then we change the axis which the clock is measuring. This indicates that the dimension of time exists, but isn't unique due to how we can change frame of reference.
it could this far along and a sequence of actions moved it in this direction, reversing all the actions perfectly moves everything the other way.
Sequence of actions isn't well defined. It is quite possible to observe different sequences of events based on where you are and how fast you are moving. One event follows another only if the second event is in the future cone of the first event (assuming events are points in space-time). This is equivalent to the first event being in the past cone of the second event.
Of course, even if this were definitely true, you would still be faced with the dual direction problem - i.e. it looks like if time is a dimension, then it runs the same way forward as backward - as long as actions are reversible. This is just another way to say that time itself is static
No, it's not. Something is static if it doesn't change with respect to time. Any parameter changes with respect to itself at rate 1.
What I'm really saying here is that if time is a dimension, then the real problem is having a universe where time runs both forwards and backwards in different regions of space and that it would be possible to observe one from the other.
This isn't at all a problem. After all, we can already observe in every unit of space, time moving forward or backwards as we see it. The trick is to have a consistent change of coordinates between the differing viewpoints. They are different frames of reference for the same space and every frame of reference has this consistent transformation to another frame of reference for the same space (so changing the direction of time is not even a unique transformation of the space, but part of a much larger set of transformations).
Every physical property dependent on space-time coordinates can thus be transformed via change of coordinates.
The sequence of events is not a neat linear ordering with everything happening in a strict sequence, but a sort of "partial ordering" where somethings happen after others, while others are incomparable either because they could happen before or after, depending on your frame of reference, or because they'll never affect each others' future timeline (say due to an expanding universe stretching space infinitely much between them).
Finally, there are words you use, such as "static", "dynamic", and "interact" that require time to exist in order to make sense. So saying
Time is the result of a universe struggling with a paradox of it being one solid indivisible thing, or a multitude of things that appear to interact.
You can't "appear to interact" without some sort of time coordinate along which the interaction occurs.
You could program it to not take things like emotions into account.
It all depends on what they're programmed to do, and whether that program acts as expected. That's why I wouldn't trust them more than humans.
In contrast, I don't see a political "futures market" providing any more economic benefit than betting on sports teams or horse races. I don't think it will make political pundits any more accountable than sports betting makes sports commentators accountable.
To the contrary, the Intrade betting market warned me for many months that Obama was likely to win. That was economic value to me. There's not much use to taking big job or stock market-related risks, if things aren't going to improve for at least a couple of years.
And guess what? *I* am not so fucking shortsighted as to complain that my taxes are going to things that help the country, and help the environment.
I'd say the problem here is that you don't complain about things that don't help the country. What's the point of paying a lot in taxes, if they aren't to our collective benefit?
There may be many modifications needed in order to handle a crewed capsule in a safe and reliable manner.
Compared to what? It's already as man-rated as any manned launch vehicle ever made.
If SpaceX could throttle their motors like modern launchers can then they could avoid this fuel transfer problem but more sophisticated engines would mean costlier launches.
That's not the point of cross-feed. The point is that the Falcon 9 heavy launches with three side by side "cores" (first stages) and engines on the bottom of every one of those cores. By emptying the two on the outside first before even touching the propellant stored in the core in the center, the rocket minimizes the time that it is burning fuel to lift those two heavy outer cores (which aren't going to space).
And it efficiently uses all available rockets on the base of all of the cores. When it has three times the mass of the first stage, it has three times the propulsion power. You could develop a engine (or engine cluster) that can throttle back to under a third of its original thrust, but what would be the point of that when you can have three such engines one each on the base of each core?
That means a better mass fraction and more mass to orbit.
Even with far more sophisticated engines, the advantage of cross-feed remains, namely, that the dead weight of the two empty side cores comes off earlier than it would in the absence of cross-feed, and every rocket is used in the first few minutes of liftoff.
No, I'm saying scale is not a good and huge reason at all.
And I'm merely pointing out the foolishness of that opinion.
How is that trivial? You're assuming every single part of the country is within a few minutes of travel to a connection (by what? Foot? Car? Now you're assuming everybody has cars or access to one), and that connection doesn't censor, using an ISP that doesn't censor.
When I first posted in this thread, I thought the story was about censoring by software in a employer's servers. At that point, one merely goes to machines that aren't part of that network. My assumption holds almost everywhere in the developed world where an uncensored internet exists.
Sure, one can with considerable effort contrive a situation where one can't access a non-censored part of the network (maybe you're on an oil platform deep in the ocean or something and completely beholden to your employer), but it's not going to hold for the vast majority of the developed world.
That's the same in your "trivial" case. Again, what if that Internet cafe censors too? What if your ISP at home censors? Censoring can happen anywhere along the line which you do not control.
Then there's no opportunity for your employer or whatever to be a hypocrite and we're well into the second case where the country is alleged to censor your internet access.
The complexity of the problem doesn't change with scale.
No, we see the contrary, that scale matters. But some of us choose not to recognize the difficulties and challenges that problems of large scale present over problems of small scale. It's like claiming that because you've figured out how to feed one person, then feeding one trillion people is not significantly harder, because it is just a matter of scale.
It will help the people who want to build rockets. IMHO the latter industry is the more important one
No, it isn't. The launch industry is completely irrelevant without something to launch. That's what happened with the Space Shuttle. NASA made a huge vehicle with no need for the vehicle and then spent many decades rationalizing the decision rather than do actual space development. If Arianespace and the ESA go that route, then what are they going to launch on this platform? Makework that has no value to anyone other than the people skimming off of it.
Development of a capsule system that could keep people alive for 18 months to two years for the round trip to and from Mars.. Part of that development time would be taken up by a full-dress unmanned rehearsal flight under remote control before risking human beings -- that would take about two years total after maybe ten years development work.
Here's part of the problem. Bogus and excessive testing procedures. What's the point of not having people on such a mission? It's not a full-dress rehearsal flight without people anyway. Might as well put some people on board and hit the Martian moons while you're out there. And maybe land on Mars for a couple of years while you're at it.
Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.Development and deployment in LEO, Mars orbit and the Martian surface of the fleet of fuel tankers, tugs, supply landers, manned landers, ascent stages and transfer vehicles plus emergency rescue spares in case something goes bonk along the way. That's what makes up the 2000 tonnes to LEO I mentioned; note that at least half of that mass will be fuel, probably hydrazine and N2O4 as cryogenic gases don't store well in orbit.
Or get your propellant from Mars and cut that payload requirement in half or more right there.
A worked example is the ISS -- 400 tonnes of modules, none of which massed more than 20 tonnes on the pad before launch. From proposal to completion took well over a decade, funding was trimmed and restored, corners were cut and major revisions made as it was built. For 150 billion dollars we ended up with a large spacecraft that can only go round in circles and if a really serious problem ever occurred then the crew could be rescued in theory since a compatible biosphere is only 400 km away. A manned Mars mission is going to cost a lot more than that, and the launch costs are a minor part of the time and money budgets.
And if there was more funding lying on the table, it would have cost even more than it did. It is foolish to take the ISS as a serious spacecraft rather than a convenient white elephant for transferring money from taxpayers to political merchants.
This is about the big technology companies that run the major sites used throughout the world: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, Amazon, and how they used filters and censorship on the customer facing side of their network (not their internal networks), despite their vocal public appeals for the net to be free and open. I don't see how you can possibly miss the hypocrisy.
Very easily it seems. There is no hypocrisy to see and I think this whole argument is quite phony.
I support adult entertainment in the real world. But I don't run a brothel or adult bookstore nor even shop at such places. Nor would I permit such facilities in my sandbox, should they become as unrestricted as I would like. Does that mean I'm a hypocrite?
Look Facebook and all those other businesses have sandboxes. It's reasonable that they exercise such controls on that as they see fit. And it's certainly compatible with their beliefs about the net being free and open, since the internet is not their sandboxes. There's no inconsistency here for hypocrisy to take root in.
I don't see any difference. Employees can go home. Populations can migrate. It's only a matter of scale.
Ok, so you don't see "scale" as a difference even though that happens to be a good and huge reason why they're different. In the first case, it's a trivial matter to look at the content in a different place. A few minutes of travel, say, to an internet cafe or whatever. In the latter case, you're equivocating that modest burden with moving out of the country (and it would have to be to a country that would allow you to see that content).
Modern cryogenic engine designs like the Vulcain-1, the RS-68A and even the venerable RS-25 Block 2 have throttle-down capability so they don't need to use the venerable clustered-motor system SpaceX has adopted from Soyuz.
In other words, they need a throttle down system because they haven't adopted the venerable clustered-motor system. As it turns out, the Merlin engine can be throttled between 60% and 100% (which is handy for the second stage), but they don't need that for the first stage.
Building and testing the fleet of fuel tanker/motor modules, landers, ascent stages, Mars orbiter transfer vehicles, supply landers etc. is where the rest of the trillion bucks goes.
Well, if that's too much, then spend less. I don't take the trillion dollar estimate seriously. If we launch 1000 tons, including the four person crew, to LEO, at $3000 per ton on the Falcon 9 Heavy (in 20 ton lots) or $2000 per ton on the Falcon Heavy (in 50 ton lots), then that's only $2-3 billion in launch costs.
It's also the giant suck of time, the years that would stretch into decades since all of it would have to be built and working before the first crew gets into their Soyuz or Dragon capsule on their ride to orbit.
What would take so long? Obviously, there's nothing going on now (with NASA doing psychological experiments, of all things) so it would take some time to ramp up. But we made rapid progress before, going from the first orbital launches to a person on the Moon in twelve years. The claim that it would take decades isn't based on actual history of manned space flight.
Transferring fuel and oxidiser sideways between tankage sections under 3-4 gees of thrust and vibration is, as far as I am aware, going to be a first in rocketry. It takes plumbing, pumps, valve gear etc. meaning major changes to the core and strap-on sections which add to the vehicle weight as well as the cost of manufacture since the cores are no longer physically identical. In contrast the Delta 4 Heavy strap-ons are pretty nearly identical to the core; the central engine just runs throttled down so that when the strap-ons separate it has enough propellant left to continue to orbit without the extra parasitic weight of transfer pumps etc. I don't know why this option isn't available to SpaceX; do the Merlin engines have a throttle-down and/or in-flight start capability?
Just because something is new doesn't mean it is a "kludge". Also, they have natural ways to throttle down arrays of engines. Just shut down some of the rocket engines as you no longer need the thrust.
The major cost of a manned Moon or Mars mission isn't the launch vehicles, it's the crew vehicle design and testing and construction.
No, there is a genuine bottleneck in the cost of getting it into space. Every kg you use adds cost to the mission. As a result, mission cost generally is five to ten times the launch costs. So shaving $50 billion in launch costs yields a additional $200-450 billion reduction in total costs.
What makes it hypocrisy? There's this thing called "context". Blocking sexual images is a cheap way to reduce porn surfing on company computers.
And there's a huge difference between "censorship" on a business's private machines which blocks what its employees are allowed to view only on those machines and "censorship" which blocks or removes content for anyone in an entire population. In the former case, the employee can always go home to view the content in question.
So I don't think there is hypocrisy here. And I sure don't believe there is a conversation worth having here.
That time was before Slashdot existed. And believe it or not, it was longer than you'd think. At least five years. I kid you not. Then the universe was created.