The bizarre thing is that the "palate cleansers" mentioned in the link have extremely strong and lingering flavors. In my view, a genuine palate cleanser would be water and saltine crackers. They have virtually no flavor, meaning you really do restart your taste buds.
Six months is not that much more than a few weeks.
And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that.
Except that, well, it is like that. You can have fresh air and artificial gravity on the spaceship as well. You can get outside. And they're going to stop off at Mars and Earth.
People have done this sort of thing for centuries perhaps even millennia, but it's all supposed to be different now because it's in space.
No SANE person is going to volunteer
Uh huh. That's a remarkably ignorant statement. There's never been a shortage of SANE volunteers for manned spaceflight.
So you are telling me they can figure this out a month before launch?
Actually, yes they could with off the shelf stuff such as vacuum bagging and freeze drying. There might be a modest degree of inefficiency in terms of mass using tools not intended for space flight. Frankly, the critical issues are experience with manned deep space flight and extended duration missions, developing a vehicle or vehicles that can travel to and land on Mars, and development and deployment of Mars-side infrastructure. NASA has a vast amount of experience with storing food in space.
There isn't a compelling need to work on space food until NASA has a need for it.
I'm guessing that NASA has done the math and figured out that it's easier, and possibly cheaper, to send all the food up to LEO and then transfer it to Mars in one go along with the astronauts than it is to engage in multiple interplanetary transfers, each with an orbital rendezvous and risk of failure.
NASA is notorious for flubbing this particular math. If it comes to a choice between using a small vehicle frequently or a large massive, "cost plus"-expensive vehicle, then NASA tends to go for whatever benefits its contractors most of the time (that is, use the big vehicle).
The advantages of smaller vehicles operating more frequently, is a) they're cheaper per flight due to economies of scale, and b) you can build up a lot of knowledge and experience for difficult tasks using low risk payloads.
For an example of the latter point, if you come up with a new engineering trick for lowering delta v a little, you can try it with a cheap bulk payload first rather than people or mission critical equipment. Also, you can send radiation insensitive payloads via Venus flyby (and perhaps via solar powered propulsion systems). That appears to broaden the available windows for flying stuff to Mars efficiently.
But being a no-show is not enough to get you on a no-fly or scrutiny list - I've canceled flights a number of times even a short time before departure and have never had any trouble getting back through security the next time I flew.
If your cancellations correlated with the announcements of random screenings at the gate, it might be a different story.
So, basicly, purpose needs a special kind of control structure (since control structures are the only known entities that can act purposefully).
That's an interesting take. One might never be able to discern purpose, but existence of possible control structures or means for control may be a different matter.
Or for that matter, even if the robot somehow wasn't originated by man, it would still be flawed by virtue of existence in a universe with entropy. A novel variation of Original Sin, I'd say.
Russia has a couple as well with its Soyuz. Parachute didn't deploy on one and decompression of the capsule for the other. Wikipedia says these were designated Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.
This is not intended to be an apples to apples comparison (going to Mars is a wee bit harder than achieving orbit and doing a few things for a few days). I'm just pointing out the far greater number of failures on the unmanned side.
The amplification of the hydrologic cycle is resulting in more intense precipitation events with longer periods of little precipitation in between, and dryer conditions in general for much of the USA.
And if we ever get evidence in support of your assertion (and which supports your tone of alarmism), you'll be right. In the meantime, dealing with agricultural problems that are much more serious than AGW (such as deforestation, desertification, soil fertility), is the better idea. Hell, it may still be better to deal with those problems instead, even if AGW is confirmed.
Plus, spending resources on science and adventure is a hell of a lot more palatable than blowing it on corporate bailouts and foreign conflicts, yes?
In other words, because someone forces me to squander money on rat holes, then I should also squander money on their preferred rat hole? I don't think it should work that way.
Except that we do have that tech and have been going to space for half a century. I really don't understand how one can simply deny what has been going on for a long time now.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. TShit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances.
That's pretty lame bullshit right there. Just simply correct the course every so often as you get better data on your trajectory. And one doesn't need to thread a needle on the other side, just get close enough that one can maneuver to the desired trajectory. There are many hard problems, but this isn't one of them.
It's not that serious an obstacle, if you're willing and able to take the time. For example, 0.1% of the speed of light means that 4.2 light year trip takes 4200 years. Not good for short-lived us and our societies (which often don't live any longer than we do), but feasible for those who live much longer than we do.
And sometimes the destination is moving in a different direction. So you can add some distance while you build up a society or whatever.
Then you are indeed not much of an expert. Mars missions are notorious for failure. Manned missions despite their many flaws are not. For example, there have been four in-flight accidents that killed astronauts out of perhaps 200-300 manned missions over the past 50 years. In comparison, 26 of the 50 unmanned missions to Mars have failed.
This is not intended to be an apples to apples comparison (going to Mars is a wee bit harder than achieving orbit and doing a few things for a few days). I'm just pointing out the far greater number of failures on the unmanned side.
You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.
It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
He'd be recorded as a no-show. If someone got ambitious and went through airport video (or a computer program did so), they just might notice that the bad guy left after hearing about the random check.
Having said that, I don't see the point, unless they're trying to catch people who repeatedly break the law, like smugglers. Or to put up a show.
Violent radiation that would fry you in no time, and magnetic fields around Jupiter, the magnitude and extent of which were unknown during the engineering. Tidal forces. Engines that would be used only a few times with periods of sometimes years inbetween. The asteroid belt and ice rings. Increasing cold and lack of light as you move away from the sun.
None of which exists in generic interstellar space. Jupiter's radiation belts (or whatever they're called) only matter for the short period of time you're doing a near pass of Jupiter (plus, we now know a lot of details about those belts). Jupiter isn't following you into interstellar space. Similarly, the temperature swings only occur when you're close enough to the Sun. The Sun isn't following you out into interstellar space either. Once you're far enough away, you're pretty much in a constant very cold temperature. Near steady state.
The Asteroid Belt and ice rings? Well, there might be a lot of such things in interstellar space, but not enough to hinder our view of the universe. Which means it's not much of a problem for a spacecraft unless it gets unlucky. One can always launch multiple craft to insure greater likelihood that one craft survives.
Tidal forces? What is that spacecraft getting near that has tidal forces that would affect a small, compact object like a space probe? Neutron stars?
Anyway, the parts of this that are actual problems are all part of the "hard", initial part which I already mentioned.
Mechanical parts like tapes that wear over time with no way of fixing them once they do.
Wear and tear is part of the "easy", ongoing problem I mentioned. For example, one could make a tape drive which was more durable and lasted longer before it gave out. Or one could replace it with a device with less moving parts, say magnetic core memory, increasing its durability considerably.
I believe in comparative advantage here. It's simply not a good use of my time or resources to answer such questions when there are people brighter and a whole lot better funded to research such issues.
Plus, it's just not that simple a question to answer. For example, we can observe the processes that lead to humans, and those appear to be random to a high degree. There's no real harm in treating such processes as random.
But to go from that to assume without evidence that the universe is similarly created by random processes is an unscientific leap of faith.
as it's hard to believe that atmospheric resistance could suck the momentum out of a four foot wide, four inch thick chunk of solid steel in the second and a half that it would have taken to exit the troposphere.
Well, keep in mind that each square inch of surface area has to push about 6.5 kg of air. If you have a square of the alleged thickness of the cover moving face on, it is pushing along about 15,000 kg of air, but the slab itself weights about 750 kg. So the cover, if face on, collides with about 20 times its mass in air. Even if it is moving edge on, it'll still run into around 1250 kg of air. That's still 50% more mass than the cover has.
In the former case, that would mean that the cover would decelerate from its initial 45 km/s to suborbital speed (and probably vaporize in the process). Even in the edge-on case, it's going to slow down by somewhere around 40% (which drops the speed of the door to under 30 km/s, which in turn is dropped another 7km/s by exiting the Earth's gravitational field. Whether that is enough to escape the Solar System, depends on what direction the cover was heading.
Glancing around, the test seems to have been done at 22:30 utc, which puts it in the afternoon facing a little behind (and plenty to the side) of the direction of travel for Earth in orbit around the Sun. That probably means that even if the manhole cover in question survived passage through Earth's atmosphere, it probably wasn't fast enough in its direction of travel to escape the Solar System.
It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.
We already are at such a level. Voyager 1 travels only at 0.005% of the speed of light. 0.1% or so of the speed of light is achievable with reasonable ISP electric propulsion (let's say powered by an RTG) and a modest mass fraction. That's about 20 times the speed of Voyager 1. It would take about 2 years at that speed to catch up to where Voyager 1 is now.
Now if Voyager were traveling at 1% of the speed of light, then it might well remain the most distance human device ever made. But frankly, it's not traveling anywhere near fast enough, unless humanity should choose in the not very distant future some permanent way to prevent such innovations.
Slashdot Mirror
The bizarre thing is that the "palate cleansers" mentioned in the link have extremely strong and lingering flavors. In my view, a genuine palate cleanser would be water and saltine crackers. They have virtually no flavor, meaning you really do restart your taste buds.
And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that.
Except that, well, it is like that. You can have fresh air and artificial gravity on the spaceship as well. You can get outside. And they're going to stop off at Mars and Earth.
People have done this sort of thing for centuries perhaps even millennia, but it's all supposed to be different now because it's in space.
No SANE person is going to volunteer
Uh huh. That's a remarkably ignorant statement. There's never been a shortage of SANE volunteers for manned spaceflight.
NASA gets plenty of money. They just use it extremely poorly.
So you are telling me they can figure this out a month before launch?
Actually, yes they could with off the shelf stuff such as vacuum bagging and freeze drying. There might be a modest degree of inefficiency in terms of mass using tools not intended for space flight. Frankly, the critical issues are experience with manned deep space flight and extended duration missions, developing a vehicle or vehicles that can travel to and land on Mars, and development and deployment of Mars-side infrastructure. NASA has a vast amount of experience with storing food in space.
There isn't a compelling need to work on space food until NASA has a need for it.
I'm guessing that NASA has done the math and figured out that it's easier, and possibly cheaper, to send all the food up to LEO and then transfer it to Mars in one go along with the astronauts than it is to engage in multiple interplanetary transfers, each with an orbital rendezvous and risk of failure.
NASA is notorious for flubbing this particular math. If it comes to a choice between using a small vehicle frequently or a large massive, "cost plus"-expensive vehicle, then NASA tends to go for whatever benefits its contractors most of the time (that is, use the big vehicle).
The advantages of smaller vehicles operating more frequently, is a) they're cheaper per flight due to economies of scale, and b) you can build up a lot of knowledge and experience for difficult tasks using low risk payloads.
For an example of the latter point, if you come up with a new engineering trick for lowering delta v a little, you can try it with a cheap bulk payload first rather than people or mission critical equipment. Also, you can send radiation insensitive payloads via Venus flyby (and perhaps via solar powered propulsion systems). That appears to broaden the available windows for flying stuff to Mars efficiently.
But being a no-show is not enough to get you on a no-fly or scrutiny list - I've canceled flights a number of times even a short time before departure and have never had any trouble getting back through security the next time I flew.
If your cancellations correlated with the announcements of random screenings at the gate, it might be a different story.
While I agree in principle, it's likely that someone would, once there's a large number of human flights that have the opportunity to do so.
So, basicly, purpose needs a special kind of control structure (since control structures are the only known entities that can act purposefully).
That's an interesting take. One might never be able to discern purpose, but existence of possible control structures or means for control may be a different matter.
Or for that matter, even if the robot somehow wasn't originated by man, it would still be flawed by virtue of existence in a universe with entropy. A novel variation of Original Sin, I'd say.
Russia has a couple as well with its Soyuz. Parachute didn't deploy on one and decompression of the capsule for the other. Wikipedia says these were designated Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.
This is not intended to be an apples to apples comparison (going to Mars is a wee bit harder than achieving orbit and doing a few things for a few days). I'm just pointing out the far greater number of failures on the unmanned side.
The amplification of the hydrologic cycle is resulting in more intense precipitation events with longer periods of little precipitation in between, and dryer conditions in general for much of the USA.
And if we ever get evidence in support of your assertion (and which supports your tone of alarmism), you'll be right. In the meantime, dealing with agricultural problems that are much more serious than AGW (such as deforestation, desertification, soil fertility), is the better idea. Hell, it may still be better to deal with those problems instead, even if AGW is confirmed.
You don't get to choose the definition of "wisely" by yourself.
Frequently, you don't get to choose at all.
Plus, spending resources on science and adventure is a hell of a lot more palatable than blowing it on corporate bailouts and foreign conflicts, yes?
In other words, because someone forces me to squander money on rat holes, then I should also squander money on their preferred rat hole? I don't think it should work that way.
Maybe one day, but we do not have the tech
Except that we do have that tech and have been going to space for half a century. I really don't understand how one can simply deny what has been going on for a long time now.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. TShit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances.
That's pretty lame bullshit right there. Just simply correct the course every so often as you get better data on your trajectory. And one doesn't need to thread a needle on the other side, just get close enough that one can maneuver to the desired trajectory. There are many hard problems, but this isn't one of them.
It's not that serious an obstacle, if you're willing and able to take the time. For example, 0.1% of the speed of light means that 4.2 light year trip takes 4200 years. Not good for short-lived us and our societies (which often don't live any longer than we do), but feasible for those who live much longer than we do.
And sometimes the destination is moving in a different direction. So you can add some distance while you build up a society or whatever.
Then you are indeed not much of an expert. Mars missions are notorious for failure. Manned missions despite their many flaws are not. For example, there have been four in-flight accidents that killed astronauts out of perhaps 200-300 manned missions over the past 50 years. In comparison, 26 of the 50 unmanned missions to Mars have failed.
This is not intended to be an apples to apples comparison (going to Mars is a wee bit harder than achieving orbit and doing a few things for a few days). I'm just pointing out the far greater number of failures on the unmanned side.
You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.
It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.
oh well, at least we've got another three, and we're still under budget."
Um, not the NASA in our reality. They're almost never under budget and they never build four copies.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
He'd be recorded as a no-show. If someone got ambitious and went through airport video (or a computer program did so), they just might notice that the bad guy left after hearing about the random check.
Having said that, I don't see the point, unless they're trying to catch people who repeatedly break the law, like smugglers. Or to put up a show.
Violent radiation that would fry you in no time, and magnetic fields around Jupiter, the magnitude and extent of which were unknown during the engineering. Tidal forces. Engines that would be used only a few times with periods of sometimes years inbetween. The asteroid belt and ice rings. Increasing cold and lack of light as you move away from the sun.
None of which exists in generic interstellar space. Jupiter's radiation belts (or whatever they're called) only matter for the short period of time you're doing a near pass of Jupiter (plus, we now know a lot of details about those belts). Jupiter isn't following you into interstellar space. Similarly, the temperature swings only occur when you're close enough to the Sun. The Sun isn't following you out into interstellar space either. Once you're far enough away, you're pretty much in a constant very cold temperature. Near steady state.
The Asteroid Belt and ice rings? Well, there might be a lot of such things in interstellar space, but not enough to hinder our view of the universe. Which means it's not much of a problem for a spacecraft unless it gets unlucky. One can always launch multiple craft to insure greater likelihood that one craft survives.
Tidal forces? What is that spacecraft getting near that has tidal forces that would affect a small, compact object like a space probe? Neutron stars?
Anyway, the parts of this that are actual problems are all part of the "hard", initial part which I already mentioned.
Mechanical parts like tapes that wear over time with no way of fixing them once they do.
Wear and tear is part of the "easy", ongoing problem I mentioned. For example, one could make a tape drive which was more durable and lasted longer before it gave out. Or one could replace it with a device with less moving parts, say magnetic core memory, increasing its durability considerably.
And you'll never look for yourself.
I believe in comparative advantage here. It's simply not a good use of my time or resources to answer such questions when there are people brighter and a whole lot better funded to research such issues.
Plus, it's just not that simple a question to answer. For example, we can observe the processes that lead to humans, and those appear to be random to a high degree. There's no real harm in treating such processes as random.
But to go from that to assume without evidence that the universe is similarly created by random processes is an unscientific leap of faith.
as it's hard to believe that atmospheric resistance could suck the momentum out of a four foot wide, four inch thick chunk of solid steel in the second and a half that it would have taken to exit the troposphere.
Well, keep in mind that each square inch of surface area has to push about 6.5 kg of air. If you have a square of the alleged thickness of the cover moving face on, it is pushing along about 15,000 kg of air, but the slab itself weights about 750 kg. So the cover, if face on, collides with about 20 times its mass in air. Even if it is moving edge on, it'll still run into around 1250 kg of air. That's still 50% more mass than the cover has.
In the former case, that would mean that the cover would decelerate from its initial 45 km/s to suborbital speed (and probably vaporize in the process). Even in the edge-on case, it's going to slow down by somewhere around 40% (which drops the speed of the door to under 30 km/s, which in turn is dropped another 7km/s by exiting the Earth's gravitational field. Whether that is enough to escape the Solar System, depends on what direction the cover was heading.
Glancing around, the test seems to have been done at 22:30 utc, which puts it in the afternoon facing a little behind (and plenty to the side) of the direction of travel for Earth in orbit around the Sun. That probably means that even if the manhole cover in question survived passage through Earth's atmosphere, it probably wasn't fast enough in its direction of travel to escape the Solar System.
It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.
We already are at such a level. Voyager 1 travels only at 0.005% of the speed of light. 0.1% or so of the speed of light is achievable with reasonable ISP electric propulsion (let's say powered by an RTG) and a modest mass fraction. That's about 20 times the speed of Voyager 1. It would take about 2 years at that speed to catch up to where Voyager 1 is now.
Now if Voyager were traveling at 1% of the speed of light, then it might well remain the most distance human device ever made. But frankly, it's not traveling anywhere near fast enough, unless humanity should choose in the not very distant future some permanent way to prevent such innovations.