So you'd have to find objects that provide: oil/kerosene (a fuel), liquid oxygen and/or hydrogen (a catalyst) and your precious metal all in close proximity near earth, find multi-billion dollar investors to mine stuff we can easily find on earth.
You can find metal oxides anywhere. With some energy, that becomes LOX and a reactive metal which you can use in either a pressured gas engine or a hybrid (LOX/metal) motor. You wouldn't want to fire it in Earth orbit due to the spew of solids in the propellant exhaust.
Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
I did say the dude was crazy. Maybe he read too much Heinlein.
Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
Maybe, we should refrain from doing stupid stuff, eh?
We can't really discuss the subject with you when you keep asking irrelevant, leading questions. Suppose the previous poster was a hard-core "manifest destiny" type who actually does agree that colonialism is an unalloyed great thing. Or not. It's completely irrelevant to their point about the natives being unable to maintain possession of land they used to occupy.
I'm not saying it won't happen eventually, but it won't be profitable until we're measuring cost per pound to orbit in pennies rather than thousands of dollars.
In other words, it won't be profitable until the mass for that machinery and propellant comes from somewhere much cheaper than Earth, say the asteroid you're mining.
"Economic growth" can't be sustained forever. A new social model will have to replace that idea. So sorry.
So what when there are at the least, centuries of growth left? After all, not everyone currently enjoys a developed world lifestyle. That's one avenue for growth. Not every society is fully industrialized. That's another avenue. We don't live indefinitely; we don't have massive space civilizations; we don't have post-scarcity conditions; we don't fully understand the universe; we don't have a host of things which we can put into our grasp eventually.
There's plenty of room for growth and it makes no sense to talk about imaginary "new social models" which are irrelevant to a world in growth for the practical future.
A private entitey gaining ownership over what is currently public could be looked on as theft from the public.
There are surprisingly few things owned in space by the public or anyone else. If some crazy dude with a bunch of robots can keep the rest of humanity from doing anything with the Moon other than look at it, then he effectively owns it even if no one else agrees.
It's also a matter of intent. Intentionally, being a dick is macroaggression. Accidentally being a dick is a microaggression. But this leads to an important secondary matter, that of interpretation. After all, if I'm trying to be a dick, then by my own viewpoint I am macroaggressing. If I'm not trying, then how does anyone know I'm microaggressing? The answer is that someone observes my behavior and decides it is a microaggression.
That leads to the second observation, that microagression is a matter of perception and subjectivity, often by people with chips on their thin-skinned shoulders. It can be an obvious insult, like assuming someone is a drooling idiot because they're a certain ethnicity. But it can also be something pretentious like someone deciding that the word, "niggardly" is an insult against African Americans even though the word doesn't have racist origins (unlike say, "indian summer"). The attitude is particularly pernicious when the person who perceives the insult is acting as an unauthorized proxy acting on the behalf of an apathetic or completely absent group.
All I can say is that I didn't care before microaggression became a thing and the situation hasn't changed now that I've been made aware of this dire threat to humanity. I think it has to do with the fundamental observation that people can choose not to be insulted by non-insults. Thus, anyone who has a serious problem with microaggressions needs to look in a mirror to see who is responsible for fixing that.
No, it just means that as education prevails, people are less prone to fall for insane cults.
The anti-vaccination craze? Fad ketosis dieting? Near-worship of media figures like the Kardashians? Climate change skepticism? I'd go on but that's already more than enough to refute your statement.
You would only be correct, if cults had a smaller membership in the past. I'll note that we've had over the past thirty years a sharp drop in both the membership and severity of communism.That directly improves the lives of about a billion and a half people living today.
But, I don't recall the enormous wailing and hand wringing about the USA losing its abilities in space back during the gap in the 70's like there is today.
That's because it was forty years ago. Forty years have passed and we going through the same route of failure again. There are two obvious problems that get ignored here. First, where's the money for payloads on the SLS coming from? NASA has had a nearly constant budget for the last 40 years and SLS consumes a sixth of that budget for little gain.
Second, SLS has terrible economics, particularly low launch frequency and a dependency on the Shuttle supply chain. There's no excuse any more for NASA rolling its own launch vehicle when it can and should be using commercial vehicles. That budget could be buying serious deep space missions now rather than a launch vehicle that will never be well used.
Only if you ignore the much more substantial work that had to be done after Apollo 1 (which required not only a change in the life support system from the oxygen rich atmosphere but also a switching over of much of the wiring to less hazardous materials in case of fire). For example, the solution to Challenger was to not expose o-rings to freezing temperatures. They could have launched again in a few months when freezing temperatures were no longer an issue and the pad was ready for launch again. Similarly, the solution for Columbia was to cross fingers and hope that rare ice impact event doesn't happen on your next few launches (after all, they had over 100 launches with only one lethal ice impact event) while you fix the known problem. Delays of over two years are inexcusable.
What you seem to be missing is that War is a macro-aggressive, acute failure of society. Microaggression is a stealthy, sinister, chronic failure of society that is far more widespread and far more damaging to the long-term health of humanity than is an acute War that has a beginning and an end.
What you seem to be missing is that macroaggression is a real thing which kills people. Microaggression is in your head.
If you consider that our interpersonal relationships have been on a serious decline since the industrial revolution, the divorce rate is the highest it has ever been, children resort to violence first and diplomacy only when trying to talk themselves out of punishment, I would say we are not, in fact, in a very peaceful time at all.
There's always some bullshit reason out there why things are getting worse. But since we're talking about the children, I've heard that they've been getting worse since ancient times. Pretty soon, they'll be backtalking and uppity. That's certainly just as bad as killing 70 million people in a world war.
Philanthropy, as in the case of Carnegie, is all about ego, power and influence and nothing to do with helping anyone. It is corrupt
No, that is not the meaning of corrupt. First, ego, power, and influence are perfectly valid reasons for charity. You should be happy that there is a society where greed and ambition can lead to charitable acts.
Funny how the places on that list with incompetent governance and mismanagement of agriculture have climate change problems and the places that don't, don't.
1) These environmental guidelines are useful for sustaining life on earth.
They are apparently more useful for sustaining life outside of the US than they are inside the US.
2) Moving to Mexico won't help.
It'll help Tesla and Mexico a great deal.
3) If you are worried about not being able to compete with Mexico, argue to your (potential) customers.
Are your potential customers going to adjust US regulations? Or are they going to buy a more expensive product just to save a negligible amount of pollution emissions?
There's a simple one word answer to why car salespeople don't like electric vehicles, options. The car manufacturer sells the car and publicizes a recommended price. The dealerships are thereby very limited as to how much they can charge for the base car itself. Thus, most of their profit comes from everything else that they can sell on top of that base car, the "options". This can be fancy protective coatings, electrically powered systems (brakes, steering, windows), A/C, nitrogen-filled tires, bling hubcaps, fancy service plans, etc.
An SUV with a massive power source can be packed fill of high margin bling and options while a skimpy electric vehicle can't. Bottom line is that car dealerships and their salespeople get much more profit per SUV than they do per electric car. That completely explains the dislike for electric vehicles.
Oh please show how the present cost of an interplanetary unmanned mission is mostly the access to orbit.
You're trying to say that they would continue to spend vast sums on development of single, small, incredibly optimized vehicles when they could cheaply throw together something much larger, more capable, and a higher number of units for orders of magnitude less money per vehicle?
The space probes and satellites operating in space now had to pay an ante of $5,000-20,000 per kg just to get in space, not just for the spacecraft, but also for any propellant needed in addition. Of course, the designers spent a lot of money to optimize the vehicle so that they got the most out of the vehicle. With free access to space, the need to do that costly optimization goes away.
There's also some engineering rules of thumb right now. Currently, a spacecraft tends to have launch costs around 5-20% of the total value of the vehicle. A higher share of launch costs tends to be on high risk vehicles (like low value, sacrificial packages sent up on the first few flights of a new vehicle) and a lower share for government agencies throwing really expensive probes or spy satellites on a rocket.
he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars
Rich billionaire is willing to spend X to get to Mars for a tourist trip. Cost is Y where Y
You can do the same calculation for more customers. The problem here is that Y>X. Bring the cost down and the business cases appear.
Posit: Access to orbit is free. Everything else stays the same price. Now what? Who cares? Why? What for? THOSE are the critical questions.
You'd have near future orbital joyrides and near free suborbital transportation. Interplanetary unmanned missions drop by orders of magnitude in cost, putting them well in the range of well funded researchers, entrepreneurs, and hobbyist groups. Manned Mars missions would be well within the capabilities of national groups looking to make a mark. It might be within the capabilities of the extremely wealthy and large corporations too.
For the next half century, I think we'd start seeing colonization of the Moon, Mars, and asteroids.
Slashdot Mirror
So you'd have to find objects that provide: oil/kerosene (a fuel), liquid oxygen and/or hydrogen (a catalyst) and your precious metal all in close proximity near earth, find multi-billion dollar investors to mine stuff we can easily find on earth.
You can find metal oxides anywhere. With some energy, that becomes LOX and a reactive metal which you can use in either a pressured gas engine or a hybrid (LOX/metal) motor. You wouldn't want to fire it in Earth orbit due to the spew of solids in the propellant exhaust.
Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
I did say the dude was crazy. Maybe he read too much Heinlein.
Alternatively you could just make a bunch of those metal things impact earth and mine it from there (businesses of your proposed magnitude wouldn't care much about environmental or people issues such as wiping a small country off the map).
Maybe, we should refrain from doing stupid stuff, eh?
We can't really discuss the subject with you when you keep asking irrelevant, leading questions. Suppose the previous poster was a hard-core "manifest destiny" type who actually does agree that colonialism is an unalloyed great thing. Or not. It's completely irrelevant to their point about the natives being unable to maintain possession of land they used to occupy.
I'm not saying it won't happen eventually, but it won't be profitable until we're measuring cost per pound to orbit in pennies rather than thousands of dollars.
In other words, it won't be profitable until the mass for that machinery and propellant comes from somewhere much cheaper than Earth, say the asteroid you're mining.
"Economic growth" can't be sustained forever. A new social model will have to replace that idea. So sorry.
So what when there are at the least, centuries of growth left? After all, not everyone currently enjoys a developed world lifestyle. That's one avenue for growth. Not every society is fully industrialized. That's another avenue. We don't live indefinitely; we don't have massive space civilizations; we don't have post-scarcity conditions; we don't fully understand the universe; we don't have a host of things which we can put into our grasp eventually.
There's plenty of room for growth and it makes no sense to talk about imaginary "new social models" which are irrelevant to a world in growth for the practical future.
A private entitey gaining ownership over what is currently public could be looked on as theft from the public.
There are surprisingly few things owned in space by the public or anyone else. If some crazy dude with a bunch of robots can keep the rest of humanity from doing anything with the Moon other than look at it, then he effectively owns it even if no one else agrees.
It's also a matter of intent. Intentionally, being a dick is macroaggression. Accidentally being a dick is a microaggression. But this leads to an important secondary matter, that of interpretation. After all, if I'm trying to be a dick, then by my own viewpoint I am macroaggressing. If I'm not trying, then how does anyone know I'm microaggressing? The answer is that someone observes my behavior and decides it is a microaggression.
That leads to the second observation, that microagression is a matter of perception and subjectivity, often by people with chips on their thin-skinned shoulders. It can be an obvious insult, like assuming someone is a drooling idiot because they're a certain ethnicity. But it can also be something pretentious like someone deciding that the word, "niggardly" is an insult against African Americans even though the word doesn't have racist origins (unlike say, "indian summer"). The attitude is particularly pernicious when the person who perceives the insult is acting as an unauthorized proxy acting on the behalf of an apathetic or completely absent group.
All I can say is that I didn't care before microaggression became a thing and the situation hasn't changed now that I've been made aware of this dire threat to humanity. I think it has to do with the fundamental observation that people can choose not to be insulted by non-insults. Thus, anyone who has a serious problem with microaggressions needs to look in a mirror to see who is responsible for fixing that.
unbridled capitalism
Here's the problem. There's no such thing in the world today as unbridled capitalism except in black markets and a few MMOs like Eve Online.
No, it just means that as education prevails, people are less prone to fall for insane cults.
The anti-vaccination craze? Fad ketosis dieting? Near-worship of media figures like the Kardashians? Climate change skepticism? I'd go on but that's already more than enough to refute your statement.
You would only be correct, if cults had a smaller membership in the past. I'll note that we've had over the past thirty years a sharp drop in both the membership and severity of communism.That directly improves the lives of about a billion and a half people living today.
But, I don't recall the enormous wailing and hand wringing about the USA losing its abilities in space back during the gap in the 70's like there is today.
That's because it was forty years ago. Forty years have passed and we going through the same route of failure again. There are two obvious problems that get ignored here. First, where's the money for payloads on the SLS coming from? NASA has had a nearly constant budget for the last 40 years and SLS consumes a sixth of that budget for little gain.
Second, SLS has terrible economics, particularly low launch frequency and a dependency on the Shuttle supply chain. There's no excuse any more for NASA rolling its own launch vehicle when it can and should be using commercial vehicles. That budget could be buying serious deep space missions now rather than a launch vehicle that will never be well used.
Only if you ignore the much more substantial work that had to be done after Apollo 1 (which required not only a change in the life support system from the oxygen rich atmosphere but also a switching over of much of the wiring to less hazardous materials in case of fire). For example, the solution to Challenger was to not expose o-rings to freezing temperatures. They could have launched again in a few months when freezing temperatures were no longer an issue and the pad was ready for launch again. Similarly, the solution for Columbia was to cross fingers and hope that rare ice impact event doesn't happen on your next few launches (after all, they had over 100 launches with only one lethal ice impact event) while you fix the known problem. Delays of over two years are inexcusable.
The Government is blamed
I don't see the problem myself. People blame others all the time. Most of the time it is completely inconsequential.
What you seem to be missing is that War is a macro-aggressive, acute failure of society. Microaggression is a stealthy, sinister, chronic failure of society that is far more widespread and far more damaging to the long-term health of humanity than is an acute War that has a beginning and an end.
What you seem to be missing is that macroaggression is a real thing which kills people. Microaggression is in your head.
If you consider that our interpersonal relationships have been on a serious decline since the industrial revolution, the divorce rate is the highest it has ever been, children resort to violence first and diplomacy only when trying to talk themselves out of punishment, I would say we are not, in fact, in a very peaceful time at all.
There's always some bullshit reason out there why things are getting worse. But since we're talking about the children, I've heard that they've been getting worse since ancient times. Pretty soon, they'll be backtalking and uppity. That's certainly just as bad as killing 70 million people in a world war.
Means justify the ends.
Philanthropy, as in the case of Carnegie, is all about ego, power and influence and nothing to do with helping anyone. It is corrupt
No, that is not the meaning of corrupt. First, ego, power, and influence are perfectly valid reasons for charity. You should be happy that there is a society where greed and ambition can lead to charitable acts.
Funny how the places on that list with incompetent governance and mismanagement of agriculture have climate change problems and the places that don't, don't.
Who here thinks it's a good idea to confuse catastrophe with non-catastrophe? That seems like an important distinction to me.
1) These environmental guidelines are useful for sustaining life on earth.
They are apparently more useful for sustaining life outside of the US than they are inside the US.
2) Moving to Mexico won't help.
It'll help Tesla and Mexico a great deal.
3) If you are worried about not being able to compete with Mexico, argue to your (potential) customers.
Are your potential customers going to adjust US regulations? Or are they going to buy a more expensive product just to save a negligible amount of pollution emissions?
There's a simple one word answer to why car salespeople don't like electric vehicles, options. The car manufacturer sells the car and publicizes a recommended price. The dealerships are thereby very limited as to how much they can charge for the base car itself. Thus, most of their profit comes from everything else that they can sell on top of that base car, the "options". This can be fancy protective coatings, electrically powered systems (brakes, steering, windows), A/C, nitrogen-filled tires, bling hubcaps, fancy service plans, etc.
An SUV with a massive power source can be packed fill of high margin bling and options while a skimpy electric vehicle can't. Bottom line is that car dealerships and their salespeople get much more profit per SUV than they do per electric car. That completely explains the dislike for electric vehicles.
Oh please show how the present cost of an interplanetary unmanned mission is mostly the access to orbit.
You're trying to say that they would continue to spend vast sums on development of single, small, incredibly optimized vehicles when they could cheaply throw together something much larger, more capable, and a higher number of units for orders of magnitude less money per vehicle?
The space probes and satellites operating in space now had to pay an ante of $5,000-20,000 per kg just to get in space, not just for the spacecraft, but also for any propellant needed in addition. Of course, the designers spent a lot of money to optimize the vehicle so that they got the most out of the vehicle. With free access to space, the need to do that costly optimization goes away.
There's also some engineering rules of thumb right now. Currently, a spacecraft tends to have launch costs around 5-20% of the total value of the vehicle. A higher share of launch costs tends to be on high risk vehicles (like low value, sacrificial packages sent up on the first few flights of a new vehicle) and a lower share for government agencies throwing really expensive probes or spy satellites on a rocket.
I was speaking of the century starting with 1897. And yes, I'm aware the Great Depression falls in that century as do many other recessions.
he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars
Rich billionaire is willing to spend X to get to Mars for a tourist trip. Cost is Y where Y
You can do the same calculation for more customers. The problem here is that Y>X. Bring the cost down and the business cases appear.
Posit: Access to orbit is free. Everything else stays the same price. Now what? Who cares? Why? What for? THOSE are the critical questions.
You'd have near future orbital joyrides and near free suborbital transportation. Interplanetary unmanned missions drop by orders of magnitude in cost, putting them well in the range of well funded researchers, entrepreneurs, and hobbyist groups. Manned Mars missions would be well within the capabilities of national groups looking to make a mark. It might be within the capabilities of the extremely wealthy and large corporations too.
For the next half century, I think we'd start seeing colonization of the Moon, Mars, and asteroids.