As for faster-than-light travel, remember that for a long time people believed that faster-than-sound travel was impossible...flight was impossible...
In the early days of powered flight it was known that bullets and the tip of a cracking whip travelled faster than sound. In the days before human flight, it was known that birds flew. Neither was ever considered a theoretical impossibility, only a major engineering difficulty. FTL travel is different: our best working theory of space and time says it requires either infinite energy, negative energy, or an imaginary mass, or possibly all three, and that if you CAN achieve it then you also achieve time travel. And in the observed Universe we see nothing that travels faster than light. That's a pretty damn strong objection, way beyond a mere question of engineering.
Honestly, if you had four arms, how often would you actually use the extra two?
I'd probably use them all frequently. Remember, our civilisation and all our technology is designed for creatures with two arms. If we had four, we'd have different designs for keyboards and for the controls of our vehicles, and those designs would be a lot more efficient than our current ones; the four-armed society might make similar interfaces to ours, but they'd be specialised ones for the disabled.
as far as what you say about the aliens looking too much like us, naturally evolution on just about any planet is going to eventually take a similar course.
Why? Evolution is a process of adaptation to environmental conditions. Are you going to claim that environmental conditions are identical on every life-bearing planet? I would expect different conditions to produce different outcomes.
the dinosaurs died out because that evolutionary ladder that focused primarily on size and force wasn't efficient.
The dinosaurs survived for hundreds of millions of years and would quite likely still be here today if that meteor had missed. And... 'evolutionary ladder'? That's not a concept with which I'm familiar; what do you mean by it?
as far as being bipedal, you only need two legs to hold you up and keep balance, so of course there'd only be two legs.
Three would be substantially more stable. Most other large animals go for four, but the vast majority of animals currently alive have six, with a substantial minority going for eight.
you must be kidding about the two eyes thing, right?
Ask the spiders.
those aliens may have many different kinds of life forms on their planet, but the life forms that we would meet would be heading in a similar direction that we are, which is a primary focus on the evolution of our minds.
I'd agree with that, in that it takes a powerful brain to design and build a starship. But why that brain has to sit in a body that looks anything like humanoid, you have not explained.
by poking a hole in time and traveling through it, you are in what's called "ether".
Who calls it that? The terms 'wormhole' and 'Einstein-Rosen bridge' I've heard, but 'ether'?
there are things like order that entropy does not contain
What does that even mean? Entropy isn't some abstract concept of absolute chaos. Entropy is a physical quantity which increases with time in a closed system. Life is a process which decreases entropy locally by increasing entropy globally.
Time travel IS faster-than-light travel. Mathematically the two are equivalent.
Look up special relativity and the relativity of simultaneity for how FTL implies time travel. For how time travel implies FTL, well... if you're on Earth in 2200, and you want to be at Alpha Centauri four lightyears away in 2202, first travel back in time a decade or so. Then you can take your time getting there and still arrive earlier than a light signal would have done it.
ABORIGINE 1: 'Look, if you had a huge boat that could cross the whole sea from the other side of the world, and you know these inferior beings pose no threat to you at all, why would you try to hide?'
ABORIGINE 2: 'Cause we've got stone axes, bro.'
No, wait, that's not quite right; it's being grossly unfair to the Australian natives, who though primitive were intellectual peers of the invaders. We're not going to be the Australian aborigines to their British; we're the spiders.
Seriously - Aliens, if they do exist, do not count as infallible techno-gods come to save us from ourselves. They most likely have similar flaws to our own, and have simply made it a few centuries further along than we have.
A few centuries? Think carefully about how amazingly unlikely that is. The Universe is some 13.7 billion years old. The formation of planetary systems takes place on a timescale of billions of years. Evolution takes place on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years. Technological progress takes place on a timescale of centuries. So if an alien race from another planetary system, from a completely separate evolutionary history, just happens to be within a few centuries of us, that's the most spectacular coincidence I've ever heard of.
More likely they evolved a billion years or more before us, when the Earth was the domain of the prokaryotes only, and have been enhancing themselves genetically and cybernetically ever since, or have maybe just become nanotech bush robots or something, and are now incalculably far beyond animals like us. Don't expect to be visited by Klingons and Romulans when aliens arrive; expect Xeelee. Expect gods.
Except, the Saturn V only got them to the moon. Getting into orbit, landing, coming back up, and getting back to earth was the job of your minibus and tiny capsule.
Saturn V got Apollo to the Moon, with the fuel and equipment necessary to stop and land there and to come home again.
Let's see: the service module, the lunar excursion module, all the fuel for both of them... that's got to be three or four times the mass of the command module, which was all that got back to Earth (I haven't looked it up so this is probably well off). A rocket whose sole purpose was to send a crew around the Moon, but not to land, could have been a whole lot smaller than Saturn V.
Look at it this way: suppose that bringing along a lander and fuel supplies for a Moon landing doubles the mass of your spacecraft at the Moon. Then clearly, that must require that you at least double the size of the rocket on the pad.
I don't actually know what the plan would be for a Moon landing with this vehicle. The fact that it has its own thrusters for landing suggests to me that it might have a direct-ascent mission profile: no separate lander, just bring down the whole ship. NASA considered this approach when planning Apollo: it has the benefit of simplicity, but would have needed a more powerful rocket even than Saturn V to bring enough fuel. Perhaps with modern materials and engineering it could be done this way: but as the article says, no rocket powerful enough currently exists.
Article states this is capable of bring six people into Terran orbit, and four into Lunar orbit. I understand the difficulty in getting down to the moon and back up, but if you're capable of getting there and back with four people, odds are you can get down to the surface.
Not a bit of it. It's a question of fuel.
Having reached the Moon, you have to fire engines to slow down into orbit. Otherwise you loop around the back and head straight back to Earth like Apollo 13. So you need to carry fuel for this.
So now you're circling the Moon like Apollo 8. Good. To come home, you need to fire engines again to speed back up. More fuel.
But wait, you want to visit the surface? Then you need a lander. Those things are heavy. And it needs fuel: fuel to land, and fuel to take off again.
That's the trouble with spaceflight. It's all about fuel. Every manoeuvre burns fuel. Every kilogram of fuel means you need even more fuel at the start, just to carry that fuel into space with you. It's why the Saturn V rocket was the size of a skyscraper, but only carried something the size of a minibus to the moon, and brought only a tiny capsule home to Earth. All the rest? Fuel tanks.
The lack of a Saturn-class booster does pretty much kill the idea though. Neither Arianespace nor Energiya are going to fund the development of that kind of monster, not when there's no commercial use for it and no guarantee of continued political backing for manned Moonshots.
Hence the first related story linked from TFA, which discusses the prospect of an ATV-derived spacecraft to launch on an Ariane 5. Much cheaper, and using existing kit. Funding for it might require political change in Britain, however, which has so far refused to get involved in manned projects.
Debatable. The most detailed explanation of what's going on was on Encyclopaedia Dramatica; it seems to be a matter of multiple script kiddies going at each other. Someone DOS'd a lot of chans a couple of days ago and framed some other idiot for it. In the subsequent confusion, and lack of information and coordination with few chans actually up, it seems that people from every downed chan on the net leapt to a variety of conclusions about who was behind it all, and retaliated blind. Anything not DOS'ing is being DOS'd.
Anontalk may very well be DOS'ing 4chan now, but they probably didn't begin it.
From: NASA News (hqnews@mediaservices.nasa.gov) Sent: Mon 7/21/08 4:00 PM To: NASA News (hqnews@mediaservices.nasa.gov)
July 21, 2008
John Yembrick Headquarters, Washington 202-358-0602 John.yembrick-1@nasa.gov
RELEASE: 08-181
STATEMENT ON INACCURATE REPORTS ABOUT JAPANESE CARGO SERVICES
WASHINGTON -- Contrary to news reports, NASA has not officially or unofficially been discussing the purchase of H-II Transfer Vehicles (HTV) -- uninhabited resupply cargo ships for the space station -- from the Japanese Space Agency, or JAXA.
NASA is committed to domestic commercial cargo resupply to the space station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from Japan. As part of our original agreements as compensation for common system operating costs NASA has limited cargo capability on the Japanese and European cargo vehicles. NASA has recently issued a request for proposal for the cargo needs of International Space Station beyond those supplied by our current international agreements. NASA has chosen to depend on commercial resupply of cargo delivery to the station.
-end-
To subscribe to the list, send a message to: hqnews-subscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov To remove your address from the list, send a message to: hqnews-unsubscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov
And what happened to Russia? I thought they were a huge part of the ISS, and just recently the RSA received a lot more interest from their government if I recall correctly, so why aren't we poking sticks at them?
Russia's Progress supply ships have been keeping the ISS running for years. When the Shuttle was grounded after Columbia, it was the Russians who kept the project alive.
It was a close-run thing, though; the Shuttle's cargo capacity dwarfs Progress, and it was a major loss. Hence the development of independent cargo ships by ESA and Japan. These are much bigger than Soyuz, and also divide the labour three ways instead of relying on Russia alone to produce enough rockets.
They go after these egold folks and the liberty dollar folks because they don't want market forces to be able to leave the growing worthless dollar.
I doubt either are significant. The market is abandoning the dollar in favour of the euro. I suppose the US could suspend convertibility of the dollar if they were concerned about that, or fix an exchange rate - but first they'd better ask Zimbabwe what happens when you start playing that game.
As galaxies shrink, the space between them increases, giving rise to the illusion that they are flying apart (faster and faster), when they could just be staying in relatively the same areas they originally formed in. This explanation, which I call the big collapse, doesn't need the iffy explanation of 'everything coming from a singularity'. It doesn't require the awkward expansion period.
Actually, you require exactly what the Big Bang requires, just with the opposite sign on the constants. The Big Bang gets a singularity in the past when all distances approach zero; you get a singularity in the past when all sizes approach infinity.
The standard model of cosmology has the scale factor of the Universe expanding, effectively stretching space between the galaxies. The galaxies don't move much locally, the cosmological drift is a result of the expansion of the Universe rather than a result of proper motion.
Stretching space is geometrically much the same as shrinking the objects in it. You're just taking the inverse view of the same phenomenon. However, the Big Bang model is based on the general theory of relativity, which explains how the spacetime scale factor can vary, using actual mathematics; this is generally considered a good reason to look at things in terms of expanding space, rather than shrinking objects.
If people knew that the only thing preventing them from living 1,000 years was an accident of some sort, it seems logical that most would become very cautious and averse to bodily risk. Who in their right mind would volunteer for combat duty?
10 years back it seemed sky is limit for CPU clock and therefore speed. Now we know its not easy to go much above 5 GHz in consumer-grade generic CPU, even if you employ some of the best scientists and engineers around the globe.
My Athlon XP 2000+ (from 2003), ran at 1.66GHz. My Core 2 Duo 8200 (from 2008) runs at 2.66GHz. Clock rate increase in five years: 60%. Unimpressive, I'm sure you'll agree.
I fished out some benchmarks I programmed when I was first playing with Python on the old machine. Still had the output file showing timings for sorting lists of random numbers by bubblesort and quicksort. And I ran the same code on the new box.
Number-crunching performance increase in five years: 400%.
Oh, and that old code - being just me, a few years ago, implementing sort algorithms to learn a new language - was certainly not multi-threaded. There was a second core, just as powerful as the first, sitting idle. So total computational power increase in five years: 800%.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty well satisfied with that rate of progress. Gigahertz aren't everything, haven't been for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
In the early days of powered flight it was known that bullets and the tip of a cracking whip travelled faster than sound. In the days before human flight, it was known that birds flew. Neither was ever considered a theoretical impossibility, only a major engineering difficulty. FTL travel is different: our best working theory of space and time says it requires either infinite energy, negative energy, or an imaginary mass, or possibly all three, and that if you CAN achieve it then you also achieve time travel. And in the observed Universe we see nothing that travels faster than light. That's a pretty damn strong objection, way beyond a mere question of engineering.
I'd probably use them all frequently. Remember, our civilisation and all our technology is designed for creatures with two arms. If we had four, we'd have different designs for keyboards and for the controls of our vehicles, and those designs would be a lot more efficient than our current ones; the four-armed society might make similar interfaces to ours, but they'd be specialised ones for the disabled.
Why? Evolution is a process of adaptation to environmental conditions. Are you going to claim that environmental conditions are identical on every life-bearing planet? I would expect different conditions to produce different outcomes.
the dinosaurs died out because that evolutionary ladder that focused primarily on size and force wasn't efficient.
The dinosaurs survived for hundreds of millions of years and would quite likely still be here today if that meteor had missed. And... 'evolutionary ladder'? That's not a concept with which I'm familiar; what do you mean by it?
as far as being bipedal, you only need two legs to hold you up and keep balance, so of course there'd only be two legs.
Three would be substantially more stable. Most other large animals go for four, but the vast majority of animals currently alive have six, with a substantial minority going for eight.
you must be kidding about the two eyes thing, right?
Ask the spiders.
those aliens may have many different kinds of life forms on their planet, but the life forms that we would meet would be heading in a similar direction that we are, which is a primary focus on the evolution of our minds.
I'd agree with that, in that it takes a powerful brain to design and build a starship. But why that brain has to sit in a body that looks anything like humanoid, you have not explained.
by poking a hole in time and traveling through it, you are in what's called "ether".
Who calls it that? The terms 'wormhole' and 'Einstein-Rosen bridge' I've heard, but 'ether'?
What does that even mean? Entropy isn't some abstract concept of absolute chaos. Entropy is a physical quantity which increases with time in a closed system. Life is a process which decreases entropy locally by increasing entropy globally.
Time travel IS faster-than-light travel. Mathematically the two are equivalent.
Look up special relativity and the relativity of simultaneity for how FTL implies time travel. For how time travel implies FTL, well... if you're on Earth in 2200, and you want to be at Alpha Centauri four lightyears away in 2202, first travel back in time a decade or so. Then you can take your time getting there and still arrive earlier than a light signal would have done it.
ABORIGINE 1: 'Look, if you had a huge boat that could cross the whole sea from the other side of the world, and you know these inferior beings pose no threat to you at all, why would you try to hide?'
ABORIGINE 2: 'Cause we've got stone axes, bro.'
No, wait, that's not quite right; it's being grossly unfair to the Australian natives, who though primitive were intellectual peers of the invaders. We're not going to be the Australian aborigines to their British; we're the spiders.
A few centuries? Think carefully about how amazingly unlikely that is. The Universe is some 13.7 billion years old. The formation of planetary systems takes place on a timescale of billions of years. Evolution takes place on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years. Technological progress takes place on a timescale of centuries. So if an alien race from another planetary system, from a completely separate evolutionary history, just happens to be within a few centuries of us, that's the most spectacular coincidence I've ever heard of.
More likely they evolved a billion years or more before us, when the Earth was the domain of the prokaryotes only, and have been enhancing themselves genetically and cybernetically ever since, or have maybe just become nanotech bush robots or something, and are now incalculably far beyond animals like us. Don't expect to be visited by Klingons and Romulans when aliens arrive; expect Xeelee. Expect gods.
One possible benefit is that on coming out of jail he might be a little less keen to help people enlarge their penises.
Aunt Tillie has a three-screen setup?
Could the two be connected? Since your GPU was devoting its full attention to running Compiz, other OpenGL apps suffered?
Saturn V got Apollo to the Moon, with the fuel and equipment necessary to stop and land there and to come home again.
Let's see: the service module, the lunar excursion module, all the fuel for both of them... that's got to be three or four times the mass of the command module, which was all that got back to Earth (I haven't looked it up so this is probably well off). A rocket whose sole purpose was to send a crew around the Moon, but not to land, could have been a whole lot smaller than Saturn V.
Look at it this way: suppose that bringing along a lander and fuel supplies for a Moon landing doubles the mass of your spacecraft at the Moon. Then clearly, that must require that you at least double the size of the rocket on the pad.
I don't actually know what the plan would be for a Moon landing with this vehicle. The fact that it has its own thrusters for landing suggests to me that it might have a direct-ascent mission profile: no separate lander, just bring down the whole ship. NASA considered this approach when planning Apollo: it has the benefit of simplicity, but would have needed a more powerful rocket even than Saturn V to bring enough fuel. Perhaps with modern materials and engineering it could be done this way: but as the article says, no rocket powerful enough currently exists.
Not a bit of it. It's a question of fuel.
Having reached the Moon, you have to fire engines to slow down into orbit. Otherwise you loop around the back and head straight back to Earth like Apollo 13. So you need to carry fuel for this.
So now you're circling the Moon like Apollo 8. Good. To come home, you need to fire engines again to speed back up. More fuel.
But wait, you want to visit the surface? Then you need a lander. Those things are heavy. And it needs fuel: fuel to land, and fuel to take off again.
That's the trouble with spaceflight. It's all about fuel. Every manoeuvre burns fuel. Every kilogram of fuel means you need even more fuel at the start, just to carry that fuel into space with you. It's why the Saturn V rocket was the size of a skyscraper, but only carried something the size of a minibus to the moon, and brought only a tiny capsule home to Earth. All the rest? Fuel tanks.
The lack of a Saturn-class booster does pretty much kill the idea though. Neither Arianespace nor Energiya are going to fund the development of that kind of monster, not when there's no commercial use for it and no guarantee of continued political backing for manned Moonshots.
Hence the first related story linked from TFA, which discusses the prospect of an ATV-derived spacecraft to launch on an Ariane 5. Much cheaper, and using existing kit. Funding for it might require political change in Britain, however, which has so far refused to get involved in manned projects.
Debatable. The most detailed explanation of what's going on was on Encyclopaedia Dramatica; it seems to be a matter of multiple script kiddies going at each other. Someone DOS'd a lot of chans a couple of days ago and framed some other idiot for it. In the subsequent confusion, and lack of information and coordination with few chans actually up, it seems that people from every downed chan on the net leapt to a variety of conclusions about who was behind it all, and retaliated blind. Anything not DOS'ing is being DOS'd.
Anontalk may very well be DOS'ing 4chan now, but they probably didn't begin it.
tl;dr: chan war for teh epic lulz.
From my email yesterday:
From: NASA News (hqnews@mediaservices.nasa.gov)
Sent: Mon 7/21/08 4:00 PM
To: NASA News (hqnews@mediaservices.nasa.gov)
July 21, 2008
John Yembrick
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0602
John.yembrick-1@nasa.gov
RELEASE: 08-181
STATEMENT ON INACCURATE REPORTS ABOUT JAPANESE CARGO SERVICES
WASHINGTON -- Contrary to news reports, NASA has not officially or
unofficially been discussing the purchase of H-II Transfer Vehicles
(HTV) -- uninhabited resupply cargo ships for the space station --
from the Japanese Space Agency, or JAXA.
NASA is committed to domestic commercial cargo resupply to the space
station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from
Japan. As part of our original agreements as compensation for common
system operating costs NASA has limited cargo capability on the
Japanese and European cargo vehicles. NASA has recently issued a
request for proposal for the cargo needs of International Space
Station beyond those supplied by our current international
agreements. NASA has chosen to depend on commercial resupply of cargo
delivery to the station.
-end-
To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
hqnews-subscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov
To remove your address from the list, send a message to:
hqnews-unsubscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov
Russia's Progress supply ships have been keeping the ISS running for years. When the Shuttle was grounded after Columbia, it was the Russians who kept the project alive.
It was a close-run thing, though; the Shuttle's cargo capacity dwarfs Progress, and it was a major loss. Hence the development of independent cargo ships by ESA and Japan. These are much bigger than Soyuz, and also divide the labour three ways instead of relying on Russia alone to produce enough rockets.
I doubt either are significant. The market is abandoning the dollar in favour of the euro. I suppose the US could suspend convertibility of the dollar if they were concerned about that, or fix an exchange rate - but first they'd better ask Zimbabwe what happens when you start playing that game.
Actually, you require exactly what the Big Bang requires, just with the opposite sign on the constants. The Big Bang gets a singularity in the past when all distances approach zero; you get a singularity in the past when all sizes approach infinity.
The standard model of cosmology has the scale factor of the Universe expanding, effectively stretching space between the galaxies. The galaxies don't move much locally, the cosmological drift is a result of the expansion of the Universe rather than a result of proper motion.
Stretching space is geometrically much the same as shrinking the objects in it. You're just taking the inverse view of the same phenomenon. However, the Big Bang model is based on the general theory of relativity, which explains how the spacetime scale factor can vary, using actual mathematics; this is generally considered a good reason to look at things in terms of expanding space, rather than shrinking objects.
Look up how long a day is on Venus. I've never heard any good proposal for how to terraform that away.
That's a stretch. Red dwarfs last a long, long time; this planet could easily be billions of years older than Earth.
You make that sound like a bad thing...
So are we.
Signed, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Spain...
Yes, it's a crime, I agree, but since when was it wrong?
No seasons. No weather. No night. No birdshit. No NIMBYs.
My Athlon XP 2000+ (from 2003), ran at 1.66GHz. My Core 2 Duo 8200 (from 2008) runs at 2.66GHz. Clock rate increase in five years: 60%. Unimpressive, I'm sure you'll agree.
I fished out some benchmarks I programmed when I was first playing with Python on the old machine. Still had the output file showing timings for sorting lists of random numbers by bubblesort and quicksort. And I ran the same code on the new box.
Number-crunching performance increase in five years: 400%.
Oh, and that old code - being just me, a few years ago, implementing sort algorithms to learn a new language - was certainly not multi-threaded. There was a second core, just as powerful as the first, sitting idle. So total computational power increase in five years: 800%.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty well satisfied with that rate of progress. Gigahertz aren't everything, haven't been for a long time.