... and as I recall, the results were that hunter-gatherers were better nourished (both in terms of just calories and the various essential nutrients) than earlier farming populations... on average. The trouble was that excursions from the "average" were a lot bigger for the hunter gatherers.. it was quite literally feast or famine. So although the H-G populations got more nutrition over the course of, say, a year, they were also more likely to starve to death during the lean times. Agriculture was, comparatively, a sure thing, which is why most groups took to it. But the move wasn't without cost - for one thing, you ended up having to work a lot harder to be successful at agriculture, as someone pointed out above.
... would be a valid solution to the "paradox", the trouble is that there's no evidence that stars are distributed fractally at the largest distance scales. In fact, they seem to be uniformly distributed. While I'm not a cosmologist, I do make an effort to keep up with this stuff to the extent a layman can, and I haven't seen any results relating to either the CMB or galaxy spin distributions that show anisotropy in the universe. Got a reference?
If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use on Earth, it's harder to justify, yes. If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use outside the gravity well, that's a different story; ship your production equipment out of the gravity well once, and then you don't need to continually lift your finished goods.
You have a chicken/egg problem here. The problem is that no one has any use for finished goods in space. No one lives there, remember? At least to get started, you'd have to do a lot of shipping back and forth to the earth, and you can't, so to speak, get that project off the ground - it's too expensive.
Do you have any analysis to point to to the effect that using the moon as a lower-risk, lower-cost testbed environment is counterproductive in this case?
You mean, aside from where I pointed out that colonizing the moon costs a ridiculous amount of money and doesn't get you anything? And you haven't even addressed the main objection, which is that colonizing Mars is just as useless as colonizing the moon, only even more ludicrously expensive due to the great distance involved.
Absorption by dust: doesn't really solve the problem, as over an infinite period of time, the dust would heat up to the same temperature as the stars behind it, and begin radiating itself.
The universe "that we see" is not infinite: this seems to beg the question. Why don't we see all of it? (but with this one you're getting somewhere... see below)
Stars not evenly distributed. It's true that at distance scales of up to the size of galaxy superclusters, stars are not evenly distributed. But over larger scales, this lumpiness goes away. If you trace it out far enough, every point should still trace out to the surface of a star.
As usual, Wikipedia knows all, but in a nutshell, there are a couple of possible explanations for the "paradox". Among them: 1) star formation has not been in progress for an infinite period of time, so it would seem to be the case that in fact, not every point in the sky can be traced back to the surface of a star. And 2) the universe is expanding at an inflationary pace - that means some stars are receding beyond our ability to see them, because the space between us and them is expanding faster than the light can go through it. Another way to look at this is that the light has become so red-shifted that it's not detectable any more. Either way, the second bullet above hints at the answer - we really DON'T see the whole universe.
... they didn't do the xeriscaping. They just ripped up the grass and replaced it with nothing. When confronted, they later put in a few token plants and a decorative fence. You should look at the picture. The lot consists of a house, a sea of wood chips, and a few plants in front of the new fence and in one corner. I'm all in favor of environmental protection, saving water, and against unreasonable regulations... but it seems to me that the "victims" in this case are the ones being unreasonable.
A couple of things - while I'm a) all in favor of protecting the environment, and b) I agree that these property appearance rules can go too far... in this case, I think I'm with the city. It's all very well to say that you should be able to do absolutely whatever you want with your own property, but the fact is that what you do with your property affects other people. Don't agree? Then you won't mind if I buy the place next to you and install a toxic waste dump on it. After all, it's my property, right? Part of what you get when you buy a property is the right to enjoy the use of it - if you're neighbor's property is such a mess that it interferes with your enjoyment of your own property, then you've lost that. Reasonable people can disagree about the balance between your rights and your neighbors, but that's why we have city/county governments and courts. It's not "anything goes inside my fence".
The summary of the article isn't accurate (what a surprise). The county is not telling them they have to grow a lawn full of grass and water it. They're telling them that they have to landscape it with at least 40% live plants. The owner's first pass it this was apparently to just rip out all the grass. Then, when confronted, they put down the wood chips and a few token plants. They could have easily have achieved their goals of massive water use reduction by following the damn ordinance - it would have ended up being a lot less expensive for them to just plant the lot 40% in desert plants than to dick around the way they have, and then be hauled into court.
I have very little sympathy for the couple in question here.
They don't do well in direct sunlight (there's a reason you find them on the north side of the tree trunk), and this being Orange county, I'm betting the place gets a lot of sun.
Right, because getting the materials to the moon necessary to 1) mine lots of uranium, and 2) build a hundred thousand ton spacecraft, wouldn't be too expensive or anything. The environmental and political issues are the least of your problems here.
Presuming that somebody is going to the Moon anyway, the cost of getting a kilo of water there is of the order of tens of thousands of dollars. Digging a kilo up in-situ, if it's handy, costs very little indeed. That's the point.
You need to think this through. Digging up water on the freaking moon is going to cost very little? Dude, it would cost the tens of thousands of dollars just to get a garden shovel there. Then you also need to send up the guy doing the shovelling, and his life support gear, and water transportation piping or tanker rockets or whatever, to get it to where you need it (which presumably is not going to be the poles - by definition, you wouldn't be getting enough light there to do farming or solar power generation). Your free water is a lot more expensive than you think it is.
... that wheat raised on the moon and then sent back to earth would cost about a zillion times more than just growing it on earth, I can't see any objection at all. Stuff you need to grow wheat on earth: land, rain, fertilizer, tractors, farmers, grain elevators, trucks for distribution. Stuff you need to grow wheat on the moon: land (plus air, plus a dome to hold the air in), water (that you have to pipe from the poles to the equatorial regions where the sun actually shines), fertilizer (that you have to ship from earth, as the moon is not particularly rich in fixed nitrogen), tractors (that have to be shipped up from earth), farmers (that have to be shipped up from earth, and require an enormous amount of life support equipment), grain elevators (that have to be assembled on site from materials shipped up from earth), rockets for distribution.
but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to water, I don't see the feasibility concerns
I'm planning on building a 10,000 square foot waterfront mansion in Manhattan - but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to building materials, I don't see the feasibility concerns. Seriously, dude, water is the least of the feasibility problems here.
Water is one of the key things you'd need to run a settlement for other purposes
What other purposes? I've never seen any convincing rationale for wanting to settle the moon. But let's dispose of some rejoinders right up front, shall we?
But the moon has lots of He3! Answer: call me when we've figured out a use for He3. Fusion power: 20 years away, always will be.
But we could manufacture stuff on the moon and sell it! Answer: a non-starter. Consider that building factories is really expensive. Now consider that you'd have to build this factory, then lift it 250k miles - straight up. And you'd have to bring a bunch of people. And all their life support gear. And housing. And food (or hydroponic facilities or whatever). And at least some minimal personal possessions. Add up the weight of all that. Now remember that it costs like $10k/kg just to get to freaking low earth orbit. There is absolutely no way you could ever recover the costs even to get everything there that you'd need, not to mention your operating costs. If there was some magical, hugely lucrative product that had to be made on the moon, that would be one thing... but there isn't. The moon is a big chunk of the same rocks the earth is made of.
Space hotels! Answer: also a non-starter, for much the same reason. Hotels are expensive to build on earth, and to put one on the moon you'd need to get it there, at exorbitant rates. Plus all your staff. Given the costs of getting people into space, you're talking about a market of, what, a few people per year? You couldn't support a hotel ON EARTH with that kind of occupancy rate.
We need to establish a second home in case earth gets wiped out! Answer: probably a good idea, but good luck getting today's taxpayers to fund an absolutely ludicrously expensive project (both in capital expenditures and operating costs) that has absolutely no chance whatsoever of benefiting them personally. While I think space colonization would be really a cool thing to do, I wouldn't actually vote for doing it - it's simply too expensive for what we'd get out of it in any reasonable period.
We need practice for colonizing Mars! Answer: 1) Ok, so why do we need to colonize Mars? All the same objections apply. 2) Even if we did, why not just go straight to Mars and learn there? It would be cheaper in the long run. But seriously, you're never going to get past part 1).
Look, I read all the Heinlein books too. They were great. And colonizing space would be really cool. But there has to be some kind of economically feasible way to do it, and there just isn't.
... there's more to it than the designs. There's safe operations and maintenance too. Without regulations and inspectors, plant operators again have every incentive to skimp on things like repairs, operator training, etc. And developing and enforcing regulations == bureaucracy. You can't have one without the other. To the extent that there are silly and useless regulations out there, yes, that should be changed. But really, most of the regs really are necessary.
Both of those actually seem pretty feasible for at least some populations of hypothetical aliens - so far, we have shown only passing interest in exploring space (mostly because it's really hard) - so we have ourselves as sort of an example of point 2. But surely, at least some would be interested in expanding. It would only take one.
I still think that the most LIKELY case is some combination of 1) intelligent life is very rare and 2) interstellar travel is (all but) impossible.
Sort of related to the COBOL comments here... COBOL's now been replaced by other languages, which in turn are going to be replaced by other languages, etc. And there's the rub: it's a treadmill. For a few years I was doing Lotus Notes, web, and database development (cue the Lotus haters in 3... 2... 1... - I actually liked it). It was a fun job, but... trying to keep my skills up to date was a real drag. Notes itself evolved significantly over time, web development changed very significantly with the advent of stuff like various revisions of CSS, XML arrived on the scene, Javascript, LotusScript (the Lotus equivalent of VB), Java, various databases, LDAP... the more stuff I learned, the more I needed to learn. And oh, by the way, I needed to do this while I was working full time. That was fun for a while, but it eventually wore on me. I finally moved on to a new line of work for unrelated reasons, but I won't deny I was a little relieved that I could get off the new tech treadmill before I fell off it. I was not quite 40 when I bailed.
... can dance on the head of a pin? Seriously, the difference between 99.9999% and 10% of c isn't that much either, practically speaking. We can't come close to attaining either one. I'll start worrying about these other issues when we develop some practical way to go this fast.
If you accept as givens that 1) intelligent life develops with relative ease, and 2) interstellar travel is technologically feasible, then what the Fermi paradox is telling you that we shouldn't expect to be the first, as that outcome is quite unlikely. The universe has been in business for almost 15 billion years, which is plenty of time for lots of civilizations to have developed. Since it's manifestly not true that the universe has been overrun with space-faring aliens, one or both of the premises must be false. My personal bet is that they both are, but I'm pessimistic that way.
The slashdot crowd has a tendency to ignore this, but to do a project like this, there has to be some kind of a payoff - and the payoff for an interstellar mission would be 1) uncertain at a best, and 2) wouldn't come for decades or more. The net present value, accordingly, is zero, and the amount of expenditure required would be huge. Therefore, it ain't happening.
You might make a case that one or more of the world's governments may want to do this for the sheer scientific knowledge to be gained, but still: 1) huge upfront payment, 2) data doesn't come back until we're all dead (I mean, all of us currently alive). It's a really hard sell to your taxpayers.
So the bottom line here is that interstellar travel is pretty much a non-starter.
The biggest reason that the nuclear industry in the US essentially came to a standstill wasn't excessive regulation, protests, or anything else (although that's what gets all the press). The real reason is that economically speaking, nuclear plants are very risky - they cost a huge amount of money upfront, and they don't pay off for many, many years. And if there's any fumbles during the design and construction process, costs can really skyrocket. Then the plant owners are left with the fun choices of 1) jacking up electricity rates to obscene levels (and thus really pissing off their customers) or 2) having the plant not pay off at all before the end of its life. Because of that, financing for plants has been all but impossible to get. This loan guarantee program could really make a difference in getting financing for plants going again.
Look, I'm all about moving from fossil fuels to nuclear (and solar & wind too), but seriously... reducing the regulatory burden? Are you nuts? Much is made of the fact that nuclear plants are very safe - and they are. The reason they're very safe is because they are quite sensibly regulated to within an inch of their lives. Without these regulations, there'd be nothing stopping the power companies from building Chernobyl-style plants all over the place, and every financial incentive TO do so - because as you say, all that safety stuff is expensive.
Doing more nuclear does make sense. So does drinking a little less of the libertarian kool-aid.
First of all, I, for one, object to seeing propellers everywhere I look.
Lots more people object to seeing nuclear power plants. So?
Windmills have to be built with a much higher power handling capacity than other power plants, because wind power is so intermittent.
No one is seriously suggesting that our entire electrical demand be satisfied by wind power alone. You use wind and solar to handle peak loads, and power storage (from the wind & solar) plus nuclear power for the base load.
All in all, although wind power is certainly greener than fossil fuels, it's not the magic solution to all our problems and they are certainly very far from being harmless to the environment.
No single source of power is the magic solution to all our problems.
No source of power is harmless to the environment.
People need to get over the idea that their preferred means of power generation can or should solve our power problems all by itself. Each of the main types of non-CO2 producing power - solar photoelectric, solar thermal, wind, and nuclear - has its advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal solution is almost certainly going to involve a mix of all four.
... that the overall particle physics community is not real enthusiastic about the "God particle" terminology. There's nothing particularly "god-like" about it.
1) You can't get to absolute zero - to get something that cold would require you to chill it with something even colder, which is impossible by definition.
2) Even if you could get to absolute zero, all molecular motion doesn't stop - the particles still have what's called "zero-point" energy, which means they would still be moving a little. For them to be completely stopped would violate the uncertainty principle: you'd know their position and momentum exactly.
3) Obviously, just because things stop moving doesn't mean their mass disappears. Does your car become massless when you put it in your garage? For a photon, the concept of "rest mass" is pretty much purely a mathematical idea - they can't ever stop moving, so their rest mass is never directly in evidence.
Hmm. I sorta misstated what the Higgs is about - rather than actually producing gravity, it's thought to be responsible for causing massive particles to actually have mass. Related, but not the same as what I was talking about... sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
... and as I recall, the results were that hunter-gatherers were better nourished (both in terms of just calories and the various essential nutrients) than earlier farming populations... on average. The trouble was that excursions from the "average" were a lot bigger for the hunter gatherers.. it was quite literally feast or famine. So although the H-G populations got more nutrition over the course of, say, a year, they were also more likely to starve to death during the lean times. Agriculture was, comparatively, a sure thing, which is why most groups took to it. But the move wasn't without cost - for one thing, you ended up having to work a lot harder to be successful at agriculture, as someone pointed out above.
Replying to myself, bad form. But for what it's worth, Wikipedia thinks the universe is isotropic.
... would be a valid solution to the "paradox", the trouble is that there's no evidence that stars are distributed fractally at the largest distance scales. In fact, they seem to be uniformly distributed. While I'm not a cosmologist, I do make an effort to keep up with this stuff to the extent a layman can, and I haven't seen any results relating to either the CMB or galaxy spin distributions that show anisotropy in the universe. Got a reference?
You have a chicken/egg problem here. The problem is that no one has any use for finished goods in space. No one lives there, remember? At least to get started, you'd have to do a lot of shipping back and forth to the earth, and you can't, so to speak, get that project off the ground - it's too expensive.
You mean, aside from where I pointed out that colonizing the moon costs a ridiculous amount of money and doesn't get you anything? And you haven't even addressed the main objection, which is that colonizing Mars is just as useless as colonizing the moon, only even more ludicrously expensive due to the great distance involved.
Let's run through these:
As usual, Wikipedia knows all, but in a nutshell, there are a couple of possible explanations for the "paradox". Among them: 1) star formation has not been in progress for an infinite period of time, so it would seem to be the case that in fact, not every point in the sky can be traced back to the surface of a star. And 2) the universe is expanding at an inflationary pace - that means some stars are receding beyond our ability to see them, because the space between us and them is expanding faster than the light can go through it. Another way to look at this is that the light has become so red-shifted that it's not detectable any more. Either way, the second bullet above hints at the answer - we really DON'T see the whole universe.
... they didn't do the xeriscaping. They just ripped up the grass and replaced it with nothing. When confronted, they later put in a few token plants and a decorative fence. You should look at the picture. The lot consists of a house, a sea of wood chips, and a few plants in front of the new fence and in one corner. I'm all in favor of environmental protection, saving water, and against unreasonable regulations... but it seems to me that the "victims" in this case are the ones being unreasonable.
A couple of things - while I'm a) all in favor of protecting the environment, and b) I agree that these property appearance rules can go too far... in this case, I think I'm with the city. It's all very well to say that you should be able to do absolutely whatever you want with your own property, but the fact is that what you do with your property affects other people. Don't agree? Then you won't mind if I buy the place next to you and install a toxic waste dump on it. After all, it's my property, right? Part of what you get when you buy a property is the right to enjoy the use of it - if you're neighbor's property is such a mess that it interferes with your enjoyment of your own property, then you've lost that. Reasonable people can disagree about the balance between your rights and your neighbors, but that's why we have city/county governments and courts. It's not "anything goes inside my fence".
The summary of the article isn't accurate (what a surprise). The county is not telling them they have to grow a lawn full of grass and water it. They're telling them that they have to landscape it with at least 40% live plants. The owner's first pass it this was apparently to just rip out all the grass. Then, when confronted, they put down the wood chips and a few token plants. They could have easily have achieved their goals of massive water use reduction by following the damn ordinance - it would have ended up being a lot less expensive for them to just plant the lot 40% in desert plants than to dick around the way they have, and then be hauled into court.
I have very little sympathy for the couple in question here.
They don't do well in direct sunlight (there's a reason you find them on the north side of the tree trunk), and this being Orange county, I'm betting the place gets a lot of sun.
... I'd want to mine the asteroids for metals, when I can get all the same stuff on earth, only a lot cheaper?
Right, because getting the materials to the moon necessary to 1) mine lots of uranium, and 2) build a hundred thousand ton spacecraft, wouldn't be too expensive or anything. The environmental and political issues are the least of your problems here.
You need to think this through. Digging up water on the freaking moon is going to cost very little? Dude, it would cost the tens of thousands of dollars just to get a garden shovel there. Then you also need to send up the guy doing the shovelling, and his life support gear, and water transportation piping or tanker rockets or whatever, to get it to where you need it (which presumably is not going to be the poles - by definition, you wouldn't be getting enough light there to do farming or solar power generation). Your free water is a lot more expensive than you think it is.
... that wheat raised on the moon and then sent back to earth would cost about a zillion times more than just growing it on earth, I can't see any objection at all. Stuff you need to grow wheat on earth: land, rain, fertilizer, tractors, farmers, grain elevators, trucks for distribution. Stuff you need to grow wheat on the moon: land (plus air, plus a dome to hold the air in), water (that you have to pipe from the poles to the equatorial regions where the sun actually shines), fertilizer (that you have to ship from earth, as the moon is not particularly rich in fixed nitrogen), tractors (that have to be shipped up from earth), farmers (that have to be shipped up from earth, and require an enormous amount of life support equipment), grain elevators (that have to be assembled on site from materials shipped up from earth), rockets for distribution.
I'm planning on building a 10,000 square foot waterfront mansion in Manhattan - but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to building materials, I don't see the feasibility concerns. Seriously, dude, water is the least of the feasibility problems here.
What other purposes? I've never seen any convincing rationale for wanting to settle the moon. But let's dispose of some rejoinders right up front, shall we?
Look, I read all the Heinlein books too. They were great. And colonizing space would be really cool. But there has to be some kind of economically feasible way to do it, and there just isn't.
... there's more to it than the designs. There's safe operations and maintenance too. Without regulations and inspectors, plant operators again have every incentive to skimp on things like repairs, operator training, etc. And developing and enforcing regulations == bureaucracy. You can't have one without the other. To the extent that there are silly and useless regulations out there, yes, that should be changed. But really, most of the regs really are necessary.
Both of those actually seem pretty feasible for at least some populations of hypothetical aliens - so far, we have shown only passing interest in exploring space (mostly because it's really hard) - so we have ourselves as sort of an example of point 2. But surely, at least some would be interested in expanding. It would only take one.
I still think that the most LIKELY case is some combination of 1) intelligent life is very rare and 2) interstellar travel is (all but) impossible.
Sort of related to the COBOL comments here... COBOL's now been replaced by other languages, which in turn are going to be replaced by other languages, etc. And there's the rub: it's a treadmill. For a few years I was doing Lotus Notes, web, and database development (cue the Lotus haters in 3... 2... 1... - I actually liked it). It was a fun job, but... trying to keep my skills up to date was a real drag. Notes itself evolved significantly over time, web development changed very significantly with the advent of stuff like various revisions of CSS, XML arrived on the scene, Javascript, LotusScript (the Lotus equivalent of VB), Java, various databases, LDAP... the more stuff I learned, the more I needed to learn. And oh, by the way, I needed to do this while I was working full time. That was fun for a while, but it eventually wore on me. I finally moved on to a new line of work for unrelated reasons, but I won't deny I was a little relieved that I could get off the new tech treadmill before I fell off it. I was not quite 40 when I bailed.
... can dance on the head of a pin? Seriously, the difference between 99.9999% and 10% of c isn't that much either, practically speaking. We can't come close to attaining either one. I'll start worrying about these other issues when we develop some practical way to go this fast.
If you accept as givens that 1) intelligent life develops with relative ease, and 2) interstellar travel is technologically feasible, then what the Fermi paradox is telling you that we shouldn't expect to be the first, as that outcome is quite unlikely. The universe has been in business for almost 15 billion years, which is plenty of time for lots of civilizations to have developed. Since it's manifestly not true that the universe has been overrun with space-faring aliens, one or both of the premises must be false. My personal bet is that they both are, but I'm pessimistic that way.
The slashdot crowd has a tendency to ignore this, but to do a project like this, there has to be some kind of a payoff - and the payoff for an interstellar mission would be 1) uncertain at a best, and 2) wouldn't come for decades or more. The net present value, accordingly, is zero, and the amount of expenditure required would be huge. Therefore, it ain't happening.
You might make a case that one or more of the world's governments may want to do this for the sheer scientific knowledge to be gained, but still: 1) huge upfront payment, 2) data doesn't come back until we're all dead (I mean, all of us currently alive). It's a really hard sell to your taxpayers.
So the bottom line here is that interstellar travel is pretty much a non-starter.
The biggest reason that the nuclear industry in the US essentially came to a standstill wasn't excessive regulation, protests, or anything else (although that's what gets all the press). The real reason is that economically speaking, nuclear plants are very risky - they cost a huge amount of money upfront, and they don't pay off for many, many years. And if there's any fumbles during the design and construction process, costs can really skyrocket. Then the plant owners are left with the fun choices of 1) jacking up electricity rates to obscene levels (and thus really pissing off their customers) or 2) having the plant not pay off at all before the end of its life. Because of that, financing for plants has been all but impossible to get. This loan guarantee program could really make a difference in getting financing for plants going again.
Look, I'm all about moving from fossil fuels to nuclear (and solar & wind too), but seriously... reducing the regulatory burden? Are you nuts? Much is made of the fact that nuclear plants are very safe - and they are. The reason they're very safe is because they are quite sensibly regulated to within an inch of their lives. Without these regulations, there'd be nothing stopping the power companies from building Chernobyl-style plants all over the place, and every financial incentive TO do so - because as you say, all that safety stuff is expensive.
Doing more nuclear does make sense. So does drinking a little less of the libertarian kool-aid.
Lots more people object to seeing nuclear power plants. So?
No one is seriously suggesting that our entire electrical demand be satisfied by wind power alone. You use wind and solar to handle peak loads, and power storage (from the wind & solar) plus nuclear power for the base load.
People need to get over the idea that their preferred means of power generation can or should solve our power problems all by itself. Each of the main types of non-CO2 producing power - solar photoelectric, solar thermal, wind, and nuclear - has its advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal solution is almost certainly going to involve a mix of all four.
... that the overall particle physics community is not real enthusiastic about the "God particle" terminology. There's nothing particularly "god-like" about it.
1) You can't get to absolute zero - to get something that cold would require you to chill it with something even colder, which is impossible by definition.
2) Even if you could get to absolute zero, all molecular motion doesn't stop - the particles still have what's called "zero-point" energy, which means they would still be moving a little. For them to be completely stopped would violate the uncertainty principle: you'd know their position and momentum exactly.
3) Obviously, just because things stop moving doesn't mean their mass disappears. Does your car become massless when you put it in your garage? For a photon, the concept of "rest mass" is pretty much purely a mathematical idea - they can't ever stop moving, so their rest mass is never directly in evidence.
Hmm. I sorta misstated what the Higgs is about - rather than actually producing gravity, it's thought to be responsible for causing massive particles to actually have mass. Related, but not the same as what I was talking about... sorry.