I got a buddy that uses a Dremel tool to fix his disks. It takes a delicate touch. I tried it with a Rick Springfield disk that skipped because of a scratch. My results where.. well lets just say the disk doesn't skip any more:)
Wasn't that an issue with some cdrom a few years back? It was like a 100x reader or something. It would spin the disk so fast that some of them just simply exploded in the drive.
Actually what happened is the thread more or less got high jacked by what seems to be the anti nuclear crowed.
The real intent of the thread is gravity tugs, solar sails, other "out of reach" technologies are not ready to be used. We have more experience with nuclear weapons that any of that technology. For some reason some people got the idea that we would blow the threat up aka Bruce Willis with one huge honking bomb.
My statement is simple. We would send a team to the threat, or several teams, of highly trained astronauts and cosmonauts that would use nuclear charges to ether deflect or blast it into smaller pieces.
The shot gun affect is a known possibility. We would be prepared for that. We would not simply blow the thing to hell and hope for the best.
We'll I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree. Given time anything is possible but in time frames I'm thinking of I see no other option.
Besides we wouldn't send Bruce Willis anyway. It's Lee Majors or nobody... well maybe Shawn Connery... or AeroSmith...that would work.. How about Harrison Ford?
That too is a very good plan but how fast can it be made ready? Do you want to take a chance with a relatively new technology? Even if it has a good track record. We have had 60 years of experience with blowing crap up with nukes and we have a hell of lot of them.
You also know that for a lot of those studies there is one that says just the opposite. That right there shows me that a manned mission is the only way to go. A manned mission would be a lot more flexible than a robot mission. We've never seen humans out that far but that doesn't change anything. We are talking civilization ending event here, if not species. We can't trust that to a machine.
Okay, lets readdress the gravity tug issue again. Lets assume you have a 10 mile wide rock, solid rock, where are you going to get the mass to deflect it in given time? How do you plan to move such mass?
Simplicity is best when it is an option. A gravity tug is an elegant concept given enough time. But what if you don't have the time? You have to deal with the extra complexity of moving enough mass to have an effect.
A nuclear option may not the best option but it's the only option we have right now, this second. If there is rock 10 year out there is simply no way we'll have solar sails or gravity tugs or anything else ready. With a nuclear and a manned mission we might have a chance.
Right, and your an expert how? Get real dumb ass, this is a discussion board not a physics class. You bitch but you don't say much. Please explain the wholes and what makes your argument better? You talk robots and fail to realize that is a dead end plan. Something goes wrong, your dead.
And I'm not going to respond to every when there is nothing more to say. You also need to think about that I started the discussion. If you have nothing worth saying then move along, its not worth your time and its certainly not worth mine.
That is good because that means we are still thinking. I had another though just a few moments ago. See how this sounds.
We have the big honking rock. Deflecting it is not an option because of size. But we can blow it into smaller manageable chunks. Those chunks we can deflect. Now my question what is easier, blowing big ass rock into smaller chunks or just deflecting the big ass one?
Not going to bother to quote all that just going to answer it.
And almost every manned mission that has had a failure that didn't destroy the ship out right has had a man in place to do what need to me done. I give you Apollo 11 and Apollo 13.
When the lander was running low on fuel mission control was ready to abort. Niel Armstrong saw a place to land in the last second and landed there. On Apollo 13 most of the work was done on the ground but it was men in craft that made it work. None of those would have been possible if there where robots and not men there.
My argument for manned missions holds up on the arguments alone.
Shotgun effect is already covered I feel no need to keep hashing it.
Lets keep this simple. Earthquake; bicycle bell. small bell, small hammer. KT event, 10 mile rock; Big Honking Bell, Big Honking Hammer. Earthquake, manageable. KT event not manageable.
Deflection is best but if you can't deflect it in one piece then you blow it into smaller chunks that you can deflect. And also what you can't deflect you lesson some more damage because they are all not going to hit at the same time.
You really need to think your arguments through before you respond. They are really good arguments but have to many holes in them.
Wrong again. Lets see if the model clears it up. Take a piece of plywood and place it in front of a watermelon. The plywood is the atmosphere and the watermelon is the Earth. Now shoot one from 20 feet away with a shotgun loaded with rat shot and one with a 30.06.
Now what is the effect? Of course you have to balance the load in each so that the shotgun is carrying the same energy as the rifle bullet but with the shotgun the energy is scattered over a wider area of effect. The plywood/atmosphere will stop a good bit of it and parts that get through will have lost much of their energy from passing.
What did the rifle bullet do to the watermellon? What was the effect of the plywood on it? Sure your going to have heat effect from the dust and that is bad, but that is manageable. The rifle slug is end game. You don't manage that. You don't survive it.
By the way, the smaller the particles, the higher up in the atmosphere they will explode. Better have them up there than on the ground.
I know exactly what a gravity tug is. I suggested that we use one a few posts back to move a moon from Jupiter to Venus. So, yeah I know what is and how it works. I also know this, we don't have the experience to make it work. And we don't have time to learn.
You say this is "much safer" like nukes are a bad thing? Actually the nuclear option is much safer because with out present level of understanding it is the best thing that will work. Hell, it's the only thing. Are you opposed to using nukes because they have that word nuclear in them?
We would not just start lobbing nuclear bombs at a target and hoping one of them works. We would send a highly trained team out there to ether demolish it into manageable chunks or change is course with nuclear demolitions, with a carefully thought up plan.
You know why all this solar sail and gravity tug plan came up? or why the nuclear option has been pretty much shunned? Because some hippie scientist didn't like the idea of using nukes in space, if forget his name, not even to save the planet.
An I completely agree with you. We can have people working on two plans but lets put priority where it's due. But lets not just dismiss the nuclear demolition / deflection plan out of hand because we don't like it. Because a gravity tug or solar sails sounds better. Nukes are still the best option on the table and until something better comes along we need to go with what we know.
Keep researching solar sails and gravity tugs but for the foreseeable future it's nukes or nothing.
Wrong'o buck'o. I gave a very good description of the Tzar Bomb and MIRV warheads several weeks ago. Feel free to look it up. And that is Tzar, not Tsar, I made that mistake before.
That is why we would send several teams on separate ships. It's that eggs in the one basket thing again. You know that really bad movie with Bruce Willis in it that people like to drag up about shit like this? Remember what happened in the end? Something fucked up. If you send robots, even hundreds of them, and you encounter something that they are not prepared / designed for then its game over. With manned missions you have a second chance. There is always that chance that someone who is on the spot maybe able to fix the problem. With robots you don't' have that chance.
I fully understand the shotgun effect. The damage would be tremendous but it would be manageable. Even if you had 30 or 40 chunks that did make it to the surface and blow holes in the crust a mile wide that would be bad but not end of the world bad. We have a chance of surviving that. Maybe not as a civilization but as a species.
I'm thinking dinosaur killer when I say punched through to the mantle because that is what that one did. It rang the planet like a bell. That would very likely kills us as a species.
If there is a dinosaur killer out there coming at us most likely we are boned but the nuke and blasting it to rubble is still the only option if we can't deflect it. And if we can deflect it, it will be with nukes because once again, its all we got.
Yeah, was expecting an answer like that. Okay, wise ass, what is your plan? Pull a solar sail out of your ass or a gravity tug, or a mass driver. You can't because they don't exist.
And you missed the whole point of my comment. We can't use fantastic technology like this because we can't. We don't know how. We have theories but that is all they are. We have nukes and rockets, and that is it. We don't know anything about attaching solar sails to rocks in space. An granted, we don't know much about blowing them up with nukes. But we know more about the latter than the former.
That movie maybe Hollywood BS right now but its closer to reality than solar sales and gravity tugs.
You realize that no human has been beyond LEO (more or less) for over 30 years?...
We have lots of ICBMs to expend
Don't take this the wrong way but that first comment sounds like an excuse to me. My repose is "so." Even if we had never been beyond LEO we would go because we have no choice. The results of not going are total end of everything. We'll go and we'll send manned ships. Several manned ships. And we'll do it because there is no other choice.
ICBMS won't work. They are ballistic weapons. They don't have the steering jets that would require them to change course in space. That old '70 movie where they used them is bullshit.
Gravity Tractor? You know I love these sky high fantasy ideas to deflect asteroids as much as anyone else but shouldn't we be concentrating on what is real? If an asteroid does threaten Earth in the next few years we will use nuclear demolitions on it. We will not use a gravity tractor, laser beams, or giant snow balls. Nor will we attach plasma engines or mass drivers to it. We will use nuclear demolitions because that is, simply, all we have.
We will not send a robot to do it nor will we send some type of futuristic space ship driven by plasma/ion engines. It will be a manned ship with old style chemical rockets right out of the '60. Why? Because we have over 60 years experience with them and they will get the job done. We'll send men and not a robot because the mission is to important to have place in the hands on questionable technology. A robot breaks down and the mission is over. With men at least you have some hope they can fix it. Yes, it will probably be one way but the pilots will know that. They will go anyway.
Yes, we will break it up in to smaller pieces because that is best. Don't give me that shotgun crap about it scattering the damage over a wider area. We will think of that and cover it. If we let a huge honking rock ride in the atmosphere will not even slow it down. It will punch through it like it isn't even there. Worse is it will punch through the crust to the mantel causing shockwaves all around the planet.
We wont' use one nuke. We will blowup the big one then we will blow up the smaller ones into smaller pieces. We will do this until the chunks are small enough that the atmosphere will handle. With smaller chunks there is more surface area for the atmosphere to work on. Most importantly the smaller chunks will not "crack the crust" as one fat ass one would.
Well I think that I'm about to get called a troll but I've owned several systems over the last few years. Some have had nforce chipssets and others a mixture of AMD, Intel, and VIA. When I setdown and think about the systems that I have had the most trouble out of have nforce chipsets.
My current system has a AMD chipset in it and it has been the most stable and trouble free system I've. I bought two systems a few years ago. One for a linux server and the other for a HTPC. The linux server was a VIA / Bisostar system and the other was a Suttle nforce3. The biostar is now living in my sons room as a game machine and the shuttle is still a htpc. There has never been an issue with the biostar. But the shuttle has been the most troublesome system I've had. I've replaced everything in it from the graphics card, memory, cpu, and the PS and it still every 6 months eats itself. Last night the screen turned blue and it scragged the OS.
The system I had before this one was a Nforce4 and it had issues. Sometimes I had to cycle the power a couple of times to get it to boot. Once it was up it would run fine for months but would do some strange things.
I've know other people with nforce chipsets that have had no issues with them. But I do find it interesting that I do.
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I would call mine irreplaceable because once you got rid of them you didn't want to replace them.
I got a buddy that uses a Dremel tool to fix his disks. It takes a delicate touch. I tried it with a Rick Springfield disk that skipped because of a scratch. My results where .. well lets just say the disk doesn't skip any more :)
Wasn't that an issue with some cdrom a few years back? It was like a 100x reader or something. It would spin the disk so fast that some of them just simply exploded in the drive.
Okay, my bad I see what you bring to the table.
And your any better? You seem to refuse to read anything I say or even come up with a reasonable rebuttal.
Here what do you bring to the table?
Actually what happened is the thread more or less got high jacked by what seems to be the anti nuclear crowed.
The real intent of the thread is gravity tugs, solar sails, other "out of reach" technologies are not ready to be used. We have more experience with nuclear weapons that any of that technology. For some reason some people got the idea that we would blow the threat up aka Bruce Willis with one huge honking bomb.
My statement is simple. We would send a team to the threat, or several teams, of highly trained astronauts and cosmonauts that would use nuclear charges to ether deflect or blast it into smaller pieces.
The shot gun affect is a known possibility. We would be prepared for that. We would not simply blow the thing to hell and hope for the best.
We'll I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree. Given time anything is possible but in time frames I'm thinking of I see no other option.
Besides we wouldn't send Bruce Willis anyway. It's Lee Majors or nobody... well maybe Shawn Connery. .. or AeroSmith...that would work.. How about Harrison Ford?
That too is a very good plan but how fast can it be made ready? Do you want to take a chance with a relatively new technology? Even if it has a good track record. We have had 60 years of experience with blowing crap up with nukes and we have a hell of lot of them.
You also know that for a lot of those studies there is one that says just the opposite. That right there shows me that a manned mission is the only way to go. A manned mission would be a lot more flexible than a robot mission. We've never seen humans out that far but that doesn't change anything. We are talking civilization ending event here, if not species. We can't trust that to a machine.
Okay, lets readdress the gravity tug issue again. Lets assume you have a 10 mile wide rock, solid rock, where are you going to get the mass to deflect it in given time? How do you plan to move such mass?
Simplicity is best when it is an option. A gravity tug is an elegant concept given enough time. But what if you don't have the time? You have to deal with the extra complexity of moving enough mass to have an effect.
A nuclear option may not the best option but it's the only option we have right now, this second. If there is rock 10 year out there is simply no way we'll have solar sails or gravity tugs or anything else ready. With a nuclear and a manned mission we might have a chance.
Right, and your an expert how? Get real dumb ass, this is a discussion board not a physics class. You bitch but you don't say much. Please explain the wholes and what makes your argument better? You talk robots and fail to realize that is a dead end plan. Something goes wrong, your dead.
And I'm not going to respond to every when there is nothing more to say. You also need to think about that I started the discussion. If you have nothing worth saying then move along, its not worth your time and its certainly not worth mine.
And you bring what to the table? Didn't think so.
I don't think that "next" was merited just yet...
That is good because that means we are still thinking. I had another though just a few moments ago. See how this sounds.
We have the big honking rock. Deflecting it is not an option because of size. But we can blow it into smaller manageable chunks. Those chunks we can deflect. Now my question what is easier, blowing big ass rock into smaller chunks or just deflecting the big ass one?
Not going to bother to quote all that just going to answer it.
And almost every manned mission that has had a failure that didn't destroy the ship out right has had a man in place to do what need to me done. I give you Apollo 11 and Apollo 13.
When the lander was running low on fuel mission control was ready to abort. Niel Armstrong saw a place to land in the last second and landed there. On Apollo 13 most of the work was done on the ground but it was men in craft that made it work. None of those would have been possible if there where robots and not men there.
My argument for manned missions holds up on the arguments alone.
Shotgun effect is already covered I feel no need to keep hashing it.
Lets keep this simple. Earthquake; bicycle bell. small bell, small hammer. KT event, 10 mile rock; Big Honking Bell, Big Honking Hammer. Earthquake, manageable. KT event not manageable.
Deflection is best but if you can't deflect it in one piece then you blow it into smaller chunks that you can deflect. And also what you can't deflect you lesson some more damage because they are all not going to hit at the same time.
You really need to think your arguments through before you respond. They are really good arguments but have to many holes in them.
You are aware that when one must resort to personal attacks in a debate one has lost the debate right?
My statement still stands, Nukes are what we will use because it is all we have for the moment. And if you don't like it, tough.
And where to you plan to get this big honking rock from? Launch it? Move it from deep space?
Wrong again. Lets see if the model clears it up. Take a piece of plywood and place it in front of a watermelon. The plywood is the atmosphere and the watermelon is the Earth. Now shoot one from 20 feet away with a shotgun loaded with rat shot and one with a 30.06.
Now what is the effect? Of course you have to balance the load in each so that the shotgun is carrying the same energy as the rifle bullet but with the shotgun the energy is scattered over a wider area of effect. The plywood/atmosphere will stop a good bit of it and parts that get through will have lost much of their energy from passing.
What did the rifle bullet do to the watermellon? What was the effect of the plywood on it? Sure your going to have heat effect from the dust and that is bad, but that is manageable. The rifle slug is end game. You don't manage that. You don't survive it.
By the way, the smaller the particles, the higher up in the atmosphere they will explode. Better have them up there than on the ground.
Next!
I know exactly what a gravity tug is. I suggested that we use one a few posts back to move a moon from Jupiter to Venus. So, yeah I know what is and how it works. I also know this, we don't have the experience to make it work. And we don't have time to learn.
You say this is "much safer" like nukes are a bad thing? Actually the nuclear option is much safer because with out present level of understanding it is the best thing that will work. Hell, it's the only thing. Are you opposed to using nukes because they have that word nuclear in them?
We would not just start lobbing nuclear bombs at a target and hoping one of them works. We would send a highly trained team out there to ether demolish it into manageable chunks or change is course with nuclear demolitions, with a carefully thought up plan.
You know why all this solar sail and gravity tug plan came up? or why the nuclear option has been pretty much shunned? Because some hippie scientist didn't like the idea of using nukes in space, if forget his name, not even to save the planet.
An I completely agree with you. We can have people working on two plans but lets put priority where it's due. But lets not just dismiss the nuclear demolition / deflection plan out of hand because we don't like it. Because a gravity tug or solar sails sounds better. Nukes are still the best option on the table and until something better comes along we need to go with what we know.
Keep researching solar sails and gravity tugs but for the foreseeable future it's nukes or nothing.
Wrong'o buck'o. I gave a very good description of the Tzar Bomb and MIRV warheads several weeks ago. Feel free to look it up. And that is Tzar, not Tsar, I made that mistake before.
That is why we would send several teams on separate ships. It's that eggs in the one basket thing again. You know that really bad movie with Bruce Willis in it that people like to drag up about shit like this? Remember what happened in the end? Something fucked up. If you send robots, even hundreds of them, and you encounter something that they are not prepared / designed for then its game over. With manned missions you have a second chance. There is always that chance that someone who is on the spot maybe able to fix the problem. With robots you don't' have that chance.
I fully understand the shotgun effect. The damage would be tremendous but it would be manageable. Even if you had 30 or 40 chunks that did make it to the surface and blow holes in the crust a mile wide that would be bad but not end of the world bad. We have a chance of surviving that. Maybe not as a civilization but as a species.
I'm thinking dinosaur killer when I say punched through to the mantle because that is what that one did. It rang the planet like a bell. That would very likely kills us as a species.
If there is a dinosaur killer out there coming at us most likely we are boned but the nuke and blasting it to rubble is still the only option if we can't deflect it. And if we can deflect it, it will be with nukes because once again, its all we got.
Yeah, was expecting an answer like that. Okay, wise ass, what is your plan? Pull a solar sail out of your ass or a gravity tug, or a mass driver. You can't because they don't exist.
And you missed the whole point of my comment. We can't use fantastic technology like this because we can't. We don't know how. We have theories but that is all they are. We have nukes and rockets, and that is it. We don't know anything about attaching solar sails to rocks in space. An granted, we don't know much about blowing them up with nukes. But we know more about the latter than the former.
That movie maybe Hollywood BS right now but its closer to reality than solar sales and gravity tugs.
Not completely but I know enough to know the difference between a rifle slug and a light scattering of small buckshot from a distance.
You realize that no human has been beyond LEO (more or less) for over 30 years? ...
We have lots of ICBMs to expend
Don't take this the wrong way but that first comment sounds like an excuse to me. My repose is "so." Even if we had never been beyond LEO we would go because we have no choice. The results of not going are total end of everything. We'll go and we'll send manned ships. Several manned ships. And we'll do it because there is no other choice.
ICBMS won't work. They are ballistic weapons. They don't have the steering jets that would require them to change course in space. That old '70 movie where they used them is bullshit.
Gravity Tractor? You know I love these sky high fantasy ideas to deflect asteroids as much as anyone else but shouldn't we be concentrating on what is real? If an asteroid does threaten Earth in the next few years we will use nuclear demolitions on it. We will not use a gravity tractor, laser beams, or giant snow balls. Nor will we attach plasma engines or mass drivers to it. We will use nuclear demolitions because that is, simply, all we have.
We will not send a robot to do it nor will we send some type of futuristic space ship driven by plasma/ion engines. It will be a manned ship with old style chemical rockets right out of the '60. Why? Because we have over 60 years experience with them and they will get the job done. We'll send men and not a robot because the mission is to important to have place in the hands on questionable technology. A robot breaks down and the mission is over. With men at least you have some hope they can fix it. Yes, it will probably be one way but the pilots will know that. They will go anyway.
Yes, we will break it up in to smaller pieces because that is best. Don't give me that shotgun crap about it scattering the damage over a wider area. We will think of that and cover it. If we let a huge honking rock ride in the atmosphere will not even slow it down. It will punch through it like it isn't even there. Worse is it will punch through the crust to the mantel causing shockwaves all around the planet.
We wont' use one nuke. We will blowup the big one then we will blow up the smaller ones into smaller pieces. We will do this until the chunks are small enough that the atmosphere will handle. With smaller chunks there is more surface area for the atmosphere to work on. Most importantly the smaller chunks will not "crack the crust" as one fat ass one would.
Well I think that I'm about to get called a troll but I've owned several systems over the last few years. Some have had nforce chipssets and others a mixture of AMD, Intel, and VIA. When I setdown and think about the systems that I have had the most trouble out of have nforce chipsets.
My current system has a AMD chipset in it and it has been the most stable and trouble free system I've. I bought two systems a few years ago. One for a linux server and the other for a HTPC. The linux server was a VIA / Bisostar system and the other was a Suttle nforce3. The biostar is now living in my sons room as a game machine and the shuttle is still a htpc. There has never been an issue with the biostar. But the shuttle has been the most troublesome system I've had. I've replaced everything in it from the graphics card, memory, cpu, and the PS and it still every 6 months eats itself. Last night the screen turned blue and it scragged the OS.
The system I had before this one was a Nforce4 and it had issues. Sometimes I had to cycle the power a couple of times to get it to boot. Once it was up it would run fine for months but would do some strange things.
I've know other people with nforce chipsets that have had no issues with them. But I do find it interesting that I do.