Ignore the other poster. Even connections just listed as 3Mbps/1Mbps are probably the median or above median number for the US. When friends of ours sprung for fiber listed at 10Mbps/3Mbps, we were all jealous, as that was 2-10x better than what we were getting. Of course, that was costing them over $100 US per month.
We're a third-world country when it comes to bandwidth, almost.
Sadly, it was a step up for me. From rural Vermont I was getting 0.75Mb down, and 0.2Mb up, on DSL, which was the only thing available. (I was 20 miles from where cable ended, there was no fiber in the state, for the most part.) I moved to the outskirts of a city, and on a limited budget, pay $40/month for 1.5Mb down, and about 0.3Mb up.
That's the state of broadband in the US. If I was willing to pay $80-$100, I could add phone and TV, and double those speeds. But I'm not willing to do that.
We're a decade behind Europe and Japan in both cell phones and internet connections. Part of it is the size and population density of most of the US, the other part is a legacy of Ma Bell and the monopolies on communications networks.
Are you fucking kidding me? Cheaper? This is a $50 game with a $10/month subscription fee. That's ridiculous already. If they can't make a profit off that, they shouldn't be in business.
This is triple-dipping, at the best.
Doom3 sold 3.5 million copies. If this sells a million copies, and a single month of subscription to go with it, that's a gross of $60 million. One website said the parent company got an investment of $50 million recently. Even if all that went to the game, that's a $10 million profit, WITHOUT the triple-dipping of in-game ads, and with only a single month of subscription. Every 100,000 people that purchase another month subscription puts $1 million into their pockets, before the in-game ads. To include ads is just obscene.
I'm starting to feel like an old, ornery codger, but you know, fuck this shit. I used to blow tons of money on games. In the last 5-7 years or so, it's become less and less and less. In the last year, I've purchased 8 games, which cost me a total of about $100. Most of these were either indie or older titles. None had a subscription. None had in-game advertising. None cost more than $30.
They adequately fill the time I have to waste on them, and they don't rip me off, nor piss me off.
I guess I'm old enough now that I don't need to buy any games. I don't need to have the latest shiny thing. In looking at all the fools who will pay way more for the game than it's worth, pay way more per month to play than is reasonable, and despite all that, sit through in-game ads, I feel like an idiot. I should be trying to sell them some useless garbage, rather than doing what I'm doing for a job now. There seems to be an endless supply of stupid people with too much money.
Papers with some of the dumbest, most glaring mistakes......two dies...
"Dies" is a verb, meaning "to cease to live". A die is a single polyhedron with some numbering scheme designed to make semi-random numerical results when rolled/thrown/dropped. Dice are more than one die.
For quite some time now I've wondered what a LFT market would look like. You buy shares, and can't sell them for a quarter or a year or something. It would be all about wise, safe investments. Too bad people would rather play the zero-sum lottery game.
But boringball is a pretty good description. I'm at the point now where the only sports I can really enjoy watching are Hockey and MMA. Games where the rules either aren't enforced or randomly enforced, (basketball) or games that have more down-time and commercials than actual action (american football, baseball) don't interest me in the least.
What I really want to see is a 1 minute time-limit per batter in baseball. If they're not out or on base by the end of 1 minute, they walk. If you let it get to a full count, you'll have to be pitching a ball every 10 seconds.
Undercooked? It was a fucking disaster of a launch. They launched a game before they had the servers ready. For some reason they thought that the 80-90% of Linux/Unix UT servers would magically become Windows servers because they only had a Windows server at launch. That meant that 80% of the UT servers in the world didn't transition to UT3. Great idea - launch a multiplayer game, and hope your half-dozen servers serving 10-20 people each will cut it.
They made some of the most idiotic choices about their maps they could make. Before, maps were moderate sized. They relied on all the textures, sounds, meshes, etc to be installed on the client computer. If you didn't have those, you'd download them.
Their brilliant idea for UT3 was to "cook" their maps - essentially zipping ALL the textures, sounds, etc needed for a map into one gigantic file. Maps used to be 0.4-5 mb, at the absolute most. Now the average map runs 50-100 mb. Disk space usage is obscene like that, and the time it takes to download maps is noticeable on a fast connection, and game-ending on a slow connection.
Linux has pretty much perfected package managers. I don't for the life of me understand how they felt zipping it all up was a better idea.
Add to those disasters broken menus, designed for a console, (no back buttons, flaky arrow navigation, first letter of choice doesn't go there) a very shitty game selection screen, no crosshair customization which has been standard in UT for years now, and vehicles which drive like shit, and you've got a lot of angry fans.
In the last year, they've made some improvements. But overall, the game is still a half-assed implementation of what it used to be. A pretty one, but still very broken. You can hack around the cross hairs, but when they code a small vehicle to weigh 100x a large one because it doesn't have the traction they want, you know it's a half-assed game.
Not only was the Linux client promised, a Linux version of the editor was talked about during the early days. I'm an almost decade old fan of UT, but these things not ever happening, plus a fucking awful game, with significantly reduced functionality from the previous version, made it hard to like the game. Haven't played it in months, despite having a dedicated server at my service. I'm not sure I'm going to buy any more UT games either.
A link? Hardly. They contain a link shortener, with no clue as to where it leads. Gotta save as many characters as possible...
With the vast amount of garbage in the world, I'm at the point now where I do NOT click on link shorteners. If it's not goatse, it's a blog that copied a blog that copied a blog that twisted a summary of a blog that got misinformation from someone who couldn't understand an actual piece of news.
It's the same reason that half the time I look at links in a slashdot summary, and either do my own search, or just close the tab.
I'm not interested in wasting my time driving ad dollars to unfathomably shitty blogs.
Ridiculously high priced, requiring a massive investment in all new equipment, and generally not worth the upgrade?
I'd totally agree.
I don't watch much in the way of TV or movies. But recently, I got to see some "high definition sports!!!!!!!". Really, when HD is lower quality than what the monitor on my desk gives me, for double the price, it's laughable. So far, I've been pretty unimpressed with HD. It's such a marginal upgrade that I'm amazed that the world has been suckered into it. Of course, there's nothing stopping 3-D from being taken up like HD, except a recession and the glasses. Fix those, (there was a "3-D without glasses story the other day here) and it might take off like HD.
Rote learning, for SOME PEOPLE, is a great method of retaining stuff. For a lot of people, it doesn't do a damn thing. It's pretty well established that there are a lot of different learning styles. Rote learning works well for only a couple of them.
Additionally, higher test scores don't have a lot to do with much of anything related to learning. My master's thesis looked at whether or not kids even tried on the standardized tests in school. About 30% tried. The rest just blew them off. Despite that, our school was smack dab on the line between "needs a kick in the ass" and "doing ok". My little sister graduated at the top of her HS class. Then failed to get into her first 3 colleges of choice, because her SAT scores were just below average. In college, she did fantastically well, won a presidential award for her work junior year and her senior year was free.
Test scores measure a few things: Test taking ability, motivation, basic content knowledge and logic. They measure a terribly small amount of learning. I took a standardized test to become certified to teach Chemistry at the HS level, despite only taking Chem 101 seven years prior. (I might have to teach one, so I was curious as to what was on it. It wasn't necessary for the science teaching cert, which just required passing one content area.) I missed the cutoff for that by 3 points. Why? I didn't know a large chunk of the content, but I'm a damn good test taker, and I can logic my way through standardized tests pretty well.
Rote learning has a place, for sure. But it's a damn smaller place than the 90% coverage it gets in school currently. Most of the state education tests are largely rote memory. They do NOT test learning, logic, creative thinking, etc. They're just a brain dump of content, whether or not it's correct or logical.
The US isn't going to improve education until this changes. When your "learning" is based on spitting out rote memory stuff, all your "teaching" becomes rote learning. That is a huge disservice to everyone involved. Except the testing companies.
I tried to re-read your post. I still don't see how it's in any way feasible in 20 years. Without an anchor mass, you need waaaay more ribbon to provide enough centripetal force (putting it beyond GSO) to keep it taught. The whole reason that carbon nanotubes are looked at for this is that they are extremely low density. If you want to haul 50 tons to orbit, you're going to need a lot of climbers at the end, or you're going to have them way past GSO to provide the counterbalance.
Regardless, "built in 100km sections" should probably be restated to read, "built out of fairy wings". Carbon nanotubes have like a 30 cm record length last I checked. Can you name anything, anything at all that we've made in 100km sections? Even our transoceanic fiber only gets laid in 40km sections. Now we're talking about robots doing this, climbing a ribbon, through the atmosphere to space, from storms to vacuum, hard radiation, and debris.
I'm sorry, but every time someone mentions "space elevator", there are 95 things that are currently impossible to do for ever 5 that we can do. Hell, a Launch Loop is an order of magnitude more feasible, and nobody has even considered laying the groundwork for one.
We don't have:
More than 30cm of continuous carbon nanotubes A way to join them Any experience building anything of this scale Any experience having a ROBOT build anything even 5 orders of magnitude smaller than this. (We don't even use robots to build bridges, sky scrapers, and power lines. You're seriously telling me that in 20 years, we'll have robots able to climb to space? Really?) Any experience designing a robot to work flawlessly in the range of environments encountered for weeks or months at a time. Any expertise using these particular materials in construction.
What happens when a climber dies half-way up for some reason? Do you send another one up to pitch it off the cable? When a cosmic ray trips a bit in it, and it lets go of the cable, what then? When a hunk of space junk punches a hole through the cable, does it stay up? Can the climbers get past that part?
A space elevator belongs in the same realm as phasers set to stun, colonies on other plants, and universal constructors. All are "technologically possible", and none are likely in the next 50-100 years.
Humm, so other than the fact that we're still an order of magnitude from "a few meters long", we don't have any such matrix yet, nor do we have proof that it would provide the same tensile strength as solid carbon nanotubes, and we don't have the crawlers, nor the beginning anchor mass, which is generally determined to have to be large, like an asteroid or something, since it would cost too much to send an appropriate anchor into orbit, it's possible?
I'd seriously wager that we're closer to being able to genetically modify pigs to fly than to overcome those "engineering challenges". Other than what I pointed out above, that a very, very thin ribbon would be needed for us to be able to get it into orbit, nothing you've mentioned is possible now, nor will be possible for many decades, and perhaps never.
You've completely ignored perhaps the biggest issue, which is that we've never automated the construction of AND THE TESTING OF a structure longer than the circumference of the earth. Do you seriously think anyone will go for putting a structure like this into orbit without a pretty serious guarantee that it will work?
Seriously...when, in the next 30, 50 years someone makes an earth-based, real-size mockup of this, complete with the automated construction, QC, and load testing of a ribbon longer than the circumference of the earth, wake me up in my nursing home. Because then we'll only be 10-30 years away from being able to deploy this in orbit.
"no obvious impossibilities" is true, of course. There are no obvious impossibilities in building a colony ship with a thousand people and sending it to orbit Europa, either. We can build structures in orbit, we can fly through space, we can build biodomes that sort-of-work. What's the chance of that happening? About the same as a space elevator, for a lot of the same reasons. The only difference is that a space elevator would be financially more rewarding.
Lots of things are possible should the "engineering challenges" be overcome. A space elevator happens to fall firmly into the camp of "lacking 95% of the engineering needed to overcome those challenges".
Yeah, it gives me a case of the facepalm every time I see it as well. GSO is 42,164 km away, ala wikipedia. Call it 4.2x10^7 meters. The only material close to being possible to use for a cable are carbon nanotubes. Lets make a thread of a carbon nanotube cable, which does not exist in lengths more than like 30 cm at the moment, with a diameter of 1mm. That is an area of 3x10^-6 m^2, and results in a volume of about 132 cubic meters. This is over 50% more than the shuttle can hold.
Assuming we could go get an asteroid, a very, very large asteroid, and put it into GSO without either skipping it off the atmosphere or turning a city into a crater, we're left with the issue that we can't get a tiny, continuous cable into orbit with any current technology. The shuttle comes in 50% too small, and doesn't get to GSO, even Falcon 9 only has cargo volume of 14m^3 to GTO!
The next option is to somehow attach 1x10^9 30 cm sections of nanotube together, in a way that doesn't weaken them. That doesn't exist. We'd also have to be able to do this in space, since we can't realistically get a continuous cable up there.
So the only things stopping a space elevator are:
1) 1x10^9 carbon nanotube units short of reaching GSO 2) No way currently to move a large asteroid into GSO safely, nor many nations willing to let someone try for fear of an extinction event. 3) No way to get a continuous cable into GSO, despite the problems of #1 4) No known way to stick 1x10^9 chunks of carbon nanotube together effectively, preserving their high tensile strength. In space. 5) Current climber technology is shooting for 1km. That's only 42,163 km short of GSO. 6) Coincidently, the earth's circumference is about 40,000 km. Have we ever built ANYTHING on the scale of the earth's circumference? Have we ever tried to stress-test a cable of more than a km or two?
Sure, we could shoot for a continuous, 0.1 mm diameter cable, and that might fit on Falcon 9 and be possible to bring to GSO. But again, we're left with the problem with the asteroid, the climber, and stress-testing and QCing a cable that we can't build in a billionth of that length at a time, longer than the circumference of the earth. Or we somehow come up with a way to bond nanotubes together in a way that preserves their tensile strength, in space, with the ability to test and QC the work, and we're only left with the asteroid and climber issues....
Magic is unlikely to be better to research, but not by a lot...
Pretty much. Except we already have the infrastructure to filter water here.
I don't understand how water components in rocks has gotten so much press. If you're going to rocket all the infrastructure needed to extract the water from these rocks to the moon, why not just ship water and a good recycling setup. It would probably weigh as much or less, and be 100000x more energy efficient.
The issue is that those 200 clouds would all be different. And you'd probably never find another one like any one of them. In fact, it's likely that you'll find a bunch of different conditions within all those clouds.
That doesn't help you down the line. We can't even tell what cloud properties are like without flying a plane through the cloud. And when we do, two things happen: First, we change the cloud around the plane. Second, we're only sampling a tiny part of the cloud.
Statistics start to fall down when you have a nearly infinite number of choices, and no ability to make use of the statistics. And by that I mean that even knowing what conditions statistically are good for cloud seeding, the only way to find out if they are occurring is to fly a plane through the cloud and sample it. That doesn't really help, since there's no predictive ability.
And the worst part? Rainfall is so variable that the statistics would be nearly impossible. I'm guessing you'd need far more than 100 tries to get anywhere. Even across a square mile you'll often find rainfall differences in excess of 100%. Where do you sample? How do you ensure that you got an accurate measure of rainfall? If you set out a rain gauge, and all the rain fell the mile before it got to it, you've got useless data.
Mix high internal variability, with high spatial variability, and an inability for us to measure almost any part, and you've got something pretty impossible to do a controlled study on.
I know you think you're very smart. But you really don't understand how different clouds are, or you don't understand what a control group is.
If you were going to test a fishing lure, would you use a "control group" consisting of trout, bass, pike, baleen whales, and tiger sharks? Would you then apply the results to all "fish", despite the fact that some of those weren't fish at all? I would hope not.
This is the case with clouds.
If you'd like to know more, try Wallace and Hobbs. It's one of the cornerstones of modern atmospheric science. I know you're all hip and can make fancy [citation needed] fake-wiki code, but there are some subjects you can't be an expert on just by casually reading a page on the internet. Neurosurgery and cloud microphysics are two of those things.
Not many people studying clouds are surprised. It's pretty well established that any sort of disturbance can affect cloud formation. There have been discussions for years that "cloud seeding" may just be caused by the plane flying through the clouds.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore the other poster. Even connections just listed as 3Mbps/1Mbps are probably the median or above median number for the US. When friends of ours sprung for fiber listed at 10Mbps/3Mbps, we were all jealous, as that was 2-10x better than what we were getting. Of course, that was costing them over $100 US per month.
We're a third-world country when it comes to bandwidth, almost.
Sadly, it was a step up for me. From rural Vermont I was getting 0.75Mb down, and 0.2Mb up, on DSL, which was the only thing available. (I was 20 miles from where cable ended, there was no fiber in the state, for the most part.) I moved to the outskirts of a city, and on a limited budget, pay $40/month for 1.5Mb down, and about 0.3Mb up.
That's the state of broadband in the US. If I was willing to pay $80-$100, I could add phone and TV, and double those speeds. But I'm not willing to do that.
We're a decade behind Europe and Japan in both cell phones and internet connections. Part of it is the size and population density of most of the US, the other part is a legacy of Ma Bell and the monopolies on communications networks.
Are you fucking kidding me? Cheaper? This is a $50 game with a $10/month subscription fee. That's ridiculous already. If they can't make a profit off that, they shouldn't be in business.
This is triple-dipping, at the best.
Doom3 sold 3.5 million copies. If this sells a million copies, and a single month of subscription to go with it, that's a gross of $60 million. One website said the parent company got an investment of $50 million recently. Even if all that went to the game, that's a $10 million profit, WITHOUT the triple-dipping of in-game ads, and with only a single month of subscription. Every 100,000 people that purchase another month subscription puts $1 million into their pockets, before the in-game ads. To include ads is just obscene.
I'm starting to feel like an old, ornery codger, but you know, fuck this shit. I used to blow tons of money on games. In the last 5-7 years or so, it's become less and less and less. In the last year, I've purchased 8 games, which cost me a total of about $100. Most of these were either indie or older titles. None had a subscription. None had in-game advertising. None cost more than $30.
They adequately fill the time I have to waste on them, and they don't rip me off, nor piss me off.
I guess I'm old enough now that I don't need to buy any games. I don't need to have the latest shiny thing. In looking at all the fools who will pay way more for the game than it's worth, pay way more per month to play than is reasonable, and despite all that, sit through in-game ads, I feel like an idiot. I should be trying to sell them some useless garbage, rather than doing what I'm doing for a job now. There seems to be an endless supply of stupid people with too much money.
Very cool way to do it! Thanks!
Papers with some of the dumbest, most glaring mistakes......two dies...
"Dies" is a verb, meaning "to cease to live". A die is a single polyhedron with some numbering scheme designed to make semi-random numerical results when rolled/thrown/dropped. Dice are more than one die.
I couldn't parse that for a few seconds....
The parent's Step 1 costs a bunch of time and money up front. Yours is probably quicker and more cost effective....
For quite some time now I've wondered what a LFT market would look like. You buy shares, and can't sell them for a quarter or a year or something. It would be all about wise, safe investments. Too bad people would rather play the zero-sum lottery game.
Don't feel bad. I posted the same thing above, then scrolled down some more and found that multiple people had beaten me to it by 3-4 hours.
Posting to the wrong comment is definitely a step above me...
Best I've seen in awhile is this.
But boringball is a pretty good description. I'm at the point now where the only sports I can really enjoy watching are Hockey and MMA. Games where the rules either aren't enforced or randomly enforced, (basketball) or games that have more down-time and commercials than actual action (american football, baseball) don't interest me in the least.
What I really want to see is a 1 minute time-limit per batter in baseball. If they're not out or on base by the end of 1 minute, they walk. If you let it get to a full count, you'll have to be pitching a ball every 10 seconds.
Undercooked? It was a fucking disaster of a launch. They launched a game before they had the servers ready. For some reason they thought that the 80-90% of Linux/Unix UT servers would magically become Windows servers because they only had a Windows server at launch. That meant that 80% of the UT servers in the world didn't transition to UT3. Great idea - launch a multiplayer game, and hope your half-dozen servers serving 10-20 people each will cut it.
They made some of the most idiotic choices about their maps they could make. Before, maps were moderate sized. They relied on all the textures, sounds, meshes, etc to be installed on the client computer. If you didn't have those, you'd download them.
Their brilliant idea for UT3 was to "cook" their maps - essentially zipping ALL the textures, sounds, etc needed for a map into one gigantic file. Maps used to be 0.4-5 mb, at the absolute most. Now the average map runs 50-100 mb. Disk space usage is obscene like that, and the time it takes to download maps is noticeable on a fast connection, and game-ending on a slow connection.
Linux has pretty much perfected package managers. I don't for the life of me understand how they felt zipping it all up was a better idea.
Add to those disasters broken menus, designed for a console, (no back buttons, flaky arrow navigation, first letter of choice doesn't go there) a very shitty game selection screen, no crosshair customization which has been standard in UT for years now, and vehicles which drive like shit, and you've got a lot of angry fans.
In the last year, they've made some improvements. But overall, the game is still a half-assed implementation of what it used to be. A pretty one, but still very broken. You can hack around the cross hairs, but when they code a small vehicle to weigh 100x a large one because it doesn't have the traction they want, you know it's a half-assed game.
Not only was the Linux client promised, a Linux version of the editor was talked about during the early days. I'm an almost decade old fan of UT, but these things not ever happening, plus a fucking awful game, with significantly reduced functionality from the previous version, made it hard to like the game. Haven't played it in months, despite having a dedicated server at my service. I'm not sure I'm going to buy any more UT games either.
A link? Hardly. They contain a link shortener, with no clue as to where it leads. Gotta save as many characters as possible...
With the vast amount of garbage in the world, I'm at the point now where I do NOT click on link shorteners. If it's not goatse, it's a blog that copied a blog that copied a blog that twisted a summary of a blog that got misinformation from someone who couldn't understand an actual piece of news.
It's the same reason that half the time I look at links in a slashdot summary, and either do my own search, or just close the tab.
I'm not interested in wasting my time driving ad dollars to unfathomably shitty blogs.
Take it for a drag?
3D is to HD as HD is to standard definition
Ridiculously high priced, requiring a massive investment in all new equipment, and generally not worth the upgrade?
I'd totally agree.
I don't watch much in the way of TV or movies. But recently, I got to see some "high definition sports!!!!!!!". Really, when HD is lower quality than what the monitor on my desk gives me, for double the price, it's laughable. So far, I've been pretty unimpressed with HD. It's such a marginal upgrade that I'm amazed that the world has been suckered into it. Of course, there's nothing stopping 3-D from being taken up like HD, except a recession and the glasses. Fix those, (there was a "3-D without glasses story the other day here) and it might take off like HD.
Nope. You're mostly wrong.
Rote learning, for SOME PEOPLE, is a great method of retaining stuff. For a lot of people, it doesn't do a damn thing. It's pretty well established that there are a lot of different learning styles. Rote learning works well for only a couple of them.
Additionally, higher test scores don't have a lot to do with much of anything related to learning. My master's thesis looked at whether or not kids even tried on the standardized tests in school. About 30% tried. The rest just blew them off. Despite that, our school was smack dab on the line between "needs a kick in the ass" and "doing ok". My little sister graduated at the top of her HS class. Then failed to get into her first 3 colleges of choice, because her SAT scores were just below average. In college, she did fantastically well, won a presidential award for her work junior year and her senior year was free.
Test scores measure a few things: Test taking ability, motivation, basic content knowledge and logic. They measure a terribly small amount of learning. I took a standardized test to become certified to teach Chemistry at the HS level, despite only taking Chem 101 seven years prior. (I might have to teach one, so I was curious as to what was on it. It wasn't necessary for the science teaching cert, which just required passing one content area.) I missed the cutoff for that by 3 points. Why? I didn't know a large chunk of the content, but I'm a damn good test taker, and I can logic my way through standardized tests pretty well.
Rote learning has a place, for sure. But it's a damn smaller place than the 90% coverage it gets in school currently. Most of the state education tests are largely rote memory. They do NOT test learning, logic, creative thinking, etc. They're just a brain dump of content, whether or not it's correct or logical.
The US isn't going to improve education until this changes. When your "learning" is based on spitting out rote memory stuff, all your "teaching" becomes rote learning. That is a huge disservice to everyone involved. Except the testing companies.
Shotgun!
Eeerrrr...I mean 'Gunner'!
I tried to re-read your post. I still don't see how it's in any way feasible in 20 years. Without an anchor mass, you need waaaay more ribbon to provide enough centripetal force (putting it beyond GSO) to keep it taught. The whole reason that carbon nanotubes are looked at for this is that they are extremely low density. If you want to haul 50 tons to orbit, you're going to need a lot of climbers at the end, or you're going to have them way past GSO to provide the counterbalance.
Regardless, "built in 100km sections" should probably be restated to read, "built out of fairy wings". Carbon nanotubes have like a 30 cm record length last I checked. Can you name anything, anything at all that we've made in 100km sections? Even our transoceanic fiber only gets laid in 40km sections. Now we're talking about robots doing this, climbing a ribbon, through the atmosphere to space, from storms to vacuum, hard radiation, and debris.
I'm sorry, but every time someone mentions "space elevator", there are 95 things that are currently impossible to do for ever 5 that we can do. Hell, a Launch Loop is an order of magnitude more feasible, and nobody has even considered laying the groundwork for one.
We don't have:
More than 30cm of continuous carbon nanotubes
A way to join them
Any experience building anything of this scale
Any experience having a ROBOT build anything even 5 orders of magnitude smaller than this. (We don't even use robots to build bridges, sky scrapers, and power lines. You're seriously telling me that in 20 years, we'll have robots able to climb to space? Really?)
Any experience designing a robot to work flawlessly in the range of environments encountered for weeks or months at a time.
Any expertise using these particular materials in construction.
What happens when a climber dies half-way up for some reason? Do you send another one up to pitch it off the cable? When a cosmic ray trips a bit in it, and it lets go of the cable, what then? When a hunk of space junk punches a hole through the cable, does it stay up? Can the climbers get past that part?
A space elevator belongs in the same realm as phasers set to stun, colonies on other plants, and universal constructors. All are "technologically possible", and none are likely in the next 50-100 years.
Humm, so other than the fact that we're still an order of magnitude from "a few meters long", we don't have any such matrix yet, nor do we have proof that it would provide the same tensile strength as solid carbon nanotubes, and we don't have the crawlers, nor the beginning anchor mass, which is generally determined to have to be large, like an asteroid or something, since it would cost too much to send an appropriate anchor into orbit, it's possible?
I'd seriously wager that we're closer to being able to genetically modify pigs to fly than to overcome those "engineering challenges". Other than what I pointed out above, that a very, very thin ribbon would be needed for us to be able to get it into orbit, nothing you've mentioned is possible now, nor will be possible for many decades, and perhaps never.
You've completely ignored perhaps the biggest issue, which is that we've never automated the construction of AND THE TESTING OF a structure longer than the circumference of the earth. Do you seriously think anyone will go for putting a structure like this into orbit without a pretty serious guarantee that it will work?
Seriously...when, in the next 30, 50 years someone makes an earth-based, real-size mockup of this, complete with the automated construction, QC, and load testing of a ribbon longer than the circumference of the earth, wake me up in my nursing home. Because then we'll only be 10-30 years away from being able to deploy this in orbit.
"no obvious impossibilities" is true, of course. There are no obvious impossibilities in building a colony ship with a thousand people and sending it to orbit Europa, either. We can build structures in orbit, we can fly through space, we can build biodomes that sort-of-work. What's the chance of that happening? About the same as a space elevator, for a lot of the same reasons. The only difference is that a space elevator would be financially more rewarding.
Lots of things are possible should the "engineering challenges" be overcome. A space elevator happens to fall firmly into the camp of "lacking 95% of the engineering needed to overcome those challenges".
Yeah, it gives me a case of the facepalm every time I see it as well. GSO is 42,164 km away, ala wikipedia. Call it 4.2x10^7 meters. The only material close to being possible to use for a cable are carbon nanotubes. Lets make a thread of a carbon nanotube cable, which does not exist in lengths more than like 30 cm at the moment, with a diameter of 1mm. That is an area of 3x10^-6 m^2, and results in a volume of about 132 cubic meters. This is over 50% more than the shuttle can hold.
Assuming we could go get an asteroid, a very, very large asteroid, and put it into GSO without either skipping it off the atmosphere or turning a city into a crater, we're left with the issue that we can't get a tiny, continuous cable into orbit with any current technology. The shuttle comes in 50% too small, and doesn't get to GSO, even Falcon 9 only has cargo volume of 14m^3 to GTO!
The next option is to somehow attach 1x10^9 30 cm sections of nanotube together, in a way that doesn't weaken them. That doesn't exist. We'd also have to be able to do this in space, since we can't realistically get a continuous cable up there.
So the only things stopping a space elevator are:
1) 1x10^9 carbon nanotube units short of reaching GSO
2) No way currently to move a large asteroid into GSO safely, nor many nations willing to let someone try for fear of an extinction event.
3) No way to get a continuous cable into GSO, despite the problems of #1
4) No known way to stick 1x10^9 chunks of carbon nanotube together effectively, preserving their high tensile strength. In space.
5) Current climber technology is shooting for 1km. That's only 42,163 km short of GSO.
6) Coincidently, the earth's circumference is about 40,000 km. Have we ever built ANYTHING on the scale of the earth's circumference? Have we ever tried to stress-test a cable of more than a km or two?
Sure, we could shoot for a continuous, 0.1 mm diameter cable, and that might fit on Falcon 9 and be possible to bring to GSO. But again, we're left with the problem with the asteroid, the climber, and stress-testing and QCing a cable that we can't build in a billionth of that length at a time, longer than the circumference of the earth. Or we somehow come up with a way to bond nanotubes together in a way that preserves their tensile strength, in space, with the ability to test and QC the work, and we're only left with the asteroid and climber issues....
Magic is unlikely to be better to research, but not by a lot...
Pretty much. Except we already have the infrastructure to filter water here.
I don't understand how water components in rocks has gotten so much press. If you're going to rocket all the infrastructure needed to extract the water from these rocks to the moon, why not just ship water and a good recycling setup. It would probably weigh as much or less, and be 100000x more energy efficient.
Here's my reasoning from another reply.
The issue is that those 200 clouds would all be different. And you'd probably never find another one like any one of them. In fact, it's likely that you'll find a bunch of different conditions within all those clouds.
That doesn't help you down the line. We can't even tell what cloud properties are like without flying a plane through the cloud. And when we do, two things happen: First, we change the cloud around the plane. Second, we're only sampling a tiny part of the cloud.
Statistics start to fall down when you have a nearly infinite number of choices, and no ability to make use of the statistics. And by that I mean that even knowing what conditions statistically are good for cloud seeding, the only way to find out if they are occurring is to fly a plane through the cloud and sample it. That doesn't really help, since there's no predictive ability.
And the worst part? Rainfall is so variable that the statistics would be nearly impossible. I'm guessing you'd need far more than 100 tries to get anywhere. Even across a square mile you'll often find rainfall differences in excess of 100%. Where do you sample? How do you ensure that you got an accurate measure of rainfall? If you set out a rain gauge, and all the rain fell the mile before it got to it, you've got useless data.
Mix high internal variability, with high spatial variability, and an inability for us to measure almost any part, and you've got something pretty impossible to do a controlled study on.
I know you think you're very smart. But you really don't understand how different clouds are, or you don't understand what a control group is.
If you were going to test a fishing lure, would you use a "control group" consisting of trout, bass, pike, baleen whales, and tiger sharks? Would you then apply the results to all "fish", despite the fact that some of those weren't fish at all? I would hope not.
This is the case with clouds.
If you'd like to know more, try Wallace and Hobbs. It's one of the cornerstones of modern atmospheric science. I know you're all hip and can make fancy [citation needed] fake-wiki code, but there are some subjects you can't be an expert on just by casually reading a page on the internet. Neurosurgery and cloud microphysics are two of those things.
Cheers!
Not many people studying clouds are surprised. It's pretty well established that any sort of disturbance can affect cloud formation. There have been discussions for years that "cloud seeding" may just be caused by the plane flying through the clouds.