Sorry but if you dig deep into the article (and even look into DARPA's slides and animations) you'll see it doesnt have any engines except for four small RCS (reaction control thrusters) on the rear (you'll need to view the animations). The mission profile also shows this with the only course/speed changes coming from the aero surfaces and thrusters. As much as I'd like to believe that DARPA's leapfrogged the current state of the art, there is no propulsion system (and certainly not scramjet/ramjet, no air intakes or external combustion surfaces like NASA's waverider.)
It's an unpowered lifting body, no engines, so it basically glides (at a very high speed!) and is capable of surviving re-entry.
It looks like it's a weapons delivery system capable of avoiding terminal ballistic missile defenses. A MARV (MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle).
I thought we (the U.S.) were the only ones with a (semi)-robust missile defense system (well I guess the Isrealis also). I guess DARPA's just planning ahead for the day when the Chinese decide to redress the strategic balance by spending their Trillions on a good BMD. Also I'm thinking it must be so expensive that the only kind of warhead that's worth placing on board is nuclear. But then again maybe there are VERY specific soft targets which you absolutely positively have to kill in an hour (because that's all you know they'll be in that location for). Then a "conventional" warhead could do (or at 13,000MPH just a bunch of tungsten rods "Rods from God" would do. Think of it as an intercontinental sniper rifle with bullets that can swerve around defenses. Good for "decapitating" an enemy, (I guess a lot of threats we face would go away if we could take out just the top few people/person: are you listening Kim Jong-Il? Qaddafi? S&P ratings board?).
I was kinda hoping DARPA was working on a (much) faster version of the Wave-rider hypersonic aircraft. Oh well, guess even they can't beat the laws of physics (and our lack of a good propulsion system).
Even "cooler" would be a laser that could be quickly lofted into space and would zap a target on the earth below. Unfortunately, "Real Genius" notwithstanding we don't have any lasers compact enough to be launched in anything short of a Saturn V (I don't think Dr. Teller's nuke pumped X-Ray laser was ever shown to work). That pesky outer space treaty prohibits us from placing weapons in space so we can't just have laser satellites floating around picking off people we don't like I guess.
I would imagine that since it hasn't been launched yet, they could easily retarget the uber-rover Curiosity to land there.
Of course I have no idea if conditions are suitable for landing (which is already hair-raising enough!) but it seems to be worth looking into. I'm sure the appropriate people at NASA are already doing so (I don't consider them to be nearly as dysfunctional or incompetent as some other parts of the US govt.).
My bad, I thought the Leaf was a hybrid (like a Prius)! So you're right, having lots of Leafs (Leaves?) would make things worse not better. However that's for society as a whole which is usually the last thing on the average person's mind around here.:(
As far as the affordability goes though, the wealth distribution in Vietnam is very bad. Lots of motorbikes but also some Mercedes, Bentleys and Maybachs. I figure anyone whose stolen... I mean made enough money to afford a car can afford a Leaf.
You know, this would be really really useful here in Vietnam where the extraordinary growth rate coupled with communist era bureaucracies/corruption has left power supplies lagging far behind demand. I would dearly love a generator I could use to power my abode when the power goes out (typically in the hottest part of the day which in Vietnam is pretty hot!). This is probably true of a lot of developing countries.
Also in my previous career in the film industry having a powerful generator that is not only mobile but transports itself (and cargo and crew!) would be a godsend for shots not on the studio lot.
And motion capture (and probably a whole host of new applications my imagination is too poor to come up with. Surgery? Anatomical imaging? Real time engineering analysis of structural deformation? Radio telescope antennae deployment? Really accurate munitions delivery for "keyhole" shots, personal assassination? Automatically docking/refueling of vehicles?).
so keeping up with science developments is really just restricted to what I can get over the Internet.
That said, I've found the best site for news is sciencedaily.com. I found it because it was rated one of the top 100 web sites on the Internet I think by PCMag. It's really good at giving a very comprehensive (they must have several dozens of articles a day) run down on what's going on in a fashion that's accessible to the intelligent technical professional.
If technology is your thing then I'd recommend MIT's technologyreview.com. It's articles are a little more in depth and focus also on societal implications of the technology being discussed.
Finally, if you're a space nut like me, I'd recommend spacedaily.com (published by the same people who do science daily). Again it's a "just the facts ma'am" web site that is clear and to the point.
There are many other good sites but these give me what I want in the least amount of TIME (which is to me a very precious resource!).
I, for one, would like to welcome our super intelligent Eskimo overlords! (And troglodytes and blind people and habitual sunglass wearers and squinty eyed folk).
I would think that due to the very low acceleration of an ion engine the placement of the tankage wouldn't be a problem. As far as the ion engines goes, while no single engine exists that could push the ISS with the necessary power, why not use (lots) of lower power engines in parallel? However these are just off the cuff suggestions (as was my original post), I am by no means an aeronautics engineer.
In any case your very good points about the Van Allen bets makes my whole conjecture unworkable. Also, I always thought that the shuttle was altitude constrained, not Soyuz. I read somewhere that that is the reason why the ISS and Hubble were in their comparatively low orbits. However as I said, I am by no means an aeronautics engineer! I learn something new everyday.
Yes it would take a lot of energy to get to the moon's orbit and yes you'd need to expend some more to put it into orbit AROUND the moon. If you made judicious use of the "interplanetary expressway" (I think that's what it's called), you could use the chaotic nature of orbits to trade time for energy but you're still going to need a good deal of delta-V.
So why not hook up an ion engine?
Nobody will be living on the thing (it has to go through the Van Allen radiation belts) so all the power for life support from those huge solar arrays will be available. Use this power to hook up an ion engine (with a relatively modest amount of xenon fuel) and a slow spiraling orbit could take you out of LEO to almost anywhere. I'd prefer L1 because the views would be so nice but given a bit more fuel (and a lot more time) you could put it next to, say an asteroid where it could be a really useful base for scientific studies (how about the one that might clock us in 2036?).
In fact, if put into the proper position (relative to the sun) BEHIND the asteroid (very easy due to the negligible gravity) the asteroid will block out any danger from lethal solar flares! (Of course any manned mission to an asteroid should think about using this trick, might be a lot easier than digging into the soil/pebbles/hard rock/baked lava of the asteroid's surface.
NASA's been doing a good job of repurposing old spacecraft for new missions once they've completed their primary mission (like Deep Impact which went on to some more comets or Artemis which is now headed to the moon I think). Why not a whole space station?
By the way, does anyone know if (now that the space shuttle doesn't go there anymore) it can be boosted to a much higher orbit? (the space shuttle barely had enough fuel to reach it). I believe Soyuz, Falcon 9/Dragon and the European resupply ship can go considerably higher. This would make the orbital decay time much much longer and hopefully prevent a repeat of SkyLab (where NASA literally ran out of time).
they didn't seem to regret their transaction(s) because they sold three kids (and not all at once). They seem to have gotten better at it as they went along, getting higher and higher prices. (Or maybe the later ones were just cuter/harder working).
I remember when the first crew boarded the as then under-construction ISS. I turned to a friend of mine and said:
"Maybe from this point on, for the rest of humanity's existence, there will always be a human who is off-planet. From this humble beginning we could hopefully draw an unbroken line to voyages to the planets, other stars and the eventual inhabitation of the galaxy." (or something like that;)
It's sad to think that in 2020 this line may be broken. Hopefully, if no-one else steps up to bat, at least the Chinese will have their space station up and running. I hope they can keep it completely manned (or womanned?).
I'd just like to think I was alive at the time when humanity first became a true spacefaring civilization and didn't drop the ball.
Ok, I know this doesn't solve the problem of actually ANALYZING the data but for storing and moving the data around, what's the best compression algorithm for astronomical (I mean the discipline, not the size!) data.
I used to work for a company that developed a really good compression algorithm using wavelets. At the time it was the only one to be accepted by A-list movie directors (the people with the real power in Hollywood); they refused to go with any of the JPEG or MPEG variants (this was before JPEG 2000 which I understand also uses wavelets). We pitched to JPL the idea that they use some of this technology for some of their mission imaging requirements but they said the data was almost priceless and they couldn't risk losing any data an admittedly "lossy" compression algorithm. Of course they were forced to break this policy with Galileo because the main antenna never opened so only had a tiny fraction of the bandwidth that they originally planned. (Interestingly enough after the Columbia disaster, our equipment was later heavily used by NASA for imaging requirements related to observing the space shuttle. It helped make the conversion to a digital workflow practical which really sped up the time needed to distribute Hi-Res launch videos to all the NASA engineering sites around the country.)
So do astronomers use some lossless compression algorithm? In the case of space based data collection, do they have the computer power to compress it on board? Do they "clean up" the images first to make it easier to compress?
I actually read one of the links (I know, I know...) and saw some (to my non-professional engineer eyes) great or at least interesting ideas.
Like having the "left seat" have flying controls and the "right seat" have the driving controls. Sure, as other posters pointed out, you can't take over in an emergency but I would imagine (since I don't fly a plane) it must make the controls a lot easier to design and use. I wonder why they didn't put the driving controls on the left side since I presume they would use it in the USA not say Britain? Of course you don't need separate enclosed cabins to use this idea.
I'm impressed that hybrid technology is advanced enough that you could carry the additional equipment without a crippling weight penalty. That of course allowed them to do all sorts of interesting things like decoupling the gas engines from the electric motors allowing them to be placed wherever it is best and splitting the gas engines up for redundancy. Having presumably small lightweight electric motors in the wheels takes care of a lot of power train issues I guess. Also having lithium battery assisted takeoff is good for keeping the engines smaller because they don't have to provide brief spikes in power. I wonder if the plane can generate power as it descends (like an aerial version of regenerative breaking)? Can it charge the batteries on a windy day on the ground?
From what I saw in my cursory skimming of the article, the wings are detached before the "car" goes on the road. I guess they didn't really try to optimize the design because this is just a test vehicle (and they designed and built it in a very short amount of time! 4 months!) but I imagine that as long as you're going to leave part of the gear at the airport, why not leave the rear airfoils and electric propeller? That's another benefit from the hybrid design, no mechanical coupling to the propeller, just a power cable.
Anyway even if the overall project doesn't really "take off" (bada bish!) some of these ideas seem very interesting! I wonder if high temperature super conductors could really make this idea "go"!
So these brown dwarfs are essentially big balls of (mostly) hydrogen with the centers under tremendous pressures and temperatures but not quite hot enough to "light" (in a fusion sense). Well what would happen if you managed to drop a fusion bomb on it? (On or near the surface where the temperatures are low but the high gravity might still compress the hydrogen into the megabar range).
While (probably) it would just fizzle, could the concentrated energy ignite just enough so the whole star went boom? (Like a Type I supernova?). I mean the "temperature" of an H-Bomb is in the hundreds of millions of degrees maybe it just requires one tiny (if an H-Bomb is "tiny") spark. Just like you can pour millions of gallons of gasoline on a barely sub-critical mass of Uranium and it won't go bang but one small neutron generator and you've got a mushroom cloud. While the impacts of asteroid and larger bodies could deliver a lot more energy, an H-Bomb could do so more INTENSELY.
I guess this is what the first H-Bomb scientists were worried about when they feared the first H-Bomb *might* ignite the water vapor in the atmosphere and consume the entire world. Just how easy would it be to blow one of these things up? Could you do it with even smaller cooler less dense bodies, say Jupiter (as proposed by sci-fi writer Charles Sheffield) or Neptune? (Tried it on earth, nope doesn't work). Lastly, our sun is already alite, but the RATE of fusion reaction is very slow (each gram of the sun produces far less energy per time than, say, a live elephant). Could we speed it up? Could an H-Bomb (or a suitably powerful laser such as was used in one of the Man-Kzinti war sci-fi books) trigger a local (or maybe not so local) explosion?
I guess this was the general idea behind the movie "Sunshine" (good movie). Seems they had some sort of very dense (causing a local gravitational field) fission bomb to re-ignite the sun. Wish they had a companion book to flesh out some of the details.
Anyway I know these ideas are probably non-sensical to any physicist but don't have enough math and physics knowledge to calculate it for myself. If anyone of you is so inclined and it won't take much time or effort, I'd appreciate the debunking (or not!) of this idle speculation.
(For even crazier speculation, how about igniting all that supposedly great fusion fuel Helium-3 that is just lying around on the lunar surface? Would it be enough to blow the moon out of orbit a la "Space 1999"?)
So (like another poster) I'm not sure how useful these would be as refueling dumps (stepping stones). I mean, once you've gotten a starship up to speed then slowing it down to refuel just to speed up again just doesn't make sense. I guess the only use would be if there were consumables that could be obtained for "generation ships" or if some large piece of the ship needed repair material (as in the ice shield on the starship in Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth"). I guess they might make sense if they were power stations that could beam (lasers?) energy to a passing ship.
Another (briefly discussed) issue is that of missing matter. I realize that the amount of planetary matter must be a negligible contribution but why couldn't there be 100s or 1000s of brown dwarfs for every sunlike star? Is it because we'd see a lot more microlensing events or our Oort cloud would be perturbed much more frequently? It would be kinda cool if there were much more of these things out there rather than stuff we can't interact with.
Are there any "habitable zones" around them? Sure there wouldn't be any light but it'd be like being next to a nice campfire for some really close orbits. Would the orbits be too close and decay in a geologically insignificant amount of time?
If we ever got fusion drives (but nothing better) maybe having lots of these things would allow galactic expansion as a long slow crawl at very small fractions of the speed of light. In which case setting up colonies of couple thousand AUs over many millennia could gradually establish a dark web between the brightly lit stars (so much for Star Trek). These bodies then wouldn't be waypoints. They would be our homes.
Look, I really REALLY love NASA's unmanned science programs and would think it would be a crying shame if they cut the JWST at this point but what is wrong with the budgeting process if they get it off by a factor of four? (so I've heard). Should they first launch a small prototype test mission to evaluate the technologies or something? Or were they putting the wrong people in charge of budgeting? Are they scientists who may be brilliant in their fields but not skilled at project forecasting or bureaucrats who might be looking to please their political masters? I never did like the idea that the telescope was named after a NASA administrator rather than a famous DEAD astronomer, it seemed a bit too self-serving. Maybe this is expensive poetic justice; instead I guess they could've named it the Carl Sagan Space Telescope to look at "billions and billions" of stars.
Anyway, it would be a shame to see this cancelled after they've spent so much and even finished the mirrors. (I know, sunk-costs fallacy). Of course if they taxed the rich (top execs got 23% more in the last YEAR while average income has stayed flat for the last DECADE) appropriately we would be more likely to afford things like the JWST cost overruns or not.
By the scale of the upcoming James Web Space Telescope or even by the Hubble Space Telescope, GAIA has some pretty small primary mirrors (1.45m). Hell, there are probably some amateurs with telescopes with bigger mirrors than that (though not 1.5 million kilometers in space!). I'm amazed that with such small mirrors it will have the sensitivity to do all that is claimed it will like find (hopefully) tens of thousands of brown dwarfs which are very dim (hence the name). (Of course ACCURACY not sensitivity is the main goal of this thing, that's why even though it could have the resolution to pinpoint a thumbnail on the moon it couldn't see it unless it was a very bright thumb!)
Still I am not a professional astronomer and since this is being done by the same(?) people as who created hipparcus, the previous spacecraft of this type, I'm optimistic that it will be equally successful. Someday we can hope here will be a version of this with really big mirrors, maybe that will allow us to get the remaining 99% of the galaxy. Still to think that soon we may have a pretty good 3D model of the galaxy (with a billion 3D data points) is amazing considering that the only comparable example of this was in Star Trek Voyager's "Map Room" set several centuries in the future! And they were still lost!
If one of the goals of astronomy is to show humanity's place in the universe, I think this goes a long way to fulfilling it. I really really want the 3D dataset when it comes out after 2018 so I can take my own virtual voyages through the milky way!
What a great plot "device" (ba da bash!) for a science fiction story!
Call it "Deus* Ex Machina"! (Or how about "Intelligent Design ex machina" for our evolutionarily clueless friends?)
*"Deus" in this context does not mean literally God but rather the blind forces of nature artificially sped up by this machine. Sort of like a blind watchmaker on steroids AND caffeine (with apologies to Richard Dawkins).
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
Did I say stop all exploration or even all attempts at communications? No, even though we are "babes in the woods" galactically speaking, there ARE safe ways of carrying this out.
First, if you're really sure the cosmos is a safe friendly place, a few decades (centuries at most) of listening should determine that once and for all. I believe that an Areceibo sized dish could hear its counterpart clear across the galaxy. So a little patience (on a civilizational scale not necessarily on your ego-centric lifetime) is all it would take.
Even if we still heard nothing, we could still venture out even if the wood was full of wolves. Probes/starships communicating on tight beam quantum encrypted communications through scattered relays could provide cover until we were SURE the coast was clear. We could even do some deliberate broadcasting of our own (as opposed to our current radio leakage) IF we placed the transmitters sufficiently far enough from our home solar system, say on an interstellar colony. That way if we screwed up well too bad colonists but at least our home world wouldn't be immediately found.
Of course the chance of interstellar civilizations being HOSTILE as opposed to friendly is probably(?) very small, I'm willing to concede that. (Actually most people would probably say our ever FINDING anyone out there is very small.) The stakes though, being (for us) are infinitely high; if you're wrong you could lose literally EVERYTHING important to us (our species, biosphere maybe even planet!).
It's like nuclear power, the risk is (supposedly) very low but the consequences very high. As Fukushima has recently shown it is hard to calculate very small risks. (By the way, the latest in is that ALL four cores completely melted, they've got to actively keep them cool for six months more to keep them from breaching the containment vessel. So it isn't over).. Would you take the (very small) risk to TALK to the aliens but putting everything we hold dear at (a very small) jeopardy? Or would you just wait a few decades, LISTENING ALL YOU WANT and even sending probes with a few precautions? While YOU might want to talk with E.T. NOW the rest of the world (and all your descendants) might prefer it is not the last conversation to ever take place.
(I'm assuming it's obvious to you that even after a long time (thousands or millions of years) if we meet any aliens we are overwhelmingly likely to be the newest technological species. Also in my original post I thought of writing we should lay low "until WE become the wolves" but I thought people might take it as being too belligerent. I guess from your gung-ho attitude that's not the case.)
I fear we may have only 40 years left before the invasion fleet (or planet busters) arrive.
Don't you people read any (bad?) science fiction? One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that there ARE aliens but they are definitely NOT friendly. Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out. In fact maybe they do so out of prudence thinking that if they don't, the new civilization will wipe THEM out! Sort of like an intergalactic version of the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy that STILL underpins the basic relationship between the superpowers.
In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). (This is the plot of Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"). So instead of telling everyone "We're here, we're here!", we should be as quiet as possible like a lamb all alone in the deep dark woods filled with wolves. I didn't mind the Arecibo transmission sent out in the 70s (and used as the plot device for the movie "Species") because it was aimed at one of the Magellanic clouds; hundreds of thousands of light years away. But Gliese 581? Cosmically speaking, that isn't just next door it's on our door mat!
So great an intellect as Stephen Hawkings has expressed his concern on this so it bears thinking about! Anyway, it's too late now so let's hope that if anyone's there it's E.T. or the Vulcans rather than Predators or Aliens!
It seems that his skills could be very useful in designing multi-purpose rooms in the (extremely) cramped spaces of spacecraft used for long duration voyages.
He might welcome the challenge since presumably he could design with the additional freedom of the third dimension. That assumes the spacecraft is in zero or very low gee environments most of the time like under ion thrust or having "landed" on a small asteroid.
I wonder if he does set design? These skills might be very good for quickly changing sets especially in venues where they do not have a lot of backstage space.
The problem I understand nowadays is not that we (the U.S.) don't have enough drones (even though the predator costs millions) but that we don't have enough flight crews to operate them. I understand they require the equivalent of a fighter pilot and navigator/"gunner" and while the armed forces are training them as fast as they can there still aren't enough.
So why not "outsource" (from the military not from the U.S.) these less lethal but presumably easier to fly drones?
Have a reality show where any U.S. citizen is permitted to try flying one of these things. A decent home computer with a broadband connection should suffice. At the basic level, groups of these beginner flyers will be supervised (moderated) by a flight instructor (moderator). Fly enough hours and you get to fly solo and then become a moderator yourself. Gain enough hours successfully "moderating" flight groups without too many crashes and you'll be allowed to try being a navigator/gunner (again being moderated). Rinse, repeat.
Do this, with improving more capable drones until you are flying predators with hellfires!
If you could thow in a little pay, it might help reduce the 9 percent unemployment. And it would provide the U.S. with one hell of a reserve force in the event of a major war!
Look, if there are millions of tons of this helium-3 stuff just lying around on the surface and it is especially easy to "light" in a nuclear fusion "fire", maybe all we have to do is drop an H-bomb "match". Who knows, maybe the resulting explosion, if asymmetrical could blow the moon out of orbit! (Hope it doesn't fall down!)
I came up with this idea after watching "Space 1999" and thinking that there was no way that we could bring up enough nuclear waste to blow the moon out of it's orbit. However if this was merely the ignition maybe it is just within the utmost outer range of something remotely plausible.
I hope this isn't what the U.S. was planning to do In the 50s when they were thinking about nuking the moon! (you look it up:)
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Sorry but if you dig deep into the article (and even look into DARPA's slides and animations) you'll see it doesnt have any engines except for four small RCS (reaction control thrusters) on the rear (you'll need to view the animations). The mission profile also shows this with the only course/speed changes coming from the aero surfaces and thrusters. As much as I'd like to believe that DARPA's leapfrogged the current state of the art, there is no propulsion system (and certainly not scramjet/ramjet, no air intakes or external combustion surfaces like NASA's waverider.)
Too bad.
It's an unpowered lifting body, no engines, so it basically glides (at a very high speed!) and is capable of surviving re-entry.
It looks like it's a weapons delivery system capable of avoiding terminal ballistic missile defenses. A MARV (MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle).
I thought we (the U.S.) were the only ones with a (semi)-robust missile defense system (well I guess the Isrealis also). I guess DARPA's just planning ahead for the day when the Chinese decide to redress the strategic balance by spending their Trillions on a good BMD. Also I'm thinking it must be so expensive that the only kind of warhead that's worth placing on board is nuclear. But then again maybe there are VERY specific soft targets which you absolutely positively have to kill in an hour (because that's all you know they'll be in that location for). Then a "conventional" warhead could do (or at 13,000MPH just a bunch of tungsten rods "Rods from God" would do. Think of it as an intercontinental sniper rifle with bullets that can swerve around defenses. Good for "decapitating" an enemy, (I guess a lot of threats we face would go away if we could take out just the top few people/person: are you listening Kim Jong-Il? Qaddafi? S&P ratings board?).
I was kinda hoping DARPA was working on a (much) faster version of the Wave-rider hypersonic aircraft. Oh well, guess even they can't beat the laws of physics (and our lack of a good propulsion system).
Even "cooler" would be a laser that could be quickly lofted into space and would zap a target on the earth below. Unfortunately, "Real Genius" notwithstanding we don't have any lasers compact enough to be launched in anything short of a Saturn V (I don't think Dr. Teller's nuke pumped X-Ray laser was ever shown to work). That pesky outer space treaty prohibits us from placing weapons in space so we can't just have laser satellites floating around picking off people we don't like I guess.
I would imagine that since it hasn't been launched yet, they could easily retarget the uber-rover Curiosity to land there.
Of course I have no idea if conditions are suitable for landing (which is already hair-raising enough!) but it seems to be worth looking into. I'm sure the appropriate people at NASA are already doing so (I don't consider them to be nearly as dysfunctional or incompetent as some other parts of the US govt.).
My bad, I thought the Leaf was a hybrid (like a Prius)! So you're right, having lots of Leafs (Leaves?) would make things worse not better. However that's for society as a whole which is usually the last thing on the average person's mind around here. :(
As far as the affordability goes though, the wealth distribution in Vietnam is very bad. Lots of motorbikes but also some Mercedes, Bentleys and Maybachs. I figure anyone whose stolen... I mean made enough money to afford a car can afford a Leaf.
You know, this would be really really useful here in Vietnam where the extraordinary growth rate coupled with communist era bureaucracies/corruption has left power supplies lagging far behind demand. I would dearly love a generator I could use to power my abode when the power goes out (typically in the hottest part of the day which in Vietnam is pretty hot!). This is probably true of a lot of developing countries.
Also in my previous career in the film industry having a powerful generator that is not only mobile but transports itself (and cargo and crew!) would be a godsend for shots not on the studio lot.
And motion capture (and probably a whole host of new applications my imagination is too poor to come up with. Surgery? Anatomical imaging? Real time engineering analysis of structural deformation? Radio telescope antennae deployment? Really accurate munitions delivery for "keyhole" shots, personal assassination? Automatically docking/refueling of vehicles?).
so keeping up with science developments is really just restricted to what I can get over the Internet.
That said, I've found the best site for news is sciencedaily.com. I found it because it was rated one of the top 100 web sites on the Internet I think by PCMag. It's really good at giving a very comprehensive (they must have several dozens of articles a day) run down on what's going on in a fashion that's accessible to the intelligent technical professional.
If technology is your thing then I'd recommend MIT's technologyreview.com. It's articles are a little more in depth and focus also on societal implications of the technology being discussed.
Finally, if you're a space nut like me, I'd recommend spacedaily.com (published by the same people who do science daily). Again it's a "just the facts ma'am" web site that is clear and to the point.
There are many other good sites but these give me what I want in the least amount of TIME (which is to me a very precious resource!).
I, for one, would like to welcome our super intelligent Eskimo overlords! (And troglodytes and blind people and habitual sunglass wearers and squinty eyed folk).
I would think that due to the very low acceleration of an ion engine the placement of the tankage wouldn't be a problem. As far as the ion engines goes, while no single engine exists that could push the ISS with the necessary power, why not use (lots) of lower power engines in parallel? However these are just off the cuff suggestions (as was my original post), I am by no means an aeronautics engineer.
In any case your very good points about the Van Allen bets makes my whole conjecture unworkable. Also, I always thought that the shuttle was altitude constrained, not Soyuz. I read somewhere that that is the reason why the ISS and Hubble were in their comparatively low orbits. However as I said, I am by no means an aeronautics engineer! I learn something new everyday.
Yes it would take a lot of energy to get to the moon's orbit and yes you'd need to expend some more to put it into orbit AROUND the moon. If you made judicious use of the "interplanetary expressway" (I think that's what it's called), you could use the chaotic nature of orbits to trade time for energy but you're still going to need a good deal of delta-V.
So why not hook up an ion engine?
Nobody will be living on the thing (it has to go through the Van Allen radiation belts) so all the power for life support from those huge solar arrays will be available. Use this power to hook up an ion engine (with a relatively modest amount of xenon fuel) and a slow spiraling orbit could take you out of LEO to almost anywhere. I'd prefer L1 because the views would be so nice but given a bit more fuel (and a lot more time) you could put it next to, say an asteroid where it could be a really useful base for scientific studies (how about the one that might clock us in 2036?).
In fact, if put into the proper position (relative to the sun) BEHIND the asteroid (very easy due to the negligible gravity) the asteroid will block out any danger from lethal solar flares! (Of course any manned mission to an asteroid should think about using this trick, might be a lot easier than digging into the soil/pebbles/hard rock/baked lava of the asteroid's surface.
NASA's been doing a good job of repurposing old spacecraft for new missions once they've completed their primary mission (like Deep Impact which went on to some more comets or Artemis which is now headed to the moon I think). Why not a whole space station?
By the way, does anyone know if (now that the space shuttle doesn't go there anymore) it can be boosted to a much higher orbit? (the space shuttle barely had enough fuel to reach it). I believe Soyuz, Falcon 9/Dragon and the European resupply ship can go considerably higher. This would make the orbital decay time much much longer and hopefully prevent a repeat of SkyLab (where NASA literally ran out of time).
they didn't seem to regret their transaction(s) because they sold three kids (and not all at once). They seem to have gotten better at it as they went along, getting higher and higher prices. (Or maybe the later ones were just cuter/harder working).
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229318/kid_sells_kidney_for_ipad_2_regrets_transaction.html
I remember when the first crew boarded the as then under-construction ISS. I turned to a friend of mine and said:
"Maybe from this point on, for the rest of humanity's existence, there will always be a human who is off-planet. From this humble beginning we could hopefully draw an unbroken line to voyages to the planets, other stars and the eventual inhabitation of the galaxy." (or something like that ;)
It's sad to think that in 2020 this line may be broken. Hopefully, if no-one else steps up to bat, at least the Chinese will have their space station up and running. I hope they can keep it completely manned (or womanned?).
I'd just like to think I was alive at the time when humanity first became a true spacefaring civilization and didn't drop the ball.
Ok, I know this doesn't solve the problem of actually ANALYZING the data but for storing and moving the data around, what's the best compression algorithm for astronomical (I mean the discipline, not the size!) data.
I used to work for a company that developed a really good compression algorithm using wavelets. At the time it was the only one to be accepted by A-list movie directors (the people with the real power in Hollywood); they refused to go with any of the JPEG or MPEG variants (this was before JPEG 2000 which I understand also uses wavelets). We pitched to JPL the idea that they use some of this technology for some of their mission imaging requirements but they said the data was almost priceless and they couldn't risk losing any data an admittedly "lossy" compression algorithm. Of course they were forced to break this policy with Galileo because the main antenna never opened so only had a tiny fraction of the bandwidth that they originally planned. (Interestingly enough after the Columbia disaster, our equipment was later heavily used by NASA for imaging requirements related to observing the space shuttle. It helped make the conversion to a digital workflow practical which really sped up the time needed to distribute Hi-Res launch videos to all the NASA engineering sites around the country.)
So do astronomers use some lossless compression algorithm? In the case of space based data collection, do they have the computer power to compress it on board? Do they "clean up" the images first to make it easier to compress?
I actually read one of the links (I know, I know...) and saw some (to my non-professional engineer eyes) great or at least interesting ideas.
Like having the "left seat" have flying controls and the "right seat" have the driving controls. Sure, as other posters pointed out, you can't take over in an emergency but I would imagine (since I don't fly a plane) it must make the controls a lot easier to design and use. I wonder why they didn't put the driving controls on the left side since I presume they would use it in the USA not say Britain? Of course you don't need separate enclosed cabins to use this idea.
I'm impressed that hybrid technology is advanced enough that you could carry the additional equipment without a crippling weight penalty. That of course allowed them to do all sorts of interesting things like decoupling the gas engines from the electric motors allowing them to be placed wherever it is best and splitting the gas engines up for redundancy. Having presumably small lightweight electric motors in the wheels takes care of a lot of power train issues I guess. Also having lithium battery assisted takeoff is good for keeping the engines smaller because they don't have to provide brief spikes in power. I wonder if the plane can generate power as it descends (like an aerial version of regenerative breaking)? Can it charge the batteries on a windy day on the ground?
From what I saw in my cursory skimming of the article, the wings are detached before the "car" goes on the road. I guess they didn't really try to optimize the design because this is just a test vehicle (and they designed and built it in a very short amount of time! 4 months!) but I imagine that as long as you're going to leave part of the gear at the airport, why not leave the rear airfoils and electric propeller? That's another benefit from the hybrid design, no mechanical coupling to the propeller, just a power cable.
Anyway even if the overall project doesn't really "take off" (bada bish!) some of these ideas seem very interesting! I wonder if high temperature super conductors could really make this idea "go"!
So these brown dwarfs are essentially big balls of (mostly) hydrogen with the centers under tremendous pressures and temperatures but not quite hot enough to "light" (in a fusion sense). Well what would happen if you managed to drop a fusion bomb on it? (On or near the surface where the temperatures are low but the high gravity might still compress the hydrogen into the megabar range).
While (probably) it would just fizzle, could the concentrated energy ignite just enough so the whole star went boom? (Like a Type I supernova?). I mean the "temperature" of an H-Bomb is in the hundreds of millions of degrees maybe it just requires one tiny (if an H-Bomb is "tiny") spark. Just like you can pour millions of gallons of gasoline on a barely sub-critical mass of Uranium and it won't go bang but one small neutron generator and you've got a mushroom cloud. While the impacts of asteroid and larger bodies could deliver a lot more energy, an H-Bomb could do so more INTENSELY.
I guess this is what the first H-Bomb scientists were worried about when they feared the first H-Bomb *might* ignite the water vapor in the atmosphere and consume the entire world. Just how easy would it be to blow one of these things up? Could you do it with even smaller cooler less dense bodies, say Jupiter (as proposed by sci-fi writer Charles Sheffield) or Neptune? (Tried it on earth, nope doesn't work). Lastly, our sun is already alite, but the RATE of fusion reaction is very slow (each gram of the sun produces far less energy per time than, say, a live elephant). Could we speed it up? Could an H-Bomb (or a suitably powerful laser such as was used in one of the Man-Kzinti war sci-fi books) trigger a local (or maybe not so local) explosion?
I guess this was the general idea behind the movie "Sunshine" (good movie). Seems they had some sort of very dense (causing a local gravitational field) fission bomb to re-ignite the sun. Wish they had a companion book to flesh out some of the details.
Anyway I know these ideas are probably non-sensical to any physicist but don't have enough math and physics knowledge to calculate it for myself. If anyone of you is so inclined and it won't take much time or effort, I'd appreciate the debunking (or not!) of this idle speculation.
(For even crazier speculation, how about igniting all that supposedly great fusion fuel Helium-3 that is just lying around on the lunar surface? Would it be enough to blow the moon out of orbit a la "Space 1999"?)
So (like another poster) I'm not sure how useful these would be as refueling dumps (stepping stones). I mean, once you've gotten a starship up to speed then slowing it down to refuel just to speed up again just doesn't make sense. I guess the only use would be if there were consumables that could be obtained for "generation ships" or if some large piece of the ship needed repair material (as in the ice shield on the starship in Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth"). I guess they might make sense if they were power stations that could beam (lasers?) energy to a passing ship.
Another (briefly discussed) issue is that of missing matter. I realize that the amount of planetary matter must be a negligible contribution but why couldn't there be 100s or 1000s of brown dwarfs for every sunlike star? Is it because we'd see a lot more microlensing events or our Oort cloud would be perturbed much more frequently? It would be kinda cool if there were much more of these things out there rather than stuff we can't interact with.
Are there any "habitable zones" around them? Sure there wouldn't be any light but it'd be like being next to a nice campfire for some really close orbits. Would the orbits be too close and decay in a geologically insignificant amount of time?
If we ever got fusion drives (but nothing better) maybe having lots of these things would allow galactic expansion as a long slow crawl at very small fractions of the speed of light. In which case setting up colonies of couple thousand AUs over many millennia could gradually establish a dark web between the brightly lit stars (so much for Star Trek). These bodies then wouldn't be waypoints. They would be our homes.
Look, I really REALLY love NASA's unmanned science programs and would think it would be a crying shame if they cut the JWST at this point but what is wrong with the budgeting process if they get it off by a factor of four? (so I've heard). Should they first launch a small prototype test mission to evaluate the technologies or something? Or were they putting the wrong people in charge of budgeting? Are they scientists who may be brilliant in their fields but not skilled at project forecasting or bureaucrats who might be looking to please their political masters? I never did like the idea that the telescope was named after a NASA administrator rather than a famous DEAD astronomer, it seemed a bit too self-serving. Maybe this is expensive poetic justice; instead I guess they could've named it the Carl Sagan Space Telescope to look at "billions and billions" of stars.
Anyway, it would be a shame to see this cancelled after they've spent so much and even finished the mirrors. (I know, sunk-costs fallacy). Of course if they taxed the rich (top execs got 23% more in the last YEAR while average income has stayed flat for the last DECADE) appropriately we would be more likely to afford things like the JWST cost overruns or not.
By the scale of the upcoming James Web Space Telescope or even by the Hubble Space Telescope, GAIA has some pretty small primary mirrors (1.45m). Hell, there are probably some amateurs with telescopes with bigger mirrors than that (though not 1.5 million kilometers in space!). I'm amazed that with such small mirrors it will have the sensitivity to do all that is claimed it will like find (hopefully) tens of thousands of brown dwarfs which are very dim (hence the name). (Of course ACCURACY not sensitivity is the main goal of this thing, that's why even though it could have the resolution to pinpoint a thumbnail on the moon it couldn't see it unless it was a very bright thumb!)
Still I am not a professional astronomer and since this is being done by the same(?) people as who created hipparcus, the previous spacecraft of this type, I'm optimistic that it will be equally successful. Someday we can hope here will be a version of this with really big mirrors, maybe that will allow us to get the remaining 99% of the galaxy. Still to think that soon we may have a pretty good 3D model of the galaxy (with a billion 3D data points) is amazing considering that the only comparable example of this was in Star Trek Voyager's "Map Room" set several centuries in the future! And they were still lost!
If one of the goals of astronomy is to show humanity's place in the universe, I think this goes a long way to fulfilling it. I really really want the 3D dataset when it comes out after 2018 so I can take my own virtual voyages through the milky way!
What a great plot "device" (ba da bash!) for a science fiction story!
Call it "Deus* Ex Machina"! (Or how about "Intelligent Design ex machina" for our evolutionarily clueless friends?)
*"Deus" in this context does not mean literally God but rather the blind forces of nature artificially sped up by this machine. Sort of like a blind watchmaker on steroids AND caffeine (with apologies to Richard Dawkins).
As the facts continue to mount against them, these groups...
Climate change skeptics
Evolution denialists
"Birthers" (USA only)
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
How pathetic.
Did I say stop all exploration or even all attempts at communications? No, even though we are "babes in the woods" galactically speaking, there ARE safe ways of carrying this out.
First, if you're really sure the cosmos is a safe friendly place, a few decades (centuries at most) of listening should determine that once and for all. I believe that an Areceibo sized dish could hear its counterpart clear across the galaxy. So a little patience (on a civilizational scale not necessarily on your ego-centric lifetime) is all it would take.
Even if we still heard nothing, we could still venture out even if the wood was full of wolves. Probes/starships communicating on tight beam quantum encrypted communications through scattered relays could provide cover until we were SURE the coast was clear. We could even do some deliberate broadcasting of our own (as opposed to our current radio leakage) IF we placed the transmitters sufficiently far enough from our home solar system, say on an interstellar colony. That way if we screwed up well too bad colonists but at least our home world wouldn't be immediately found.
Of course the chance of interstellar civilizations being HOSTILE as opposed to friendly is probably(?) very small, I'm willing to concede that. (Actually most people would probably say our ever FINDING anyone out there is very small.) The stakes though, being (for us) are infinitely high; if you're wrong you could lose literally EVERYTHING important to us (our species, biosphere maybe even planet!).
It's like nuclear power, the risk is (supposedly) very low but the consequences very high. As Fukushima has recently shown it is hard to calculate very small risks. (By the way, the latest in is that ALL four cores completely melted, they've got to actively keep them cool for six months more to keep them from breaching the containment vessel. So it isn't over).. Would you take the (very small) risk to TALK to the aliens but putting everything we hold dear at (a very small) jeopardy? Or would you just wait a few decades, LISTENING ALL YOU WANT and even sending probes with a few precautions? While YOU might want to talk with E.T. NOW the rest of the world (and all your descendants) might prefer it is not the last conversation to ever take place.
(I'm assuming it's obvious to you that even after a long time (thousands or millions of years) if we meet any aliens we are overwhelmingly likely to be the newest technological species. Also in my original post I thought of writing we should lay low "until WE become the wolves" but I thought people might take it as being too belligerent. I guess from your gung-ho attitude that's not the case.)
I fear we may have only 40 years left before the invasion fleet (or planet busters) arrive.
Don't you people read any (bad?) science fiction? One solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that there ARE aliens but they are definitely NOT friendly. Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out. In fact maybe they do so out of prudence thinking that if they don't, the new civilization will wipe THEM out! Sort of like an intergalactic version of the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy that STILL underpins the basic relationship between the superpowers.
In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). (This is the plot of Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"). So instead of telling everyone "We're here, we're here!", we should be as quiet as possible like a lamb all alone in the deep dark woods filled with wolves. I didn't mind the Arecibo transmission sent out in the 70s (and used as the plot device for the movie "Species") because it was aimed at one of the Magellanic clouds; hundreds of thousands of light years away. But Gliese 581? Cosmically speaking, that isn't just next door it's on our door mat!
So great an intellect as Stephen Hawkings has expressed his concern on this so it bears thinking about! Anyway, it's too late now so let's hope that if anyone's there it's E.T. or the Vulcans rather than Predators or Aliens!
It seems that his skills could be very useful in designing multi-purpose rooms in the (extremely) cramped spaces of spacecraft used for long duration voyages.
He might welcome the challenge since presumably he could design with the additional freedom of the third dimension. That assumes the spacecraft is in zero or very low gee environments most of the time like under ion thrust or having "landed" on a small asteroid.
I wonder if he does set design? These skills might be very good for quickly changing sets especially in venues where they do not have a lot of backstage space.
The problem I understand nowadays is not that we (the U.S.) don't have enough drones (even though the predator costs millions) but that we don't have enough flight crews to operate them. I understand they require the equivalent of a fighter pilot and navigator/"gunner" and while the armed forces are training them as fast as they can there still aren't enough.
So why not "outsource" (from the military not from the U.S.) these less lethal but presumably easier to fly drones?
Have a reality show where any U.S. citizen is permitted to try flying one of these things. A decent home computer with a broadband connection should suffice. At the basic level, groups of these beginner flyers will be supervised (moderated) by a flight instructor (moderator). Fly enough hours and you get to fly solo and then become a moderator yourself. Gain enough hours successfully "moderating" flight groups without too many crashes and you'll be allowed to try being a navigator/gunner (again being moderated). Rinse, repeat.
Do this, with improving more capable drones until you are flying predators with hellfires!
If you could thow in a little pay, it might help reduce the 9 percent unemployment. And it would provide the U.S. with one hell of a reserve force in the event of a major war!
Look, if there are millions of tons of this helium-3 stuff just lying around on the surface and it is especially easy to "light" in a nuclear fusion "fire", maybe all we have to do is drop an H-bomb "match". Who knows, maybe the resulting explosion, if asymmetrical could blow the moon out of orbit! (Hope it doesn't fall down!)
I came up with this idea after watching "Space 1999" and thinking that there was no way that we could bring up enough nuclear waste to blow the moon out of it's orbit. However if this was merely the ignition maybe it is just within the utmost outer range of something remotely plausible.
I hope this isn't what the U.S. was planning to do In the 50s when they were thinking about nuking the moon! (you look it up :)