So, if one model of the universe (currently out if favor) is correct that has it oscillating between big bangs and big crunches, would this be a way for sone super civilization to survive the end (big crunch) of the universe? The "Heechee" in Frederick Pohl's Gateway novels had them hiding out in black holes (though not for this reason). They were hiding out from another even more advanced race that had created the universe (which explained why the cosmological constant amongst other things was so finely tuned) and didn't want to be around when they came back to reclaim their "property".
The Heechee had some way as well of getting OUT of these black holes (FTL travel?). Of course since the the latest models show the universe to be expending itself to smithereens even if you could hide out in a black hole, it is likely there would be literally nothing to come back to.
By the way, does time stop completely below the event horizon? Might be another reason why hiding out in a black hole wouldn't be such a good idea.
With the power of these (and other modern cards) it would be trivial for them to power a hi-def VR headrig. I would imagine latency would be acceptable (at least on the graphics output end, don't know about the head tracker).
So why hasn't anyone put together a truly awesome, truly IMMERSIVE experience? Instead of hitting keys (or moving a mouse or joystick, sorry I don't know, I'm not a gamer) you could JUST TURN YOUR HEAD, like in real-life (tm). Wouldn't this make game play a lit more fun and less wonky? Add a cheap plastic AK-47 a la guitar hero, add a few position sensors and voila! You've got something that's good enough for training!
What's holding it up? It's the lack of hi-def eyepieces isn't it?
Here's my story submission which according to slashdot logs I submitted on Thursday, April 28@1:25am. I assume this was just an oversight on the part of the editors, no problem, I just wanted to bring up the larger (smaller?) issues regarding having spacecraft design directly coupled to the exponentially increasing (decreasing?) semiconductor fabrication industry which has been in progress now for over half a century.
"Here's a way to harness Moore's law (which has given us many orders of magnitudes of improvement) to spaceflight (which is still using technology more or less developed in the middle of the 20th century). Some researchers at Cornell will be launching their "Chip" sats, tiny 1" square satellites affixed(?) to the Endeavour space shuttle. "Their small size allows them to travel like space dust," said Peck. "Blown by solar winds, they can 'sail' to distant locations without fuel...." Hopefully they "may travel to Saturn within the next decade, and as they flutter down through its atmosphere, they will collect data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts."
While I really believe this is the future, I do have some questions. Although much can be miniaturized (nano-rized?), I'm wondering about some things such as optics (for cameras) and antenna/power (for transmitting the results back home). So while these may very well flutter down Saturn's atmosphere, there may need to be a large(r) mothership capable of transmitting the results home. (This was the mechanism used by Greg Bear in his novel "Queen of Angels" where his interstellar ship dropped "coin" sized probes to explore the worlds of Alpha Centauri.)
With the retirement of Endeavour we have the end of one technology coinciding with the birth of another."
As much as I hate to admit it (being an iPad 2 owner and Apple stock holder), iPads and its predecessor the iPod are luxuries.
It has often been said that you can't do anything on a tablet that you can on a notebook (this may be changing with some truly innovative new apps but let's go with this for now). So, by definition it is a luxury especially because with the iPad at least you NEED a regular computer to sync to.
The same is (was, before smartphones started decimating this category) true of MP3 players. While being able to listen to music on the go is nice, it is hardly a "need" like a cellphone. However for those who wanted one and could afford it, other factors beyond sheer utilitarianism came to play. Styling, user interface, the "shininess". When you buy a luxury car, the hood ornament is sometimes more important than the MPG.
So this shows the disparities in iPhone versus iPad sales in two ways. When the iPhone came out, many people decided they needed something like it. Either it was unavailable or, due to religious objections they couldn't fathom the idea of buying an Apple product so they got an Android.
With the iPad because it is a luxury, those who bought it (at first at least) are buying a status symbol product. That is why product styling is so important (remember when Samsung took back its latest tablet because it was a millimeter or two thicker than the iPad 2?). I mean for the people who can afford a $500 luxury item as long as you're going to buy it, you might as well get the best. And there are a LOT of rich people in the world (10s of millions of millionaires in the US alone). Think of the fancy watches and expensive cars and jewelry that people buy (and the iPad 2 is like a big piece of jewelry!). Even when reasonable alternatives exist people will wait weeks or pay a substantial premium to get the name brand.
Now, of course, they are finding new, hard to duplicate (on a regular PC) uses, that take advantage of this "magical" device. (And it IS magical, there is something about the immediacy and directness that the touch interface, unencumbered by the abstraction of the hand-to-mouse-to-cursor paradigm, that makes it so). Still is this user interface necessary? No, for now at least it is a luxury (but maybe in time it will become as much a part of our lives as windows and mice).
And who is the master at selling electronic luxuries? Apple.
Wow, 275 watts of power FOR THIRTY YEARS (actually I think it was substantially higher at the beginning, exponential decay and everything).
This is in a device with no moving parts, about the size of a microwave oven (I think, but maybe that's just one of them), able to operate in interstellar cold and Jupiter's radiation belts, not to mention the vibration and acceleration of liftoff. Oh, and it has to survive an explosion on the pad or accidental re-entry!
If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)
So I'm astonished that (they claim) they'll be able to make a FULL SPHERE of glass as opposed to some puny porthole.
Some questions: A part (half?) of the sphere will have to be removed to allow people/things in and out (unlike "ecospheres") it can't be seamlessly sealed. Isn't that the most likely place of failure?
I assume there will have to be holes to allow power, cooling/heating, communications right? Another point of failure? (Actually I read a story where some grad student had figured out a way of transmitting powe/communications THROUGH a submarine's metal hull using sonic waves.)
Where in the world will they test this thing to one and a quarter times the max. pressure? (And I thought engineering standards were to one and a half max.)
I'm not a hacker by inclination (or ability!) and I normally look dimly upon vigilantees who take it upon themselves to bring about "justice". But in this case I'm happy to see the Iranian nuclear program stalled through almost any means possible; to imagine their president Ahmadinejad having a nuke is almost as bad as imaging the Taliban/Al Qaeda having one! I mean, really who would benefit from Iran getting a bomb? I'm not sure even the Iranians (ultimately) would!
If only the dear leader had been tricked into buying Siemens industrial control systems for his centrifuges. (I guess the problem with having sanctions against North Korea for so long is that they were forced to develop all of their own technologies).
To put the emphasis on improving LEO access first (through better lower cost commercialized technologies) than trying to push the shuttle derived Ares program (that republicans have been trying to resurrect.)?
If Space-X can meet its goal of $1,000/lb. to LEO (one TENTH) the cost of the space shuttle, I would think so!
(I don't have any moderation points now, sometimes I get 15 sometimes 5?)
You know good journalism is expensive, it costs companies to produce it and sometimes it costs journalists (and photo journalists!) their lives:(
I rely on the NYTimes so heavily for good information and, more importantly ANALYSIS that I actually felt guilty until they put up the paywall. I didn't think they could generate enough revenue just through their ads so I was worried. I'm a subscriber now of course.
Then again maybe the NYTimes to me is a special case. There are very few other sites I would pay for.
10x stronger than steel sounds great even if it is just tensile strength because tensile strength is what is needed to go to Geosync orbit right? Then with the right solar/laser powered "climber" we have our space elevator right?
I have no idea how many orders of magnitude improvement are needed but I am happy that at least this stuff is being made in macroscopic quantities. (I mean there's an actual PICTURE of it being held by some forceps! Not like the tiny lengths of nanotubes I've heard about).
By the way, wouldn't this make a great Kevlar replacement? Think of really light body armor!
... of FIRST reducing the cost of access to space through technology development (scrapping the Orion rocket) and commercialization BEFORE going for the Moon/Mars right? (Sorry for the run on sentence).
If the Falcon Heavy can get payloads to orbit for $1,000/lb. (one TENTH the cost of the shuttle!), I would think so.
There is an entertaining video on this from a presentation at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) that is only 4 minutes long. And no I've never been.
TITAN (not Mars or Europa) should be our goal...
on
Titan May Have an Ocean
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
(... and not even the ice geysers of Enceladus should sway our choice).
Why? Because as Professor Peter Ward claims in his very interesting book on astro-biology "Life as we do not know it", only "Titan holds the promise of not just alien life but of MORE THAN ONE KIND OF FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT alien life". (emphasis mine). There could be."three distinct empires of life, from two entirely different trees; CHON life of two kinds (ammono and water CHON life) and silicon life." (p. 234). While he said the "CHON ammono life would be found, presumably beneath the ice, in the ammonia ocean" and the "silicon life would exist, if it existed at all, in the ethane-methane lakes of Titan's surface" he thought the "earthlike" CHON life would be found in the transient freshwater lakes after an asteroid or comet impact.
Well, if there is a (huge) water ocean beneath the ice (and below the ammonia ocean?) the earthlike CHON life wouldn't have to depend on transient impact events! I guess the reason why the researchers believe the ocean to be water (as opposed to the methane the Technology Review editors seem to think), is because the temperature and pressure at those depths make water the most likely candidate. So anyway to recap, on Titan there are a possibility of THREE COMPLETELY different "empires" (his term) of life with only one of them having even the remotest possibility of being anything like life on earth (even if it is earthlike CHON life, that means only that it uses the carbon and other atoms at energy levels corresponding to liquid water, they might not use DNA, RNA or even proteins!).
The reasons why (he suggests) we should skip over Mars, Europa (and I presume Enceladus) is as follows: while Mars was certainly once capable of supporting (Earthlike CHON) life, now it is cold, dry and likely dead. For Europa (and Enceladus) he claims that while they have the liquid water necessary to support (again earthlike CHON) life, they don't have enough energy. His calculations show that the gravitational flexing caused by Jupiter, the main source of energy for Europa, would only be enough to drive a modest ecosystem that would be dispersed in an ocean of millions of cubic kilometers of water. Too dilute to be sustainable. (The same would be presumably be true to an even greater extent of Enceledus).
Titan, on the other hand, is large enough to presumably be able to generate heat internally (it is the largest moon in the solar system) and also gets (some) energy from tidal interactions with Saturn. An interesting additional input is the (weak) ultraviolet rays from the (distant) sun that hits its atmosphere (the only substantial one of any moon) and creates a whole host of organic compounds. Finally if his speculations on the other empires of life are correct, their much colder metabolism may allow (require?) them to exist on much less energy our liquid water based ones do.
This is, of course, rank speculation but the finding a new empire of life would be truly monumental, it would mean life is likely present in every solar system in the galaxy. Of course even finding "earthlike" CHON life would be astounding. Anyway, if the beauty of Saturn's rings weren't enough, this is another great reason to go back. Besides landing and exploring Titan could be comparatively easy. Aeorobraking, aerocapture and reentry will save a lot of fuel compared with landing on an airless world. Parachutes alone will work extremely well in the dense atmosphere and low gravity (unlike Mars) as will planes and hot "air" balloons. The surface ocean is likely to be very calm so boats and submersibles should be usable. There is also land for rovers and drilling operations. The only problem is distance (and money), so let's get cracking on nuclear powered ion engines!
... but here in Vietnam we DO hear quite a bit about the rapid encroachment (and salinization) by the ocean into the Mekong delta. It is clear that with the ocean coming in (I seem to remember an encroachment figure of 1.4km/yr.) and that hundreds of thousands have already been displaced because they can no longer farm there. (This has driven the growth of the big cities which is where I live). The government is constantly projecting that millions more will move in the next few decades (This is from their Thanh Nhien News which is a pretty widely read paper, there's an English website you can visit).
Of course matters will soon be made even worse as upstream countries start damming the Mekong. (They may be doing so because the freshwater source in the Himalayas is losing its snowpack cover. This may also be due to climate change.)
Vietnam is supposedly one of the most susceptible countries to sea level rising but I can imagine things could be even worse in an even poorer (and closer to sea level) country like Bangladesh.
Let me guess, this guy has some sort of political axe to grind and he is looking for way to try to justify tax cuts in areas he doesn't like.
FACTS ARE FACTS, these are numbers where money is going and where they are spent. While he can say that "welfare" should be renamed "money for cadillac queens" or that the "defense department" should be renamed "military industrial complex" it doesn't change where the money is going or what is is actually being spent for.
(Not unless you're Jon Kyl and claim on the senate floor that Planned Parenthood spends 90% of its money on abortion counseling. The real amount is 3%. But why pick on our elected Senators? You could be one of the many Americans who believe that NASA takes up 20% of the federal budget. The real amount is less than 1%).
Well perhaps for the upper class Americans for whom air travel was a given back in the seventies travel hasn't sped up. But for the 10s or 100s of millions who are being introduced to commercial air travel for the first time, let me tell you their average speed has really taken off. Air travel has become affordable for the first time to a significant fraction of the world's population. Rising living standards and cheaper flights due to de-regulation has done the trick. Living here in Vietnam I personally have taken many airplane "virgins" for a ride.;)
(Due to an extremely fortunate set of circumstances, I must confess I was lucky enough to break the sound barrier in a Concorde flight way back when. It was interesting watching the digital airspeed gauge go higher and higher!)
It looks really cool* and I'd love to get this App on my new iPad 2:)
The next step which I've been looking for but haven't seen yet is some means of a user "grasping" objects in 3D space. While the technology doesn't exist for a true haptic interface, you would imagine someone could use two cameras to calculate the 3D position of a user's fingers (or other body part!) or some sort of 3D depth sensor (how does the proximity sensor on an iPhone work?). So while this may not work on this generation iPad presumably it might on some of the other devices that have two cameras capable of parallax vision (Nintendo 3DS, LG tablets, various android phones).
One issue though is that these demos all show the 3D interface as if you are looking down into a "well" or into a box. Obviously since you can't put your fingers there you will need the display to appear to project "up" or "out" if you want a 3D touch interface to interact with your 3D elements. This will, of course, make the 3D volume and the view angles considerably smaller, so much so that perhaps it is only practical on a tablet sized device. There may be other problems such as occlusion caused by the fingers.
Anyone working on this?
*I know this was done before on the Wii and I believe the authors acknowledged the previous work done by a James Lee(?) at Carnegie Mellon (now at Microsoft I think).
Look I'm very VERY much for kicking our fossil fuel addiction that causes global warming and is directly funding terrorism (republican appointed defense secretary Gates said most financial support for Taliban/Al Queda comes from gulf states not drug trafficking) but using crops for biofuels is not the way to go. Aside from the fact that some fuels (ethanol from corn) may require MORE energy to produce than is harvested, there are serious ethical issues when you have American S.U.V. drivers competing directly with sub-Saharan african peasants for a life sustaining resource. For one thing it connects the global food market with the monopolistic oil pricing strategies of our friends (sarcasm) from the middle east. (I was at a talk given by the president of ASEAN who represents some of the largest rice exporting countries in the world like Thailand and Vietnam. When asked if they had thought about setting up a cartel like OPEC but with rice not oil he remarked that there were serious ethical issues to consider if you were going to use as a weapon the basic foodstuff of hundreds of millions.)
The powerful political farming interests would just love to see their product fueling our cars. (I keep seeing this commercial on Discovery TV implying the average westerner utilizes 120 TIMES as much energy in maintaining their lifestyle as they do eating). Clearly even if crops were net energy positive (after fertilizers, transport, fermentation, etc.) using them in this way would send the price into the stratosphere. Renewable solar technology MUST be used (sorry, but let's face it Nukes are not going to have a renaissance in the West at least:(. Hopefully photovoltaics or something like the "artificial leaf" can generate carbon zero fuels at a much higher efficiency (supposedly 10x natural photosynthesis which, as this article confirms, is appallingly inefficient). More importantly, placed in the deserts or other areas not suitable for farming they won't compete with the crops we need to LIVE.
I'm really not against fossil fuels, I'd really like to see us get some oil from the tar sands those nice Canadians have, or tap into the abundance of natural gas or even go after the HUGE undersea deposits of methane clathrates. HOWEVER, we've really got to do this WHILE keeping the carbon impact zero (or negative!). This is possible, there are a number of carbon sequestration technologies that should be able to do this (there was a recent Sci-Amer. article on this) while only consuming a fraction of the energy gained from burning it. Until that's demonstrated and put into place though, we should really be focusing on renewable technologies until nuclear fusion comes online to save our butts in 20 years.;)
Ok, the App is very minimal, just tells you how much time you've gained(?) compared to a "stationary" observer.
The info panel allows you to put in your birth date. Presumably this is to show you how much time you've added to your life? (It also allows you to turn on multi-tasking for the app so I guess it can constantly determine how much time you've saved).
I wish it would give a little more info (ideally a running graph showing time slowing down as you're speeding up). It says it uses GPS but I'm assuming it isn't calculating how much time is speeding up if you climb up some stairs (out of the gravity well). For that matter I assume it isn't taking into account acceleration (note to physicists: does non-gravity acceleration cause time dilation?).
Still it is free, and makes me feel very very very slightly younger!
Actually this is probably what dance theory is all about right? Might provide a useful abstraction of the subject though. Maybe there's a thesis in this for some non-tech averse grad student!
The quick answer (which I'm sure many posters have already said) is don't involve chemistry; use nuclear engines, or ion engines or solar sails or magnetic balloons. There is a lot more energy (million fold) in nuclear bonds that you can get from fission reactors or by using the fusion furnace at the center of our solar system.
That said, I haven't really heard of good answers to long time LIVING (not just survival) outside of the earth's magnetic field/shield and without one-gee acceleration keeping our bodies reasonably fit. Want to COLONIZE Mars and not just go there for a flags and footprints mission? Well we have no idea if the 1/3 G gravity will keep the astronaut's bones from becoming brittle. Who knows if women can give birth to healthy infants in such an environment or even if we can grow crops there! (I really thought they shouldn't have cancelled the centrifuge that was to be a part of the ISS. Hopefully, if the Falcon 9 works out, it'll be cheap enough to add it later).
I'm actually a little more optimistic about the long term ability of humanity to spread throughout the cosmos. In just a few decades, hopefully we'll know enough about our biology to really tinker with it. Getting rid of susceptibility to low gravity is a given of course but how about a little radiation hardening? (Some organisms can tolerate millions of times as much radiation as we can). Perhaps later we could learn to deal with decompression sicknesses (like marine mammals) so spacesuit design could become a lot simpler. Maybe we could learn the tricks of hibernation from bears and squirrels so long space flights wouldn't consume so many resources (and be so boring!).
We might end up not quite the same as homo sapiens. Call it man plus. (For INTERSTELLAR travel, we'll need some pretty spectacular physics or some pretty radical reengineering of ourselves. How 'bout brains in boxes? Or better yet, just software running on commodity hardware?).
And if it HASN'T been too well maintained over the years (not thoroughly cleaned inside) maybe you can get some old skin flakes from when Steve Jobs personally hand soldered some of the connections.
Then, using the DNA from the flakes, makes some clones. From the clones, harvest some organs (a pancreas and liver should do just fine*). Offer them to Mr. Jobs for a cool $1 Billion (or the chance to be first in line for the iPad 3;)
Actually there might be easier ways of getting the requisite cells. In fact, if you've already got this level of cloning ability, you could probably just ask him. (Another alternative would be to grow some organs from stem cells, that technology is coming along.)
*while you're at it try to excise/replace the "bad" gene which made his pancreas cancerous in the first place
Slashdot Mirror
So, if one model of the universe (currently out if favor) is correct that has it oscillating between big bangs and big crunches, would this be a way for sone super civilization to survive the end (big crunch) of the universe? The "Heechee" in Frederick Pohl's Gateway novels had them hiding out in black holes (though not for this reason). They were hiding out from another even more advanced race that had created the universe (which explained why the cosmological constant amongst other things was so finely tuned) and didn't want to be around when they came back to reclaim their "property".
The Heechee had some way as well of getting OUT of these black holes (FTL travel?). Of course since the the latest models show the universe to be expending itself to smithereens even if you could hide out in a black hole, it is likely there would be literally nothing to come back to.
By the way, does time stop completely below the event horizon? Might be another reason why hiding out in a black hole wouldn't be such a good idea.
With the power of these (and other modern cards) it would be trivial for them to power a hi-def VR headrig. I would imagine latency would be acceptable (at least on the graphics output end, don't know about the head tracker).
So why hasn't anyone put together a truly awesome, truly IMMERSIVE experience? Instead of hitting keys (or moving a mouse or joystick, sorry I don't know, I'm not a gamer) you could JUST TURN YOUR HEAD, like in real-life (tm). Wouldn't this make game play a lit more fun and less wonky? Add a cheap plastic AK-47 a la guitar hero, add a few position sensors and voila! You've got something that's good enough for training!
What's holding it up? It's the lack of hi-def eyepieces isn't it?
Here's my story submission which according to slashdot logs I submitted on Thursday, April 28@1:25am. I assume this was just an oversight on the part of the editors, no problem, I just wanted to bring up the larger (smaller?) issues regarding having spacecraft design directly coupled to the exponentially increasing (decreasing?) semiconductor fabrication industry which has been in progress now for over half a century.
"Here's a way to harness Moore's law (which has given us many orders of magnitudes of improvement) to spaceflight (which is still using technology more or less developed in the middle of the 20th century). Some researchers at Cornell will be launching their "Chip" sats, tiny 1" square satellites affixed(?) to the Endeavour space shuttle. "Their small size allows them to travel like space dust," said Peck. "Blown by solar winds, they can 'sail' to distant locations without fuel. ..." Hopefully they "may travel to Saturn within the next decade, and as they flutter down through its atmosphere, they will collect data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts."
While I really believe this is the future, I do have some questions. Although much can be miniaturized (nano-rized?), I'm wondering about some things such as optics (for cameras) and antenna/power (for transmitting the results back home). So while these may very well flutter down Saturn's atmosphere, there may need to be a large(r) mothership capable of transmitting the results home. (This was the mechanism used by Greg Bear in his novel "Queen of Angels" where his interstellar ship dropped "coin" sized probes to explore the worlds of Alpha Centauri.)
With the retirement of Endeavour we have the end of one technology coinciding with the birth of another."
As much as I hate to admit it (being an iPad 2 owner and Apple stock holder), iPads and its predecessor the iPod are luxuries.
It has often been said that you can't do anything on a tablet that you can on a notebook (this may be changing with some truly innovative new apps but let's go with this for now). So, by definition it is a luxury especially because with the iPad at least you NEED a regular computer to sync to.
The same is (was, before smartphones started decimating this category) true of MP3 players. While being able to listen to music on the go is nice, it is hardly a "need" like a cellphone. However for those who wanted one and could afford it, other factors beyond sheer utilitarianism came to play. Styling, user interface, the "shininess". When you buy a luxury car, the hood ornament is sometimes more important than the MPG.
So this shows the disparities in iPhone versus iPad sales in two ways. When the iPhone came out, many people decided they needed something like it. Either it was unavailable or, due to religious objections they couldn't fathom the idea of buying an Apple product so they got an Android.
With the iPad because it is a luxury, those who bought it (at first at least) are buying a status symbol product. That is why product styling is so important (remember when Samsung took back its latest tablet because it was a millimeter or two thicker than the iPad 2?). I mean for the people who can afford a $500 luxury item as long as you're going to buy it, you might as well get the best. And there are a LOT of rich people in the world (10s of millions of millionaires in the US alone). Think of the fancy watches and expensive cars and jewelry that people buy (and the iPad 2 is like a big piece of jewelry!). Even when reasonable alternatives exist people will wait weeks or pay a substantial premium to get the name brand.
Now, of course, they are finding new, hard to duplicate (on a regular PC) uses, that take advantage of this "magical" device. (And it IS magical, there is something about the immediacy and directness that the touch interface, unencumbered by the abstraction of the hand-to-mouse-to-cursor paradigm, that makes it so). Still is this user interface necessary? No, for now at least it is a luxury (but maybe in time it will become as much a part of our lives as windows and mice).
And who is the master at selling electronic luxuries? Apple.
Wow, 275 watts of power FOR THIRTY YEARS (actually I think it was substantially higher at the beginning, exponential decay and everything).
This is in a device with no moving parts, about the size of a microwave oven (I think, but maybe that's just one of them), able to operate in interstellar cold and Jupiter's radiation belts, not to mention the vibration and acceleration of liftoff. Oh, and it has to survive an explosion on the pad or accidental re-entry!
If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)
So I'm astonished that (they claim) they'll be able to make a FULL SPHERE of glass as opposed to some puny porthole.
Some questions:
A part (half?) of the sphere will have to be removed to allow people/things in and out (unlike "ecospheres") it can't be seamlessly sealed. Isn't that the most likely place of failure?
I assume there will have to be holes to allow power, cooling/heating, communications right? Another point of failure?
(Actually I read a story where some grad student had figured out a way of transmitting powe/communications THROUGH a submarine's metal hull using sonic waves.)
Where in the world will they test this thing to one and a quarter times the max. pressure? (And I thought engineering standards were to one and a half max.)
... taken down.
I'm not a hacker by inclination (or ability!) and I normally look dimly upon vigilantees who take it upon themselves to bring about "justice". But in this case I'm happy to see the Iranian nuclear program stalled through almost any means possible; to imagine their president Ahmadinejad having a nuke is almost as bad as imaging the Taliban/Al Qaeda having one! I mean, really who would benefit from Iran getting a bomb? I'm not sure even the Iranians (ultimately) would!
If only the dear leader had been tricked into buying Siemens industrial control systems for his centrifuges. (I guess the problem with having sanctions against North Korea for so long is that they were forced to develop all of their own technologies).
To put the emphasis on improving LEO access first (through better lower cost commercialized technologies) than trying to push the shuttle derived Ares program (that republicans have been trying to resurrect.)?
If Space-X can meet its goal of $1,000/lb. to LEO (one TENTH) the cost of the space shuttle, I would think so!
I would imagine PC users are also...
More likely to not believe in evolution
More likely to not believe in global warming
More likely to think autism is caused by vaccines
In short, more likely to be anti-science or Republican (or in the case of Obama's birthplace, clearly anti-fact as well)
(you may consider this a troll but this story is about attitudes so it is on topic. And it is true is it not?)
(I don't have any moderation points now, sometimes I get 15 sometimes 5?)
You know good journalism is expensive, it costs companies to produce it and sometimes it costs journalists (and photo journalists!) their lives :(
I rely on the NYTimes so heavily for good information and, more importantly ANALYSIS that I actually felt guilty until they put up the paywall. I didn't think they could generate enough revenue just through their ads so I was worried. I'm a subscriber now of course.
Then again maybe the NYTimes to me is a special case. There are very few other sites I would pay for.
10x stronger than steel sounds great even if it is just tensile strength because tensile strength is what is needed to go to Geosync orbit right? Then with the right solar/laser powered "climber" we have our space elevator right?
I have no idea how many orders of magnitude improvement are needed but I am happy that at least this stuff is being made in macroscopic quantities. (I mean there's an actual PICTURE of it being held by some forceps! Not like the tiny lengths of nanotubes I've heard about).
By the way, wouldn't this make a great Kevlar replacement? Think of really light body armor!
... of FIRST reducing the cost of access to space through technology development (scrapping the Orion rocket) and commercialization BEFORE going for the Moon/Mars right? (Sorry for the run on sentence).
If the Falcon Heavy can get payloads to orbit for $1,000/lb. (one TENTH the cost of the shuttle!), I would think so.
There is an entertaining video on this from a presentation at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) that is only 4 minutes long. And no I've never been.
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
(... and not even the ice geysers of Enceladus should sway our choice).
Why? Because as Professor Peter Ward claims in his very interesting book on astro-biology "Life as we do not know it", only "Titan holds the promise of not just alien life but of MORE THAN ONE KIND OF FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT alien life". (emphasis mine). There could be."three distinct empires of life, from two entirely different trees; CHON life of two kinds (ammono and water CHON life) and silicon life." (p. 234). While he said the "CHON ammono life would be found, presumably beneath the ice, in the ammonia ocean" and the "silicon life would exist, if it existed at all, in the ethane-methane lakes of Titan's surface" he thought the "earthlike" CHON life would be found in the transient freshwater lakes after an asteroid or comet impact.
Well, if there is a (huge) water ocean beneath the ice (and below the ammonia ocean?) the earthlike CHON life wouldn't have to depend on transient impact events! I guess the reason why the researchers believe the ocean to be water (as opposed to the methane the Technology Review editors seem to think), is because the temperature and pressure at those depths make water the most likely candidate. So anyway to recap, on Titan there are a possibility of THREE COMPLETELY different "empires" (his term) of life with only one of them having even the remotest possibility of being anything like life on earth (even if it is earthlike CHON life, that means only that it uses the carbon and other atoms at energy levels corresponding to liquid water, they might not use DNA, RNA or even proteins!).
The reasons why (he suggests) we should skip over Mars, Europa (and I presume Enceladus) is as follows: while Mars was certainly once capable of supporting (Earthlike CHON) life, now it is cold, dry and likely dead. For Europa (and Enceladus) he claims that while they have the liquid water necessary to support (again earthlike CHON) life, they don't have enough energy. His calculations show that the gravitational flexing caused by Jupiter, the main source of energy for Europa, would only be enough to drive a modest ecosystem that would be dispersed in an ocean of millions of cubic kilometers of water. Too dilute to be sustainable. (The same would be presumably be true to an even greater extent of Enceledus).
Titan, on the other hand, is large enough to presumably be able to generate heat internally (it is the largest moon in the solar system) and also gets (some) energy from tidal interactions with Saturn. An interesting additional input is the (weak) ultraviolet rays from the (distant) sun that hits its atmosphere (the only substantial one of any moon) and creates a whole host of organic compounds. Finally if his speculations on the other empires of life are correct, their much colder metabolism may allow (require?) them to exist on much less energy our liquid water based ones do.
This is, of course, rank speculation but the finding a new empire of life would be truly monumental, it would mean life is likely present in every solar system in the galaxy. Of course even finding "earthlike" CHON life would be astounding. Anyway, if the beauty of Saturn's rings weren't enough, this is another great reason to go back. Besides landing and exploring Titan could be comparatively easy. Aeorobraking, aerocapture and reentry will save a lot of fuel compared with landing on an airless world. Parachutes alone will work extremely well in the dense atmosphere and low gravity (unlike Mars) as will planes and hot "air" balloons. The surface ocean is likely to be very calm so boats and submersibles should be usable. There is also land for rovers and drilling operations. The only problem is distance (and money), so let's get cracking on nuclear powered ion engines!
... but here in Vietnam we DO hear quite a bit about the rapid encroachment (and salinization) by the ocean into the Mekong delta. It is clear that with the ocean coming in (I seem to remember an encroachment figure of 1.4km/yr.) and that hundreds of thousands have already been displaced because they can no longer farm there. (This has driven the growth of the big cities which is where I live). The government is constantly projecting that millions more will move in the next few decades (This is from their Thanh Nhien News which is a pretty widely read paper, there's an English website you can visit).
Of course matters will soon be made even worse as upstream countries start damming the Mekong. (They may be doing so because the freshwater source in the Himalayas is losing its snowpack cover. This may also be due to climate change.)
Vietnam is supposedly one of the most susceptible countries to sea level rising but I can imagine things could be even worse in an even poorer (and closer to sea level) country like Bangladesh.
Let me guess, this guy has some sort of political axe to grind and he is looking for way to try to justify tax cuts in areas he doesn't like.
FACTS ARE FACTS, these are numbers where money is going and where they are spent. While he can say that "welfare" should be renamed "money for cadillac queens" or that the "defense department" should be renamed "military industrial complex" it doesn't change where the money is going or what is is actually being spent for.
(Not unless you're Jon Kyl and claim on the senate floor that Planned Parenthood spends 90% of its money on abortion counseling. The real amount is 3%. But why pick on our elected Senators? You could be one of the many Americans who believe that NASA takes up 20% of the federal budget. The real amount is less than 1%).
Well perhaps for the upper class Americans for whom air travel was a given back in the seventies travel hasn't sped up. But for the 10s or 100s of millions who are being introduced to commercial air travel for the first time, let me tell you their average speed has really taken off. Air travel has become affordable for the first time to a significant fraction of the world's population. Rising living standards and cheaper flights due to de-regulation has done the trick. Living here in Vietnam I personally have taken many airplane "virgins" for a ride. ;)
(Due to an extremely fortunate set of circumstances, I must confess I was lucky enough to break the sound barrier in a Concorde flight way back when. It was interesting watching the digital airspeed gauge go higher and higher!)
It looks really cool* and I'd love to get this App on my new iPad 2 :)
The next step which I've been looking for but haven't seen yet is some means of a user "grasping" objects in 3D space. While the technology doesn't exist for a true haptic interface, you would imagine someone could use two cameras to calculate the 3D position of a user's fingers (or other body part!) or some sort of 3D depth sensor (how does the proximity sensor on an iPhone work?). So while this may not work on this generation iPad presumably it might on some of the other devices that have two cameras capable of parallax vision (Nintendo 3DS, LG tablets, various android phones).
One issue though is that these demos all show the 3D interface as if you are looking down into a "well" or into a box. Obviously since you can't put your fingers there you will need the display to appear to project "up" or "out" if you want a 3D touch interface to interact with your 3D elements. This will, of course, make the 3D volume and the view angles considerably smaller, so much so that perhaps it is only practical on a tablet sized device. There may be other problems such as occlusion caused by the fingers.
Anyone working on this?
*I know this was done before on the Wii and I believe the authors acknowledged the previous work done by a James Lee(?) at Carnegie Mellon (now at Microsoft I think).
Look I'm very VERY much for kicking our fossil fuel addiction that causes global warming and is directly funding terrorism (republican appointed defense secretary Gates said most financial support for Taliban/Al Queda comes from gulf states not drug trafficking) but using crops for biofuels is not the way to go. Aside from the fact that some fuels (ethanol from corn) may require MORE energy to produce than is harvested, there are serious ethical issues when you have American S.U.V. drivers competing directly with sub-Saharan african peasants for a life sustaining resource. For one thing it connects the global food market with the monopolistic oil pricing strategies of our friends (sarcasm) from the middle east. (I was at a talk given by the president of ASEAN who represents some of the largest rice exporting countries in the world like Thailand and Vietnam. When asked if they had thought about setting up a cartel like OPEC but with rice not oil he remarked that there were serious ethical issues to consider if you were going to use as a weapon the basic foodstuff of hundreds of millions.)
The powerful political farming interests would just love to see their product fueling our cars. (I keep seeing this commercial on Discovery TV implying the average westerner utilizes 120 TIMES as much energy in maintaining their lifestyle as they do eating). Clearly even if crops were net energy positive (after fertilizers, transport, fermentation, etc.) using them in this way would send the price into the stratosphere. Renewable solar technology MUST be used (sorry, but let's face it Nukes are not going to have a renaissance in the West at least :(. Hopefully photovoltaics or something like the "artificial leaf" can generate carbon zero fuels at a much higher efficiency (supposedly 10x natural photosynthesis which, as this article confirms, is appallingly inefficient). More importantly, placed in the deserts or other areas not suitable for farming they won't compete with the crops we need to LIVE.
I'm really not against fossil fuels, I'd really like to see us get some oil from the tar sands those nice Canadians have, or tap into the abundance of natural gas or even go after the HUGE undersea deposits of methane clathrates. HOWEVER, we've really got to do this WHILE keeping the carbon impact zero (or negative!). This is possible, there are a number of carbon sequestration technologies that should be able to do this (there was a recent Sci-Amer. article on this) while only consuming a fraction of the energy gained from burning it. Until that's demonstrated and put into place though, we should really be focusing on renewable technologies until nuclear fusion comes online to save our butts in 20 years. ;)
Sorry about Goddard, his designs although ungainly did significantly advance the field (didn't know about the quote from Von Braun, thanks).
Thank you very much!
Ok, the App is very minimal, just tells you how much time you've gained(?) compared to a "stationary" observer.
The info panel allows you to put in your birth date. Presumably this is to show you how much time you've added to your life? (It also allows you to turn on multi-tasking for the app so I guess it can constantly determine how much time you've saved).
I wish it would give a little more info (ideally a running graph showing time slowing down as you're speeding up). It says it uses GPS but I'm assuming it isn't calculating how much time is speeding up if you climb up some stairs (out of the gravity well). For that matter I assume it isn't taking into account acceleration (note to physicists: does non-gravity acceleration cause time dilation?).
Still it is free, and makes me feel very very very slightly younger!
Actually this is probably what dance theory is all about right? Might provide a useful abstraction of the subject though. Maybe there's a thesis in this for some non-tech averse grad student!
The quick answer (which I'm sure many posters have already said) is don't involve chemistry; use nuclear engines, or ion engines or solar sails or magnetic balloons. There is a lot more energy (million fold) in nuclear bonds that you can get from fission reactors or by using the fusion furnace at the center of our solar system.
That said, I haven't really heard of good answers to long time LIVING (not just survival) outside of the earth's magnetic field/shield and without one-gee acceleration keeping our bodies reasonably fit. Want to COLONIZE Mars and not just go there for a flags and footprints mission? Well we have no idea if the 1/3 G gravity will keep the astronaut's bones from becoming brittle. Who knows if women can give birth to healthy infants in such an environment or even if we can grow crops there! (I really thought they shouldn't have cancelled the centrifuge that was to be a part of the ISS. Hopefully, if the Falcon 9 works out, it'll be cheap enough to add it later).
I'm actually a little more optimistic about the long term ability of humanity to spread throughout the cosmos. In just a few decades, hopefully we'll know enough about our biology to really tinker with it. Getting rid of susceptibility to low gravity is a given of course but how about a little radiation hardening? (Some organisms can tolerate millions of times as much radiation as we can). Perhaps later we could learn to deal with decompression sicknesses (like marine mammals) so spacesuit design could become a lot simpler. Maybe we could learn the tricks of hibernation from bears and squirrels so long space flights wouldn't consume so many resources (and be so boring!).
We might end up not quite the same as homo sapiens. Call it man plus. (For INTERSTELLAR travel, we'll need some pretty spectacular physics or some pretty radical reengineering of ourselves. How 'bout brains in boxes? Or better yet, just software running on commodity hardware?).
But it might take awhile.
And if it HASN'T been too well maintained over the years (not thoroughly cleaned inside) maybe you can get some old skin flakes from when Steve Jobs personally hand soldered some of the connections.
Then, using the DNA from the flakes, makes some clones. From the clones, harvest some organs (a pancreas and liver should do just fine*). Offer them to Mr. Jobs for a cool $1 Billion (or the chance to be first in line for the iPad 3 ;)
Actually there might be easier ways of getting the requisite cells. In fact, if you've already got this level of cloning ability, you could probably just ask him. (Another alternative would be to grow some organs from stem cells, that technology is coming along.)
*while you're at it try to excise/replace the "bad" gene which made his pancreas cancerous in the first place