Both projects Daedalus and Longshot used a fusion engine in order to do something an awful lot like that. Daedalus used inertial fusion for main power and thrust, Longshot used a fission plant to power the fusion torch and all kinds of sensors when they get there. Not to mention using a 45-meter engine bell as a radio dish to return the results to Earth.
Magnetic solar sail braking is stupendously energy - and propellant - efficient, making it much cheaper to brake than accelerate. This also helps your flying-fuel-pyramid problem.
Either Longshot or Daedalus was supposed to enter orbit around Barnard's star (the other was indeed a flyby), meaning that stopping at the target system is in fact feasible.
Most people have no real appreciation of the scale involved in psace travel. As daunting as our own solar system is, even that pales in comparison to the scales involved in traveling to other solar systems. Currently it takes us about 9 years for a probe to reach Pluto. When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
120,000 years is the correct answer. Most people guess between 100-1000. That's why people think it is plausible for mankind to colonize space. They don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
Project Longshot was talking about getting a probe to Proxima Centauri and returning data within 40 years. On the other hand, Longshot was an atomic robot designed to reach low relativistic speed, autonomously survey the star system, and launch space probes to further investigate anything the computer considers interesting.
Do I have mod points? No.
This is the single biggest reason I run noscript and adblock, folks. Making your page load thirty times faster by stripping out the crap I didn't request? Awesome. Preparing for bandwidth caps by eliminating most of the large binary blobs I download? That too.
When you're paywalling three-meg flash ads, people will start resenting those shenanigans.
Babylon 5 and DS9 have a very sordid history. JMS pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount, and a couple months later they mysteriously announced this "secret" project of DS9 and scooped JMS's project. Coincidence? Probably not.
Regardless, at least one (B5) was developed independently of the other, and if you believe Paramount, both were developed independently.
AT&T's dumbphones, at least, (all two of them) have hardkeys that can't be remapped from data-consuming navigation programs and web portals.
They love the data plan and its accompanying profit source - you fat finger one of those, and you're on the hook for $3ish. The smartphones are the carrot, and their current dumbphones are the stick.
Did you RTFA? The author says they have to file patents or risk being locked out of selling/working on their own technology by someone else patenting it out from under them.
He couldn't work in his field at all, because someone else patented any and all combinations of stem cells plus diabetus. If anything sounds catastrophically dumb, it's the ability to patent "stem cells plus * " and get a valid patent. It's like the old "internet plus * " and "computer plus * " patent storms all over again.
Well, with the Arduino, some RFID tags, and a reader on the car, I'm sure you could slap a governor on the throttle to limit it to 80% most of the time, but mash things to 100% for a second and a half after flying past a "boost" tag.
I was in central Florida during the March 13, 1989 solar storm. Reach out your hand toward the sky and splay your fingers. Strontium-red plasma burned in the sky in a swath three times as broad as your fingers.
I am entirely willing to accept that the iPhone is a good, even excellent, smartphone. I am not, emphasis not, willing to accept it as a good PDA when it costs >= $2000 over the life of the product.
Good PDAs that are also smartphones aren't good PDAs.
iPod Touch is the best one I've seen lately. Zune HD... Idunno.
Android? I've looked and not found.
I'd rather have a smartphone with the option to block all 3G/EDGE traffic at the phone level, relying on wi-fi except in emergencies. I've been waiting since the Treo 600 was hot news. Its retail launch was in mid 2003, so... eight years or so?
Chernobyl was a textbook case - they made every mistake in the textbook.
Three mile island was an object lesson in why American reactors have pressure vessels, unlike Soviet designs (read as: Chernobyl). It was also when we realized that you couldn't print out error codes for the operator on a line printer, have them look up the code, and take action; within seconds, there were hours worth of error codes queued at the printer. Not textbook at the time, but we changed the textbooks and nobody does that now.
Chinese designs beat them both at the moment; the experimental models can simply have the power to cooling systems cut, and you then watch the fission pile peter out instead of watching it burn through the floor.
Remember, kids: many things are not as simple as they sound.
Are you crazy? The proper second step is to install wireless hardware and a network stack allowing for zeroconfig networking and automatic synchronization to the cloud.
Then when events do conspire to make you dead, you just restore from backup, having not lost anything too critical - a good analogy would be losing an arm in an age where prosthetics are just as good as the real thing but subtly different - Ghost in the Shell, for example.
It's been argued that the odds are, we are living in a matrix in an omega-point computer or somebody-from-the-future's ancestor simulation. I'm not sure that contradicts the irreducible mind thing - with weirdness being a result of software bugs, buffer overflows in the Matrix leading to exploits.
At the very least, it explains your theory about how stuff seems like a special case of information, and how the behavior of entropy can be explained so well in the context of information, and how the speed of light is not actually how fast the light wave travels (when you fuck with the medium), it's how fast the wave can transmit information. I wonder if it also can be used to postulate a model for the wave/particle duality.
put that in your pipe and smoke it. Along with a little hashish marinated in LSD.:D
You've got it backwards - in cryptospeak, the trusted party is the one capable of betraying the other one. That would make the government the trusted party. Note that trusted != trustworthy.
The year is 2010, and we have enough atomic weapons to reduce the planet to a burned out cinder (if we half-ass it; we could probably make an asteroid belt if we put our minds to it).
Stop giving them ideas.
According to Cameron, they tried mining the mountains once. There was a terrible accident, and they never tried again.
Also, unobtanium isn't adamantium, it's room temperature superconductor. That's why the mountains float (over the retardedly strong magnetic field of Pandora - note that the mineral formation near the soul tree was crystal growth along magnetic field lines; I'd say right on top of the magnetic pole)
You know how long it takes to dig a proper pit mine? They couldn't extract it all, with a half-dozen slowboats already en route for Pandora, and be gone by sunrise. That mine would have filled the next dozen starships to head back to Earth, or they wouldn't have been so gung-ho about that particular deposit.
What would be much harder to believe is that a virus hasn't evolved in that environment that would have transmitted itself planet-wide through their TreetherNet.
What do you think the planetary hivemind started as, if it were not built deliberately as such?
I'm fond of the theory that Pandora is a colony world created by a post-Singularity species, where they could enjoy the rest of... until the sun burns out.
What would you do with eternity and nanomachines after going to the stars?
Seriously, tell me you have some better idea than making everyone sexy and having mind-blowing sex as often as you like while a demonstrably benevolent god keeps everything working as originally intended, possibly also absorbing the informational content of every brain that ends up buried? (This is a euphemism for any computer-generated afterlife you care to implement, from reincarnation to harps and clouds)
It also explains why all the na'vi are in perfect health and nobody needs anything but the vestiges of modern medicine (encounters with modern machine guns aside).
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Those rare earths aren't exactly rare; they're just really hard to process.
I look forward to nanotech recycling and making expensive and scarce raw materials cheap and common.
Both projects Daedalus and Longshot used a fusion engine in order to do something an awful lot like that. Daedalus used inertial fusion for main power and thrust, Longshot used a fission plant to power the fusion torch and all kinds of sensors when they get there. Not to mention using a 45-meter engine bell as a radio dish to return the results to Earth.
Magnetic solar sail braking is stupendously energy - and propellant - efficient, making it much cheaper to brake than accelerate. This also helps your flying-fuel-pyramid problem.
Either Longshot or Daedalus was supposed to enter orbit around Barnard's star (the other was indeed a flyby), meaning that stopping at the target system is in fact feasible.
Most people have no real appreciation of the scale involved in psace travel. As daunting as our own solar system is, even that pales in comparison to the scales involved in traveling to other solar systems. Currently it takes us about 9 years for a probe to reach Pluto. When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
120,000 years is the correct answer. Most people guess between 100-1000. That's why people think it is plausible for mankind to colonize space. They don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
Project Longshot was talking about getting a probe to Proxima Centauri and returning data within 40 years. On the other hand, Longshot was an atomic robot designed to reach low relativistic speed, autonomously survey the star system, and launch space probes to further investigate anything the computer considers interesting.
Do I have mod points? No. This is the single biggest reason I run noscript and adblock, folks. Making your page load thirty times faster by stripping out the crap I didn't request? Awesome. Preparing for bandwidth caps by eliminating most of the large binary blobs I download? That too. When you're paywalling three-meg flash ads, people will start resenting those shenanigans.
You don't play games much, do you?
Hell, what about a college education?
An elementary education?
Babylon 5 and DS9 have a very sordid history. JMS pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount, and a couple months later they mysteriously announced this "secret" project of DS9 and scooped JMS's project. Coincidence? Probably not.
Regardless, at least one (B5) was developed independently of the other, and if you believe Paramount, both were developed independently.
AT&T's dumbphones, at least, (all two of them) have hardkeys that can't be remapped from data-consuming navigation programs and web portals. They love the data plan and its accompanying profit source - you fat finger one of those, and you're on the hook for $3ish. The smartphones are the carrot, and their current dumbphones are the stick.
Did you RTFA? The author says they have to file patents or risk being locked out of selling/working on their own technology by someone else patenting it out from under them.
He couldn't work in his field at all, because someone else patented any and all combinations of stem cells plus diabetus. If anything sounds catastrophically dumb, it's the ability to patent "stem cells plus * " and get a valid patent. It's like the old "internet plus * " and "computer plus * " patent storms all over again.
Well, with the Arduino, some RFID tags, and a reader on the car, I'm sure you could slap a governor on the throttle to limit it to 80% most of the time, but mash things to 100% for a second and a half after flying past a "boost" tag.
I was in central Florida during the March 13, 1989 solar storm. Reach out your hand toward the sky and splay your fingers. Strontium-red plasma burned in the sky in a swath three times as broad as your fingers.
I am entirely willing to accept that the iPhone is a good, even excellent, smartphone. I am not, emphasis not, willing to accept it as a good PDA when it costs >= $2000 over the life of the product.
Good PDAs that are also smartphones aren't good PDAs.
... eight years or so?
iPod Touch is the best one I've seen lately. Zune HD... Idunno.
Android? I've looked and not found.
I'd rather have a smartphone with the option to block all 3G/EDGE traffic at the phone level, relying on wi-fi except in emergencies. I've been waiting since the Treo 600 was hot news. Its retail launch was in mid 2003, so
Chernobyl was a textbook case - they made every mistake in the textbook.
Three mile island was an object lesson in why American reactors have pressure vessels, unlike Soviet designs (read as: Chernobyl). It was also when we realized that you couldn't print out error codes for the operator on a line printer, have them look up the code, and take action; within seconds, there were hours worth of error codes queued at the printer. Not textbook at the time, but we changed the textbooks and nobody does that now.
Chinese designs beat them both at the moment; the experimental models can simply have the power to cooling systems cut, and you then watch the fission pile peter out instead of watching it burn through the floor.
Remember, kids: many things are not as simple as they sound.
They make buying used hardware an unacceptable risk to many people.
Are you crazy? The proper second step is to install wireless hardware and a network stack allowing for zeroconfig networking and automatic synchronization to the cloud.
Then when events do conspire to make you dead, you just restore from backup, having not lost anything too critical - a good analogy would be losing an arm in an age where prosthetics are just as good as the real thing but subtly different - Ghost in the Shell, for example.
Also, you get to be in two places at once.
It's been argued that the odds are, we are living in a matrix in an omega-point computer or somebody-from-the-future's ancestor simulation. I'm not sure that contradicts the irreducible mind thing - with weirdness being a result of software bugs, buffer overflows in the Matrix leading to exploits.
:D
At the very least, it explains your theory about how stuff seems like a special case of information, and how the behavior of entropy can be explained so well in the context of information, and how the speed of light is not actually how fast the light wave travels (when you fuck with the medium), it's how fast the wave can transmit information. I wonder if it also can be used to postulate a model for the wave/particle duality.
put that in your pipe and smoke it. Along with a little hashish marinated in LSD.
You've got it backwards - in cryptospeak, the trusted party is the one capable of betraying the other one. That would make the government the trusted party. Note that trusted != trustworthy.
The year is 2010, and we have enough atomic weapons to reduce the planet to a burned out cinder (if we half-ass it; we could probably make an asteroid belt if we put our minds to it). Stop giving them ideas.
According to Cameron, they tried mining the mountains once. There was a terrible accident, and they never tried again.
Also, unobtanium isn't adamantium, it's room temperature superconductor. That's why the mountains float (over the retardedly strong magnetic field of Pandora - note that the mineral formation near the soul tree was crystal growth along magnetic field lines; I'd say right on top of the magnetic pole)
You know how long it takes to dig a proper pit mine? They couldn't extract it all, with a half-dozen slowboats already en route for Pandora, and be gone by sunrise. That mine would have filled the next dozen starships to head back to Earth, or they wouldn't have been so gung-ho about that particular deposit.
What would be much harder to believe is that a virus hasn't evolved in that environment that would have transmitted itself planet-wide through their TreetherNet. What do you think the planetary hivemind started as, if it were not built deliberately as such?
I'm fond of the theory that Pandora is a colony world created by a post-Singularity species, where they could enjoy the rest of ... until the sun burns out.
What would you do with eternity and nanomachines after going to the stars?
Seriously, tell me you have some better idea than making everyone sexy and having mind-blowing sex as often as you like while a demonstrably benevolent god keeps everything working as originally intended, possibly also absorbing the informational content of every brain that ends up buried? (This is a euphemism for any computer-generated afterlife you care to implement, from reincarnation to harps and clouds) It also explains why all the na'vi are in perfect health and nobody needs anything but the vestiges of modern medicine (encounters with modern machine guns aside).
I for one would like to read your master's thesis.