The only purpose of Little Boy was identical to AK-47s single purpose, or Sarin for that matter. If designing one was ethical, then the other one was as well.
Helium-3 has existing very high value terrestrial uses, and its prices spiked up tenfold after 9/11 - guess why. It hypothetical potential as fuel for fusion is just a side benefit. Unfortunately almost all research into further He-3 applications is impossible as it has become much too expensive for researchers to acquire.
Let me try a random headline generator with the word Bitcoin substituted in, see how many land on Slashdot
Could binge bitoin mining burgle the middle class? Will the bitcoin steal the identity of the conservative party? Is the nanny state destroying the bitcoin? Could dumbing-down bitcoin tax england? Is cancer stealing the bitcoins of your children?
Are they referring to the badBIOS myth or what exactly ? Or just riding on the FUD wave of "OMG there are BIOS virii!" Maybe their PR department failed to read the thorough debunkings of it ?
>>I guess NASA made a mistake in the 1960s packing air and water on the Apollo mission?
In a way, yes. More robotic exploration beforehand would have told them many things we know now that they didnt know back then. In situ oxygen production was an idea that came around right when people started looking at lunar rock samples.
The abundance of volatiles like hydrogen and potentially water came about only decades later - because it didnt occur to anyone to survey polar latitudes extensively before that.
Had they known what we known now, we might have ended up with quite a different space history, where a lunar base would have been established early. Unfortunately the program was driven by saber rattling and beating the soviets, rather than actual drive to gain a foothold off the planet.
Please educate yourself. Moon has abundant oxygen and hydrogen, and very likely also water. It also basks in abundant sunlight which is about 8 times stronger than on earth, and there are permantly lit mountain tops on polar locations that do not have the 2-week lunar night. In fact, there is pretty much every resource on the moon to support a nice small city for millenia. It also has elements and isotopes that are exceedingly rare or very hard to access on Earth and have very high value - like helium-3.
You should read something other than childrens "science" books from 50ies, sometime.
No, everything is not here, and quite possibly everyone is not here either. I will buy a ticket to see a sunrise on the moon, as soon as i can afford one. But if you are happy with your seven continents and 2-dimensional map of the world, don't let yourself be bothered by the rest of us hoping to go see the stars.
Also, with OST there are bunch of people running around claiming that it leaves the door open for private property. Well, any national space agency could technically make any of their big projects "private" with a stroke of a pen - JPL robots are built by Lockheed, China has a "China Aerospace and Technology Corporation", Russia has Roscosmos, etc etc. It would be super easy to get around the technicality of private/public there, so i dont think that aspect can really be leveraged.
The budgets NASA is receiving is an order of magnitude bigger than anything Chinese are spending on their space programs. In fact, NASA budget still eclipses every other national civil space budget combined. 17 billion dollars is a lot of dough.
BTW, whatever happened to a Joystick ? Every PC store had them in 90ies. Not so much, anymore. Did $300-400 bucks kill it ? No, i think my trusty old Sidewinder Pro cost be around 100 max.
Right, i have read Wingo's version and others - he is wildly optimistic about this being a business bootstrap and his prices and cost structures. Plus, there is no way you will get the numbers of petabytes he dreams in deep space radiation environment. But, something like that could be conjured up as some super premium service by an existing business with coffers to fund things at couple hundred million dollar level and patience to market it and return the investment on the service. However, we know how well big businesses like far out ideas.
You want your data to be safe ? Send it to the moon. Careful about the storage format - etched metal plates are probably the most durable. But pick encoding that an alien could understand and decode. See Voyager Golden Record.
A hundred sample return missions could come back empty and it would still not tell you if life existed on Mars or no. Same for human sorties. This is not an argument against spaceflight , but i think the chase to find evidence of life on Mars - if it ever existed - at this stage of our spaceflight capabilities is slightly futile and a little bit overprioritized. The best you can do is characterize the environment of the past, which is what Curiosity did here, but actually hitting a fossil with any one off mission has a very very low probability, IMO.
Any everest climber pays for it with his own money, or by his direct sponsors that support his cause. South Pole the same. Higgs Boson and LHC are scientific endeavours, greatly contributing to science and our understanding of the word.
Apollo was "our germans are better than your germans" and "we can build a bigger ICBM than you" pissing contest - and effectively bankrupted further space development on both sides. As has been said elsewhere in this thread - Lunokhods and Luna landers, and Surveyors were much much more reasonable use of the funds. And im not against manned spaceflight per se - i think X-15 was an excellent use of funds too.
In fact, Apollo can be blamed on the fact that we still dont have O'Neill colonies and a lunar base, because it established the wrong paradigm that was unaffordable from the get go.
We don't want a robot to land on mars. The world's attention on MSL/Curiosity landing and live broadcast on Time's square speaks otherwise.
Yes its wrong. China has lots of scientist and engineers that have put their hard work into this - and they are doing something that nobody has done for decades, and they are doing it better, with more modern and even completely new instruments.
The Soviet union is, of course, still just living off resources created on the back of peasants and workers during the Soviet era. USSR doesnt exist anymore - but if you meant Russian space industry, then yes absolutely. And it has been crumbling for years.
The moon landing may have been a good political stunt, but scientifically and economically, it was a huge waste of money. You'll get no argument on this one. Most of the manned spaceflight to date is still a huge waste of money.
Because everyone of the "new space" followers was high at the SpaceShipOne X-Prize victory at the time and they all believed space is much easier than government has made it out to be. So they thought putting a lunar lander together takes a blog, two guys in a garage, github and attending a summit - they will all have Chinese beat by years.
Apparently, it doesnt quite work that way - and Branson is still waiting for his rocket to take him on his worlds highest rollercoaster.
Slashdot Mirror
The only purpose of Little Boy was identical to AK-47s single purpose, or Sarin for that matter. If designing one was ethical, then the other one was as well.
What would modern Africa look like, if not for his great invention ?
Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
Helium-3 has existing very high value terrestrial uses, and its prices spiked up tenfold after 9/11 - guess why. It hypothetical potential as fuel for fusion is just a side benefit.
Unfortunately almost all research into further He-3 applications is impossible as it has become much too expensive for researchers to acquire.
Why exactly are binary blobs more evil than other code ? A simple disasm will show you exactly what it will do.
Average Perl code is harder to read than disassembled BIOS
Will they be available as a service pack for XP ?
Let me try a random headline generator with the word Bitcoin substituted in, see how many land on Slashdot
Could binge bitoin mining burgle the middle class?
Will the bitcoin steal the identity of the conservative party?
Is the nanny state destroying the bitcoin?
Could dumbing-down bitcoin tax england?
Is cancer stealing the bitcoins of your children?
Are they referring to the badBIOS myth or what exactly ? Or just riding on the FUD wave of "OMG there are BIOS virii!" Maybe their PR department failed to read the thorough debunkings of it ?
>>I guess NASA made a mistake in the 1960s packing air and water on the Apollo mission?
In a way, yes. More robotic exploration beforehand would have told them many things we know now that they didnt know back then. In situ oxygen production was an idea that came around right when people started looking at lunar rock samples.
The abundance of volatiles like hydrogen and potentially water came about only decades later - because it didnt occur to anyone to survey polar latitudes extensively before that.
Had they known what we known now, we might have ended up with quite a different space history, where a lunar base would have been established early. Unfortunately the program was driven by saber rattling and beating the soviets, rather than actual drive to gain a foothold off the planet.
>>Or water or air for that matter.
Please educate yourself. Moon has abundant oxygen and hydrogen, and very likely also water. It also basks in abundant sunlight which is about 8 times stronger than on earth, and there are permantly lit mountain tops on polar locations that do not have the 2-week lunar night.
In fact, there is pretty much every resource on the moon to support a nice small city for millenia. It also has elements and isotopes that are exceedingly rare or very hard to access on Earth and have very high value - like helium-3.
You should read something other than childrens "science" books from 50ies, sometime.
India is, and this is putting it politely, still an absolute shithole. Brazil is only marginally better, and China only marginally better than that.
I'm sorry but i dont think you travel much. Try it some time, it can be really eye opening.
*Everything* and *everyone* is right here!
No, everything is not here, and quite possibly everyone is not here either. I will buy a ticket to see a sunrise on the moon, as soon as i can afford one.
But if you are happy with your seven continents and 2-dimensional map of the world, don't let yourself be bothered by the rest of us hoping to go see the stars.
Also, with OST there are bunch of people running around claiming that it leaves the door open for private property. Well, any national space agency could technically make any of their big projects "private" with a stroke of a pen - JPL robots are built by Lockheed, China has a "China Aerospace and Technology Corporation", Russia has Roscosmos, etc etc. It would be super easy to get around the technicality of private/public there, so i dont think that aspect can really be leveraged.
The budgets NASA is receiving is an order of magnitude bigger than anything Chinese are spending on their space programs. In fact, NASA budget still eclipses every other national civil space budget combined. 17 billion dollars is a lot of dough.
BTW, whatever happened to a Joystick ? Every PC store had them in 90ies. Not so much, anymore. Did $300-400 bucks kill it ? No, i think my trusty old Sidewinder Pro cost be around 100 max.
However, the content dried up ..
Its easily found on Play store in many incarnations, so if you want it you have it. I've been using it for months. Whats the big deal ?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.colortiger.appopsinstaller
Right, i have read Wingo's version and others - he is wildly optimistic about this being a business bootstrap and his prices and cost structures. Plus, there is no way you will get the numbers of petabytes he dreams in deep space radiation environment. But, something like that could be conjured up as some super premium service by an existing business with coffers to fund things at couple hundred million dollar level and patience to market it and return the investment on the service.
However, we know how well big businesses like far out ideas.
You want your data to be safe ? Send it to the moon. Careful about the storage format - etched metal plates are probably the most durable. But pick encoding that an alien could understand and decode. See Voyager Golden Record.
A hundred sample return missions could come back empty and it would still not tell you if life existed on Mars or no. Same for human sorties.
This is not an argument against spaceflight , but i think the chase to find evidence of life on Mars - if it ever existed - at this stage of our spaceflight capabilities is slightly futile and a little bit overprioritized. The best you can do is characterize the environment of the past, which is what Curiosity did here, but actually hitting a fossil with any one off mission has a very very low probability, IMO.
Some of them did
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams/omega-envoy/blog/earthrise-space-inc-launches-kickstarter-project
I have a hard time understanding the concept of nationalism in a country made up almost exclusively of immigrants.
Any everest climber pays for it with his own money, or by his direct sponsors that support his cause. South Pole the same. Higgs Boson and LHC are scientific endeavours, greatly contributing to science and our understanding of the word.
Apollo was "our germans are better than your germans" and "we can build a bigger ICBM than you" pissing contest - and effectively bankrupted further space development on both sides. As has been said elsewhere in this thread - Lunokhods and Luna landers, and Surveyors were much much more reasonable use of the funds. And im not against manned spaceflight per se - i think X-15 was an excellent use of funds too.
In fact, Apollo can be blamed on the fact that we still dont have O'Neill colonies and a lunar base, because it established the wrong paradigm that was unaffordable from the get go.
We don't want a robot to land on mars.
The world's attention on MSL/Curiosity landing and live broadcast on Time's square speaks otherwise.
Yes its wrong. China has lots of scientist and engineers that have put their hard work into this - and they are doing something that nobody has done for decades, and they are doing it better, with more modern and even completely new instruments.
Why would you want this to fail?
The Soviet union is, of course, still just living off resources created on the back of peasants and workers during the Soviet era.
USSR doesnt exist anymore - but if you meant Russian space industry, then yes absolutely. And it has been crumbling for years.
The moon landing may have been a good political stunt, but scientifically and economically, it was a huge waste of money.
You'll get no argument on this one. Most of the manned spaceflight to date is still a huge waste of money.
Because everyone of the "new space" followers was high at the SpaceShipOne X-Prize victory at the time and they all believed space is much easier than government has made it out to be. So they thought putting a lunar lander together takes a blog, two guys in a garage, github and attending a summit - they will all have Chinese beat by years.
Apparently, it doesnt quite work that way - and Branson is still waiting for his rocket to take him on his worlds highest rollercoaster.