Living on Earth also requires shielding against micrometeorites that didn't completely finish burning up as shooting stars. There are lots of mineralogists collecting meteorites, each of which successfully made it to the planet's surface. Meteorites were also a source of iron for ancients in Bible times before iron smelting was invented. So it's only a matter of time before you get hit on the head by a meteorite down here on Earth too, but chances are so small that most people make it safely to death. Same deal on Mars, chances are much larger, but you can probably make it safely to death without ever getting hit on the head by a meteorite there. Of course with huge space stations, the huger they are, the larger the chances, just like with buildings made out of glass down here on Earth.
No no no, we should invest and waste all this time on finding a martian cave to live in like caveman, and then maybe we can go hunt for nonexisting martian dinosaur bones to use as weapons against the nonexisting martian martians.
Going to Mars in the first place is a major waste of time and taxpayer dollars, as the Moon is a lot closer with a lot less gravity to build a rotating cylinder centrifugal artificial gravity space station from. Then only thing Mars has going for it is the 100 x thinner than Earth's atmosphere atmosphere that has a lot of CO2, a good source of carbon should it be difficult to find in lunar rocks or meteorites, in a low gravity gravity well, but it's kinda far to go for it, and also solar panels and farming are less efficient that far away from the Sun. We should instead focus on turning Venus into a livable space, by smacking artificial comets into it to move it farther away from the Sun and to get it to start spinning and develop a magnetic field van Allen belt Aurora Borealis protection for its atmosphere from the solar wind, and possibly put up gigantic shades if we can't get it far enough from the Sun. It also has a lot of CO2 as carbon source for space station based life forms, such as more humans, especially if you end up with humans in the trillions instead of the 7 billion we have today, they need room to live and also lots of carbon to make up their bodies. There is a lot of room in outer space to put a lot of people, you just have to make it possible to live well surrounded by vacuum. Also Venus is a longterm project, and the biggest priority right now is setting up a Moon base, digging for silicate dust/rock and extracting oxygen and silicon and aluminum and iron and titanium via calcium reduction, making a gigantic tiltable solar panel/shade system at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point as an antidote for global warming, as a cooling effect, and then we can go berserk down here invading our deserts with greenhouse jungles, turning every livable place on the face of Earth green and full of life, instead of desert nothingness, and migrating sand dunes. What a waste of real estate deserts are, but you cannot invade them without upsetting the solar reflectivity of the Earth, and the heat budget. Of course even with a jungle invasion you still need to set up a few natural reservations for cactus and rattlesnakes and such, but much of the Sahara is full of nothing, almost 100% zero life. Once you can live on the Moon, you can also live in deserts, and then people don't have to get so congested in the good farming areas when there is 7 billion of them, or there can be a lot more of us to get the same congestion effect down here on Earth.
Taking a trip to outer space right now costs on the order of $10,000/lb in rocket fuel alone, and for a 200 lb person that comes to like 2 million dollars, so it's really expensive to emigrate into space even if there were livable space stations and farmable areas, but it's only a matter of energy. If you can put up huge solar shades and solar panels all over outer space, you can get a lot of energy that you can convert into rocket fuel, and drop the price of taking a trip to space to something like an airplane ticket cost. But we're so stupid down here we can't even figure out a way to live well, and instead we pay $4/gallon for gas with $8/hr minimum wage. Idiocracy.
There is 2.7 % nitrogen and 1.6% argon, both of which work great for breathing gas, you can cryogenically separate the 95% CO2 which doesn't have to be cooled so much, after combusting the toxic carbon monoxide into CO2 also with heated copper oxide gauze. That should eliminate any nitrous oxides too generated by UV/cosmic rays.
For oxygen you can either use the standard but extremely energy hungry silicate rock oxygen extraction, or you can get it out of the CO2 you liquefied. The easiest way is to react it with hydrogen to methane+H2O, electrolyze the H2O, and graphitize your methane in absence of air into a tar/graphite, hence ending up with C and O2, recycling the H2. It should be much less energy intensive than extracting oxygen from silicate rock, and would need a smaller nuclear power module to get it done.
By the way nitrogen has a molecular weight of 34 for N2, oxygen 36 for O2, and argon 39 for Ar. Helium has a molecular weight of 4 as He, and inhaling it from balloons increases the pitch of sound coming from your vocal chords to something really funny. As Ar is so close to normal air, the pitch change should be almost unnoticeable, but toward the deeper sounds. Heavier stuff like Xenon(mw 131) or even Krypton(mw 84) might create difficulty with breathing (I have no clue, possibly diver's nitrogen bubble in blood issues) but it should produce a really deep sound as an oxygen diluent, on Mars. But sulfur hexafluoride which is not in the Martian atmosphere is best at lowering the pitch of sound as it has a molecular weight of 146. See the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... page for discussion about effects on vocal chords.
The atmosphere is so thin on Mars, the storms are not that bad. The only reason why the dust floats is because gravity is so low. But going to Mars is like a waste of time when you can go to the Moon instead, and get your materials there for constructing a space station. It's a lot closer, and it has a lot less gravity too than Mars, ideal thing to mine for materials.
Inhaling Mars dust is a big problem! Especially when it has almost no atmosphere! You're breathing by sucking gas out of a friggin can, who cares about the toxicity of the dust? And by the way it should be normal silicate rock, you know, kind of like the stuff you find in riverbeds, volcano ash, or deserts.
Because gravity ain't big enough on Mars for your skeletal and muscular system not to deteriorate under. On Earth g=9.806 m/s2, on Mars this is 3.711 m/s2, or 37.6% of g on Earth (meaning 100 lb person will weigh 37.6 lbs, a 200 lb person 75.2 lbs, etc) and on the Moon g is 1.622 m/s2, or 16.5% of g on Earth, (meaning a 100 lb person will weigh 16.5 lbs on the Moon, and a 200 lb person 33 lbs, etc.), while in outer space in a "free fall" circular or elliptic orbit around a gravitational object like the Earth, Mars, Moon, or the Sun, g=0, and your weight is 0 lbs, and you float in space. In all places your skeletomuscular systems deteriorate from nonuse and cause all kinds of systemic ailments, and there are records of length of times astronauts have spent in space, I think Russians stuck on their Mir )(meaning peace, btw. it has been intentionally allowed to burn up and destroyed by hitting the Earth's atmosphere like a shooting star meteorite) not having funds to haul their guys down and Nasa having to step in to use the Space Shuttle for the trip, hold the record. In all cases the astronauts had to be carried on hospital beds because they lost their muscles due to unuse and could not stand on their own feet.
The answer to such health problems is artificial gravity. The way to create artificial gravity is really simple, it happens in centrifuges, like washing machines, or even merry go rounds or rollercoasters going upside down in a circle going fast enough not to fall down but stick to the track upwards. In 0 g environment like in free space all you need is a rotating cylinder space station and you walk on the inside walls. On reduced gravity places like Mars and the Moon, a flat cylinder doesn't work, instead you need a conical cylinder, with the walls angled dependent on the outside gravity. In free space the cylinder walls should be parallel, but on the Moon and Mars at a certain degree. I'm too lazy to do the vector calculations right now, oh what the heck, here we go, you need to draw a vector diagram, basically you're looking for the angle of omega^2 x r + vector add g_of_planet = g_of_Earth, shorthand w^2.r + (vector+) g_P=g_E, changing vector add triangle into scalar terms using Pythagoras theorem for right triangles (w^2.r)^2+g_P^2=g_E^2, solve for w^2.r (for each (cylindrical-conical-belt) radius there is a different w2 angular velocity that gives the correct centripetal force), and tan(alpha)=w^2.r/g_P, from which the angle can be calculated as alpha=arctan(g_P/w^2.r), when g_P is 0 then angle being 0, or cylinder. So w^2.r=sqrt(g_E^2-g_P^2), on Mars this is w^2.r term is 9.806^2-3.711^2 = 96.16-13.77 = 84.39 m2/s4, square root of which is 9.19 m/s2, and alpha angle=arc tan (3.71/9.19)= arc tan (0.4037)= -.3837 radians angle, or, in degrees angle = (0.3837 rads/Pi * 180)=0.3837/3.1416*180 degrees=0.1221*180= degrees. So the walls of the cylinder have to be tilted 21.98 degrees,or 22 degrees tilt wall conical wall surface.
Suppose we have a 100 meter radius conical cylinder, as omega^2.100 m=9.19 m/s2, omega^2=0.0919 radians^32/s^2, or omega=sqrt(0.0919)=.303 rad/s, or.303/3.1416*180=17.36 degrees/s rotational speed.
For a tiny 10 meter radius conical cylinder the correct rotational speed is sqrt(0.919)/3.1416*180=54.9 degrees/s. If I didn't make a mistake in the calculations, which I often do.
Of course as a 22 degree tilt of the cylinder-cone walls on Mars modifies the radius, the actual g at the bottom and top of the cone will differ, and the corresponding angle against which you walk perpendicularly is more vertical toward the top due to higher than 9.8 g, and less at the bottom, again, I'm too lazy to do those calculations. So there is a spread of actual weights you will feel on a curved conical surface, weighing more toward the top than toward the bottom. What a healthy g is is up for debate, nobody who weighs 200 lbs wants to weigh 250, instead they'd rather weight 150 and still feel healthy, it also requires less food and ox
And the ping time a broadband link between Venus and Earth would vary with the seasons, or disappear when there is a Venus eclipse and Earth and Venus are on opposite sides of the Sun, (and you'd need a 3rd relay point away from direct line of sight) but Sun to Earth ping time is roughly 8 minutes (it's how long light takes to get from the Sun to Earth), so you're talking, I'm guessing 3 minutes on closest approach to 15 minutes on farthest distance ping time, or something on that scale. Imagine playing a multiplayer first person shooter with such ping times. Maybe a game of Chess or Go is better.
There is a hunger issue at the city kennel with not enough funding to feed all the cats and dogs, so a lot of them get put to sleep, or get neutered at the least. In an ideal world you'd let all cats and dogs freely breed and provide each with as much food as they want, but once you end up with a few billion cats and dogs, and you're still living up to your principles of free breeding and the right to feed, you're facing a few trillion of them, and the costs of living up to your principles sooner or later come due. Life has an immense capacity to breed and proliferate, and only a resource limit, such as availability of funds and food put a limit on the population. In this sense, in the sense of lack of self control in population management, starving is a necessity that sooner or later comes due. You simply cannot teach and explain to people to stop hitting that booty when the kids you already have are starving. Life reproduces irregardless of resource limits, and whatever will be will be, we face the tomorrow boldly, head on, we'll figure out a way later, or starve, but we have to keep breeding no matter what. Starving is a necessity with such attitudes.
Yeah, all these replies to myself, cuz I like talking to myself, why should I talk to you when I can have awesome conversations with myself, especially if you have nothing good to add?
PS. If I really wanted to talk to myself I'd be writing a diary, or be on blogspot.com, but on Slashdot sometimes people talk back with very good ideas you would have never come up with yourself, or might have taken forever. Such as smashing comets into Venus.
Back in the day there was a rule that only landholders, property holders could vote, and that rule sucks. However one way to moderate the population explosion effects on voting is to introduce just that, the factor, so whoever votes, they should get the number of votes of not 1, but of 2 generations ago, so a single white kid with 4 grandparents and no other siblings get 4 votes, and also 49 black or latino kids with 4 grandparents get 4 votes, sort of dividing up the inheritance, but after the 3rd and 4th generation they'd still prevail, so this would be a way to make everyone think about this topic and keep it in view, in a democracy, while still allowing the dominant population to decide what they want for themselves, as 1 person deciding the lives of thousands/millions, as in a monarchy/nobility is not optimal either. This rolling average going back 2 generations could be a way to slightly moderate breeding out of control irregardless of resources, and make people at least keep it in direct focus, even if they can't do much about it.
Oh yeah, and I think I read somewhere that the term for an 80 year old japanese anime fan is chi chi, which means grandfather, daddy, also boobs. Also see https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... There is also this "daddy" term in English, and a custom of men being usually older than women in a relationship, as men don't mature at age 12-14, where women are way ahead in mental powers and world comprehension, also done with height growth, while a lot of boys/men don't finish growing to their full height til age 16-18, and some men mentally don't mature until age 45. So even if they want to, sometimes 12 year old women or even 18 year old women have a hard time finding males on par with their own abilities of world comprehension and seriousness about life in their own age group. Men tend to play video games to later ages compared to women getting busy and serious about babies and jobs and things that matter most at an earlier age. Sometimes they go at it alone, and in single, unwed mothers, sometimes they have to be mothers to their husbands of the same age as themselves too. For women the clock is always ticking and it's too late for a woman to mature in mental capacity and seriousness about life and babies at age 40, as menopause is too close, also a woman can't rape a man if the man is not willing, and has full mental control over his erections/ejaculations, but a man can rape a woman even if she has no desire, mental state, or willingness, and produce a pregnancy, so population control issues are fully the responsibility of the males, not the females, because she's always willing right now (often she don't have time to wait for mr right, she needs a mr right now), the clock is ticking for her, she also loses her 12 year old youth with every second that goes by. It's complicated, because she also needs somebody to stick it out by her to help raise the baby, but in a democracy with a guaranteed welfare safety net this waiting for mr right is not that important because she can rear a brood in absence of mr right on welfare, nobody is allowed to starve. It's also complicated because though men control populations, women can also control it, they can kill a baby (though this is very difficult for a mother) or torture/mis-raise a baby psycho style if they hate the father, or even, in a breeding out of control world, handing down abortion sticks from grandmother to granddaughter, with which you do your own abortions by smashing the fetus. Anal sex is a great contraceptive, but in the heat of the moment in a party world who's got time to contemplate "rules", it also feels nowhere near as good as the normal way. Women control populations too because the father can be very far by the time the 9 months is up, 9 months is a long time, and she holds life and death in her hands, but for a mother it's very difficult not to be a mother. So theoretically the women can do a lot, in practice the men are responsible for watching population levels, which is why most societies are patriarchal around the world, to manage resource availability with population levels in balance, as the woman has no power to make decisions about population levels. A child is born out of the will of the father, not the mother, 99% of the time. In a democracy with a welfare system, the men who are always willing to ask for a back that thang up take over very fast, and the future is people like brazil, everybody neither white, nor black, or asian, everybody brown, looking like white/asian women, and black men. That's a great loss of genetic variability. Ideally you should have white people as white people, black people as black people, asians as asians, and, as neither group should be too inbred, there should be always some mixing at the fringes, to small degrees, not 100% "melting pot." This requires some kind of segregation, that there is a natural tendency for people to do anyway. But then you get issues like job discrimination, you have a black family with 7 kids each of two generations
Oh yeah, if the fast breeders can compute the square root of 2, they will take over the world, and could maintain democracy/communism/equality as opposed to monarchy/property/slavery world as a stable situation, such as it happens in China and Japan, (as these folks are good at math and they are also pedophiles - just watch any
anime, like http://joyreactor.com/tag/ecch..., they all all 12-13 year old girls (even if the men are 80+ year old grandpas, it doesn't really matter who the men are, the women take 9 months per baby, and under such circumstances, premature born tending mothers might gain an edge, popping kids ever 6 months instead of 9, and the kids survive fine) and even Taro Aso got in some kind of not really trouble, well it was an issue, over being an anime fan) but the fast breeding will put a severe resource strain on the population, even if they dominate the world in a democratic, nonstarvation situation. Monogamy and 80 year old men sticking with their 76 year old wives instead of running off chasing a freshly matured 12 year old may be a thing of the past under such circumstances, because they get drowned out in voting power by the perverts. Neither is slavery/property/monogamy/monarchy starvation enforced world rich on resources such an idyllic situation, so there should be some kind of balance between communism and property, between starvation and nonstarvation, between equality/master-slavery, and monarchy/democracy, though I don't really see a magic answer that strikes such a balance. All I know is I don't want war and apocklipses, or property to the point of slavery, or communism without personal property where nobody has incentive to care.
Forgot about this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KI0F... This image is not possible, but it keeps bugging me. As most of the matter in a solar system is stuck in the star, eventually when you run out of materials using up all the planets and debris, you have to get to the star and mine that. The image is not possible because everything vaporizes at the surface temperature of the Sun. But there may be ways to magnetically control plasma and keep it away form the walls, and send enough cooling power from far away, to the walls, also dynamic stabilizing could keep the whole thing upright in a magnetic/gravity field, and you still have to watch for buoyancy effects, and in a 75%H / 35% He ocean you need quite a bit of 100% H balloon, or 100% vacuum balloon with strong enough walls if you can find anything like that, to act like a fishing float, and have a stick like that stick out off the surface of the star. Now you're talking a really huge surface area to keep unvaporized and cool deep under the surface of the star, and it's not possible, not physically possible, but it will be a thought bugging anyone who's greedy for some stuff once all the planets and debris are used to up construct space stations. There may be a long time until that need arises, if ever.
Woah, all awake now, that stuff is like I was high or something. Seriously, I couldn't keep my eyes open to hit that post button, and didn't wanna cancel the post either, but I had no energy left to review and correct the mess I typed waking up for 2 minutes, passing out for 5, waking up for 2, etc. Sorry..
So a lot of instabilities in solar output might be due to magnetic and inertia effects, compressing nuclear materials sending them into a high temperature creating reaction, the inertia taking time to accelerate and the heat builds up, the natural hot low density (like hot air balloons) plus expansion inertia making the whole thing light and move up in gravity, as a plasma, in a magnetic field - just watching the Sun's surface, there are lots of instabilities and hot spots and cold spots present, also solar flares, and some instabilities might have a characteristic lifetime of an iceage, especially if a massive object on the size of a few Jupiters falls into the Sun, bringing fresh fuel. If there is actually fusion going on too, in the very center, it must be slow because the hydrogen concentration there is very low (though the force of gravity decays the closer you are to the center and becomes 0 at the center.) Even with all that plasma, and gaseous state, the core of the Sun is probably different than the outer surface, because of gas density of metal vapors compared to hydrogen - is this true? Nope, the wikipedia Sun page says 3/4 hydrogen, 1/4 helium, and minor, less than 2% silicate stuff. Because of all that helium fusion is prevalent. So I'm still thinking and don't have a really good explanation of why solar output would fluctuate on the scale of, with time constants of, a whole ice age or terrestrial extinction event period. Maybe somebody could explain, or displain, proving that no, solar output is stable and ice ages on Earth originate in other causes. By the way Earth's magnetic field has flipped a few times, and that could be due to inertial current flows in lava, carrying strong enough magnetic fields in a certain direction, because of inertia, ending up opposing the main field and having enough inertia juice to fight it down. Similar magnetic-inertial things could be going on in the Sun too, where a flip in the magnetic field might create and ice-age effect. I don't know. It might be possible to dig for rocks/fossils that record the spectrum of solar radiation, as different temperatures have different colors, but this is a far shot, especially if it also causes an ice age, and the fossils demonstrate effect of ice age, not solar spectrum. It's a really difficult topic, but it doesn't really matter, we know ice ages happen, so global warming ages might happen too where you can stick your carbon tax dollars in your anus as they may have little or nothing to do with why global temperatures are rising, the fact is that temperatures fluctuate, and the easiest way to deal with that, if you want to control the temperature to be stable (at least to the point where arctic and antarctic ice doesn't melt flooding much of Russia, the Netherlands, and Florida, including every major city like New York, DC, LA, SF, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Calcutta, etc, even if Switzerland is safe) you need to provide for decreasing solar input in global warming, i.e. flippable shades, or increasing solar input in an ice-age, i.e. Fresnel lens rings around the circumference of Earth, or mirrors. By the way you have to consider the safety of such a thing, especially if the idiots take over the planet in a democratic voting world, where, for humanitarian reasons nobody is allowed to starve, and it's whoever can breed the fastest (i.e. starting age of hitting puberty for girls, 12-13 yrs, having the most kids by age 15-18, and being a great grandmother by age 50), so if people who can't compute the square root of 2, let alone compute a rocket orbit to fly to and adjust the shades take over the world, you still have to care about them too when you're gone, and you can't leave the world messed up for them, if you can't control t
Oh yeah, how about instead of a rollercoaster in Utah saving some rocket fuel by accelerating the spaceship to 1000 miles/hr and then firing the rockets, how about launching them from the edge of the atmosphere, really high, off the back of some fast airplane going a gazillion miles/hr already, and then firing the rockets. These airplanes take the oxidizer part from the air instead of rocket fuel having to carry it along, and it's a lot cheaper to fly about with just the fuel without having to carry the oxidizer too. So they are expensive to fly anyway, especially if one with a high ceiling of operation. Or they could design rockets that have stages like airplanes, don't carry the oxidizer, take it from the atmosphere while you can, semi-vertical landing ones, but speeding up toward the east (which is the way the Earth already rotates and is the standard encircling way or sending everything into a rotating, encircling space orbit.)
Oh and on the mobile nuclear platform on the Moon with geothermal cooling, lacking ground moisture, or softening from high temperature lava, (i.e. the deeper you go on Earth the hotter it gets, but as the Moon is like 80 times less than (or 0.0123x) Earth, (but because of much smaller radius, and r^2 term in the denomitator for gravitational attraction (spheres behave as if all their mass were gathered in the center, per Gauss' laws), so you're only 6x less weight on the Moon, not 80x) the disperse radioactive decay in rocks does not heat enough to melt the core) there might be lots of leaks in heating and insufficient contact. So you may need cpu-heatsink-like "thermal paste" on the outside, and at first I thought metallic sodium, potassium and calcium might work, but they could locally self heat reacting and corroding away into the rocks. So aluminum, the second most abundant metalloid after silicon, is the choice for outer coating and softness to adapt to the bore hole with good contact, but it probably can't directly carry NaK or molten Na (which are probably the nastiest things ever, watch Nurdrage potassium video for safety, https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., or https://www.youtube.com/watch?... for no safety, I heard a story of a girl unloading sodium from a railcar or tanker truck, and the hose popped, and she got sprayed with liquid (molten) sodium across her body, which usually instantly reacts with moisture containing materials like your body or even clothes.. she asked, am I gonna die now? well let's see, you have no liver, or intestines left after that splash, so what do you think?) into the ground because of alloying/corrosion,
so locally made aluminum clad iron tubing (need some minor qty of carbon carried to make steel and strong iron, 100% pure iron is quite soft compared to good steels) is probably the way to go. But I'm no expert on geothermal or oil drilling topics at all,,
Also, a note on ice ages: They might have been because of drop of Solar output. How sure are we that the Sun isn't just like any other planet, just simply bigger - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... pictures, on just how huge the Sun is compared to Jupiter, which in turn is also huge compared to Earth. So the Sun, because of size, would have molten lava surface, just like Earth does, or would if it were bigger. Also because of huge gravity, even hydrogen and helium get retained even at the 6000C temperature. They say the Sun is fueled by fusion. I say it's fueled like any other massive object, as massive objects all contain Th232, U238, K40, U235 and automatically light up. So all the stars you see in the sky are most likely the only massive objects at that scale, besides the strange black hole things we don't really know what to think about. So anyway, assume the Sun is not fusing much H, but it's mostly just heating like lava on Earth is, by that ppb quantity fission fuel material. Then a fission creates ext
How about children playing with poisoned mushrooms in the forest! Let's ban all species of poisonous mushrooms, stingy bees, and poisonous snakes and spiders. Eradicate them from the world just so we are safe! People will let a lot of their freedoms be taken away in the name of a little safety! You know in the national anthem it says the land of the free and the home of the brave, and all I hear is pussies like you that are neither brave, nor complaining about their freedoms taken away by regulations, in the name of some marginal safety. Watch George Carlin's airport security on youtube. Yeah, there are two sides to everything, and he may be swinging too much to the other side of proper balance, but he does have a point, in how out of balance things have gotten. Airport security hasn't found a single bomb yet. After all this waste of time, not one found. So Da Man who's pulling the strings on this let's herd this herd-crowd gradually into more and more bondage by slowly eroding their freedoms, til we can turn them into total salves and exploit them, like we used to back in the old days, so Da Man is gonna now put it in the paper and in the news that all these bombs have been found by airport security scanners. And they will be actual stories of conspiracy gangstas operating on behalf of Da Man doing it, so we can keep up this, camera on every streetlight I can't even pick my nose at a red light in privacy anymore, world.
How about unlicensed ass-wipers? With all this stupid regulation soon you'll need a license and permit to wipe your ass, or hire someone with a license. There'll be a permit that expires stamped on each slice of toilet paper, and if expired, has to be renewed with a new license fee payment, else it's considered illegal asswiping! But it's okay to wipe with it as long as you don't get caught by the authorities!
I have this idea or dream of turning excess renewable power that a utility won't take or won't pay for, such as wind or solar, into aluminum, instead of dumping it to heat coil, nut Da Man is careful to cock block me every move I make, including tearing down my house and harassing me with grass cutting fees, it's like I'm some sort of experiment to see how can you raise a family on minimum wage and not be bankrupt, and the answer is that you can't, you can take care of yourself on minimum wage as long as you can find roommates you can trust (good luck with that) as housing is by far the biggest cost item on the list, but you can't take care of, say, 5 people, unless you're hispanic living in a basement rented at 200 bux per month and 20 people secretly living there. Then minimum wage is luxuriously high. Housing cost is everything, and now they are introducing this new way to get anally raped, mandatory insurance like health insurance, at first 10% income, then 20%, then, eventually, like 90% of your income, because how much is your health worth to you? Everything, infinite! It's like charging you for air, and asking how much is air worth to you? Everything, infinite! But I'm gettin it for free these days, till Da Man can figure out a way to make me pay for it, so I drive by this place called Air Products, showcasing air as private property, and they want me to go back to a job where I get gassed with research chemical warfare gases, and the obvious answer to it is "Scuba Steve", i.e. get a scuba diving gear, with a gas cylinder, and pay for the air you breathe. I have yet to pay for the air I breathe, but soon, soon, Da Man is working hard at it. I used to have windows open 24/7/365 til tenants moved out downstairs and landlord shut the heat off downstairs to cause a pipe freeze/burst, so I had to shut the windows and turn the heat on, and still had a pipeburst because you have to heat from below, heat rises, it doesn't go down, but I gotta keep my ass covered, so now I don't get fresh air at home like I used to, against the anesthetic gases that knock you right out when you type on Slashdot. Right now I happen to have a job with doors swung wide open and not much odor stuff that'd require a gas mask, but I get google search results/ads showing me CPAP, pressurized air supply for allergic people sleeping, and uber is constantly hiring, paying good money, just so I pay, once and for all, for the fucking air I breathe. It's soooo important to Da Man to accomplish this one thing, because of that sillybilly linuxbios post I made a long time ago on slashdot. Oh, and by the way, for the record, the opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of whoever happens to be my employer at the time. And sometimes they are not my own opinions either, I just practice some good ol sarcasm. Or not. That's the fun part about sarcasm, you never know if it is.
LG makes cars? For whatever reason, they seem to make quite nice phones, but they too are slaves to their own lawyers, in DRM/intellectual property bullshit up to their ears.
The military has this dilemma about being out of a job, and Obama cutting their funds, sort of, as there are no true arch-enemies around on the scale of Soviet Union communists of the Cold War era, there are no good wars to fight, other than these makebelieve terrorist wars, lucky for them we had a 9/11 or their budget might have been cut long time ago. The USA is a military nation. Kinda like ancient Rome. We love the gladiators in the colosseum, dressed in steel fighting lions and each other to death, and we have this manhood issue of wearing helmets with dick looking spikes, and holy elderly priests preaching brotherly love can get out of the way of our Arrrnold Schwarzenegger pump you full of lead machine guns. (See google image search "arnold schwarzenegger machine gun.") Or even preaching holy jihad against the porn and resource waste of America, like Osama did, we take them mofos out. So we love our guns, we love military stuff, it improves our self worth, self image, like huge pickup trucks and SUV's compared to, say, Arnold being convicted to drive in a tiny "Smart Car". That would not be very manly. But there are no good enemies around, and that's kind of good though, because war is pain and suffering and it sucks, we're men, we can take pain, but it's nice not to have to. Sometimes. So the military's present motto is maintaining peace and avoiding a war, by things such as overwhelming force, is just as, if not more important, as winning a war. Every time China sharpens their tooth for Taiwan, we do a parade with our carriers in the straits between mainland China and Taiwan, to quell the emotions a bit. So now the Chinese are buying a junked Ukrainian (Kuznetsov class "Riga") carrier with the fake excuse of turning it into a casino, when it's really made into a carrier ("Liaoning"), one that could be copied. China has massive economic power, but might be on the edge on resources, and a global economic apocalypse or a collapse of the US govt financially Lehman Bros. style would be devastating to them, so they keep lending us money so we keep buying their stuff and maintaining status quo, funny money, it matters, but not hard core, even if it never gets paid back, keep the status quo, keep production going in China. There is this delicate dance, dependence on each other, common interest, but disagreement too over things like Taiwan. So we got 10 major carriers, each costing money out da ass every second to upkeep and service, and nobody even comes close in number. So what if China copies the one carrier they got, 20 times over, and now it's their 20 vs. our 10, we can no longer do this show of force patrol, kind of like lions vs hyenas of the Serengeti. It all comes down to economic power, as always, back in the day the British Empire had a policy of outdoing in Navy power at least the top two next in line, which pretty much broke the bank. We can't afford 20 carriers to keep up with China, but China can't afford us collapsing economically, or the world economy buying Chinese goods collapsing economically. This interdependence of debt and economy is good for world peace. So where does the military fit in? But I'm rambling now, about military stuff, back to the space stuff, NASA..
Expanding an empire is usually through military, though, traditionally the US has done it through cash purchases, Louisiana purchase, Alaska purchase, some wars with Mexico, and some rounding up of bow and arrow and spear native americans taking them on a "Trail of Tears" and such, relocating them into the Arizona deserts, but most expansion has stopped, because there is nowhere more to go. You can't really occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and claim them as US territory or colonial domain and collect taxes into the treasury from them like you used to back 150 years ago. You can't attack Canada or Mexico without a good excuse, so the only place left to expand the empire is outer space, and places like Venus, but first of all, the Moon. Without the incentive of letting people or countries/sove
Or we need to include NASA in the military budget, and assuming outer space is gonna get divided up into smallscale Star Trek-like micro quadrants (alpha quadrant, beta quadrant) by whoever occupies it first and sticks a flag down with a rotating space station, with some minimum distance rule by these things, so conquest of areas close to Earth as space territories is important if they are more valuable than the ones farther away, even if there is a lot of room up there. But before anything else comes the Moon, and I say whatever country can go up there and stick a flagpole down and "claim it", they can get it as national territory. You could have something like the United States of America, and Puerto Rico and Sectors 3,5,31,15 on the Moon, and quadrants alpha(all), beta 4, gamma 3. But, indeed, such long titles sound better when appended to monarch's names, such as the oldtime Habsburgs, Emperor of Holy Roman Empire, prince of Bohemia, etc., prince of Lunar sectors 3, 5, 31, 15. Once you show new territory to Monarch's, they are greedy and wanna conquer it, should they have enough science and military power to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Living on Earth also requires shielding against micrometeorites that didn't completely finish burning up as shooting stars. There are lots of mineralogists collecting meteorites, each of which successfully made it to the planet's surface. Meteorites were also a source of iron for ancients in Bible times before iron smelting was invented. So it's only a matter of time before you get hit on the head by a meteorite down here on Earth too, but chances are so small that most people make it safely to death. Same deal on Mars, chances are much larger, but you can probably make it safely to death without ever getting hit on the head by a meteorite there. Of course with huge space stations, the huger they are, the larger the chances, just like with buildings made out of glass down here on Earth.
No no no, we should invest and waste all this time on finding a martian cave to live in like caveman, and then maybe we can go hunt for nonexisting martian dinosaur bones to use as weapons against the nonexisting martian martians.
/lb in rocket fuel alone, and for a 200 lb person that comes to like 2 million dollars, so it's really expensive to emigrate into space even if there were livable space stations and farmable areas, but it's only a matter of energy. If you can put up huge solar shades and solar panels all over outer space, you can get a lot of energy that you can convert into rocket fuel, and drop the price of taking a trip to space to something like an airplane ticket cost. But we're so stupid down here we can't even figure out a way to live well, and instead we pay $4/gallon for gas with $8/hr minimum wage. Idiocracy.
Going to Mars in the first place is a major waste of time and taxpayer dollars, as the Moon is a lot closer with a lot less gravity to build a rotating cylinder centrifugal artificial gravity space station from. Then only thing Mars has going for it is the 100 x thinner than Earth's atmosphere atmosphere that has a lot of CO2, a good source of carbon should it be difficult to find in lunar rocks or meteorites, in a low gravity gravity well, but it's kinda far to go for it, and also solar panels and farming are less efficient that far away from the Sun. We should instead focus on turning Venus into a livable space, by smacking artificial comets into it to move it farther away from the Sun and to get it to start spinning and develop a magnetic field van Allen belt Aurora Borealis protection for its atmosphere from the solar wind, and possibly put up gigantic shades if we can't get it far enough from the Sun. It also has a lot of CO2 as carbon source for space station based life forms, such as more humans, especially if you end up with humans in the trillions instead of the 7 billion we have today, they need room to live and also lots of carbon to make up their bodies. There is a lot of room in outer space to put a lot of people, you just have to make it possible to live well surrounded by vacuum. Also Venus is a longterm project, and the biggest priority right now is setting up a Moon base, digging for silicate dust/rock and extracting oxygen and silicon and aluminum and iron and titanium via calcium reduction, making a gigantic tiltable solar panel/shade system at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point as an antidote for global warming, as a cooling effect, and then we can go berserk down here invading our deserts with greenhouse jungles, turning every livable place on the face of Earth green and full of life, instead of desert nothingness, and migrating sand dunes. What a waste of real estate deserts are, but you cannot invade them without upsetting the solar reflectivity of the Earth, and the heat budget. Of course even with a jungle invasion you still need to set up a few natural reservations for cactus and rattlesnakes and such, but much of the Sahara is full of nothing, almost 100% zero life. Once you can live on the Moon, you can also live in deserts, and then people don't have to get so congested in the good farming areas when there is 7 billion of them, or there can be a lot more of us to get the same congestion effect down here on Earth.
Taking a trip to outer space right now costs on the order of $10,000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
is a youtube video about sulfur hexafluoride and helium effects comparison on voice.
There is 2.7 % nitrogen and 1.6% argon, both of which work great for breathing gas, you can cryogenically separate the 95% CO2 which doesn't have to be cooled so much, after combusting the toxic carbon monoxide into CO2 also with heated copper oxide gauze. That should eliminate any nitrous oxides too generated by UV/cosmic rays.
For oxygen you can either use the standard but extremely energy hungry silicate rock oxygen extraction, or you can get it out of the CO2 you liquefied. The easiest way is to react it with hydrogen to methane+H2O, electrolyze the H2O, and graphitize your methane in absence of air into a tar/graphite, hence ending up with C and O2, recycling the H2. It should be much less energy intensive than extracting oxygen from silicate rock, and would need a smaller nuclear power module to get it done.
By the way nitrogen has a molecular weight of 34 for N2, oxygen 36 for O2, and argon 39 for Ar. Helium has a molecular weight of 4 as He, and inhaling it from balloons increases the pitch of sound coming from your vocal chords to something really funny. As Ar is so close to normal air, the pitch change should be almost unnoticeable, but toward the deeper sounds. Heavier stuff like Xenon(mw 131) or even Krypton(mw 84) might create difficulty with breathing (I have no clue, possibly diver's nitrogen bubble in blood issues) but it should produce a really deep sound as an oxygen diluent, on Mars. But sulfur hexafluoride which is not in the Martian atmosphere is best at lowering the pitch of sound as it has a molecular weight of 146. See the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... page for discussion about effects on vocal chords.
The atmosphere is so thin on Mars, the storms are not that bad. The only reason why the dust floats is because gravity is so low. But going to Mars is like a waste of time when you can go to the Moon instead, and get your materials there for constructing a space station. It's a lot closer, and it has a lot less gravity too than Mars, ideal thing to mine for materials.
Inhaling Mars dust is a big problem! Especially when it has almost no atmosphere! You're breathing by sucking gas out of a friggin can, who cares about the toxicity of the dust? And by the way it should be normal silicate rock, you know, kind of like the stuff you find in riverbeds, volcano ash, or deserts.
Because gravity ain't big enough on Mars for your skeletal and muscular system not to deteriorate under. On Earth g=9.806 m/s2, on Mars this is 3.711 m/s2, or 37.6% of g on Earth (meaning 100 lb person will weigh 37.6 lbs, a 200 lb person 75.2 lbs, etc) and on the Moon g is 1.622 m/s2, or 16.5% of g on Earth, (meaning a 100 lb person will weigh 16.5 lbs on the Moon, and a 200 lb person 33 lbs, etc.), while in outer space in a "free fall" circular or elliptic orbit around a gravitational object like the Earth, Mars, Moon, or the Sun, g=0, and your weight is 0 lbs, and you float in space. In all places your skeletomuscular systems deteriorate from nonuse and cause all kinds of systemic ailments, and there are records of length of times astronauts have spent in space, I think Russians stuck on their Mir )(meaning peace, btw. it has been intentionally allowed to burn up and destroyed by hitting the Earth's atmosphere like a shooting star meteorite) not having funds to haul their guys down and Nasa having to step in to use the Space Shuttle for the trip, hold the record. In all cases the astronauts had to be carried on hospital beds because they lost their muscles due to unuse and could not stand on their own feet.
/Pi * 180)=0.3837/3.1416*180 degrees=0.1221*180= degrees. So the walls of the cylinder have to be tilted 21.98 degrees,or 22 degrees tilt wall conical wall surface.
.303/3.1416*180=17.36 degrees/s rotational speed.
The answer to such health problems is artificial gravity. The way to create artificial gravity is really simple, it happens in centrifuges, like washing machines, or even merry go rounds or rollercoasters going upside down in a circle going fast enough not to fall down but stick to the track upwards. In 0 g environment like in free space all you need is a rotating cylinder space station and you walk on the inside walls. On reduced gravity places like Mars and the Moon, a flat cylinder doesn't work, instead you need a conical cylinder, with the walls angled dependent on the outside gravity. In free space the cylinder walls should be parallel, but on the Moon and Mars at a certain degree. I'm too lazy to do the vector calculations right now, oh what the heck, here we go, you need to draw a vector diagram, basically you're looking for the angle of omega^2 x r + vector add g_of_planet = g_of_Earth, shorthand w^2.r + (vector+) g_P=g_E, changing vector add triangle into scalar terms using Pythagoras theorem for right triangles (w^2.r)^2+g_P^2=g_E^2, solve for w^2.r (for each (cylindrical-conical-belt) radius there is a different w2 angular velocity that gives the correct centripetal force), and tan(alpha)=w^2.r/g_P, from which the angle can be calculated as alpha=arctan(g_P/w^2.r), when g_P is 0 then angle being 0, or cylinder. So w^2.r=sqrt(g_E^2-g_P^2), on Mars this is w^2.r term is 9.806^2-3.711^2 = 96.16-13.77 = 84.39 m2/s4, square root of which is 9.19 m/s2, and alpha angle=arc tan (3.71/9.19)= arc tan (0.4037)= -.3837 radians angle, or, in degrees angle = (0.3837 rads
Suppose we have a 100 meter radius conical cylinder, as omega^2.100 m=9.19 m/s2, omega^2=0.0919 radians^32/s^2, or omega=sqrt(0.0919)=.303 rad/s, or
For a tiny 10 meter radius conical cylinder the correct rotational speed is sqrt(0.919)/3.1416*180=54.9 degrees/s. If I didn't make a mistake in the calculations, which I often do.
Of course as a 22 degree tilt of the cylinder-cone walls on Mars modifies the radius, the actual g at the bottom and top of the cone will differ, and the corresponding angle against which you walk perpendicularly is more vertical toward the top due to higher than 9.8 g, and less at the bottom, again, I'm too lazy to do those calculations. So there is a spread of actual weights you will feel on a curved conical surface, weighing more toward the top than toward the bottom. What a healthy g is is up for debate, nobody who weighs 200 lbs wants to weigh 250, instead they'd rather weight 150 and still feel healthy, it also requires less food and ox
And the ping time a broadband link between Venus and Earth would vary with the seasons, or disappear when there is a Venus eclipse and Earth and Venus are on opposite sides of the Sun, (and you'd need a 3rd relay point away from direct line of sight) but Sun to Earth ping time is roughly 8 minutes (it's how long light takes to get from the Sun to Earth), so you're talking, I'm guessing 3 minutes on closest approach to 15 minutes on farthest distance ping time, or something on that scale. Imagine playing a multiplayer first person shooter with such ping times. Maybe a game of Chess or Go is better.
There is a hunger issue at the city kennel with not enough funding to feed all the cats and dogs, so a lot of them get put to sleep, or get neutered at the least. In an ideal world you'd let all cats and dogs freely breed and provide each with as much food as they want, but once you end up with a few billion cats and dogs, and you're still living up to your principles of free breeding and the right to feed, you're facing a few trillion of them, and the costs of living up to your principles sooner or later come due. Life has an immense capacity to breed and proliferate, and only a resource limit, such as availability of funds and food put a limit on the population. In this sense, in the sense of lack of self control in population management, starving is a necessity that sooner or later comes due. You simply cannot teach and explain to people to stop hitting that booty when the kids you already have are starving. Life reproduces irregardless of resource limits, and whatever will be will be, we face the tomorrow boldly, head on, we'll figure out a way later, or starve, but we have to keep breeding no matter what. Starving is a necessity with such attitudes.
Yeah, all these replies to myself, cuz I like talking to myself, why should I talk to you when I can have awesome conversations with myself, especially if you have nothing good to add?
PS. If I really wanted to talk to myself I'd be writing a diary, or be on blogspot.com, but on Slashdot sometimes people talk back with very good ideas you would have never come up with yourself, or might have taken forever. Such as smashing comets into Venus.
Back in the day there was a rule that only landholders, property holders could vote, and that rule sucks. However one way to moderate the population explosion effects on voting is to introduce just that, the factor, so whoever votes, they should get the number of votes of not 1, but of 2 generations ago, so a single white kid with 4 grandparents and no other siblings get 4 votes, and also 49 black or latino kids with 4 grandparents get 4 votes, sort of dividing up the inheritance, but after the 3rd and 4th generation they'd still prevail, so this would be a way to make everyone think about this topic and keep it in view, in a democracy, while still allowing the dominant population to decide what they want for themselves, as 1 person deciding the lives of thousands/millions, as in a monarchy/nobility is not optimal either. This rolling average going back 2 generations could be a way to slightly moderate breeding out of control irregardless of resources, and make people at least keep it in direct focus, even if they can't do much about it.
Oh yeah, and I think I read somewhere that the term for an 80 year old japanese anime fan is chi chi, which means grandfather, daddy, also boobs. Also see https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... There is also this "daddy" term in English, and a custom of men being usually older than women in a relationship, as men don't mature at age 12-14, where women are way ahead in mental powers and world comprehension, also done with height growth, while a lot of boys/men don't finish growing to their full height til age 16-18, and some men mentally don't mature until age 45. So even if they want to, sometimes 12 year old women or even 18 year old women have a hard time finding males on par with their own abilities of world comprehension and seriousness about life in their own age group. Men tend to play video games to later ages compared to women getting busy and serious about babies and jobs and things that matter most at an earlier age. Sometimes they go at it alone, and in single, unwed mothers, sometimes they have to be mothers to their husbands of the same age as themselves too. For women the clock is always ticking and it's too late for a woman to mature in mental capacity and seriousness about life and babies at age 40, as menopause is too close, also a woman can't rape a man if the man is not willing, and has full mental control over his erections/ejaculations, but a man can rape a woman even if she has no desire, mental state, or willingness, and produce a pregnancy, so population control issues are fully the responsibility of the males, not the females, because she's always willing right now (often she don't have time to wait for mr right, she needs a mr right now), the clock is ticking for her, she also loses her 12 year old youth with every second that goes by. It's complicated, because she also needs somebody to stick it out by her to help raise the baby, but in a democracy with a guaranteed welfare safety net this waiting for mr right is not that important because she can rear a brood in absence of mr right on welfare, nobody is allowed to starve. It's also complicated because though men control populations, women can also control it, they can kill a baby (though this is very difficult for a mother) or torture/mis-raise a baby psycho style if they hate the father, or even, in a breeding out of control world, handing down abortion sticks from grandmother to granddaughter, with which you do your own abortions by smashing the fetus. Anal sex is a great contraceptive, but in the heat of the moment in a party world who's got time to contemplate "rules", it also feels nowhere near as good as the normal way. Women control populations too because the father can be very far by the time the 9 months is up, 9 months is a long time, and she holds life and death in her hands, but for a mother it's very difficult not to be a mother. So theoretically the women can do a lot, in practice the men are responsible for watching population levels, which is why most societies are patriarchal around the world, to manage resource availability with population levels in balance, as the woman has no power to make decisions about population levels. A child is born out of the will of the father, not the mother, 99% of the time. In a democracy with a welfare system, the men who are always willing to ask for a back that thang up take over very fast, and the future is people like brazil, everybody neither white, nor black, or asian, everybody brown, looking like white/asian women, and black men. That's a great loss of genetic variability. Ideally you should have white people as white people, black people as black people, asians as asians, and, as neither group should be too inbred, there should be always some mixing at the fringes, to small degrees, not 100% "melting pot." This requires some kind of segregation, that there is a natural tendency for people to do anyway. But then you get issues like job discrimination, you have a black family with 7 kids each of two generations
Oh yeah, if the fast breeders can compute the square root of 2, they will take over the world, and could maintain democracy/communism/equality as opposed to monarchy/property/slavery world as a stable situation, such as it happens in China and Japan, (as these folks are good at math and they are also pedophiles - just watch any anime, like http://joyreactor.com/tag/ecch..., they all all 12-13 year old girls (even if the men are 80+ year old grandpas, it doesn't really matter who the men are, the women take 9 months per baby, and under such circumstances, premature born tending mothers might gain an edge, popping kids ever 6 months instead of 9, and the kids survive fine) and even Taro Aso got in some kind of not really trouble, well it was an issue, over being an anime fan) but the fast breeding will put a severe resource strain on the population, even if they dominate the world in a democratic, nonstarvation situation. Monogamy and 80 year old men sticking with their 76 year old wives instead of running off chasing a freshly matured 12 year old may be a thing of the past under such circumstances, because they get drowned out in voting power by the perverts. Neither is slavery/property/monogamy/monarchy starvation enforced world rich on resources such an idyllic situation, so there should be some kind of balance between communism and property, between starvation and nonstarvation, between equality/master-slavery, and monarchy/democracy, though I don't really see a magic answer that strikes such a balance. All I know is I don't want war and apocklipses, or property to the point of slavery, or communism without personal property where nobody has incentive to care.
Forgot about this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KI0F... This image is not possible, but it keeps bugging me. As most of the matter in a solar system is stuck in the star, eventually when you run out of materials using up all the planets and debris, you have to get to the star and mine that. The image is not possible because everything vaporizes at the surface temperature of the Sun. But there may be ways to magnetically control plasma and keep it away form the walls, and send enough cooling power from far away, to the walls, also dynamic stabilizing could keep the whole thing upright in a magnetic/gravity field, and you still have to watch for buoyancy effects, and in a 75%H / 35% He ocean you need quite a bit of 100% H balloon, or 100% vacuum balloon with strong enough walls if you can find anything like that, to act like a fishing float, and have a stick like that stick out off the surface of the star. Now you're talking a really huge surface area to keep unvaporized and cool deep under the surface of the star, and it's not possible, not physically possible, but it will be a thought bugging anyone who's greedy for some stuff once all the planets and debris are used to up construct space stations. There may be a long time until that need arises, if ever.
Woah, all awake now, that stuff is like I was high or something. Seriously, I couldn't keep my eyes open to hit that post button, and didn't wanna cancel the post either, but I had no energy left to review and correct the mess I typed waking up for 2 minutes, passing out for 5, waking up for 2, etc. Sorry..
So a lot of instabilities in solar output might be due to magnetic and inertia effects, compressing nuclear materials sending them into a high temperature creating reaction, the inertia taking time to accelerate and the heat builds up, the natural hot low density (like hot air balloons) plus expansion inertia making the whole thing light and move up in gravity, as a plasma, in a magnetic field - just watching the Sun's surface, there are lots of instabilities and hot spots and cold spots present, also solar flares, and some instabilities might have a characteristic lifetime of an iceage, especially if a massive object on the size of a few Jupiters falls into the Sun, bringing fresh fuel. If there is actually fusion going on too, in the very center, it must be slow because the hydrogen concentration there is very low (though the force of gravity decays the closer you are to the center and becomes 0 at the center.) Even with all that plasma, and gaseous state, the core of the Sun is probably different than the outer surface, because of gas density of metal vapors compared to hydrogen - is this true? Nope, the wikipedia Sun page says 3/4 hydrogen, 1/4 helium, and minor, less than 2% silicate stuff. Because of all that helium fusion is prevalent. So I'm still thinking and don't have a really good explanation of why solar output would fluctuate on the scale of, with time constants of, a whole ice age or terrestrial extinction event period. Maybe somebody could explain, or displain, proving that no, solar output is stable and ice ages on Earth originate in other causes. By the way Earth's magnetic field has flipped a few times, and that could be due to inertial current flows in lava, carrying strong enough magnetic fields in a certain direction, because of inertia, ending up opposing the main field and having enough inertia juice to fight it down. Similar magnetic-inertial things could be going on in the Sun too, where a flip in the magnetic field might create and ice-age effect. I don't know. It might be possible to dig for rocks/fossils that record the spectrum of solar radiation, as different temperatures have different colors, but this is a far shot, especially if it also causes an ice age, and the fossils demonstrate effect of ice age, not solar spectrum. It's a really difficult topic, but it doesn't really matter, we know ice ages happen, so global warming ages might happen too where you can stick your carbon tax dollars in your anus as they may have little or nothing to do with why global temperatures are rising, the fact is that temperatures fluctuate, and the easiest way to deal with that, if you want to control the temperature to be stable (at least to the point where arctic and antarctic ice doesn't melt flooding much of Russia, the Netherlands, and Florida, including every major city like New York, DC, LA, SF, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Calcutta, etc, even if Switzerland is safe) you need to provide for decreasing solar input in global warming, i.e. flippable shades, or increasing solar input in an ice-age, i.e. Fresnel lens rings around the circumference of Earth, or mirrors. By the way you have to consider the safety of such a thing, especially if the idiots take over the planet in a democratic voting world, where, for humanitarian reasons nobody is allowed to starve, and it's whoever can breed the fastest (i.e. starting age of hitting puberty for girls, 12-13 yrs, having the most kids by age 15-18, and being a great grandmother by age 50), so if people who can't compute the square root of 2, let alone compute a rocket orbit to fly to and adjust the shades take over the world, you still have to care about them too when you're gone, and you can't leave the world messed up for them, if you can't control t
Oh yeah, how about instead of a rollercoaster in Utah saving some rocket fuel by accelerating the spaceship to 1000 miles/hr and then firing the rockets, how about launching them from the edge of the atmosphere, really high, off the back of some fast airplane going a gazillion miles/hr already, and then firing the rockets. These airplanes take the oxidizer part from the air instead of rocket fuel having to carry it along, and it's a lot cheaper to fly about with just the fuel without having to carry the oxidizer too. So they are expensive to fly anyway, especially if one with a high ceiling of operation. Or they could design rockets that have stages like airplanes, don't carry the oxidizer, take it from the atmosphere while you can, semi-vertical landing ones, but speeding up toward the east (which is the way the Earth already rotates and is the standard encircling way or sending everything into a rotating, encircling space orbit.)
Oh and on the mobile nuclear platform on the Moon with geothermal cooling, lacking ground moisture, or softening from high temperature lava, (i.e. the deeper you go on Earth the hotter it gets, but as the Moon is like 80 times less than (or 0.0123x) Earth, (but because of much smaller radius, and r^2 term in the denomitator for gravitational attraction (spheres behave as if all their mass were gathered in the center, per Gauss' laws), so you're only 6x less weight on the Moon, not 80x) the disperse radioactive decay in rocks does not heat enough to melt the core) there might be lots of leaks in heating and insufficient contact. So you may need cpu-heatsink-like "thermal paste" on the outside, and at first I thought metallic sodium, potassium and calcium might work, but they could locally self heat reacting and corroding away into the rocks. So aluminum, the second most abundant metalloid after silicon, is the choice for outer coating and softness to adapt to the bore hole with good contact, but it probably can't directly carry NaK or molten Na (which are probably the nastiest things ever, watch Nurdrage potassium video for safety, https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., or https://www.youtube.com/watch?... for no safety, I heard a story of a girl unloading sodium from a railcar or tanker truck, and the hose popped, and she got sprayed with liquid (molten) sodium across her body, which usually instantly reacts with moisture containing materials like your body or even clothes.. she asked, am I gonna die now? well let's see, you have no liver, or intestines left after that splash, so what do you think?) into the ground because of alloying/corrosion, so locally made aluminum clad iron tubing (need some minor qty of carbon carried to make steel and strong iron, 100% pure iron is quite soft compared to good steels) is probably the way to go. But I'm no expert on geothermal or oil drilling topics at all,,
Also, a note on ice ages: They might have been because of drop of Solar output. How sure are we that the Sun isn't just like any other planet, just simply bigger - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... pictures, on just how huge the Sun is compared to Jupiter, which in turn is also huge compared to Earth. So the Sun, because of size, would have molten lava surface, just like Earth does, or would if it were bigger. Also because of huge gravity, even hydrogen and helium get retained even at the 6000C temperature. They say the Sun is fueled by fusion. I say it's fueled like any other massive object, as massive objects all contain Th232, U238, K40, U235 and automatically light up. So all the stars you see in the sky are most likely the only massive objects at that scale, besides the strange black hole things we don't really know what to think about. So anyway, assume the Sun is not fusing much H, but it's mostly just heating like lava on Earth is, by that ppb quantity fission fuel material. Then a fission creates ext
How about children playing with poisoned mushrooms in the forest! Let's ban all species of poisonous mushrooms, stingy bees, and poisonous snakes and spiders. Eradicate them from the world just so we are safe! People will let a lot of their freedoms be taken away in the name of a little safety! You know in the national anthem it says the land of the free and the home of the brave, and all I hear is pussies like you that are neither brave, nor complaining about their freedoms taken away by regulations, in the name of some marginal safety. Watch George Carlin's airport security on youtube. Yeah, there are two sides to everything, and he may be swinging too much to the other side of proper balance, but he does have a point, in how out of balance things have gotten. Airport security hasn't found a single bomb yet. After all this waste of time, not one found. So Da Man who's pulling the strings on this let's herd this herd-crowd gradually into more and more bondage by slowly eroding their freedoms, til we can turn them into total salves and exploit them, like we used to back in the old days, so Da Man is gonna now put it in the paper and in the news that all these bombs have been found by airport security scanners. And they will be actual stories of conspiracy gangstas operating on behalf of Da Man doing it, so we can keep up this, camera on every streetlight I can't even pick my nose at a red light in privacy anymore, world.
How about unlicensed ass-wipers? With all this stupid regulation soon you'll need a license and permit to wipe your ass, or hire someone with a license. There'll be a permit that expires stamped on each slice of toilet paper, and if expired, has to be renewed with a new license fee payment, else it's considered illegal asswiping! But it's okay to wipe with it as long as you don't get caught by the authorities!
I downgraded to XP on this HP Mini 210 netbook from Win 7 that it came with.
I have this idea or dream of turning excess renewable power that a utility won't take or won't pay for, such as wind or solar, into aluminum, instead of dumping it to heat coil, nut Da Man is careful to cock block me every move I make, including tearing down my house and harassing me with grass cutting fees, it's like I'm some sort of experiment to see how can you raise a family on minimum wage and not be bankrupt, and the answer is that you can't, you can take care of yourself on minimum wage as long as you can find roommates you can trust (good luck with that) as housing is by far the biggest cost item on the list, but you can't take care of, say, 5 people, unless you're hispanic living in a basement rented at 200 bux per month and 20 people secretly living there. Then minimum wage is luxuriously high. Housing cost is everything, and now they are introducing this new way to get anally raped, mandatory insurance like health insurance, at first 10% income, then 20%, then, eventually, like 90% of your income, because how much is your health worth to you? Everything, infinite! It's like charging you for air, and asking how much is air worth to you? Everything, infinite! But I'm gettin it for free these days, till Da Man can figure out a way to make me pay for it, so I drive by this place called Air Products, showcasing air as private property, and they want me to go back to a job where I get gassed with research chemical warfare gases, and the obvious answer to it is "Scuba Steve", i.e. get a scuba diving gear, with a gas cylinder, and pay for the air you breathe. I have yet to pay for the air I breathe, but soon, soon, Da Man is working hard at it. I used to have windows open 24/7/365 til tenants moved out downstairs and landlord shut the heat off downstairs to cause a pipe freeze/burst, so I had to shut the windows and turn the heat on, and still had a pipeburst because you have to heat from below, heat rises, it doesn't go down, but I gotta keep my ass covered, so now I don't get fresh air at home like I used to, against the anesthetic gases that knock you right out when you type on Slashdot. Right now I happen to have a job with doors swung wide open and not much odor stuff that'd require a gas mask, but I get google search results/ads showing me CPAP, pressurized air supply for allergic people sleeping, and uber is constantly hiring, paying good money, just so I pay, once and for all, for the fucking air I breathe. It's soooo important to Da Man to accomplish this one thing, because of that sillybilly linuxbios post I made a long time ago on slashdot. Oh, and by the way, for the record, the opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of whoever happens to be my employer at the time. And sometimes they are not my own opinions either, I just practice some good ol sarcasm. Or not. That's the fun part about sarcasm, you never know if it is.
LG makes cars? For whatever reason, they seem to make quite nice phones, but they too are slaves to their own lawyers, in DRM/intellectual property bullshit up to their ears.
Thanks for that info!
Military is also about expansion.
The military has this dilemma about being out of a job, and Obama cutting their funds, sort of, as there are no true arch-enemies around on the scale of Soviet Union communists of the Cold War era, there are no good wars to fight, other than these makebelieve terrorist wars, lucky for them we had a 9/11 or their budget might have been cut long time ago. The USA is a military nation. Kinda like ancient Rome. We love the gladiators in the colosseum, dressed in steel fighting lions and each other to death, and we have this manhood issue of wearing helmets with dick looking spikes, and holy elderly priests preaching brotherly love can get out of the way of our Arrrnold Schwarzenegger pump you full of lead machine guns. (See google image search "arnold schwarzenegger machine gun.") Or even preaching holy jihad against the porn and resource waste of America, like Osama did, we take them mofos out. So we love our guns, we love military stuff, it improves our self worth, self image, like huge pickup trucks and SUV's compared to, say, Arnold being convicted to drive in a tiny "Smart Car". That would not be very manly. But there are no good enemies around, and that's kind of good though, because war is pain and suffering and it sucks, we're men, we can take pain, but it's nice not to have to. Sometimes. So the military's present motto is maintaining peace and avoiding a war, by things such as overwhelming force, is just as, if not more important, as winning a war. Every time China sharpens their tooth for Taiwan, we do a parade with our carriers in the straits between mainland China and Taiwan, to quell the emotions a bit. So now the Chinese are buying a junked Ukrainian (Kuznetsov class "Riga") carrier with the fake excuse of turning it into a casino, when it's really made into a carrier ("Liaoning"), one that could be copied. China has massive economic power, but might be on the edge on resources, and a global economic apocalypse or a collapse of the US govt financially Lehman Bros. style would be devastating to them, so they keep lending us money so we keep buying their stuff and maintaining status quo, funny money, it matters, but not hard core, even if it never gets paid back, keep the status quo, keep production going in China. There is this delicate dance, dependence on each other, common interest, but disagreement too over things like Taiwan. So we got 10 major carriers, each costing money out da ass every second to upkeep and service, and nobody even comes close in number. So what if China copies the one carrier they got, 20 times over, and now it's their 20 vs. our 10, we can no longer do this show of force patrol, kind of like lions vs hyenas of the Serengeti. It all comes down to economic power, as always, back in the day the British Empire had a policy of outdoing in Navy power at least the top two next in line, which pretty much broke the bank. We can't afford 20 carriers to keep up with China, but China can't afford us collapsing economically, or the world economy buying Chinese goods collapsing economically. This interdependence of debt and economy is good for world peace. So where does the military fit in? But I'm rambling now, about military stuff, back to the space stuff, NASA..
Expanding an empire is usually through military, though, traditionally the US has done it through cash purchases, Louisiana purchase, Alaska purchase, some wars with Mexico, and some rounding up of bow and arrow and spear native americans taking them on a "Trail of Tears" and such, relocating them into the Arizona deserts, but most expansion has stopped, because there is nowhere more to go. You can't really occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and claim them as US territory or colonial domain and collect taxes into the treasury from them like you used to back 150 years ago. You can't attack Canada or Mexico without a good excuse, so the only place left to expand the empire is outer space, and places like Venus, but first of all, the Moon. Without the incentive of letting people or countries/sove
Woah, I think my eyelids were half closed when I wrote that, before passing out asleep.
Or we need to include NASA in the military budget, and assuming outer space is gonna get divided up into smallscale Star Trek-like micro quadrants (alpha quadrant, beta quadrant) by whoever occupies it first and sticks a flag down with a rotating space station, with some minimum distance rule by these things, so conquest of areas close to Earth as space territories is important if they are more valuable than the ones farther away, even if there is a lot of room up there. But before anything else comes the Moon, and I say whatever country can go up there and stick a flagpole down and "claim it", they can get it as national territory. You could have something like the United States of America, and Puerto Rico and Sectors 3,5,31,15 on the Moon, and quadrants alpha(all), beta 4, gamma 3. But, indeed, such long titles sound better when appended to monarch's names, such as the oldtime Habsburgs, Emperor of Holy Roman Empire, prince of Bohemia, etc., prince of Lunar sectors 3, 5, 31, 15. Once you show new territory to Monarch's, they are greedy and wanna conquer it, should they have enough science and military power to do so.