Going with distrowatch numbers is complicated, as it seems to be promoting/pushing not so good distros, and then either all the users are retarded, or something smells fishy, either the statistics are damned lies, or even the users might smell fishy, as in conspiracy and stuff, ya know.
I envy you. My dream car is a car-computerless Porsche, and I think all fuel injectors are computerized, so if carburetted, it's terribly inefficien at miles per gallon. Maybe somebody, like Tesla, needs to start an open source car that people can program all the chips themselves.
Driving on regular roads is a matter of life and death, but they could have high-way like traffic zones where the cars get hooked onto each other by a chainlike fashion, and move together as one, as a train, and no deer or accidents are expected on the highway, just like with trains, and the whole train follows signals and semaphores by computer systems, and if someone gets stuck in the middle of the track while one of these trains is coming, well they are out of luck, just like they are out of luck when falling off a platform in a regular train station, with the train coming around the corner, unable to stop even if braking hard. At least some regions of traffic you could automate in this "tough luck" if you get caught up in the wheels of the "traffic machine" fashion, the traffic machine train can't stop.
Self driving cars are absolute nonsense. It requires intellect to decide whether an object is a plastic bear or a real bear about to enter the road, and has to be braked for. Any business/investment into this self driving car design field is setting themselves up for a major lawsuit because the basic principle is that you require artificial intelligence on par with a human to make the same correct decisions while driving, identifying objects and predicting their future behavior correctly. Even a dog's level won't cut it, as shepherds have dogs and sheep, and the trio exists well together, but dogs and sheep can't coexist, or at least wolves haven't figured out a way yet, and you need a human to decide things like we're gonna take that mountain pass yonder instead of the one over here. Alpha wolves and wolf packs make similar decisions, and a whole lot of wolf lives depend on a good or bad decision, in middle of winter, similar to the Donner Party back in the Oregon Trail/California Trail days. Even humans make horrible judgment calls sometimes which way to drive, or in an accident piling up in front of you which way to swerve, how are you gonna trust these decisions to a machine, or intellect less than a human? Driving is a matter of life and death. If anything you need a machine smarter than a human in comprehending the world around it, and predicting actions of objects like insane people as pedestrians, walking in the middle of the road. Saying you ran someone over "legally" does not fly far in court, just because someone crossed the street before you when they had red light and you had green, or stopped in the middle like Rain Man, you still have to judge for yourself what to do.
I agree. You won't be allowed to open the hood, and check the oil level, or add windshield washer fluid, because of DRM/DMCA issues - you're messing with someone else's intellectual property, and might reverse engineer something and guess the passwords by which all parts, like chipped ink cartridges, interact, and build a replacement part yourself on a lathe instead of buying it only from the intellectual property holder of the car design. The only windshield washer fluid refill "cartridge" the car will accept will be one with a chip made by the original company, costing a mere $2000/gallon of windshiel washing fluid. Oh, and you can buy a new car for like ten bucks or free during special promotions, but don't expect it to run without these super expensive and chipped refill cartridges, inlcuding oil change chipped/passworded refill cartrdige, windshield washer fluid chipped/passworded refill cartridge, gasoline chipped/passworded refill cartdrige at a mere $10/gal of gas when other gas is $4/gal (hey the car was free, you gotta pay for it somehow!) Ah! The wonders of chips and computerization!
If you have solar panels harvesting sunlight, and the ratio of energy harvested to impact by interstellar density vaccum gas ( couple atoms per cubig mile?), then whatever you harvest can accelerate up with a cyclotron (aka synchrophasotron) at eject them at very high speed. So in that case the answer is yes, but of course it would be falls if the startlight harvested solar energy were used to propel a boat or other transportation device at the gas-density prevalent in the atmosphere on Earth.
As the Moon does not have a molten lava to sink all the tungsten, uranium, iridium, osmium, lead, gold, platinum and or course nickel/cobalt/iron into a solid metallic core, the abundance and minability of these things might be profitable on the Moon even for oceanic Earth-dops of cargo with a parachute.
Yes beryllium is one of those things way off on a tangent asymptote. By the way there are a lot of nonspark tools for explosive fire safety environments made of beryllium-copper bronze, though the beryllium percentage is low. It is very toxic, but has surprising strength and light weight. It's rare, but not as rare as say rhenium or iridium used in high temperature oxidation resistant things like fighterjet turbines and electric sparking resistant switch contacts, or even spark plugs. The toxicity is mainly due to people being unaware of it. There are plenty of highly poisonous mushrooms in the world living symbiotically with many forests and other plants, and as long as people don't ingest it or handle it wrong, they can coexist with us in the world, just like objects made of beryllium, or even nonsparking beryllium bronze.
There are other things that don't pass the smell test, such as solar panels collecting starlight energy - you need like a whole planet's area's worth of solar panel per person, not even talking about the jungle you're taking along, that contains elephants and tigers and ants, and such, Noah's Ark style.
Another thing that doesn't pass the smell test is the communication to long distances.. I think we lost radio contact with the Voyager space probes, so their twitter account only displays their estimated distance from us, in light-hours or something like that. The Voyager probes slingshotted off of Jupiter's orbit, making Jupiter drop someting like 0.1 nanometer in orbit closer to the Sun, and that energy used to propel the Voyager probes. If one actually does the calculations it's more likely something like one femtometer or attometer closer to the Sun in orbit. Whoever came up with the slingshot idea was a very clever guy, kudos to him. So anyway, radio contact may be impossible even with a highly directional huge solar panel the size of a planet array per person, so we may have to resort to sending flare signals, kind of simplified Morse code, such as they would watch with a telescope for nuke flashes going off near the orbit of Pluto, sufficiently away from the Sun, at a preagreed location, and the sequence of flashes would be tee tee tah tah kind of Morse code. I don't know if they'd have the resources to also signal us with flares. Yes, there are lots of difficulties with going to the nearest stars. But one can dream about a time when we have people and eartian elephants at Alpha Centauri and such stars nearby, a few light years away. And with a cyclotron drive ejecting captured particles near the speed of light, continuous acceleration close to the speed of light might be possible, say 70% cutting total travel time to something like 1000 years.or maybe even 200 years. That's not such a long time, as current space projects with the Voyager probes had to wait for decades before it was time to get the results back, such as outer solar system planet flybys..
Also with the calcium/liquid oxygen energy cash used for power tools and such, an issue is venting, as you can't continuously vent oxygen into the living/working quarters, and upset the 21% O2/79$ He or N2 balance, so all power tools would have a pneumatic power chord/tube that also contained a return chord/tube that would vent the exhaust O2 gas into outer space, or to be recycled.
Also helium generation from hydrogen via neutron bombardment is difficult, and if successful, it would generate so much friggin power and heat, that cooling the ship would be an issue. The neutron absorption cross section for hydrogen 2, i.e. deuterium is very low, and it must be even lower for hydrogen e, i.e. tritium, but each successful tritium neutron capture to "hydrogen 4", that has no other common name, probably generates helium very fast plus a lot of energy.. I'd have to look up the literature, but they say fusion as a power source is not possible with these portable neutron generators, because the rate of neutron generation is so small compared to the energy invested, I mean you're talking 1 or 10 or 100 neutrons per s
Oops, made a mistake there, the magnesium/o2 battery is only 2789 Wh/kg, while calcium/o2 is 2990 Wh/kg, according to the wikipedia article, with oxygen included, it's only better if oxygen comes from the atmosphere, like down here on Earth, so no, magnesium is not better in the energy density respect weight wise, only ease of vaporization-wise, but as calcium is so reactive, and also very soft, it is most likely easy to ignite in the solid form with an iridium (or maybe tungsten(burns) or platinum(melts)) resistance wire with oxygen present in the reaction chamber, and also easier to squeeze because of it's softness (though it's harder than lead, and can be cut with a knife only with difficulty.) and if this softness/vaporization becomes an issue, sodium/oxygen may be good, as sodium is even softer and easier to vaporize/liquefy, but the energy density now drops to 1677 Wh/kg, or half.
Calcium is the universal reductant, but it's not the highest specific energy density material to use in a metal/oxygen electrochemical cell weight-wise. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...–air_electrochemical_cell Beryllium/oxygen leaves everything else in the dust, but in it's very rare, and in its absence the abundant aluminum/oxygen battery is more energy dense weight-wise than calcium/oxygen (though it's harder to find an electrolyte that will ionically dissolve aluminum to later react with oxygen), and even the also abundant magnesium/oxygen is better, weight-wise. This is only a concern when you use 50/50 (or, more exactly the stoichiometric amount) of metal/oxygen in a battery cell to get electricity out of it, with the oxide recyclable through calcium reduction or a separate electrochemical process dedicated to aluminum or magnesium oxide, and is not as relevant when you use the 3% metal/97% liquid O2 pneumatic propulsion system, with the oxide ejected/discarded too, as calcium will be made in large quantitites as the universal reductant of even magnesium and aluminum, both of which will be left intermixed in the metallic residue with each other and oxygen and take extra effort to separate out for use. Also, using aluminum in a direct combustion way may be difficult, and it may have to be finely granulated, because of the protective oxide layer that forms, and it's impossible to vaporize, unlike calcium, which if, necessary, can be used in a vaporized way to react with oxygen in a burner, but nothing beats magnesium in energy density and ease of vaporization, so one may find that the energy cash may actually end up being magnesium metal/liquid oxygen, because of both energy density/weight and also ease of vaporization/combustion considerations.
According to existentialism, all ethics is relative. Humans are ethical beings, just like some social bugs, like ants, bees or mammals like dogs, and we have a choice in how we want to live, what the best ethical system suits our needs as a whole. There is no inherently right or wrong in the world, but there is a "We don't wanna live that way, with those ethics" choice. It's like saying we don't want to play baseball by those rules, as there is no inherent right or wrong way to play baseball, or any game, they are made up things, made up games, but once you have rules, and everyone agrees on them, the umpires try to enforce them. You can't just play baseball without rules.
You're right though, a whole lot of macho people end up in the military thinking they are so awesome, with super cool weapons they can take any "enemy" down. Some of them though truly believe they are doing an honorable thing by serving their country and their people when they follow their commander's orders, and if there is something wrong with those orders, it trickles down from the top, and the ones at the very top should be blamed, not the "honorable" soldiers faithfully executing them down the ranks. After all you can't have a reliable military where each soldier debates with himself whether he should execute an order or not, and constantly object to having to shoot and kill. According to existentialism though, you still cannot avoid personal responsibility when you follow such orders, as yes, you should always debate and object if you have to to any order given to you. Especially when it comes to killing innocent enemy civilian lives. I for one would have refused to execute Richard the Lionheart's order to execute the civil population of Tyre during the Crusade, just so he eliminates the threat of rebellion once he moves on with his units toward Jerusalem. Something is wrong with butchering nonarmed, nonresisting enemy civilians, you could almost consider POW's, though during WW2 allied bombing of civilian ammunition and weapons or automotive factories or even just residential cities was considered normal, especially in response to axis submarine attacks of unarmed civilian merchant ships. Who started it first, it's like the chicken and egg problem, whoever started it the other continued. And yes, this shows there is such a thing as attacking unarmed civilian enemy population being considered normal during a war. Are you not gonna attack an enemy munitions factory, or a bridge, to disrupt their ability to fight, and only shoot at fully armed, resisting military units, unless they wave a white flag and become nonresisting POW's? It's complicated, especially with nonuniformed espionage, and terrorism, it's hard to identify who's a combatant and who's not.
We believe in trials. Settling disputes without violence. Back in the days before trials there were often duels, gentlemen choose your weapons. Or wars between princes. But these days we try to have trials. I think there was a Star Trek episode, with Voyager, where one of the crew was subpoenaed to court, only to find himself in a WWF-like ring, with swords, and told to start arguing, present his arguments to his opponents, by swinging his weapons at each other. He was told this is how we argue, this is what we mean by arguing in court. Instead of weapons, our founding fathers believed in smacking words at each other's heads. Skill in twisting and abusing the English language comes in handy in such situations. By the way, in medieval and violent Japan, some feudal lords decided to settle their disputes through nonviolent means - instead of smashing their armies against each other, they each presented a Go player, and the outcome of the match would decide the outcome of the battle, without anyone dying. Go players were highly valued under such circumstances. Maybe we could resort to such nonviolent things, instead of violent duels, or twisting the legal jargon in court, we could have chess games or Go games to settle disputes through nonviolent means.
With a 70,000 year trip corrosion is a big issue, so there may have to be a lot of gold used in the construction of the ship, and as the ship has to be quite a sizable thing considering psychological factors of having a society, and minding that all the gold ever mined on Earth fits into like a 2 km cube, there are issues here. Probably something like a 20 walled ship is needed, with vacuum pumped down to absolute vacuum by the 5th wall, and then corrosion is a nonissue there, and the inner 5 layers have to constantly be renewed/replaced, at least once every 1000 years. Also, once the pioneers/settlers arrive, and there's gotta be floating debris or planets around each star even if there is no liquid water bearing planet, how will they know what to do, would they still have the skills to fabricate things? While traveling there, there may be some outer solar system objects we call comets that have crystallized ice on them, going in the same direction with the same speed as the ship, therefore capturable if sufficient steering is available (what a minuscule chance for such a thing), and then skill can be kept up on the way there to dismantle/process "stuff" found in the vast emptiness of outer space, stuff that should be very dense once arrived near that star. Even in absence of that, practice material and laboratories, and mechanical workshops would have to be kept up, with possibly repair spacewalks, leading to a sizable ship. As there is always a chance of hitting small meteorites at say 30-200,000 km/s, and some units leaking to full vacuum, many completely isolated units would have to be maintained, say even 20 or 50, and ending up with only one surviving by the trip end able to carry and sustain the whole crew would have to be considered. If the different 20 walls rotate with respect to each other, then a small meteorite hole may create a leak into the interstitial wall spaces, but as the holes are not lined up, the vacuum pumps might be able to keep up and scavenge the escaping air, even calcium of vacuum tube barium or liquid helium traps that capture any atoms striking them could be a way to save stuff from leaking in the outer layers. The tighter the spacing between the walls, the less the leakage, and as soon as a leak is detected, there could be a certain preprogrammed rotation misaligning the hole away from each other to maximum distance, then a sudden crash, a halt of the relative rotation of the walls to each other, until the holes are patched, and sliding rotation can be restarted. I don't know what the economic optimum number of walls is.
As nitrogen is scarce, but hydrogen and helium are abundant in outer space, diluting oxygen harvested from comet rocks could be done, but not with hydrogen that forms an explosive mixture with oxygen, but with helium. The helium might have to be fusion generated from the harvested hydrogen, if nothing else, through cyclotron or energy inefficient portable neutron generator bombardment. And everyone would get used to the chipmunk sound of helium balloon inhalation you can hear down here on Earth.
Also, communication with the speed of light would take a few years to go back and forth, to exchange hello's, draining quite a bit of power from the ship for dish/antenna use, and in case the crew on this ship messes up and ends up in deep doo doo sending out an SOS to us, we can reply to them with the phrase/video transcript from Mad TV's Dolla Bill Montgomery's Real Motherf****in Talk Mother's Day episode, "Talk to the hand, you're on your own, motherf****!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... We can give them advice, but not much else, advice they have to wait 4-8 years for to arrive. For psychological reasons, a reality show transmitted from them and programming transmitted to them would be neat, each without waiting for a reply to arrive, at least not reacting to one for the few years it takes to transmit the message. Their internet ping timeouts would have to be set to the corresponding few years, if
Also, providing the oxygen surface to the electrolyte is not that complicated, as the calcium ion dissolving electrolyte might react directly with gaseous oxygen, with the surface scraped, the electrolytic potential harvested as Ca++ concentration difference between the metal and oxygen zones, as in concentration batteries. Yeah, you don't need a second electrolyte bs for oxygen reaction.
A mobile nuclear power plant drilling for geothermal cooling, staying for a while, then moving on could work for start, but you can't return to previous locations as the geothermal region there would still be hot for years, and unavailable as a coolant. But a moderate 100C-200C nuclear heat rejection temperature could be attainable this way, assuming the initial geothermal condition of the Moon is the same as down here on Earth, near 0 C or 20 C, room temperature.
A trip to the nearest stars with the speeds attained by Voyagers I and II and then some, at the limits of our technology, would take on the orders of 70,000 Earth-years. Should it be done? Hell yeah! Do you expect to be alive? Hell no! But with huge solar panels living off of starlight per person carried, you could take a human colony into orbit to the nearest stars, and they could live there for millions of years. Mind you written history is like 8000 years old (Egyptian Pharaoh's and hyeroglyphs, or 11-13000 if you go with the Sanskrit writings), and modern humans (Omo remains) have only been around for 200,000 years, so a 70,000 year trip is quite a trip. But, you never know, humans on Earth may develop an AI that kills everyone, or a super intelligent genetically modified biotech photosynthetic microorganism that kills everyone and everything including trees, grass, lions, deer, fish.. and emerges as the "winner" back home as the only surviving species, well, at least these folks far away would be safe, at least for a while, till this super intelligent life form chases them down too and eats them too. But at least they get some time to figure out how to defend and stand a chance, possibly by creating their own, friendly superintelligent artificial intelligence silicon/organic android microbe that's better than themselves so it could kill them, but luckily it doesn't, but like a good guard dog, protects them from the attacks of the Earth based microbe, that come after them in say, 1000 years (if they have figured out a 70x faster ways to make the same trip.) See a thousand years is a long time to think things through.
The propulsion system should use extra-solar system harvested hydrogen atoms (they are like 1 H atom per cubic mile or something like that), accelerating it to near speed of light through special cyclotrons, then as the relativistic mass takes over and things get out of sync, special coiled linear accelerators continuing it, and you can get almost any kind of mass out of each atom, and get a great propulsion kick, impulse out of each, for rotation and speed control, or for further accelerating, being mindful that halfway through the trip you have to start decelerating, and such propulsion would still beat the simple light propulsion by orders of magnitude, because the impulse per energy expanded ratio is much better than with simple light. It's true that you're creating mass out of energy as you build the mass of each proton up, and shooting off pure energy as mass is equivalent to shooting off pure light as mass, so there is an optimum velocity, optimum ejection speed dependent on the economics of harvesting each atom from the really thin galactic vacuum vs. economics of not building up too much relativistic mass into it and wasting energy as mass, as in case of a light propulsion. You may have to resort to pure light propulsion in case you cannot find any hydrogen atoms whatsoever within 100 cubic miles or so, such as intergalactic space.
In closer quarters, on rotating cylinder space modules near Earth orbit or Lunar orbit, such propulsion, including light propulsion is pure absolute economic waste, compared to specific impulse gained per size (mass, volume) of the drive, as we have plenty of matter to waste, if nothing else, solar wind close to the Sun is pretty matter rich, visible with things like Aurora Borealis. In particular even a cyclotron drive on a rotation cylinder station may not be the economic optimum to align solar panels and control orientaton, rotation speed and orbit, but instead a liquid oxygen/calcium metal energy cash could be used near the Moon and on the Moon's surface. See life down here on Earth uses ATP (high energy adenosine tri-phosphate) as the energy cash, and all processes within all lifeforms respect the resource limit of energy cash, and all processes either generate ATP with food or light energy from ADP (low energy adenosine di-phosphate) plus P, phosphoric acid, APP + P + energy ---> APPP, or APPP ----> APP + P + energy. So, similarly, near
It's very difficult to justify private industry in space, other than monarchies power grubbing and expanding their reach and territories. That's a basic difference between a monarchy and a democracy. In the old days a lot of captains were grilled and criticized for not being aggressive enough in the British Navy, as expanding the empire was a constant requirement, even against almost neutral entitites. In a democracy you don't generally have such a territorial expansion policy, well, except in the 1800's the US did a lot of Louisiana purchase, and Alaska purchase, but the world is "full" now, no more free empty space to go around, Canada ain't gonna sell the US no land, and neither will Mexico, so if you want to keep expanding, it has to be into outer space, and there is plenty of room up there to be occupied and claimed, but it has to happen at the national level, either by the democratic state, or a private monarch, a private enterprise claiming "real estate" up there for profit puposes aint' gonna fly. Perhaps they can find mines of platinum, iridium or even tungsten and uranium and nickel, etc, in greater abundance on the surface of the Moon, than down here on Earth to the point where mining might become profitable. You'd need a very accurate x-ray emission scan of the whole Moon surface to see if there are profitable mines on the surface, China might have done something like that without telling anyone about it, but as there is no wind and everything is covered in dust, it's hard to see just below the dust layer on the surface. Satellites are a profitable private investment in space, but I don't know what else. space tourism? Nah..
They should start with a dog like Laika, just like the russians did, they got the dog from the city kennel's death row, and made a national hero out of it. Then Yurij Gagarin went up after Laika, the dog, and word is when he came down the first thing he asked for was fresh underwear. Just kidding. But them two animals were the first two in space.
Hey, it's big enough achievement, as the people from the 60's and 70's are all retired or dead, we lost all that expertise. It's like the internet has been down after a global apocalypse for 30 years, and now some people are coming up with a global network to send data and pictures worldwide. Yeah, that's a worthy accomplishment in that context.
There is probably a remote kill switch on most laptops/computers, unless they are like a 386 or 286, but I've been happily chugging along on this 5W chipset+Atom cpu/7-9 hr battery HP Mini 210 with XP for 4 years now. My previous laptop, still kinda working but the screen hinge broke, HP C508US (came with Vista, yucckkk, downgraded to Win2K super good) was better, no real battery life, but you could play games like Rairoad Tycoon 2 Gold and Age of Empires Gold on it just fine, because this HP Mini is only 1024x600, can't do 768 needed by those games. Also Linux could access the soundcard on that one, on this one it's like this IDT sound chipset needs some special password before it will process sound. Remember the old BIOS days where there was a standard function, memory range, that many chipsets could adapt to, without funky secret keys and drivers? So this one is only good on XP for stuff like Emusic, but when I'm off the internet fully when DRM spreads too much and all my save buttons are taken away, I'll have to go back to the older stuff. I've been collecting older PC's, as funds become available, mostly made around Windows 2000, or at least be able to run Windows 2000 even if made in say, 2005 or 6. Windows 2000 is the last windows that could be reinstalled without activation, or special hardware check, as in it must be a dell, hp, ibm, or one of the other in with the gang companies. I'm not even trying to get used to these newer games, whatever games used to run back then, those are for good for me, 40 years from now when I'm retired, and everyone else is locked into a 2 menu option, 5 button android world. The questions that arise with this tegra and android are: can you run MS Office 2000 on it? How about PostgreSQL 8? How about Apache or similar webserver? My guess is no, no, and no. It doesn't really matter, because you'll be forced to create your office documents on the cloud, through a browser, as the ads on Slashdot even today advertise creating music on the cloud. If all businesses run their stuff on the cloud, as opposed to offline computers, then every 6 months that browsers get obsoleted they have to buy new computers, and they cannot get away with the bullshit of running a computer for 30 years, without a large and expensive IT department, and not upgrading at least twice a year, like the computer business people would like it. So what if your link to the cloud is severed from some Axis bombing? How are you gonna keep producing weapons in your factories? See with a home computer running Win2K/FL Studio 5 in a bunker basement you don't have to give a fuck if WW3 is raging outside between the Canadians and Japanese, the US with its 5th world economy by then (because we can't educate our kids) taking collateral damage, or the zombies of the apocalypse are eating each other, if you got a couple days leave as vacation you can ignore all that and compose some music at home. Not if you have a cloud based computer with the link to the cloud severed.
Another big problem, why the Lord may send the world into an apocalypse on purpose, is the proliferation of suburbia, and that by itself would not be so bad, as in the nuclear age living less concentrated and more spread out helps defend against Tsar-bomba like attacks. However suburbia brings with itself lawns, lawns moved to half an inch or one inch, with nonnative plants, and it also brings with it herbicides and pesticides. A while ago, of the nonfarmed area, there was like 80% unlawned area, mostly contiguous, but now it's flipping, to where it's 80% lawned, disrupting continuity of unlawned areas, together with the sustaining of other lifeforms, such as flowerfeeding bugs like bees and butterflies, other bugs like grasshoppers too, snakes, birds and rodents, that can nest in tall grass but not in a mowed lawn, affecting their predatory chains - diversity of life is severely disrupted for no reason other than most people's distorted sense of beauty. I love bugs, snakes, birds and rodents, and only if I have a food farm do I find it necessary to attack them, not when I'm admiring the beauty of an unfarmed piece of nature. I hate three things in life - mosquitoes, powerpoint presentations, and grass cutting, and I don't really hate mosquitos, but do hate retarded presentation slides, but I hate nothing like retarded time wasting, gas wasting, butterfly and bee wasting lawn mowing that every idiot around me practices. I'm surrounded by idiots, there is a sea of them wherever the eye can see! They are all mowing their lawns like retards! In an apocalypse with no gas to put into lawnmowers, suddenly people's distorted sense of beauty would be corrected, so they'd only scythe the grass when it's tall to make hay for the horses, without pesticides, herbicides or genetically modified grass, and in the meantime allow other lifeforms to coexist in some sort of harmony with them. Apocalypse, global economic downturn, as a sense of beauty correction, like magic eyeglasses, just what the doctor prescribed! Do a google image search on "apocalypse lolcat".
Actually, now that I think of it, Carnot cycle heat engine considerations don't apply to the above reactions, i.e. the higher the O2 decomposition temperature, the better the efficiency. Not! You just need to find reactions that proceed with a decent rate, and then the lower the BO-->B+O2 temperature, the better, but that means the HA--->H2+A is higher. There is probably a magic combination of reactants that proceed at say 200 C or 225 C that just make it possible to separate water, with a decent rate, or at 235 C with a very fast rate, so there is that puzzle to solve. Life has all kinds of whacky enzymes that solve the puzzles of low temperature carbohydrate oxidation of C6 H12O6+O2 ---> CO2 + H2O, and we humans, still lack skill when it comes to designing and running such reactions, such as the reverse, sunlight + CO2 + H2O ---> C6 H12O6 + O2, called photosynthesis, or even sunlight + H2O ---> H2 + O2. There are some Titanium Dioxide supported dyes that do this, but you still have to gas-separate H2 from O2. It would be nicer to have some layer of liquids that picked each of these up, one carrying the HA the other one the BO, and them some mild effect, such as application of a magnetic field releasing the H and O2, or if that's not available, some mild temperature increase. We don't have the technology, there's lots of stuff that needs to be researched, but Da Man might think it differently, he might create an intentional apocalypse to quench all this breeding idiots out of control drowning out everybody that practices self control, that's going on today, because that's an even greater problem than resource limits, such as energy limits, because there is no amount of resources that can keep up with infinite breeding capacity, and the only way to apply the resource limit in absence of behaving, self control, is through pain, such as death, starvation, misery, disease, and it's coming, I know it's coming, but all I know is I don't want to live through an apocalypse if there is a way to avert it, instead we should try to teach everyone the virtues of self control. I mean come on, you wanna have everyone starve and suffer, or you wanna put a leash on your dick and ignore that magical bootay? I know it's hard, cuz she's so fine, she's always on my mind... but to everything there are consequences.
I was half asleep when I wrote that last night, sorry for the spelling, but what I wrote today about the sulfur iodine cycles should be better quality.
Is it too much to ask for a diesel car that can take gasoline or diesel or ethanol into a fuel tank, with ethanol and gasoline needing an extra "lighting match fluid" dumped after them, but it also has a propane/natural gas tank that can either be filled with propane or natural gas from your home heating appliance? Then gas stations can't really play hockey with the prices if you get natural gas for a better deal at home, and then all fuels compete against each other in a true free market, instead of this highly segmented market where trucker have to pay superhigh prices for diesel, the rest of the population some high but no so high for gasoline, and natural gas, which we have a ton of, still not cheap, but a lower price. This allows Da Man to micromanage extracting the last pennies out of everyone, without starving people, or making them sit in winter cold. All you'd need for natural gas is a good compressor, as the gas that comes to your house is very low pressure. Also the natural gas tank would take up most of your trunk space, so you'd have to carry cargo on your rear seats, and also it would have to be superheavy gauge, because propane tanks are not strong enough, because propane is a mild gas, easily liquefiable under pressure, unlinke natural gas. There is this non-liquid compression burst safety issue, but natural gas is cheap, or should be, if there is a ton of it. A lot of power stations switched to combined cycle natural gas instead of coal, and they can compete with coal, I say fuck that, stop wasting our precious natural gas for a power plant that could handle pulverized coal instead in a combined cycle, and let us waste it driving our diesel cars around. Methane is very hard to self ignite, but if you take the diesel compression ration even higher than the usual 20, the temperature should be high enough to ignite methane too. If not, design a secondary diesel injector that sprays some ignitable fluid (and then you don't have to add it to your ethanol/gasoline tank but add it to the reservoir like you add coolant or windshield washer fluid) or add a spark plug that fires every millisecond or quarter milliseconds for 100 milliseconds or whatever is needed in the diesel cycle, then stop, then repeat the firing sequence again. The low cost Otto engine is obsoleted by the Diesel engine that can burn any fluid fuel in face of increased and likely to further increasing fuel prices.
Only ammonia, the fuel of the future, made in a nuclear plant is an exception to the above fossil fuel categories, because it won't combust in air, or it won't combust well unless you use a catalyst, and you probably need a fuel cell to efficiently extract its energy content. Ammonia is the answer to the hydrogen economy, because hydrogen is not possible to store cheaply, but ammonia is. Its odor warning is good, and it does not pollute the environment, but it's a good fertilizer for it. It sill poses as a smog-threat, so in metropolitan areas sniffer leak checks and NOx emissions may still be needed.
By the way, to make the hydrogen needed for ammonia, electrolysis free sulfur-iodine thermal cycles are available, that split water in a heat engine like fashion into H2 and O2. It goes like this I2 + SO2 + H2O-->HI + SO3, taking the O away from the H, HI --mild heat---> H2 + I2, getting back the I2, and SO3---high heat --->SO2 + O2. The problem with this process is the need for quenched reactions, as the temperature at which the DeltaG for the last SO3 reaction inverts to positive dG=dH - T dS, well it goes back into the negative once you drop the temperature T, so SO2 + O2 ---cooling---> SO3, unless you use quenching where the rate, k, of the reaction is minuscule. Quenching is terribly inefficient, so the whole process is just a guideline, but not a practically usable one. Instead you need to mess with something like SeO2, which is a solid, but oops, that too sublimes too easily, so how about TeO2 (super expensive.) The HI-->H2+I2 also has issues, so there are probably some heavy polycyclic aromatic
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Going with distrowatch numbers is complicated, as it seems to be promoting/pushing not so good distros, and then either all the users are retarded, or something smells fishy, either the statistics are damned lies, or even the users might smell fishy, as in conspiracy and stuff, ya know.
I envy you. My dream car is a car-computerless Porsche, and I think all fuel injectors are computerized, so if carburetted, it's terribly inefficien at miles per gallon. Maybe somebody, like Tesla, needs to start an open source car that people can program all the chips themselves.
Driving on regular roads is a matter of life and death, but they could have high-way like traffic zones where the cars get hooked onto each other by a chainlike fashion, and move together as one, as a train, and no deer or accidents are expected on the highway, just like with trains, and the whole train follows signals and semaphores by computer systems, and if someone gets stuck in the middle of the track while one of these trains is coming, well they are out of luck, just like they are out of luck when falling off a platform in a regular train station, with the train coming around the corner, unable to stop even if braking hard. At least some regions of traffic you could automate in this "tough luck" if you get caught up in the wheels of the "traffic machine" fashion, the traffic machine train can't stop.
Self driving cars are absolute nonsense. It requires intellect to decide whether an object is a plastic bear or a real bear about to enter the road, and has to be braked for. Any business/investment into this self driving car design field is setting themselves up for a major lawsuit because the basic principle is that you require artificial intelligence on par with a human to make the same correct decisions while driving, identifying objects and predicting their future behavior correctly. Even a dog's level won't cut it, as shepherds have dogs and sheep, and the trio exists well together, but dogs and sheep can't coexist, or at least wolves haven't figured out a way yet, and you need a human to decide things like we're gonna take that mountain pass yonder instead of the one over here. Alpha wolves and wolf packs make similar decisions, and a whole lot of wolf lives depend on a good or bad decision, in middle of winter, similar to the Donner Party back in the Oregon Trail/California Trail days. Even humans make horrible judgment calls sometimes which way to drive, or in an accident piling up in front of you which way to swerve, how are you gonna trust these decisions to a machine, or intellect less than a human? Driving is a matter of life and death. If anything you need a machine smarter than a human in comprehending the world around it, and predicting actions of objects like insane people as pedestrians, walking in the middle of the road. Saying you ran someone over "legally" does not fly far in court, just because someone crossed the street before you when they had red light and you had green, or stopped in the middle like Rain Man, you still have to judge for yourself what to do.
I agree. You won't be allowed to open the hood, and check the oil level, or add windshield washer fluid, because of DRM/DMCA issues - you're messing with someone else's intellectual property, and might reverse engineer something and guess the passwords by which all parts, like chipped ink cartridges, interact, and build a replacement part yourself on a lathe instead of buying it only from the intellectual property holder of the car design. The only windshield washer fluid refill "cartridge" the car will accept will be one with a chip made by the original company, costing a mere $2000/gallon of windshiel washing fluid. Oh, and you can buy a new car for like ten bucks or free during special promotions, but don't expect it to run without these super expensive and chipped refill cartridges, inlcuding oil change chipped/passworded refill cartrdige, windshield washer fluid chipped/passworded refill cartridge, gasoline chipped/passworded refill cartdrige at a mere $10/gal of gas when other gas is $4/gal (hey the car was free, you gotta pay for it somehow!) Ah! The wonders of chips and computerization!
If you have solar panels harvesting sunlight, and the ratio of energy harvested to impact by interstellar density vaccum gas ( couple atoms per cubig mile?), then whatever you harvest can accelerate up with a cyclotron (aka synchrophasotron) at eject them at very high speed. So in that case the answer is yes, but of course it would be falls if the startlight harvested solar energy were used to propel a boat or other transportation device at the gas-density prevalent in the atmosphere on Earth.
No, I get a natural, "organic" high and I love it, I can go on mindtrips to the nearest star and back.
As the Moon does not have a molten lava to sink all the tungsten, uranium, iridium, osmium, lead, gold, platinum and or course nickel/cobalt/iron into a solid metallic core, the abundance and minability of these things might be profitable on the Moon even for oceanic Earth-dops of cargo with a parachute.
Yes beryllium is one of those things way off on a tangent asymptote. By the way there are a lot of nonspark tools for explosive fire safety environments made of beryllium-copper bronze, though the beryllium percentage is low. It is very toxic, but has surprising strength and light weight. It's rare, but not as rare as say rhenium or iridium used in high temperature oxidation resistant things like fighterjet turbines and electric sparking resistant switch contacts, or even spark plugs. The toxicity is mainly due to people being unaware of it. There are plenty of highly poisonous mushrooms in the world living symbiotically with many forests and other plants, and as long as people don't ingest it or handle it wrong, they can coexist with us in the world, just like objects made of beryllium, or even nonsparking beryllium bronze.
There are other things that don't pass the smell test, such as solar panels collecting starlight energy - you need like a whole planet's area's worth of solar panel per person, not even talking about the jungle you're taking along, that contains elephants and tigers and ants, and such, Noah's Ark style.
Another thing that doesn't pass the smell test is the communication to long distances.. I think we lost radio contact with the Voyager space probes, so their twitter account only displays their estimated distance from us, in light-hours or something like that. The Voyager probes slingshotted off of Jupiter's orbit, making Jupiter drop someting like 0.1 nanometer in orbit closer to the Sun, and that energy used to propel the Voyager probes. If one actually does the calculations it's more likely something like one femtometer or attometer closer to the Sun in orbit. Whoever came up with the slingshot idea was a very clever guy, kudos to him. So anyway, radio contact may be impossible even with a highly directional huge solar panel the size of a planet array per person, so we may have to resort to sending flare signals, kind of simplified Morse code, such as they would watch with a telescope for nuke flashes going off near the orbit of Pluto, sufficiently away from the Sun, at a preagreed location, and the sequence of flashes would be tee tee tah tah kind of Morse code. I don't know if they'd have the resources to also signal us with flares. Yes, there are lots of difficulties with going to the nearest stars. But one can dream about a time when we have people and eartian elephants at Alpha Centauri and such stars nearby, a few light years away. And with a cyclotron drive ejecting captured particles near the speed of light, continuous acceleration close to the speed of light might be possible, say 70% cutting total travel time to something like 1000 years.or maybe even 200 years. That's not such a long time, as current space projects with the Voyager probes had to wait for decades before it was time to get the results back, such as outer solar system planet flybys..
Also with the calcium/liquid oxygen energy cash used for power tools and such, an issue is venting, as you can't continuously vent oxygen into the living/working quarters, and upset the 21% O2/79$ He or N2 balance, so all power tools would have a pneumatic power chord/tube that also contained a return chord/tube that would vent the exhaust O2 gas into outer space, or to be recycled.
Also helium generation from hydrogen via neutron bombardment is difficult, and if successful, it would generate so much friggin power and heat, that cooling the ship would be an issue. The neutron absorption cross section for hydrogen 2, i.e. deuterium is very low, and it must be even lower for hydrogen e, i.e. tritium, but each successful tritium neutron capture to "hydrogen 4", that has no other common name, probably generates helium very fast plus a lot of energy.. I'd have to look up the literature, but they say fusion as a power source is not possible with these portable neutron generators, because the rate of neutron generation is so small compared to the energy invested, I mean you're talking 1 or 10 or 100 neutrons per s
Oops, made a mistake there, the magnesium/o2 battery is only 2789 Wh/kg, while calcium/o2 is 2990 Wh/kg, according to the wikipedia article, with oxygen included, it's only better if oxygen comes from the atmosphere, like down here on Earth, so no, magnesium is not better in the energy density respect weight wise, only ease of vaporization-wise, but as calcium is so reactive, and also very soft, it is most likely easy to ignite in the solid form with an iridium (or maybe tungsten(burns) or platinum(melts)) resistance wire with oxygen present in the reaction chamber, and also easier to squeeze because of it's softness (though it's harder than lead, and can be cut with a knife only with difficulty.) and if this softness/vaporization becomes an issue, sodium/oxygen may be good, as sodium is even softer and easier to vaporize/liquefy, but the energy density now drops to 1677 Wh/kg, or half.
Calcium is the universal reductant, but it's not the highest specific energy density material to use in a metal/oxygen electrochemical cell weight-wise. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...–air_electrochemical_cell Beryllium/oxygen leaves everything else in the dust, but in it's very rare, and in its absence the abundant aluminum/oxygen battery is more energy dense weight-wise than calcium/oxygen (though it's harder to find an electrolyte that will ionically dissolve aluminum to later react with oxygen), and even the also abundant magnesium/oxygen is better, weight-wise. This is only a concern when you use 50/50 (or, more exactly the stoichiometric amount) of metal/oxygen in a battery cell to get electricity out of it, with the oxide recyclable through calcium reduction or a separate electrochemical process dedicated to aluminum or magnesium oxide, and is not as relevant when you use the 3% metal/97% liquid O2 pneumatic propulsion system, with the oxide ejected/discarded too, as calcium will be made in large quantitites as the universal reductant of even magnesium and aluminum, both of which will be left intermixed in the metallic residue with each other and oxygen and take extra effort to separate out for use. Also, using aluminum in a direct combustion way may be difficult, and it may have to be finely granulated, because of the protective oxide layer that forms, and it's impossible to vaporize, unlike calcium, which if, necessary, can be used in a vaporized way to react with oxygen in a burner, but nothing beats magnesium in energy density and ease of vaporization, so one may find that the energy cash may actually end up being magnesium metal/liquid oxygen, because of both energy density/weight and also ease of vaporization/combustion considerations.
"have no idea what that word really means"
According to existentialism, all ethics is relative. Humans are ethical beings, just like some social bugs, like ants, bees or mammals like dogs, and we have a choice in how we want to live, what the best ethical system suits our needs as a whole. There is no inherently right or wrong in the world, but there is a "We don't wanna live that way, with those ethics" choice. It's like saying we don't want to play baseball by those rules, as there is no inherent right or wrong way to play baseball, or any game, they are made up things, made up games, but once you have rules, and everyone agrees on them, the umpires try to enforce them. You can't just play baseball without rules.
You're right though, a whole lot of macho people end up in the military thinking they are so awesome, with super cool weapons they can take any "enemy" down. Some of them though truly believe they are doing an honorable thing by serving their country and their people when they follow their commander's orders, and if there is something wrong with those orders, it trickles down from the top, and the ones at the very top should be blamed, not the "honorable" soldiers faithfully executing them down the ranks. After all you can't have a reliable military where each soldier debates with himself whether he should execute an order or not, and constantly object to having to shoot and kill. According to existentialism though, you still cannot avoid personal responsibility when you follow such orders, as yes, you should always debate and object if you have to to any order given to you. Especially when it comes to killing innocent enemy civilian lives. I for one would have refused to execute Richard the Lionheart's order to execute the civil population of Tyre during the Crusade, just so he eliminates the threat of rebellion once he moves on with his units toward Jerusalem. Something is wrong with butchering nonarmed, nonresisting enemy civilians, you could almost consider POW's, though during WW2 allied bombing of civilian ammunition and weapons or automotive factories or even just residential cities was considered normal, especially in response to axis submarine attacks of unarmed civilian merchant ships. Who started it first, it's like the chicken and egg problem, whoever started it the other continued. And yes, this shows there is such a thing as attacking unarmed civilian enemy population being considered normal during a war. Are you not gonna attack an enemy munitions factory, or a bridge, to disrupt their ability to fight, and only shoot at fully armed, resisting military units, unless they wave a white flag and become nonresisting POW's? It's complicated, especially with nonuniformed espionage, and terrorism, it's hard to identify who's a combatant and who's not.
We believe in trials. Settling disputes without violence. Back in the days before trials there were often duels, gentlemen choose your weapons. Or wars between princes. But these days we try to have trials. I think there was a Star Trek episode, with Voyager, where one of the crew was subpoenaed to court, only to find himself in a WWF-like ring, with swords, and told to start arguing, present his arguments to his opponents, by swinging his weapons at each other. He was told this is how we argue, this is what we mean by arguing in court. Instead of weapons, our founding fathers believed in smacking words at each other's heads. Skill in twisting and abusing the English language comes in handy in such situations. By the way, in medieval and violent Japan, some feudal lords decided to settle their disputes through nonviolent means - instead of smashing their armies against each other, they each presented a Go player, and the outcome of the match would decide the outcome of the battle, without anyone dying. Go players were highly valued under such circumstances. Maybe we could resort to such nonviolent things, instead of violent duels, or twisting the legal jargon in court, we could have chess games or Go games to settle disputes through nonviolent means.
With a 70,000 year trip corrosion is a big issue, so there may have to be a lot of gold used in the construction of the ship, and as the ship has to be quite a sizable thing considering psychological factors of having a society, and minding that all the gold ever mined on Earth fits into like a 2 km cube, there are issues here. Probably something like a 20 walled ship is needed, with vacuum pumped down to absolute vacuum by the 5th wall, and then corrosion is a nonissue there, and the inner 5 layers have to constantly be renewed/replaced, at least once every 1000 years. Also, once the pioneers/settlers arrive, and there's gotta be floating debris or planets around each star even if there is no liquid water bearing planet, how will they know what to do, would they still have the skills to fabricate things? While traveling there, there may be some outer solar system objects we call comets that have crystallized ice on them, going in the same direction with the same speed as the ship, therefore capturable if sufficient steering is available (what a minuscule chance for such a thing), and then skill can be kept up on the way there to dismantle/process "stuff" found in the vast emptiness of outer space, stuff that should be very dense once arrived near that star. Even in absence of that, practice material and laboratories, and mechanical workshops would have to be kept up, with possibly repair spacewalks, leading to a sizable ship. As there is always a chance of hitting small meteorites at say 30-200,000 km/s, and some units leaking to full vacuum, many completely isolated units would have to be maintained, say even 20 or 50, and ending up with only one surviving by the trip end able to carry and sustain the whole crew would have to be considered. If the different 20 walls rotate with respect to each other, then a small meteorite hole may create a leak into the interstitial wall spaces, but as the holes are not lined up, the vacuum pumps might be able to keep up and scavenge the escaping air, even calcium of vacuum tube barium or liquid helium traps that capture any atoms striking them could be a way to save stuff from leaking in the outer layers. The tighter the spacing between the walls, the less the leakage, and as soon as a leak is detected, there could be a certain preprogrammed rotation misaligning the hole away from each other to maximum distance, then a sudden crash, a halt of the relative rotation of the walls to each other, until the holes are patched, and sliding rotation can be restarted. I don't know what the economic optimum number of walls is.
As nitrogen is scarce, but hydrogen and helium are abundant in outer space, diluting oxygen harvested from comet rocks could be done, but not with hydrogen that forms an explosive mixture with oxygen, but with helium. The helium might have to be fusion generated from the harvested hydrogen, if nothing else, through cyclotron or energy inefficient portable neutron generator bombardment. And everyone would get used to the chipmunk sound of helium balloon inhalation you can hear down here on Earth.
Also, communication with the speed of light would take a few years to go back and forth, to exchange hello's, draining quite a bit of power from the ship for dish/antenna use, and in case the crew on this ship messes up and ends up in deep doo doo sending out an SOS to us, we can reply to them with the phrase/video transcript from Mad TV's Dolla Bill Montgomery's Real Motherf****in Talk Mother's Day episode, "Talk to the hand, you're on your own, motherf****!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... We can give them advice, but not much else, advice they have to wait 4-8 years for to arrive. For psychological reasons, a reality show transmitted from them and programming transmitted to them would be neat, each without waiting for a reply to arrive, at least not reacting to one for the few years it takes to transmit the message. Their internet ping timeouts would have to be set to the corresponding few years, if
Also, providing the oxygen surface to the electrolyte is not that complicated, as the calcium ion dissolving electrolyte might react directly with gaseous oxygen, with the surface scraped, the electrolytic potential harvested as Ca++ concentration difference between the metal and oxygen zones, as in concentration batteries. Yeah, you don't need a second electrolyte bs for oxygen reaction.
A mobile nuclear power plant drilling for geothermal cooling, staying for a while, then moving on could work for start, but you can't return to previous locations as the geothermal region there would still be hot for years, and unavailable as a coolant. But a moderate 100C-200C nuclear heat rejection temperature could be attainable this way, assuming the initial geothermal condition of the Moon is the same as down here on Earth, near 0 C or 20 C, room temperature.
A trip to the nearest stars with the speeds attained by Voyagers I and II and then some, at the limits of our technology, would take on the orders of 70,000 Earth-years. Should it be done? Hell yeah! Do you expect to be alive? Hell no! But with huge solar panels living off of starlight per person carried, you could take a human colony into orbit to the nearest stars, and they could live there for millions of years. Mind you written history is like 8000 years old (Egyptian Pharaoh's and hyeroglyphs, or 11-13000 if you go with the Sanskrit writings), and modern humans (Omo remains) have only been around for 200,000 years, so a 70,000 year trip is quite a trip. But, you never know, humans on Earth may develop an AI that kills everyone, or a super intelligent genetically modified biotech photosynthetic microorganism that kills everyone and everything including trees, grass, lions, deer, fish.. and emerges as the "winner" back home as the only surviving species, well, at least these folks far away would be safe, at least for a while, till this super intelligent life form chases them down too and eats them too. But at least they get some time to figure out how to defend and stand a chance, possibly by creating their own, friendly superintelligent artificial intelligence silicon/organic android microbe that's better than themselves so it could kill them, but luckily it doesn't, but like a good guard dog, protects them from the attacks of the Earth based microbe, that come after them in say, 1000 years (if they have figured out a 70x faster ways to make the same trip.) See a thousand years is a long time to think things through.
The propulsion system should use extra-solar system harvested hydrogen atoms (they are like 1 H atom per cubic mile or something like that), accelerating it to near speed of light through special cyclotrons, then as the relativistic mass takes over and things get out of sync, special coiled linear accelerators continuing it, and you can get almost any kind of mass out of each atom, and get a great propulsion kick, impulse out of each, for rotation and speed control, or for further accelerating, being mindful that halfway through the trip you have to start decelerating, and such propulsion would still beat the simple light propulsion by orders of magnitude, because the impulse per energy expanded ratio is much better than with simple light. It's true that you're creating mass out of energy as you build the mass of each proton up, and shooting off pure energy as mass is equivalent to shooting off pure light as mass, so there is an optimum velocity, optimum ejection speed dependent on the economics of harvesting each atom from the really thin galactic vacuum vs. economics of not building up too much relativistic mass into it and wasting energy as mass, as in case of a light propulsion. You may have to resort to pure light propulsion in case you cannot find any hydrogen atoms whatsoever within 100 cubic miles or so, such as intergalactic space.
In closer quarters, on rotating cylinder space modules near Earth orbit or Lunar orbit, such propulsion, including light propulsion is pure absolute economic waste, compared to specific impulse gained per size (mass, volume) of the drive, as we have plenty of matter to waste, if nothing else, solar wind close to the Sun is pretty matter rich, visible with things like Aurora Borealis. In particular even a cyclotron drive on a rotation cylinder station may not be the economic optimum to align solar panels and control orientaton, rotation speed and orbit, but instead a liquid oxygen/calcium metal energy cash could be used near the Moon and on the Moon's surface. See life down here on Earth uses ATP (high energy adenosine tri-phosphate) as the energy cash, and all processes within all lifeforms respect the resource limit of energy cash, and all processes either generate ATP with food or light energy from ADP (low energy adenosine di-phosphate) plus P, phosphoric acid, APP + P + energy ---> APPP, or APPP ----> APP + P + energy. So, similarly, near
It's very difficult to justify private industry in space, other than monarchies power grubbing and expanding their reach and territories. That's a basic difference between a monarchy and a democracy. In the old days a lot of captains were grilled and criticized for not being aggressive enough in the British Navy, as expanding the empire was a constant requirement, even against almost neutral entitites. In a democracy you don't generally have such a territorial expansion policy, well, except in the 1800's the US did a lot of Louisiana purchase, and Alaska purchase, but the world is "full" now, no more free empty space to go around, Canada ain't gonna sell the US no land, and neither will Mexico, so if you want to keep expanding, it has to be into outer space, and there is plenty of room up there to be occupied and claimed, but it has to happen at the national level, either by the democratic state, or a private monarch, a private enterprise claiming "real estate" up there for profit puposes aint' gonna fly. Perhaps they can find mines of platinum, iridium or even tungsten and uranium and nickel, etc, in greater abundance on the surface of the Moon, than down here on Earth to the point where mining might become profitable. You'd need a very accurate x-ray emission scan of the whole Moon surface to see if there are profitable mines on the surface, China might have done something like that without telling anyone about it, but as there is no wind and everything is covered in dust, it's hard to see just below the dust layer on the surface. Satellites are a profitable private investment in space, but I don't know what else. space tourism? Nah..
They should start with a dog like Laika, just like the russians did, they got the dog from the city kennel's death row, and made a national hero out of it. Then Yurij Gagarin went up after Laika, the dog, and word is when he came down the first thing he asked for was fresh underwear. Just kidding. But them two animals were the first two in space.
Hey, it's big enough achievement, as the people from the 60's and 70's are all retired or dead, we lost all that expertise. It's like the internet has been down after a global apocalypse for 30 years, and now some people are coming up with a global network to send data and pictures worldwide. Yeah, that's a worthy accomplishment in that context.
There is probably a remote kill switch on most laptops/computers, unless they are like a 386 or 286, but I've been happily chugging along on this 5W chipset+Atom cpu /7-9 hr battery HP Mini 210 with XP for 4 years now. My previous laptop, still kinda working but the screen hinge broke, HP C508US (came with Vista, yucckkk, downgraded to Win2K super good) was better, no real battery life, but you could play games like Rairoad Tycoon 2 Gold and Age of Empires Gold on it just fine, because this HP Mini is only 1024x600, can't do 768 needed by those games. Also Linux could access the soundcard on that one, on this one it's like this IDT sound chipset needs some special password before it will process sound. Remember the old BIOS days where there was a standard function, memory range, that many chipsets could adapt to, without funky secret keys and drivers? So this one is only good on XP for stuff like Emusic, but when I'm off the internet fully when DRM spreads too much and all my save buttons are taken away, I'll have to go back to the older stuff. I've been collecting older PC's, as funds become available, mostly made around Windows 2000, or at least be able to run Windows 2000 even if made in say, 2005 or 6. Windows 2000 is the last windows that could be reinstalled without activation, or special hardware check, as in it must be a dell, hp, ibm, or one of the other in with the gang companies. I'm not even trying to get used to these newer games, whatever games used to run back then, those are for good for me, 40 years from now when I'm retired, and everyone else is locked into a 2 menu option, 5 button android world. The questions that arise with this tegra and android are: can you run MS Office 2000 on it? How about PostgreSQL 8? How about Apache or similar webserver? My guess is no, no, and no. It doesn't really matter, because you'll be forced to create your office documents on the cloud, through a browser, as the ads on Slashdot even today advertise creating music on the cloud. If all businesses run their stuff on the cloud, as opposed to offline computers, then every 6 months that browsers get obsoleted they have to buy new computers, and they cannot get away with the bullshit of running a computer for 30 years, without a large and expensive IT department, and not upgrading at least twice a year, like the computer business people would like it. So what if your link to the cloud is severed from some Axis bombing? How are you gonna keep producing weapons in your factories? See with a home computer running Win2K/FL Studio 5 in a bunker basement you don't have to give a fuck if WW3 is raging outside between the Canadians and Japanese, the US with its 5th world economy by then (because we can't educate our kids) taking collateral damage, or the zombies of the apocalypse are eating each other, if you got a couple days leave as vacation you can ignore all that and compose some music at home. Not if you have a cloud based computer with the link to the cloud severed.
Another big problem, why the Lord may send the world into an apocalypse on purpose, is the proliferation of suburbia, and that by itself would not be so bad, as in the nuclear age living less concentrated and more spread out helps defend against Tsar-bomba like attacks. However suburbia brings with itself lawns, lawns moved to half an inch or one inch, with nonnative plants, and it also brings with it herbicides and pesticides. A while ago, of the nonfarmed area, there was like 80% unlawned area, mostly contiguous, but now it's flipping, to where it's 80% lawned, disrupting continuity of unlawned areas, together with the sustaining of other lifeforms, such as flowerfeeding bugs like bees and butterflies, other bugs like grasshoppers too, snakes, birds and rodents, that can nest in tall grass but not in a mowed lawn, affecting their predatory chains - diversity of life is severely disrupted for no reason other than most people's distorted sense of beauty. I love bugs, snakes, birds and rodents, and only if I have a food farm do I find it necessary to attack them, not when I'm admiring the beauty of an unfarmed piece of nature. I hate three things in life - mosquitoes, powerpoint presentations, and grass cutting, and I don't really hate mosquitos, but do hate retarded presentation slides, but I hate nothing like retarded time wasting, gas wasting, butterfly and bee wasting lawn mowing that every idiot around me practices. I'm surrounded by idiots, there is a sea of them wherever the eye can see! They are all mowing their lawns like retards! In an apocalypse with no gas to put into lawnmowers, suddenly people's distorted sense of beauty would be corrected, so they'd only scythe the grass when it's tall to make hay for the horses, without pesticides, herbicides or genetically modified grass, and in the meantime allow other lifeforms to coexist in some sort of harmony with them. Apocalypse, global economic downturn, as a sense of beauty correction, like magic eyeglasses, just what the doctor prescribed! Do a google image search on "apocalypse lolcat".
Actually, now that I think of it, Carnot cycle heat engine considerations don't apply to the above reactions, i.e. the higher the O2 decomposition temperature, the better the efficiency. Not! You just need to find reactions that proceed with a decent rate, and then the lower the BO-->B+O2 temperature, the better, but that means the HA--->H2+A is higher. There is probably a magic combination of reactants that proceed at say 200 C or 225 C that just make it possible to separate water, with a decent rate, or at 235 C with a very fast rate, so there is that puzzle to solve. Life has all kinds of whacky enzymes that solve the puzzles of low temperature carbohydrate oxidation of C6 H12O6+O2 ---> CO2 + H2O, and we humans, still lack skill when it comes to designing and running such reactions, such as the reverse, sunlight + CO2 + H2O ---> C6 H12O6 + O2, called photosynthesis, or even sunlight + H2O ---> H2 + O2. There are some Titanium Dioxide supported dyes that do this, but you still have to gas-separate H2 from O2. It would be nicer to have some layer of liquids that picked each of these up, one carrying the HA the other one the BO, and them some mild effect, such as application of a magnetic field releasing the H and O2, or if that's not available, some mild temperature increase. We don't have the technology, there's lots of stuff that needs to be researched, but Da Man might think it differently, he might create an intentional apocalypse to quench all this breeding idiots out of control drowning out everybody that practices self control, that's going on today, because that's an even greater problem than resource limits, such as energy limits, because there is no amount of resources that can keep up with infinite breeding capacity, and the only way to apply the resource limit in absence of behaving, self control, is through pain, such as death, starvation, misery, disease, and it's coming, I know it's coming, but all I know is I don't want to live through an apocalypse if there is a way to avert it, instead we should try to teach everyone the virtues of self control. I mean come on, you wanna have everyone starve and suffer, or you wanna put a leash on your dick and ignore that magical bootay? I know it's hard, cuz she's so fine, she's always on my mind... but to everything there are consequences.
I was half asleep when I wrote that last night, sorry for the spelling, but what I wrote today about the sulfur iodine cycles should be better quality.
Is it too much to ask for a diesel car that can take gasoline or diesel or ethanol into a fuel tank, with ethanol and gasoline needing an extra "lighting match fluid" dumped after them, but it also has a propane/natural gas tank that can either be filled with propane or natural gas from your home heating appliance? Then gas stations can't really play hockey with the prices if you get natural gas for a better deal at home, and then all fuels compete against each other in a true free market, instead of this highly segmented market where trucker have to pay superhigh prices for diesel, the rest of the population some high but no so high for gasoline, and natural gas, which we have a ton of, still not cheap, but a lower price. This allows Da Man to micromanage extracting the last pennies out of everyone, without starving people, or making them sit in winter cold. All you'd need for natural gas is a good compressor, as the gas that comes to your house is very low pressure. Also the natural gas tank would take up most of your trunk space, so you'd have to carry cargo on your rear seats, and also it would have to be superheavy gauge, because propane tanks are not strong enough, because propane is a mild gas, easily liquefiable under pressure, unlinke natural gas. There is this non-liquid compression burst safety issue, but natural gas is cheap, or should be, if there is a ton of it. A lot of power stations switched to combined cycle natural gas instead of coal, and they can compete with coal, I say fuck that, stop wasting our precious natural gas for a power plant that could handle pulverized coal instead in a combined cycle, and let us waste it driving our diesel cars around. Methane is very hard to self ignite, but if you take the diesel compression ration even higher than the usual 20, the temperature should be high enough to ignite methane too. If not, design a secondary diesel injector that sprays some ignitable fluid (and then you don't have to add it to your ethanol/gasoline tank but add it to the reservoir like you add coolant or windshield washer fluid) or add a spark plug that fires every millisecond or quarter milliseconds for 100 milliseconds or whatever is needed in the diesel cycle, then stop, then repeat the firing sequence again. The low cost Otto engine is obsoleted by the Diesel engine that can burn any fluid fuel in face of increased and likely to further increasing fuel prices.
Only ammonia, the fuel of the future, made in a nuclear plant is an exception to the above fossil fuel categories, because it won't combust in air, or it won't combust well unless you use a catalyst, and you probably need a fuel cell to efficiently extract its energy content. Ammonia is the answer to the hydrogen economy, because hydrogen is not possible to store cheaply, but ammonia is. Its odor warning is good, and it does not pollute the environment, but it's a good fertilizer for it. It sill poses as a smog-threat, so in metropolitan areas sniffer leak checks and NOx emissions may still be needed.
By the way, to make the hydrogen needed for ammonia, electrolysis free sulfur-iodine thermal cycles are available, that split water in a heat engine like fashion into H2 and O2. It goes like this I2 + SO2 + H2O-->HI + SO3, taking the O away from the H, HI --mild heat---> H2 + I2, getting back the I2, and SO3---high heat --->SO2 + O2. The problem with this process is the need for quenched reactions, as the temperature at which the DeltaG for the last SO3 reaction inverts to positive dG=dH - T dS, well it goes back into the negative once you drop the temperature T, so SO2 + O2 ---cooling---> SO3, unless you use quenching where the rate, k, of the reaction is minuscule. Quenching is terribly inefficient, so the whole process is just a guideline, but not a practically usable one. Instead you need to mess with something like SeO2, which is a solid, but oops, that too sublimes too easily, so how about TeO2 (super expensive.) The HI-->H2+I2 also has issues, so there are probably some heavy polycyclic aromatic