Eventually the hydrogen powering the Sun's fusion reaction will run out as well. I do not see people concerned.
Nuclear fission materials decay. So it is a matter of use it, or lose it. Better use it. It can power our economy for several hundreds of years, perhaps thousands with advanced reactor designs. Good enough to provide some breathing space until the next big thing arrives.
War is the pursuit of politics by other means. It is used by economically poorer nations against economically richer, albeit weakly defended nations, to transfer wealth to the militarily strong nation. However wars are expensive, especially long wars. Smart rulers avoid long, protracted wars.
I would be especially wary of protectionism. Once you start to see economical protectionism rising, war will likely soon follow.
There is work being done to displace oil as an energy source. It is being done for several decades. In the 1970s most electric power in the US came from oil peaker plants. Today it comes from natural gas. Tomorrow it may come mostly from wind and solar. Canada and Venezuela have large tar sands resources. Canada alone has more tar sands resources than Saudi Arabia has conventional oil resources. This will be a more expensive, dirtier alternative to petroleum, but it exists and is being ramped up for powering vehicles. Vehicle engine technology is getting more efficient thanks to computer control of fuel injection parameters. Presently a barrel petroleum of petroleum is pretty cheap. AFAIK most of the present problems are in refining capacity. We may need another oil crisis for additional alternatives to petroleum to show up.
Not just rockets. Axis submarine technology was also considerably more advanced. Japanese carriers were larger and more advanced. Arguably German heavy tank technology was a wash with Soviet technology. Although German tank targeting systems were clearly superior, the Soviets had better tank engines. The Western Allies had their own superiority in strategic bombers, radar, sonar. Axis powers worked a lot on quality versus quantity and asymmetric warfare as a way to beat numerically superior forces and industrially richer countries with obsolete weapons systems. This means the Axis had a large spectrum of weapons where their technology was clearly superior, although it was not across the board.
The US is still the current leader in space technology. Just try to compare how many different types of launcher architectures the US has compared to other countries: Atlas V, Delta 4, Pegasus, Taurus, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and soon Taurus II. This is even not counting the Shuttle. Also try to compare national space budgets. The US spends more than the rest of the world combined.
Tell me which other country has people working on something on the technological level of SpaceshipTwo.
There has been a prioritization of state funds that happens in any sort of economic crunch. This means suppliers which have been missing time and cost budgets (like ATK) are being accounted for their actions. ATK has spent years milking state funds for Ares I and Ares V. Their major claim to fame in Ares I is launching an old Shuttle solid engine with a mockup on top (Ares I). Ares I, according to the original plan, should be launched after the Shuttle was retired to service ISS. Well the Shuttle is retiring this year, and the ISS was originally planned to de-orbit in 2016. As things are going they are nowhere near meeting that 2016 deadline. Neither the first stage, nor the second stage, nor the capsule are finished, nor are there any prototypes looking anything like the final design.
If anything Ares should have been canceled sooner. Heck Bush should never have allowed the NASA administration to fund this failed enterprise. It should have just done the EELV upgrades that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing have been proposing for yonks and put a capsule on top of an existing rocket, instead of designing a whole new rocket based on expensive legacy technology.
Their industry will get cleaner eventually. Their major problem is their reliance on coal for electricity production. To add insult to injury they burn really poor quality coal and the power plants are really old and have little or no filters. The Chinese government already has environmental concerns as part of their policy for the near future. The main issue is that China does not have a lot of native energy alternatives to coal.
It may be that the suicides are mostly not due to insurance at all. The suicide profit motive mostly sounds like bullshit by people who can think of nothing in terms other than money to me. If you lived in a prison like environment, wearing uniforms, not leaving the factory compound even to sleep, or eat, far away from home, your sense of self esteem would be diminished. In that case it is hardly surprising the suicide rate goes up.
The Taiwanese companies are bringing much needed capital, machinery, and know-how to mainland China. Eventually the Chinese will be able to manufacture their own products with their own companies.
All for ourselves,
and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have
been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as
they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents
themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other
persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as
frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or, what is the
same thing, the price of the maintenance of 1000 men for a year, and
with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The
buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature
was to have any share of them; whereas, in the more ancient method
of expense, they must have shared with at least 1000 people.
It is usually easier to scale up a design than the other way around. ITER is so huge because the designers can't be bothered to increase the plasma density too much. It is too hard a problem. Yet money does not seem to be a problem in their head. Well it is in the real world.
IMO ITER is too large. At the size and cost it is coming at, there is no way this technology could ever be used in a commercial power plant. The magnetic confinement fusion folks should scale the thing down. Try to prove basic technology elements and increase the plasma density. Otherwise it may be a "neat" project but unusable.
Actually I suspect the major factor in the slower GCC development was RMS's reluctance in allowing C++ code in the tree. As for Apple, they may use LLVM, but guess which compiler they use in Xcode...
Three Gorges is one of the greatest environmental tragedies of the modern age.
It is precisely this kind of misguided, pseudo ecologist, decadent mode of thought that is leading to Western downfall. Fortunately the Chinese have not fell prey to such anti-progressive trite.
China has some of the world's largest solar panel manufacturing plants. There are other resources in space besides He-3.
China cannot achieve a moon base without doing several intermediate steps first. I think they will only be able to do it in 2030 perhaps a bit sooner. One critical milestone is to get their next generation Long March 5 rocket family up and running. The first flight is only planned to happen in 2014 and may slip further. To build a Moon base they will probably wait until their next launcher generation, after Long March 5, which should take at least a decade to design.
China's space program has proceeded at a snail's pace. However they have been pretty committed to their space program because it is essential as part of their military force projection abilities. China should this year surpass Japan and become the world's 2nd largest economy, right behind the USA. This should allow them to ramp up their space investments substantially.
Once the Shuttle is retired (in what 1 year?) the only way for astronauts to get to ISS will be to use a Russian Soyuz. Or perhaps a Chinese Shenzhou. Lots of next generation US military satellite projects have been aborted for running over schedule and budget for years on years.
The microprocessor (e.g. 8086) was crap compared to a mainframe, or even minicomputer, processor. Only in the 1990s did microcomputers add features (e.g. superscalar processing) which supercomputers had been using since the 1960s. What made the microprocessor special was that it was cheap. It meant everyone could have a computer, rather than it being the preserve of government laboratories or mega corporations.
SpaceX is selling the Falcon 9 at a price lower than even 2nd hand Russian military rockets. If you cannot understand why this difference in price can be market transformative, you aren't looking very far. They also managed to recover from an aborted launch, in which the engines ignited, in some 2 hours and executed a successful launch afterward. Not a lot of other companies can say the same. Try shutting down and restarting the Shuttle's solids in a similar scenario. You could not do it. Sometimes "old" tech design is better than "new" tech design.
Also compare this with NASA. Ares I was originally planned to use a SSME engine for the second stage. Then they figured out it would be impossible to air start the complex staged combustion SSME engine because it was originally designed to be ground started with a complicated ignition sequence. Compare this with SpaceX which reused their Merlin 1 first stage rocket engine for the Falcon 9 second stage without major issues.
The fact is there is nothing wrong with SpaceX's design. It is fairly conservative, but this also means it is more rugged and cheaper to manufacture. Had they gone, say, for staged combustion they could have squeezed some more percent of performance at a lot of cost and even more design time.
Check out Delta IV. The RS-68 engine is nothing special either. It is gas generator, not staged combustion like SSME which is a couple of decades older. It is effectively 1960s engine cycle tech, done with 1990s tools and techniques. The big deal with it is that it is cheap. Atlas V uses a high performance Russian engine because there is no one in the US which has been able to manufacture a kerolox staged combustion engine, let alone the price the Russians sell RD-180.
SpaceX already has customers. Once they demonstrate the ability to repeatedly launch vehicles new customers, even markets will come up.
The dummy payload was meant to simulate a Dragon capsule. I doubt the rocket has enough power to lift that kind of large payload all the way to GEO. SpaceX is selling Falcon 9 to NASA for ISS resupply. The ISS is at an altitude of around 336 km. The target altitude for this flight was allegedly 250 km. A large part of the trip to the station is meant to be done using the capsule's small orbital Draco engines (which were not AFAIK installed or used in this flight).
Actually Australia would be a good place to put a space port. Many rockets were launched from Woomera a couple of decades ago. I also remember some corporation wanted to launch Russian rockets from Christmas Island. The problem is most of the places which actually manufacture launchers are very far away from Australia...
People scoff at the five elements quackery because we used to have a similar concept in European medicine dating from Greek and Roman times. Bloodletting, and primitive blood transfusions, were based on the concept of balancing "humors". The four humors as defined by Galen were: blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. This "theory" dominated Western medicine until around the Renaissance when it was thoroughly discredited.
I do have a personal experience of acupuncture working for chronic pain. However I dispute some of the more fantastic claims of wondrous cures using acupuncture. There is a reason why the introduction of European medicine revolutionized Asian medicine and culture. Because it actually worked in a predictable fashion in a lot of cases where Asian medicine did not.
My guess is you never had acupuncture. Sure I do not believe a lot of the quackery it is sometimes used for. However it does work for treating and managing pain. I have back pain and it took away the pain, in a way pain killers did not. Not to mention that it has a lasting effect, in a way pain killers do not. I also know several people who had the same experience. I have also noticed the people who do acupuncture properly actually know where you hurt the most (even if you do not explicitly tell them) and treat that area more. While if I go to the doctor he can only tell where I have a problem by doing loads of finger pressure, plus hearing me say "ouch" or by doing scans.
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Eventually the hydrogen powering the Sun's fusion reaction will run out as well. I do not see people concerned.
Nuclear fission materials decay. So it is a matter of use it, or lose it. Better use it. It can power our economy for several hundreds of years, perhaps thousands with advanced reactor designs. Good enough to provide some breathing space until the next big thing arrives.
War is the pursuit of politics by other means. It is used by economically poorer nations against economically richer, albeit weakly defended nations, to transfer wealth to the militarily strong nation. However wars are expensive, especially long wars. Smart rulers avoid long, protracted wars.
I would be especially wary of protectionism. Once you start to see economical protectionism rising, war will likely soon follow.
There is work being done to displace oil as an energy source. It is being done for several decades. In the 1970s most electric power in the US came from oil peaker plants. Today it comes from natural gas. Tomorrow it may come mostly from wind and solar. Canada and Venezuela have large tar sands resources. Canada alone has more tar sands resources than Saudi Arabia has conventional oil resources. This will be a more expensive, dirtier alternative to petroleum, but it exists and is being ramped up for powering vehicles. Vehicle engine technology is getting more efficient thanks to computer control of fuel injection parameters. Presently a barrel petroleum of petroleum is pretty cheap. AFAIK most of the present problems are in refining capacity. We may need another oil crisis for additional alternatives to petroleum to show up.
Not just rockets. Axis submarine technology was also considerably more advanced. Japanese carriers were larger and more advanced. Arguably German heavy tank technology was a wash with Soviet technology. Although German tank targeting systems were clearly superior, the Soviets had better tank engines. The Western Allies had their own superiority in strategic bombers, radar, sonar. Axis powers worked a lot on quality versus quantity and asymmetric warfare as a way to beat numerically superior forces and industrially richer countries with obsolete weapons systems. This means the Axis had a large spectrum of weapons where their technology was clearly superior, although it was not across the board.
The US is still the current leader in space technology. Just try to compare how many different types of launcher architectures the US has compared to other countries: Atlas V, Delta 4, Pegasus, Taurus, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and soon Taurus II. This is even not counting the Shuttle. Also try to compare national space budgets. The US spends more than the rest of the world combined.
Tell me which other country has people working on something on the technological level of SpaceshipTwo.
There has been a prioritization of state funds that happens in any sort of economic crunch. This means suppliers which have been missing time and cost budgets (like ATK) are being accounted for their actions. ATK has spent years milking state funds for Ares I and Ares V. Their major claim to fame in Ares I is launching an old Shuttle solid engine with a mockup on top (Ares I). Ares I, according to the original plan, should be launched after the Shuttle was retired to service ISS. Well the Shuttle is retiring this year, and the ISS was originally planned to de-orbit in 2016. As things are going they are nowhere near meeting that 2016 deadline. Neither the first stage, nor the second stage, nor the capsule are finished, nor are there any prototypes looking anything like the final design.
If anything Ares should have been canceled sooner. Heck Bush should never have allowed the NASA administration to fund this failed enterprise. It should have just done the EELV upgrades that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing have been proposing for yonks and put a capsule on top of an existing rocket, instead of designing a whole new rocket based on expensive legacy technology.
Nevermind that the price for both is totally different.
Correct. The question is if this can all happen before there is major social upheaval in the West due to rising unemployment rates and what not.
Their industry will get cleaner eventually. Their major problem is their reliance on coal for electricity production. To add insult to injury they burn really poor quality coal and the power plants are really old and have little or no filters. The Chinese government already has environmental concerns as part of their policy for the near future. The main issue is that China does not have a lot of native energy alternatives to coal.
It may be that the suicides are mostly not due to insurance at all. The suicide profit motive mostly sounds like bullshit by people who can think of nothing in terms other than money to me. If you lived in a prison like environment, wearing uniforms, not leaving the factory compound even to sleep, or eat, far away from home, your sense of self esteem would be diminished. In that case it is hardly surprising the suicide rate goes up.
The Taiwanese companies are bringing much needed capital, machinery, and know-how to mainland China. Eventually the Chinese will be able to manufacture their own products with their own companies.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Like the Spruce Goose?
It is usually easier to scale up a design than the other way around. ITER is so huge because the designers can't be bothered to increase the plasma density too much. It is too hard a problem. Yet money does not seem to be a problem in their head. Well it is in the real world.
IMO ITER is too large. At the size and cost it is coming at, there is no way this technology could ever be used in a commercial power plant. The magnetic confinement fusion folks should scale the thing down. Try to prove basic technology elements and increase the plasma density. Otherwise it may be a "neat" project but unusable.
Actually I suspect the major factor in the slower GCC development was RMS's reluctance in allowing C++ code in the tree. As for Apple, they may use LLVM, but guess which compiler they use in Xcode...
Anyway the problem with BSD is not forking. It is closed proprietary forking like what Transgaming does.
Down payment for lease masquerading as a call plan. All iPhones in the US are sold for the AT&T cellphone operator.
Three Gorges is one of the greatest environmental tragedies of the modern age.
It is precisely this kind of misguided, pseudo ecologist, decadent mode of thought that is leading to Western downfall. Fortunately the Chinese have not fell prey to such anti-progressive trite.
China has some of the world's largest solar panel manufacturing plants. There are other resources in space besides He-3.
China cannot achieve a moon base without doing several intermediate steps first. I think they will only be able to do it in 2030 perhaps a bit sooner. One critical milestone is to get their next generation Long March 5 rocket family up and running. The first flight is only planned to happen in 2014 and may slip further. To build a Moon base they will probably wait until their next launcher generation, after Long March 5, which should take at least a decade to design.
China's space program has proceeded at a snail's pace. However they have been pretty committed to their space program because it is essential as part of their military force projection abilities. China should this year surpass Japan and become the world's 2nd largest economy, right behind the USA. This should allow them to ramp up their space investments substantially.
Once the Shuttle is retired (in what 1 year?) the only way for astronauts to get to ISS will be to use a Russian Soyuz. Or perhaps a Chinese Shenzhou. Lots of next generation US military satellite projects have been aborted for running over schedule and budget for years on years.
The microprocessor (e.g. 8086) was crap compared to a mainframe, or even minicomputer, processor. Only in the 1990s did microcomputers add features (e.g. superscalar processing) which supercomputers had been using since the 1960s. What made the microprocessor special was that it was cheap. It meant everyone could have a computer, rather than it being the preserve of government laboratories or mega corporations.
SpaceX is selling the Falcon 9 at a price lower than even 2nd hand Russian military rockets. If you cannot understand why this difference in price can be market transformative, you aren't looking very far. They also managed to recover from an aborted launch, in which the engines ignited, in some 2 hours and executed a successful launch afterward. Not a lot of other companies can say the same. Try shutting down and restarting the Shuttle's solids in a similar scenario. You could not do it. Sometimes "old" tech design is better than "new" tech design.
Also compare this with NASA. Ares I was originally planned to use a SSME engine for the second stage. Then they figured out it would be impossible to air start the complex staged combustion SSME engine because it was originally designed to be ground started with a complicated ignition sequence. Compare this with SpaceX which reused their Merlin 1 first stage rocket engine for the Falcon 9 second stage without major issues.
The fact is there is nothing wrong with SpaceX's design. It is fairly conservative, but this also means it is more rugged and cheaper to manufacture. Had they gone, say, for staged combustion they could have squeezed some more percent of performance at a lot of cost and even more design time.
Check out Delta IV. The RS-68 engine is nothing special either. It is gas generator, not staged combustion like SSME which is a couple of decades older. It is effectively 1960s engine cycle tech, done with 1990s tools and techniques. The big deal with it is that it is cheap. Atlas V uses a high performance Russian engine because there is no one in the US which has been able to manufacture a kerolox staged combustion engine, let alone the price the Russians sell RD-180.
SpaceX already has customers. Once they demonstrate the ability to repeatedly launch vehicles new customers, even markets will come up.
The dummy payload was meant to simulate a Dragon capsule. I doubt the rocket has enough power to lift that kind of large payload all the way to GEO. SpaceX is selling Falcon 9 to NASA for ISS resupply. The ISS is at an altitude of around 336 km. The target altitude for this flight was allegedly 250 km. A large part of the trip to the station is meant to be done using the capsule's small orbital Draco engines (which were not AFAIK installed or used in this flight).
Actually Australia would be a good place to put a space port. Many rockets were launched from Woomera a couple of decades ago. I also remember some corporation wanted to launch Russian rockets from Christmas Island. The problem is most of the places which actually manufacture launchers are very far away from Australia...
Lockheed Martin assembles Atlas rockets at Decatur, Alabama. But hey, who cares uh? Better to fund a rocket proposed by ATK - a company from Utah.
The ISS is in LEO. Plus this launcher was originally designed to be GEO capable as well. Try reading the spec sheets at spacex.com.
I do have a personal experience of acupuncture working for chronic pain. However I dispute some of the more fantastic claims of wondrous cures using acupuncture. There is a reason why the introduction of European medicine revolutionized Asian medicine and culture. Because it actually worked in a predictable fashion in a lot of cases where Asian medicine did not.
My guess is you never had acupuncture. Sure I do not believe a lot of the quackery it is sometimes used for. However it does work for treating and managing pain. I have back pain and it took away the pain, in a way pain killers did not. Not to mention that it has a lasting effect, in a way pain killers do not. I also know several people who had the same experience. I have also noticed the people who do acupuncture properly actually know where you hurt the most (even if you do not explicitly tell them) and treat that area more. While if I go to the doctor he can only tell where I have a problem by doing loads of finger pressure, plus hearing me say "ouch" or by doing scans.