With any man made device I can never say never, but(there's always a but), do British and French reactors not use containment buildings? This one factor alone could have drastically reduced the affects of Chernobyl.
I don't know.
They do and it would have made a huge difference to the outcome if Chernobyl had had one. Basically those heroic Ukrainian emergency workers gave their lives in order to kludge together an improvised, helicopter-delivered containment dome onto a runaway nuclear core (its hardly suprising that it needs shoring up a decade or two later). Even so, and bearing in mind that Chernobyl is the worst accident to have occurred in half a century of civil nuclear engineering and one that only occurred because safety systems were deliberately disabled on a reactor design that no engineer outside of the Soviet Union would have sanctioned, fewer than 50 people died as a result of the accident. I don't have the estimated total death toll (in terms of increased cancer rates and premature mortality) number to hand, but its in the low three figures IIRC.
Compare and contrast with the death toll from the *routine* operations of Ukrainian coal mines over the same period (note routine - to my recollection there have been no world's-worst-disaster-in-fifty-years scale events in the Donbass recently), never mind the sorts of horrendous casualty rates you get if you stack up the body count for fossil fuel extractive industries world-wide. Its entirely possible that more people died as a result of that train exploding in North Korea last month (petroleum gas I believe) than have *ever* been killed by the world's civil nuclear power industries over five decades of operation.
But I do know that there are many other ways for radioactivity to get into the environment
Yes. Pretty much every industrial process releases radiation to the environment in some form because most terrestrial materials contain radioactive particles - for instance coal contains traces of uranium which means that the smokestacks of coal-fired power stations are a significant radiation emitter. A serious scaling up of wind-power in the UK (something that I'm all for BTW - Britain would be mad to ignore some of the best wind and tidal resources in the northern hemisphere) will mean that there will be lots of turbine farms going up in places like Cornwall and the Scottish highlands - their construction will release large quantities of granite dust into the atmosphere. Are you happy with the thought of so much radon floating around in the air we breathe?
The fact that radiation is released is a matter for concern of course, but a rational consideration of the problem requires that similar levels of concern should be applied to the actual or proposed alternatives.
I strongly disagree with your sentiment that the effects of nuclear accidents are blown out of proportion.
Yet sources of radiation in our environment that are as large, or indeed massively larger, than the radiation emitted by nuclear power stations are routinely ignored by those who are anti-nuclear. Where are the massive protests about radon gas seeping into Cornish cellars? Why are't Greenpeace activists on the news running geiger counters over the rubbish bins of hospital radiology departments? Why aren't there primetime TV documentaries about the radiation doses that airline crews receive in their line of work?
Protecting our environment is important and anti-nuclear campaigners have good reason, and every right, to resist the introduction of more nuclear power plants.
Even if this means that atmospheric carbon concentrations will continue to rise? Global warming will do more damage to biodiversity and ecosystems over the next thousand years than any radiation that could be released by nuclear power stations will.
> Because the last time there was a big spike in energy prices (the '73 oil shock) we had a serious bout of inflationary recession that took the best part of fifteen years to recover from?
Yes, you(the US) had a recession, from which took a decade to recover from. For Japan, it was very successful decade. Replacing all the bulky gasoline sucking cars with more efficient ones drove the economy.
Note that I am posting from the UK. There was a big glob of inflation that happened to us (and most of the industrialised world) in the mid-late 70s that can be traced back to the Oil shock of '73. This inflation, the recessions it provoked and the policy reaction to *them* in the 80s (Thatcherism, Reaganomics etc) shaped the world economy for the last three decades of the century. The fact that Japan (and the Saudis) did relatively well in the short term doesn't change that fact. There might be policy lessons to be learned for next time from places that rode out the storm better, but the storm still occurred and it was almost entirely down to a sudden, huge increase in the price of one of the fundamental inputs for industrialised economies.
But to reduce the recession on the oil price seems a bit simplified to me (For the above reason).
Sometimes the simple answer is the correct one though. The world economy was showing signs of strain prior to the Oil Shock of course, commodity prices were up and this was feeding into the inflation numbers. Vietnam was a factor in this for the US, but worldwide these were largely problems of success - demand was outstripping supply and this was causing overheating. The Oil Shock was the opposite; it choked off supply and it did it, to all intents and purposes, instantly. Certainly there were local (ie regional/national) factors that served to exacerbate or mitigate the effects of the Oil Shock as it worked its way through the system - but the magnitude of the insult to the world economic system was profoundly different to what had been happening before and this caused short-term chaos and longer term turmoil for pretty much everyone (Japan excepted).
One point certainly was the reliance of the US economy on a) cheap b) energy.
a) Was certainly a problem. But you also have to remember that at that time oil was not only expensive, but actually scarce (it even had to be rationed).
The two go together. Supply was choked off relative to demand, so the price went up. The high price was a signal for the scarcity and this fed through into higher prices across the economy which in time drove efficiency improvements and the development alternative supplies. Eventually everything settled down around a new price range and this gradually deflated in real terms until Oil was as cheap as it had been before the OPEC embargo, but this process took decades and caused a lot of turmoil along the way.
But that was only one point. I'd say even more critical was the psychological component. Yom Kippur War, the establishement of the OPEC, embargo. In general, a fairly unstable era.
These are all important, but they are part of the same mess. Yom Kippur was the trigger for the OPEC embargo, the embargo restricted supply which drove the price up and that, in turn, caused the stagflation. Once the previous equilibrium was disturbed however, removing the trigger mechanism (high oil prices) wasn't going to prevent the follow-on effects from rippling through the economy.
Think of 9/11. As coldhearted as it may sound, what economical effect does the sudden death of 5000 people have for a nation? From a purely rational point of view, it should be next to none. Still, the psychological effect on the economy was immense.
Certainly and psychological effects feed into the economy if they are sufficiently consistent across a population. There are signs that the current oil price rises are down to market psychology
"Radioactive leaks? Not a problem. The only two leaks of any significance were Chernobyl and Three Mile Island."
TMI was a contained leak however. The rest of the plant continues in operation today.
Other posters have mentioned how nice Bikini Atoll is (if you aren't human) - the same goes for the Chernobyl exclusion zone apparently. Lovelock touched upon this in a slightly facetious way when he suggested that nuclear waste be stored in wilderness areas to preserve them from human encroachment.
There have been other leaks of course. For instance the Windscale fire wasn't as large as Chernobyl, but it released a bunch of radiation to the atmosphere. Of course it was covered up at the time and nuclear power wasn't that controversial then, so it doesn't have the same resonance in the public memory.
"What makes you think that would result in a recession?"
Because the last time there was a big spike in energy prices (the '73 oil shock) we had a serious bout of inflationary recession that took the best part of fifteen years to recover from?
"Where does the money go?"
In the 70s a significant fraction of it ended up in Saudi Arabia (Saudi govt revenues went up by a factor of 10 from '73 to '74) where it paid for a massive construction boom in the Arabian peninsula (people were, literally, selling sand to Arabs), lots of flashy but ultimately useless spending (gold plated Kalashnikovs and so on) and a huge influx of foreign gastarbeiter to do all the things that Saudi citizens were unwilling or unable to do for themselves.
Drowned in a gushing torrent of cash, Saudis either gorged themselves in the fleshpots of Europe or, revolted by the debauchery, turned to the purist Wahabi-ite religion of their forefathers whose Madrassas were generously funded by a goverment desperate to ensure that any puritanical reaction to the orgiastic frenzy was directed outwards towards conveniently foreign scapegoats such as godless communists or corrupt westerners. And we all know how well that has turned out for the world don't we?
Its not just creative content that the BBC contributes. Slashdot types in particular should be grateful for the R&D effort BBC Engineering has put into technologies and standards for broadcast and electronic media over the years.
Their annual spend is pretty low in the order of things (GBP13 million at present) but this feeds into a lot of stuff that gets commercially developed in time - NICAM stereo being one notable achievement that most people don't know originated at Kingswood Warren. These days of course the BBC is heavily invested in their web presence, so these days BBC Research look into things like streaming media as well as their more traditional areas of focus.
Dunno about Timecop (never seen it) but yeah, Outland is High Noon in space. Still I think that setting it in space (a mining base on a moon of one of the outer gas giants isn't it?) and having things like EVA suits and rayguns (I don't remember - do they have rayguns?), tips it over to the science fiction side I think. Its not the subject matter of the film, but the whole scenario for the story presupposes a significant space-based industrial sector (at least) and the consequent implications for launch technologies, life support, space operations etc etc which are a long way in the future.
By contrast CapOne is set in the present day (for the film) or an unremarkably different very near future and entirely focuses upon themes and situations which are pure post-Watergate conspiracy thriller.
Sure the Macguffin of the story is a faked Mars landing which is somewhat SF-nal, but even that is based on existing at the time technology (Apollo lifters like in Stephen Baxter's 'Voyage') and so doesn't imply, depend or concern itself with speculative advances in all sorts of technological and scientific fields. At best it can be characterised as a "What if?" alternate history rather than a futuristic speculation. Given all that, its not *much* more SF-nal than 'Apollo 13' - its got about the same amount of future tech in it as 'Deep Impact' had (relative to its time).
But splitting hairs on where SF (or even sci-fi) begins is a mug's game, so I'll shut up now.
Phoenix is one of the upstream projects for the Aurora programme, which is ESAs manned space exploration effort and envisages manned Moon landings in the late '20s and a Mars mission in the '30s.
Clearly if human missions to the Moon and Mars are part of the roadmap 25 years down the line, ESA needs to be working on the orbital stepping stones now and Phoenix is one of those. Its still very early days however and there are no guarantees that the final system will look anything like what was tested in Sweden last week - at the moment various concepts and technologies are being put through their paces, but the final design won't be finalised for three of four years yet.
Personally I'm a little concerned that they seem to be creating a replica of Shuttle - the dimensions of full-scale Phoenix seem awfully close to Shuttle, so presumably this is intended to be a man-rated launcher that can also lift heavy cargo - but ESA is also looking at other concepts such as Hopper, so perhaps they're working towards a more modular fleet of vehicles that can be configured according to mission requirements rather than being stuck with a one-size-fits-all hybrid monster like Shuttle.
The English Wine Industry being non-existent? Hmmm... that's news to these folks then.
Certainly I got a nice little crop of grapes off the vine growing up my wall last year, but then it was the fifth warmest year in the Central England Temperature series.
Its 10 big ones to get a pound into orbit isn't it?
So that pound of asteroidal iron has a purchase parity value of USD10,000.10 in NEO - at least until launch costs come down.
Of course you couldn't set up an asteroidal resource extraction operation until launch costs come down from ten large, so the price target would need to be modified downwards in any case. Dunno if there's a sweet spot where launch costs are low enough to make the infrastructure feasible, yet high enough to make getting asteroidal iron back to earth orbit an economic proposition.
The UK is not meeting its Kyoto target and isn't on track to do so unless big changes occur very quickly. Given how long it takes for energy policy to feed through into effective action on the ground I think we've probably missed the boat on Kyoto already.
A shame really, we have the biggest wind and tidal energy potential in Europe and with the offshore engineering expertise accrued from working the North Sea oilfields we could have been on the ground floor of a very interesting new industry - not that wind/tidal is by any means the answer, but its a step in the right direction. Instead the UK's most significant engineering achievements of the past decade have been an insanely expensive tent and a spot painting buried in the Martian regolith.
Climate is not weather. I repeat, climate is not weather.
Whilst on a human scale (what will happen in *this* particular 5km square on *that* particular day) predicting it is a nigh impossible problem, at the global scale the system is a lot less complex and thus easier to model. That's not to say that it isn't still extremely difficult, there are feedbacks in the system that aren't well understood and work continues to be done on refining things, but climate models are a *lot* easier to do than weather forecasts.
Like everything else (including the current US and Australian -- yes... I am Australian -- administrations' denials that that global warming is real), it only becomes an issue when it affects You personally.
Maybe those seven figure beachfront properties on the barrier islands of the eastern seaboard will serve some positive function then. Shame that the Shrub prefers a ranch well inland tho'...
Regards
Luke
PS - a nitpick - Britain wouldn't get Siberian weather, we're still a maritime zone after all; we're on the same latitude as Labrador so absent the Gulf Stream we'd probably get weather akin to there or the southern reaches of Alaska.
What Erik and 2Marcus said. Also as the atmosphere and oceans heat up climatic systems become more energetic which leads to stronger local variations and an increasing incidence of extreme events eg. 100-year storms coming along every decade or so.
Thus its not that the Medway/Eden never flooded before - its that the floods, which used to happen once per half century say, might start happening once per decade or so. You don't have to have too many of those sort of events before insurance companies start refusing to cover vulnerable flood zones - this has already happened in parts of Lewes that got flooded out a couple of years back apparently.
Offshore outsourcing and following knowledge transfer are the reasons for this exponential grows.
Nope. India grew 7% last year, but a lot of that was because they had a good monsoon after two bad years. The IT sector is very dynamic and offshoring makes waves amongst geeks in the US and Europe, but it contributed less than 2% to India's economy last year - whilst 28% of India's population still falls below the poverty level of a dollar per day.
Having nitpicked the specifics however, your general point is well taken. China and India's per capita CO2 emmissions are something like 5% of the USA's - if CO2 forcing is as significant as climate scientists say it is then having those 2 billion odd people emitting US levels of CO2 (if such a thing is possible given current availability of industrial raw materials) would be disastrous.
I really don't trust their motives, especially since I'm 52 years old and well remember the "ice age is upon us" stories
The 'ice age' stories being the ones that got all the media hoo-ha in the mid-70s? The ones that were inspired by the early scientific conferences which essentially boiled down to climatologists saying "Uh-oh this is something new, human activity might impact the global climate and cause changes as severe as the last ice age - we need to study this some more."? Those stories?
But now you'll dismiss the scientists who went away and did the work; got frostbite drilling ice cores in Antarcta, refined the models, built the computers, crunched the numbers and did the stats - because some media wankers made a quick buck hyping up tentative, early results thirty years ago? The same media wankers who are now earning a crust spinning a cynical "those whacky labcoated nerds can't keep their story straight" line for their paymasters du jour?
Remember when looking at any global warming predicition, these are the same models used to predict your local extended forecast. Considering they can't reliably predict 10 days out, how much credit can you really give a prediction years out?
Christ, not this old saw again.... Repeat after me - 'Climate is not weather. Climate is not weather'.
London today is beautifully sunny and spring like, yet only two days ago it was pissing with rain, grey and overcast. In two days time it might be back to the grey gloom, it might be sunshine and scattered showers or it might be a howling gale. This is because Britain has weather.
Three years ago I was living and working in Jakarta. I haven't been back since December '01 but my prediction is that the temperature is just under 30 celcius (its late evening now) with high humidity and they've probably had a heavy rain shower sometime in the past day or so. This is because Indonesia has climate.
[Checks the yahoo weather page for Jakarta]
Scattered thunderstorms, 100% humidity and 25 degrees celcius at 2000h WIT. I was a little high on the temperature prediction, so sue me.
In many ways it doesn't, as Jerry Pournelle said back in the 70s once you are in orbit you are half-way to anywhere.
Having said that, distance does of course have an impact on the budget. Absent a revival of the Orion concept, going to Mars would involve a mission running for several years rather than (as in the Moonshots) several days. So straight away you have a much more significant logistical challenge.
You either have to take your supplies along with the manned mission (*very* expensive), send them along in resupply payloads (not so expensive, but now you have a new class of failure modes) or make more during the mission (experimental, may not be appropriate for all classes of supplies).
Furthermore the crew are going to have to be self-supporting for the duration of the mission. This means their vessel is expected to last for several years and the crew will need to have the capability to repair or replace failing components without calling back to base for special resources (resupply could be possible, but we are talking a lead time of at least several months so the crew would have to be able to improvise something to last them that long).
Fault-tolerant, failsafe and reduntant systems, spares (or feedstock for spares plus manufacturing kit) all add mass and might well add new mission specialists (remember the 'Janitor' character from one of those crappy Mars movies a few years back?) to your mission profile.
More mass means more fuel or more non-manrated resupply loads or more automated supply manufactories (if you adopt Zubrin's philosophy of 'living off the land'). All these things increase your logistical tail, which either cuts in to your scientific/flag-planting payload or increases the overall budget.
Of course there are a bunch of infrastructure or basic capability costs to a mission which are pretty much fixed and which wouldn't change much between a Mars mission and (say) a Jupiter Moons mission or an Asteroid rendevous mission. But distance translates into time, time translates into logistics and logistics translates into money.
Actually it occurs to me that this sort of problem-domain would make a good computer game - has anyone done something like this?
Still, if $60bn is the 'too high', conservative-NASA end of the scale - it does point up the ludicrousnes of the gigabuck estimate that's been bouncing around in the media.
Lets say that NASA's number is only a little over-conservative - the Mars mission actually comes in at around $50bn plus the various 'launch infrastructure' missions to the moon and earth orbit cost another $50bn - the total cost is still an order of magnitude lower than the $1trn pricetag that has been bruited about everywhere.
Amortised over 20 years it comes in at a pretty reasonable (for federal govt values of reasonable)$5 billion per year. Which is about... what, a third of NASA's current budget isn't it? Sounds entirely achievable if the political will and focus could be sustained (which I doubt).
Merely asserting something doesn't necessarily make it true. I seriously believe that the moon landing may have been faked, not based on nit picky evidence and counter-evidence.
Its easy to believe stupid things if you ignore the evidence.
Breaking news - the world isn't flat, human beings evolved from savannah-dwelling apes, several million people were murdered by the Nazi regime in Germany and the 9/11 atrocities weren't a Mossad plot.
Now, having come perilously close to Godwin-ing this thread, I'd better shut up.
That would be point C in the grandparent post then.
Putting together a robotic mission that could emplace laser reflectors and return samples of lunar regolith would have been as technically challenging in the 60s as sending a manned mission. Automation and/or remote operation were very primitive back then.
The technical problems would have been different challenges of course, but still bloody awkward; plus the technology and engineering spin-offs from Apollo would have been very different.
But what would you expect from a guy who has defined the "Hollywood ending". You know, the ending where we all live happily ever after (or most of us anyway)
Kind of ironic, given that every major character in the film gets whacked bar Ryan, the coward and the guy who wanted to blow off the mission.
[Jallison]
The middle is definitely standard-issue war movie stuff. The first 20 minutes are incredible, though. This movie has unecessary bookends as well. Do we really need to see the old vet at the beginning and end of the movie? We get the point without that!
The bookends are necessary to fake out the audience though. The cut from 'vet having a flashback', to 'Hanks in the landing craft' is clearly intended to make the audience think the vet is Hanks and that his character is going to come through (although the Airborne pin on the vet is a giveaway for the observant militaria-geeks in the audience - guilty as charged m'lud).
This allows Spielberg to shock/surprise the audience with Hanks' character's death in the final fight - although of course Spielberg still manages to work in some schmaltzy stuff about 'Greatest Generation' sacrifices at the end there, but that's Stevie for you.
Personally I think 'Ryan' is a so-so film in terms of plot, character etc bar the two battles at start and finish. However you have to credit the gritty production design and cinematography (which practicaly all war movies bugger up) and of course without 'Ryan' there would have been no 'Band of Brothers' mini-series, so I cut it a bunch of slack.
I googled up some info on the Tunguska event earlier. Recent work in Siberia has shown up a bunch of pebbley 'shrapnel' all over the destruction zone - so the latest consensus is that the Tunnguska object was a rocky body rather than a cometary fragment. Which I didn't know before yesterday.
Estimates based on the pattern of destruction are that it was about twice the size of this one (ie ~60m diameter) and had an explosive yield of around half a megaton or so.
Other things being equal (which of course they never are) and going by the cube law, this one would have yielded ~65 kton if it actually hit - a shade under 4 Hiroshima bombs in other words. So it was certainly large enough to whack a decent sized city if it came down in the right (or rather wrong) place.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare and contrast with the death toll from the *routine* operations of Ukrainian coal mines over the same period (note routine - to my recollection there have been no world's-worst-disaster-in-fifty-years scale events in the Donbass recently), never mind the sorts of horrendous casualty rates you get if you stack up the body count for fossil fuel extractive industries world-wide. Its entirely possible that more people died as a result of that train exploding in North Korea last month (petroleum gas I believe) than have *ever* been killed by the world's civil nuclear power industries over five decades of operation.
Yes. Pretty much every industrial process releases radiation to the environment in some form because most terrestrial materials contain radioactive particles - for instance coal contains traces of uranium which means that the smokestacks of coal-fired power stations are a significant radiation emitter. A serious scaling up of wind-power in the UK (something that I'm all for BTW - Britain would be mad to ignore some of the best wind and tidal resources in the northern hemisphere) will mean that there will be lots of turbine farms going up in places like Cornwall and the Scottish highlands - their construction will release large quantities of granite dust into the atmosphere. Are you happy with the thought of so much radon floating around in the air we breathe? The fact that radiation is released is a matter for concern of course, but a rational consideration of the problem requires that similar levels of concern should be applied to the actual or proposed alternatives. Yet sources of radiation in our environment that are as large, or indeed massively larger, than the radiation emitted by nuclear power stations are routinely ignored by those who are anti-nuclear. Where are the massive protests about radon gas seeping into Cornish cellars? Why are't Greenpeace activists on the news running geiger counters over the rubbish bins of hospital radiology departments? Why aren't there primetime TV documentaries about the radiation doses that airline crews receive in their line of work? Even if this means that atmospheric carbon concentrations will continue to rise? Global warming will do more damage to biodiversity and ecosystems over the next thousand years than any radiation that could be released by nuclear power stations will.Regards Luke
Note that I am posting from the UK. There was a big glob of inflation that happened to us (and most of the industrialised world) in the mid-late 70s that can be traced back to the Oil shock of '73. This inflation, the recessions it provoked and the policy reaction to *them* in the 80s (Thatcherism, Reaganomics etc) shaped the world economy for the last three decades of the century. The fact that Japan (and the Saudis) did relatively well in the short term doesn't change that fact. There might be policy lessons to be learned for next time from places that rode out the storm better, but the storm still occurred and it was almost entirely down to a sudden, huge increase in the price of one of the fundamental inputs for industrialised economies.
Sometimes the simple answer is the correct one though. The world economy was showing signs of strain prior to the Oil Shock of course, commodity prices were up and this was feeding into the inflation numbers. Vietnam was a factor in this for the US, but worldwide these were largely problems of success - demand was outstripping supply and this was causing overheating. The Oil Shock was the opposite; it choked off supply and it did it, to all intents and purposes, instantly. Certainly there were local (ie regional/national) factors that served to exacerbate or mitigate the effects of the Oil Shock as it worked its way through the system - but the magnitude of the insult to the world economic system was profoundly different to what had been happening before and this caused short-term chaos and longer term turmoil for pretty much everyone (Japan excepted).
The two go together. Supply was choked off relative to demand, so the price went up. The high price was a signal for the scarcity and this fed through into higher prices across the economy which in time drove efficiency improvements and the development alternative supplies. Eventually everything settled down around a new price range and this gradually deflated in real terms until Oil was as cheap as it had been before the OPEC embargo, but this process took decades and caused a lot of turmoil along the way.
These are all important, but they are part of the same mess. Yom Kippur was the trigger for the OPEC embargo, the embargo restricted supply which drove the price up and that, in turn, caused the stagflation. Once the previous equilibrium was disturbed however, removing the trigger mechanism (high oil prices) wasn't going to prevent the follow-on effects from rippling through the economy.
Certainly and psychological effects feed into the economy if they are sufficiently consistent across a population. There are signs that the current oil price rises are down to market psychology
"Radioactive leaks? Not a problem. The only two leaks of any significance were Chernobyl and Three Mile Island."
TMI was a contained leak however. The rest of the plant continues in operation today.
Other posters have mentioned how nice Bikini Atoll is (if you aren't human) - the same goes for the Chernobyl exclusion zone apparently. Lovelock touched upon this in a slightly facetious way when he suggested that nuclear waste be stored in wilderness areas to preserve them from human encroachment.
There have been other leaks of course. For instance the Windscale fire wasn't as large as Chernobyl, but it released a bunch of radiation to the atmosphere. Of course it was covered up at the time and nuclear power wasn't that controversial then, so it doesn't have the same resonance in the public memory.
Regards
Luke
"What makes you think that would result in a recession?"
Because the last time there was a big spike in energy prices (the '73 oil shock) we had a serious bout of inflationary recession that took the best part of fifteen years to recover from?
"Where does the money go?"
In the 70s a significant fraction of it ended up in Saudi Arabia (Saudi govt revenues went up by a factor of 10 from '73 to '74) where it paid for a massive construction boom in the Arabian peninsula (people were, literally, selling sand to Arabs), lots of flashy but ultimately useless spending (gold plated Kalashnikovs and so on) and a huge influx of foreign gastarbeiter to do all the things that Saudi citizens were unwilling or unable to do for themselves.
Drowned in a gushing torrent of cash, Saudis either gorged themselves in the fleshpots of Europe or, revolted by the debauchery, turned to the purist Wahabi-ite religion of their forefathers whose Madrassas were generously funded by a goverment desperate to ensure that any puritanical reaction to the orgiastic frenzy was directed outwards towards conveniently foreign scapegoats such as godless communists or corrupt westerners. And we all know how well that has turned out for the world don't we?
Regards
Luke
Their annual spend is pretty low in the order of things (GBP13 million at present) but this feeds into a lot of stuff that gets commercially developed in time - NICAM stereo being one notable achievement that most people don't know originated at Kingswood Warren. These days of course the BBC is heavily invested in their web presence, so these days BBC Research look into things like streaming media as well as their more traditional areas of focus.
Regards Luke
Dunno about Timecop (never seen it) but yeah, Outland is High Noon in space. Still I think that setting it in space (a mining base on a moon of one of the outer gas giants isn't it?) and having things like EVA suits and rayguns (I don't remember - do they have rayguns?), tips it over to the science fiction side I think. Its not the subject matter of the film, but the whole scenario for the story presupposes a significant space-based industrial sector (at least) and the consequent implications for launch technologies, life support, space operations etc etc which are a long way in the future.
By contrast CapOne is set in the present day (for the film) or an unremarkably different very near future and entirely focuses upon themes and situations which are pure post-Watergate conspiracy thriller.
Sure the Macguffin of the story is a faked Mars landing which is somewhat SF-nal, but even that is based on existing at the time technology (Apollo lifters like in Stephen Baxter's 'Voyage') and so doesn't imply, depend or concern itself with speculative advances in all sorts of technological and scientific fields. At best it can be characterised as a "What if?" alternate history rather than a futuristic speculation. Given all that, its not *much* more SF-nal than 'Apollo 13' - its got about the same amount of future tech in it as 'Deep Impact' had (relative to its time).
But splitting hairs on where SF (or even sci-fi) begins is a mug's game, so I'll shut up now.
Regards
Luke
That was me in the parent.
Regards
Luke
Just to nitpick. Capricorn One isn't a science fiction movie, its a conspiracy thriller and, as a conspiracy thriller, its not at all bad.
Regards
Luke
Phoenix is one of the upstream projects for the Aurora programme, which is ESAs manned space exploration effort and envisages manned Moon landings in the late '20s and a Mars mission in the '30s.
Clearly if human missions to the Moon and Mars are part of the roadmap 25 years down the line, ESA needs to be working on the orbital stepping stones now and Phoenix is one of those. Its still very early days however and there are no guarantees that the final system will look anything like what was tested in Sweden last week - at the moment various concepts and technologies are being put through their paces, but the final design won't be finalised for three of four years yet.
Personally I'm a little concerned that they seem to be creating a replica of Shuttle - the dimensions of full-scale Phoenix seem awfully close to Shuttle, so presumably this is intended to be a man-rated launcher that can also lift heavy cargo - but ESA is also looking at other concepts such as Hopper, so perhaps they're working towards a more modular fleet of vehicles that can be configured according to mission requirements rather than being stuck with a one-size-fits-all hybrid monster like Shuttle.
Regards
Luke
The English Wine Industry being non-existent? Hmmm... that's news to these folks then.
Certainly I got a nice little crop of grapes off the vine growing up my wall last year, but then it was the fifth warmest year in the Central England Temperature series.
Regards Luke
Does anybody in LA actually think though?
Regards
Luke
Its 10 big ones to get a pound into orbit isn't it?
So that pound of asteroidal iron has a purchase parity value of USD10,000.10 in NEO - at least until launch costs come down.
Of course you couldn't set up an asteroidal resource extraction operation until launch costs come down from ten large, so the price target would need to be modified downwards in any case. Dunno if there's a sweet spot where launch costs are low enough to make the infrastructure feasible, yet high enough to make getting asteroidal iron back to earth orbit an economic proposition.
Regards
Luke
The UK is not meeting its Kyoto target and isn't on track to do so unless big changes occur very quickly. Given how long it takes for energy policy to feed through into effective action on the ground I think we've probably missed the boat on Kyoto already.
A shame really, we have the biggest wind and tidal energy potential in Europe and with the offshore engineering expertise accrued from working the North Sea oilfields we could have been on the ground floor of a very interesting new industry - not that wind/tidal is by any means the answer, but its a step in the right direction. Instead the UK's most significant engineering achievements of the past decade have been an insanely expensive tent and a spot painting buried in the Martian regolith.
Regards Luke
Climate is not weather. I repeat, climate is not weather.
Whilst on a human scale (what will happen in *this* particular 5km square on *that* particular day) predicting it is a nigh impossible problem, at the global scale the system is a lot less complex and thus easier to model. That's not to say that it isn't still extremely difficult, there are feedbacks in the system that aren't well understood and work continues to be done on refining things, but climate models are a *lot* easier to do than weather forecasts.
Regards
Luke
Maybe those seven figure beachfront properties on the barrier islands of the eastern seaboard will serve some positive function then. Shame that the Shrub prefers a ranch well inland tho'...
Regards Luke
PS - a nitpick - Britain wouldn't get Siberian weather, we're still a maritime zone after all; we're on the same latitude as Labrador so absent the Gulf Stream we'd probably get weather akin to there or the southern reaches of Alaska.
What Erik and 2Marcus said. Also as the atmosphere and oceans heat up climatic systems become more energetic which leads to stronger local variations and an increasing incidence of extreme events eg. 100-year storms coming along every decade or so.
Thus its not that the Medway/Eden never flooded before - its that the floods, which used to happen once per half century say, might start happening once per decade or so. You don't have to have too many of those sort of events before insurance companies start refusing to cover vulnerable flood zones - this has already happened in parts of Lewes that got flooded out a couple of years back apparently.
Regards
Luke
Nope. India grew 7% last year, but a lot of that was because they had a good monsoon after two bad years. The IT sector is very dynamic and offshoring makes waves amongst geeks in the US and Europe, but it contributed less than 2% to India's economy last year - whilst 28% of India's population still falls below the poverty level of a dollar per day.
Having nitpicked the specifics however, your general point is well taken. China and India's per capita CO2 emmissions are something like 5% of the USA's - if CO2 forcing is as significant as climate scientists say it is then having those 2 billion odd people emitting US levels of CO2 (if such a thing is possible given current availability of industrial raw materials) would be disastrous.
Regards Luke
The 'ice age' stories being the ones that got all the media hoo-ha in the mid-70s? The ones that were inspired by the early scientific conferences which essentially boiled down to climatologists saying "Uh-oh this is something new, human activity might impact the global climate and cause changes as severe as the last ice age - we need to study this some more."? Those stories?
But now you'll dismiss the scientists who went away and did the work; got frostbite drilling ice cores in Antarcta, refined the models, built the computers, crunched the numbers and did the stats - because some media wankers made a quick buck hyping up tentative, early results thirty years ago? The same media wankers who are now earning a crust spinning a cynical "those whacky labcoated nerds can't keep their story straight" line for their paymasters du jour?
Good call.
Regards Luke
London today is beautifully sunny and spring like, yet only two days ago it was pissing with rain, grey and overcast. In two days time it might be back to the grey gloom, it might be sunshine and scattered showers or it might be a howling gale. This is because Britain has weather.
Three years ago I was living and working in Jakarta. I haven't been back since December '01 but my prediction is that the temperature is just under 30 celcius (its late evening now) with high humidity and they've probably had a heavy rain shower sometime in the past day or so. This is because Indonesia has climate.
[Checks the yahoo weather page for Jakarta]
Scattered thunderstorms, 100% humidity and 25 degrees celcius at 2000h WIT. I was a little high on the temperature prediction, so sue me.
Regards Luke
In many ways it doesn't, as Jerry Pournelle said back in the 70s once you are in orbit you are half-way to anywhere.
Having said that, distance does of course have an impact on the budget. Absent a revival of the Orion concept, going to Mars would involve a mission running for several years rather than (as in the Moonshots) several days. So straight away you have a much more significant logistical challenge.
You either have to take your supplies along with the manned mission (*very* expensive), send them along in resupply payloads (not so expensive, but now you have a new class of failure modes) or make more during the mission (experimental, may not be appropriate for all classes of supplies).
Furthermore the crew are going to have to be self-supporting for the duration of the mission. This means their vessel is expected to last for several years and the crew will need to have the capability to repair or replace failing components without calling back to base for special resources (resupply could be possible, but we are talking a lead time of at least several months so the crew would have to be able to improvise something to last them that long).
Fault-tolerant, failsafe and reduntant systems, spares (or feedstock for spares plus manufacturing kit) all add mass and might well add new mission specialists (remember the 'Janitor' character from one of those crappy Mars movies a few years back?) to your mission profile.
More mass means more fuel or more non-manrated resupply loads or more automated supply manufactories (if you adopt Zubrin's philosophy of 'living off the land'). All these things increase your logistical tail, which either cuts in to your scientific/flag-planting payload or increases the overall budget.
Of course there are a bunch of infrastructure or basic capability costs to a mission which are pretty much fixed and which wouldn't change much between a Mars mission and (say) a Jupiter Moons mission or an Asteroid rendevous mission. But distance translates into time, time translates into logistics and logistics translates into money.
Actually it occurs to me that this sort of problem-domain would make a good computer game - has anyone done something like this?
Regards
Luke
Still, if $60bn is the 'too high', conservative-NASA end of the scale - it does point up the ludicrousnes of the gigabuck estimate that's been bouncing around in the media.
Lets say that NASA's number is only a little over-conservative - the Mars mission actually comes in at around $50bn plus the various 'launch infrastructure' missions to the moon and earth orbit cost another $50bn - the total cost is still an order of magnitude lower than the $1trn pricetag that has been bruited about everywhere.
Amortised over 20 years it comes in at a pretty reasonable (for federal govt values of reasonable)$5 billion per year. Which is about... what, a third of NASA's current budget isn't it? Sounds entirely achievable if the political will and focus could be sustained (which I doubt).
Regards
Luke
That would be point C in the grandparent post then.
Putting together a robotic mission that could emplace laser reflectors and return samples of lunar regolith would have been as technically challenging in the 60s as sending a manned mission. Automation and/or remote operation were very primitive back then.
The technical problems would have been different challenges of course, but still bloody awkward; plus the technology and engineering spin-offs from Apollo would have been very different.
Regards
Luke
Kind of ironic, given that every major character in the film gets whacked bar Ryan, the coward and the guy who wanted to blow off the mission.
[Jallison]
The bookends are necessary to fake out the audience though. The cut from 'vet having a flashback', to 'Hanks in the landing craft' is clearly intended to make the audience think the vet is Hanks and that his character is going to come through (although the Airborne pin on the vet is a giveaway for the observant militaria-geeks in the audience - guilty as charged m'lud).
This allows Spielberg to shock/surprise the audience with Hanks' character's death in the final fight - although of course Spielberg still manages to work in some schmaltzy stuff about 'Greatest Generation' sacrifices at the end there, but that's Stevie for you.
Personally I think 'Ryan' is a so-so film in terms of plot, character etc bar the two battles at start and finish. However you have to credit the gritty production design and cinematography (which practicaly all war movies bugger up) and of course without 'Ryan' there would have been no 'Band of Brothers' mini-series, so I cut it a bunch of slack.
Regards
Luke
I googled up some info on the Tunguska event earlier. Recent work in Siberia has shown up a bunch of pebbley 'shrapnel' all over the destruction zone - so the latest consensus is that the Tunnguska object was a rocky body rather than a cometary fragment. Which I didn't know before yesterday.
Estimates based on the pattern of destruction are that it was about twice the size of this one (ie ~60m diameter) and had an explosive yield of around half a megaton or so.
Other things being equal (which of course they never are) and going by the cube law, this one would have yielded ~65 kton if it actually hit - a shade under 4 Hiroshima bombs in other words. So it was certainly large enough to whack a decent sized city if it came down in the right (or rather wrong) place.
Regards
Luke