P. T. Barnum only made money when people were entertained..... so in that sense what he did was entertainment, which worked for the job it was trying to perform. Sure, he created all sorts of silly and impossible creatures, and he hyped up folks like Tom Thumb to be something they weren't, but on the whole his purpose was to entertain people, not to actually make claims for the purpose of deliberate fraud.
Besides, if Rossi is a fraud, such a comparison does more to spoil the name of P.T. Barnum than it does to make a realistic comparison. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Bernie Madoff, especially as this would definitely be in the category of a "Long Con" rather than something done for a quick buck.
Still, what would it take to convince you that this works? Widespread adoption? Something running in you neighbor's house?
Ultimately it doesn't matter if Rossi makes money or not, as it isn't your money on the line. As far as I can tell (not certain, because the "investor" hasn't been disclosed) no tax money has been involved. Either he will be proven a fraud, or the thing will work. There is something called physics and real life that sort of bump up against the claims that this guy is making.
I would have to assume that if this "customer" is somebody rather serious and has some money as well as the physical need for a 1 MW power plant based off of any kind of power source, they also have the money to hire a legal team to slowly cut Rossi to pieces if it proves to be a fraud when they take the plant into their own possession and put it onto their own power grid at whatever facility they want to drop this shipping container at.
I can imagine a few ways using chemicals or batteries to get a device the size of what is produced here to work at boiling water for a couple of hours, or perhaps even a day or so. There reaches a point, however, where even if the inside of these reactors is pure gasoline (or some other petroleum/hydrocarbon by-product) that the reservoirs would run out and that you would have to explain the power production from some other reaction. I don't know how long a shipping container full of gasoline would last if it was producing a continuous supply of 1 MW of power, and the power output continuously monitored, but I can't expect it to last more than a week. There are some hard physical limits to what chemical reactions would do over time to where you would have to explain what is happening with some other process.
I would have to assume also that this "customer" intends to use this reactor as a baseline power supply, as that seems like the only practical application for this technology. It doesn't matter where the steam actually goes in terms of how it is used (for electricity generation or other applications of steam), but if the thing stops working in less than a week it certainly would piss off the customer.
If nickel+hydrogen=>copper becomes a reality, it ensures the survival of humanity, more or less forever, as it allows us to leave the planet (and encourages us to do so to mine the asteroids), and even the star system. All things become possible with this kind of energy at our fingertips.
The amazing thing about this as a power source is how compact the device can be made. Just a back of the envelope calculation also gives some interesting ISP numbers (specific impulse) for rockets made with this as the energy source. Certainly a fusion reactor opens up the rest of the Solar System in a big way as you can travel to Mars in a matter of weeks and send something to Pluto in a couple of months.
All of this is speculation in terms of a presumption that this technology works, but the achievements you can make with this is extraordinary. It is something that I certainly could see my family using as a practical power source for within my home, where just that one thing alone would make a huge difference in terms of my lifestyle and even relationship to my local government.
I am extremely skeptical that the claims are true, but if they are it is something which can change the world in a profound way that will make the 21st Century to be nothing like the 20th. Perhaps not better, but it sure will look different.
Also, when you submit a paper for peer review, you should at least have something resembling a theory about how something works before you publish the data. Submitting data like "here is something interesting.... I have no idea how it works, only that it does" usually isn't something which would be accepted by scientific journals.
Rossi claims that he has no idea how the process works, only that it does. It is a pinch of this and a handful of that, thrown together and somehow the thing works.
Of course it was pointed out that James Watt didn't have any idea how his version of the steam engine actually worked in terms of a proper scientific explanation, yet it was used for years as a pump to drain water from mines for a great many years before that scientific explanation was finally obtained. After that happened, it also substantially improved the quality of those engines, so the research wasn't wasted either.
This said, presuming that this device actually works, who is going to be gutsy enough to submit a "cold fusion" paper based upon Rossi's work to figure out how the thing does its stuff?
There are several retail outlets which make ice cream with liquid nitrogen.... in part for the reasons you are mentioning in terms of the crystalization of the ice within the strawberries. Especially because they have food handler permits anyway and have a ready supply of the liquid nitrogen, paying them $10 or $20 to freeze a batch of strawberries seems like something they would take in stride or even use to make a strawberry milk shake out of the stuff if you really cared. It may even be on their menu. At least as an experiment it could be used to your satisfaction.
From my study of cold fusion, it is at best an intellectual curiosity where it might rival the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor as something to produce a neutron radiation source that can be turned on and off with a light switch. There certainly are some applications for a device like that, even if you don't have "net energy", and indeed with the Fusor such devices are sold commercially. It is a niche product that only a nuclear physics researcher or some applications in nuclear medicine would have a use for such a device.
One of the better run studies conducted a study of "cold fusion" where they were checking for radioactive products (as opposed to a calorimeter) and they were able to measure a significant statistical deviation from the "background radiation" of the environment of the laboratory where the experiment was being made. In other words, real fusion was taking place, but the amount was so low as to be something only for a research paper or to discuss at a fusion conference. The problem is that Pons & Fleischmann made such a circus out of the concept that anybody saying "slow down a minute.... it isn't really that big of a deal" were dismissed as crackpots and the entire concept was shot down.
Where Rossi and his "fellow researchers" are coming off as completely off their rockers isn't that they've discovered a repeatable way to create fusion through packing Palladium with Hydrogen (a known property of Palladium), but that they have basically said that Pons & Fleischmann are just pikers and didn't know how to generate manly amounts of energy from their device. The claims for the amount of fusion, that the reaction is aneutronic, and method of presenting their discovery via press conference (like Pons & Fleischmann) instead of through scientific journals is what makes those in the field look at Rossi as a crackpot or even a flagrant fraud.
Either the guy is a stinking genius and has discovered the cure to world peace (depending on how it works out), or the guy is a brilliant con artists that would make Frank Abagnale look like a rank amateur. From what I've seen of the thing, I put it more like 80% likely he is a con artist, but I'm still giving that 20% wiggle room he might be telling the truth. He isn't violating thermodynamics or even basic principles of physics, but it does seem unlikely that he has discovered a genuine power source based upon current knowledge of materials and previous attempts to generate power.
On the other hand, because it seems like Rossi doesn't have a firm scientific theory on how his device works (he sounds more like a tinkerer along the lines of James Watt or Thomas Edison), if this device does work out it will unlock a whole new field of scientific exploration with real money. I expect it will be something more akin to room-temperature superconductors, where new classes of materials can be discovered to incorporate the basic principles and perhaps even get higher efficiencies than what Rossi has discovered. But that is a big "IF" the device actually produces energy in the manner that he claims it does right now. At some point this device is going to need to be dropped on the desk of some competent nuclear energy researcher at Los Alamos, and likely other major labs, where it will be tested, dissected, poked, rebuilt, and critically examined just to see if it works before it gains any real credibility.
Swapping out batteries could get rather complicated, although a "quick change-out" might be possible. The concept of battery swaps has been discussed extensively on several blogs and discussion groups about electric vehicles for some time.
It terms of quick recharging stations, I would hope that you have some very experienced technicians. The "super capacitors" and other technologies which might be able to give you rapid recharging capabilities would need so much energy that you would need a nuclear (fission) reactor sitting next to the refueling station and need to connect a mega-watt power source to the automobile. Perhaps it could be automated, but I would hate to be a technician trying to repair that stuff when it goes wrong.
Yes, there obviously are technicians at major power plants who deal with this kind of power on a daily basis, but even there I don't think you find them making hundreds of new connections to different pieces of equipment each day. They also get paid much more than minimum wage to be working with that kind of power. It would have to be people with a same kind of salary requirements as a Formula 1 pit team member.
I do think there might be "supplemental" electrical generator devices for some "pure electric" vehicles such as an after-market trailer which pulls a gasoline motor with a recharging cable for long-distance travel, where the trailer stays home (or at the hotel) for the shorter commuter trips. It doesn't have to be all or nothing here.
The largest problem at the moment is simply standardization of the connectors, so you can build an after-market industry for devices like this or for other applications which might use the interface.
One of the cool things that the original Model "T" Ford had was an auxiliary power take-off port where you could tap into the mechanical energy of the engine for purposes other than transportation (with the transmission in neutral). It was used to power electric generators, water pumps, and other kinds of farm machinery like a thresher, where a substantial group of inventors came up with several devices which hooked up to the car for power. That automobiles aren't used that way today is more of a lack of creativity, and that other power sources tend to be cheaper at the moment.... but it is interesting to think of the applications if you break preconceived notions about how you use some of these devices.
Agreed. Some of that is where I don't think the engineers could think outside of the box to even conceive of a car that could work without gasoline. The complaint that Americans (their major market in terms of customers) simply wouldn't buy a car with only a 300 mile driving radius is a tough one to argue against, and it looks like that argument won the day in regards to the design of the Volt. They also didn't have much faith in Li-ion batteries in terms of being the primary power source for the vehicle. Last I saw, the Volt only gets about 50 miles of driving before the gasoline motor typically kicks in, and the transmission for the Volt is one of the most complicated pieces of machinery that I've ever seen. Trying to get both the electric motor and the gasoline motor working at the same time was some amazing engineering, but at what cost?
The Volt was explicitly developed by General Motors as an answer to the Tesla Roadster. The presumption was that GM simply needed to get some experience building electric vehicles and needed to stay in the game to establish some supplier relationships on the off chance that Tesla might just have something which catches on in the automotive marketplace.
Considering that the Volt was perhaps the only significant automotive engineering effort which survived the bankruptcy/buy-out/government take over/IPO process that GM had to go through in the past several years, it shows there is some merit to the concept perhaps even beyond just as a "marketing tool". Many other worthy projects were canned and even whole automotive production lines were shut down, so the Volt certainly would have been an easy target in the bankruptcy proceedings if it wasn't considered something for the company's future.
That the Volt at the moment is more of a joke has more to do with how GM is marketing the car as well as some engineering decisions that I think were wrongly made, but they are decisions which can be reversed or have subsequent models be able to refine the concepts introduced in the Volt. If some new power source (like this reactor by Rossi, if it works) or a hyper improved battery technology comes along which passes up the Li-ion batteries by an order of magnitude (not out of the question either), GM will have the engineering team and some motor designs together with a production plant ready to exploit those changes in the auto industry. They certainly don't have to get a team of engineers up to speed in terms of building an efficient electric motor that can work in a production automobile.
Getting back onto the main topic, if this Rossi guy actually turns out to have a real device, it would be able to essentially eliminate automotive batteries on electric vehicles other than as a "starter" system to get the reactor going as well as to "buffer" the energy needed by the motor if there might be temporary peak demand for the juice (such as when passing at a high speed or something of that nature).
Certainly traveling for 10k miles without filling up or even stopping other than for bathroom breaks is possible, and "refilling" the vehicle would take just a minute or so. The claim is that the reactor consumes about 1 gram of hydrogen per hour, and then it might require some distilled water in terms of an energy transference medium if you have a leaking radiator. Perhaps ordinary Ethel Glycol/Water might be used in that situation, but it would be something rather mundane. The assertion is that the reactor is about the size of the Tesla Roadster battery pack (with electrical converters), about the same mass.
Then again, if it is producing steam, there might be other ways you could harness the power of this power source other than electrical generation, but that is a real possibility. Of course that is only *IF* this reactor actually works as claimed.
There would be two different issues at hand here, where local governments certainly could be used (and IMHO ought to be used) for determining who could be issued individual licenses to operate within certain frequencies and established technical standards for those using those frequencies. This could including anything from licensing local television and radio stations to approving cell phone towers... not just the building permits but also the "right" to use certain frequencies in the local area.
This said, when "local" governments get involved in terms of frequency allocation for devices and in determining technical specifications, it gets to be very messy. A good example of that is how the Open BTS guys tried to set up a cell phone network in the country/island of Niue. Since the whole country has the population of a small midwestern town, it is a good case study to see what "local" regulation of frequencies would be like. The whole Niue chronicle is certainly well worth a read on its own (scroll down on the blog... they did the installation back in March 2010, but they also have provided cell phone service during the "Burning Man" events too). When people don't care about frequency allocations and make it a "free for all" in terms of how radio frequencies are being used, it can make life very uncomfortable for those using radio devices of almost any sort.
There is a diffference between delivering couple hundred kilograms and establishing a permanent base, don't you think?
Just wash, rinse, and repeat. I'm being pretty serious here too. The problem is the myopic thinking that we need to send the entire rocket into space all at once from Cape Kennedy so it can land in once place on Mars and then return... just like Apollo did in terms of going to the Moon.
You can send dozens of much smaller rockets into orbit at a price point much cheaper than sending one monolithic spacecraft which has to be debugged and inspected for the singular flight where everything has to work correctly the first time. If a dozen flights are being done to assemble a "Mars spaceship" with robotic missions to Mars as preliminary steps to build habitats and get things going so it is in pretty good shape when the astronauts finally arrive, a piece can fail and it isn't that big of a deal.
So ultimately, the answer is no, it isn't all that different from sending a couple hundred pounds to Mars. It just matters how you get that task accomplished to get the final objective completed.
BTW, the Apollo mission had been originally designed to do something similar to that, with multiple flights to assemble a group of vehicles that would go to the Moon. It was called the "Earth-orbit rendezvous" concept that even included building a space station like Skylab prior to getting to the Moon that would be an embarkation location for the trip. It would have been interesting had that plan been developed, but it wouldn't have made the 1970 "deadline" NASA was all paranoid about, so it was abandoned in favor of the "Lunar orbit rendezvous" concept that was eventually adopted.
Virgin is suggesting they may even have multiple flights in the same day, and the original Spaceship One had about a 1 week turn around as a specific requirement to win the original X-Prize.
The one problem Scaled Composites has been having is getting their engine to work within the flight performance. It sounds like they may have that bug licked, but I'm not sure what system they are using. From the summary, it looks like Scaled Composites hasn't settled down on a specific fuel/oxidizer combination yet either although I've heard rumors (completely unsourced) they should be flying SS2 with a rocket motor early next year. We'll see.
The original Spaceship One was using essentially tire rubber and laughing gas (where they could extinguish the rocket simply by turning off the fuel). Burt Rutan certainly was planning on something that simple.... and not pushing the engines to be running at 110% of rated thrust performance like the Space Shuttle. That extra "push" (a late design decision on the Shuttle over what it was originally designed to do) really caused havoc on the SSMEs and forced NASA to essentially rebuild the engines completely after each Shuttle flight.
About the only time it was said about the Space Shuttle that they were going to have the rapid turn around and weekly flights was when NASA originally went before Congress getting authorization to start the Shuttle program. It went downhill from there. Virgin Galactic already has competition from other sub-orbital spacelines, so they aren't going to be too happy if the vehicle doesn't meet up with the specifications agreed upon with the contract. Spaceship Two has also done several "unpowered" landings already, so they are getting a pretty good idea on what things to be looking for.
Who's to say if we would have invented the electronic computer in the 50's if we didn't need missles. Would the microchip have been invented?
The first major application of electronic computers (the ENIAC) was calculate trigonometry tables primarily for ground artillery, and then when it got more refined to help prepare big thick books of tables for the artillery officers so they didn't have to hand calculate each target before they fired. The next major users for computers was the Census Bureau as well as several major banks. Where does that even remotely get connected to spaceflight? That this technology perhaps enabled advanced rocketry, perhaps, but so did a whole bunch of other technology and I think you got the order of the technology creation mixed up. Spaceflight is the child of the computer industry, no the other way around.
As for the integrated circuit and the "microchip", it had little if anything to do with missile technology or even the space program. It was developed by Texas Instruments completely on their own dime (with other companies getting to the business shortly after that effort), and the commercial applications were readily apparent even when it was being developed. Spaceflight had nothing to do with its creation or development.
About the only thing that NASA or even the USAF had to do with microchips was being a very early adopter of the technology. The Gemini capsules as well as the Mercury capsules all used vacuum tubes for their guidance computers, as did most of the missiles in the 1950's. When the decision to build the Apollo Guidance Computer came around, the engineers were planning on using vacuum tubes there as well, but the use of chips (mainly 7400 gate logic chips at the time or the equivalent) was able to save a small amount of space and weight, although not as much as you would think. The tubes were more reliable and at the time better understood. Again, I'd hardly call that a motivating factor for the development of the chips in the early space program.
What did happen is that NASA purchased something like 70%-80% of the world-wide inventory of microchips for some of those early years, clearly giving some indirect early financing into the microchip industry and giving rise to the belief that somehow NASA was responsible for making it all happen. This early purchase was more of a by-product of the fact that NASA was buying large quantities of just about everything even remotely related to spacecraft components, and the fact that the world-wide production for microchips was so few that anybody buying chips in any large quantities would have swamped the market.
Please don't continue this lie that the computer industry was somehow invented by and created for NASA and/or the USAF. It couldn't be further from the truth. No doubt both use computers heavily, but so do a whole bunch of other people too and computers would have been around even if the "space program" never happened.
The Dragon vehicle as well as the Falcon 9 were already well under development before the government contract was offered, and both vehicles (if you count them separately) have been largely built using private financing and investment.
The question is, if "money is raining from the sky", don't you pull out a bucket and pick some up, especially if you have a bucket which can carry some of it? Or more generally, if government contracts are being thrown around like candy to build rockets, wouldn't it make sense to grab some of that money if it happens to be for the same purpose you are building a device which will fill that contract? SpaceX would have been foolish not to take up that contract for the COTS program. Both the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule would likely have been built without the government funding, but it is happening sooner.
The one thing you need to know about the contract SpaceX and Orbital Science have through the COTS program vs. what you find other space launch contractors is that it is their own engineers building the rockets largely without NASA interference in terms of the technologies or systems being used, and for either company to receive money through these contracts they have to meet specific goals with delivered hardware.
Most other typical government contracts use a "cost-plus" financing model. That works fine for things you really don't have a clue about in terms of how they work or if you can build the device at all, much less if there is no practical way to really gauge how much the project is going to cost. For something like a dam or for going to the Moon with the Apollo program, that was most definitely the case. The mantra for many contractors was "waste anything but time" when the Saturn rockets were being built. The cost of that project showed that sort of mentality too. The major space contractors (ATK, Lockheed Martin, Boeing) all have been using that same contracting model for everything since as well. Cost-plus implies that the government pays the "costs" and that the company making the device or engineering project is guaranteed a profit (the "plus") they will earn for completing the project.
This is how you get projects which are millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. A fixed-price contract rarely has that happen, especially if there is a bonus for early completion. The COTS flights to the ISS are being paid for with a fixed price contract where SpaceX won't be paid until after the trip to the ISS has been completed. This is no different than buying a car where the auto manufacturer is paid when they deliver the car.
The problem with the Moon as a resource base is that it is essentially a planet in its own right (well, a "dwarf planet", if you want to get technical). It does have a practically non-existent atmosphere (measurable, but not worth worrying about on a practical level), but the gravity well is a pain in the behind.
Near-earth asteroids on the other hand could come in real handy if you are trying to do something at one of the Lagrangian points or GEO. It is material already out of a gravity well, and using something like a Thorium reactor (nuclear fission... not even a new technology needing a breakthrough) powering a NERVA (not my first choice) or VASIMR rocket pushing something like a 100m asteroid could really make a difference. There are several which pass by or "near" the Earth on a regular basis, so it isn't for a lack of stuff which could be used.
North America, sure but the Spanish had multiple colonies in the Caribbean by the 1510's.
And for space there has been Skylab, Mir, and the ISS, as well as a Chinese station soon to come on line and some stuff that Bigelow Aerospace is going to throw up into space once some other companies get their act together to be able to send passengers into orbit.
A much better analogy might have been what the Polynesians had to do when they sent people to Hawaii for permanent settlement. Taking a leap of faith going thousands of miles across the ocean with nothing more than a canoe guided by the stars hauling pigs, chickens, and children. THAT took real nerves of steel and determination to make it work.
I thought it was one drunk guy inventing warp drive with some old rocket parts and a timely fly-by by some pointy-eared Aliens that helped us to grow up as a species....
You forgot the part when all of the lawyers and politicians of the world were killed in a mass genocide based on occupation. That sort of makes it easier for Cochraine to build his little project in an abandoned nuclear missile silo.
I don't think he was saying "Don't even try" he was saying "Stop thinking that it's a realistic plan to save yourself from the rather disturbing consequences of constant growth". He was also pointing out that it's not realistic to compare it to early earth migrations/settlement because the differences in difficulty are orders of magnitude.
Compared with the knowledge of the universe, the level of technology, the tools we have available to us, and the raw resources we can bring to bear upon the problem, I would dare say that the ability to travel to Mars and build a thriving and successful independent civilization upon that planet is orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than it was for sailors traveling from England to enable a mass migration to establish an independent civilization in Australia. I completely disagree with your premise here.
Using ordinary physics with perhaps a new breakthrough in power sources from something like nuclear fusion, but even perhaps with Thorium nuclear reactors in a power plant, it is certainly possible to build spacecraft that can travel from the Earth to Mars in under a month... a couple of months if you are being even more conservative. A round trip to Pluto can be had in under a year. Yes, those aren't with Hohmann transfer orbits, but we don't send most passengers and high value cargo on slow moving freight trains either.
The difficulty in terms of getting into space is a solved problem. It isn't like it was at the beginning of the 20th Century when there was some very real question as to if people could get into space.... we can. We know how it can be done, and the trick at the moment is to make it more economical to do so.
Going on fuel costs alone, the price for a "ticket" into space for somebody to send a metric ton into orbit (i.e. a person, plus their personal baggage, plus life support & food) is presumed at the moment to be something on the order of about $100 million if you believe NASA figures and how much it cost to operate the Space Shuttle and how much the SLS program is going to cost sending an astronaut into space. Space Adventures currently is charging about $30 million if you simply want to pluck down the money on the table... and they are hardly being competitive at that price and openly admit the problem is the people who are offering the rides. The problem here is that the cost of going into space isn't the fuel, but the cost of the rocket + the cost of the engineering to make that rocket.
My point is that it isn't nearly as difficult as everybody is trying to make it out to be. Traveling across oceans for months at a time using 16th Century technology was just as dangerous, complex and expensive, perhaps even more so. Yet the migrations happened.
This said, I agree that there will some concerns about what is happening here on the Earth. In spite of people living in space and developing civilizations on other planets, there still will be people living on the Earth, perhaps for thousands or even millions of years. There still are people living in Europe, in spite of a huge mass migration of people away from Europe in the past 500 years or so. Those that stayed needed to deal with the resources of the land that existed at the time, but you can't deny the benefits for those who remained in terms of what they received in terms of trade and new ideas from those who migrated. It certainly is not a zero sum game. In this regards, our experience with other previous migration experiences is precisely something we can compare, as I think those who reject that experience forget how difficult such earlier journeys really were.
While I'll agree with at least the general sentiment that you are expressing here in terms of the fact that we may, through natural selection and the history of our species, be bred to live here on the Earth. It is also important to note we are also the first multi-cellular species which has the potential of living somewhere other than on the Earth as well. The intelligence we possess and the technology we have developed as a species is specifically what gives us the ability to bring ourselves and many other species with us into space.
Besides, who says that the Earth is dying? Who says that the Earth must die before we even consider leaving? Who says that the bulk of humanity who remains here on the Earth even has to care what happens to somebody in a distant location? Who says that "other place" is even an Utopia at all, and what does that mean? The objections you are raising here make no sense and sounds self-loathing to me and shows a hatred to your own species. I do not believe that mankind is doomed to certain extinction in the not too distant future, even for those who choose to stay here on the Earth. Furthermore, all of the arguments "against" this simply are irrelevant regardless of what happens here on the Earth anyway, other than simply because you might be envious of those who take the leap to leave as you are too lazy to bother trying.
What I'm referring to here is simply the concept of liberty in its most raw and basic form. There have been people who have left the confines of the Earth and have done something as remarkable as those first brave souls who took the chance to get on a boat and sail beyond the horizon, using nothing but dead reckoning and looking at the stars for guidance to bring them back home. It is that big of a change. People were willing to leave home in the past and the islands of the sea are now the home for a great many people. People have moved from one place to another and now every continent on this planet is within the reach of even ordinary people. Certainly a determined ordinary person earning ordinary labor wages in most 1st world countries and even many 3rd world countries can (given a willing government that will let them or a government that will let them in) travel to any place in the world they please. It is only political considerations alone at the moment which prevent more freedom of movement on the Earth itself.
It is this same concept of liberty where people who wish to travel elsewhere should at least be given the chance to try, and I dare say it is political considerations alone which is preventing us from going elsewhere in the Solar System besides the Earth. If you want to hold a gun to my head and tell me or my children that we can't travel off of this planet, make sure you know full well what it is that you are saying here and why you are saying that. Also be prepared for some very pissed off people to be angry with you for holding that gun against my head and telling me that I can't leave.
We can leave the Earth because we are capable of doing that. Will you let me leave, if I want to do so on my own dime and using the resources I have gained from the fruits of my own labor?
Mankind already lives in what is largely an artificial environment, especially if you live in a big city.
The original settlement of Buena Vista, Alta California (before the days of the 1849 gold rush) died out to the very last person because there was insufficient water resources to sustain the village. Yet today in that same place there are millions of people and generations of inhabitants of that same region. The difference is that technology has brought in the water and transportation links have been able to provide both the food and other resources for a major city of the world to exist in an otherwise hostile environment.
There has been a more or less permanent "outpost" of humanity living at the South Pole for a great many years, where the environment is even more hostile to human survival. Some of them even reply on Slashdot from time to time, so it would be interesting to see what their perspective on this whole thing would be like.
As you are kind of indicating, there is a whole lot to learn about "closed systems" environments that would be needed for a long-term stay on another planet or for that matter anywhere else besides the Earth. We've learned quite a bit over the past 50 years with regards to Antarctica as well as in dealing with the ISS. The technologies needed to establish a permanent "base", much less a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or Mars may very well be a century or two away, and I'm not going to completely dismiss the challenges needed for doing that.
The problem I have with the main article as presented in this Slashdot post is that the author is more or less giving up and saying we shouldn't even bother trying. I think something is lost from the soul when somebody tells you that, particularly when they are willing to try on their own dime and just want to be allowed the chance to see if it could be done or not. It is like telling a kid they can never be an astronaut when they grow up, or that that a small kid in America can never grow up to become the President. Sure, the odds may be stacked against them heavily, but why shoot down dreams? Sometimes even the act of simply trying is enough to make a difference somewhere even if that attempt fails miserably.
But I’ll just point out that the idea that we are no longer able to accomplish feats we once could do (like travel to the Moon) clashes with the prevailing narrative that we march forever forward. Not only can’t we get to the Moon at present, but the U.S. no longer has a space shuttle program—originally envisioned to make space travel as routine as air travel. And for that matter, I no longer have the option to purchase a ticket to fly trans-Atlantic at supersonic speeds on the Concorde. Narratives can break. I’ll leave it at that.
I agree that the ability to move out into the solar system has been sidetracked. It has been a bit of a problem and mankind has pulled back from what we could be doing in terms of getting things done in space. The apparent retrenchment in the ability to travel into space isn't really accurate in the least and this guy really misses what is going on.
The Apollo missions were a highly focused goal that really pushed the limits of the technology available at the time, perhaps even pushing that technology to its breaking point as the Apollo 13 missions demonstrated very clearly. At best those could be compared to weekend camping trips. We learned a whole bunch about how to live and work in space on those trips that we also learned how tough it would be to go.
That said, the problem here is that we have been depending on "the government" to get us into space on Manhattan Project type "big science" expeditions, where those programs could be cut and abused because of political whims, graft, and corruption. All of that has happened and more with NASA. Had the NASA budget kept pace with the federal budget from the mid-1960's to today, there most certainly would be at least an outpost on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System like the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. One of the first missions of the "Apollo Applications Program" that was cut was a manned mission to Venus. A mission to Mars has been talked about since the Nixon administration. Getting "out there" has been in the cards, but the funding to make it happen hasn't been there primarily because the political will that got the Apollo program going ran out of steam.
Private spaceflight efforts, in other words private citizens trying to get into space on their own dime without subsidies from a government entity, has taken a long time to get going. There are established markets for commercial enterprises in space today, primarily concentrated at the moment in the form of telecommunications (including "satellite" television, mobile telephones, and other long-distance communication), navigation (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Compass, and others), remote sensing, cartography (Google Maps and others), and reconnaissance (both government and civilian). Add to that list is rapid point-to-point delivery and space tourism that is just beginning to open up. All of these are proven money-makers for those groups who wish to get involved with them and have also made life today much better because they exist as well.
Far from "we are never going to get into space", we are already there. We are just getting our toes out into the water, so to say, but the commercial development of space-based resources has steadily improved and now represents a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the hang-ups about getting more happening in space has been the cost of spaceflight. In other words, trying to find cheaper ways of getting stuff into space. When a 1 liter bottle of water costs $100,000 or more to send it into space, the economics of getting people into space for settlement simply don't work.
The fallacy in this article is the presumption that we simply can't get cheaper than $100,000/kg for putting stuff into space and that the cost of going into space is only going to go up. The reason that is currently the case is because the government, a
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P. T. Barnum only made money when people were entertained..... so in that sense what he did was entertainment, which worked for the job it was trying to perform. Sure, he created all sorts of silly and impossible creatures, and he hyped up folks like Tom Thumb to be something they weren't, but on the whole his purpose was to entertain people, not to actually make claims for the purpose of deliberate fraud.
Besides, if Rossi is a fraud, such a comparison does more to spoil the name of P.T. Barnum than it does to make a realistic comparison. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Bernie Madoff, especially as this would definitely be in the category of a "Long Con" rather than something done for a quick buck.
Still, what would it take to convince you that this works? Widespread adoption? Something running in you neighbor's house?
Ultimately it doesn't matter if Rossi makes money or not, as it isn't your money on the line. As far as I can tell (not certain, because the "investor" hasn't been disclosed) no tax money has been involved. Either he will be proven a fraud, or the thing will work. There is something called physics and real life that sort of bump up against the claims that this guy is making.
I would have to assume that if this "customer" is somebody rather serious and has some money as well as the physical need for a 1 MW power plant based off of any kind of power source, they also have the money to hire a legal team to slowly cut Rossi to pieces if it proves to be a fraud when they take the plant into their own possession and put it onto their own power grid at whatever facility they want to drop this shipping container at.
I can imagine a few ways using chemicals or batteries to get a device the size of what is produced here to work at boiling water for a couple of hours, or perhaps even a day or so. There reaches a point, however, where even if the inside of these reactors is pure gasoline (or some other petroleum/hydrocarbon by-product) that the reservoirs would run out and that you would have to explain the power production from some other reaction. I don't know how long a shipping container full of gasoline would last if it was producing a continuous supply of 1 MW of power, and the power output continuously monitored, but I can't expect it to last more than a week. There are some hard physical limits to what chemical reactions would do over time to where you would have to explain what is happening with some other process.
I would have to assume also that this "customer" intends to use this reactor as a baseline power supply, as that seems like the only practical application for this technology. It doesn't matter where the steam actually goes in terms of how it is used (for electricity generation or other applications of steam), but if the thing stops working in less than a week it certainly would piss off the customer.
If nickel+hydrogen=>copper becomes a reality, it ensures the survival of humanity, more or less forever, as it allows us to leave the planet (and encourages us to do so to mine the asteroids), and even the star system. All things become possible with this kind of energy at our fingertips.
The amazing thing about this as a power source is how compact the device can be made. Just a back of the envelope calculation also gives some interesting ISP numbers (specific impulse) for rockets made with this as the energy source. Certainly a fusion reactor opens up the rest of the Solar System in a big way as you can travel to Mars in a matter of weeks and send something to Pluto in a couple of months.
All of this is speculation in terms of a presumption that this technology works, but the achievements you can make with this is extraordinary. It is something that I certainly could see my family using as a practical power source for within my home, where just that one thing alone would make a huge difference in terms of my lifestyle and even relationship to my local government.
I am extremely skeptical that the claims are true, but if they are it is something which can change the world in a profound way that will make the 21st Century to be nothing like the 20th. Perhaps not better, but it sure will look different.
I think you just proved the previous AC commentator correct. It is nice you took the bait.
By chance, what is the name of this town?
Also, when you submit a paper for peer review, you should at least have something resembling a theory about how something works before you publish the data. Submitting data like "here is something interesting.... I have no idea how it works, only that it does" usually isn't something which would be accepted by scientific journals.
Rossi claims that he has no idea how the process works, only that it does. It is a pinch of this and a handful of that, thrown together and somehow the thing works.
Of course it was pointed out that James Watt didn't have any idea how his version of the steam engine actually worked in terms of a proper scientific explanation, yet it was used for years as a pump to drain water from mines for a great many years before that scientific explanation was finally obtained. After that happened, it also substantially improved the quality of those engines, so the research wasn't wasted either.
This said, presuming that this device actually works, who is going to be gutsy enough to submit a "cold fusion" paper based upon Rossi's work to figure out how the thing does its stuff?
There are several retail outlets which make ice cream with liquid nitrogen.... in part for the reasons you are mentioning in terms of the crystalization of the ice within the strawberries. Especially because they have food handler permits anyway and have a ready supply of the liquid nitrogen, paying them $10 or $20 to freeze a batch of strawberries seems like something they would take in stride or even use to make a strawberry milk shake out of the stuff if you really cared. It may even be on their menu. At least as an experiment it could be used to your satisfaction.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream#Using_liquid_nitrogen
From my study of cold fusion, it is at best an intellectual curiosity where it might rival the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor as something to produce a neutron radiation source that can be turned on and off with a light switch. There certainly are some applications for a device like that, even if you don't have "net energy", and indeed with the Fusor such devices are sold commercially. It is a niche product that only a nuclear physics researcher or some applications in nuclear medicine would have a use for such a device.
One of the better run studies conducted a study of "cold fusion" where they were checking for radioactive products (as opposed to a calorimeter) and they were able to measure a significant statistical deviation from the "background radiation" of the environment of the laboratory where the experiment was being made. In other words, real fusion was taking place, but the amount was so low as to be something only for a research paper or to discuss at a fusion conference. The problem is that Pons & Fleischmann made such a circus out of the concept that anybody saying "slow down a minute.... it isn't really that big of a deal" were dismissed as crackpots and the entire concept was shot down.
Where Rossi and his "fellow researchers" are coming off as completely off their rockers isn't that they've discovered a repeatable way to create fusion through packing Palladium with Hydrogen (a known property of Palladium), but that they have basically said that Pons & Fleischmann are just pikers and didn't know how to generate manly amounts of energy from their device. The claims for the amount of fusion, that the reaction is aneutronic, and method of presenting their discovery via press conference (like Pons & Fleischmann) instead of through scientific journals is what makes those in the field look at Rossi as a crackpot or even a flagrant fraud.
Either the guy is a stinking genius and has discovered the cure to world peace (depending on how it works out), or the guy is a brilliant con artists that would make Frank Abagnale look like a rank amateur. From what I've seen of the thing, I put it more like 80% likely he is a con artist, but I'm still giving that 20% wiggle room he might be telling the truth. He isn't violating thermodynamics or even basic principles of physics, but it does seem unlikely that he has discovered a genuine power source based upon current knowledge of materials and previous attempts to generate power.
On the other hand, because it seems like Rossi doesn't have a firm scientific theory on how his device works (he sounds more like a tinkerer along the lines of James Watt or Thomas Edison), if this device does work out it will unlock a whole new field of scientific exploration with real money. I expect it will be something more akin to room-temperature superconductors, where new classes of materials can be discovered to incorporate the basic principles and perhaps even get higher efficiencies than what Rossi has discovered. But that is a big "IF" the device actually produces energy in the manner that he claims it does right now. At some point this device is going to need to be dropped on the desk of some competent nuclear energy researcher at Los Alamos, and likely other major labs, where it will be tested, dissected, poked, rebuilt, and critically examined just to see if it works before it gains any real credibility.
Swapping out batteries could get rather complicated, although a "quick change-out" might be possible. The concept of battery swaps has been discussed extensively on several blogs and discussion groups about electric vehicles for some time.
It terms of quick recharging stations, I would hope that you have some very experienced technicians. The "super capacitors" and other technologies which might be able to give you rapid recharging capabilities would need so much energy that you would need a nuclear (fission) reactor sitting next to the refueling station and need to connect a mega-watt power source to the automobile. Perhaps it could be automated, but I would hate to be a technician trying to repair that stuff when it goes wrong.
Yes, there obviously are technicians at major power plants who deal with this kind of power on a daily basis, but even there I don't think you find them making hundreds of new connections to different pieces of equipment each day. They also get paid much more than minimum wage to be working with that kind of power. It would have to be people with a same kind of salary requirements as a Formula 1 pit team member.
I do think there might be "supplemental" electrical generator devices for some "pure electric" vehicles such as an after-market trailer which pulls a gasoline motor with a recharging cable for long-distance travel, where the trailer stays home (or at the hotel) for the shorter commuter trips. It doesn't have to be all or nothing here.
The largest problem at the moment is simply standardization of the connectors, so you can build an after-market industry for devices like this or for other applications which might use the interface.
One of the cool things that the original Model "T" Ford had was an auxiliary power take-off port where you could tap into the mechanical energy of the engine for purposes other than transportation (with the transmission in neutral). It was used to power electric generators, water pumps, and other kinds of farm machinery like a thresher, where a substantial group of inventors came up with several devices which hooked up to the car for power. That automobiles aren't used that way today is more of a lack of creativity, and that other power sources tend to be cheaper at the moment.... but it is interesting to think of the applications if you break preconceived notions about how you use some of these devices.
Agreed. Some of that is where I don't think the engineers could think outside of the box to even conceive of a car that could work without gasoline. The complaint that Americans (their major market in terms of customers) simply wouldn't buy a car with only a 300 mile driving radius is a tough one to argue against, and it looks like that argument won the day in regards to the design of the Volt. They also didn't have much faith in Li-ion batteries in terms of being the primary power source for the vehicle. Last I saw, the Volt only gets about 50 miles of driving before the gasoline motor typically kicks in, and the transmission for the Volt is one of the most complicated pieces of machinery that I've ever seen. Trying to get both the electric motor and the gasoline motor working at the same time was some amazing engineering, but at what cost?
The Volt was explicitly developed by General Motors as an answer to the Tesla Roadster. The presumption was that GM simply needed to get some experience building electric vehicles and needed to stay in the game to establish some supplier relationships on the off chance that Tesla might just have something which catches on in the automotive marketplace.
Considering that the Volt was perhaps the only significant automotive engineering effort which survived the bankruptcy/buy-out/government take over/IPO process that GM had to go through in the past several years, it shows there is some merit to the concept perhaps even beyond just as a "marketing tool". Many other worthy projects were canned and even whole automotive production lines were shut down, so the Volt certainly would have been an easy target in the bankruptcy proceedings if it wasn't considered something for the company's future.
That the Volt at the moment is more of a joke has more to do with how GM is marketing the car as well as some engineering decisions that I think were wrongly made, but they are decisions which can be reversed or have subsequent models be able to refine the concepts introduced in the Volt. If some new power source (like this reactor by Rossi, if it works) or a hyper improved battery technology comes along which passes up the Li-ion batteries by an order of magnitude (not out of the question either), GM will have the engineering team and some motor designs together with a production plant ready to exploit those changes in the auto industry. They certainly don't have to get a team of engineers up to speed in terms of building an efficient electric motor that can work in a production automobile.
Getting back onto the main topic, if this Rossi guy actually turns out to have a real device, it would be able to essentially eliminate automotive batteries on electric vehicles other than as a "starter" system to get the reactor going as well as to "buffer" the energy needed by the motor if there might be temporary peak demand for the juice (such as when passing at a high speed or something of that nature).
Certainly traveling for 10k miles without filling up or even stopping other than for bathroom breaks is possible, and "refilling" the vehicle would take just a minute or so. The claim is that the reactor consumes about 1 gram of hydrogen per hour, and then it might require some distilled water in terms of an energy transference medium if you have a leaking radiator. Perhaps ordinary Ethel Glycol/Water might be used in that situation, but it would be something rather mundane. The assertion is that the reactor is about the size of the Tesla Roadster battery pack (with electrical converters), about the same mass.
Then again, if it is producing steam, there might be other ways you could harness the power of this power source other than electrical generation, but that is a real possibility. Of course that is only *IF* this reactor actually works as claimed.
There would be two different issues at hand here, where local governments certainly could be used (and IMHO ought to be used) for determining who could be issued individual licenses to operate within certain frequencies and established technical standards for those using those frequencies. This could including anything from licensing local television and radio stations to approving cell phone towers... not just the building permits but also the "right" to use certain frequencies in the local area.
This said, when "local" governments get involved in terms of frequency allocation for devices and in determining technical specifications, it gets to be very messy. A good example of that is how the Open BTS guys tried to set up a cell phone network in the country/island of Niue. Since the whole country has the population of a small midwestern town, it is a good case study to see what "local" regulation of frequencies would be like. The whole Niue chronicle is certainly well worth a read on its own (scroll down on the blog... they did the installation back in March 2010, but they also have provided cell phone service during the "Burning Man" events too). When people don't care about frequency allocations and make it a "free for all" in terms of how radio frequencies are being used, it can make life very uncomfortable for those using radio devices of almost any sort.
There is a diffference between delivering couple hundred kilograms and establishing a permanent base, don't you think?
Just wash, rinse, and repeat. I'm being pretty serious here too. The problem is the myopic thinking that we need to send the entire rocket into space all at once from Cape Kennedy so it can land in once place on Mars and then return... just like Apollo did in terms of going to the Moon.
You can send dozens of much smaller rockets into orbit at a price point much cheaper than sending one monolithic spacecraft which has to be debugged and inspected for the singular flight where everything has to work correctly the first time. If a dozen flights are being done to assemble a "Mars spaceship" with robotic missions to Mars as preliminary steps to build habitats and get things going so it is in pretty good shape when the astronauts finally arrive, a piece can fail and it isn't that big of a deal.
So ultimately, the answer is no, it isn't all that different from sending a couple hundred pounds to Mars. It just matters how you get that task accomplished to get the final objective completed.
BTW, the Apollo mission had been originally designed to do something similar to that, with multiple flights to assemble a group of vehicles that would go to the Moon. It was called the "Earth-orbit rendezvous" concept that even included building a space station like Skylab prior to getting to the Moon that would be an embarkation location for the trip. It would have been interesting had that plan been developed, but it wouldn't have made the 1970 "deadline" NASA was all paranoid about, so it was abandoned in favor of the "Lunar orbit rendezvous" concept that was eventually adopted.
Virgin is suggesting they may even have multiple flights in the same day, and the original Spaceship One had about a 1 week turn around as a specific requirement to win the original X-Prize.
The one problem Scaled Composites has been having is getting their engine to work within the flight performance. It sounds like they may have that bug licked, but I'm not sure what system they are using. From the summary, it looks like Scaled Composites hasn't settled down on a specific fuel/oxidizer combination yet either although I've heard rumors (completely unsourced) they should be flying SS2 with a rocket motor early next year. We'll see.
The original Spaceship One was using essentially tire rubber and laughing gas (where they could extinguish the rocket simply by turning off the fuel). Burt Rutan certainly was planning on something that simple.... and not pushing the engines to be running at 110% of rated thrust performance like the Space Shuttle. That extra "push" (a late design decision on the Shuttle over what it was originally designed to do) really caused havoc on the SSMEs and forced NASA to essentially rebuild the engines completely after each Shuttle flight.
About the only time it was said about the Space Shuttle that they were going to have the rapid turn around and weekly flights was when NASA originally went before Congress getting authorization to start the Shuttle program. It went downhill from there. Virgin Galactic already has competition from other sub-orbital spacelines, so they aren't going to be too happy if the vehicle doesn't meet up with the specifications agreed upon with the contract. Spaceship Two has also done several "unpowered" landings already, so they are getting a pretty good idea on what things to be looking for.
Who's to say if we would have invented the electronic computer in the 50's if we didn't need missles. Would the microchip have been invented?
The first major application of electronic computers (the ENIAC) was calculate trigonometry tables primarily for ground artillery, and then when it got more refined to help prepare big thick books of tables for the artillery officers so they didn't have to hand calculate each target before they fired. The next major users for computers was the Census Bureau as well as several major banks. Where does that even remotely get connected to spaceflight? That this technology perhaps enabled advanced rocketry, perhaps, but so did a whole bunch of other technology and I think you got the order of the technology creation mixed up. Spaceflight is the child of the computer industry, no the other way around.
As for the integrated circuit and the "microchip", it had little if anything to do with missile technology or even the space program. It was developed by Texas Instruments completely on their own dime (with other companies getting to the business shortly after that effort), and the commercial applications were readily apparent even when it was being developed. Spaceflight had nothing to do with its creation or development.
About the only thing that NASA or even the USAF had to do with microchips was being a very early adopter of the technology. The Gemini capsules as well as the Mercury capsules all used vacuum tubes for their guidance computers, as did most of the missiles in the 1950's. When the decision to build the Apollo Guidance Computer came around, the engineers were planning on using vacuum tubes there as well, but the use of chips (mainly 7400 gate logic chips at the time or the equivalent) was able to save a small amount of space and weight, although not as much as you would think. The tubes were more reliable and at the time better understood. Again, I'd hardly call that a motivating factor for the development of the chips in the early space program.
What did happen is that NASA purchased something like 70%-80% of the world-wide inventory of microchips for some of those early years, clearly giving some indirect early financing into the microchip industry and giving rise to the belief that somehow NASA was responsible for making it all happen. This early purchase was more of a by-product of the fact that NASA was buying large quantities of just about everything even remotely related to spacecraft components, and the fact that the world-wide production for microchips was so few that anybody buying chips in any large quantities would have swamped the market.
Please don't continue this lie that the computer industry was somehow invented by and created for NASA and/or the USAF. It couldn't be further from the truth. No doubt both use computers heavily, but so do a whole bunch of other people too and computers would have been around even if the "space program" never happened.
The Dragon vehicle as well as the Falcon 9 were already well under development before the government contract was offered, and both vehicles (if you count them separately) have been largely built using private financing and investment.
The question is, if "money is raining from the sky", don't you pull out a bucket and pick some up, especially if you have a bucket which can carry some of it? Or more generally, if government contracts are being thrown around like candy to build rockets, wouldn't it make sense to grab some of that money if it happens to be for the same purpose you are building a device which will fill that contract? SpaceX would have been foolish not to take up that contract for the COTS program. Both the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule would likely have been built without the government funding, but it is happening sooner.
The one thing you need to know about the contract SpaceX and Orbital Science have through the COTS program vs. what you find other space launch contractors is that it is their own engineers building the rockets largely without NASA interference in terms of the technologies or systems being used, and for either company to receive money through these contracts they have to meet specific goals with delivered hardware.
Most other typical government contracts use a "cost-plus" financing model. That works fine for things you really don't have a clue about in terms of how they work or if you can build the device at all, much less if there is no practical way to really gauge how much the project is going to cost. For something like a dam or for going to the Moon with the Apollo program, that was most definitely the case. The mantra for many contractors was "waste anything but time" when the Saturn rockets were being built. The cost of that project showed that sort of mentality too. The major space contractors (ATK, Lockheed Martin, Boeing) all have been using that same contracting model for everything since as well. Cost-plus implies that the government pays the "costs" and that the company making the device or engineering project is guaranteed a profit (the "plus") they will earn for completing the project.
This is how you get projects which are millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. A fixed-price contract rarely has that happen, especially if there is a bonus for early completion. The COTS flights to the ISS are being paid for with a fixed price contract where SpaceX won't be paid until after the trip to the ISS has been completed. This is no different than buying a car where the auto manufacturer is paid when they deliver the car.
The problem with the Moon as a resource base is that it is essentially a planet in its own right (well, a "dwarf planet", if you want to get technical). It does have a practically non-existent atmosphere (measurable, but not worth worrying about on a practical level), but the gravity well is a pain in the behind.
Near-earth asteroids on the other hand could come in real handy if you are trying to do something at one of the Lagrangian points or GEO. It is material already out of a gravity well, and using something like a Thorium reactor (nuclear fission... not even a new technology needing a breakthrough) powering a NERVA (not my first choice) or VASIMR rocket pushing something like a 100m asteroid could really make a difference. There are several which pass by or "near" the Earth on a regular basis, so it isn't for a lack of stuff which could be used.
North America, sure but the Spanish had multiple colonies in the Caribbean by the 1510's.
And for space there has been Skylab, Mir, and the ISS, as well as a Chinese station soon to come on line and some stuff that Bigelow Aerospace is going to throw up into space once some other companies get their act together to be able to send passengers into orbit.
A much better analogy might have been what the Polynesians had to do when they sent people to Hawaii for permanent settlement. Taking a leap of faith going thousands of miles across the ocean with nothing more than a canoe guided by the stars hauling pigs, chickens, and children. THAT took real nerves of steel and determination to make it work.
I thought it was one drunk guy inventing warp drive with some old rocket parts and a timely fly-by by some pointy-eared Aliens that helped us to grow up as a species....
You forgot the part when all of the lawyers and politicians of the world were killed in a mass genocide based on occupation. That sort of makes it easier for Cochraine to build his little project in an abandoned nuclear missile silo.
I don't think he was saying "Don't even try" he was saying "Stop thinking that it's a realistic plan to save yourself from the rather disturbing consequences of constant growth". He was also pointing out that it's not realistic to compare it to early earth migrations/settlement because the differences in difficulty are orders of magnitude.
Compared with the knowledge of the universe, the level of technology, the tools we have available to us, and the raw resources we can bring to bear upon the problem, I would dare say that the ability to travel to Mars and build a thriving and successful independent civilization upon that planet is orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than it was for sailors traveling from England to enable a mass migration to establish an independent civilization in Australia. I completely disagree with your premise here.
Using ordinary physics with perhaps a new breakthrough in power sources from something like nuclear fusion, but even perhaps with Thorium nuclear reactors in a power plant, it is certainly possible to build spacecraft that can travel from the Earth to Mars in under a month... a couple of months if you are being even more conservative. A round trip to Pluto can be had in under a year. Yes, those aren't with Hohmann transfer orbits, but we don't send most passengers and high value cargo on slow moving freight trains either.
The difficulty in terms of getting into space is a solved problem. It isn't like it was at the beginning of the 20th Century when there was some very real question as to if people could get into space.... we can. We know how it can be done, and the trick at the moment is to make it more economical to do so.
Going on fuel costs alone, the price for a "ticket" into space for somebody to send a metric ton into orbit (i.e. a person, plus their personal baggage, plus life support & food) is presumed at the moment to be something on the order of about $100 million if you believe NASA figures and how much it cost to operate the Space Shuttle and how much the SLS program is going to cost sending an astronaut into space. Space Adventures currently is charging about $30 million if you simply want to pluck down the money on the table... and they are hardly being competitive at that price and openly admit the problem is the people who are offering the rides. The problem here is that the cost of going into space isn't the fuel, but the cost of the rocket + the cost of the engineering to make that rocket.
My point is that it isn't nearly as difficult as everybody is trying to make it out to be. Traveling across oceans for months at a time using 16th Century technology was just as dangerous, complex and expensive, perhaps even more so. Yet the migrations happened.
This said, I agree that there will some concerns about what is happening here on the Earth. In spite of people living in space and developing civilizations on other planets, there still will be people living on the Earth, perhaps for thousands or even millions of years. There still are people living in Europe, in spite of a huge mass migration of people away from Europe in the past 500 years or so. Those that stayed needed to deal with the resources of the land that existed at the time, but you can't deny the benefits for those who remained in terms of what they received in terms of trade and new ideas from those who migrated. It certainly is not a zero sum game. In this regards, our experience with other previous migration experiences is precisely something we can compare, as I think those who reject that experience forget how difficult such earlier journeys really were.
But humans can't leave Earth. We ARE Earth.
While I'll agree with at least the general sentiment that you are expressing here in terms of the fact that we may, through natural selection and the history of our species, be bred to live here on the Earth. It is also important to note we are also the first multi-cellular species which has the potential of living somewhere other than on the Earth as well. The intelligence we possess and the technology we have developed as a species is specifically what gives us the ability to bring ourselves and many other species with us into space.
Besides, who says that the Earth is dying? Who says that the Earth must die before we even consider leaving? Who says that the bulk of humanity who remains here on the Earth even has to care what happens to somebody in a distant location? Who says that "other place" is even an Utopia at all, and what does that mean? The objections you are raising here make no sense and sounds self-loathing to me and shows a hatred to your own species. I do not believe that mankind is doomed to certain extinction in the not too distant future, even for those who choose to stay here on the Earth. Furthermore, all of the arguments "against" this simply are irrelevant regardless of what happens here on the Earth anyway, other than simply because you might be envious of those who take the leap to leave as you are too lazy to bother trying.
What I'm referring to here is simply the concept of liberty in its most raw and basic form. There have been people who have left the confines of the Earth and have done something as remarkable as those first brave souls who took the chance to get on a boat and sail beyond the horizon, using nothing but dead reckoning and looking at the stars for guidance to bring them back home. It is that big of a change. People were willing to leave home in the past and the islands of the sea are now the home for a great many people. People have moved from one place to another and now every continent on this planet is within the reach of even ordinary people. Certainly a determined ordinary person earning ordinary labor wages in most 1st world countries and even many 3rd world countries can (given a willing government that will let them or a government that will let them in) travel to any place in the world they please. It is only political considerations alone at the moment which prevent more freedom of movement on the Earth itself.
It is this same concept of liberty where people who wish to travel elsewhere should at least be given the chance to try, and I dare say it is political considerations alone which is preventing us from going elsewhere in the Solar System besides the Earth. If you want to hold a gun to my head and tell me or my children that we can't travel off of this planet, make sure you know full well what it is that you are saying here and why you are saying that. Also be prepared for some very pissed off people to be angry with you for holding that gun against my head and telling me that I can't leave.
We can leave the Earth because we are capable of doing that. Will you let me leave, if I want to do so on my own dime and using the resources I have gained from the fruits of my own labor?
Mankind already lives in what is largely an artificial environment, especially if you live in a big city.
The original settlement of Buena Vista, Alta California (before the days of the 1849 gold rush) died out to the very last person because there was insufficient water resources to sustain the village. Yet today in that same place there are millions of people and generations of inhabitants of that same region. The difference is that technology has brought in the water and transportation links have been able to provide both the food and other resources for a major city of the world to exist in an otherwise hostile environment.
There has been a more or less permanent "outpost" of humanity living at the South Pole for a great many years, where the environment is even more hostile to human survival. Some of them even reply on Slashdot from time to time, so it would be interesting to see what their perspective on this whole thing would be like.
As you are kind of indicating, there is a whole lot to learn about "closed systems" environments that would be needed for a long-term stay on another planet or for that matter anywhere else besides the Earth. We've learned quite a bit over the past 50 years with regards to Antarctica as well as in dealing with the ISS. The technologies needed to establish a permanent "base", much less a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or Mars may very well be a century or two away, and I'm not going to completely dismiss the challenges needed for doing that.
The problem I have with the main article as presented in this Slashdot post is that the author is more or less giving up and saying we shouldn't even bother trying. I think something is lost from the soul when somebody tells you that, particularly when they are willing to try on their own dime and just want to be allowed the chance to see if it could be done or not. It is like telling a kid they can never be an astronaut when they grow up, or that that a small kid in America can never grow up to become the President. Sure, the odds may be stacked against them heavily, but why shoot down dreams? Sometimes even the act of simply trying is enough to make a difference somewhere even if that attempt fails miserably.
I agree that the ability to move out into the solar system has been sidetracked. It has been a bit of a problem and mankind has pulled back from what we could be doing in terms of getting things done in space. The apparent retrenchment in the ability to travel into space isn't really accurate in the least and this guy really misses what is going on.
The Apollo missions were a highly focused goal that really pushed the limits of the technology available at the time, perhaps even pushing that technology to its breaking point as the Apollo 13 missions demonstrated very clearly. At best those could be compared to weekend camping trips. We learned a whole bunch about how to live and work in space on those trips that we also learned how tough it would be to go.
That said, the problem here is that we have been depending on "the government" to get us into space on Manhattan Project type "big science" expeditions, where those programs could be cut and abused because of political whims, graft, and corruption. All of that has happened and more with NASA. Had the NASA budget kept pace with the federal budget from the mid-1960's to today, there most certainly would be at least an outpost on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System like the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. One of the first missions of the "Apollo Applications Program" that was cut was a manned mission to Venus. A mission to Mars has been talked about since the Nixon administration. Getting "out there" has been in the cards, but the funding to make it happen hasn't been there primarily because the political will that got the Apollo program going ran out of steam.
Private spaceflight efforts, in other words private citizens trying to get into space on their own dime without subsidies from a government entity, has taken a long time to get going. There are established markets for commercial enterprises in space today, primarily concentrated at the moment in the form of telecommunications (including "satellite" television, mobile telephones, and other long-distance communication), navigation (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Compass, and others), remote sensing, cartography (Google Maps and others), and reconnaissance (both government and civilian). Add to that list is rapid point-to-point delivery and space tourism that is just beginning to open up. All of these are proven money-makers for those groups who wish to get involved with them and have also made life today much better because they exist as well.
Far from "we are never going to get into space", we are already there. We are just getting our toes out into the water, so to say, but the commercial development of space-based resources has steadily improved and now represents a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the hang-ups about getting more happening in space has been the cost of spaceflight. In other words, trying to find cheaper ways of getting stuff into space. When a 1 liter bottle of water costs $100,000 or more to send it into space, the economics of getting people into space for settlement simply don't work.
The fallacy in this article is the presumption that we simply can't get cheaper than $100,000/kg for putting stuff into space and that the cost of going into space is only going to go up. The reason that is currently the case is because the government, a