When the Challenger blew up, I was living in what could be charitably called a monastery and the first time I saw a picture of the explosion was about 3 months later... in another country on a newspaper in another language. Surprisingly, in spite of my "self-imposed" isolation I still heard about the incident within about 30 minutes of it happening, but it was by word of mouth alone. Somehow that didn't have the same impact upon me like television had for many people.
Oh, I knew about the "Teacher in Space" program and some of the issues surrounding the Shuttles as well, and I was a serious "space geek", but my first real introduction to what happened was when I read the official accident report in a public library after I "re-entered" normal life. Reading the words of Richard Feynman and the rest of the review board didn't make me sad... it made me angry instead how some stupid weenie was able to push hard and ignore the valid advise of skilled engineers who knew better and cost the lives of some very honorable people.
That perhaps is one reason why the "accident" of the Shuttle Columbia happened that my reaction was "oh no, not again!" I was simply pissed at the program managers at NASA to the point I couldn't even listen to what they were saying without thinking how much they screwed things up again.
I have subsequently met with and talked with engineers from Thiokol (now ATK) who were involved with the SRB development and their viewpoint is such that the whole thing should never have happened... and the rocket was launched without their blessings or support. Too bad nobody "important" paid attention to them.
Considering that North Korea is poised to have its leadership pass to the third generation of the same family with no other family or person being given consideration, I'd call that a monarchy even if it has the trappings of communism.
At least the Chinese and Russian style of communism allowed others to get into the top leadership roles, although admittedly even those countries had/have a sort of aristocracy. Still, it is possible to be the premier of China even now if you were born as an ordinary peasant/blue collar working class family and showed some promise and intelligence to rise within the party ranks to achieve the top spot. I'd say it is almost as easy to do that as it is to be from an ordinary background and become President of the USA.
That certainly isn't the case in North Korea or some of the other countries cited here, where clearly they are trying to re-establish monarchies after a fashion. In some cases, these "dictatorships" are stronger than some of the ancient monarchies that existed previously in those same countries.
I don't think I've misplaced a decimal point here. All I'm saying is that if anything is going to the Moon that spending a couple million dollars as a side project to demonstrate He-3 extraction would certainly be worth the effort. That would be a small rover that could be tele-operated from the Earth which could do some prospecting/demonstration extraction.
BTW, I think you also misplace the quantity that is being extracted currently from nuclear warheads and other nuclear projects at the moment. Yes, there are some sources for this particular isotope, but it is still valuable and has other applications if it were available in volume that currently aren't available right now.
There are several groups with the Google Lunar X-Prize that are going to the Moon who are planning on spending just a couple million dollars for the effort to get there, and the cost of spaceflight on the whole has been dropping more than you realize. I'm not saying that it is cheap, but certainly a trip to the Moon doesn't require billions except in the bloated cost-plus government contracts that aren't really trying to be cost-effective anyway.
Oh yeah, there is an effort by Space Adventures to go to the Moon with some space tourists. I give it less than a decade before Apollo 8 is duplicated with private spacecraft, but I'll leave that to your wild imaginations as to if that seems a little too fantastic.
Not that I'm disputing the fact that some people in America (myself included from time to time in my life) are in a situation where they involuntarily were prohibited from eating a square meal due to economic circumstances and not just poor planning (such as blowing the wad of money they had on alcohol, drugs, porn, or some other "pleasure" in life)... I am curious how you arrived at the figure of 10 million people?
Also, 10 million out of a country of 300 million is pretty good, and as a percentage of my life that I've lived in poverty and hunger would make me rather typical and average. Generally I haven't had to worry too hard about at least being able to take care of myself and finding a meal for tomorrow isn't usually an issue unless I'm simply new to an area... usually in an attempt to try and make a better life for myself too. Generally that is using only something in terms of "qualifications" that amount to only a high school diploma with an eagerness to stick with the job.
Sometimes the circumstances of life simply beat down upon you, and I've been able to know several homeless people on a first hand basis where I do know there are some people who are genuinely down on their luck in a bad way. Some do keep shooting themselves in the foot in a figurative manner too, but I don't think life is really all that bad in America even for the abject poor and needy.
I've also spent some time in Brazil and worked in the favellas where I met some incredible people, and some poverty that makes anything I've ever seen in the worst neighborhoods in America look like a paradise by comparison. I will declare that the poor in America do live like kings compared to a great many other places in the world where poverty is genuine and the ability to feed yourself isn't a matter of personal choice but rather that there isn't any opportunity at all to improve your lot in life... where you can't even steal the food for survival.
I insist that the problem is not the concept of a corporation, but rather the nature of a typical corporation. Most of them have a clause that either is or approximates the following sentence in their corporate charters:
"The purpose of this corporation is to maximize profits and to increase shareholder equity."
That is well and good by itself, but I believe that kind of corporation is by itself evil through and through. There are no morals to that statement, as it simply means that all possible means to increase profits are explicitly a goal, and indeed any effort to consider any other goal or objective is contrary to the mission of such a corporation or organization.
If you want to know why companies are psychopaths, it is because of this very statement. Having a laser focus on just profits at the cost of anything else in humanity is one way to permanently corrupt your soul and to be cold and calculating on everything including life itself, where a life has a value that can be coldly calculated as being cost-effective to lose. Neither life, liberty, nor personal property are respected under such objectives.
People usually aren't so focused on such things, as there usually does reach a point that some things simply don't have a price or out of basic principles and respect for others that they won't perform certain actions. They have a "life purpose" that isn't to maximize profits.
There are companies who don't have this statement in their corporate charters, and I'll note that those companies who don't are usually much more ethical companies. "Don't be evil" is a good corporate motto in that sense and it is something that as a corporation Google at least strives for after a fashion. In other words, there is something of a moral fabric to that particular company. Some companies such as Ben & Jerry's have a corporate charter that is much more explicit about giving back to the community and the world in general.
It is possible to make a profit and not exploit every possible opportunity where a profit can be made, out of the interest of being a moral and just organization. What is sad is that few people insist upon either changing corporate charters to reflect that viewpoint or to insist upon other founding principles when establishing a responsible company.
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How we know the distance to Betelguese is due to Stellar Parallax and other stellar distance measurement systems that use the parallax as a baseline. This is a system of measurement that is roughly the same what is used for surveying land using a compass and a transit, but applied to astronomical object.
The point is not that the light is so old but that the star is so far away that based upon our understanding of physics that it would take about 600 years (give or take some.... the number isn't exact) for that light to reach the Earth. Quite literally, Betelguese is "600 light years" or the distance that light takes 600 years to travel at 300,000 km/second before it gets to the Earth. If you prefer to use kilometers, miles, or furlongs for measurement I can do the unit conversion but when dealing with those kind of distances it is much more convenient to stick with either parsecs or lightyears as a distance measurement.
BTW, Betelguese is actually a "close" star in a broad sense, considering that the nearest stars to the Earth besides the Sun are about 4-5 light years away. It is still far enough away that even stellar parallax is not really working well and needs other ways to measure the distance, but "roughly 600 light years" is a good approximation. The main Wikipedia article goes into more detail specific to this star.
As for the other factors you are putting into there, the main thing is to point out the Einstein described that the speed of light is constant in all directions from all points of view. In terms of getting into the esoteric philosophical minutiae, you can plow yourself into metaphysics if you want to that is to me more like contemplating the existence of your belly button and what implication it might have if it is missing from your abdomen. Compared to the speed of light and the uncertainty of the measurement of the distance to this star, worrying about minor tweaks that could distort the distance measurement in this fashion is irrational and not worth the effort of refuting or even acknowledging.
The problem is that the "singularity" of a black hole is very nearly fiction on the same order as anything else.... which is why slamming the guy really is more like the pot calling the kettle black. It is a nice fiction so far as it simplifies the physics equations, but we really don't know what happens once a black hole forms and what happens to the mass at that point.
Because of the simplification of the equations and because at the moment no known "pressure" can be presumed in terms of what happens to sustain any size of an object where its radius is slightly smaller than the event horizon, the fiction is a good way to think about the issue. Still, it is fiction none the less and only applies for the convenience of the physicists who are trying to deal with astronomical bodies of that nature.
It is that reason why I suggest you can't really describe anything other than the event horizon as a physical characteristic of a black hole.
On a small scale? Yes, I do think there is some merit to mining lunar soil to extract He3 as a way to jump start a Lunar colony. It wouldn't be useful in terms of a massive processing facility like was sort of depicted on the movie "Avatar" by James Cameron in terms of an extra-terrestrial mining facility with trillions of dollars invested, but spending several million dollars on a small scale to "prove" the viability of extracting He-3 would certainly be of some benefit.
The best practical application of He-3 at the moment is as a refrigerant for very cold cryogenics, as He-3 has the lowest boiling point for any known substance... even lower than He-4. That counts for a whole lot and if you are dealing with temperatures just a degree or two above absolute zero, every little bit helps a whole lot. Paying $100k/kg or more is certainly something worth doing in that application.
The size of a black hole is defined by its event horizon radius, so in this sense it isn't "infinitely dense", but rather has a defined mass and volume. It still is very high density even with that definition. What happens to matter when it gets inside of the event horizon is simply undefined by current physics although it is something fun to speculate about by physicists.
There has been some science fiction that speculates about what happens inside a black hole and postulates the idea that essentially an entire universe can exist inside. Frederick Pohl with his Gateway series of books explores that idea in depth where entire solar systems were "pulled inside" of a black hole, yet remained habitable for sentient beings to continue to live on those planets... inside of a black hole. I think it is from such science fiction that the original grandparent was posting.
As to if such a thing is possible, I simply can't say. First define the physics of something that can't be defined because any measurement of that "thing" requires information traveling faster than the speed of light.
It will take centuries or longer and deliberate effort to simply exceed the mass that is accumulating on both the Moon and the Earth in terms of mass that is coming to these bodies from meteors and other debris already in space.
Seriously, of the things to worry about, this has got to be near the bottom of the list of things that will be any sort of problem. There are certainly many, many other problems like the heat death of the Universe to worry about first.
He-2 may not be as impossible as you are suggesting, even though I agree that the binding energy between two protons is such that it would have an extremely short half-life.
As for any stable elements with triple digit atomic numbers, I'll leave that to science fiction writers.
It has been speculated that the Moon may have a Peak of Eternal Light that may be able to accomplish this task rather well. I'm sure there are other applications here, but such a system certainly could work rather well. Oxygen happens to be a rather abundant element on the Moon (bound chemically to the rocks), which would make an interesting gas for such a system. Pure oxygen under pressure, however, does sound at least a little dangerous.
It would be interesting to see if there were some substantive quantities of hydrocarbons on the Moon, and it might be some interesting proving ground for abiotic origins of petroleum if there might be petroleum reserves on the Moon. At the moment we simply don't know if that even might be an option on the Moon. It would prove to be useful for a number of things if found though, particularly in terms of harvesting hydrogen from petroleum and having a practical source of carbon.
In other words, it isn't nearly as far fetched as it may seem, although it wouldn't be useful in term of shipping it to the Earth.
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon, but I suspect companies such as Weyland-Yutani may find it a worth while exercise for research purposes.
Oh, really?
Helium-3 has been noted as one element found within the lunar regolith that is not only worth while, but profitable in terms of export from the Moon to return to the Earth. I'll admit that its primary purpose would be as a fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, but it does have other uses particularly for cyrogenic research as it turns out that particular isotope is one of the coldest known liquids in terms of its boiling point... something useful if you want to cool something down to a very low temperature. As such, it is an excellent refrigerant for a freezer that goes down to less than 10 Kelvin. It has some other uses too, but that is its primary application at the moment beside fusion research. It is also an isotope that is incredibly rare on the Earth and thus very expensive to produce.
Other more practical applications of lunar regolith is to use it as a gravel base for cement. This I'll admit has applications mainly on the Moon itself in terms of construction materials to make facilities, but it is a legitimate application that can be very beneficial and is certainly cheap compared to bringing materials from the Earth. A parabolic mirror can sinter the regolith into essentially bricks.... plus extract some needed oxygen and other trace gasses in the process. I'd call that very useful, even if bringing those bricks back to the Earth would only be souvenirs at best.
While it is admittedly a small market, there is also a market for simply having "Moon rocks" as something exotic, and I think there will continue to be at least some sort of market for that for awhile by space fans.
The one nice thing about the "bedrooms" in the ISS is that they are completely private. The other parts of the ISS do have cameras and other "big brother" aspects where ground control can monitor what is going on.... for generally pretty good reasons too. There are places like the Progress vehicles that generally don't have interior cameras, as well as the logistics modules like the Leonardo... but those also contain supplies or trash. I suppose if you want to feel dirty....
Crew size is still at 3 people right now, as the main problem is trying to be able to evacuate everybody from the station in an emergency. A Soyuz capsule can stay in orbit (hence attached to the ISS) for between six months to little more than a year. The Space Shuttle is limited to about 30-45 days in orbit (presuming that the Shuttle orbiter minimizes energy consumption by drawing power directly from the ISS rather than from fuel cells). While the ISS itself can support more than six people on a temporary basis and in theory it can support six people on an indefinite basis, all that implies is that the overlap between crews doesn't have to be rushed... where they certainly can do some projects that might require more crew members. It still remains a crew of 3 often enough that it can be considered the current crew size at the moment.
Most of these guys & gals who go up to the ISS are older and married, or those who are single usually have outside relationships too. Considering the easiest way to become an astronaut is to have a PhD with some post-grad work of distinction, that sort of puts a pretty tough minimum age for a typical astronaut and represents a certain level of maturity that limits the kind of experimentation for sexual activities that is more common with undergrads or kids in high school. Think about it. Many astronauts can move from NASA to a major university after doing a stint as an astronaut to become a full professor directly rather than having to mess with the tenure fight... as they usually have plenty of publications and usually bring plenty of distinction to the university that grabs them. Being known as the gigolo of spaceflight doesn't really help an astronaut if that word got out.
The gravity on Mars won't be the same. The hours of daylight.... while similar to the Earth are going to be slightly different. Trace mineral concentrations are going to be different for Martian soil. Dangers to people living on Mars are also going to be different in terms of "natural disasters" that could happen. Hurricanes, tsunamis, thunder storms, tornadoes, and perhaps even things like earthquakes and volcanoes are things that won't be seen on Mars, but there will be other phenomena that will happen on Mars that will definitely not be "Earth-like".
Yes, I do realize that volcanoes exist on Mars, but they are fairly dormant. It would be news indeed if a volcano was to erupt on Mars... so that would be an excellent question to study in terms of how "areologically speaking" (as opposed to geologically speaking) the interior of Mars shows activity. From first glance, it appears to be dead, but then again everybody thought the Cascade range of the Pacific North-west of North America was geologically dead too.
Of significance too is that the air pressure on Mars is likely to be different than that of the Earth, even in the habitats. While oxygen and CO2 levels will have to be maintained, it seems to be silly to include other elements of the Earth's atmosphere like Nitrogen and Argon unless they are really necessary, at least at first.
The question here is in terms of how many generations it took to develop Sherpas with these genetic traits. It certainly didn't happen in just one generation, at least I find it highly unlikely that the first groups of people living in the environment where the Sherpas live to have adapted immediately with their kids.
The Sherpas were also in an isolated environment that was generally spared the ravages of warfare common to other parts of the world, thus they also were able to develop these traits without having the local gene pool get "contaminated" with people from other parts of the world.
In terms of Martians (humans living on Mars), I highly doubt that the isolation is going to happen unless there is a nuclear war on the Earth that also halts interplanetary spaceflight for several generations. I suppose that is also a possibility, but that is also strongly in the realm of science fiction and not something that should be expected except as a remote contingency plan.
Not that extra-marital sex is necessarily a problem either, but there has been at least one married couple who have been into space together too. That said, most of the shuttle flights are so hectic that getting a chance to snuggle usually isn't in the cards.
Sex on the ISS, on the other hand, may be a bit more likely and there certainly have been some opportunities so to say. On the other hand, the general population that has been up there has been for the most part rather small.... usually just three people most of the time. They have also been older folks with previous commitments and selected for their serious nature. In other words they aren't young folks with raging hormones and a strong desire to mate with any available opportunity. Those astronauts are also quite busy and usually have their schedules nailed down to the minute for many operations. There is some "down time" for personal pet projects or for R&R, but even that is rather strongly programmed.
With 10 years of opportunity, however, to say that it has never happened at all even on just one occasion seems to be a stretch of the imagination. The "personal bunkers" (essentially the size of a walk-in closet but intended as the "bedrooms" for the permanent astronauts) are large enough to fit at least two people into them.
The end of the road is here for tax & spend programs. America simply can't spend its way out of financial problems like it could in the past... in part because there were some intelligent people who explicitly set up "rainy day funds" that could be exploited if there was an emergency. Those are now exhausted but the idiots who keep spending the money on foolish things think there is an endless supply of money, forgetting what exactly money really is in the first place for the most part.
I'm not afraid about the collapse of the idea of America, but I do think there are some very hard times ahead and Americans will take it on the chin in the near future in a way that is going to get downright ugly. This is of concern for the rest of the world too because any such collapse of the American Republic will have disasterous long-terms consequences for the rest of the world too. Indeed I dare say that there won't be a person untouched by it in the rest of the world, in a substantial and negative manner.
The stakes are high, and I consider what is happening with NASA only a manifestation of the problems, not the actual disease. Fixing NASA isn't going to solve the problems facing the rest of America. If you think NASA is being foolish with its money, that is only because you have a clue about what it is that they are doing. Other federal departments and federal programs are by far and away much worse but usually able to hide the corruption as NASA has to be able to follow the laws of physics from time to time... something that is hard to fake.
Let's be very clear, this is to make sure that Senator Orrin Hatch can bring the bacon home to Utah. His last campaign was pretty much "vote for me! Bringing the bacon home to Utah since 1976!" He is also in campaign mode because he is going up for re-election in 2012 and already has some people in his own party nipping on his heels to kick him out if he makes a big mistake (to the Utah voters).
Senator Shelby of Alabama is another of the usual suspects, as are a few others in various places. It isn't a mistake that the Johnson Space Center got the name of the most famous fairy-god senator for the space program: Lyndon B. Johnson.
I guess it all ends up being about bread and circuses... the final downfall of any democracy.
The politicians aren't telling the rocket engineers how to engineer the next ship. They're producing a set of basic guiding principles for the design process so that they get a design that meets their requirements and does so with a minimum of cost overruns (maybe). It's more like management telling software engineers that they need to pay attention to security or spend this release cycle focusing on performance. They aren't telling software engineers how to write specific lines of code (and shouldn't, because they aren't programmers), but rather they are giving the software engineers an overarching plan that their code needs to fit into.
I wish it was how you described everything. Unfortunately Congress is telling them to use certain suppliers, that certain engine parts, explicitly specified in the law, must be used and even going into some depth about how the rocket should be put together.
What is really happening here is that the companies who are trying to build this rocket are trying to help write the RFP in such a way that only one company could possibly qualify for the contract. Unfortunately for the usual "old space" companies (Boeing, Lock-Mart, ATK) they now have a whole bunch of competition from a bunch or relative new companies who are just as capable of putting something into orbit as these more traditional rocket builders. Companies like Orbital Science and SpaceX can meet almost any general sort of guideline set up for a contract, and are offering to sell the rockets on a cash & carry basis rather than a research cost-plus contract too.
As a result, the only way that these companies can be assured of getting the contract is to have Congress do the actual engineering. Well, it isn't them but rather the companies who have cozy lobbyist relationships with the congressmen involved, but the net effect is that the full design layout is being put into law in an attempt to lock out the competition. And as a result it is getting to the absurd point that in effect you have Congress literally "engineering" the rocket via law rather than simply giving the broad guidelines for how it is to be built and letting the engineers do what they know how to do: make things.
It is political corruption at its most blatant, but then again that has been business as usual for many decades. The unfortunate thing is that it has to be so raw as to be smacking the heads of everybody involved in terms of what is going on now.
We need to think of Mars as we would any other colony. Yes, the technical hurdles may be more extreme than getting a wooden boat from Europe to the New World, but at the time, the risk of colonists to the Americas was still pretty high.
I would argue that the technological hurdles for going to Mars are actually fewer and our knowledge of the things necessary to get to Mars and thrive there is by far and away much better than the Europeans had by travel via wooden sail ships in the 13th Century.
I also don't want to dismiss the technological leap that was to build trans-oceanic watercraft, as that really was a huge deal in the 13th Century too. Between the concepts of oceanic sailing ships, joint-stock corporations, the printing press, improved timekeeping and navigation devices, firearms, and knowledge of physics and chemistry such as a basic understanding of electro-magnetic radiation all contributed substantially to the ability to make an intercontinental colonization voyage. Compared to even a couple hundred years earlier, those in the 13th Century were really masters of their domain and it showed when they made contact with the peoples already in America.
We know quite a bit about Mars, at least in terms of initial surveys and a basic understanding of the geography once we might get there. The ability to build a vehicle capable of getting to Mars and assure a 90%+ likelihood of survival to get there (much better odds than the early sailors had crossing the Atlantic prior to the 18th Century) certainly can be assured.
The real trick in terms of getting to Mars is to simply be able to afford the journey in the first place. My argument there is that once people are out and about in the Solar System, it will take deliberate actions on the part of the governments of this world to keep people from going to Mars. I'm sure that when there are some millionaires who are living in Bigelow habitats on a full-time basis, somebody is going to venture beyond LEO and likely will be heading to places like Mars too. I predict that regardless of any government program to get people to Mars, there will be people going that way on their own dime within this century.
I've also predicted that the first NASA astronauts landing on Mars will be covered live by CNN camera crews that got there ahead of time to "cover" the historic occasion. That may also be true about any return to the Moon.
You are going to know that you have a self-sustaining environment within a month or two. Any long-term issues will be something related more to nutrition. Knowing what trace elements may be needed for survival is a bit more of a complex issue. There certainly is going to need to be some major study to see just how it might be an issue.
In terms of "simulating" a Mars-like environment, I think it would be incredibly useful to build a space station of roughly the size of the ISS that would be built in a way to have "simulated gravity" where at least some parts of the station would have an acceleration vector equivalent to Mars gravity. There even was a module that was scheduled to be put onto the ISS that would do just that, but congress in their infinite wisdom decided to cut funding to the flight (not the module itself... which still exists and is in a crate ready to go up) and can that whole research line.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that kids be made within the first year or so, but there is no need for a self-limiting situation like waiting for 100 people to maintain a strong genetic pool or some other such nonsense. More importantly, we need to know what to expect before we get to Mars, and there certainly are some sane and rational things that can be done for legitimate scientific inquiry that are not being done at the moment which can and indeed ought to be used for any planning for going to Mars.
I'll say it again, much of what is getting done in terms of planning for a trip to Mars is based upon Science Fiction, not science fact. Until that changes, I don't think anybody should be going there at all... and it is stuff that can and to me I think should be done right now. It certainly is scientific research that doesn't necessarily have to wait until we get people on the surface of Mars. My fear is that the research will happen on Mars, using people as guinea pigs, because emotional factors are being done instead of thinking things ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
When the Challenger blew up, I was living in what could be charitably called a monastery and the first time I saw a picture of the explosion was about 3 months later... in another country on a newspaper in another language. Surprisingly, in spite of my "self-imposed" isolation I still heard about the incident within about 30 minutes of it happening, but it was by word of mouth alone. Somehow that didn't have the same impact upon me like television had for many people.
Oh, I knew about the "Teacher in Space" program and some of the issues surrounding the Shuttles as well, and I was a serious "space geek", but my first real introduction to what happened was when I read the official accident report in a public library after I "re-entered" normal life. Reading the words of Richard Feynman and the rest of the review board didn't make me sad... it made me angry instead how some stupid weenie was able to push hard and ignore the valid advise of skilled engineers who knew better and cost the lives of some very honorable people.
That perhaps is one reason why the "accident" of the Shuttle Columbia happened that my reaction was "oh no, not again!" I was simply pissed at the program managers at NASA to the point I couldn't even listen to what they were saying without thinking how much they screwed things up again.
I have subsequently met with and talked with engineers from Thiokol (now ATK) who were involved with the SRB development and their viewpoint is such that the whole thing should never have happened... and the rocket was launched without their blessings or support. Too bad nobody "important" paid attention to them.
Considering that North Korea is poised to have its leadership pass to the third generation of the same family with no other family or person being given consideration, I'd call that a monarchy even if it has the trappings of communism.
At least the Chinese and Russian style of communism allowed others to get into the top leadership roles, although admittedly even those countries had/have a sort of aristocracy. Still, it is possible to be the premier of China even now if you were born as an ordinary peasant/blue collar working class family and showed some promise and intelligence to rise within the party ranks to achieve the top spot. I'd say it is almost as easy to do that as it is to be from an ordinary background and become President of the USA.
That certainly isn't the case in North Korea or some of the other countries cited here, where clearly they are trying to re-establish monarchies after a fashion. In some cases, these "dictatorships" are stronger than some of the ancient monarchies that existed previously in those same countries.
I don't think I've misplaced a decimal point here. All I'm saying is that if anything is going to the Moon that spending a couple million dollars as a side project to demonstrate He-3 extraction would certainly be worth the effort. That would be a small rover that could be tele-operated from the Earth which could do some prospecting/demonstration extraction.
BTW, I think you also misplace the quantity that is being extracted currently from nuclear warheads and other nuclear projects at the moment. Yes, there are some sources for this particular isotope, but it is still valuable and has other applications if it were available in volume that currently aren't available right now.
There are several groups with the Google Lunar X-Prize that are going to the Moon who are planning on spending just a couple million dollars for the effort to get there, and the cost of spaceflight on the whole has been dropping more than you realize. I'm not saying that it is cheap, but certainly a trip to the Moon doesn't require billions except in the bloated cost-plus government contracts that aren't really trying to be cost-effective anyway.
Oh yeah, there is an effort by Space Adventures to go to the Moon with some space tourists. I give it less than a decade before Apollo 8 is duplicated with private spacecraft, but I'll leave that to your wild imaginations as to if that seems a little too fantastic.
Not that I'm disputing the fact that some people in America (myself included from time to time in my life) are in a situation where they involuntarily were prohibited from eating a square meal due to economic circumstances and not just poor planning (such as blowing the wad of money they had on alcohol, drugs, porn, or some other "pleasure" in life)... I am curious how you arrived at the figure of 10 million people?
Also, 10 million out of a country of 300 million is pretty good, and as a percentage of my life that I've lived in poverty and hunger would make me rather typical and average. Generally I haven't had to worry too hard about at least being able to take care of myself and finding a meal for tomorrow isn't usually an issue unless I'm simply new to an area... usually in an attempt to try and make a better life for myself too. Generally that is using only something in terms of "qualifications" that amount to only a high school diploma with an eagerness to stick with the job.
Sometimes the circumstances of life simply beat down upon you, and I've been able to know several homeless people on a first hand basis where I do know there are some people who are genuinely down on their luck in a bad way. Some do keep shooting themselves in the foot in a figurative manner too, but I don't think life is really all that bad in America even for the abject poor and needy.
I've also spent some time in Brazil and worked in the favellas where I met some incredible people, and some poverty that makes anything I've ever seen in the worst neighborhoods in America look like a paradise by comparison. I will declare that the poor in America do live like kings compared to a great many other places in the world where poverty is genuine and the ability to feed yourself isn't a matter of personal choice but rather that there isn't any opportunity at all to improve your lot in life... where you can't even steal the food for survival.
I insist that the problem is not the concept of a corporation, but rather the nature of a typical corporation. Most of them have a clause that either is or approximates the following sentence in their corporate charters:
That is well and good by itself, but I believe that kind of corporation is by itself evil through and through. There are no morals to that statement, as it simply means that all possible means to increase profits are explicitly a goal, and indeed any effort to consider any other goal or objective is contrary to the mission of such a corporation or organization.
If you want to know why companies are psychopaths, it is because of this very statement. Having a laser focus on just profits at the cost of anything else in humanity is one way to permanently corrupt your soul and to be cold and calculating on everything including life itself, where a life has a value that can be coldly calculated as being cost-effective to lose. Neither life, liberty, nor personal property are respected under such objectives.
People usually aren't so focused on such things, as there usually does reach a point that some things simply don't have a price or out of basic principles and respect for others that they won't perform certain actions. They have a "life purpose" that isn't to maximize profits.
There are companies who don't have this statement in their corporate charters, and I'll note that those companies who don't are usually much more ethical companies. "Don't be evil" is a good corporate motto in that sense and it is something that as a corporation Google at least strives for after a fashion. In other words, there is something of a moral fabric to that particular company. Some companies such as Ben & Jerry's have a corporate charter that is much more explicit about giving back to the community and the world in general.
It is possible to make a profit and not exploit every possible opportunity where a profit can be made, out of the interest of being a moral and just organization. What is sad is that few people insist upon either changing corporate charters to reflect that viewpoint or to insist upon other founding principles when establishing a responsible company.
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How we know the distance to Betelguese is due to Stellar Parallax and other stellar distance measurement systems that use the parallax as a baseline. This is a system of measurement that is roughly the same what is used for surveying land using a compass and a transit, but applied to astronomical object.
The point is not that the light is so old but that the star is so far away that based upon our understanding of physics that it would take about 600 years (give or take some.... the number isn't exact) for that light to reach the Earth. Quite literally, Betelguese is "600 light years" or the distance that light takes 600 years to travel at 300,000 km/second before it gets to the Earth. If you prefer to use kilometers, miles, or furlongs for measurement I can do the unit conversion but when dealing with those kind of distances it is much more convenient to stick with either parsecs or lightyears as a distance measurement.
BTW, Betelguese is actually a "close" star in a broad sense, considering that the nearest stars to the Earth besides the Sun are about 4-5 light years away. It is still far enough away that even stellar parallax is not really working well and needs other ways to measure the distance, but "roughly 600 light years" is a good approximation. The main Wikipedia article goes into more detail specific to this star.
As for the other factors you are putting into there, the main thing is to point out the Einstein described that the speed of light is constant in all directions from all points of view. In terms of getting into the esoteric philosophical minutiae, you can plow yourself into metaphysics if you want to that is to me more like contemplating the existence of your belly button and what implication it might have if it is missing from your abdomen. Compared to the speed of light and the uncertainty of the measurement of the distance to this star, worrying about minor tweaks that could distort the distance measurement in this fashion is irrational and not worth the effort of refuting or even acknowledging.
The problem is that the "singularity" of a black hole is very nearly fiction on the same order as anything else.... which is why slamming the guy really is more like the pot calling the kettle black. It is a nice fiction so far as it simplifies the physics equations, but we really don't know what happens once a black hole forms and what happens to the mass at that point.
Because of the simplification of the equations and because at the moment no known "pressure" can be presumed in terms of what happens to sustain any size of an object where its radius is slightly smaller than the event horizon, the fiction is a good way to think about the issue. Still, it is fiction none the less and only applies for the convenience of the physicists who are trying to deal with astronomical bodies of that nature.
It is that reason why I suggest you can't really describe anything other than the event horizon as a physical characteristic of a black hole.
On a small scale? Yes, I do think there is some merit to mining lunar soil to extract He3 as a way to jump start a Lunar colony. It wouldn't be useful in terms of a massive processing facility like was sort of depicted on the movie "Avatar" by James Cameron in terms of an extra-terrestrial mining facility with trillions of dollars invested, but spending several million dollars on a small scale to "prove" the viability of extracting He-3 would certainly be of some benefit.
The best practical application of He-3 at the moment is as a refrigerant for very cold cryogenics, as He-3 has the lowest boiling point for any known substance... even lower than He-4. That counts for a whole lot and if you are dealing with temperatures just a degree or two above absolute zero, every little bit helps a whole lot. Paying $100k/kg or more is certainly something worth doing in that application.
The size of a black hole is defined by its event horizon radius, so in this sense it isn't "infinitely dense", but rather has a defined mass and volume. It still is very high density even with that definition. What happens to matter when it gets inside of the event horizon is simply undefined by current physics although it is something fun to speculate about by physicists.
There has been some science fiction that speculates about what happens inside a black hole and postulates the idea that essentially an entire universe can exist inside. Frederick Pohl with his Gateway series of books explores that idea in depth where entire solar systems were "pulled inside" of a black hole, yet remained habitable for sentient beings to continue to live on those planets... inside of a black hole. I think it is from such science fiction that the original grandparent was posting.
As to if such a thing is possible, I simply can't say. First define the physics of something that can't be defined because any measurement of that "thing" requires information traveling faster than the speed of light.
It will take centuries or longer and deliberate effort to simply exceed the mass that is accumulating on both the Moon and the Earth in terms of mass that is coming to these bodies from meteors and other debris already in space.
Seriously, of the things to worry about, this has got to be near the bottom of the list of things that will be any sort of problem. There are certainly many, many other problems like the heat death of the Universe to worry about first.
That would be the Crater of Eternal Darkness, but otherwise spot on.
It does have a mythical feel to that name, doesn't it?
He-2 may not be as impossible as you are suggesting, even though I agree that the binding energy between two protons is such that it would have an extremely short half-life.
As for any stable elements with triple digit atomic numbers, I'll leave that to science fiction writers.
It has been speculated that the Moon may have a Peak of Eternal Light that may be able to accomplish this task rather well. I'm sure there are other applications here, but such a system certainly could work rather well. Oxygen happens to be a rather abundant element on the Moon (bound chemically to the rocks), which would make an interesting gas for such a system. Pure oxygen under pressure, however, does sound at least a little dangerous.
It would be interesting to see if there were some substantive quantities of hydrocarbons on the Moon, and it might be some interesting proving ground for abiotic origins of petroleum if there might be petroleum reserves on the Moon. At the moment we simply don't know if that even might be an option on the Moon. It would prove to be useful for a number of things if found though, particularly in terms of harvesting hydrogen from petroleum and having a practical source of carbon.
In other words, it isn't nearly as far fetched as it may seem, although it wouldn't be useful in term of shipping it to the Earth.
You do realize that there are industrial and scientific applications for He-3 besides nuclear fusion?
There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon, but I suspect companies such as Weyland-Yutani may find it a worth while exercise for research purposes.
Oh, really?
Helium-3 has been noted as one element found within the lunar regolith that is not only worth while, but profitable in terms of export from the Moon to return to the Earth. I'll admit that its primary purpose would be as a fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, but it does have other uses particularly for cyrogenic research as it turns out that particular isotope is one of the coldest known liquids in terms of its boiling point... something useful if you want to cool something down to a very low temperature. As such, it is an excellent refrigerant for a freezer that goes down to less than 10 Kelvin. It has some other uses too, but that is its primary application at the moment beside fusion research. It is also an isotope that is incredibly rare on the Earth and thus very expensive to produce.
Other more practical applications of lunar regolith is to use it as a gravel base for cement. This I'll admit has applications mainly on the Moon itself in terms of construction materials to make facilities, but it is a legitimate application that can be very beneficial and is certainly cheap compared to bringing materials from the Earth. A parabolic mirror can sinter the regolith into essentially bricks.... plus extract some needed oxygen and other trace gasses in the process. I'd call that very useful, even if bringing those bricks back to the Earth would only be souvenirs at best.
While it is admittedly a small market, there is also a market for simply having "Moon rocks" as something exotic, and I think there will continue to be at least some sort of market for that for awhile by space fans.
The one nice thing about the "bedrooms" in the ISS is that they are completely private. The other parts of the ISS do have cameras and other "big brother" aspects where ground control can monitor what is going on.... for generally pretty good reasons too. There are places like the Progress vehicles that generally don't have interior cameras, as well as the logistics modules like the Leonardo... but those also contain supplies or trash. I suppose if you want to feel dirty....
Crew size is still at 3 people right now, as the main problem is trying to be able to evacuate everybody from the station in an emergency. A Soyuz capsule can stay in orbit (hence attached to the ISS) for between six months to little more than a year. The Space Shuttle is limited to about 30-45 days in orbit (presuming that the Shuttle orbiter minimizes energy consumption by drawing power directly from the ISS rather than from fuel cells). While the ISS itself can support more than six people on a temporary basis and in theory it can support six people on an indefinite basis, all that implies is that the overlap between crews doesn't have to be rushed... where they certainly can do some projects that might require more crew members. It still remains a crew of 3 often enough that it can be considered the current crew size at the moment.
Most of these guys & gals who go up to the ISS are older and married, or those who are single usually have outside relationships too. Considering the easiest way to become an astronaut is to have a PhD with some post-grad work of distinction, that sort of puts a pretty tough minimum age for a typical astronaut and represents a certain level of maturity that limits the kind of experimentation for sexual activities that is more common with undergrads or kids in high school. Think about it. Many astronauts can move from NASA to a major university after doing a stint as an astronaut to become a full professor directly rather than having to mess with the tenure fight... as they usually have plenty of publications and usually bring plenty of distinction to the university that grabs them. Being known as the gigolo of spaceflight doesn't really help an astronaut if that word got out.
The gravity on Mars won't be the same. The hours of daylight.... while similar to the Earth are going to be slightly different. Trace mineral concentrations are going to be different for Martian soil. Dangers to people living on Mars are also going to be different in terms of "natural disasters" that could happen. Hurricanes, tsunamis, thunder storms, tornadoes, and perhaps even things like earthquakes and volcanoes are things that won't be seen on Mars, but there will be other phenomena that will happen on Mars that will definitely not be "Earth-like".
Yes, I do realize that volcanoes exist on Mars, but they are fairly dormant. It would be news indeed if a volcano was to erupt on Mars... so that would be an excellent question to study in terms of how "areologically speaking" (as opposed to geologically speaking) the interior of Mars shows activity. From first glance, it appears to be dead, but then again everybody thought the Cascade range of the Pacific North-west of North America was geologically dead too.
Of significance too is that the air pressure on Mars is likely to be different than that of the Earth, even in the habitats. While oxygen and CO2 levels will have to be maintained, it seems to be silly to include other elements of the Earth's atmosphere like Nitrogen and Argon unless they are really necessary, at least at first.
The question here is in terms of how many generations it took to develop Sherpas with these genetic traits. It certainly didn't happen in just one generation, at least I find it highly unlikely that the first groups of people living in the environment where the Sherpas live to have adapted immediately with their kids.
The Sherpas were also in an isolated environment that was generally spared the ravages of warfare common to other parts of the world, thus they also were able to develop these traits without having the local gene pool get "contaminated" with people from other parts of the world.
In terms of Martians (humans living on Mars), I highly doubt that the isolation is going to happen unless there is a nuclear war on the Earth that also halts interplanetary spaceflight for several generations. I suppose that is also a possibility, but that is also strongly in the realm of science fiction and not something that should be expected except as a remote contingency plan.
Not that extra-marital sex is necessarily a problem either, but there has been at least one married couple who have been into space together too. That said, most of the shuttle flights are so hectic that getting a chance to snuggle usually isn't in the cards.
Sex on the ISS, on the other hand, may be a bit more likely and there certainly have been some opportunities so to say. On the other hand, the general population that has been up there has been for the most part rather small.... usually just three people most of the time. They have also been older folks with previous commitments and selected for their serious nature. In other words they aren't young folks with raging hormones and a strong desire to mate with any available opportunity. Those astronauts are also quite busy and usually have their schedules nailed down to the minute for many operations. There is some "down time" for personal pet projects or for R&R, but even that is rather strongly programmed.
With 10 years of opportunity, however, to say that it has never happened at all even on just one occasion seems to be a stretch of the imagination. The "personal bunkers" (essentially the size of a walk-in closet but intended as the "bedrooms" for the permanent astronauts) are large enough to fit at least two people into them.
The end of the road is here for tax & spend programs. America simply can't spend its way out of financial problems like it could in the past... in part because there were some intelligent people who explicitly set up "rainy day funds" that could be exploited if there was an emergency. Those are now exhausted but the idiots who keep spending the money on foolish things think there is an endless supply of money, forgetting what exactly money really is in the first place for the most part.
I'm not afraid about the collapse of the idea of America, but I do think there are some very hard times ahead and Americans will take it on the chin in the near future in a way that is going to get downright ugly. This is of concern for the rest of the world too because any such collapse of the American Republic will have disasterous long-terms consequences for the rest of the world too. Indeed I dare say that there won't be a person untouched by it in the rest of the world, in a substantial and negative manner.
The stakes are high, and I consider what is happening with NASA only a manifestation of the problems, not the actual disease. Fixing NASA isn't going to solve the problems facing the rest of America. If you think NASA is being foolish with its money, that is only because you have a clue about what it is that they are doing. Other federal departments and federal programs are by far and away much worse but usually able to hide the corruption as NASA has to be able to follow the laws of physics from time to time... something that is hard to fake.
Let's be very clear, this is to make sure that Senator Orrin Hatch can bring the bacon home to Utah. His last campaign was pretty much "vote for me! Bringing the bacon home to Utah since 1976!" He is also in campaign mode because he is going up for re-election in 2012 and already has some people in his own party nipping on his heels to kick him out if he makes a big mistake (to the Utah voters).
Senator Shelby of Alabama is another of the usual suspects, as are a few others in various places. It isn't a mistake that the Johnson Space Center got the name of the most famous fairy-god senator for the space program: Lyndon B. Johnson.
I guess it all ends up being about bread and circuses... the final downfall of any democracy.
The politicians aren't telling the rocket engineers how to engineer the next ship. They're producing a set of basic guiding principles for the design process so that they get a design that meets their requirements and does so with a minimum of cost overruns (maybe). It's more like management telling software engineers that they need to pay attention to security or spend this release cycle focusing on performance. They aren't telling software engineers how to write specific lines of code (and shouldn't, because they aren't programmers), but rather they are giving the software engineers an overarching plan that their code needs to fit into.
I wish it was how you described everything. Unfortunately Congress is telling them to use certain suppliers, that certain engine parts, explicitly specified in the law, must be used and even going into some depth about how the rocket should be put together.
What is really happening here is that the companies who are trying to build this rocket are trying to help write the RFP in such a way that only one company could possibly qualify for the contract. Unfortunately for the usual "old space" companies (Boeing, Lock-Mart, ATK) they now have a whole bunch of competition from a bunch or relative new companies who are just as capable of putting something into orbit as these more traditional rocket builders. Companies like Orbital Science and SpaceX can meet almost any general sort of guideline set up for a contract, and are offering to sell the rockets on a cash & carry basis rather than a research cost-plus contract too.
As a result, the only way that these companies can be assured of getting the contract is to have Congress do the actual engineering. Well, it isn't them but rather the companies who have cozy lobbyist relationships with the congressmen involved, but the net effect is that the full design layout is being put into law in an attempt to lock out the competition. And as a result it is getting to the absurd point that in effect you have Congress literally "engineering" the rocket via law rather than simply giving the broad guidelines for how it is to be built and letting the engineers do what they know how to do: make things.
It is political corruption at its most blatant, but then again that has been business as usual for many decades. The unfortunate thing is that it has to be so raw as to be smacking the heads of everybody involved in terms of what is going on now.
We need to think of Mars as we would any other colony. Yes, the technical hurdles may be more extreme than getting a wooden boat from Europe to the New World, but at the time, the risk of colonists to the Americas was still pretty high.
I would argue that the technological hurdles for going to Mars are actually fewer and our knowledge of the things necessary to get to Mars and thrive there is by far and away much better than the Europeans had by travel via wooden sail ships in the 13th Century.
I also don't want to dismiss the technological leap that was to build trans-oceanic watercraft, as that really was a huge deal in the 13th Century too. Between the concepts of oceanic sailing ships, joint-stock corporations, the printing press, improved timekeeping and navigation devices, firearms, and knowledge of physics and chemistry such as a basic understanding of electro-magnetic radiation all contributed substantially to the ability to make an intercontinental colonization voyage. Compared to even a couple hundred years earlier, those in the 13th Century were really masters of their domain and it showed when they made contact with the peoples already in America.
We know quite a bit about Mars, at least in terms of initial surveys and a basic understanding of the geography once we might get there. The ability to build a vehicle capable of getting to Mars and assure a 90%+ likelihood of survival to get there (much better odds than the early sailors had crossing the Atlantic prior to the 18th Century) certainly can be assured.
The real trick in terms of getting to Mars is to simply be able to afford the journey in the first place. My argument there is that once people are out and about in the Solar System, it will take deliberate actions on the part of the governments of this world to keep people from going to Mars. I'm sure that when there are some millionaires who are living in Bigelow habitats on a full-time basis, somebody is going to venture beyond LEO and likely will be heading to places like Mars too. I predict that regardless of any government program to get people to Mars, there will be people going that way on their own dime within this century.
I've also predicted that the first NASA astronauts landing on Mars will be covered live by CNN camera crews that got there ahead of time to "cover" the historic occasion. That may also be true about any return to the Moon.
You are going to know that you have a self-sustaining environment within a month or two. Any long-term issues will be something related more to nutrition. Knowing what trace elements may be needed for survival is a bit more of a complex issue. There certainly is going to need to be some major study to see just how it might be an issue.
In terms of "simulating" a Mars-like environment, I think it would be incredibly useful to build a space station of roughly the size of the ISS that would be built in a way to have "simulated gravity" where at least some parts of the station would have an acceleration vector equivalent to Mars gravity. There even was a module that was scheduled to be put onto the ISS that would do just that, but congress in their infinite wisdom decided to cut funding to the flight (not the module itself... which still exists and is in a crate ready to go up) and can that whole research line.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that kids be made within the first year or so, but there is no need for a self-limiting situation like waiting for 100 people to maintain a strong genetic pool or some other such nonsense. More importantly, we need to know what to expect before we get to Mars, and there certainly are some sane and rational things that can be done for legitimate scientific inquiry that are not being done at the moment which can and indeed ought to be used for any planning for going to Mars.
I'll say it again, much of what is getting done in terms of planning for a trip to Mars is based upon Science Fiction, not science fact. Until that changes, I don't think anybody should be going there at all... and it is stuff that can and to me I think should be done right now. It certainly is scientific research that doesn't necessarily have to wait until we get people on the surface of Mars. My fear is that the research will happen on Mars, using people as guinea pigs, because emotional factors are being done instead of thinking things ahead.