I am calling this BS, I was being polite before. Yeah, mile high structures were "designed", but besides things like the CN tower or the Space Needle, I havn't really seen too many realistic structures that can claim to even be over 2 km high. The CN tower BTW is only 553 meters. That the Empire State Building (381 meters... built in 1931) is still in the top 10 largest buildings should say quite a bit about how difficult and expensive of a task this is.
The current growth in skyscrapers is pretty much hitting the limit of both budgetary constraints and materials research. 11 km up, and I gave some close examples to demonstrate that this altitude is at least theoritcally possible under ideal conditions. As a practical matter you can expect this to be far less, and I seriously doubt that there would be any real investment into a system like this unless mass commercial space travel has taken off to such volume that spaceports are busier than O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, by passenger count alone. That need won't be for more than a century at the earliest, and possibly much, much later.
It was for this reason I suggested space elevators, and the structural materials for the space elevator IMHO is going to be just as easy to pull off as what you are suggesting here.
Call me a skeptic, but I am in this case. I've been involved with the design and construction of multi-million dollar projects, seen over a billion dollars dumped into a single projects (with the accompanying political BS), and a project of this scale is going to be close to $1 Trillion USD. The Apollo project didn't even cost that much, and Ronald Reagan spent that much to rearm the USA during the 1980's, and that was over eight years. You are not going to get that kind of money from a private investor... even Bill Gates or the Walton family (aka Wal-Mart and their fortune). It can only come from a very advanced super power like the USA, and I fail to see how you are going to convince that kind of money to be spent.
The $100 Million that Elon Musk is spending on SpaceX is incredible, but close to the absolute limit on any crazy scheme... and he has a clear vision and is willing to cut through the BS to get his ideas implemented. I fail to see how something like this project is going to be built with private funds at all.
Just doing a "back of the envelope" calculation and an understanding of raw structural engineering, I fail to see how you can get a tube up that high.
OK, Mt. Everest is about 9km, and it is in theory possible to construct a tower over 3 km, so in absolute raw theory this may be possible, but highly unlikely. Besides political implications, the Himalayas are also aligned east and west, which is not a very good orientation for spaceflight.
Perhaps more reasonable and something that would be useful in this context is to use Mt. Chimborazo in Equador. Discounting the fact that this is a volcano and not a geologic uplift mountain like Everest (with related dangers that the top of the mountain could blow up at any time wiping out the launch system), building a tube up to its 6200 m summit is goiing to be an impressive feat. Still, if you have it go on an east-west alignment taking into account that it is only 1 degree north of the equator, you get additional tangential velocity from the Earth's spin + some significant height. It might work, but just barely. Even here I think you can get at most about 7 km into the sky, not 11.
Also keep in mind that if you are intending to scar up mountains in this way, you have to find a government that is inclined to bend over and let you repeal just about any environmental impact laws that may exist.
I find it hard to believe that this approach is going to be used unless there is some huge amount of traffic of stuff going into space, and mind you places like Mt. Chimborazo are also going to be ideal candidates for a space elevator as well, which is equally exotic but at least has some significant more engineering which has gone into the design and development of such systems.
This is a "back burner" project that may or may not get built. The rationale for building a system like this on the Moon, however, is more justified, especially as you can build the "evacuated tube" on the Moon without even having a tube, and the escape velocity is significantly lower. It would also be a good place to build a proof of concept device first before you start to strap people into the launcher for a much harder to engineer device here on the Earth.
I was thinking the same thing, that this was an archeology study of the ancient wonder of the world, where trying to build a statue like the Statue of Liberty with Bronze Age tools might have been a very major accomplishment, and it would have been "How did they do that?"
A cool engineering topic in its own right.
The other thought I had was that perhaps this was all about the WWII computer that was developed by the British Government to reverse engineer the Enigma Machine (German encryption device that was in widespread use by the Nazis). There are some aspects of the design of that computer (Colossus) that could still be followed through as it was on the bleeding edge of computer hardware and software at the time it was built. Some assumptions were made about computer design since then where older designs like this computer might suggest a very different approach to computer hardware design to consider. It was also some incredible technology for the era, with debates as to if it were even a computer in a strict technical sense.
An 18,000 polygon model of either Colossus would be a cool thing to see in a virtual world as well, as would shadow rendering for both of them.
Not only does the cost go down, but by driving the costs down for metals like this from off-world sources it will make terrestrial mines for similar materials to be forced out of business.
For the most part this will be a good thing, as most of the current mines are located in what is today largely wilderness... for exactly the same reasons why people go there to search for these metals: They don't have to deal with purchasing property at huge prices (like downtown Manhattan or Tokyo) in order to extract the minerals. Fights over mineral rights and appropriate methods for extracting those minerals lose one of their main justifications: If we don't to it here, where else are we going to get it?
Mines like the Kennecot Copper Mine in Utah is an example of something that will be a relic of the past. If you ever fly into or out of Salt Lake City International from the south end of the airport, you will fly right over this mine and be rather low to the ground as well. You would miss it only if you didn't pay any attention to it at all. The residents of Salt Lake City realize the large number of jobs this mine represents, and it has been there for more than a century, so they don't really mind too much that the mine is there. Still, it has had a devistating impact on the wilderness of Bingham Canyon, not to mention that the canyon nor the mountains that were next to it even exist anymore. The tailings hill left from mining these mountains is a permanent feature to Salt Lake Valley that has also had a major impact on the local environment that is not to be ignored either.
All of this damage, and under control of U.S. mining regulations that are hard to deal with, yet the mine is still profitable. This is a mine that would definitely be shut down due to extra-terrestrial mining efforts, and no similar mine would ever be started either. Oh, some limited mining would still occur because of national priorities, welfare service projects (keeping people employed through government subsidies... although it might be cheaper to simply pay the miners directly and close the mine anyway), or simply because of the need for a specific mineral that is required for a certain industry from a very reliable source. That and it will take centuries for extra-terrestrial mining efforts to really be developed, so something needs to keep businesses operating in the meantime.
I completely agree here. Apple Computers and Disney are so radically different in the kinds of industry that they serve in, that by combining the two companies you will be destroying both of them. Of course, I hardly thought that aquiring ABC Television by Disney was a good idea either, but at least both were in the business of delivering content to people that sit on their behinds and watch a light display in front of them.
Of course with Apple computer.... I guess they do the same thing, after a sort.
Still, the culture differences between Apple and Disney are quite a bit different. Of course if Apple spun off its iTunes store and stuck with merely manufacturing of computer equipment, with the iTunes stuff going to Disney... that might make some huge since and something that Disney has considerable experience in working with. Disney has had its own record label for decades now and is in the business of delivering content of that nature.
If you send one of these nuclear rockets into space, it might kill some of the cyano-algae that is going to start the life cycle on some planet in a couple billion years, thus making it impossible for that future civilization to exist.:)
Seriously, I have to agree that the uber left-wing idiots against nuclear energy are clueless as to its potential. Of course I've already seen environmentalists complaining about the effects of open pit mining on the Moon damaging the environment... and studies to complain about the changing tides devistating wildlife on the Earth due to over production of lunar ores. I am not kidding about this one either. Lunar environmental protection laws... the next frontier of the Ecology movement.
BTW, I agree with that nuclear rockets are clearly the way to go for inter-planetary and interstellar travel... at least using current scientific knowledge and only needing to develop engineering skills to get the equipment running. All military vessels in space will be almost exclusively nuclear, as will likely all passenger vessels as well except for re-entry capsules going to the Earth. There is no way that a nuclear rocket could even compete against a single solar flare in terms of radioactive material and ionizing radiation that is produced from such an event.
In addition, nuclear fuels (fission, forget about fusion unless that can be made feasable) are the only way to densly pack large amounts of energy into a small space to make an actual ship be able to function in space. Chemical rockets are only going to be used to get people up to Low-Earth Orbit only... and that because lanuching via nuclear power is likely to give you some serious problems underneath the rockets here on the Earth. Yes, this is rocket science, but not advanced rocket science and nothing that the current generation of spacecraft designers can't handle or even really new production techniques. Or nuclear submarine designers for that matter. Unfortunately, the political environment is such that a nuclear spacecraft is unlikely to be built for more than 50 years.
One of the sources for the ledgends of huge monsters, at least with Native American groups, was some of the exposed Dinosaur bones that were discovered on the Great Plains of North America. Indeed the Louis & Clarke expedition jotted down some of the discussion about these stories about huge monsters that were buried in the ground.
Many of these dinosaur remains have been extracted from many places throughout the world, and it seems to be a plausable explanation for a "universal myth", especially as many of the dinosaurs did live on a common continent at one point in time.
As far as being truly universal, there are some huge differences in the behavior of dragons from European ledgends and those of ancient China. The Chinese dragons tend to be more lizzard and snake like often without even flight and offer protection, while the European dragons (in ledgend) tend to be more flying monsters that are evil incarnate, with sometimes bat-like features (at least for wings). American creatures were even more bizzare in legend, but those stories are not as well recorded.
There is strong evidence (through similarities in larval development and bodily structures) that ants are decended from wasps and bees... which also have similar social structures.
There are, however, some solitary bees and wasps who only come together for breeding and then go off again to do their own thing and don't live in a colony. Obviously you are going to notice the colonial groups more than the solitary ones simply due to raw numbers, and the fact that a hive is usually quite prominent and doesn't move around (at least too much).
Now what the evoluationary mechanisms were to cause this socialization... or for that matter even multi-cellular organisms to develop, it would be mostly speculation.
I do like you theory of human evolution tho. It is as good as any I've see from supposed respected biological theoriticians, and just as provable.
Fertilizer for millenia came from the behind of many domestic animals, as well as composted blood and remains from the slaughter of these animals.
Drugs, while some are uniquely from petroleum, are not exclusively from it. Besides, you would likely be able to manufacture all of the drugs that the whole world needs from a single tanker truck of raw crude. At least a full year's supply. It would not need the full infrastructure needed for the current oil production that we currently have.
As far as plastics are concerned, yeah, that might be an issue. However, most plastics are from supposed waste products that are derived from petroleum production, and there are plastics that can be made from other organic chemical sources, including plants that are developed especially to produce some of the compounds needed for plastics.
In short, all of these items are by-products that could be done through other means, but since petroleum is cheap and plentiful we might as well get them from this easy to obtain commodity that can be delivered by the ton in some places for prices cheaper than water, damage to the environment not withstanding.
I think it was Jay Gould (one of the 19th Century rail barons in the USA) who issued a challange that he would personnally drink every drop of oil that came from Texas.
He didn't think you could find a single drop of oil from that state... and based on geological evidence presented to him by several well informed geologists with PhD's no less.
To base the conclusions that the Oil supply of the world is at a peak due to a short term drop in production is just too silly to even comment on.
The big problem that Middle Eastern countries are going to have to eventually face is that they may be sitting on top of huge oil reserves eventually with nobody willing to buy them due to people moving on to other energy sources. In that regard it is possible that the peak of oil production has occured, as alternative energy sources are being exploited and petroleum is not the only way to power a vehicle.
Pittsburg PA, in the 1890's (not 1990's BTW), had air pollution so thick that the sun was completely blotted out, not just brown and hazy. And the "three rivers" of Pittsburgh were so polluted that nothing lived in them and were full of industrial waste and raw sewage, not to mention the "biological pollution" of croweded streets filled with horses leaving behind the stuff from their behinds.
If the world is going to h*** and is always getting worse, why is Pittsburgh not like this today? And decades (or perhaps even more than a century for some aspects of these laws) of environmental laws in the USA have absolutely no impact at all? Why even pass the laws if they are so ineffective?
BTW, I agree with your view of China, and with 4x the population of the USA it is likely to get much worse before it gets better. China is still using largely 1930's/1940's era technology and industrial methods for their mining and manufacturing industries, except for those areas that the Chinese government is aggressively following. That isn't bad, and it is better than China has had for decades, but they are now entering the equivalent of the most damaging and polluting stage industrialization before they can refine the manufacturing techniques to make them less polluting. And China doesn't really have the financial resources to really deal with this pollution, not to mention the political willpower to deal with it either.
I won't even touch Eastern Europe, but China is not alone for these problems either. Or try to take a stroll down the Tiete River in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The joke in Sao Paulo is that if you jump into that river, you will die before you hit the water due to the fumes from the chemicals that are in it.
Yeah, the U.S. government is responsible for all of this global pollution and can stop all of it by a simple act of the U.S. Congress.
Instead, the reason why U.S. manufacturing companies are moving elsewhere (both big and small) is due to a deliberate policy on the part of the U.S. Government to kill manufacturing in the USA. At least if it was policy I don't see how it would be any different.
Besides H.R. bulls*** rules and a corporate tax system from h*** that strongly discourages innovation with a strong emphasis on short term earnings, it is no wonder that companies are leaving the USA for elsewhere.
Where I live, the local government is quite quirky in regards to accepting companies from outside, but there is a huge manufacturing base from local citizens who simply knew how to build a better mousetrap and created a product that was better than anything else in that market. This ranges from bio-tech, heavy vehicle manufacturing, electronics, and even textiles. I have watched over the years as even these middle and sometimes even small (about 50 employees total in one company) businesses have closed up shop with only a small sales team left behind to deal with existing clients, but the manufacturing has gone elsewhere, mainly Mexico but sometimes China or Singapore as well. The ones that are left either have U.S. Government contracts where they don't necessarily have to be very cost effective and the contract requires them to make the stuff in the USA, or requires such specialized skills (often with a PhD as a minimum requirement for employment) that making the stuff can only be done here.
It is disapointing, and eventually the USA is going to have to "pay the piper" for this loss of skills. That is the critical thing now, because many people don't even know how to manage a decent manufacturing company, and the only real growth industries are health care, law firms, and accountants. I don't know how much longer the rest of us can help support this type of service industry when there is nobody left to buy their services except each other.
I love Delphi as a programming language, and have been using Delphi since the original Delphi 1 release back elsewhen. I have been able to program in circles around my C++ co-workers, and was the "go-to" guy whenever a GUI prototype had to be developed in a hurry. Visual Studio just didn't compete until the C# compiler tools became available... and guess who helped develop the C# spec and GUI tools for Microsoft? (look at the list of Delphi 1 developers for a hint)
I hope with this move that Delphi can recapture some of the software developer tool market, with hopefully a scaled back low-end development system for ordinary developers that has a reasonable price. Borland seemed to have been targeting high-end development groups that didn't bat an eye for a $10,000 development suite per seat. Unfortunately, this is a rarified market and is very particular with their needs. This has also made Delphi into an eliete platform that unfortunately is also competing directly with Microsoft and the kind of people who purchase the MSDN Universal subscription. This makes it almost impossible to compete against Microsoft.
Boy, this sounds like the classic SF book, "Thrice upon a Time" by James P. Hogan. Even the ability to transmit messages back in time is an incredible accomplishment and it would be interesting to find out some details (obviously classified) about this. Too bad the parent posted as an anonymous coward on this topic.
As far as the gravity well of the Earth is concerned, it is the largest object in the Solar System except for the four major Gas Giant planets and the Sun. You can take all of the other objects of the inner solar system, including comets, meteorites, asteroids, the Moon and the other planets, push them together, and you still wouldn't have an object that is the size or mass of the Earth. That sounds like a cosmic Hoover to me, and a surface acceleration of 9.8 m/s is for me rather significant compared to just about any other measurement regarding the rest of the Solar System. This does suck up a bunch of meteorites and they do fall to the Earth with fairly regular occurances.
And I strongly disagree that something that would be a major flash in the sky on the Earth would be lethal on the Moon. Something that would be a significant hazard for an astronaut on the Moon would also be a likely candidate to make it through the atmosphere on the Earth, so I consider the comparison to be very valid. In addition, the significantly lower gravity on the Moon is going to make the actual velocity quite a bit less.
There are some other dynamic of how the moon always keeps the same side to the Earth that are also going to affect the physical path of anything which is going to hit the surface of the Moon on at least the closer side to us. The gravity well of the Earth is going to deflect most of the debris before it even hits that part of the Moon.
Basically, this is a non-issue for day-to-day worries while on the Moon. Yes, every once in a while it may happen and if there will be millions of people on the Moon I would bet that every once in a while somebody might get hit, but it is not a reason to avoid even going out onto the surface of the Moon. You are much more likely to be struck by lightning on the surface of the Earth than you would ever be hit by a meteor while walking on the surface of the Moon. And the consequence of being struck by lightning is just as deadly if not more so.
You also forgot to mention that the gravity well on the Moon is going to be considerably less, which means that impacts on the Moon are going to be weaker than comparable impacts on the Earth, and it simply won't even attract as much stuff as normally impacts the Earth.
I'd also like to challenge the original poster to show how many people have been struck by a meteor on the Earth recently? Meteor landfalls do occur often enough that you can purchase them from collectors and hobbiest. I've seen some of the collections at universities that have a not insignificant number of them. I know of only two credible news reports of meteor crashes into people's houses, and even with one hitting somebody didn't do any fatal damage. And that is with the increased delta vee due to the much higher gravity on the Earth.
Far more damaging for people on the Moon will be Solar Storms, where you will have to seek some sort of radiation shelter if it gets too ugly. The Apollo missions were fortunate to have occured during a solar minimum of the sunspot cycle, so this never became a major issue for the astronauts at the time. You do not want to be in just a spacesuit when a solar flare hits the surface of the Moon. On the Earth it just creates spectacular Aurora.
Spaceflight indeed chews up so much fuel that through using chemical rockets we are just barely capable of getting to the Moon. This also required the development of the F1 Engine that was used on the 1st stage of the Saturn V rocket, which is still considered the most powerful rocket engine that has ever been developed by any rocket engineer. And that took five of those engines to power the first stage. The Russians had a smaller rocket engine for their lunar vehicles, and that was indeed one of the points of failure for their program because they had to have close to 20 engines firing simultaneously to get their lunar vehicle off the ground.
As far as going into Lunar orbit first before landing... well, what do you think the Apollo spacecraft did? The problem is that you have one shot to land until you get some fuel resupply depots in Lunar orbit. It is also going to be much cheaper and easier to manufacture the fuel on the Moon than by hauling it up from the Earth, with the one problem of trying to collect hydrogen for the typical LOX/H2 rocket fuel.
Once you get onto the surface of the Moon, it will be much easier to get around with some sort of surface transportation than trying to fly around with rockets. These can even be solar powered so you don't need to worry about obtaining fuel from the Earth to keep them going, and have electric motors simply pushing against the surface with designs roughly like cars on the Earth. With nearly two weeks of continuous sunlight even on the Equator, I'm sure you can travel a fairly large distance before you run out of daylight and need to build even an emergency shelter from the lunar night.
Actually, if you could ever get some "gas mines" (aka Bespin from the classic Star Wars movies) to be able to operate with fusion power and build a large floating city, the gravity on Uranus would be almost identical to the gravity that we experience here on the Earth. Storms would be interesting, and of course you couldn't be able to stand out in the open air, but it would be an interesting environment for a good science fiction story.
As far as practicality is concerned, it is way out there and you would have to be real desperate for Real Estate if you try to use Uranus directly for some.
And if you can get 50% + of the ownership shares in a corporation to agree to silly corporate charter ammendments like refusing to do business with Denmark (or pick your favorite "politically incorrect" country of the moment), this isn't going to happen anyway?
Fortunately most shareholders don't agree with these silly charter ammendments, especially as most major corporations are actually owned by "institutional" investors, including mutual and retirement funds. Trying to get them to make a charter change to permit notification by FedEx, on the other hand, is going to be trivial to get passed and indeed is something I would expect to be suggested by one of these institutional investors, because it makes their job easier.
BTW, I could split fine hairs on the IRS code, but you don't have to file before April 15th... you just have to make sure that your taxes have been paid before then. Even that has ugly fine points that are needless for this discussion as well, but it doesn't really matter. The point here is that documents have other alternative methods of delivery.
I just can't wait until delivery to yesterday (due to the International Date Line issues... not time travel) becomes widespread due to sub-orbital cargo delivery flights. I've actually needed that a couple of times, and would have been willing to pay $500/lb or more to do it. I did charter a private pilot to be a personal courrier once to deliver a package that missed a FedEx shipping deadline.
If you sent a tax return via FedEx rather than USPS on April 15th, the IRS would be very hard pressed to deny that you filed the tax return on the correct date. Of course when dealing with the federal government anything can happen. You would be "safer" through the USPS because it is still considered a federal agency and that you have given it to the federal government once your return physically enters a postal mailing box.
As for ammeding the bylaws for corporations... that just takes a shareholder meeting and a little bit of legal paperwork... and something that should be done if they are thinking intelligently about it. I have used FedEx for critical memos of the nature you were talking about so much that I wouldn't have given it a second thought that it was even a problem, but yeah, I guess that looking in the bylaws to see if it is legal to do would be a smart thing.
More important about the Falcon 9 is that it is being designed from the ground up as a manned lanuch platform. Sure, the primary market is still going to be for satellite launches, but for less than $200 m you can put a manned spacecraft platform into orbit is going to be a neat thing to see. With multiple passengers as well.
If you are ambitious enough and have the money burning a hole in your pocket, you can even start designing the spacecraft, but you are right that I would like to see if SpaceX can even get the Falcon 1 going first.
Although like the original posting mentioned, if you sent a meeting notice or other legal matter via FedEx or priority mail, you get essentially the same result, including a signed notice of recept. Even better you can usually get a copy of the actual signature within minutes or hours of when it was signed.
Still, before overnight delivery, I think you would have to be correct.
The last telegram that I recieved was when I lived in Brazil about 20 years ago. Where I was living there was a government bureaucracy from hell that governed the establishment of telephone service, and you had to get on a waiting list that was often as long as 10-15 years worth of waiting before you got your telephone connection. As a result, telegrams were a fairly standard method of communication for short messages... especially between other Americans when the exchange rate was quite favorable.
You could send the messages from the local post office, and if you paid for priority courrier service there would be a messenger who would ride a motorcycle to your doorway and hand deliver the message, even in the evening. Like a previous poster mentioned, telegrams were very convienient to send messages when the reciever didn't have any sort of electronic decryption or reception equipment.
I tried to send a telegram message to the USA as a Christmas message, but the cost of going through Western Union was so incredibly high (about $50 even with the exchange rate) that I said forget about it. That was close to a three weeks of living expenses including housing, clothing, and food for me at the time and while I was living there.
Prior to the Reagan administration, NASA was the only game in town for just about everything that went into space, incuding private payloads as well. Or you had to renouce your American citizenship (if you were American) and try the Russians. Sure, there were private contractors who did the actual construction of the vehicles and even largely ran the lanuch operations, but there was a NASA official at just about every other step along the way.
As an example of private payloads launched through NASA, the Telstar Satellite, while owned and technically operated by AT&T, was built and launched through a government procurement contract. The original process was so complicated that AT&T bought a couple of congress critters to reform the process, which led to the development of Intelsat for major long distance communication. BTW, the Wikipedia articles really whitewash the whole episode of how ugly the politics got for launching private space vehicles.
This is still used as an example of how the government should not operate in space, and that the bureaucracy for getting things into space has always been there. Only now are totally private launch systems even being developed, and even in the case of SpaceX there is still government money involved. Just not as directly and SpaceX decided to take matters into their own hands in regards to the launch. It was originally scheduled to be at Vandenburg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, but got tied down in bureaucratic B.S. to force them to either delay the lanuch for a considerable length of time or find another place to launch.
I'm not particularly pleased with the current proposal that is kicking around, but it has been talked about for some time (at least more than a year). Some discussion about having reader grading of content to some sort of approval process to get featured articles moved into a "Wikipedia 1.0" site as a researched and fact checked article.
Some sort of content review standards will happen, and it is likely that Wikipedia will be quite a bit different from its current format in 5-10 years. It will be interesting to see just will happen with this very real need.
Slashdot Mirror
I am calling this BS, I was being polite before. Yeah, mile high structures were "designed", but besides things like the CN tower or the Space Needle, I havn't really seen too many realistic structures that can claim to even be over 2 km high. The CN tower BTW is only 553 meters. That the Empire State Building (381 meters... built in 1931) is still in the top 10 largest buildings should say quite a bit about how difficult and expensive of a task this is.
The current growth in skyscrapers is pretty much hitting the limit of both budgetary constraints and materials research. 11 km up, and I gave some close examples to demonstrate that this altitude is at least theoritcally possible under ideal conditions. As a practical matter you can expect this to be far less, and I seriously doubt that there would be any real investment into a system like this unless mass commercial space travel has taken off to such volume that spaceports are busier than O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, by passenger count alone. That need won't be for more than a century at the earliest, and possibly much, much later.
It was for this reason I suggested space elevators, and the structural materials for the space elevator IMHO is going to be just as easy to pull off as what you are suggesting here.
Call me a skeptic, but I am in this case. I've been involved with the design and construction of multi-million dollar projects, seen over a billion dollars dumped into a single projects (with the accompanying political BS), and a project of this scale is going to be close to $1 Trillion USD. The Apollo project didn't even cost that much, and Ronald Reagan spent that much to rearm the USA during the 1980's, and that was over eight years. You are not going to get that kind of money from a private investor... even Bill Gates or the Walton family (aka Wal-Mart and their fortune). It can only come from a very advanced super power like the USA, and I fail to see how you are going to convince that kind of money to be spent.
The $100 Million that Elon Musk is spending on SpaceX is incredible, but close to the absolute limit on any crazy scheme... and he has a clear vision and is willing to cut through the BS to get his ideas implemented. I fail to see how something like this project is going to be built with private funds at all.
Just doing a "back of the envelope" calculation and an understanding of raw structural engineering, I fail to see how you can get a tube up that high.
OK, Mt. Everest is about 9km, and it is in theory possible to construct a tower over 3 km, so in absolute raw theory this may be possible, but highly unlikely. Besides political implications, the Himalayas are also aligned east and west, which is not a very good orientation for spaceflight.
Perhaps more reasonable and something that would be useful in this context is to use Mt. Chimborazo in Equador. Discounting the fact that this is a volcano and not a geologic uplift mountain like Everest (with related dangers that the top of the mountain could blow up at any time wiping out the launch system), building a tube up to its 6200 m summit is goiing to be an impressive feat. Still, if you have it go on an east-west alignment taking into account that it is only 1 degree north of the equator, you get additional tangential velocity from the Earth's spin + some significant height. It might work, but just barely. Even here I think you can get at most about 7 km into the sky, not 11.
Also keep in mind that if you are intending to scar up mountains in this way, you have to find a government that is inclined to bend over and let you repeal just about any environmental impact laws that may exist.
I find it hard to believe that this approach is going to be used unless there is some huge amount of traffic of stuff going into space, and mind you places like Mt. Chimborazo are also going to be ideal candidates for a space elevator as well, which is equally exotic but at least has some significant more engineering which has gone into the design and development of such systems.
This is a "back burner" project that may or may not get built. The rationale for building a system like this on the Moon, however, is more justified, especially as you can build the "evacuated tube" on the Moon without even having a tube, and the escape velocity is significantly lower. It would also be a good place to build a proof of concept device first before you start to strap people into the launcher for a much harder to engineer device here on the Earth.
I was thinking the same thing, that this was an archeology study of the ancient wonder of the world, where trying to build a statue like the Statue of Liberty with Bronze Age tools might have been a very major accomplishment, and it would have been "How did they do that?"
A cool engineering topic in its own right.
The other thought I had was that perhaps this was all about the WWII computer that was developed by the British Government to reverse engineer the Enigma Machine (German encryption device that was in widespread use by the Nazis). There are some aspects of the design of that computer (Colossus) that could still be followed through as it was on the bleeding edge of computer hardware and software at the time it was built. Some assumptions were made about computer design since then where older designs like this computer might suggest a very different approach to computer hardware design to consider. It was also some incredible technology for the era, with debates as to if it were even a computer in a strict technical sense.
An 18,000 polygon model of either Colossus would be a cool thing to see in a virtual world as well, as would shadow rendering for both of them.
Not only does the cost go down, but by driving the costs down for metals like this from off-world sources it will make terrestrial mines for similar materials to be forced out of business.
For the most part this will be a good thing, as most of the current mines are located in what is today largely wilderness... for exactly the same reasons why people go there to search for these metals: They don't have to deal with purchasing property at huge prices (like downtown Manhattan or Tokyo) in order to extract the minerals. Fights over mineral rights and appropriate methods for extracting those minerals lose one of their main justifications: If we don't to it here, where else are we going to get it?
Mines like the Kennecot Copper Mine in Utah is an example of something that will be a relic of the past. If you ever fly into or out of Salt Lake City International from the south end of the airport, you will fly right over this mine and be rather low to the ground as well. You would miss it only if you didn't pay any attention to it at all. The residents of Salt Lake City realize the large number of jobs this mine represents, and it has been there for more than a century, so they don't really mind too much that the mine is there. Still, it has had a devistating impact on the wilderness of Bingham Canyon, not to mention that the canyon nor the mountains that were next to it even exist anymore. The tailings hill left from mining these mountains is a permanent feature to Salt Lake Valley that has also had a major impact on the local environment that is not to be ignored either.
All of this damage, and under control of U.S. mining regulations that are hard to deal with, yet the mine is still profitable. This is a mine that would definitely be shut down due to extra-terrestrial mining efforts, and no similar mine would ever be started either. Oh, some limited mining would still occur because of national priorities, welfare service projects (keeping people employed through government subsidies... although it might be cheaper to simply pay the miners directly and close the mine anyway), or simply because of the need for a specific mineral that is required for a certain industry from a very reliable source. That and it will take centuries for extra-terrestrial mining efforts to really be developed, so something needs to keep businesses operating in the meantime.
I completely agree here. Apple Computers and Disney are so radically different in the kinds of industry that they serve in, that by combining the two companies you will be destroying both of them. Of course, I hardly thought that aquiring ABC Television by Disney was a good idea either, but at least both were in the business of delivering content to people that sit on their behinds and watch a light display in front of them.
Of course with Apple computer.... I guess they do the same thing, after a sort.
Still, the culture differences between Apple and Disney are quite a bit different. Of course if Apple spun off its iTunes store and stuck with merely manufacturing of computer equipment, with the iTunes stuff going to Disney... that might make some huge since and something that Disney has considerable experience in working with. Disney has had its own record label for decades now and is in the business of delivering content of that nature.
If you send one of these nuclear rockets into space, it might kill some of the cyano-algae that is going to start the life cycle on some planet in a couple billion years, thus making it impossible for that future civilization to exist. :)
Seriously, I have to agree that the uber left-wing idiots against nuclear energy are clueless as to its potential. Of course I've already seen environmentalists complaining about the effects of open pit mining on the Moon damaging the environment... and studies to complain about the changing tides devistating wildlife on the Earth due to over production of lunar ores. I am not kidding about this one either. Lunar environmental protection laws... the next frontier of the Ecology movement.
BTW, I agree with that nuclear rockets are clearly the way to go for inter-planetary and interstellar travel... at least using current scientific knowledge and only needing to develop engineering skills to get the equipment running. All military vessels in space will be almost exclusively nuclear, as will likely all passenger vessels as well except for re-entry capsules going to the Earth. There is no way that a nuclear rocket could even compete against a single solar flare in terms of radioactive material and ionizing radiation that is produced from such an event.
In addition, nuclear fuels (fission, forget about fusion unless that can be made feasable) are the only way to densly pack large amounts of energy into a small space to make an actual ship be able to function in space. Chemical rockets are only going to be used to get people up to Low-Earth Orbit only... and that because lanuching via nuclear power is likely to give you some serious problems underneath the rockets here on the Earth. Yes, this is rocket science, but not advanced rocket science and nothing that the current generation of spacecraft designers can't handle or even really new production techniques. Or nuclear submarine designers for that matter. Unfortunately, the political environment is such that a nuclear spacecraft is unlikely to be built for more than 50 years.
One of the sources for the ledgends of huge monsters, at least with Native American groups, was some of the exposed Dinosaur bones that were discovered on the Great Plains of North America. Indeed the Louis & Clarke expedition jotted down some of the discussion about these stories about huge monsters that were buried in the ground.
Many of these dinosaur remains have been extracted from many places throughout the world, and it seems to be a plausable explanation for a "universal myth", especially as many of the dinosaurs did live on a common continent at one point in time.
As far as being truly universal, there are some huge differences in the behavior of dragons from European ledgends and those of ancient China. The Chinese dragons tend to be more lizzard and snake like often without even flight and offer protection, while the European dragons (in ledgend) tend to be more flying monsters that are evil incarnate, with sometimes bat-like features (at least for wings). American creatures were even more bizzare in legend, but those stories are not as well recorded.
There is strong evidence (through similarities in larval development and bodily structures) that ants are decended from wasps and bees... which also have similar social structures.
There are, however, some solitary bees and wasps who only come together for breeding and then go off again to do their own thing and don't live in a colony. Obviously you are going to notice the colonial groups more than the solitary ones simply due to raw numbers, and the fact that a hive is usually quite prominent and doesn't move around (at least too much).
Now what the evoluationary mechanisms were to cause this socialization... or for that matter even multi-cellular organisms to develop, it would be mostly speculation.
I do like you theory of human evolution tho. It is as good as any I've see from supposed respected biological theoriticians, and just as provable.
Fertilizer for millenia came from the behind of many domestic animals, as well as composted blood and remains from the slaughter of these animals.
Drugs, while some are uniquely from petroleum, are not exclusively from it. Besides, you would likely be able to manufacture all of the drugs that the whole world needs from a single tanker truck of raw crude. At least a full year's supply. It would not need the full infrastructure needed for the current oil production that we currently have.
As far as plastics are concerned, yeah, that might be an issue. However, most plastics are from supposed waste products that are derived from petroleum production, and there are plastics that can be made from other organic chemical sources, including plants that are developed especially to produce some of the compounds needed for plastics.
In short, all of these items are by-products that could be done through other means, but since petroleum is cheap and plentiful we might as well get them from this easy to obtain commodity that can be delivered by the ton in some places for prices cheaper than water, damage to the environment not withstanding.
I think it was Jay Gould (one of the 19th Century rail barons in the USA) who issued a challange that he would personnally drink every drop of oil that came from Texas.
He didn't think you could find a single drop of oil from that state... and based on geological evidence presented to him by several well informed geologists with PhD's no less.
To base the conclusions that the Oil supply of the world is at a peak due to a short term drop in production is just too silly to even comment on.
The big problem that Middle Eastern countries are going to have to eventually face is that they may be sitting on top of huge oil reserves eventually with nobody willing to buy them due to people moving on to other energy sources. In that regard it is possible that the peak of oil production has occured, as alternative energy sources are being exploited and petroleum is not the only way to power a vehicle.
Pittsburg PA, in the 1890's (not 1990's BTW), had air pollution so thick that the sun was completely blotted out, not just brown and hazy. And the "three rivers" of Pittsburgh were so polluted that nothing lived in them and were full of industrial waste and raw sewage, not to mention the "biological pollution" of croweded streets filled with horses leaving behind the stuff from their behinds.
If the world is going to h*** and is always getting worse, why is Pittsburgh not like this today? And decades (or perhaps even more than a century for some aspects of these laws) of environmental laws in the USA have absolutely no impact at all? Why even pass the laws if they are so ineffective?
BTW, I agree with your view of China, and with 4x the population of the USA it is likely to get much worse before it gets better. China is still using largely 1930's/1940's era technology and industrial methods for their mining and manufacturing industries, except for those areas that the Chinese government is aggressively following. That isn't bad, and it is better than China has had for decades, but they are now entering the equivalent of the most damaging and polluting stage industrialization before they can refine the manufacturing techniques to make them less polluting. And China doesn't really have the financial resources to really deal with this pollution, not to mention the political willpower to deal with it either.
I won't even touch Eastern Europe, but China is not alone for these problems either. Or try to take a stroll down the Tiete River in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The joke in Sao Paulo is that if you jump into that river, you will die before you hit the water due to the fumes from the chemicals that are in it.
Yeah, the U.S. government is responsible for all of this global pollution and can stop all of it by a simple act of the U.S. Congress.
Instead, the reason why U.S. manufacturing companies are moving elsewhere (both big and small) is due to a deliberate policy on the part of the U.S. Government to kill manufacturing in the USA. At least if it was policy I don't see how it would be any different.
Besides H.R. bulls*** rules and a corporate tax system from h*** that strongly discourages innovation with a strong emphasis on short term earnings, it is no wonder that companies are leaving the USA for elsewhere.
Where I live, the local government is quite quirky in regards to accepting companies from outside, but there is a huge manufacturing base from local citizens who simply knew how to build a better mousetrap and created a product that was better than anything else in that market. This ranges from bio-tech, heavy vehicle manufacturing, electronics, and even textiles. I have watched over the years as even these middle and sometimes even small (about 50 employees total in one company) businesses have closed up shop with only a small sales team left behind to deal with existing clients, but the manufacturing has gone elsewhere, mainly Mexico but sometimes China or Singapore as well. The ones that are left either have U.S. Government contracts where they don't necessarily have to be very cost effective and the contract requires them to make the stuff in the USA, or requires such specialized skills (often with a PhD as a minimum requirement for employment) that making the stuff can only be done here.
It is disapointing, and eventually the USA is going to have to "pay the piper" for this loss of skills. That is the critical thing now, because many people don't even know how to manage a decent manufacturing company, and the only real growth industries are health care, law firms, and accountants. I don't know how much longer the rest of us can help support this type of service industry when there is nobody left to buy their services except each other.
I love Delphi as a programming language, and have been using Delphi since the original Delphi 1 release back elsewhen. I have been able to program in circles around my C++ co-workers, and was the "go-to" guy whenever a GUI prototype had to be developed in a hurry. Visual Studio just didn't compete until the C# compiler tools became available... and guess who helped develop the C# spec and GUI tools for Microsoft? (look at the list of Delphi 1 developers for a hint)
I hope with this move that Delphi can recapture some of the software developer tool market, with hopefully a scaled back low-end development system for ordinary developers that has a reasonable price. Borland seemed to have been targeting high-end development groups that didn't bat an eye for a $10,000 development suite per seat. Unfortunately, this is a rarified market and is very particular with their needs. This has also made Delphi into an eliete platform that unfortunately is also competing directly with Microsoft and the kind of people who purchase the MSDN Universal subscription. This makes it almost impossible to compete against Microsoft.
Boy, this sounds like the classic SF book, "Thrice upon a Time" by James P. Hogan. Even the ability to transmit messages back in time is an incredible accomplishment and it would be interesting to find out some details (obviously classified) about this. Too bad the parent posted as an anonymous coward on this topic.
As far as the gravity well of the Earth is concerned, it is the largest object in the Solar System except for the four major Gas Giant planets and the Sun. You can take all of the other objects of the inner solar system, including comets, meteorites, asteroids, the Moon and the other planets, push them together, and you still wouldn't have an object that is the size or mass of the Earth. That sounds like a cosmic Hoover to me, and a surface acceleration of 9.8 m/s is for me rather significant compared to just about any other measurement regarding the rest of the Solar System. This does suck up a bunch of meteorites and they do fall to the Earth with fairly regular occurances.
And I strongly disagree that something that would be a major flash in the sky on the Earth would be lethal on the Moon. Something that would be a significant hazard for an astronaut on the Moon would also be a likely candidate to make it through the atmosphere on the Earth, so I consider the comparison to be very valid. In addition, the significantly lower gravity on the Moon is going to make the actual velocity quite a bit less.
There are some other dynamic of how the moon always keeps the same side to the Earth that are also going to affect the physical path of anything which is going to hit the surface of the Moon on at least the closer side to us. The gravity well of the Earth is going to deflect most of the debris before it even hits that part of the Moon.
Basically, this is a non-issue for day-to-day worries while on the Moon. Yes, every once in a while it may happen and if there will be millions of people on the Moon I would bet that every once in a while somebody might get hit, but it is not a reason to avoid even going out onto the surface of the Moon. You are much more likely to be struck by lightning on the surface of the Earth than you would ever be hit by a meteor while walking on the surface of the Moon. And the consequence of being struck by lightning is just as deadly if not more so.
You also forgot to mention that the gravity well on the Moon is going to be considerably less, which means that impacts on the Moon are going to be weaker than comparable impacts on the Earth, and it simply won't even attract as much stuff as normally impacts the Earth.
I'd also like to challenge the original poster to show how many people have been struck by a meteor on the Earth recently? Meteor landfalls do occur often enough that you can purchase them from collectors and hobbiest. I've seen some of the collections at universities that have a not insignificant number of them. I know of only two credible news reports of meteor crashes into people's houses, and even with one hitting somebody didn't do any fatal damage. And that is with the increased delta vee due to the much higher gravity on the Earth.
Far more damaging for people on the Moon will be Solar Storms, where you will have to seek some sort of radiation shelter if it gets too ugly. The Apollo missions were fortunate to have occured during a solar minimum of the sunspot cycle, so this never became a major issue for the astronauts at the time. You do not want to be in just a spacesuit when a solar flare hits the surface of the Moon. On the Earth it just creates spectacular Aurora.
Spaceflight indeed chews up so much fuel that through using chemical rockets we are just barely capable of getting to the Moon. This also required the development of the F1 Engine that was used on the 1st stage of the Saturn V rocket, which is still considered the most powerful rocket engine that has ever been developed by any rocket engineer. And that took five of those engines to power the first stage. The Russians had a smaller rocket engine for their lunar vehicles, and that was indeed one of the points of failure for their program because they had to have close to 20 engines firing simultaneously to get their lunar vehicle off the ground.
As far as going into Lunar orbit first before landing... well, what do you think the Apollo spacecraft did? The problem is that you have one shot to land until you get some fuel resupply depots in Lunar orbit. It is also going to be much cheaper and easier to manufacture the fuel on the Moon than by hauling it up from the Earth, with the one problem of trying to collect hydrogen for the typical LOX/H2 rocket fuel.
Once you get onto the surface of the Moon, it will be much easier to get around with some sort of surface transportation than trying to fly around with rockets. These can even be solar powered so you don't need to worry about obtaining fuel from the Earth to keep them going, and have electric motors simply pushing against the surface with designs roughly like cars on the Earth. With nearly two weeks of continuous sunlight even on the Equator, I'm sure you can travel a fairly large distance before you run out of daylight and need to build even an emergency shelter from the lunar night.
Actually, if you could ever get some "gas mines" (aka Bespin from the classic Star Wars movies) to be able to operate with fusion power and build a large floating city, the gravity on Uranus would be almost identical to the gravity that we experience here on the Earth. Storms would be interesting, and of course you couldn't be able to stand out in the open air, but it would be an interesting environment for a good science fiction story.
As far as practicality is concerned, it is way out there and you would have to be real desperate for Real Estate if you try to use Uranus directly for some.
And if you can get 50% + of the ownership shares in a corporation to agree to silly corporate charter ammendments like refusing to do business with Denmark (or pick your favorite "politically incorrect" country of the moment), this isn't going to happen anyway?
Fortunately most shareholders don't agree with these silly charter ammendments, especially as most major corporations are actually owned by "institutional" investors, including mutual and retirement funds. Trying to get them to make a charter change to permit notification by FedEx, on the other hand, is going to be trivial to get passed and indeed is something I would expect to be suggested by one of these institutional investors, because it makes their job easier.
BTW, I could split fine hairs on the IRS code, but you don't have to file before April 15th... you just have to make sure that your taxes have been paid before then. Even that has ugly fine points that are needless for this discussion as well, but it doesn't really matter. The point here is that documents have other alternative methods of delivery.
I just can't wait until delivery to yesterday (due to the International Date Line issues... not time travel) becomes widespread due to sub-orbital cargo delivery flights. I've actually needed that a couple of times, and would have been willing to pay $500/lb or more to do it. I did charter a private pilot to be a personal courrier once to deliver a package that missed a FedEx shipping deadline.
If you sent a tax return via FedEx rather than USPS on April 15th, the IRS would be very hard pressed to deny that you filed the tax return on the correct date. Of course when dealing with the federal government anything can happen. You would be "safer" through the USPS because it is still considered a federal agency and that you have given it to the federal government once your return physically enters a postal mailing box.
As for ammeding the bylaws for corporations... that just takes a shareholder meeting and a little bit of legal paperwork... and something that should be done if they are thinking intelligently about it. I have used FedEx for critical memos of the nature you were talking about so much that I wouldn't have given it a second thought that it was even a problem, but yeah, I guess that looking in the bylaws to see if it is legal to do would be a smart thing.
More important about the Falcon 9 is that it is being designed from the ground up as a manned lanuch platform. Sure, the primary market is still going to be for satellite launches, but for less than $200 m you can put a manned spacecraft platform into orbit is going to be a neat thing to see. With multiple passengers as well.
If you are ambitious enough and have the money burning a hole in your pocket, you can even start designing the spacecraft, but you are right that I would like to see if SpaceX can even get the Falcon 1 going first.
Although like the original posting mentioned, if you sent a meeting notice or other legal matter via FedEx or priority mail, you get essentially the same result, including a signed notice of recept. Even better you can usually get a copy of the actual signature within minutes or hours of when it was signed.
Still, before overnight delivery, I think you would have to be correct.
The last telegram that I recieved was when I lived in Brazil about 20 years ago. Where I was living there was a government bureaucracy from hell that governed the establishment of telephone service, and you had to get on a waiting list that was often as long as 10-15 years worth of waiting before you got your telephone connection. As a result, telegrams were a fairly standard method of communication for short messages... especially between other Americans when the exchange rate was quite favorable.
You could send the messages from the local post office, and if you paid for priority courrier service there would be a messenger who would ride a motorcycle to your doorway and hand deliver the message, even in the evening. Like a previous poster mentioned, telegrams were very convienient to send messages when the reciever didn't have any sort of electronic decryption or reception equipment.
I tried to send a telegram message to the USA as a Christmas message, but the cost of going through Western Union was so incredibly high (about $50 even with the exchange rate) that I said forget about it. That was close to a three weeks of living expenses including housing, clothing, and food for me at the time and while I was living there.
Prior to the Reagan administration, NASA was the only game in town for just about everything that went into space, incuding private payloads as well. Or you had to renouce your American citizenship (if you were American) and try the Russians. Sure, there were private contractors who did the actual construction of the vehicles and even largely ran the lanuch operations, but there was a NASA official at just about every other step along the way.
As an example of private payloads launched through NASA, the Telstar Satellite, while owned and technically operated by AT&T, was built and launched through a government procurement contract. The original process was so complicated that AT&T bought a couple of congress critters to reform the process, which led to the development of Intelsat for major long distance communication. BTW, the Wikipedia articles really whitewash the whole episode of how ugly the politics got for launching private space vehicles.
This is still used as an example of how the government should not operate in space, and that the bureaucracy for getting things into space has always been there. Only now are totally private launch systems even being developed, and even in the case of SpaceX there is still government money involved. Just not as directly and SpaceX decided to take matters into their own hands in regards to the launch. It was originally scheduled to be at Vandenburg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, but got tied down in bureaucratic B.S. to force them to either delay the lanuch for a considerable length of time or find another place to launch.
I'm not particularly pleased with the current proposal that is kicking around, but it has been talked about for some time (at least more than a year). Some discussion about having reader grading of content to some sort of approval process to get featured articles moved into a "Wikipedia 1.0" site as a researched and fact checked article.
Some sort of content review standards will happen, and it is likely that Wikipedia will be quite a bit different from its current format in 5-10 years. It will be interesting to see just will happen with this very real need.