Being a "mainframe guy", I can't help but laugh at how PCs were brought in to break the IT stranglehold, and now after uncountabillions have been spent on virus protection and remediation (with companies still not blocking most web sites), the pendulum is now swinging back in the direction of centralized control.
3)Build space elevator to atmosphere of Jupiter using asteroids for building material.
Even easier!!
5)Go anywhere you want after that because you've got fuel.
Any questions?
Sure: 1) Where do you get all the dense mass to protect you from hard cosmic radiation? 2) How do you protect the elevator from all that crap whizzing around Jupiter? 3) What do you build the ship with? 4) How do you provision it, etc, etc, etc?
The Earth and Sun just do too much that we take for granted, and stellar distances are just too great to be practical.
Which is fertile ground for a host of cognitive biases. "Confirmation" and "Experimenter's" leap instantly to mind, especially when the experiments take a decade or more and cost billions of Other People's Money.
If anything, SETI is a hell of a lot closer to playing the lottery then it is to religion.
Playing the lottery is a "tax on the mathematically challenged". Nothing that you or Ragondux wrote have convinced me that SETI is anything but a "tax on the reality challenged". Flat Earthers have a closer grip on reality.
Why and how "on Earth" would any advanced ET have known hundreds of years ago to aim a directed beacon at not just Earth (if it were aimed at Saturn, we wouldn't detect it), but Earth now when we have the technology?
Unless the thinking is that ET decided to continually blast directed EM beacons at every planet circling every star. Which is, of course, absurd.
What's unscientific is believing, like you seem to do, that we are very special and that there can't be intelligent life on the other billions of planets in the vicinity.
Nothing in OP's message indicates that we are unique in the galaxy. The point is that we don't broadcast all sorts of messy EM, why should anyone else?
What would be a REAL scientific test would be to launch a large-antennae "Can you hear me now?" satellite with an ion engine aimed away from the orbital plane. Aim the antennae towards Earth. If it can't detect Earth signals at one Lunar orbital radius then SETI should close up shop and give the radio telescopes over to some worthwhile purpose. If it's still detecting signals at 120 AU, then the probability of SETI detecting something goes from zero to 10e-30.
Except that the likelihood of (a) some super advanced civilization existing (b) close enough that the EMF radiation didn't dissipate into unreadability and (c) that they'd actually have the foresight to know when and where we are listening is.. Z E R O.
The mere existence of SETI, that "serious" scientists could even think that "someone else" is bathing the universe with encoded signals, and that so many people want to pay money to listen for these non-existent signals is -- IMNSHO -- an even bigger indication of the decline of critical thinking in the US than Real Housewives Of Atlanta.
Nothing, since I use GNOME 2.32. But v3.0 and (since I use Ubuntu) Unity approacheth.
It's been a long time (Mandrake 7.0) since I used KDE, but ever since then I've consistently read of theming and font problems mixing GTK and KDE apps.
Stop being snarky and realize that maybe I'm not so stupid as to not realize that "nuclear energy" exists.
Anyway, are you referring to fission or fusion?
With either, It's very hard to (a) get a high Isp while (b) protecting the crew from immediate death, without (c) lots of radiation absorbers, which of course (d) adds so much more mass that needs to be launched.
The Earth is a very deep gravity well, so it takes a high Isp to get out of it. But not so high as to tun the passengers into jelly. Distances are so great that it takes high velocity to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. Then you need some *practical* manner of slowing down once you get where you're going.
The problem with so many ideas is that the devil is in the details. For example, rail guns. So common in fiction, yet so hard in practice.
I'm old enough to remember when going to a DMV in Chicago was a nightmare. Now they are very well run, and staffed by union members to boot.
And *why* are they now well run? By some magic pixie dust desire to do better? No: fear of privatization motivated the unions and their members to do right.
I don't mind, though, since I'm not dogmatic about privatization. The "threat" from competition still has to be there, though.
There are a number of us working in the space industry who are eager to take part in human exploration of space because being trapped on this single rock for the rest of our lives is just plain boring.
couchslug is completely accurate that human existence outside of our little blue marble is incredibly expensive and incredibly hazardous: vacuum, meteorites, high energy particles, gamma rays, bone deterioration, etc, etc.
Some radical new energy source source is needed in order to launch all the mass required to make long-term existence even reasonably safe.
Look what having private industry involved with the has done to the cost of health care.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970s. Government services SUCKED: poorly done and took forever to complete. That's why so many people were in favor of privatization.
Do a bit of research into government-run PTTs. Their inefficiency is why cellphones became so popular so quickly everywhere except the USA, where ATT was motivated by profit to quickly lay lots of wire and connect lots of customers.
America runs on CYA. If a drug company puts out a vaccine that kills children, as long as they have followed the proper protocol they will not be liable for the murder of the children.
You're mistaking CYA with "we can't know everything, but we did our best by following agreed-upon standards and practices". This country (and Europe for that matter) is already too nannyish and afraid of lawyers (refer to the "Can a Playground Be Too Safe?" article. Any more and progress will grind to a *complete* halt.
None yet, but it's what you're dealing with if you discuss it today.
For Christ's Fucking Sake! It's 2000 and God Damed 11.
Nuclear war is the ABSOLUTE last thing on everyone's minds except: 1) a relative handful of government employees and think tanks around the world, and 2) lunatics like you.
it's a current state... Nothing in my statement made it "okay in the past" - your inability to understand basic English grammar is not my problem.
There's no "current state" of nuclear war.
Really ? Nuclear retaliation would be okay you say ?
Sure. In certain specific circumstances. But you blithely ignore that clause.
You realize that the only effect it would have is massive and unstoppable escalation.
By who?
Russia? China? Pakistan? India?
For that matter - the only thing that makes your action "better" in your book is that it's retalliation. "He did it first !"... what are you ? 3 years old ?
Since Third Parties (think Ross Perot or Ralph Nader) steal votes from one or another main party candidate, winner-take-all election systems naturally gravitate towards two party systems.
In the US, all those different opinions and thoughts on thousands of different issues boil down to "Republican" and "Democrat". I don't like it, but not liking it is a fruitful as not liking friction.
wait are you seriously suggesting that there is any kind of variation in how bad it is to vaporize a few million people - mostly civilians ?
Which nuclear bombs killed a few million people?
it's always going to be just about the most evil thing anybody can do in the world with current technology
Yes. That's future tense.
SIXTY SIX YEARS ago, two small atom bombs dropped on a fanatical (remember kamikaze?) enemy to close out a long, declared war in not the same as instant global thermonuclear (i.e. hydrogen bomb) war.
By your logic, there must be cases today where dropping a nuke would be okay because the droppers are sufficiently "good" and the government of the country it's droppped on sufficiently bad that all those innocent civilians dying one of the most painful deaths known to man is acceptable ? Can you seriously believe that ?
Yes, actually, as retaliation if Iran were to launch nukes at Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
(No, I didn't RTFA.)
Being a "mainframe guy", I can't help but laugh at how PCs were brought in to break the IT stranglehold, and now after uncountabillions have been spent on virus protection and remediation (with companies still not blocking most web sites), the pendulum is now swinging back in the direction of centralized control.
I assure you that the people who are really interested in space operations do not.
It's all sci fi until someone figures out (a) how to harness nuclear fusion, and (b) use it to create a VASIMIR-like engine.
Congress. It seems that the members of congress are so dense
I thought they were full of hot air...
Anyway, great post. +5 Insightful.
2)Move asteroids to orbit of Jupiter.
Easy-peasey no problem!!!
3)Build space elevator to atmosphere of Jupiter using asteroids for building material.
Even easier!!
5)Go anywhere you want after that because you've got fuel.
Any questions?
Sure:
1) Where do you get all the dense mass to protect you from hard cosmic radiation?
2) How do you protect the elevator from all that crap whizzing around Jupiter?
3) What do you build the ship with?
4) How do you provision it, etc, etc, etc?
The Earth and Sun just do too much that we take for granted, and stellar distances are just too great to be practical.
Of course, that wouldn't have been possible without having some idea of what the ether should be.
What's your alternative then?
Just keep on staring out into space. Who knows how much more stuff we'll discover.
Which is fertile ground for a host of cognitive biases. "Confirmation" and "Experimenter's" leap instantly to mind, especially when the experiments take a decade or more and cost billions of Other People's Money.
Despite lots of effort, nobody has come up with a satisfactory theory of gravity which fixes the problem.
It's actually *ok* to say, "Our knowledge and theories are incomplete. Once we get more data we can fill in the gaps."
If anything, SETI is a hell of a lot closer to playing the lottery then it is to religion.
Playing the lottery is a "tax on the mathematically challenged". Nothing that you or Ragondux wrote have convinced me that SETI is anything but a "tax on the reality challenged". Flat Earthers have a closer grip on reality.
directed beacons aimed into our direction
Why and how "on Earth" would any advanced ET have known hundreds of years ago to aim a directed beacon at not just Earth (if it were aimed at Saturn, we wouldn't detect it), but Earth now when we have the technology?
Unless the thinking is that ET decided to continually blast directed EM beacons at every planet circling every star. Which is, of course, absurd.
What's unscientific is believing, like you seem to do, that we are very special and that there can't be intelligent life on the other billions of planets in the vicinity.
Nothing in OP's message indicates that we are unique in the galaxy. The point is that we don't broadcast all sorts of messy EM, why should anyone else?
What would be a REAL scientific test would be to launch a large-antennae "Can you hear me now?" satellite with an ion engine aimed away from the orbital plane. Aim the antennae towards Earth. If it can't detect Earth signals at one Lunar orbital radius then SETI should close up shop and give the radio telescopes over to some worthwhile purpose. If it's still detecting signals at 120 AU, then the probability of SETI detecting something goes from zero to 10e-30.
and conduct an experiment to test it.
Except that the likelihood of (a) some super advanced civilization existing (b) close enough that the EMF radiation didn't dissipate into unreadability and (c) that they'd actually have the foresight to know when and where we are listening is.. Z E R O.
The mere existence of SETI, that "serious" scientists could even think that "someone else" is bathing the universe with encoded signals, and that so many people want to pay money to listen for these non-existent signals is -- IMNSHO -- an even bigger indication of the decline of critical thinking in the US than Real Housewives Of Atlanta.
What doesn't work for you?
Nothing, since I use GNOME 2.32. But v3.0 and (since I use Ubuntu) Unity approacheth.
It's been a long time (Mandrake 7.0) since I used KDE, but ever since then I've consistently read of theming and font problems mixing GTK and KDE apps.
How's that coming?
As a Firefox user who's children love Flash games, that's a /sine qua non/.
We could call it "nuclear energy", maybe.
Stop being snarky and realize that maybe I'm not so stupid as to not realize that "nuclear energy" exists.
Anyway, are you referring to fission or fusion?
With either, It's very hard to (a) get a high Isp while (b) protecting the crew from immediate death, without (c) lots of radiation absorbers, which of course (d) adds so much more mass that needs to be launched.
The Earth is a very deep gravity well, so it takes a high Isp to get out of it. But not so high as to tun the passengers into jelly. Distances are so great that it takes high velocity to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. Then you need some *practical* manner of slowing down once you get where you're going.
The problem with so many ideas is that the devil is in the details. For example, rail guns. So common in fiction, yet so hard in practice.
I'm old enough to remember when going to a DMV in Chicago was a nightmare. Now they are very well run, and staffed by union members to boot.
And *why* are they now well run? By some magic pixie dust desire to do better? No: fear of privatization motivated the unions and their members to do right.
I don't mind, though, since I'm not dogmatic about privatization. The "threat" from competition still has to be there, though.
There are a number of us working in the space industry who are eager to take part in human exploration of space because being trapped on this single rock for the rest of our lives is just plain boring.
couchslug is completely accurate that human existence outside of our little blue marble is incredibly expensive and incredibly hazardous: vacuum, meteorites, high energy particles, gamma rays, bone deterioration, etc, etc.
Some radical new energy source source is needed in order to launch all the mass required to make long-term existence even reasonably safe.
Look what having private industry involved with the has done to the cost of health care.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970s. Government services SUCKED: poorly done and took forever to complete. That's why so many people were in favor of privatization.
Do a bit of research into government-run PTTs. Their inefficiency is why cellphones became so popular so quickly everywhere except the USA, where ATT was motivated by profit to quickly lay lots of wire and connect lots of customers.
America runs on CYA. If a drug company puts out a vaccine that kills children, as long as they have followed the proper protocol they will not be liable for the murder of the children.
You're mistaking CYA with "we can't know everything, but we did our best by following agreed-upon standards and practices". This country (and Europe for that matter) is already too nannyish and afraid of lawyers (refer to the "Can a Playground Be Too Safe?" article. Any more and progress will grind to a *complete* halt.
Google "only guilty people have something to hide".
That only happened on sub-120MHz Pentiums.
None yet, but it's what you're dealing with if you discuss it today.
For Christ's Fucking Sake! It's 2000 and God Damed 11.
Nuclear war is the ABSOLUTE last thing on everyone's minds except:
1) a relative handful of government employees and think tanks around the world, and
2) lunatics like you.
it's a current state ... Nothing in my statement made it "okay in the past" - your inability to understand basic English grammar is not my problem.
There's no "current state" of nuclear war.
Really ? Nuclear retaliation would be okay you say ?
Sure. In certain specific circumstances. But you blithely ignore that clause.
You realize that the only effect it would have is massive and unstoppable escalation.
By who?
Russia? China? Pakistan? India?
For that matter - the only thing that makes your action "better" in your book is that it's retalliation. "He did it first !" ... what are you ? 3 years old ?
You're an anti-war activist, aren't you?
Sadly, politics isn't physics.
Since Third Parties (think Ross Perot or Ralph Nader) steal votes from one or another main party candidate, winner-take-all election systems naturally gravitate towards two party systems.
In the US, all those different opinions and thoughts on thousands of different issues boil down to "Republican" and "Democrat". I don't like it, but not liking it is a fruitful as not liking friction.
wait are you seriously suggesting that there is any kind of variation in how bad it is to vaporize a few million people - mostly civilians ?
Which nuclear bombs killed a few million people?
it's always going to be just about the most evil thing anybody can do in the world with current technology
Yes. That's future tense.
SIXTY SIX YEARS ago, two small atom bombs dropped on a fanatical (remember kamikaze?) enemy to close out a long, declared war in not the same as instant global thermonuclear (i.e. hydrogen bomb) war.
By your logic, there must be cases today where dropping a nuke would be okay because the droppers are sufficiently "good" and the government of the country it's droppped on sufficiently bad that all those innocent civilians dying one of the most painful deaths known to man is acceptable ? Can you seriously believe that ?
Yes, actually, as retaliation if Iran were to launch nukes at Israel.
Way to make up your own mind.
Since I'm not making the choice you would have made, I'm not actually making a "choice", but simply being a sheeple?
The rest of UN political organizations are there mostly for lulz
You forgot, "graft" and "veneer of civilization".