1. Nuclear Power Supply...hundreds of megawatts.
2. Non-chemical propulsion.
2. Magnetic shielding to protect against solar radiation.
3. Rotating living quarters for "artificial gravity".
4. Complete atmospheric and waste recycling.
5. Detachable vehicles for EVAs and descent vehicles.
Now THAT is a challenge that rises to the level of difficulty as Apollo and would spawn a like number of innovations for the rest of the world.
Hell, if you can make number 4 alone work reliably enough to go to mars, then imagine the benefits here on Earth.
Any serious attempt to go to Mars will require pretty much those things. If they are proposing less than that, you can tell that they are not being serious about going there.
Trump is Bush with more bankruptcies, less military service, and no discernible interest in anything about the job other than power.
Obama's administration carried on most of the Bush-era policies that Democrats loathed the most - and Hillary's being billed by everyone, even Obama, as Obama's Third Term.
Have fun with that!
So it'll be Bush the Younger's fifth term. I keep telling my dad that I don't see why he doesn't like Hillary, she's probably the best (pre-Reagan) Republican candidate that is possible, since the Dixiecrats have taken over the Republican party.
Poor analogy. Tor exit nodes don't store anything. It's a relay that people use in order to obscure the place they came from.
Here's a better analogy. Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police then charged the shop owners as an accessory to evading law enforcement.
Poor analogy. Here is a better analogy.
Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police questioned the shop owners to confirm that they were the shop owners and not the criminal.
I miss the days it was just Netflix and Netflix had just about everything.
True, but streaming is the new cable, and cable is the new broadcast TV. Personally, I still mostly use their DVD service and they still have most everything.
Mars is at the bottom of a fairly deep gravity well and has a very thin atmosphere. This makes landing on Mars is challenging. The atmosphere is thick enough to cause problems but not thick enough for useful aerobreaking. Getting useful loads down to the ground is a a technically challenging problem, and getting back into orbit is just difficult enough to be annoyingly expensive.
If only somebody was working on a reusable spacecraft that can use it's own engines to land exactly where it wants to, and then refuel and lift off again. Remember this is for cargo or humans. Before any people go to Mars, I expect to see cargo trips to Mars that will land LOX fuel compressors and robotic follow up that will refuel and launch, with physical samples, back to Earth. Then we'll see some humans go if they figure out all the other issues with moving space habitats that are indepedent for long periods of time.
Not only are we left to wonder what a mooncake is, which is not so bad really as we can look it up, but we're left to wonder why we should care about Alibaba's annual mooncake sale which we've never heard of before. Not linking mooncake to WP is dumb, but not linking "annual mooncake sale" to a page which explains what it is to us is just goddamned stupid.
I thought Slashdot was going to be different now... better. But...
Nope. Whinier commenters these days. In the old days, a whiny commenter would have whined and then posted links to all the things in question in disgust to get those precious mod points.
The world has changed. You may not like it, I certainly don't like it, but when a sizable portion of the population only really visits Facebook and relies on Facebook for news, events, all that sort of stuff, ANY kind of censorship is getting dangerously close to revisionism.
Seems like somebody should start FB pages that do nothing but post socially relevant articles about history that youngsters should be expected to know about.
And finally intelligence has not really show to provide any marked survival advantage for the species possessing it until very recently. Within the last 70,000 years modern humans (who have existed in their present form around 250,000 years) appear to have undergone a population bottleneck where the entire human race shrank to about 2,000 individuals - a close brush with complete extinction.
Hrrm. Perhaps that is the great filter and we have passed it. It seems that intelligence, or at least our form of it has some sever disadvantages such as longer child rearing and increased caloric requirements. Of course, our race had to deal with these disadvantages without the advantages, probably for quite some time. So, the great filter may be a race of developing things like advanced tool making and language through pure creativity before the disadvantages that allow them to happen ends up making the species less adaptable than competetors.
Even with Universal Basic Income you still have tasks to do - shopping for your food, cooking your food, cleaning your house, maintaining your yard, taking a bath (well, maybe not in your case). There is ALWAYS something that needs to be done.
However, judging by some of my roommates in college, there will still be plenty of people that won't do them.
Electric spacecraft sucks because they are no good for towing and you can't land and take off on a planet... At least with combustion spacecraft you can visit Pluto if you want.... (grin)
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college. And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
I work with doctors and there are reasons for that. You certainly don't hear about all the docs that change their course in med school. You will never hear about layoffs in residents because they're temp anyway. Some just don't make it or don't get good enough reference to get further in the field. By now, they're approaching 30 and looking to become an attending, what you are thinking about when you think "doctor". Many will have to prove themselves by being fellows. Again, pretty much a temp job, seemingly often used to fill a doctor's position till a permanent one is chosen. Then, there's the game of where do you want to move to. Becoming an attending is easier if you're willing to move to some country hospital in a flyover state for less money, but many have ideas of where they want to live and will shoot for a position in those places, while being a float or fellow in others for years while waiting for one to open up. In the end, the number of attendings are required because that's who has to sign off reports and since they typically only hired enough to man the shifts they have, there aren't really any they can layoff unless business drops below sustainable levels. Still, there is a practice of using PAs, Fellows, and other options instead of attendings but those are usually only allowed when suitable attendings can't be found, which can take some time after one retires or leaves.
All in all, it looks very similar to how professors are being replaced by adjuncts in the academic world. Trust me, the bean counters are counting beans and making all the cuts they can. As for over seas workers, there are actually nighthawk services in India and other places that will do reads of things like x-rays and CTs, that are then sent back and rubberstamped by the loan attending hired to do that. That and that many of the doctors are from out of the country going through that entire med school, resident, fellow, attending process too.
Just have 2 passwords, one that deletes a private folder on login and one that doesn't.
2 passwords. One decrypts one file, presumably deserving of encryption but innocent, such as your tax information. The other decrypts to the things you don't want found out.
Five years later, released from jail because they crack the password, finding embarrassing porn, but nothing illegal.
But no compensation for throwing a man in jail for the 'crime' of a poor memory.
Wait till it happens to somebody because they found suspicious files or areas of the hard drive and just think that something is encrypted. Then demand the password to the suspected encrypted devices and there is no password.
Which requires precision bouncing of lasers at a distance of over 4 light-years. Assuming we have powerful lasers with tight beams at that distance, we'd blast the separated sail way away from the rest pretty fast. All of the fancy laser targeting has to be done over 8 years before we know what's going on. I have my doubts.
As Frank lloyd Wright would say, "That's a problem for the engineers."
In theory it could probably be done similarly with sails at the destination as captured photons are bounced between the two sails indefinately creating a constant, increasing pressure.
Perhaps, but Greenpeace isn't running for President with a captive audience of roughly half the US voting population who will probably give him their votes just because they won't vote for the other candidate. So, while one might be worse, one certainly has the potential to cause much more damage.
If only the solar sail spacecraft had some means of propulsion that could help it slow down at it's destination.
There is. As another commenter stated, to get up to interstellar speeds, it will require a laser to shoot at the solar sail. Once it is near it's destination, the sail separated and the laser is then bounced off the separated sail and back at the original probe and remaining sail to slow it down.
I can't buy that, either. Intelligent machines must be possible -- after all, we're just meat machines, and unless there's some divine entity handing out souls there's nothing particularly special about us naturally-evolved organisms that couldn't be duplicated in an artificial organism. So it should be possible to purpose-build intelligent machines and send them out as interstellar probes. Make it so the intelligence can hibernate for the journey by powering down.
I'm not really sold that creating intelligent machines would be the answer. Machine break down and currently have no self repair mechanisms and are not intelligent. In the end, mankind are just meat machines that are already intelligent and have the capacity for self repair. It will probably be easier to fix humanity for such journeys than to build new life from scratch. Especially since we spend so much of our research on life extension and preservation already.
Anyway: who in his sane mind would sent out self replicating probes, that need millennia if not millions of years to reach a single star/planet when he himself will die a few decades later?
One thought in this line of reasoning is that we will eventually migrate to space and have space habitats that mine asteroids. There is a wealth of asteroids and dwarf planets in the oort cloud and beyond. Migrating space habitats will jump from one to another mining the resources they need. Our oort cloud pretty much runs into that of neighboring stars, so we won't so much as go exploring other stars as much as nomadically end up there eventually due to pressure to find resources. Given than being close to a star is prime energy rich territory and ours will pretty much be crowded, there will be a concrete reason to migrate that way and get there first.
Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease. Mars could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.
There are lots of deal breakers. Radiation is just one of them. Another is loss of atmosphere. Spaceships leak. The ISS has to get constant resupply of gas because the atmosphere is constantly leaking out into space. They could take more with them as supplies and no doubt will, but that just makes the entire thing heavier and harder to get there. There will have to be some significant work on seals and keeping atmosphere from escaping over the periods of time a Mars mission will take (at least 22 months) before they will be able to go. The process of building something capable of carrying at least four people to Mars will also probably need some improvements and then comes the question of moving it out of orbit and on it's way to Mars which will require some more engineering advances as it's not something we've ever done before. At least we hopefully have the living in zero-G thing worked out with study on various space stations. Still, the ISS is the most expensive human project ever, and a Mars trip will be looking at building an even higher tech one of those and then moving it out of orbit to Mats where there will be landers and then return to the station and Earth. There will be countless deal breakers out there and nobody is even really considering putting forth the money to get them done any time soon.
I am sorry but in no world is a piece of toast a single egg and then a single slice of tomato going to be enough food for breakfast. I get it, its probably healthier, I get it you need to consume less then your output if you want to loose weight, but my lunch is at 1 in the afternoon. a piece of bread, an egg and just a slice of tomato isn't enough food for a 8 year old.
You turn away alot of people who need to eat healthier when you absolutely minimize the portion sizes to minuscule proportions.
1 slice of whole grained bread, toasted: 65 calories
1 egg, fried: 92 calories
1 (thick) slice of tomato: 5 calories.
162 calories is NOT ENOUGH FOR BREAKFAST. Eating a breakfast like that will guarentee snacking later, which defeats the point.
Source: http://www.thecaloriecounter.c...
And that is why you add rashers, mushrooms, potato cakes, beans, coffee and OJ for a full English Breakfast!
And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
Dude. You're about 30 or 40 years too late. All the other places are where they looked first. Just more stars we can't see. More non-luminous matter such as Jupiters scattered around to make up the mass. A modified theory of gravitation. Neutrinos flying around the universe. All the logical stuff that would be equivilent to another planet inside Mercury's orbit was looked at first and has been disproven. The idea of dark matter that only interacts via gravity is the other direction and currently the one that best fits the evidence. It still could be something else, but if it is, its going to be a lot weirder than matter that only interacts via gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Features of a space ship vs a tin can
1. Nuclear Power Supply...hundreds of megawatts. 2. Non-chemical propulsion. 2. Magnetic shielding to protect against solar radiation. 3. Rotating living quarters for "artificial gravity". 4. Complete atmospheric and waste recycling. 5. Detachable vehicles for EVAs and descent vehicles.
Now THAT is a challenge that rises to the level of difficulty as Apollo and would spawn a like number of innovations for the rest of the world.
Hell, if you can make number 4 alone work reliably enough to go to mars, then imagine the benefits here on Earth.
Any serious attempt to go to Mars will require pretty much those things. If they are proposing less than that, you can tell that they are not being serious about going there.
Trump is Bush with more bankruptcies, less military service, and no discernible interest in anything about the job other than power.
Obama's administration carried on most of the Bush-era policies that Democrats loathed the most - and Hillary's being billed by everyone, even Obama, as Obama's Third Term.
Have fun with that!
So it'll be Bush the Younger's fifth term. I keep telling my dad that I don't see why he doesn't like Hillary, she's probably the best (pre-Reagan) Republican candidate that is possible, since the Dixiecrats have taken over the Republican party.
Poor analogy. Tor exit nodes don't store anything. It's a relay that people use in order to obscure the place they came from. Here's a better analogy. Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police then charged the shop owners as an accessory to evading law enforcement.
Poor analogy. Here is a better analogy. Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police questioned the shop owners to confirm that they were the shop owners and not the criminal.
I'm not seeing any cars!
I miss the days it was just Netflix and Netflix had just about everything.
True, but streaming is the new cable, and cable is the new broadcast TV. Personally, I still mostly use their DVD service and they still have most everything.
Mars is at the bottom of a fairly deep gravity well and has a very thin atmosphere. This makes landing on Mars is challenging. The atmosphere is thick enough to cause problems but not thick enough for useful aerobreaking. Getting useful loads down to the ground is a a technically challenging problem, and getting back into orbit is just difficult enough to be annoyingly expensive.
If only somebody was working on a reusable spacecraft that can use it's own engines to land exactly where it wants to, and then refuel and lift off again. Remember this is for cargo or humans. Before any people go to Mars, I expect to see cargo trips to Mars that will land LOX fuel compressors and robotic follow up that will refuel and launch, with physical samples, back to Earth. Then we'll see some humans go if they figure out all the other issues with moving space habitats that are indepedent for long periods of time.
or is it too much for submitters to write in grown up English and not teenie language
It is English. I suspect that you are the one with the funny accent.
Not only are we left to wonder what a mooncake is, which is not so bad really as we can look it up, but we're left to wonder why we should care about Alibaba's annual mooncake sale which we've never heard of before. Not linking mooncake to WP is dumb, but not linking "annual mooncake sale" to a page which explains what it is to us is just goddamned stupid.
I thought Slashdot was going to be different now... better. But...
Nope. Whinier commenters these days. In the old days, a whiny commenter would have whined and then posted links to all the things in question in disgust to get those precious mod points.
The world has changed. You may not like it, I certainly don't like it, but when a sizable portion of the population only really visits Facebook and relies on Facebook for news, events, all that sort of stuff, ANY kind of censorship is getting dangerously close to revisionism.
Seems like somebody should start FB pages that do nothing but post socially relevant articles about history that youngsters should be expected to know about.
And finally intelligence has not really show to provide any marked survival advantage for the species possessing it until very recently. Within the last 70,000 years modern humans (who have existed in their present form around 250,000 years) appear to have undergone a population bottleneck where the entire human race shrank to about 2,000 individuals - a close brush with complete extinction.
Hrrm. Perhaps that is the great filter and we have passed it. It seems that intelligence, or at least our form of it has some sever disadvantages such as longer child rearing and increased caloric requirements. Of course, our race had to deal with these disadvantages without the advantages, probably for quite some time. So, the great filter may be a race of developing things like advanced tool making and language through pure creativity before the disadvantages that allow them to happen ends up making the species less adaptable than competetors.
They don't need to ask the internet. The internet will let them know regardless.
And if they ask the internet, the internet will just let them know they need to rebrand Mozilla as "Browsey McBrowserface".
What's really depressing is this is the same list from ten years ago.
Even with Universal Basic Income you still have tasks to do - shopping for your food, cooking your food, cleaning your house, maintaining your yard, taking a bath (well, maybe not in your case). There is ALWAYS something that needs to be done.
However, judging by some of my roommates in college, there will still be plenty of people that won't do them.
Electric spacecraft sucks because they are no good for towing and you can't land and take off on a planet... At least with combustion spacecraft you can visit Pluto if you want.... (grin)
Hybrids are the way to go.
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college. And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
I work with doctors and there are reasons for that. You certainly don't hear about all the docs that change their course in med school. You will never hear about layoffs in residents because they're temp anyway. Some just don't make it or don't get good enough reference to get further in the field. By now, they're approaching 30 and looking to become an attending, what you are thinking about when you think "doctor". Many will have to prove themselves by being fellows. Again, pretty much a temp job, seemingly often used to fill a doctor's position till a permanent one is chosen. Then, there's the game of where do you want to move to. Becoming an attending is easier if you're willing to move to some country hospital in a flyover state for less money, but many have ideas of where they want to live and will shoot for a position in those places, while being a float or fellow in others for years while waiting for one to open up. In the end, the number of attendings are required because that's who has to sign off reports and since they typically only hired enough to man the shifts they have, there aren't really any they can layoff unless business drops below sustainable levels. Still, there is a practice of using PAs, Fellows, and other options instead of attendings but those are usually only allowed when suitable attendings can't be found, which can take some time after one retires or leaves.
All in all, it looks very similar to how professors are being replaced by adjuncts in the academic world. Trust me, the bean counters are counting beans and making all the cuts they can. As for over seas workers, there are actually nighthawk services in India and other places that will do reads of things like x-rays and CTs, that are then sent back and rubberstamped by the loan attending hired to do that. That and that many of the doctors are from out of the country going through that entire med school, resident, fellow, attending process too.
Just have 2 passwords, one that deletes a private folder on login and one that doesn't.
2 passwords. One decrypts one file, presumably deserving of encryption but innocent, such as your tax information. The other decrypts to the things you don't want found out.
"What's your password or you go to jail?"
"I don't remember what's my password."
"He's lying, throw him in jail!"
Five years later, released from jail because they crack the password, finding embarrassing porn, but nothing illegal.
But no compensation for throwing a man in jail for the 'crime' of a poor memory.
Wait till it happens to somebody because they found suspicious files or areas of the hard drive and just think that something is encrypted. Then demand the password to the suspected encrypted devices and there is no password.
Which requires precision bouncing of lasers at a distance of over 4 light-years. Assuming we have powerful lasers with tight beams at that distance, we'd blast the separated sail way away from the rest pretty fast. All of the fancy laser targeting has to be done over 8 years before we know what's going on. I have my doubts.
As Frank lloyd Wright would say, "That's a problem for the engineers."
In theory it could probably be done similarly with sails at the destination as captured photons are bounced between the two sails indefinately creating a constant, increasing pressure.
I think the people who are behind the survey realize this, but just simply object to new smartphones coming out as often as they do.
I can imagine the questions:
1.) Would you like to have a phone that does everything you want it to and never needs to be replaced?
2.) Do you think that your phone should be easy to be repaired and recycled?
Worse than Trump?
Perhaps, but Greenpeace isn't running for President with a captive audience of roughly half the US voting population who will probably give him their votes just because they won't vote for the other candidate. So, while one might be worse, one certainly has the potential to cause much more damage.
If only the solar sail spacecraft had some means of propulsion that could help it slow down at it's destination.
There is. As another commenter stated, to get up to interstellar speeds, it will require a laser to shoot at the solar sail. Once it is near it's destination, the sail separated and the laser is then bounced off the separated sail and back at the original probe and remaining sail to slow it down.
I can't buy that, either. Intelligent machines must be possible -- after all, we're just meat machines, and unless there's some divine entity handing out souls there's nothing particularly special about us naturally-evolved organisms that couldn't be duplicated in an artificial organism. So it should be possible to purpose-build intelligent machines and send them out as interstellar probes. Make it so the intelligence can hibernate for the journey by powering down.
I'm not really sold that creating intelligent machines would be the answer. Machine break down and currently have no self repair mechanisms and are not intelligent. In the end, mankind are just meat machines that are already intelligent and have the capacity for self repair. It will probably be easier to fix humanity for such journeys than to build new life from scratch. Especially since we spend so much of our research on life extension and preservation already.
Anyway: who in his sane mind would sent out self replicating probes, that need millennia if not millions of years to reach a single star/planet when he himself will die a few decades later?
One thought in this line of reasoning is that we will eventually migrate to space and have space habitats that mine asteroids. There is a wealth of asteroids and dwarf planets in the oort cloud and beyond. Migrating space habitats will jump from one to another mining the resources they need. Our oort cloud pretty much runs into that of neighboring stars, so we won't so much as go exploring other stars as much as nomadically end up there eventually due to pressure to find resources. Given than being close to a star is prime energy rich territory and ours will pretty much be crowded, there will be a concrete reason to migrate that way and get there first.
Outside the Earth's magnetic field, radiation becomes the biggest buzz-kill. It's nasty out there. There's concern that even going to the moon and back exposes you to enough high-energy radiation to cause cardio-vascular disease. Mars could be lethal, not just in getting there, but also after you arrive, because Mars has no magnetosphere strong enough to provide a shield (Earth says, "you're welcome"). Any deep-space research has to solve this problem or manned missions will be a death sentence.
There are lots of deal breakers. Radiation is just one of them. Another is loss of atmosphere. Spaceships leak. The ISS has to get constant resupply of gas because the atmosphere is constantly leaking out into space. They could take more with them as supplies and no doubt will, but that just makes the entire thing heavier and harder to get there. There will have to be some significant work on seals and keeping atmosphere from escaping over the periods of time a Mars mission will take (at least 22 months) before they will be able to go. The process of building something capable of carrying at least four people to Mars will also probably need some improvements and then comes the question of moving it out of orbit and on it's way to Mars which will require some more engineering advances as it's not something we've ever done before. At least we hopefully have the living in zero-G thing worked out with study on various space stations. Still, the ISS is the most expensive human project ever, and a Mars trip will be looking at building an even higher tech one of those and then moving it out of orbit to Mats where there will be landers and then return to the station and Earth. There will be countless deal breakers out there and nobody is even really considering putting forth the money to get them done any time soon.
I am sorry but in no world is a piece of toast a single egg and then a single slice of tomato going to be enough food for breakfast. I get it, its probably healthier, I get it you need to consume less then your output if you want to loose weight, but my lunch is at 1 in the afternoon. a piece of bread, an egg and just a slice of tomato isn't enough food for a 8 year old.
You turn away alot of people who need to eat healthier when you absolutely minimize the portion sizes to minuscule proportions. 1 slice of whole grained bread, toasted: 65 calories 1 egg, fried: 92 calories 1 (thick) slice of tomato: 5 calories.
162 calories is NOT ENOUGH FOR BREAKFAST. Eating a breakfast like that will guarentee snacking later, which defeats the point. Source: http://www.thecaloriecounter.c...
And that is why you add rashers, mushrooms, potato cakes, beans, coffee and OJ for a full English Breakfast!
And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and ... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
Dude. You're about 30 or 40 years too late. All the other places are where they looked first. Just more stars we can't see. More non-luminous matter such as Jupiters scattered around to make up the mass. A modified theory of gravitation. Neutrinos flying around the universe. All the logical stuff that would be equivilent to another planet inside Mercury's orbit was looked at first and has been disproven. The idea of dark matter that only interacts via gravity is the other direction and currently the one that best fits the evidence. It still could be something else, but if it is, its going to be a lot weirder than matter that only interacts via gravity.