Ah, but The Senior lived about 250 years and then rejuvination therapies started getting developed. Then all he had to do was show up at his doctor appointments and not put his feet on anything slippery in the meantime.
That's an insane amount of resources to pour into a project. And even with some of the world's best nuclear scientists on the job, they went from scratch to a successful test in a little less than a decade. Can your average terrorist organization throw those kinds of resources at a project AND still ensure a successful first test?
The Manhattan Project scientists weren't sure what would happen when they set off the first test shot. Some of the math suggested it would ignite the atmosphere and kill everybody, some of it suggested that it would make a pile of uranium dust. They were pioneers, they had no 'prior art' to refer to.
Today's average terrorist doesn't need PhD-level physics to build a bomb. They know it can be done. It's in high school physics text books, for chrissakes. Knowing something is possible is half the battle.
Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.
They didn't have supercomputers at Los Alamos when designing the first plutonium implosion bomb. They did all the calculations by hand, the 'computer' was various teams of women each doing one step of the calculation before passing it on to the next person.
I've got more computing power sitting beside my desk right now than they had on the entire bloody planet in 1969. A plutonium implosion device is possible, if you have the will and the materials to do it. It won't be easy, but it won't be impossible, either.
And they're useless as a real weapon. The radioactive debris is way too easy to clean up, and not lethal enough to be truly effective. Calculations I've seen suggest they'd give you a severe case of radiation poisoning only if they cemented you into place for 50 years.
The problem with non-violence is not that it doesn't work, it's that it requires more courage than most people have to execute it. Non-violent resistance is enormously effective, and anyone who chooses violence over it as an avenue for political conflict resolution is either a coward or has no interest in actually resolving the conflict. In most real cases it is probably a bit of both.
The problem with non-violence is, you're at the mercy of people who don't believe as you do. And when those people control the media, your non-violent message will not be heard. To bring it home to us Americans, 'Free Speach zone', anyone?
When a kid gets a new iPod, I can either lecture him on the evils of the RIAA and ask him not to buy any music, or I can hand him a few DVDs full of the last 3 years worth of top 100 music. The latter GUARANTEES that he won't buy the music, and with some luck he'll pass the disks along to his friends.
That, however, isn't covered by 'fair use' and could be considered to be piracy. Better to let the kid hook up to his parent's computer and download from there.
And what's with the "tree of liberty" BS? Attempting to equate stealing a purely discretionary item that's available from plenty of legitimate sources with patriotism is simply laughable from one side, and an insult to those who died fighting for our liberty on the other.
One minor detail here, though. Downloading a copy of a song without paying for it is NOT stealing. At worst, it's copyright infringement.
Yeah, like they used to say when I was a kid, "Eat right, get plenty of rest, exercise, DIE ANYWAYS". You just can't get away from it.
Statistically speaking, somebody ought to have the capacity to live forever, but they haven't popped their head up to have it shot off yet by us mere mortals...
Except in that story Lot was extolled as the very model of a 'righteous man'.
Thing I got from it was, he knew who he was talking to. He'd get more points in my book if the known angels were total strangers without any connections to 'Invisible Hank'.
What part needs magic materials? The ribbon is made of soft iron iron or steel, probably woven in a manner not unlike normal cables, or possibly in solid sheets. That's not exactly difficult to make. The sheath is a kevlar or carbon fiber composite with an aluminized mylar liner. The control magnets are copper windings over soft iron. You didn't actually read any of the papers, did you?
The tethers holding that sucker to the ground. Did you think of doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation on the tensile strength needed to hold this sucker down???? We're talking orders of magnitude beyond the best artificial spider silk to hold this thing down, and I don't think you can quite order that up in industrial quantities yet.
What part of "mega-scale engineering project" made you think this would be small?
What part of 'too goddamned big and expensive to be economically feasible in our lifetimes' do you not understand? Especially since you'd have to build the sucker in order to test its viability. I'd guestimate it'd only cost a couple trillion dollars, so wait a few weeks for the economy to finish pancaking before writing the check; you'll get your money's worth then. I'm supposing this will be a government project, nobody else would have the cash and the desire to pull this off (although there's bound to be a few private sector entities that could concievably get the cash together, I wouldn't count on their stockholders allowing them to spend it on something like this), which means it won't come in anywhere near budget or on schedule. Yes, I've done heavy construction in my younger crazier days; it put me through college.
Oh, and don't count on selling this to Congress unless you can do like Ike did with the interstate highway system that came about in the 60's & 70's.
Contrast this to a laser launching system. For a few million, you can do a real-world feasibility study. Hell, Lightcraft Technologies already did a feasibility study using a 10 kw laser to push a 25 gram weight to 200 feet as a test. The test worked. Show me a comparable feat with your launch loop.
One of the reasons I love LA, is these people down here will eat anything that doesn't eat them first....and make it taste good!!
Kids. Sigh.
Look. You carry a Swiss Army knife at all times. Not only will you be able to take shit apart and kindasorta put it back together, but you can kill what's trying to eat you first and eat it.
A running loop would have an extremely large amount of energy in the form of linear momentum. While the magnetic suspension system would be highly redundant, with failures of small sections having essentially no effect at all; if a major failure did occur the energy in the loop (1.5×1015 joules or 1.5 petajoules) would be approaching the same total energy release as a nuclear bomb explosion (350 kilotons of TNT equivalent), although not emitting nuclear radiation.
While this is a large amount of energy, it is unlikely that this would destroy very much of the structure due to its very large size, and because the energy release would be spread out over several minutes. Steps might need to be taken to lower the cable down from 80 km altitude with minimal damage, such as parachutes.
Therefore for safety and astrodynamic reasons, launch loops are intended to be installed over an ocean near the equator, well away from habitation.
The published design of a launch loop requires electronic control of the magnetic levitation to minimise power dissipation and to stabilise the otherwise under-damped cable.
This tells me it's going to need 'magic materials'. 'Magic materials' cost money to develop, time to learn to manufacture, machine, assemble, etc.
Did I mention that this launch loop is almost the size of the Great Wall of China?
OK, Earth's circumference is 40,075 km & change. Rotates once every 24 hours. That's 1669.79 km per hour, which means, any point on the equator moves at.46 km per second according to my calculator here. You're talking a supraorbital velocity of 14 km/sec, on the order of 30 times the rotational speed of the Earth at the equator. I repeat my question: How do you hang it up there? How do you keep it from flying away with those cables and maintain a speed 30 times faster than the rotational velocity of the planet? Do you put it in a track? If so, what do you make those cables out of? Hell, how do you anchor the track??? You DO realise the track would have to be 40,075 km long, right? What about expansion and contraction? How much energy do you figure it'll take to get that loop up to speed? How do you keep Luddites, terrorists, Earth Firsters, tax collectors, and herd animals from damaging the track? The loop itself will be moving at 50,400 km/hr, a mere 80 km up. How do you intend to keep pumping energy into a 2000 km long tube to offset speed loss due to air resistance? What do you mean, 'What air resistance?' Put something into LEO under 200 km up, and it'll come down due to orbital decay from air resistance. There isn't much air at 80 km, but it's not a vacuum.
Hell, how do you catch up to the loop moving at 50k km/hr? If you can do that, why bother with the tube at all?
With the laser launcher, the big investment is in the lasers, mirrors, mirror guidance & controls and all the stuff that stays on the ground. The cheap part of it, the capsual, reaction mass & payload, is what goes up. So, once you get the system into place and working, the more you use it, the more you amortise the cost across each launch until someday you get down to a per-launch cost of the capsual, payload, maintanance, and electricity to push that sucker up.
OK, I don't see the numbers working for a launch loop too easily. How do you hang a 2000 km loop 80 km up in the atmosphere to begin with???
I'm more of a fan of the laser launcher concept myself. Problem is, it takes a lot of energy to make one of these work right, so we're probably looking at a couple geosync power sats feeding microwaves to the site. Talk about bootstrapping. Development costs would be a helluva lot lower than 'magic materials' to build a loop or a fountain, I'd think, and if something screwed up, you've still got a nice shirtsleeve environment to work on...
The nudger kills my hand. Course, I'm 54 now, that could have something to do with it. And the fact that I use a conventional mouse 95% of the time on my desktop machine.
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Ah, but The Senior lived about 250 years and then rejuvination therapies started getting developed. Then all he had to do was show up at his doctor appointments and not put his feet on anything slippery in the meantime.
Yeah, that's working out well...
The Manhattan Project scientists weren't sure what would happen when they set off the first test shot. Some of the math suggested it would ignite the atmosphere and kill everybody, some of it suggested that it would make a pile of uranium dust. They were pioneers, they had no 'prior art' to refer to.
Today's average terrorist doesn't need PhD-level physics to build a bomb. They know it can be done. It's in high school physics text books, for chrissakes. Knowing something is possible is half the battle.
They didn't have supercomputers at Los Alamos when designing the first plutonium implosion bomb. They did all the calculations by hand, the 'computer' was various teams of women each doing one step of the calculation before passing it on to the next person.
I've got more computing power sitting beside my desk right now than they had on the entire bloody planet in 1969. A plutonium implosion device is possible, if you have the will and the materials to do it. It won't be easy, but it won't be impossible, either.
And they're useless as a real weapon. The radioactive debris is way too easy to clean up, and not lethal enough to be truly effective. Calculations I've seen suggest they'd give you a severe case of radiation poisoning only if they cemented you into place for 50 years.
Or some more Kool-Aide...
The problem with non-violence is, you're at the mercy of people who don't believe as you do. And when those people control the media, your non-violent message will not be heard. To bring it home to us Americans, 'Free Speach zone', anyone?
Because they're not selling anything worth listening to?
I listen a lot to the radio in the car (broadcast, not sat radio), and most of the stuff they play I wouldn't buy at gun point.
That, however, isn't covered by 'fair use' and could be considered to be piracy. Better to let the kid hook up to his parent's computer and download from there.
One minor detail here, though. Downloading a copy of a song without paying for it is NOT stealing. At worst, it's copyright infringement.
Statistically speaking, somebody ought to have the capacity to live forever, but they haven't popped their head up to have it shot off yet by us mere mortals...
What do you expect from a government contract??
You grab his phaser, I'll get his wallet...
Thing I got from it was, he knew who he was talking to. He'd get more points in my book if the known angels were total strangers without any connections to 'Invisible Hank'.
The tethers holding that sucker to the ground. Did you think of doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation on the tensile strength needed to hold this sucker down???? We're talking orders of magnitude beyond the best artificial spider silk to hold this thing down, and I don't think you can quite order that up in industrial quantities yet.
What part of 'too goddamned big and expensive to be economically feasible in our lifetimes' do you not understand? Especially since you'd have to build the sucker in order to test its viability. I'd guestimate it'd only cost a couple trillion dollars, so wait a few weeks for the economy to finish pancaking before writing the check; you'll get your money's worth then. I'm supposing this will be a government project, nobody else would have the cash and the desire to pull this off (although there's bound to be a few private sector entities that could concievably get the cash together, I wouldn't count on their stockholders allowing them to spend it on something like this), which means it won't come in anywhere near budget or on schedule. Yes, I've done heavy construction in my younger crazier days; it put me through college.
Oh, and don't count on selling this to Congress unless you can do like Ike did with the interstate highway system that came about in the 60's & 70's.
Contrast this to a laser launching system. For a few million, you can do a real-world feasibility study. Hell, Lightcraft Technologies already did a feasibility study using a 10 kw laser to push a 25 gram weight to 200 feet as a test. The test worked. Show me a comparable feat with your launch loop.
Kids. Sigh.
Look. You carry a Swiss Army knife at all times. Not only will you be able to take shit apart and kindasorta put it back together, but you can kill what's trying to eat you first and eat it.
Athens Pizza on Lorain in Cleveland made the best pizza on the planet. One of the few things I miss about Cleveland.
This tells me it's going to need 'magic materials'. 'Magic materials' cost money to develop, time to learn to manufacture, machine, assemble, etc.
Did I mention that this launch loop is almost the size of the Great Wall of China?
Hell, how do you catch up to the loop moving at 50k km/hr? If you can do that, why bother with the tube at all?
With the laser launcher, the big investment is in the lasers, mirrors, mirror guidance & controls and all the stuff that stays on the ground. The cheap part of it, the capsual, reaction mass & payload, is what goes up. So, once you get the system into place and working, the more you use it, the more you amortise the cost across each launch until someday you get down to a per-launch cost of the capsual, payload, maintanance, and electricity to push that sucker up.
I'm more of a fan of the laser launcher concept myself. Problem is, it takes a lot of energy to make one of these work right, so we're probably looking at a couple geosync power sats feeding microwaves to the site. Talk about bootstrapping. Development costs would be a helluva lot lower than 'magic materials' to build a loop or a fountain, I'd think, and if something screwed up, you've still got a nice shirtsleeve environment to work on...
We get them all lined up, it'll be that much easier to shoot them & save ammo.
Oh, shut up, Darl.
Queue incoming litigation against Balmer for the concept of 'throwing chairs' in 3... 2... 1...
4chan.
Yeah, definitely 4chan.
And of course here where it's expected to laugh yer ass off.
The nudger kills my hand. Course, I'm 54 now, that could have something to do with it. And the fact that I use a conventional mouse 95% of the time on my desktop machine.