"The solar cycle "minimum" reflects a relatively low count of sunspots - areas of magnetic and particulate disruption on the sun's surface."
Fail. Sunspots and other solar phenomena during active periods increase solar energy output, and the lack of them decreases it. Both effects are small (about 0.1% on average).
In any case, TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) is being measured directly by satellites and ground-based stations. So we are pretty sure that we are in the TSI minimum as well.
". Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really? Do you honestly think we have all the answers now? That we're even close to having all the answers?"
Yes, we have good enough understanding of Sun's effects on climate. We might still discover some subtle effects, but they won't change the overall picture.
For example, this year is tied for the warmest year on record EVEN THOUGH WE ARE IN THE SOLAR MINIMUM.
Let me repeat: we are in a deep solar minimum, but the last year was tied for the place of the warmest year.
"Are you saying C++ doesn't have development platforms that compile your code in real time as you modify it ?"
No. The closest thing is VisualStudio 2010 - it has online error checker (though not compiler) and working edit&continue. Free tools are miles behind in functionality, unfortunately.
" It is just a created commodity. It will motivate people to reduce in the beginning, but not overall and with reduced returns as more companies upgrade so they can sell their artificial commodity instead of buying it depressing the value of upgrading."
You forget that caps are not constant. They will be lowered with the time, so carbon emissions will become more and more costly.
And frankly, a slight increase in leukemia cases near some reprocessing plants is a smaller price to pay than leukemia increases from coal ash. We don't have 'perfect' technologies which can solve energy problems.
I wear polarizing anti-glare glasses and I was stupid enough to forget to take non-polarizing glasses to the movie. So I could either watch Avatar with one eye or watch it without my glasses.
So? Robots did evolve, though the selective pressure and fitness criteria were artificial. That only means that evolution was not driven by natural selection.
1) Load molten metal into a rocket. 2) Enter Moon's orbit (we're in a shallow gravity well!) 3) Divide liquid metal into droplets. 4) Cool them.
You'll get almost perfect spheres this way. There even were experiments of exactly this method (with some low-temperature alloy) back on Mir.
"(oh, and by the way: your notion of having mining vehicles be powered by solar panels on their roof A) belies an ignorance of the power density of solar energy "
I know the density of solar flux (~1400 Watts/m^2), don't worry. I also know that the first tractors and excavators used only a few horse powers.
Almost all of this can be created by vapor deposition on templates and/or machined by fairly primitive tools.
Just to pick one: excavator consumables:
* Batteries (5-10 year lifespan if a durable chemistry but heavy use)
Use direct solar power (i.e. solar batteries on your roof). You don't need speed and/or a lot of power.
* Lubricants
Use ball bearings. Everywhere.
* Blades
Easily machined, and there's a lot of titanium nearby.
* Motors (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Permanent magnet (iron and cobalt are plentiful) DC motors are dead easy to make.
* Inverter (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Not needed.
* Charger (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Not needed.
* Bearings
Easy to machine.
* Hydraulic fluid (the occasional leak)
Use helium pneumatics.
* Glass (if the operator looks outside directly -- video cameras and displays otherwise), damaged by the occasional bit of ejected rock or slowly eaten away by corrosive lunar dust until hard to see through.
There's a lot of silicon out there.
* Wheels (friction wear)
Use mesh-wire wheels.
* Fenders/hubs/anywhere else where wheel-ejected debris impacts the body and slowly abrades it (regolith is a very abrasive powder, and there's no air to slow it down)
That's easy - you just need to move slowly. Slow down to 5 km/h and there's not much problem with ejecta from the wheels.
* Any sort of electronics -- load sensors, temperature sensors, speed sensors, telematics gear, communications gear, etc. All will break eventually.
That's dead easy - do not use electronics. After all, we had airplanes and tanks without a single _electric_ (never mind electronic) device.
Of course, imported devices must be used at first to establish initial colony. And in the foreseeable future it'll probably be easier to import a lot of stuff from the Earth.
"Where are you getting that from? They found about 100L (0.1 m^3) of water in the ejecta from a crater about 20m across and about 4m deep. That's a volume of about 1700 cubic meters if you assume a cone -- probably more in the real world. That means that water made up about 60 ppm of the ejecta. That's trace."
I've read figures of about 100ppm (1L per m^3), in any case your figure is close enough.
"Metal, too, requires the massive production chains of modern technology for self sufficiency"
So I still think that long dependency chains can be severely reduced. Most of chains are that long because our technology is highly optimized, and Moon colony won't need that at first.
"Hydrogen is not plentiful on the moon. Nor is carbon. Water *was* found on the moon recently, but if you compare the estimated volume of water with the volume of the plume, it was only in trace quantities."
Water==hydrogen. And it seems there's about a liter of water per cubic meter. Which I think as 'plentiful'.
There's a lot of carbon on the Moon, but in the form of carbides, not carbon dioxide.
"Sorry, but production chains for modern parts do include computers."
Then don't use modern parts. Self-sustaining Lunar colony will probably look a bit like 'steampunk' novels. I.e. metal will be cheap, massive constructions will be easy (because of gravity), and there will be little complex automation.
And it's not that unrealistic. Take for example the Biosphere 2 project, it didn't really required that much of advanced technology.
"Don't need much nitrogen and phosphorus? Nitric and phosphoric acid are among are most widely used industrial chemicals. Both elements are critical in large quantities for agriculture. I could give a list a mile long of important things they're used for."
Agriculture will be the most important application, because there won't be a life without it. The rest can be deferred until Moon colony can produce spaceships.
Lithium is plentiful, you can mine it from seawater indefinitely for about $60 per kg. It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
Hydrogen seems to be plentiful on the Moon. Oxygen and carbon are everywhere.
Nitrogen and Phosphorus might cause a problem, but you don't need that much of both. Also nitrogen can be mined from Earth atmosphere.
Next, you probably won't need to replicate the whole industry chain. Moon settlers will probably be able to live without computers or advanced medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
"The solar cycle "minimum" reflects a relatively low count of sunspots - areas of magnetic and particulate disruption on the sun's surface."
Fail. Sunspots and other solar phenomena during active periods increase solar energy output, and the lack of them decreases it. Both effects are small (about 0.1% on average).
In any case, TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) is being measured directly by satellites and ground-based stations. So we are pretty sure that we are in the TSI minimum as well.
Also, link: http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/23/nasa-makes-it-official-2000s-were-the-hottest-decade-on-record-2009-tied-for-second-warmest-year
"How could that be ... unless it's likely the Sun doing it - and if so, that would likely explain much of the warming* here on Earth."
How come the current year is tied for the warmest on records while we're in a deep solar minimum?
Yep. And these errors were found by scientists themselves. So in future the procedure will be fixed and this won't happen again.
Do you really think that all of the rest of IPCC is trash?
". Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really? Do you honestly think we have all the answers now? That we're even close to having all the answers?"
Yes, we have good enough understanding of Sun's effects on climate. We might still discover some subtle effects, but they won't change the overall picture.
For example, this year is tied for the warmest year on record EVEN THOUGH WE ARE IN THE SOLAR MINIMUM.
Let me repeat: we are in a deep solar minimum, but the last year was tied for the place of the warmest year.
"Are you saying C++ doesn't have development platforms that compile your code in real time as you modify it ?"
No. The closest thing is VisualStudio 2010 - it has online error checker (though not compiler) and working edit&continue. Free tools are miles behind in functionality, unfortunately.
" It is just a created commodity. It will motivate people to reduce in the beginning, but not overall and with reduced returns as more companies upgrade so they can sell their artificial commodity instead of buying it depressing the value of upgrading."
You forget that caps are not constant. They will be lowered with the time, so carbon emissions will become more and more costly.
An experienced C++ programmer rarely creates memory leaks, and they are easily detected by a variety of tools.
Also, for PHP-style programs it might be easier to just restart a child server process each N requests. So memory leaks are of even less concern.
The main problem is compilation speed. C++ compilers are just plain slow.
Nitpick: bleach is not a strong base, it's a strong oxidizer.
You're thinking about NaOH (which is a base) - good stuff as well.
SRAM is not persistent, it doesn't survive power outages.
It's called 'static' because it doesn't need to be refreshed.
Who?
Volt will be the first mass-producted plug-in hybrid vehicle.
Actually, scientists are not yet sure that leukemia clusters are caused by radiation exposure:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/raw-sewage-may-be-to-blame-for-sellafield-leukaemia-cases-1344410.html And we can build safer reprocessing plants now.
And frankly, a slight increase in leukemia cases near some reprocessing plants is a smaller price to pay than leukemia increases from coal ash. We don't have 'perfect' technologies which can solve energy problems.
The problem is scale. You can build a small (say 200MW) coal-powered plant, but such a small nuclear powerplant will be uneconomical.
You need to build GW-scale plants to be cheaper than coal-firing plants. And that requires a lot of capital.
You do not necessarily need to reprocess fuel in large plants if you use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for example.
So there are alternatives, and pretty safe ones.
To be fair, GM with it GM Volt is on to something...
They were (at least here).
I wear polarizing anti-glare glasses and I was stupid enough to forget to take non-polarizing glasses to the movie. So I could either watch Avatar with one eye or watch it without my glasses.
So? Robots did evolve, though the selective pressure and fitness criteria were artificial. That only means that evolution was not driven by natural selection.
Also, Moon has several unique advantages. For example, you keep talking about high-power electronics (invertors, etc.).
But why would you need them if you can just build high-power vacuum (or low-pressure gas-filled) tubes? BIG vacuum tubes.
Great example!
And that's how I would do the same.
1) Load molten metal into a rocket.
2) Enter Moon's orbit (we're in a shallow gravity well!)
3) Divide liquid metal into droplets.
4) Cool them.
You'll get almost perfect spheres this way. There even were experiments of exactly this method (with some low-temperature alloy) back on Mir.
"(oh, and by the way: your notion of having mining vehicles be powered by solar panels on their roof A) belies an ignorance of the power density of solar energy "
I know the density of solar flux (~1400 Watts/m^2), don't worry. I also know that the first tractors and excavators used only a few horse powers.
Easy.
Dependencies:
* Excavators
* Transport (trucks, conveyors, etc)
(see below)
* Hydrogen
* Purified carbon monoxide
That's the problem.
* Ball mill
* Reaction chamber
* Compressor
* Tanks
* Heat exchanger
* Radiator
* Solid tailings separation (probably quite complex)
* Solid tailings removal/disposal
* Gasseous tailings separation and exhausting (probably quite complex)
Almost all of this can be created by vapor deposition on templates and/or machined by fairly primitive tools.
Just to pick one: excavator consumables:
* Batteries (5-10 year lifespan if a durable chemistry but heavy use)
Use direct solar power (i.e. solar batteries on your roof). You don't need speed and/or a lot of power.
* Lubricants
Use ball bearings. Everywhere.
* Blades
Easily machined, and there's a lot of titanium nearby.
* Motors (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Permanent magnet (iron and cobalt are plentiful) DC motors are dead easy to make.
* Inverter (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Not needed.
* Charger (high power electronics wear out eventually)
Not needed.
* Bearings
Easy to machine.
* Hydraulic fluid (the occasional leak)
Use helium pneumatics.
* Glass (if the operator looks outside directly -- video cameras and displays otherwise), damaged by the occasional bit of ejected rock or slowly eaten away by corrosive lunar dust until hard to see through.
There's a lot of silicon out there.
* Wheels (friction wear)
Use mesh-wire wheels.
* Fenders/hubs/anywhere else where wheel-ejected debris impacts the body and slowly abrades it (regolith is a very abrasive powder, and there's no air to slow it down)
That's easy - you just need to move slowly. Slow down to 5 km/h and there's not much problem with ejecta from the wheels.
* Any sort of electronics -- load sensors, temperature sensors, speed sensors, telematics gear, communications gear, etc. All will break eventually.
That's dead easy - do not use electronics. After all, we had airplanes and tanks without a single _electric_ (never mind electronic) device.
Of course, imported devices must be used at first to establish initial colony. And in the foreseeable future it'll probably be easier to import a lot of stuff from the Earth.
"Where are you getting that from? They found about 100L (0.1 m^3) of water in the ejecta from a crater about 20m across and about 4m deep. That's a volume of about 1700 cubic meters if you assume a cone -- probably more in the real world. That means that water made up about 60 ppm of the ejecta. That's trace."
I've read figures of about 100ppm (1L per m^3), in any case your figure is close enough.
"Metal, too, requires the massive production chains of modern technology for self sufficiency"
Carbonyl process is the current favorite for Lunar mining: http://www.space-mining.com/IRONRECOVERY.htm
It requires no complex machinery and can be used to directly produce tools. There's a good book about it: http://books.google.com/books?id=oxLBa_8tLHAC
So I still think that long dependency chains can be severely reduced. Most of chains are that long because our technology is highly optimized, and Moon colony won't need that at first.
"Hydrogen is not plentiful on the moon. Nor is carbon. Water *was* found on the moon recently, but if you compare the estimated volume of water with the volume of the plume, it was only in trace quantities."
Water==hydrogen. And it seems there's about a liter of water per cubic meter. Which I think as 'plentiful'.
There's a lot of carbon on the Moon, but in the form of carbides, not carbon dioxide.
"Sorry, but production chains for modern parts do include computers."
Then don't use modern parts. Self-sustaining Lunar colony will probably look a bit like 'steampunk' novels. I.e. metal will be cheap, massive constructions will be easy (because of gravity), and there will be little complex automation.
And it's not that unrealistic. Take for example the Biosphere 2 project, it didn't really required that much of advanced technology.
"Don't need much nitrogen and phosphorus? Nitric and phosphoric acid are among are most widely used industrial chemicals. Both elements are critical in large quantities for agriculture. I could give a list a mile long of important things they're used for."
Agriculture will be the most important application, because there won't be a life without it. The rest can be deferred until Moon colony can produce spaceships.
Nope.
Lithium is plentiful, you can mine it from seawater indefinitely for about $60 per kg. It's just that some countries can supply lithium at smaller prices.
But you don't need heavy gas engine in electric car...
Also, there are denser energy storage mediums than gasoline. Some are practical (diesel), some are not (lithium hydride + fluorine).
Hydrogen seems to be plentiful on the Moon. Oxygen and carbon are everywhere.
Nitrogen and Phosphorus might cause a problem, but you don't need that much of both. Also nitrogen can be mined from Earth atmosphere.
Next, you probably won't need to replicate the whole industry chain. Moon settlers will probably be able to live without computers or advanced medicine.