No, if it's supposed to be in our universe (which it is, just in a far away galaxy), where we can apply science and the laws of physics, we don't get to "fudge" anything we want. That makes it fantasy, which is a fine thing, but it isn't science fiction. That's my point.
As much as the next scientist, I like to find ways to conduct outreach and bring science to the public. But I have my limits, and Star Wars is about as far from science as you can get. There are plenty of other, better vehicles. We may as well do the "science" of Sex and the City or the "science" of American Idol. Really.
Lucas and/or some non-scientific Hollywood writer types made some shit up that they thought would fly. It's just dumb for scientists to sit around and come up with justifications for it after the fact when so much of it is so dumb to start with. It doesn't serve the cause of education.
Yeah, that looks like a good starting point for a FAQ. You forgot a few, like meteorites, and drawing the unwanted attention of extraterrestrials. Also, the impossibility of initially launching such an enormously long and heavy cable.
I think your objection falls under the heading of "reading papers." If someone does trot out another's informed opinion, I hope they actually understand it! I've actually read Edwards and Westling's book on the Space Elevator, for instance. There are too many SE threads on slashdot, I agree, but despite that fact, every one seems to draw new people who make the same basic objections that are easily answered. On the one hand these are easily answered, making the forum educational. On the other hand, for this particular forum it is tiresome (hence your original "Cripes!" I think).
Here with the SE concept, these uniformed objections don't matter too much. With other issues, like evolution or global warming, there are too many arguing by parroting other's positions just to support their own sense of religion or politics, without understanding or caring about the science. So I guess I have a chip on my shoulder.
Yes. I'm not laughing. That's an informed opinion based on knowing something about material science.
Progress has been fast with CNT materials. The promise (which is a promise not a certainty) is that we'll know if we can make a strong enough material in the next five years based on CNT technology. Investing in this sort of research is a good idea (and we nearly hired someone this year who worked in the area).
Re:I just have to ask...
on
NPR Talks Skyhooks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The whole concept requires it to be thin. The key is to have a material strong enough to hold up its own weight, because tens of thousands of miles of stuff adds up. What's more disconcerting to me is that at any real distance, it will be essentially invisible.
No, because it's very light and will be spread out over an area. Think of dropping a ribbon off a building. Payloads in transit are a larger issue, but more on the level of a plane crash than a nuclear explosion.
It isn't overhyped until there are competing groups actually building one. Furthermore, what is "overhyped on slashdot" is rarely even in the public consciousness. Live with it, love it, until it spills into the public imagination and gets warped into an evil, multi-national corporation's wet dream. THEN complain.
I agree that most of the technical objections are not-too-hard-to-overcome engineering challenges, not showstoppers. If you're reading this and think you have a fatal flaw to the whole concept, and haven't spent months on it doing some calculations and reading papers, I'll take the opportunity to laugh at your idea now.
I don't know that things like this have happened, yet, but certainly in the US we've been moving in that direction since 9/11. As I said in another post, it isn't even possible to find out how broad Patriot Act powers are or are not being used. Law enforcement wants more powers to keep people safe and cover their own asses, at the expense of personal freedom and privacy. Polls have shown Americans more accepting of the loss of their civil rights than in the past, which is indeed a scary trend. But, as always, the trouble is when to speak out and how to speak out. Patriot Act provisions are not permanent and will expire...if our politicians have enough patriotism to stand up for the constitution and risk looking "weak on terrorism."
I have email from other people from the early 1990s. I have a lot of my own outgoing email going back several years. And that's just me -- I don't know if my providers archive backups that might include email. Certainly lots of things get deleted, but it's probably not safe to assume any one particular piece of email you might find embarrsing will never resurface.
There's probably a version of Murphy's Law there. Something like, "If there's one email that will damage you most, that is the one that will be accidently posted to a public archive."
The way market forces work, some other up-and-coming search engine ought to be able to bite into google's share by advertising a better privacy policy. Part of the problem here, as another poster suggested, is that google is so popular and makes for one-stop-shopping for investigators.
And before someone pops and says something like "You don't anything to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong," who really wants to explain their google searches to anyone else, let alone federal agents? That's trouble I could do without. Perhaps it isn't very common, but under the Patriot Act, I believe it's secret how often it does occur.
Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever. Any email they send or receive might well be duplicated somewhere else as well.
I guess we're going to find out if things like google searches are going to bite people in the future or not. This feels like Patriot Act stuff to me, potentially, they way that libraries and book stores can be required to provide information about your reading habits. As a writer, I really don't like it. What if I want to write a book featuring terrorist villians, and do a lot of "suspicious" searches doing my research?
NASA has cut funding to a number of space science programs this year, despite a budget increase, because of the Moon/Mars initiative. I hope there really will be sufficient funding in the future, because right now this space adventure (which I'm not against on its own) is being funding at the expense of fundamental science research.
Your understanding of the history of science isn't too good. Real science began when such untrue "truths" of the Greeks were set aside in light of new observational evidence. The Greeks didn't use science for the most part, at least in the modern definition of science. Here and there, sure...but the real culprit here to blame is the church, which didn't want to throw out Aristotle's universe even when the first of the real scientists were clamoring for it.
Those are good examples, which slipped my mind (although some of Chandrasekhar's key work was in applying relativistic constraints to stellar structure). I was thinking of binary pulsars (Taylor and Hulse) in 1993, as a testing ground for gravitational waves.
Astrophyics rarely if ever wins the Nobel prize (X-ray and Neutrino astronomy did win a couple of years ago, but before that there are just a few instances involving astronomical tests of relativity). There's a lot of good work going on that would be better publicized and understood by the public with a regular high-profile prize.
Two orders of magnitude isn't a little bit in astronomy, one of the most liberal fields in terms of accuracy (both because the ranges are so large and because the measurements are so difficult). As a side point, be careful about the relationship between size and mass in stars -- there are regimes where mass increases reduce the diameter, and it also depends on the age of the star/planet.
I put my money where my mouth is. I write science fiction novels and critique the hell out of my own work and those of my peers. The bit about Jupiter is misleading to the reader, in my opinion, both as a writer and as a professor.
I think the way most astronomers and physicists these days prefer to approach the issue is that light has no rest mass, but does carry momentum (e.g., radiation pressure, is one example). Radiation fields have an energy density, but no mass. Sure, you can calculate a mass equivalent to the energy, but what does that mean, really?
Keep in mind the speed of light. We see this object in the early universe. If anyone there is looking in this direction, they see the very young Milky Way before our sun was even formed.
His EPR paper (which I have read) is a thought experiment designed to discredit quantum mechanics. I think he would have been annoyed that the experiments validate the "spooky action at a distance" that he found nonintuitive.
His 1905 paper on the photo-electric effect, and the idea that light energy is quantized, is indeed pioneering work in quantum mechanics. Also his work on radiative transition probabilites from discrete energy states, is a huge contribution to quantum mechanics and in part the basis for lasers.
Careful astronomers don't make this mistake, but we're talking about results massaged by PR people and the press. I've been through that experience, and it makes me always go to the journal article or preprint to determine what they're actually talking about.
Personally, I would never use "size" for mass, and geometrical sizes are still ambiguous. Is a size a radius, surface area, or volume? Each of the three could be the answer under different circumstances.
The best estimates I recall are more like 80-82 Jupiter masses for fusion, a little bigger than 70. I remember being irritated with Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 for saying that if Jupiter were only "a little bigger" it would be able to have fusion processes and be a star. My little bigger above is for 10% bigger, not a factor of 80 times bigger. I don't think that's being picky, I think that's just Clarke being wrong in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if it's supposed to be in our universe (which it is, just in a far away galaxy), where we can apply science and the laws of physics, we don't get to "fudge" anything we want. That makes it fantasy, which is a fine thing, but it isn't science fiction. That's my point.
As much as the next scientist, I like to find ways to conduct outreach and bring science to the public. But I have my limits, and Star Wars is about as far from science as you can get. There are plenty of other, better vehicles. We may as well do the "science" of Sex and the City or the "science" of American Idol. Really.
Lucas and/or some non-scientific Hollywood writer types made some shit up that they thought would fly. It's just dumb for scientists to sit around and come up with justifications for it after the fact when so much of it is so dumb to start with. It doesn't serve the cause of education.
Yeah, that looks like a good starting point for a FAQ. You forgot a few, like meteorites, and drawing the unwanted attention of extraterrestrials. Also, the impossibility of initially launching such an enormously long and heavy cable.
I think your objection falls under the heading of "reading papers." If someone does trot out another's informed opinion, I hope they actually understand it! I've actually read Edwards and Westling's book on the Space Elevator, for instance. There are too many SE threads on slashdot, I agree, but despite that fact, every one seems to draw new people who make the same basic objections that are easily answered. On the one hand these are easily answered, making the forum educational. On the other hand, for this particular forum it is tiresome (hence your original "Cripes!" I think).
Here with the SE concept, these uniformed objections don't matter too much. With other issues, like evolution or global warming, there are too many arguing by parroting other's positions just to support their own sense of religion or politics, without understanding or caring about the science. So I guess I have a chip on my shoulder.
Yes. I'm not laughing. That's an informed opinion based on knowing something about material science.
Progress has been fast with CNT materials. The promise (which is a promise not a certainty) is that we'll know if we can make a strong enough material in the next five years based on CNT technology. Investing in this sort of research is a good idea (and we nearly hired someone this year who worked in the area).
The whole concept requires it to be thin. The key is to have a material strong enough to hold up its own weight, because tens of thousands of miles of stuff adds up. What's more disconcerting to me is that at any real distance, it will be essentially invisible.
42 is the answer to the life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
No, because it's very light and will be spread out over an area. Think of dropping a ribbon off a building. Payloads in transit are a larger issue, but more on the level of a plane crash than a nuclear explosion.
Bad puppy, no treat!
I laugh at uninformed opinions. I've also made five figures on the hardback/paperback book, so I guess I'm laughing all the way to the bank.
Sorry for feeding the troll -- someone should mod the parent as offtopic.
It isn't overhyped until there are competing groups actually building one. Furthermore, what is "overhyped on slashdot" is rarely even in the public consciousness. Live with it, love it, until it spills into the public imagination and gets warped into an evil, multi-national corporation's wet dream. THEN complain.
I agree that most of the technical objections are not-too-hard-to-overcome engineering challenges, not showstoppers. If you're reading this and think you have a fatal flaw to the whole concept, and haven't spent months on it doing some calculations and reading papers, I'll take the opportunity to laugh at your idea now.
I don't know that things like this have happened, yet, but certainly in the US we've been moving in that direction since 9/11. As I said in another post, it isn't even possible to find out how broad Patriot Act powers are or are not being used. Law enforcement wants more powers to keep people safe and cover their own asses, at the expense of personal freedom and privacy. Polls have shown Americans more accepting of the loss of their civil rights than in the past, which is indeed a scary trend. But, as always, the trouble is when to speak out and how to speak out. Patriot Act provisions are not permanent and will expire...if our politicians have enough patriotism to stand up for the constitution and risk looking "weak on terrorism."
I have email from other people from the early 1990s. I have a lot of my own outgoing email going back several years. And that's just me -- I don't know if my providers archive backups that might include email. Certainly lots of things get deleted, but it's probably not safe to assume any one particular piece of email you might find embarrsing will never resurface.
There's probably a version of Murphy's Law there. Something like, "If there's one email that will damage you most, that is the one that will be accidently posted to a public archive."
The way market forces work, some other up-and-coming search engine ought to be able to bite into google's share by advertising a better privacy policy. Part of the problem here, as another poster suggested, is that google is so popular and makes for one-stop-shopping for investigators.
And before someone pops and says something like "You don't anything to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong," who really wants to explain their google searches to anyone else, let alone federal agents? That's trouble I could do without. Perhaps it isn't very common, but under the Patriot Act, I believe it's secret how often it does occur.
Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever. Any email they send or receive might well be duplicated somewhere else as well.
I guess we're going to find out if things like google searches are going to bite people in the future or not. This feels like Patriot Act stuff to me, potentially, they way that libraries and book stores can be required to provide information about your reading habits. As a writer, I really don't like it. What if I want to write a book featuring terrorist villians, and do a lot of "suspicious" searches doing my research?
It's troubling to me.
NASA has cut funding to a number of space science programs this year, despite a budget increase, because of the Moon/Mars initiative. I hope there really will be sufficient funding in the future, because right now this space adventure (which I'm not against on its own) is being funding at the expense of fundamental science research.
Sure you can. These examples are much better ones than the "unchanging heavens" example above.
Your understanding of the history of science isn't too good. Real science began when such untrue "truths" of the Greeks were set aside in light of new observational evidence. The Greeks didn't use science for the most part, at least in the modern definition of science. Here and there, sure...but the real culprit here to blame is the church, which didn't want to throw out Aristotle's universe even when the first of the real scientists were clamoring for it.
Those are good examples, which slipped my mind (although some of Chandrasekhar's key work was in applying relativistic constraints to stellar structure). I was thinking of binary pulsars (Taylor and Hulse) in 1993, as a testing ground for gravitational waves.
Astrophyics rarely if ever wins the Nobel prize (X-ray and Neutrino astronomy did win a couple of years ago, but before that there are just a few instances involving astronomical tests of relativity). There's a lot of good work going on that would be better publicized and understood by the public with a regular high-profile prize.
Not enough fuel to make the ISS orbit, apparently.
Two orders of magnitude isn't a little bit in astronomy, one of the most liberal fields in terms of accuracy (both because the ranges are so large and because the measurements are so difficult). As a side point, be careful about the relationship between size and mass in stars -- there are regimes where mass increases reduce the diameter, and it also depends on the age of the star/planet.
I put my money where my mouth is. I write science fiction novels and critique the hell out of my own work and those of my peers. The bit about Jupiter is misleading to the reader, in my opinion, both as a writer and as a professor.
I think the way most astronomers and physicists these days prefer to approach the issue is that light has no rest mass, but does carry momentum (e.g., radiation pressure, is one example). Radiation fields have an energy density, but no mass. Sure, you can calculate a mass equivalent to the energy, but what does that mean, really?
Keep in mind the speed of light. We see this object in the early universe. If anyone there is looking in this direction, they see the very young Milky Way before our sun was even formed.
His EPR paper (which I have read) is a thought experiment designed to discredit quantum mechanics. I think he would have been annoyed that the experiments validate the "spooky action at a distance" that he found nonintuitive.
His 1905 paper on the photo-electric effect, and the idea that light energy is quantized, is indeed pioneering work in quantum mechanics. Also his work on radiative transition probabilites from discrete energy states, is a huge contribution to quantum mechanics and in part the basis for lasers.
Careful astronomers don't make this mistake, but we're talking about results massaged by PR people and the press. I've been through that experience, and it makes me always go to the journal article or preprint to determine what they're actually talking about.
Personally, I would never use "size" for mass, and geometrical sizes are still ambiguous. Is a size a radius, surface area, or volume? Each of the three could be the answer under different circumstances.
The best estimates I recall are more like 80-82 Jupiter masses for fusion, a little bigger than 70. I remember being irritated with Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 for saying that if Jupiter were only "a little bigger" it would be able to have fusion processes and be a star. My little bigger above is for 10% bigger, not a factor of 80 times bigger. I don't think that's being picky, I think that's just Clarke being wrong in that case.