This is precisely what Dr. Robert Zubrin has been advocating since the early 1990's. His plan would run about $2 billion a year, and was developed in response to President Bush Sr.'s $450 billion Space Exploration Initiative. The first year an Earth Return Vehicle would be sent over with a small amount of Hydrogen. When it landed, it would start processing the CO2 with the H2 to produce methane and water. If a decent water source can be found (which is becoming more and more likely), they wouldn't even need to take the H2 with them. A year after the ERV is launched, the Hab is launched with the crew (while the ERV is still on its way to Mars). By the time the Hab lands on Mars (as close to the ERV as possible), the ERV's tank will be topped off and ready to go.
Zubrin is president of The Mars Society where you can find all the details about his plan, called Mars Direct.
Getting to Mars in two weeks would require godawful amounts of fuel, first for accelerating to such a ridiculous delta v (squishing any live occupants into gooey puddles, and requiring ridiculous tolerances for all hardware), then for decelerating for Martian orbit capture.
The main reason it's done the way it's done now has nothing to do with technology and everything to go with the laws of gravitation and economics.
My bad. Once you assume that the robot can magically make parts appear, it *is* trivial. And the animation for the electrical consists *entirely* of a robot plugging some sort of panel into a pre-existing panel socket, complete with magical flying self-twisting fairy screws.
My original point, that a scientist severely underestimated the difficulty of actual human labor, has been properly disproved.
It's an interesting problem. As we get better and better at robotics, more and more essential low level jobs could be replaced. The implications for the current economic system would be tremendous. If robots eventually replaced the lower class jobs, the resulting unemployment levels would be ludicrous.
Could this result in a move to a more socialist government?
So what we really have is a robot that can excrete layers of concrete, making a single wall.
From TFA:
A wall alone does not make a house. A contour crafter would also need to insert plumbing pipes, electrical wiring, and ventilation ducts in walls as it builds them. The prototype can't do that, but Khoshnevis sees that as a trivial problem
Yeah, it'll be trivial to take an 8' tall by 6' wide robot that lays concrete, and fix it up to dig and lay a foundation, run cable, wire, dry-wall, plaster, hang windows & doors, install carpet, install cabinets, etc. etc. A robotic housebuilder would essentially require a superstructure encompassing the house. The self-building cranes they use for high-rises are just for the I-beams - everything else is done by hand, and the frame for a house is the easy part - it goes up in a day or two for even the largest houses.
What about the small stuff? How is the robot going to keep the first wall plum while it starts on the second?
I think Dr. Khoshnevis needs to watch a few episodes of This Old House before calling anything trivial.
An extended object experiences less centripetal acceleration at its top than at its bottom. For an object higher than a geostationary orbit, this results in a net force away from the planet.
And to break it at the half way point would require a pinpoint-precise ballistic missle strike. Anything a terrorist could do (in this post-9/11 world) would be much closer to the ground, resulting in very little damage. The upper part could be lowered back to the base and re-anchored with very little trouble.
Because the nanotube technology is so incredibly expensive (about the only thing more expensive is anti-matter) the only reason to use it it when no other material can do the job.
Thus, space elevators.
There are many other industries that will benefit from nanotube technology, but as of now, nanotubes are only required for a space elevator. That's where the funding for the nanotube industry will come from, which is why there are a few groups working on it. Liftport has even been featured on financial websites such as Motley Fool.
Then the lower half would come down, at an initially very slow rate (gravitational minus centripetal force).
As far as the damage caused, all space elevator designs that I've seen have their bases on equatorial islands or floating equatorial platforms (similar to the floating rocket-launch platforms already out there). While such a disaster would still be a Big Deal(tm), it would only seriously affect the elevator itself (and the parent company which, presumably, had planned for such an event).
That's not how it works. The cable won't *have* an orbital anchor. It goes so far out into space (past the geo-stationary orbit) that the mass on the far end balances the mass on the near end. IE, the foundation point on the earth isn't supporting the entire mass of the cable. It isn't supporting anything, it's just there to keep the cable at one point.
Not sure why the parent was modded as funny, because this is absolutely true. Look at the height statistics from presidential elections. Sure Bush won against Kerry (Kerry had a 5" advantage)(Not that sort of 5" advantage you perv), but one of his camps' conditions for doing the debates was the split-camera view ensuring they both looked about equal in height.
Venus has the exact opposite problem; too much atmosphere. Pressure on the surface of Venus is almost 100 times that of earth's. That's right, 100 times, mostly in the form of CO2 and some sulfates. To get this down to earth pressure, there would have to be a process to turn the CO2 into carbon and carbonate rock, which would blanket the surface in meters of, essentially, graphite.
However, Venus is where the whole idea of the greenhouse effect comes from. Scientists were trying to figure out what happened there (surface temp is almost 500C, or 900F), and realized it could happen here, too.
Unfortunately there's simply not enough material to turn into gas for the atmosphere on Mars to get above about 5% of earth's atmospheric pressure.
Zubrin's Case For Mars and Sagan's Pale Blue Dot make much more optimistic assumptions about available material than most planetary scientists.
Oddly enough, one of the best means to get the atmosphere is to pump as much pollution (ie, greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere as possible. This will increase the temperature which will increase the rate of outgassing.
Memorizing songs, or even listening to them, is more closely associated with the temporal lobe than everyday memory. This also explains why lyrics are so often confused - they're being processed through the temporal lobe before being routed to the language centers. IE, traditional context cues just don't mean a thing in a song.
You can get an epilepsy of the temporal lobe that causes you to 'hear' songs over and over in your head, even songs that you haven't heard since you were a baby (before traditional memory starts).
Check out Dr. Oliver Sacks _The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat_
Here's an excerpt from Dr. Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. The book is about all sorts of incredibly, fundamentally weird mental behavior, and this excerpt is about twins who would give each other prime numbers back and forth, larger and larger. Dr. Sacks figured out what they were doing, somehow, with six-figure numbers, and brought a book of primes with him on his next visit. He said an eight-figure prime, and it took them about thirty seconds to confirm it's 'primeness'
Applications for cryptography? Maybe. I tend to think that if there were, someone from the NSA would have already tried it. Going by the amount of time it took them with the eight, ten, and twelve digit numbers, I'm not sure how useful they'd be on 128-bit numbers. That's, what, 2^128, which is about 10^37 digits? Not sure about the math....
On the other hand, maybe it works, and there's lots of autistics on government payroll. Where'd I put that tin-foil hat?
BTW - the Sacks book is phenomenal. Some of the problems these people have - there's one person who doesn't have the concept of right (as in right v. left). For dinner, she eats the food on the left half of the plate. If a ball slowly rolls to her right, she will turn a full circle to the left to find it. If I recall, there's about 10-15 cases, each one different.
Slashdot Mirror
Zubrin is president of The Mars Society where you can find all the details about his plan, called Mars Direct.
Getting to Mars in two weeks would require godawful amounts of fuel, first for accelerating to such a ridiculous delta v (squishing any live occupants into gooey puddles, and requiring ridiculous tolerances for all hardware), then for decelerating for Martian orbit capture.
The main reason it's done the way it's done now has nothing to do with technology and everything to go with the laws of gravitation and economics.
My bad. Once you assume that the robot can magically make parts appear, it *is* trivial. And the animation for the electrical consists *entirely* of a robot plugging some sort of panel into a pre-existing panel socket, complete with magical flying self-twisting fairy screws.
My original point, that a scientist severely underestimated the difficulty of actual human labor, has been properly disproved.
Step 1: Concrete-Shitting Robot
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: Profit!
It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world.
Could this result in a move to a more socialist government?
In Soviet Russia, the robots are the proletariat.
From TFA: A wall alone does not make a house. A contour crafter would also need to insert plumbing pipes, electrical wiring, and ventilation ducts in walls as it builds them. The prototype can't do that, but Khoshnevis sees that as a trivial problem
Yeah, it'll be trivial to take an 8' tall by 6' wide robot that lays concrete, and fix it up to dig and lay a foundation, run cable, wire, dry-wall, plaster, hang windows & doors, install carpet, install cabinets, etc. etc. A robotic housebuilder would essentially require a superstructure encompassing the house. The self-building cranes they use for high-rises are just for the I-beams - everything else is done by hand, and the frame for a house is the easy part - it goes up in a day or two for even the largest houses.
What about the small stuff? How is the robot going to keep the first wall plum while it starts on the second?
I think Dr. Khoshnevis needs to watch a few episodes of This Old House before calling anything trivial.
Centripetal acceleration is radial toward the center of rotation.
And to break it at the half way point would require a pinpoint-precise ballistic missle strike. Anything a terrorist could do (in this post-9/11 world) would be much closer to the ground, resulting in very little damage. The upper part could be lowered back to the base and re-anchored with very little trouble.
(Sorry for the extra post)
Because the nanotube technology is so incredibly expensive (about the only thing more expensive is anti-matter) the only reason to use it it when no other material can do the job.
Thus, space elevators.
There are many other industries that will benefit from nanotube technology, but as of now, nanotubes are only required for a space elevator. That's where the funding for the nanotube industry will come from, which is why there are a few groups working on it. Liftport has even been featured on financial websites such as Motley Fool.
Then the lower half would come down, at an initially very slow rate (gravitational minus centripetal force).
As far as the damage caused, all space elevator designs that I've seen have their bases on equatorial islands or floating equatorial platforms (similar to the floating rocket-launch platforms already out there). While such a disaster would still be a Big Deal(tm), it would only seriously affect the elevator itself (and the parent company which, presumably, had planned for such an event).
That's not how it works. The cable won't *have* an orbital anchor. It goes so far out into space (past the geo-stationary orbit) that the mass on the far end balances the mass on the near end. IE, the foundation point on the earth isn't supporting the entire mass of the cable. It isn't supporting anything, it's just there to keep the cable at one point.
Actually, I think that *is* Carrie Fisher at age 50. Eeesh.
I don't care what they do on their own time, but in public?
Think of the children....
Try using $2 bills at a strip club.
They don't call the cops, they just beat the crap out of you. Then they trash your car.
Not that I know from, er, personal experience.
Not sure why the parent was modded as funny, because this is absolutely true. Look at the height statistics from presidential elections. Sure Bush won against Kerry (Kerry had a 5" advantage)(Not that sort of 5" advantage you perv), but one of his camps' conditions for doing the debates was the split-camera view ensuring they both looked about equal in height.
Venus has the exact opposite problem; too much atmosphere. Pressure on the surface of Venus is almost 100 times that of earth's. That's right, 100 times, mostly in the form of CO2 and some sulfates. To get this down to earth pressure, there would have to be a process to turn the CO2 into carbon and carbonate rock, which would blanket the surface in meters of, essentially, graphite.
However, Venus is where the whole idea of the greenhouse effect comes from. Scientists were trying to figure out what happened there (surface temp is almost 500C, or 900F), and realized it could happen here, too.
Unfortunately there's simply not enough material to turn into gas for the atmosphere on Mars to get above about 5% of earth's atmospheric pressure.
Zubrin's Case For Mars and Sagan's Pale Blue Dot make much more optimistic assumptions about available material than most planetary scientists.
Oddly enough, one of the best means to get the atmosphere is to pump as much pollution (ie, greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere as possible. This will increase the temperature which will increase the rate of outgassing.
God Fails to Break His Own Record for Killing
Christians know from the Great Flood that God's favorite way to indiscriminately kill enormous swaths of children is by drowning them...
Take the Great Flood Bible Quiz
not the big knuckle, the knuckle just under the fingernail....
Click Here for help 'eviscerating your virtual enemies!"
Wrong thermite:
Drill Instructor: "All right, you maggots, I now that you have the Thermite (tm) strapped to your backs, I want you to fire it up!"
I always imagined the ol' three-fingered salute as just flipping the bird, really.
Middle finger on delete, thumb on alt, and index knuckle on ctrl.
Of course, now you get fragged by your teammate, flip him the bird, and oh, shit, now you have to wait for WinXP to reboot...
My favorite part, under the image:
"Soldier Not Included"
Memorizing songs, or even listening to them, is more closely associated with the temporal lobe than everyday memory. This also explains why lyrics are so often confused - they're being processed through the temporal lobe before being routed to the language centers. IE, traditional context cues just don't mean a thing in a song.
You can get an epilepsy of the temporal lobe that causes you to 'hear' songs over and over in your head, even songs that you haven't heard since you were a baby (before traditional memory starts).
Check out Dr. Oliver Sacks _The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat_
Applications for cryptography? Maybe. I tend to think that if there were, someone from the NSA would have already tried it. Going by the amount of time it took them with the eight, ten, and twelve digit numbers, I'm not sure how useful they'd be on 128-bit numbers. That's, what, 2^128, which is about 10^37 digits? Not sure about the math.... On the other hand, maybe it works, and there's lots of autistics on government payroll. Where'd I put that tin-foil hat?
BTW - the Sacks book is phenomenal. Some of the problems these people have - there's one person who doesn't have the concept of right (as in right v. left). For dinner, she eats the food on the left half of the plate. If a ball slowly rolls to her right, she will turn a full circle to the left to find it. If I recall, there's about 10-15 cases, each one different.