Alternatively, we could build space colonies - you know, this stuff. Build colonies you'd live in rather than having to inhabit a planet. The upstart costs are huge, of course. But you can tailor them to give you the environment you want, rather than being stuck with whatever Mars gives you.
I've read in a few places there's enough raw material in the solar system to support several trillion people using such a scheme... that's a lot of eggs in many different baskets. Until the sun dies of course... but that's a few years off yet.
He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.
I don't know about this - 3D interfaces tend to fail becuase they don't make tasks any easier. You don't want to miss a web page or a file because another one is in front of it. And 3D navigation tends to be quite hard if you want to do it in an efficient manner - if you want to be able to zip halfway across the universe really quickly instead of walking there slowly using a game controller.
An old but good article on this can be found here. The points seem to be very relevent to what Croquet is doing.
Oh, I'm a software developer at this place so I'm pretty familiar with how difficult it is to get things right and usable in 3D.
Well, we can hope that there's something to this story on Space.com. Who knows... maybe Burt's got it all figured out on a napkin somewhere and he's just waiting to move ahead with it after the whole X-Prize thing is done.
I'd really like to see solar powered satellites happen - not taking advantage of all the power coming from the Sun seems downright stupid, when we have all the technology to do it. And, as others have said, it gives us the power we need to become truly spacefaring.
However, what I've wondered is why we don't start by using a subset of the technology and have satellites that relay power from ground based power generators to parts of the planet that need it. If this is feasible, it seems to me that it's a logical starting point. The initial business model would be to buy energy from the energy-rich cities and nations and sell it to the energy poor. Hoping that's profitable, you could then start adding space-based solar power satellites to the system and become a power generator as well as a reseller.
Does anyone have any idea if this would be feasible? At a glance it strikes me as a better business model, since it's got a few stages to it, as opposed to doing everything at once - but it's entirely possible you could never make enough money from the first stage to pay for the second stage. And there might be technical issues making the relaying of power from space difficult (IANAEE). Still, it sounds better to me than just building everything and then turning on the power switch and hoping to make some money.
For me, the answer all boils down to the gravity at the destination. If you're talking about moving to Mars or the Moon, forget it: going somwhere where gravity is a third or a tenth of Earth's is pretty much a one-way trip since it would be very difficult to return to Earth's gravity after a few years away. For subsequent generations it would be even worse, since they'd be born and raised in low gravity. Going back to Earth would be a death sentence.
If you never intend to return to Earth this isn't an issue, but to me it seems to be a concept killer. I really don't understand why people gloss over this when they talk about colonizing the soloar system.
Now oribtal space colonies... that's different. I would love to move to such a place if I could get 1 g artificial gravity. At this point of my life I'd be willing to take the risk and try to survive there if I had the choice: to me it seems to be the future of space colonization, and I'd like to be a pioneer there. Alas, that's a choice I don't have.
"Although there are many different teams competing for the X PRIZE, we are all fundamentally on the same team. When one of us wins the X PRIZE, we will all become entrepreneurs and pioneers in the eyes of the world."
I can't speak for the actual participants, but I know that if I were on one of the teams I wouldn't be doing it primarily for the prize, but because I want to go to space. After all, I suspect that most of the entrants that are getting somwhere will have spent quite a bit more than the $10 million prize money by the time they get into space.
No, it that were the case there would be no reason to adapt the book at all. If you're going to trade on the good name of a book to draw an audience you have some duty to repay that by giving them something based on what they came to see.
I'd disagree with that. A case in point is Adaptation, a great film, but one which has very little to do with what it was based on (The Orchid Thief). The book provided inspiration for what the movie turned out to be, and I suspect most moviegoers were glad they got what they did instead of a straightforward adaptation.
I actually became more impressed with Blade Runner after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - because as much as I liked the latter, it's not terribly filmable as written. Roger Ebert's said a number of times that all a movies adapted from a book owes is to be a good movie; whether or not it's line-for-line identical is irrelevant.
All this bickering over nuclear power being the only environmentally-friendly solution in the next 50 to 100 years has me thinking of another solution: oribital solar power.
Okay, there's the cost. It'll be expensive.
But if we put that aside for the moment, the orbital solar power seems to make more and more sense for the near future. The idea is to have vast arrays of solar cells in orbit, which can collect solar energy the vast majority of the time (since Earth will block their view of the sun only a small percentage of the time) and then beam that energy back down to earth.
One of the big advantages some see in this is that you could, feasibly, transmit energy to regions that needed it on an on-demand basis, much moreso than we have today.
And it'd get more stuff happening in space. But that's a different story...
Sure, when European explorers showed up. But that was a long time after native people had settled it. And they had to rely on their technology alone for survival.
The odds of the first settlers creating a permanent colony might be low, but throw enough people at it and someone'll stick.
Having said that, I think Mars looks like a nice place to visit, but I can't see to many reasons to colonize it.
...to the idea of colonizing space itself? O'Neill habitats and that whole thing. It seems to me to be a much better idea than colonizing other planets: why would you want to go back down into the gravity well once you've gotten out of there? And why would you want to live somewhere where you're stuck with whatever gravity the planet gives you?
Okay, so there's the small matter of building the things, but still. I want my grandkids to grow up with lakes and forests overhead.
At least
someone at NASA seems to think it's still a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read in a few places there's enough raw material in the solar system to support several trillion people using such a scheme... that's a lot of eggs in many different baskets. Until the sun dies of course... but that's a few years off yet.
He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.
I don't know about this - 3D interfaces tend to fail becuase they don't make tasks any easier. You don't want to miss a web page or a file because another one is in front of it. And 3D navigation tends to be quite hard if you want to do it in an efficient manner - if you want to be able to zip halfway across the universe really quickly instead of walking there slowly using a game controller.
An old but good article on this can be found here. The points seem to be very relevent to what Croquet is doing.
Oh, I'm a software developer at this place so I'm pretty familiar with how difficult it is to get things right and usable in 3D.
Well, we can hope that there's something to this story on Space.com. Who knows... maybe Burt's got it all figured out on a napkin somewhere and he's just waiting to move ahead with it after the whole X-Prize thing is done.
When something can generate a powerful beam, what happen to those power when the beam is turned off?
I suspect if you really wanted to get rid of the energy, you could just fire it off into space, away from earth
I'd really like to see solar powered satellites happen - not taking advantage of all the power coming from the Sun seems downright stupid, when we have all the technology to do it. And, as others have said, it gives us the power we need to become truly spacefaring.
However, what I've wondered is why we don't start by using a subset of the technology and have satellites that relay power from ground based power generators to parts of the planet that need it. If this is feasible, it seems to me that it's a logical starting point. The initial business model would be to buy energy from the energy-rich cities and nations and sell it to the energy poor. Hoping that's profitable, you could then start adding space-based solar power satellites to the system and become a power generator as well as a reseller.
Does anyone have any idea if this would be feasible? At a glance it strikes me as a better business model, since it's got a few stages to it, as opposed to doing everything at once - but it's entirely possible you could never make enough money from the first stage to pay for the second stage. And there might be technical issues making the relaying of power from space difficult (IANAEE). Still, it sounds better to me than just building everything and then turning on the power switch and hoping to make some money.
For me, the answer all boils down to the gravity at the destination. If you're talking about moving to Mars or the Moon, forget it: going somwhere where gravity is a third or a tenth of Earth's is pretty much a one-way trip since it would be very difficult to return to Earth's gravity after a few years away. For subsequent generations it would be even worse, since they'd be born and raised in low gravity. Going back to Earth would be a death sentence.
If you never intend to return to Earth this isn't an issue, but to me it seems to be a concept killer. I really don't understand why people gloss over this when they talk about colonizing the soloar system.
Now oribtal space colonies... that's different. I would love to move to such a place if I could get 1 g artificial gravity. At this point of my life I'd be willing to take the risk and try to survive there if I had the choice: to me it seems to be the future of space colonization, and I'd like to be a pioneer there. Alas, that's a choice I don't have.
Farnsworth: It's a single atom of jumbonium. And element so rare, the nucleus alone is worth more than $50,000.
Bender: How much more?
Farnsworth: $100,000.
I like this quote from Canadian Arrow's website:
"Although there are many different teams competing for the X PRIZE, we are all fundamentally on the same team. When one of us wins the X PRIZE, we will all become entrepreneurs and pioneers in the eyes of the world."
I can't speak for the actual participants, but I know that if I were on one of the teams I wouldn't be doing it primarily for the prize, but because I want to go to space. After all, I suspect that most of the entrants that are getting somwhere will have spent quite a bit more than the $10 million prize money by the time they get into space.
No, it that were the case there would be no reason to adapt the book at all. If you're going to trade on the good name of a book to draw an audience you have some duty to repay that by giving them something based on what they came to see.
I'd disagree with that. A case in point is Adaptation , a great film, but one which has very little to do with what it was based on ( The Orchid Thief ). The book provided inspiration for what the movie turned out to be, and I suspect most moviegoers were glad they got what they did instead of a straightforward adaptation.
I actually became more impressed with Blade Runner after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - because as much as I liked the latter, it's not terribly filmable as written. Roger Ebert's said a number of times that all a movies adapted from a book owes is to be a good movie; whether or not it's line-for-line identical is irrelevant.
All this bickering over nuclear power being the only environmentally-friendly solution in the next 50 to 100 years has me thinking of another solution: oribital solar power .
Okay, there's the cost. It'll be expensive.
But if we put that aside for the moment, the orbital solar power seems to make more and more sense for the near future. The idea is to have vast arrays of solar cells in orbit, which can collect solar energy the vast majority of the time (since Earth will block their view of the sun only a small percentage of the time) and then beam that energy back down to earth.
One of the big advantages some see in this is that you could, feasibly, transmit energy to regions that needed it on an on-demand basis, much moreso than we have today.
And it'd get more stuff happening in space. But that's a different story...
Sure, when European explorers showed up. But that was a long time after native people had settled it. And they had to rely on their technology alone for survival.
The odds of the first settlers creating a permanent colony might be low, but throw enough people at it and someone'll stick.
Having said that, I think Mars looks like a nice place to visit, but I can't see to many reasons to colonize it.
...to the idea of colonizing space itself? O'Neill habitats and that whole thing. It seems to me to be a much better idea than colonizing other planets: why would you want to go back down into the gravity well once you've gotten out of there? And why would you want to live somewhere where you're stuck with whatever gravity the planet gives you?
Okay, so there's the small matter of building the things, but still. I want my grandkids to grow up with lakes and forests overhead.
At least someone at NASA seems to think it's still a good idea.
People definitely might. Nick Diamandis has admitted as much. But I suspect those involved are willing to take the risk.
A lot of people died while exploring and mapping the world. Would you have kept them from getting on a boat?
if you're in canada or not in the states Huh. And this whole time I thought Canada wasn't in the States.