Please tell me what power plants your area has so I can recommend them to my community. I mean free energy once it's built, no need to buy fuel for the power plant ever? Sign me right up.
Of course it is quite clear he meant $1 billion per year in terms of the cost of electricity had it been produced by a power plant (which includes fuel, construction costs, transmission losses and so on).
Basically, its current incarnation lacks both the defensive survivability (autorotate on failure) Can't it glide, somewhat, like an airplane?
offensive armament of helicopters (all it has is a small machine gun, pointing backwards, that you have to OPEN THE DOOR to fire), Yeah because the average CH-47 Chinook or C-130 Hercules are such massive gun ships, always used to shoot at the enemy. God forbid someone just wanted to move cargo or people with a helicopter or airplane. If it doesn't have enough firepower to level a small town it's useless period.
The current V-22 is a cargo plane more or less, it's designed to quickly and efficiently drop people or cargo where needed. It's not supposed to stay around and shoot at the enemy, most likely trying to fight back will just make it a much better target (and helicopters in general are easy target).
trading both for a slightly higher top speed. And longer range likely.
...you're the retard not him. Just because you don't understand his point doesn't mean it's wrong, just that you lack imagination and thinking ability.
Smoke, clouds, fog, dust, rain, natural radio interference, terrain, tall buildings, underpasses and probably many other things are NORMAL ways to block UAV vision or transmissions. In a war environment you also have ground-to-air missiles, ground-to-ground attacks (that can damage any part of the vehicle), enemy jamming, enemy smoke screens, dust from explosions and probably many other things.
If it can't move without the UAV it is useless. If it can move without it then there is no point in testing with one as that can be done later.
Well I assume that: 1. A dedicated UAV sent from some other location would make much more sense, launching and retrieving a UAV would be trying to make it a jack of all trades (and thus sacrifice it's ability to do any task well). 2. UAVs can be shot down, communications can be blocked and radio receivers can be damaged. If there is a single easy to exploit point of failure then the whole system is worthless. It needs to be able to move on it's own and everything else is gravy. In others there is no point in having such a capability at this stage since it'd have to be turned off for most of the test anyway.
Except that death isn't the only way to define "safe." Large airplane crashes rarely leave survivors while car accidents have an order of magnitude more injuries than deaths so airplanes still come out as safer.
Why did the Japanese start building American-style cars when GM and Chrysler were already good at making them? Japan had a large industrial economy since before ww2, they had people trained in engineering and had already built a number of very good designs for airplanes. Likewise shipping cars across a large ocean is expensive and cars don't cost enough to justify it. Furthermore the country had at least a decent internal demand for automobiles. As a result they had at least a local advantage in making their own cars as the costs to do so were low. After that it is only natural to compete on a global scale if the products are good enough.
Nigeria has none of these.
Not to mention that the Nigerian government certainly have their own helicopters, regardless of how poor the country is in general. Can the government stand to save money by developing state-manufactured choppers? Or better yet, can it save money by cutting off their reliance on foreign maintenance crews, and instead training their own? Save money? You mean spend a hundred million to save ten million or so in costs?
Nobody says they have to tackle Sikorsky on the global market, but I'm betting many developing nations would be in for some cheap, fairly reliable helicopters. There is a reason that safe, cheap and reliable are never all true.
Even at top of the highest mountain in the world the air density is such that the drag from having something go 15km/s (ie: roughly what you need to reach orbit I think) would melt it. The resulting drag induced deceleration would also kill anything living inside it probably. It's possibly useful as a first stage mechanism.
Atmospheric effects (oxygen I assume among other things), random effects, micro-meteorites and so on. And of course the climber has to do just that CLIMB the thing, that constant contact will likely cause damage over long periods of time.
This is something effectively the same as sheets of graphite in the high strength direction which is going to be in contact with the same material in a vaccum. Also by breaking - by what mechanism? Wouldn't the design be such as to spread the load to somehting the fibres can take.
Nothing is perfect or indestructible.
I think you'll also find that the joining you describe is about bundling the fibres axially and not sticking bits on the end of individual fibres longitudinally otherwise you would lose an order of magnitude or two of strength.
No right now it's about using short fibers as we have no foreseeable technology to make massively long fibers. Pretty much short of specialized advanced nanomachines there is no sane way to make something that long, random problems will crop up and cause breaks or problems in every fiber before it gets even close to that long. The original designs involved using actual epoxy and apparently calculation still gave the result enough strength. Also current design have a tapering cable that is much thinner at the bottom than the top.
Please explain the theory of high temperature superconductivity that shows it is not possible - all the theories I know are empirical and actually pretty confusing.
As I said some theories, in other words someone claims it is not possible. Given current problems and the complexities of the best superconductors it may be the truth.
he MBAs I am talking about are the ones that are running the space elevator consortium which is not linked with NASA since NASA is doing other stuff.
The current power beaming competition is being funded by NASA, partially at least. There are a number of scientists/engineers in the group although the group isn't there to do research. Some of the research done for this can be found here: http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/
I really have no idea why people for some inane reason always claim others, despite being more qualified, are wrong while they, and their pet theories, are right WITHOUT even looking up the explanation for something. If you disagree with them you could have emailed them for justification, could have looked at the literature in the area, could have contacted people involved in the project and probably other bloody things. Let me be blunt, you're an atrocious debater, if you wish to claim that something is wrong then you need to do it in a LOGICAL fashion. That means you find out why something is done a certain way then rip it apart. If you don't know why someone is doing something one way how in god's name can you claim their reasoning is wrong? Instead you take up others time on slashdot, a place where pretty much no one is even close to qualified to discuss this subject.
The space elevator is amazingly thin first of all, millimeter thin at the bottom possibly and only meters wide. It is absurdly long, 35000km, and all energy need to be provided ground side for now. Each climber may require say 500watts of power for a 12day ascent which means you need to be supplying say 10MW to all the climbers at any given time (this is the energy they need to receive after all loses are taken into account, you need to send much much more). Carbon nanotubes aren't that amazingly conductive, an order of magnitude close to copper over long distances I believe. Graphite is for example a few orders worse than copper in that department I think. My quick calculation put the energy loss at over 50% easily (as in even when I'm being conservative) and I'd say it's way over 90% even in the mid point if you were to properly calculate it (with realistic values and considerations).
Except that there is pretty much nothing for them to do up there. Tourism is about the best way to raise public desire and money for more space infrastructure. Also four months means you need to not only lift up a person but long term life support food, water recycling, emergency facilities, stewards and probably other things.
I think it's driven by shady back room deals with the fuel industry, personally. Ah yes, those evil shady companies that create liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and aluminum (yup the last one is fuel used by nasa). They're such vile bastards. So ingenious to boot, having not only gotten NASA but having gotten their slimy hands on the soviet space program as well (less so, those damn kerosene and unpronounceable fuel companies beat them). During the heavy communist controlled days to boot. Not to mention the European, Indian, Chinese and god knows what other space programs.
Well okay, most actual rockets use kerosene or other more absurdly exotic fuels instead. Of course NASA doesn't actually have many such rockets and instead uses the shuttle which is LOX/H2.
That will never work because the strength will drop an order of magnitude at least. I believe the current approach is to use something like Van der Waals forces to glue the nanotubes together.
What people are proposing is strands as long as twice the distance to geosynchronous orbit (counterweight) bundled together into a cable. This is not practical, individual strands will break, corrode and so on which means that they will have to be replaced with shorter strands (or incur massive repair costs). More importantly we can't make tubes that long with any current (or near future) technology.
the fibres used to conduct electricity are going to be surrounded by a lot of fibres that can be used to conduct away the heat. Nanotubes are I believe not very heat conductive in that direction.
The other option is to go for the full room temperature superconductor material that we also do not yet have but is potentially also not far off. Those are considered by some theoretically impossible. Furthermore room temperature is NOT the temperature of a space elevator. Also such super conductors would add immense mass to the elevator.
As the star wars project showed the losses involved in sending high intensity beams of energy about are astronomical No it showed that hitting a half meter wide object moving at massive velocity with indecent (enough to melt metal) amount of energy is not possible. What is being discussed here is orders of magnitude easier and less energy intensive. If you're going to argue against something at least use bloody science not horrendously flawed analogies.
so I don't understand why the MBAs and various enthusiasts that are pushing the crawlers Interesting, so your method of argument is to try to discredit those who oppose your view? I mean we all know that no scientists or engineers work at NASA, why in fact we all know that they shoot any scientist who gets within 50 miles of their offices.
don't propose powering it via one of the best conductors we know about - the carbon nanotubes they are proposing for the structure anyway. Because they don't know what they will use, what margins they will have, what exact properties their particular design will have and so on. You need to get energy out of the conductor as well and physical contact is not a possibility which will induce losses. And thats just in regard to how small sections of the elevator behave, the overall ad interactions induced by such a large circuit are a whole different manner. They are working on the one method they CAN work on, they have too little information to consider any other methods realistically. As a result this is their current idea as it will work with any possible implementation.
Depends on what the primary cargo is, there are very few satellites launches each year for example and there are only so many sats that you can shove up there before it becomes a cluster fuck. Four months is too long for sending humans, tourists up, and you will need to be sending people up quite a bit. Specific people are the only thing you can't, with time, make more cost effectively in space as they're unique. Space elevators are a great way to build an infrastructure in space but you still need something to use it.
I'd like to add that despite the insults in or tone of my post, which are simply my way of arguing online so don't take them too personally, I don't mean to discourage anyone from thinking creatively or considering new ideas. Nor am I dismissing all such ideas off hand simply because they are unconventional.
Rather I am arguing for considering such things in a rational and scientific manner instead of jumping up and down claiming to have found the equivalent of the alchemy or perpetual motion of yesterday. If you make ANY argument or claim you need to have sources to back it up. If at all possible those sources should be equations and calculations which you can derive and understand, anything less is not reliable. Don't accept something as true just because you heard someone say it in passing 5 years ago. That means you need to have a firm background in physics and the ability to understand those equations.
More importantly one needs to understand that there is a REASON things are done a certain way or a certain way is not popular. These reasons may be engineering or political but both are vital to understand. This means you need to understand the engineering process (of massive projects) in at least passing and that nothing exists in vacuum. Even a great idea may be practically inferior to a bad idea if the former can't be done efficiently in practice. In real life you have tons of complexities and costs beyond the raw math of the bare bones implementation of something.
The space elevator is for example simple in concept but absurdly complicated in implementation, things like effects of lightning alone probably require supercomputer based analysis. Practically speaking it is also too expensive to test till one works, due to both it's costs and relatively long life cycle. Rockets you can keep sending up till they stop exploding yet even those have absurd complexity compared to say a model rocket (at least one was lost asfaik due to vibrations induced from fuel in fuel lines or something).
In summary if you propose an idea you need to at least consider if it's viable from a physical, engineering, political, economic and probably other points of view. Not just part of the idea but a fully implemented version of it including any and all infrastructure needed for it. You may not understand even close to what the costs are in those areas but you need to at least understand why there could be large costs there.
To be blunt you're an armchair physicist/engineer and an especially bad one at that. Not only do you not even understand physics (which most armchairs, unlike you, actually do understand) although like the rest of your kind you don't understand the realities of engineering for large projects either.
The highest altitude an airplane can sanely go to is say 20km, a hot air balloon can go higher but they have a very limited payload capacity. Spaceship one got detached at 15km for comparison so I'm being quite kind here, in your favor. Now let's look at some actual numbers, something I assume you're incapable of doing on your own due to lack of intelligence despite the trivial difficulty of it.
The most fuel is consumed attempting to overcome the higher gravity at earths surface, which is 9.78 meters per second per second down near the equator and drops in a non-linear fashion with distance,
Apparently you cannot comprehend the massive distances involved. At 20km, see above for why I use this, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.76. At sea level it is 9.82. Non-linear means jack shit when you start at 6371km and only go up a few dozen km. 0.7%, yeah bloody helpful.
and ploughing through the earths atmosphere, which generates drag and heat.
The amount of energy lost to drag is quite small, a quick calculation puts it at below 0.1% (of the thrust of the rocket) between 0km and 20km (velocity and atmospheric density cancel out more or less I think as you go up). Also at 20km, the highest you'll realistically get a plane to go, is still well within the atmosphere.
So you will need to send a rocket up anyway, specifically one that detaches from your lift vehicle. No spaceship can "pick up" your rocket because any such spaceship would no longer be even close to in orbit (to be at such low altitude/velocity). If you want me to explain the absurdity of it more then I will but hopefully I won't need to.
So let's look at the savings of launching at 20km instead of 0km altitude, the starting velocity in both cases will essentially be 0 (even 500km/hr is nothing).
The Soyuz launch vehicle, for example, drops it's first stage at 50km and has a velocity of ~2km/s or so I think. That stage is 30% of the whole things mass/fuel, the remaining mass is still ~120 TONS. Let's ignore the absurdity of trying to list 100+ TONS to 20km by airplane (needed for sizable payload), it's more than a 767 can lift which can't even go close to that high. Now you'd get a savings of maybe 10-15% of total at 20km once you take away those 0.5km/s of velocity it no longer has. The cost and complexity of dragging it that far up, by airplane, would more than counter any savings. Also even 20% savings is small as the cost is still absurd, a space elevator gives you maybe 95%+ savings over current rockets.
Which also causes the explosions that plague rockets.
And trying to ignite at high altitude, separate from a plane and so on will cause it's own problems. Modern rockets are decently safe.
Are you saying that the fuel you save utilizing conventional lift to reach the top of the atmosphere instead of using rockets is irrelevant?
Of course it is, fuel is amazingly cheap compared to all the other costs involved. The space shuttle for example is not absurdly expensive because of fuel but because of how complex it is to deal with (billions a year just to keep the launch facilities in working order). Your ideas are complex, compared to rockets, and so would incur massive costs of this sort.
It's so obvious that everyone in the private sector who is attempting to enter the arena of space flight has chosen this approach, including SpaceShipOne, which is functionally demonstrating the concept.
You picked the perfect example to discredit your own point. They could do it BECAUSE they didn't need to generate high velocities. They were orders of magnitude off from what any traditional rocket needs in terms of velo
Except that the current design is many such relatively short tubes glued together, that would probably add a lot of resistance. I'm sure there are also problems of having such a large circuit interacting with the atmosphere and other such things.
Remember that while you can dump as much energy into a beam as you want with little ill effect on anything you care about, doing it to a cable will cause it to heat up massively from the resistance.
People really don't like nuclear reactors for this sort of things, mostly the whole crashed into ground at terminal velocity and spills it's contents thing. Baseless paranoia mostly but that's people for you.
The fucking elevator is 35786 km long, consider that for just a bloody second. Helium balloon? There isn't even an atmosphere for most of the things length.
The thing with torture is that it can be used as great propaganda, by the terrorists. They've shown themselves to be more than good enough to use it as such. As was done in ww2 the point is to remove any doubt from the terrorist minds that death is preferable to surrender or capture. Not only does this remove any chance of them giving information when captured but it causes even higher losses to their enemies. Now they would lose some recruits but they'd gain even more than they lost from people who wish to "avenge their fellow countryman/muslims/etc."
Even worse it could be used against the Iraqi people to keep them from talking to Americans. You'd need to add in some things about how talking will make them a suspect and how the Americans will drag them away to be tortured.
There would likely be some creative editing of the truth such adding worse implications of what the torture involved and so on.
The US needs to portray itself as the good guy, as helping the people and so on. It's either that or institute martial law, kill anyone who even looks funny and remove all media access. Once everyone who opposes it is dead democracy can be put into place. That would have probably worked better but no one had the balls to do it.
No, you seem to think of everything as black and white, true or false. In real life it's about percentages and numbers. The mob doesn't expect informers to disappear, they only want to make people think twice before snitching. As for not knowing about gory death, there is a reason the mob makes such things well known to those they wish to intimidate. Sure you can ignore such things when you're far away but if you're a spy and a snitch is skinned alive in front of your eyes you may consider resigning. It doesn't matter if there are 10 spies left if 90 others had second thoughts as a result, it's still a success.
Nonetheless as I said in my post this can and does fail dramatically when, as you pointed out yourself, the reason for joining is nowhere near rational. Terrorist groups would gain ten recruits for every one they lost. Worse yet these recruits would now know that they have to, literary, fight to the death. This is simply propaganda and one that can be used by either side depending on which is better at the art.
Consider for a second a perfectly honorable and selfless society. Now consider the hell it would become when even a single selfish and intelligent person were (by pure chance) born into it. Honor is simply a very nice way for those in power to keep the rest of society in line while they themselves aren't affected by it. After all it is not honorable to try and overthrow the abusive government.
Also altruism doesn't exist, as in no one is selfless. You don't sacrifice yourself for society, you sacrifice yourself for your loved ones. If you did not sacrifice yourself society would shun your loved ones and thus you have no choice but to be "selfless." Possibly you feel that your sacrifice will give you personal rewards in some afterlife.
This theory would only make sense, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed faced any prospect of ever being released... As things stand, "spreading terror" through him is completely pointless. Oh, let's say you're a member of group X. Which is more likely to stop you from being a member of group X: -A fellow group member being killed with lethal injection, after he had time to make final statements and so on. -A fellow group member being slowly tortured for months then killed in a horribly painful manner without him having any chance to contact anyone.
So yes it is spreading terror, he is spreading terror on behalf of the US against fellow members of his group. Of course that's not of much use when said terror makes one guy leave the group but ten join in his place.
So...... prostitution and drugs should not be illegal because the "marketplace" can handle the problems? Sure, why the hell not. Do you realize how much crime is caused by and public money is wasted on fighting both of those? We could probably provide welfare and free drugs to every single bloody drug user for less than it costs us now to deal with them in jail and in their gangs.
We got very close to knocking ourselves back a few dozen centuries with the bomb. The difference is that even the bomb requires massive expenditures of money and effort to develop and keep up. It could only be built, in dangerous numbers, by governments and those are usually sane enough. More importantly to become head of such a government requires an absurd amount of self-interest and power hunger, only when cornered would someone willingly sacrifice all that (after all you can't be ruler when there is no one to rule). Likewise these people, by the same reasoning, are older which makes them more conservative and relatively stable.
The scenario I mentioned, and many others like it, by definition require the exact opposite of all that to be possible. That is the problem, ever increasing technology makes it inevitable that such things will happen. If we're lucky we'll be able to control it but one look at computer security makes that prospect a bit dim. Just imagine if all those hackers nowadays could take out people and not just computer systems, if instead of playing with code they could play with genes.
Even modern biological and chemical weapons are a pain to make, yet there have been many attempts by radical groups to do just that. If they could have taken out a whole city I'm sure some would have at least attempted.
As for failed predictions, well the lovely thing is that only one prediction needs to be right and by definition we likely won't be around to appreciate that fact. I also make no real predictions but simply say what is possible and may very well happen. It may happen, it may not happen but I prefer to be safe than sorry. The stars are silent, maybe that says something about how likely our chances of making it really are.
Of course a star has a well defined definition, and the question was never if Jupiter was a star. It is however quite close in composition to a star, has its own system of "planets" but is very much too small to be even a brown dwarf. Granted it is very unlikely that Jupiter could have ever become even a brown dwarf given how much extra mass it would have required to do so.
Interestingly enough there is also a definition of a brown dwarf and a planet, one that is not what Mr Plait stated it to be. Of course he said that almost a decade ago and that definition is younger than that. Specifically it is based only on size not method of formation, which is logical given that we can't be sure if a brown dwarf can't form like a planet. That definition even specifically states it doesn't matter how a brown dwarf formed or where it resides as long as it pack enough (but not too much) mass.
Furthermore that definition in no way claims that the only objects that are failed stars are brown dwarfs. After all a very large planet could form in a star like manner but would still not be called a brown dwarf. Likewise even a large brown dwarf may not be classified as a failed star if it never had a chance of becoming one even if the variables in its formation were a lot different.
Citing old comments as canon in what is a decently active field is downright foolish.
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Please tell me what power plants your area has so I can recommend them to my community. I mean free energy once it's built, no need to buy fuel for the power plant ever? Sign me right up.
Of course it is quite clear he meant $1 billion per year in terms of the cost of electricity had it been produced by a power plant (which includes fuel, construction costs, transmission losses and so on).
The current V-22 is a cargo plane more or less, it's designed to quickly and efficiently drop people or cargo where needed. It's not supposed to stay around and shoot at the enemy, most likely trying to fight back will just make it a much better target (and helicopters in general are easy target). trading both for a slightly higher top speed. And longer range likely.
I know, I was simply explaining why that is the logical way to hold the competition.
...you're the retard not him. Just because you don't understand his point doesn't mean it's wrong, just that you lack imagination and thinking ability.
Smoke, clouds, fog, dust, rain, natural radio interference, terrain, tall buildings, underpasses and probably many other things are NORMAL ways to block UAV vision or transmissions. In a war environment you also have ground-to-air missiles, ground-to-ground attacks (that can damage any part of the vehicle), enemy jamming, enemy smoke screens, dust from explosions and probably many other things.
If it can't move without the UAV it is useless. If it can move without it then there is no point in testing with one as that can be done later.
Well I assume that:
1. A dedicated UAV sent from some other location would make much more sense, launching and retrieving a UAV would be trying to make it a jack of all trades (and thus sacrifice it's ability to do any task well).
2. UAVs can be shot down, communications can be blocked and radio receivers can be damaged. If there is a single easy to exploit point of failure then the whole system is worthless. It needs to be able to move on it's own and everything else is gravy. In others there is no point in having such a capability at this stage since it'd have to be turned off for most of the test anyway.
Except that death isn't the only way to define "safe." Large airplane crashes rarely leave survivors while car accidents have an order of magnitude more injuries than deaths so airplanes still come out as safer.
Nigeria has none of these. Not to mention that the Nigerian government certainly have their own helicopters, regardless of how poor the country is in general. Can the government stand to save money by developing state-manufactured choppers? Or better yet, can it save money by cutting off their reliance on foreign maintenance crews, and instead training their own? Save money? You mean spend a hundred million to save ten million or so in costs? Nobody says they have to tackle Sikorsky on the global market, but I'm betting many developing nations would be in for some cheap, fairly reliable helicopters. There is a reason that safe, cheap and reliable are never all true.
Even at top of the highest mountain in the world the air density is such that the drag from having something go 15km/s (ie: roughly what you need to reach orbit I think) would melt it. The resulting drag induced deceleration would also kill anything living inside it probably. It's possibly useful as a first stage mechanism.
Corrode? How?
Atmospheric effects (oxygen I assume among other things), random effects, micro-meteorites and so on. And of course the climber has to do just that CLIMB the thing, that constant contact will likely cause damage over long periods of time.
This is something effectively the same as sheets of graphite in the high strength direction which is going to be in contact with the same material in a vaccum. Also by breaking - by what mechanism? Wouldn't the design be such as to spread the load to somehting the fibres can take.
Nothing is perfect or indestructible.
I think you'll also find that the joining you describe is about bundling the fibres axially and not sticking bits on the end of individual fibres longitudinally otherwise you would lose an order of magnitude or two of strength.
No right now it's about using short fibers as we have no foreseeable technology to make massively long fibers. Pretty much short of specialized advanced nanomachines there is no sane way to make something that long, random problems will crop up and cause breaks or problems in every fiber before it gets even close to that long. The original designs involved using actual epoxy and apparently calculation still gave the result enough strength. Also current design have a tapering cable that is much thinner at the bottom than the top.
Please explain the theory of high temperature superconductivity that shows it is not possible - all the theories I know are empirical and actually pretty confusing.
As I said some theories, in other words someone claims it is not possible. Given current problems and the complexities of the best superconductors it may be the truth.
he MBAs I am talking about are the ones that are running the space elevator consortium which is not linked with NASA since NASA is doing other stuff.
The current power beaming competition is being funded by NASA, partially at least. There are a number of scientists/engineers in the group although the group isn't there to do research. Some of the research done for this can be found here:
http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/
I really have no idea why people for some inane reason always claim others, despite being more qualified, are wrong while they, and their pet theories, are right WITHOUT even looking up the explanation for something. If you disagree with them you could have emailed them for justification, could have looked at the literature in the area, could have contacted people involved in the project and probably other bloody things. Let me be blunt, you're an atrocious debater, if you wish to claim that something is wrong then you need to do it in a LOGICAL fashion. That means you find out why something is done a certain way then rip it apart. If you don't know why someone is doing something one way how in god's name can you claim their reasoning is wrong? Instead you take up others time on slashdot, a place where pretty much no one is even close to qualified to discuss this subject.
The space elevator is amazingly thin first of all, millimeter thin at the bottom possibly and only meters wide. It is absurdly long, 35000km, and all energy need to be provided ground side for now. Each climber may require say 500watts of power for a 12day ascent which means you need to be supplying say 10MW to all the climbers at any given time (this is the energy they need to receive after all loses are taken into account, you need to send much much more). Carbon nanotubes aren't that amazingly conductive, an order of magnitude close to copper over long distances I believe. Graphite is for example a few orders worse than copper in that department I think. My quick calculation put the energy loss at over 50% easily (as in even when I'm being conservative) and I'd say it's way over 90% even in the mid point if you were to properly calculate it (with realistic values and considerations).
Except that there is pretty much nothing for them to do up there. Tourism is about the best way to raise public desire and money for more space infrastructure. Also four months means you need to not only lift up a person but long term life support food, water recycling, emergency facilities, stewards and probably other things.
Well okay, most actual rockets use kerosene or other more absurdly exotic fuels instead. Of course NASA doesn't actually have many such rockets and instead uses the shuttle which is LOX/H2.
Depends on what the primary cargo is, there are very few satellites launches each year for example and there are only so many sats that you can shove up there before it becomes a cluster fuck. Four months is too long for sending humans, tourists up, and you will need to be sending people up quite a bit. Specific people are the only thing you can't, with time, make more cost effectively in space as they're unique. Space elevators are a great way to build an infrastructure in space but you still need something to use it.
I'd like to add that despite the insults in or tone of my post, which are simply my way of arguing online so don't take them too personally, I don't mean to discourage anyone from thinking creatively or considering new ideas. Nor am I dismissing all such ideas off hand simply because they are unconventional.
Rather I am arguing for considering such things in a rational and scientific manner instead of jumping up and down claiming to have found the equivalent of the alchemy or perpetual motion of yesterday. If you make ANY argument or claim you need to have sources to back it up. If at all possible those sources should be equations and calculations which you can derive and understand, anything less is not reliable. Don't accept something as true just because you heard someone say it in passing 5 years ago. That means you need to have a firm background in physics and the ability to understand those equations.
More importantly one needs to understand that there is a REASON things are done a certain way or a certain way is not popular. These reasons may be engineering or political but both are vital to understand. This means you need to understand the engineering process (of massive projects) in at least passing and that nothing exists in vacuum. Even a great idea may be practically inferior to a bad idea if the former can't be done efficiently in practice. In real life you have tons of complexities and costs beyond the raw math of the bare bones implementation of something.
The space elevator is for example simple in concept but absurdly complicated in implementation, things like effects of lightning alone probably require supercomputer based analysis. Practically speaking it is also too expensive to test till one works, due to both it's costs and relatively long life cycle. Rockets you can keep sending up till they stop exploding yet even those have absurd complexity compared to say a model rocket (at least one was lost asfaik due to vibrations induced from fuel in fuel lines or something).
In summary if you propose an idea you need to at least consider if it's viable from a physical, engineering, political, economic and probably other points of view. Not just part of the idea but a fully implemented version of it including any and all infrastructure needed for it. You may not understand even close to what the costs are in those areas but you need to at least understand why there could be large costs there.
The highest altitude an airplane can sanely go to is say 20km, a hot air balloon can go higher but they have a very limited payload capacity. Spaceship one got detached at 15km for comparison so I'm being quite kind here, in your favor. Now let's look at some actual numbers, something I assume you're incapable of doing on your own due to lack of intelligence despite the trivial difficulty of it.
The most fuel is consumed attempting to overcome the higher gravity at earths surface, which is 9.78 meters per second per second down near the equator and drops in a non-linear fashion with distance,
Apparently you cannot comprehend the massive distances involved. At 20km, see above for why I use this, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.76. At sea level it is 9.82. Non-linear means jack shit when you start at 6371km and only go up a few dozen km. 0.7%, yeah bloody helpful.
and ploughing through the earths atmosphere, which generates drag and heat.
The amount of energy lost to drag is quite small, a quick calculation puts it at below 0.1% (of the thrust of the rocket) between 0km and 20km (velocity and atmospheric density cancel out more or less I think as you go up). Also at 20km, the highest you'll realistically get a plane to go, is still well within the atmosphere.
So you will need to send a rocket up anyway, specifically one that detaches from your lift vehicle. No spaceship can "pick up" your rocket because any such spaceship would no longer be even close to in orbit (to be at such low altitude/velocity). If you want me to explain the absurdity of it more then I will but hopefully I won't need to.
So let's look at the savings of launching at 20km instead of 0km altitude, the starting velocity in both cases will essentially be 0 (even 500km/hr is nothing).
The Soyuz launch vehicle, for example, drops it's first stage at 50km and has a velocity of ~2km/s or so I think. That stage is 30% of the whole things mass/fuel, the remaining mass is still ~120 TONS. Let's ignore the absurdity of trying to list 100+ TONS to 20km by airplane (needed for sizable payload), it's more than a 767 can lift which can't even go close to that high. Now you'd get a savings of maybe 10-15% of total at 20km once you take away those 0.5km/s of velocity it no longer has. The cost and complexity of dragging it that far up, by airplane, would more than counter any savings. Also even 20% savings is small as the cost is still absurd, a space elevator gives you maybe 95%+ savings over current rockets.
Which also causes the explosions that plague rockets.
And trying to ignite at high altitude, separate from a plane and so on will cause it's own problems. Modern rockets are decently safe.
Are you saying that the fuel you save utilizing conventional lift to reach the top of the atmosphere instead of using rockets is irrelevant?
Of course it is, fuel is amazingly cheap compared to all the other costs involved. The space shuttle for example is not absurdly expensive because of fuel but because of how complex it is to deal with (billions a year just to keep the launch facilities in working order). Your ideas are complex, compared to rockets, and so would incur massive costs of this sort.
It's so obvious that everyone in the private sector who is attempting to enter the arena of space flight has chosen this approach, including SpaceShipOne, which is functionally demonstrating the concept.
You picked the perfect example to discredit your own point. They could do it BECAUSE they didn't need to generate high velocities. They were orders of magnitude off from what any traditional rocket needs in terms of velo
Except that the current design is many such relatively short tubes glued together, that would probably add a lot of resistance. I'm sure there are also problems of having such a large circuit interacting with the atmosphere and other such things.
Remember that while you can dump as much energy into a beam as you want with little ill effect on anything you care about, doing it to a cable will cause it to heat up massively from the resistance.
People really don't like nuclear reactors for this sort of things, mostly the whole crashed into ground at terminal velocity and spills it's contents thing. Baseless paranoia mostly but that's people for you.
The fucking elevator is 35786 km long, consider that for just a bloody second. Helium balloon? There isn't even an atmosphere for most of the things length.
The thing with torture is that it can be used as great propaganda, by the terrorists. They've shown themselves to be more than good enough to use it as such. As was done in ww2 the point is to remove any doubt from the terrorist minds that death is preferable to surrender or capture. Not only does this remove any chance of them giving information when captured but it causes even higher losses to their enemies. Now they would lose some recruits but they'd gain even more than they lost from people who wish to "avenge their fellow countryman/muslims/etc."
Even worse it could be used against the Iraqi people to keep them from talking to Americans. You'd need to add in some things about how talking will make them a suspect and how the Americans will drag them away to be tortured.
There would likely be some creative editing of the truth such adding worse implications of what the torture involved and so on.
The US needs to portray itself as the good guy, as helping the people and so on. It's either that or institute martial law, kill anyone who even looks funny and remove all media access. Once everyone who opposes it is dead democracy can be put into place. That would have probably worked better but no one had the balls to do it.
No, you seem to think of everything as black and white, true or false. In real life it's about percentages and numbers. The mob doesn't expect informers to disappear, they only want to make people think twice before snitching. As for not knowing about gory death, there is a reason the mob makes such things well known to those they wish to intimidate. Sure you can ignore such things when you're far away but if you're a spy and a snitch is skinned alive in front of your eyes you may consider resigning. It doesn't matter if there are 10 spies left if 90 others had second thoughts as a result, it's still a success.
Nonetheless as I said in my post this can and does fail dramatically when, as you pointed out yourself, the reason for joining is nowhere near rational. Terrorist groups would gain ten recruits for every one they lost. Worse yet these recruits would now know that they have to, literary, fight to the death. This is simply propaganda and one that can be used by either side depending on which is better at the art.
And what way is society, well?
Consider for a second a perfectly honorable and selfless society. Now consider the hell it would become when even a single selfish and intelligent person were (by pure chance) born into it. Honor is simply a very nice way for those in power to keep the rest of society in line while they themselves aren't affected by it. After all it is not honorable to try and overthrow the abusive government.
Also altruism doesn't exist, as in no one is selfless. You don't sacrifice yourself for society, you sacrifice yourself for your loved ones. If you did not sacrifice yourself society would shun your loved ones and thus you have no choice but to be "selfless." Possibly you feel that your sacrifice will give you personal rewards in some afterlife.
-A fellow group member being killed with lethal injection, after he had time to make final statements and so on.
-A fellow group member being slowly tortured for months then killed in a horribly painful manner without him having any chance to contact anyone.
So yes it is spreading terror, he is spreading terror on behalf of the US against fellow members of his group. Of course that's not of much use when said terror makes one guy leave the group but ten join in his place.
We got very close to knocking ourselves back a few dozen centuries with the bomb. The difference is that even the bomb requires massive expenditures of money and effort to develop and keep up. It could only be built, in dangerous numbers, by governments and those are usually sane enough. More importantly to become head of such a government requires an absurd amount of self-interest and power hunger, only when cornered would someone willingly sacrifice all that (after all you can't be ruler when there is no one to rule). Likewise these people, by the same reasoning, are older which makes them more conservative and relatively stable.
The scenario I mentioned, and many others like it, by definition require the exact opposite of all that to be possible. That is the problem, ever increasing technology makes it inevitable that such things will happen. If we're lucky we'll be able to control it but one look at computer security makes that prospect a bit dim. Just imagine if all those hackers nowadays could take out people and not just computer systems, if instead of playing with code they could play with genes.
Even modern biological and chemical weapons are a pain to make, yet there have been many attempts by radical groups to do just that. If they could have taken out a whole city I'm sure some would have at least attempted.
As for failed predictions, well the lovely thing is that only one prediction needs to be right and by definition we likely won't be around to appreciate that fact. I also make no real predictions but simply say what is possible and may very well happen. It may happen, it may not happen but I prefer to be safe than sorry. The stars are silent, maybe that says something about how likely our chances of making it really are.
Of course a star has a well defined definition, and the question was never if Jupiter was a star. It is however quite close in composition to a star, has its own system of "planets" but is very much too small to be even a brown dwarf. Granted it is very unlikely that Jupiter could have ever become even a brown dwarf given how much extra mass it would have required to do so.
Interestingly enough there is also a definition of a brown dwarf and a planet, one that is not what Mr Plait stated it to be. Of course he said that almost a decade ago and that definition is younger than that. Specifically it is based only on size not method of formation, which is logical given that we can't be sure if a brown dwarf can't form like a planet. That definition even specifically states it doesn't matter how a brown dwarf formed or where it resides as long as it pack enough (but not too much) mass.
Furthermore that definition in no way claims that the only objects that are failed stars are brown dwarfs. After all a very large planet could form in a star like manner but would still not be called a brown dwarf. Likewise even a large brown dwarf may not be classified as a failed star if it never had a chance of becoming one even if the variables in its formation were a lot different.
Citing old comments as canon in what is a decently active field is downright foolish.