A lot of us are anxious to see some major commercial application of space (see the recent discussion on space-based solar power, too), but I'm afraid helium-3 mining on the moon is not a feasible one.
First of all, Helium-3 already exists in smaller amounts on earth. It makes up about 0.00138% of the helium on the earth, as opposed to 0.00138% of helium on the moon. More importantly, it can also be synthesized by deuterium fusion or by tritium decay, although current production is only a few kilograms per year. However, one of the first generation fusion fuels is deuterium, so it's very likely that first generation technology could eventually be used to make fuel for second generation fusion plants.
Second, obviously, we have not achieved practical hydrogen fusion yet, much less helium fusion, which is harder. The current ITER timeline estimates the first commercial hydrogen fusion plants will come online around 2040-2050. Helium fusion, if we decide it's worth the effort to develop, will come later.
Third, you have to move a lot of dirt to get a useful amount of He-3. Estimates are the US alone would need at least 15-20 tons per year for our current electrical generation. At the quoted 0.01 ppm on the moon, that means you need to process 2 billion tons (approx 670 million cubic meters) of regolith every year. In comparison, the giant Three Gorges Dam in China required excavating only 134 million cubic meters of material over a period of 10 years, using thousands of workers and who knows how many tons of heavy equipment.
Additionally, processing the regolith for the helium requires first boiling out all of the gasses by heating the excavated dirt several hundred degrees, then separating the minute fraction of He-3 from all the "waste" gasses. It will be very energy intensive. By my very rough math, every cubic meter of moon you excavate requires on order of 100 kW-hours of heat, so a year's worth of digging would take 47 billion kW-hours. This is about 4% of our current electrical usage, which hints at the scale of the power production facilities that would have to be built on the moon to facilitate this mining...over 5,000 MW of capacity not counting digging and gas segregation energy needs.
The shuttle is docked to the station and will remain there until the end of mission. Undocking and redocking the shuttle is a lengthy procedure. It also has some potential for causing movement of the station, and if they're concerned about exacerbating the damage simply by rotating the joint, then, a less controlled motion due to undocking is most certainly a no-no.
Conducting an EVA around the ISS with the shuttle in motion is literally placing the astronauts (mass: 200 kg) between a rock (shuttle - mass: 100,000 kg) and a hard place (ISS - mass: 270,000 kg). Not to mention, as the undocked pair orbited from one side of the planet to the other, the shuttle would naturally tend to drift from one side of the array to the other, passing through the array unless the pilot constantly adjusted the position with the thrusters. That probably wouldn't fly as a properly planned EVA with months of orchestration, training, and other preparation. It certainty wouldn't fly as a scraped together barnstorming written on the back of a checklist a la Apollo 13 unless there was an imminent threat.
In fact, the threat can hardly be very substantial. The nominal voltage of an entire solar cell string is 160V...a little bit less than the peaks in 120 household VAC. According to NASA, the voltage can get as high as 320V. The astronauts are wearing thick suits, and while electrical protection probably wasn't particularly high on the list of design criteria, they certainly weren't designed to be conductive.
Of course, NASA is being careful to minimize any danger to the astronauts, but I imagine the far greater concern is an electrical short damaging some hardware, especially in the robotic arm. I highly suspect the article has over-emphasized the risk and we're getting hung up on something that's nearly a non-issue.
If I were one of the astronauts, I'd be much more concerned about the plan to get out there in the first place, since this tear would normally be out of reach. It involves the station robotic arm grabbing a part of the shuttle robotic arm like a baseball bat and dangling the astronaut out at the end of this orbital fishing pole.
I'm not sure I understand the point of the criticism. I'm merely highlighting that space flight is tough business and risky business. Perhaps you misunderstood or are reading too much into my post? It's not definitive or exhaustive; Merely illustrative.
As for your specific criticisms:
Apollo 12 actually was one of the less dangerous ones in my list. The resulting data dropout almost prompted an in-flight abort, but some quick-thinking engineers recognized the symptoms and rebooted the computer. The vehicle was performing fine. The STS-1 thermal damage is true, although the threat of structural failure at the location it occurred like on STS-117 is believed to be small. There is an official STS-1 Anomaly Report you can verify the damage from. On STS-51F, one engine shut-down due to bad data. Another quick-thinking engineer preempted a similar anomaly from shutting down a second engine, which would have prevented the Abort-to-orbit they took. One source (unverified) says they wouldn't have had enough thrust to do Trans-oceanic abort at that point and would have ditched in the Atlantic.
FYI, the Soyuz flight where the three cosmonauts died on re-entry was due to a mechanical malfunction of a valve that connected the re-entry capsule to the rest of the Soyuz spacecraft. It was not an error on the crew's part. In fact, one of the crewmen actually had just enough time to unbuckle, crawl beneath the seat and close the valve halfway before passing out. Rather tragic.
The Soviet space program is as full of accidents or more so than our own. It really is tough business:
Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 capsule remained inadvertantly connected to it's service module during re-entry due to a bundle of wires (I assume a pyro failed to fire). It caused the spacecraft to wobble marginally out-of-control until the wires burned through.
After a series of problems in-flight led to a decision to delay the Soyuz 2 launch (probably fortuitiously, since 2 would've had the same issues), the Soyuz 1 main chute didn't deploy and the backup chute tangled. The cosmonaut died when the capsule hit the ground. Interestingly, it launched under political pressure, and Gagarin had tried to get himself scheduled for the flight, believing the politburo would then listen to the engineer's concerns rather than risk losing a national hero.
All four N-1's (the Soviet's planned moon rocket) exploded during launch (unmanned).
A Cosmos rocket exploded on the pad in 1973, killing 9 engineers.
In 1975, Soyuz 18a went out of control 5 minutes into launch, causing the launch escape system to activate. This saved the crew, but barely. They experienced accellerations up to 21 g's, and the capsule landed in the mountains in NW China. One article claims the capsule would've tumbled off a cliff if the chute hadn't snagged on a tree, but I haven't seen that verified.
Soyuz 23 in 1976 crashed through a frozen lake and sank with the crew inside. Remarkably, the crew was saved after considerable effort when a diver attached a cable that allowed a helicopter to lift the capsule out.
A 1980 explosion of an unmanned Vostok rocket on the pad killed 48 people on the ground.
In 1983, Soyuz T-10 caught fire on the pad. Ground control triggered the launch escape system, pulling the two men and their capsule clear. The rocket exploded two seconds later, but the cosmonauts survived.
There was a fire aboard the Mir in 1997. The same year, a Progress cargo ship collided with the station and punctured one of the modules. The crew had to rush to close the hatch to the module.
In 2002, an unmanned Soyuz rocket exploded, killing a Russian soldier.
One thing few people realize is there have been nearly as many close-calls in the US space program. Everyone knows about Apollo 13, but the first shuttle launch had a near burn-through due to tiles that fell off during launch. Another shuttle flight had an engine shutdown due to a short circuit that left it in a low orbit. Apollo 12 was hit by lightning. One of the Gemini flights went out of control and tumbled violently, nearly killing Neil Armstrong and David Scott. The Mercury 4 capsule had a hatch blow prematurely on splash down and sank as Gus Grissom scrambled to escape.
All of these guys, US, Russian, and Chinese alike have a lot of guts.
This comet isn't exactly one to get hyped about. It's not that bright. Magnitude 3 is about as bright as the Little Dipper. You won't see it from the city and you have to know where to look to identify it from better conditions.
Of course, naked eye comets always get a brief mention in the news, even when dim, but this one caught attention because of the dramatic increase in brightness. It's all the more surprising when you consider that this is a short period comet in a relatively circular orbit. It makes it's close approach to the sun frequently, so it doesn't tend to brighten much as it makes the approach, and it has no tail. Even more remarkable, it's currently moving away from the sun, so it would normally be expected to dim, not brighten. Why? Well, it may have had an unusual outgassing event or have impacted another object. Beyond that, I don't have any good guesses.
The brightest comet in decades was McNaught, which made a show last winter. Unfortunately, it was very close to the sun, so it rose barely after sunrise and set barely after sunset and was therefore hard to observe. However, it quickly got brighter than Venus and eventually was so bright (M -6) that a clever observer in clear, dry air could spot it during the day, a scant few degrees from the sun.
It was a little more friendly to observers in the southern hemisphere, and its huge, striated tail was spectacular. Here's a picture.
Kohoutek wasn't all that bright. Probably the best observer's comet last century was Hale-Bopp, which was very photogenic and had a remarkable double tail. I wasn't alive for Halley, which has a lot of historical significance, but it's latest pass wasn't very impressive.
That's a very good point, and highlights that I was a little sloppy in defining terms, but what I was addressing was net risk. A lot of people have a major fear of airline flying and every little incident stokes that fear. Yet, partially due to the relatively small number of airplane trips the average person takes, they are far, far more likely to die in an automobile accident.
The 1 in 50 statistic comes from NTSB data that about 2% of deaths in the US are from traffic accidents. I don't know how many of those are pedestrian deaths, if any, but I suspect it's a small minority.
I may have totally botched the math (crap...college fades fast), but taking into account the point that the probability is exponential, it looks to me like the risk of dying on a commercial airline flight reaches 2% at about 101,000 flights. That's 4 flights per day for 70 years. Even a frequent business traveller taking trips every other week (50 flights per year) for an exhausting 50 year career only has a theoretical risk of 0.05%.
You're right. I didn't state it very well, but that is the point I was trying to make.
The $25 million figure in the article is wrong. I would guess it's either a very outdated cost, or is the price of the Soyuz spacecraft only, not of a complete Soyuz launch. Or perhaps they were reporting the cost of flying to the ISS as a tourist on a Soyuz, which is most definitely not the launch cost.
Last I heard, a Soyuz launch to the ISS costs about $70 million, but Russian launch prices have been skyrocketing lately (no pun intended) due to demand and the improving Russian economy.
There's quite a few ways to calculate the cost of a shuttle launch. The direct costs incidental to launch add up to only around $60 million, but there's a lot of facility and periodic maintenance costs that must be accounted for, and if you include the development costs, a shuttle launch is somewhere around $1.3 billion. The fairest figure I've heard estimates what it would cost to add additional shuttle launches to the manifest and is around the $450 million the parent cited.
But it's still an apples to oranges comparison. The Soyuz is a no-frills people transporter. The Shuttle is a somewhat over-featured cargo/personal transporter that can on its own serve as an orbital laboratory and work platform and even return large cargos to earth.
The difference is well illustrated in this picture. In fact, the space shuttle could carry an entire, fully fueled and crewed Soyuz spacecraft in its payload bay, with quite a bit of room and literally tons of mass to spare, in addition to its regular 7-man crew.
I was under the impression that the FAA had minimum distances defined between any similarly performing aircraft as approximately 3-5 miles, and I'll tell you that some of these aircraft were significantly closer than that.
The airliner in that picture on your blog is not violating any recommended practices. The 3-5 miles is typical following distance for airliners on the same path, which allows time for potentially dangerous wake turbulence to dissipate. For planes whose paths do not intersect (in the 3-D environment, not merely 2-D), much, much closer passes can safely occur. The plane you show was at least 1000 feet higher than your own, a standard separation for planes awaiting landing clearance, and not on the same flight path.
Whatever may be in NASA's report (I suspect it's mostly the collisions it refers to are mostly taxiway and tarmac incidents), does not change the fact that the airlines are still the safest way to travel by a large margin. Over the past 20 years, your odds of dying in a commerical airline accident were about 1 in 5 million per flight (multiply by number of flights you take in life for net risk). Your odds of dying on the road are about 1 in 50 (net risk).
I'm sure the DVD has some advantages in showing the personal aspects, but I was probably equally moved by the book, which I'd bet went into more technical detail (I haven't seen the DVD) and is still very personal. Much of it is Dr. Squyres' personal notes from when the mission was developing and unfolding. It was obviously quite the emotional roller coaster for the mission team.
Unfortunately, the saga cuts off two years ago. Those robotic drama queens kept writing the story long after the book ends.
A little known fact I learned from the book is that the subcontractor that built the rock abrasion tool is located in New York, within sight of the World Trade Center. They were in the middle of design on September 11, 2001. The covers on the rock abrasion tools were commemoratively made from pieces of aluminum recovered from the towers and painstakingly pounded and machined flat by the mechanics, then adorned with an American flag.
that it absorbs six or more solar masses before it can evaporate a comparable amount of mass, you'd reach the desired mass.
Black hole evaporation is related to temperature, and temperature is inversely related to mass. A large enough black hole, around the mass of the earth if I remember right, has a temperature below the 2.7 Kelvin average radiation temperature of space, meaning it actually absorbs more than it Hawking radiates and can only gain mass (from the absorbed photons according the e=hf=mc^2).
It seems unlikely that it simply absorbed lots of mass after it formed a black hole. Planets in a stable orbit have no reason to fall into the black hole, although I suppose perturbations from the companion star may upset their orbits sufficiently over time. There would be no spare gas in the immediate vicinity because stars, especially massive ones like we're talking about here, blow away extra gas and dust as they heat up and their stellar wind grows in intensity. The gas would have to fall in from quite a distance, and while I am not an expert, I suspect the timescales required for that to occur are far longer than the short life of a 70 solar-mass star like the one orbiting this black hole, barring some very unlikely conditions.
My personal thought was perhaps this is really a pair of orbiting black holes, but another poster pointed out that ternary systems are unlikely to impossible with massive stars, and further reading on the system indicates that the companion star is regularly eclipsed by the black hole. If there were a second black hole, the eclipse pattern should be distinct enough to tell.
Any stellar black hole basically has to be a Kerr black hole. If this has any effect on calculating the mass, which I wouldn't think it could, accounting for that would be obvious.
So you spent 3/7ths of you time in pubs for 20 years and 0% of your time in pubs for 18 years. Piece of cake:
(3/7 * 20 + 0 * 18) / (18+20) = 0.226
I predict that you are not in a pub. It's not a bad prediction. Even without accounting for the change in your pattern that occurred when you reached 18, I'd still be right more than I was wrong on any random selected day.
Actually, you revealed one other important fact that makes it even clearer:
You went only on weekends, so you spent 0% of your weekdays in a pub for 18 years and 0% of your weekdays in a pub for 20 years. Today is Wednesday (you posted on Tuesday):
(0* 20 + 0 * 18) / (18+20) = 0
So I'm pretty darn confident you're not in a pub.
I could go a step further and use the number of days as a sample size to establish a confidence interval, but that's just obsessive. Of course, you could always make a conscious decision to prove me wrong, something the sun can't do. That's a rather important dependent variable.
I didn't view the movie, but from the description provided by our resident EU theorist, it seems to be something easily explained by Cartesian geometry and oft-encountered in orbital mechanics.
As the radius of the plume increases, yet its speed remains the same, its angular velocity decreases, so it fall behinds objects below it moving the same speed along a concentric path. Thank goodness for this or we wouldn't have geosynchronous satellites as we know them and Copernicus might never have figured out heliocentrism. Also, I'm unsure how much of the movement is due to the rotation of Enceladeus and how much is due to the motion of Cassini, which would change the perspective of the plume. The EU proponents can easily determine that last part (something more interesting than Cassini moving relative to Enceladeus is happening) by getting the timestamps and orbital data from NASA and crunching some numbers, but that might be considered a testable prediction.
Additionally, the GP's argument is not any more supportive of the electric universe theory than it is of the Enceladians with Super Soakers Theory. He doesn't even give a useful theoretical description of why EU better explains the motion of the jets than conventional theories, much less refer to any work done to determine if it is likely or even possible. NASA has at least done calculations to determine what it would take to create the jets under their proposed mechanism.
...plasmas can be highly electrical.
Thank you professor obvious. Plasmas are by definition electrical. For the record, modelling plasmas electrically is only valid if they have a net charge relative to surrounding objects on large scales. There is no trivial mechanism for that to occur, and without it the net force is zero. In that regards it actually turns out to be convenient for the universe that gravity is only attractive.
Al Gore certainly deserves this award, but I think I speak for all geeks when I say that I wish he would be a little more accurate. I have a hard time recommending his film An Inconvenient Truth due to his factual errors and exaggerated claims. Nonetheless, he has performed an invaluable service in bringing climate change to the center stage.
In other words:
Al Gore twisted the truth to build up his political stature. Although we normally would emphatically argue that moral ends must not be used to justify immoral means, we all recognize that polar bears are at stake here; Scientific accuracy be d***ed! Furthermore, he helped prevent his fellow Tennesseans from using too much energy by carefully disposing of almost $20,000 worth of electricity from just one of his houses alone, and by using private jets to incinerate thousands of barrels of those evil fossil fuels that the common man might have, against his charitable admonishments, used for such things as driving to work and heating their homes. Then he went the extra mile by paying money to companies he owns to plant trees in his name, thereby reducing our dependency on foreign...err, um...tree planters?
And that impressive resume doesn't even touch on his son's efforts to raise public awareness of drug issues.
Truly this man is an example for all us. Let us revere him along with the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr, the Physicians Without Borders, and the many actually worthy Nobel Peace Prize recipients!
Bitter? Who, me? Nah...I love a good story about hypocrisy. However, I'd guess if you look around hard enough, you could find five, or maybe even six billion people around the world who live out Al Gore's message better than he does.
1.) The method of generation is only tangentially relevant. Solar thermal and solar-voltaic generation both only achieve marginal economic competency in good locations on the surface. Existing solar-thermal devices are actually rather heavy due to the high temperatures and , so I'm skeptical that they could yield any more than minor weight savings in this plan.
2.) It's actually about 3.5 times as much (24/7/365 average flux in good areas on earth is about 350 W/m^2). I was aware of this when I asked the original question.
3.) Link? I am aware of no experiments done ever, much less in the 60's with transmitting power from orbit to the ground. I do see that some experiments have shown 90% efficiency of a microwave receiver (not photo-electric based, as I incorrectly assumed before), but that still leaves the efficiency of beam emission and atmospheric transmission.
The paper claims they are not a navigational hazard, but does little to back it up. The equation they show for calculating peak intensity is bunk and a mark against their credibility. It yields a result 700,000 W/m when the units should be W/m^2 (solar insolation ~ 1000 W/m^2). Quote:
This low energy density and choice of wavelength also means that biological effects are likely extremely small, comparable to the heating one might feel if sitting some distance from a campfire.
Again, not very convincing in its specificity, and rather alarming when you consider those instances we have long term exposure data for at 2.45 GHz and intensities where you can feel heat. It's a lot more than a Wifi antenna.
This, of course, is onto a receiving antenna 10 km in diameter for 5 GW of power delivered to the grid. Supplying the US electricity needs would require, in addition to the clearly expensive orbital assets, 6500 sq km of antenna...about 4 times what ground based solar would require (at 250 W/m^2, and if I thought that were a singular solution either, which I don't). No discussion of what the antennae would contribute to the cost.
No gripe with using a transmission grid, except it's another layer of cost that local solar users don't contend with. Again, local use of solar is marginally cost effective. Transmission represents as much as half the consumer cost depending on the region.
There is very little specific discussion of economics in the paper, other than to talk about a 10 MW prototype plant costing ~$10 billion. I'm not going to hold the prototype costs up as a case against it, but my ultimate argument is that due to the unique costs of operating in space, our current and foreseeable technology does not hold the promise to make that competitive with the various ground-based generation methods. To launch a 5000 tonne, 5 GW station like they suggest would take 80+ launches from payload-maxed Ares V's costing around $40 billion. Even if Elon Musk can cut those costs in half for us, that's still several times what an equivalent capacity in nuclear plants would cost, and that's without any material, design, or labor costs.
The point about how much is wasted is relevant to the cost. They're using the same technology as on earth (either photovoltaic or solar thermal) in small installations, where the price is already marginal, but adding in very non-trivial costs for launch and transmission in exchange for a higher capacity factor. Have you seen what the scale of the rectenna that would need to be built? A 5 GW plant needs a 10 km diameter receiver! Even accounting for a 0.25 capacity factor (solar performance in southern California), that much land area would generate almost 20 GW of electricity with solar cells.
After I asked the question I skimmed the paper. It was hardly encouraging from an economic standpoint. They were looking at tens of billions of dollars just to launch the generating portion of the plant (not including transmitter or receiver or even design and material costs), assuming they can max out their launch vehicles for mass. This is also with basically no discussion of how to assemble a structure 50 times as massive as the ISS in a geosynchronous orbit with much of the structure having almost no rigidity useful in manipulating it on a large scale.
The one concern I did see somewhat addressed in this discussion and the paper was the efficiency of power beaming. I assumed they were talking about similar concepts that the space elevator crowd was considering: lasers and high efficiency solar cells. The efficiency of lasers is abysmal, and masers even worse. Space elevator analysis is currently looking at system efficiencies around 1%. The paper claims efficiencies (using magnetrons?) of 90%. However, I'm pretty skeptical of that number since there were no details about the conditions that was measured under or at what point in the system.
Again, I'd love to see a technology that would show undeniable fruit from the past 50 years of space exploration and developement and create an infrastructure that could serve as a springboard to further exploration. The scope of project they're talking about here would certainly do that, but I remain unconvinced it is anywhere near economically feasible in the foreseeable future.
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit, generate your electricity, then beam it to the surface at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, and then receive the beamed power at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, meanwhile creating the navigational hazards of the power beams and still requiring distribution from receiving stations rather than simply generating it via panels at the point of use?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for finding ways to utilize space, but I don't see how this is even remotely economical, especially at our current technology levels.
I think it's wasteful to launch these probes and have them leave the solar system when they could be inserted into orbit around a planet and give us years worth of useful data. As far as I know, apart from Earth, the only planets we have probes around are Mars and Saturn... and maybe Venus.
While I agree with the first part of your post about the value of long-term observation, the quoted part of the comment is much easier said than done, especially for such a distant target as Pluto. New Horizons will fly by Pluto at about 13.8 km/s. Escape velocity from the surface of Pluto is only 1.2 km/s, meaning it would have to decellerate at least 12.6 km/s. This compares to the 16.2 km/s of delta-v achieved by the entire 1.2 million pound, 190 foot tall Atlas rocket that launched it originally. Obviously you don't have to get there so fast, but it already is a 9 year flight.
As is, however, New Horizons will provide data and images hundreds of times more detailed than what we currently have, even though it will only be obtained over a short couple of weeks. See the wikipedia page on Pluto to get an idea how little we can see from earth. The best pictures are about as good as a Windows desktop icon. In comparison, New Horizons will map almost the entire body at 1.6 km/px and parts of it as detailed as 50 m/px
Assuming I converted the scales right, the above links to Google Mars show approximately the equivalent resolution from Mars images. Assuming everything works, we'll be seeing that from Pluto in 8 years.
Of course, you were talking about Io, but that wasn't New Horizon's destination. It's much easier (although not trivial) to place a probe in orbit around Jupiter, which NASA did with Galileo. Jupiter and Saturn are the only outer planets that have had orbiters, and both of those were very expensive missions.
There are currently orbiters circling Mars (Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and ESA Mars Express), Venus (ESA Venus Express), and the moon (JAXA SELENE), plus one on the way to Mercury (Messenger), and one on the way to the asteroid Vesta (Dawn).
Even the Arab Christians and Jews of the time never disputed that Allah was the real God. The Arabic translation of the Bible uses "Allah" as it is how you say God. The Pope and other religious leaders of Christianity and Judaism and Islam even agree on this.
That's a somewhat hazy interpretation of agreement.
It's true that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam agree firmly on the point of "No god but God," but the idendity of God in Christian (and to a lesser degree Jewish) theology versus Islamic theology stretches the appropriateness of equating Them. The understanding of Who God is and His relationship to mankind are markedly different, most notably through the the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus, and the role of free will.
Granted, there are plenty of reasons related to interfaith relations to refer to God from a Christian and Muslim viewpoint collectively, but the differences are fairly significant.
The prime candidates being referenced in the study are only about 60 light years away (from space.com), and only between 10 and 200 million years old. In comparison, our sun is around 4.5 billion years old, so for an alien civillization to see our solar system in a similar stage of evolution, they'd be looking from about 75 million times as far away. Keep in mind we can't even see these nearby proto-planets ourselves...just evidence in the thickness of the star's accretion discs.
If they can see that far, they'd have already seen so much of this happening that our solar system wouldn't stand out as remotely interesting. And of course, they'd be seeing it 4.5 billion years before intelligent life arose, so they wouldn't get any thrill from spotting an extra-galactic neighbor, either.
The utilities don't control the demand for energy, they control the supply. NRG is a producer here. The best they can do is limit how much electricity they produce and tell people not to use any more than that. If the people want to use more and NRG won't produce it, someone else will.
So while you're absolutely right that reducing usage is typically much more cost effective than increasing production capacity, that is a method that inherently must be exercised by the consumers, not the producers.
This is a common mistake people make in the midst of their enthusiasm to implicate the power companies in cruelly destroying the environment while sucking their pocketbooks dry.
Of course, the other important point to be made is that you can only be so efficient before you either have to make non-trivial cuts in activity or build more capacity.
Regarding the cost of wind versus nuclear power (coincidentally, I was just reading NREL's annual report on wind energy the other day): While wind costs about $1.50/Watt (your number was right for 2005) to install, it has a much lower capacity factor; how much it generates on average divided by how much it could generate if it were possible to run at rated load 100% of the time.
The best wind farms have capacity factors around 0.35. US Nuclear plants have a capacity factor of 0.87 on average (1999 number...and remember this is from a previous generation of designs). So adjusting for the capacity factor in capital costs, that works out to be $4.30/Watt for wind and $2.50/Watt for the GE ABWR. Of course, wind has a bonus of extremely low operating costs, but it can not be adjusted to demand, which is one of the main factors that relegates it to a minor role in the US power portfolio. It doesn't matter how many windmills you have if the weather is calm.
I expect anyone with concerns about nuclear power will sensibly mention decommissioning costs. These are now factored into the project at the beginning, and the NRC requires utilities to report their decommissioning fund status. Typically it's equivalent to roughly $0.50/W of capacity (source). Also, all of the GE PBWR's that have been built have been on-budget and on-time, which was one of the reasons this design was chosen, so I wouldn't expect huge unplanned costs to start appearing.
Additionally, a 5 meter sea rise is at the silly extreme end of predictions. The IPCC's estimate (from your link) is half a meter for the century. Regardless, while this could cause operability concerns, I could hardly imagine it causing any added danger of radioactive release, and the sea level rise would be observable over a period of decades.
A last point I'd like to present is that roughly half of the US nuclear power plants, representing 10% of our nation's power production and 10 times our entire installed wind capacity, are scheduled to reach the end of their operating licenses over the next few years. They are going to need to be replaced somehow or another, in addition to meeting the growing demand. Currently most utilities are planning on doing this with coal.
Can anyone clarify the statement about the genes. Are they actually changing (ie, a mutation) or are they simply being selectively expressed or suppressed in response to the conditions?
Surely the article is being sloppy with its wording, yes?
Actually I missed seeing it, but I heard about it on the radio in the morning and was pretty disappointed. Sounds like a pretty good bet you saw it though.
After reading the iPod bit, I had to doublecheck to make sure the submission wasn't from you-know-how, but then I realized it both made too much sense and contained too little gobbledygook to be from him.
However, now I'm going to be anxiously watching the firehose for an article announcing Apple's new iDecay line of atomic clocks. These will be far better than the Air Force's because they'll have built in battery packs instead of relying on solar power, and offer touch sensitive screens which will redefine the paradigm of atomic clock interfaces.
* iDecay not recommended for people with pacemakers or sensitive to ionizing radiation. Apple does not guarantee the accuracy of iDecay. Maintenance on battery pack by non-certified personel will void warranty. Possession of an iDecay may be used as evidence of WMD's. Do not take internally. Use of iDecay near copywrited material may result in quantum entanglement with the storage medium and is a violation of the DMCA. If you experience an erection lasting more than four hours while using iDecay, your Apple-fanboi status has reached flat-out perversion and you should seek professional assistance. iDecay requires Quicktime.
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A lot of us are anxious to see some major commercial application of space (see the recent discussion on space-based solar power, too), but I'm afraid helium-3 mining on the moon is not a feasible one.
First of all, Helium-3 already exists in smaller amounts on earth. It makes up about 0.00138% of the helium on the earth, as opposed to 0.00138% of helium on the moon. More importantly, it can also be synthesized by deuterium fusion or by tritium decay, although current production is only a few kilograms per year. However, one of the first generation fusion fuels is deuterium, so it's very likely that first generation technology could eventually be used to make fuel for second generation fusion plants.
Second, obviously, we have not achieved practical hydrogen fusion yet, much less helium fusion, which is harder. The current ITER timeline estimates the first commercial hydrogen fusion plants will come online around 2040-2050. Helium fusion, if we decide it's worth the effort to develop, will come later.
Third, you have to move a lot of dirt to get a useful amount of He-3. Estimates are the US alone would need at least 15-20 tons per year for our current electrical generation. At the quoted 0.01 ppm on the moon, that means you need to process 2 billion tons (approx 670 million cubic meters) of regolith every year. In comparison, the giant Three Gorges Dam in China required excavating only 134 million cubic meters of material over a period of 10 years, using thousands of workers and who knows how many tons of heavy equipment.
Additionally, processing the regolith for the helium requires first boiling out all of the gasses by heating the excavated dirt several hundred degrees, then separating the minute fraction of He-3 from all the "waste" gasses. It will be very energy intensive. By my very rough math, every cubic meter of moon you excavate requires on order of 100 kW-hours of heat, so a year's worth of digging would take 47 billion kW-hours. This is about 4% of our current electrical usage, which hints at the scale of the power production facilities that would have to be built on the moon to facilitate this mining...over 5,000 MW of capacity not counting digging and gas segregation energy needs.
The shuttle is docked to the station and will remain there until the end of mission. Undocking and redocking the shuttle is a lengthy procedure. It also has some potential for causing movement of the station, and if they're concerned about exacerbating the damage simply by rotating the joint, then, a less controlled motion due to undocking is most certainly a no-no.
Conducting an EVA around the ISS with the shuttle in motion is literally placing the astronauts (mass: 200 kg) between a rock (shuttle - mass: 100,000 kg) and a hard place (ISS - mass: 270,000 kg). Not to mention, as the undocked pair orbited from one side of the planet to the other, the shuttle would naturally tend to drift from one side of the array to the other, passing through the array unless the pilot constantly adjusted the position with the thrusters. That probably wouldn't fly as a properly planned EVA with months of orchestration, training, and other preparation. It certainty wouldn't fly as a scraped together barnstorming written on the back of a checklist a la Apollo 13 unless there was an imminent threat.
In fact, the threat can hardly be very substantial. The nominal voltage of an entire solar cell string is 160V...a little bit less than the peaks in 120 household VAC. According to NASA, the voltage can get as high as 320V. The astronauts are wearing thick suits, and while electrical protection probably wasn't particularly high on the list of design criteria, they certainly weren't designed to be conductive.
Of course, NASA is being careful to minimize any danger to the astronauts, but I imagine the far greater concern is an electrical short damaging some hardware, especially in the robotic arm. I highly suspect the article has over-emphasized the risk and we're getting hung up on something that's nearly a non-issue.
If I were one of the astronauts, I'd be much more concerned about the plan to get out there in the first place, since this tear would normally be out of reach. It involves the station robotic arm grabbing a part of the shuttle robotic arm like a baseball bat and dangling the astronaut out at the end of this orbital fishing pole.
I'm not sure I understand the point of the criticism. I'm merely highlighting that space flight is tough business and risky business. Perhaps you misunderstood or are reading too much into my post? It's not definitive or exhaustive; Merely illustrative.
As for your specific criticisms:
Apollo 12 actually was one of the less dangerous ones in my list. The resulting data dropout almost prompted an in-flight abort, but some quick-thinking engineers recognized the symptoms and rebooted the computer. The vehicle was performing fine. The STS-1 thermal damage is true, although the threat of structural failure at the location it occurred like on STS-117 is believed to be small. There is an official STS-1 Anomaly Report you can verify the damage from. On STS-51F, one engine shut-down due to bad data. Another quick-thinking engineer preempted a similar anomaly from shutting down a second engine, which would have prevented the Abort-to-orbit they took. One source (unverified) says they wouldn't have had enough thrust to do Trans-oceanic abort at that point and would have ditched in the Atlantic.
FYI, the Soyuz flight where the three cosmonauts died on re-entry was due to a mechanical malfunction of a valve that connected the re-entry capsule to the rest of the Soyuz spacecraft. It was not an error on the crew's part. In fact, one of the crewmen actually had just enough time to unbuckle, crawl beneath the seat and close the valve halfway before passing out. Rather tragic.
The Soviet space program is as full of accidents or more so than our own. It really is tough business:
Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 capsule remained inadvertantly connected to it's service module during re-entry due to a bundle of wires (I assume a pyro failed to fire). It caused the spacecraft to wobble marginally out-of-control until the wires burned through.
After a series of problems in-flight led to a decision to delay the Soyuz 2 launch (probably fortuitiously, since 2 would've had the same issues), the Soyuz 1 main chute didn't deploy and the backup chute tangled. The cosmonaut died when the capsule hit the ground. Interestingly, it launched under political pressure, and Gagarin had tried to get himself scheduled for the flight, believing the politburo would then listen to the engineer's concerns rather than risk losing a national hero.
All four N-1's (the Soviet's planned moon rocket) exploded during launch (unmanned).
A Cosmos rocket exploded on the pad in 1973, killing 9 engineers.
In 1975, Soyuz 18a went out of control 5 minutes into launch, causing the launch escape system to activate. This saved the crew, but barely. They experienced accellerations up to 21 g's, and the capsule landed in the mountains in NW China. One article claims the capsule would've tumbled off a cliff if the chute hadn't snagged on a tree, but I haven't seen that verified.
Soyuz 23 in 1976 crashed through a frozen lake and sank with the crew inside. Remarkably, the crew was saved after considerable effort when a diver attached a cable that allowed a helicopter to lift the capsule out.
A 1980 explosion of an unmanned Vostok rocket on the pad killed 48 people on the ground.
In 1983, Soyuz T-10 caught fire on the pad. Ground control triggered the launch escape system, pulling the two men and their capsule clear. The rocket exploded two seconds later, but the cosmonauts survived.
There was a fire aboard the Mir in 1997. The same year, a Progress cargo ship collided with the station and punctured one of the modules. The crew had to rush to close the hatch to the module.
In 2002, an unmanned Soyuz rocket exploded, killing a Russian soldier.
One thing few people realize is there have been nearly as many close-calls in the US space program. Everyone knows about Apollo 13, but the first shuttle launch had a near burn-through due to tiles that fell off during launch. Another shuttle flight had an engine shutdown due to a short circuit that left it in a low orbit. Apollo 12 was hit by lightning. One of the Gemini flights went out of control and tumbled violently, nearly killing Neil Armstrong and David Scott. The Mercury 4 capsule had a hatch blow prematurely on splash down and sank as Gus Grissom scrambled to escape.
All of these guys, US, Russian, and Chinese alike have a lot of guts.
This comet isn't exactly one to get hyped about. It's not that bright. Magnitude 3 is about as bright as the Little Dipper. You won't see it from the city and you have to know where to look to identify it from better conditions.
Of course, naked eye comets always get a brief mention in the news, even when dim, but this one caught attention because of the dramatic increase in brightness. It's all the more surprising when you consider that this is a short period comet in a relatively circular orbit. It makes it's close approach to the sun frequently, so it doesn't tend to brighten much as it makes the approach, and it has no tail. Even more remarkable, it's currently moving away from the sun, so it would normally be expected to dim, not brighten. Why? Well, it may have had an unusual outgassing event or have impacted another object. Beyond that, I don't have any good guesses.
The brightest comet in decades was McNaught, which made a show last winter. Unfortunately, it was very close to the sun, so it rose barely after sunrise and set barely after sunset and was therefore hard to observe. However, it quickly got brighter than Venus and eventually was so bright (M -6) that a clever observer in clear, dry air could spot it during the day, a scant few degrees from the sun.
It was a little more friendly to observers in the southern hemisphere, and its huge, striated tail was spectacular. Here's a picture.
Kohoutek wasn't all that bright. Probably the best observer's comet last century was Hale-Bopp, which was very photogenic and had a remarkable double tail. I wasn't alive for Halley, which has a lot of historical significance, but it's latest pass wasn't very impressive.
That's a very good point, and highlights that I was a little sloppy in defining terms, but what I was addressing was net risk. A lot of people have a major fear of airline flying and every little incident stokes that fear. Yet, partially due to the relatively small number of airplane trips the average person takes, they are far, far more likely to die in an automobile accident.
The 1 in 50 statistic comes from NTSB data that about 2% of deaths in the US are from traffic accidents. I don't know how many of those are pedestrian deaths, if any, but I suspect it's a small minority.
I may have totally botched the math (crap...college fades fast), but taking into account the point that the probability is exponential, it looks to me like the risk of dying on a commercial airline flight reaches 2% at about 101,000 flights. That's 4 flights per day for 70 years. Even a frequent business traveller taking trips every other week (50 flights per year) for an exhausting 50 year career only has a theoretical risk of 0.05%.
You're right. I didn't state it very well, but that is the point I was trying to make.
The $25 million figure in the article is wrong. I would guess it's either a very outdated cost, or is the price of the Soyuz spacecraft only, not of a complete Soyuz launch. Or perhaps they were reporting the cost of flying to the ISS as a tourist on a Soyuz, which is most definitely not the launch cost.
Last I heard, a Soyuz launch to the ISS costs about $70 million, but Russian launch prices have been skyrocketing lately (no pun intended) due to demand and the improving Russian economy.
There's quite a few ways to calculate the cost of a shuttle launch. The direct costs incidental to launch add up to only around $60 million, but there's a lot of facility and periodic maintenance costs that must be accounted for, and if you include the development costs, a shuttle launch is somewhere around $1.3 billion. The fairest figure I've heard estimates what it would cost to add additional shuttle launches to the manifest and is around the $450 million the parent cited.
But it's still an apples to oranges comparison. The Soyuz is a no-frills people transporter. The Shuttle is a somewhat over-featured cargo/personal transporter that can on its own serve as an orbital laboratory and work platform and even return large cargos to earth.
The difference is well illustrated in this picture. In fact, the space shuttle could carry an entire, fully fueled and crewed Soyuz spacecraft in its payload bay, with quite a bit of room and literally tons of mass to spare, in addition to its regular 7-man crew.
The airliner in that picture on your blog is not violating any recommended practices. The 3-5 miles is typical following distance for airliners on the same path, which allows time for potentially dangerous wake turbulence to dissipate. For planes whose paths do not intersect (in the 3-D environment, not merely 2-D), much, much closer passes can safely occur. The plane you show was at least 1000 feet higher than your own, a standard separation for planes awaiting landing clearance, and not on the same flight path.
Whatever may be in NASA's report (I suspect it's mostly the collisions it refers to are mostly taxiway and tarmac incidents), does not change the fact that the airlines are still the safest way to travel by a large margin. Over the past 20 years, your odds of dying in a commerical airline accident were about 1 in 5 million per flight (multiply by number of flights you take in life for net risk). Your odds of dying on the road are about 1 in 50 (net risk).
I'm sure the DVD has some advantages in showing the personal aspects, but I was probably equally moved by the book, which I'd bet went into more technical detail (I haven't seen the DVD) and is still very personal. Much of it is Dr. Squyres' personal notes from when the mission was developing and unfolding. It was obviously quite the emotional roller coaster for the mission team.
Unfortunately, the saga cuts off two years ago. Those robotic drama queens kept writing the story long after the book ends.
A little known fact I learned from the book is that the subcontractor that built the rock abrasion tool is located in New York, within sight of the World Trade Center. They were in the middle of design on September 11, 2001. The covers on the rock abrasion tools were commemoratively made from pieces of aluminum recovered from the towers and painstakingly pounded and machined flat by the mechanics, then adorned with an American flag.
Black hole evaporation is related to temperature, and temperature is inversely related to mass. A large enough black hole, around the mass of the earth if I remember right, has a temperature below the 2.7 Kelvin average radiation temperature of space, meaning it actually absorbs more than it Hawking radiates and can only gain mass (from the absorbed photons according the e=hf=mc^2).
It seems unlikely that it simply absorbed lots of mass after it formed a black hole. Planets in a stable orbit have no reason to fall into the black hole, although I suppose perturbations from the companion star may upset their orbits sufficiently over time. There would be no spare gas in the immediate vicinity because stars, especially massive ones like we're talking about here, blow away extra gas and dust as they heat up and their stellar wind grows in intensity. The gas would have to fall in from quite a distance, and while I am not an expert, I suspect the timescales required for that to occur are far longer than the short life of a 70 solar-mass star like the one orbiting this black hole, barring some very unlikely conditions.
My personal thought was perhaps this is really a pair of orbiting black holes, but another poster pointed out that ternary systems are unlikely to impossible with massive stars, and further reading on the system indicates that the companion star is regularly eclipsed by the black hole. If there were a second black hole, the eclipse pattern should be distinct enough to tell.
Any stellar black hole basically has to be a Kerr black hole. If this has any effect on calculating the mass, which I wouldn't think it could, accounting for that would be obvious.
So you spent 3/7ths of you time in pubs for 20 years and 0% of your time in pubs for 18 years. Piece of cake:
(3/7 * 20 + 0 * 18) / (18+20) = 0.226
I predict that you are not in a pub. It's not a bad prediction. Even without accounting for the change in your pattern that occurred when you reached 18, I'd still be right more than I was wrong on any random selected day.
Actually, you revealed one other important fact that makes it even clearer:
You went only on weekends, so you spent 0% of your weekdays in a pub for 18 years and 0% of your weekdays in a pub for 20 years. Today is Wednesday (you posted on Tuesday):
(0* 20 + 0 * 18) / (18+20) = 0
So I'm pretty darn confident you're not in a pub.
I could go a step further and use the number of days as a sample size to establish a confidence interval, but that's just obsessive. Of course, you could always make a conscious decision to prove me wrong, something the sun can't do. That's a rather important dependent variable.
I didn't view the movie, but from the description provided by our resident EU theorist, it seems to be something easily explained by Cartesian geometry and oft-encountered in orbital mechanics.
As the radius of the plume increases, yet its speed remains the same, its angular velocity decreases, so it fall behinds objects below it moving the same speed along a concentric path. Thank goodness for this or we wouldn't have geosynchronous satellites as we know them and Copernicus might never have figured out heliocentrism. Also, I'm unsure how much of the movement is due to the rotation of Enceladeus and how much is due to the motion of Cassini, which would change the perspective of the plume. The EU proponents can easily determine that last part (something more interesting than Cassini moving relative to Enceladeus is happening) by getting the timestamps and orbital data from NASA and crunching some numbers, but that might be considered a testable prediction.
Additionally, the GP's argument is not any more supportive of the electric universe theory than it is of the Enceladians with Super Soakers Theory. He doesn't even give a useful theoretical description of why EU better explains the motion of the jets than conventional theories, much less refer to any work done to determine if it is likely or even possible. NASA has at least done calculations to determine what it would take to create the jets under their proposed mechanism.
Thank you professor obvious. Plasmas are by definition electrical. For the record, modelling plasmas electrically is only valid if they have a net charge relative to surrounding objects on large scales. There is no trivial mechanism for that to occur, and without it the net force is zero. In that regards it actually turns out to be convenient for the universe that gravity is only attractive.
A lie for a lie leaves the world ignorant and untrusting.
Al Gore twisted the truth to build up his political stature. Although we normally would emphatically argue that moral ends must not be used to justify immoral means, we all recognize that polar bears are at stake here; Scientific accuracy be d***ed! Furthermore, he helped prevent his fellow Tennesseans from using too much energy by carefully disposing of almost $20,000 worth of electricity from just one of his houses alone, and by using private jets to incinerate thousands of barrels of those evil fossil fuels that the common man might have, against his charitable admonishments, used for such things as driving to work and heating their homes. Then he went the extra mile by paying money to companies he owns to plant trees in his name, thereby reducing our dependency on foreign...err, um...tree planters?
And that impressive resume doesn't even touch on his son's efforts to raise public awareness of drug issues.
Truly this man is an example for all us. Let us revere him along with the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr, the Physicians Without Borders, and the many actually worthy Nobel Peace Prize recipients!
Bitter? Who, me? Nah...I love a good story about hypocrisy. However, I'd guess if you look around hard enough, you could find five, or maybe even six billion people around the world who live out Al Gore's message better than he does.
1.) The method of generation is only tangentially relevant. Solar thermal and solar-voltaic generation both only achieve marginal economic competency in good locations on the surface. Existing solar-thermal devices are actually rather heavy due to the high temperatures and , so I'm skeptical that they could yield any more than minor weight savings in this plan.
2.) It's actually about 3.5 times as much (24/7/365 average flux in good areas on earth is about 350 W/m^2). I was aware of this when I asked the original question.
3.) Link? I am aware of no experiments done ever, much less in the 60's with transmitting power from orbit to the ground. I do see that some experiments have shown 90% efficiency of a microwave receiver (not photo-electric based, as I incorrectly assumed before), but that still leaves the efficiency of beam emission and atmospheric transmission.
The paper claims they are not a navigational hazard, but does little to back it up. The equation they show for calculating peak intensity is bunk and a mark against their credibility. It yields a result 700,000 W/m when the units should be W/m^2 (solar insolation ~ 1000 W/m^2). Quote:
Again, not very convincing in its specificity, and rather alarming when you consider those instances we have long term exposure data for at 2.45 GHz and intensities where you can feel heat. It's a lot more than a Wifi antenna.
This, of course, is onto a receiving antenna 10 km in diameter for 5 GW of power delivered to the grid. Supplying the US electricity needs would require, in addition to the clearly expensive orbital assets, 6500 sq km of antenna...about 4 times what ground based solar would require (at 250 W/m^2, and if I thought that were a singular solution either, which I don't). No discussion of what the antennae would contribute to the cost.
No gripe with using a transmission grid, except it's another layer of cost that local solar users don't contend with. Again, local use of solar is marginally cost effective. Transmission represents as much as half the consumer cost depending on the region.
There is very little specific discussion of economics in the paper, other than to talk about a 10 MW prototype plant costing ~$10 billion. I'm not going to hold the prototype costs up as a case against it, but my ultimate argument is that due to the unique costs of operating in space, our current and foreseeable technology does not hold the promise to make that competitive with the various ground-based generation methods. To launch a 5000 tonne, 5 GW station like they suggest would take 80+ launches from payload-maxed Ares V's costing around $40 billion. Even if Elon Musk can cut those costs in half for us, that's still several times what an equivalent capacity in nuclear plants would cost, and that's without any material, design, or labor costs.
The point about how much is wasted is relevant to the cost. They're using the same technology as on earth (either photovoltaic or solar thermal) in small installations, where the price is already marginal, but adding in very non-trivial costs for launch and transmission in exchange for a higher capacity factor. Have you seen what the scale of the rectenna that would need to be built? A 5 GW plant needs a 10 km diameter receiver! Even accounting for a 0.25 capacity factor (solar performance in southern California), that much land area would generate almost 20 GW of electricity with solar cells.
After I asked the question I skimmed the paper. It was hardly encouraging from an economic standpoint. They were looking at tens of billions of dollars just to launch the generating portion of the plant (not including transmitter or receiver or even design and material costs), assuming they can max out their launch vehicles for mass. This is also with basically no discussion of how to assemble a structure 50 times as massive as the ISS in a geosynchronous orbit with much of the structure having almost no rigidity useful in manipulating it on a large scale.
The one concern I did see somewhat addressed in this discussion and the paper was the efficiency of power beaming. I assumed they were talking about similar concepts that the space elevator crowd was considering: lasers and high efficiency solar cells. The efficiency of lasers is abysmal, and masers even worse. Space elevator analysis is currently looking at system efficiencies around 1%. The paper claims efficiencies (using magnetrons?) of 90%. However, I'm pretty skeptical of that number since there were no details about the conditions that was measured under or at what point in the system.
Again, I'd love to see a technology that would show undeniable fruit from the past 50 years of space exploration and developement and create an infrastructure that could serve as a springboard to further exploration. The scope of project they're talking about here would certainly do that, but I remain unconvinced it is anywhere near economically feasible in the foreseeable future.
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit, generate your electricity, then beam it to the surface at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, and then receive the beamed power at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, meanwhile creating the navigational hazards of the power beams and still requiring distribution from receiving stations rather than simply generating it via panels at the point of use?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for finding ways to utilize space, but I don't see how this is even remotely economical, especially at our current technology levels.
Convince me.
While I agree with the first part of your post about the value of long-term observation, the quoted part of the comment is much easier said than done, especially for such a distant target as Pluto. New Horizons will fly by Pluto at about 13.8 km/s. Escape velocity from the surface of Pluto is only 1.2 km/s, meaning it would have to decellerate at least 12.6 km/s. This compares to the 16.2 km/s of delta-v achieved by the entire 1.2 million pound, 190 foot tall Atlas rocket that launched it originally. Obviously you don't have to get there so fast, but it already is a 9 year flight.
As is, however, New Horizons will provide data and images hundreds of times more detailed than what we currently have, even though it will only be obtained over a short couple of weeks. See the wikipedia page on Pluto to get an idea how little we can see from earth. The best pictures are about as good as a Windows desktop icon. In comparison, New Horizons will map almost the entire body at 1.6 km/px and parts of it as detailed as 50 m/px
Assuming I converted the scales right, the above links to Google Mars show approximately the equivalent resolution from Mars images. Assuming everything works, we'll be seeing that from Pluto in 8 years.
Of course, you were talking about Io, but that wasn't New Horizon's destination. It's much easier (although not trivial) to place a probe in orbit around Jupiter, which NASA did with Galileo. Jupiter and Saturn are the only outer planets that have had orbiters, and both of those were very expensive missions.
There are currently orbiters circling Mars (Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and ESA Mars Express), Venus (ESA Venus Express), and the moon (JAXA SELENE), plus one on the way to Mercury (Messenger), and one on the way to the asteroid Vesta (Dawn).
That's a somewhat hazy interpretation of agreement.
It's true that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam agree firmly on the point of "No god but God," but the idendity of God in Christian (and to a lesser degree Jewish) theology versus Islamic theology stretches the appropriateness of equating Them. The understanding of Who God is and His relationship to mankind are markedly different, most notably through the the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus, and the role of free will.
Granted, there are plenty of reasons related to interfaith relations to refer to God from a Christian and Muslim viewpoint collectively, but the differences are fairly significant.
The prime candidates being referenced in the study are only about 60 light years away (from space.com), and only between 10 and 200 million years old. In comparison, our sun is around 4.5 billion years old, so for an alien civillization to see our solar system in a similar stage of evolution, they'd be looking from about 75 million times as far away. Keep in mind we can't even see these nearby proto-planets ourselves...just evidence in the thickness of the star's accretion discs.
If they can see that far, they'd have already seen so much of this happening that our solar system wouldn't stand out as remotely interesting. And of course, they'd be seeing it 4.5 billion years before intelligent life arose, so they wouldn't get any thrill from spotting an extra-galactic neighbor, either.
The utilities don't control the demand for energy, they control the supply. NRG is a producer here. The best they can do is limit how much electricity they produce and tell people not to use any more than that. If the people want to use more and NRG won't produce it, someone else will.
So while you're absolutely right that reducing usage is typically much more cost effective than increasing production capacity, that is a method that inherently must be exercised by the consumers, not the producers.
This is a common mistake people make in the midst of their enthusiasm to implicate the power companies in cruelly destroying the environment while sucking their pocketbooks dry.
Of course, the other important point to be made is that you can only be so efficient before you either have to make non-trivial cuts in activity or build more capacity.
Regarding the cost of wind versus nuclear power (coincidentally, I was just reading NREL's annual report on wind energy the other day): While wind costs about $1.50/Watt (your number was right for 2005) to install, it has a much lower capacity factor; how much it generates on average divided by how much it could generate if it were possible to run at rated load 100% of the time.
The best wind farms have capacity factors around 0.35. US Nuclear plants have a capacity factor of 0.87 on average (1999 number...and remember this is from a previous generation of designs). So adjusting for the capacity factor in capital costs, that works out to be $4.30/Watt for wind and $2.50/Watt for the GE ABWR. Of course, wind has a bonus of extremely low operating costs, but it can not be adjusted to demand, which is one of the main factors that relegates it to a minor role in the US power portfolio. It doesn't matter how many windmills you have if the weather is calm.
I expect anyone with concerns about nuclear power will sensibly mention decommissioning costs. These are now factored into the project at the beginning, and the NRC requires utilities to report their decommissioning fund status. Typically it's equivalent to roughly $0.50/W of capacity (source). Also, all of the GE PBWR's that have been built have been on-budget and on-time, which was one of the reasons this design was chosen, so I wouldn't expect huge unplanned costs to start appearing.
Additionally, a 5 meter sea rise is at the silly extreme end of predictions. The IPCC's estimate (from your link) is half a meter for the century. Regardless, while this could cause operability concerns, I could hardly imagine it causing any added danger of radioactive release, and the sea level rise would be observable over a period of decades.
A last point I'd like to present is that roughly half of the US nuclear power plants, representing 10% of our nation's power production and 10 times our entire installed wind capacity, are scheduled to reach the end of their operating licenses over the next few years. They are going to need to be replaced somehow or another, in addition to meeting the growing demand. Currently most utilities are planning on doing this with coal.
Can anyone clarify the statement about the genes. Are they actually changing (ie, a mutation) or are they simply being selectively expressed or suppressed in response to the conditions?
Surely the article is being sloppy with its wording, yes?
YES!
Actually I missed seeing it, but I heard about it on the radio in the morning and was pretty disappointed. Sounds like a pretty good bet you saw it though.
After reading the iPod bit, I had to doublecheck to make sure the submission wasn't from you-know-how, but then I realized it both made too much sense and contained too little gobbledygook to be from him.
However, now I'm going to be anxiously watching the firehose for an article announcing Apple's new iDecay line of atomic clocks. These will be far better than the Air Force's because they'll have built in battery packs instead of relying on solar power, and offer touch sensitive screens which will redefine the paradigm of atomic clock interfaces.