that is what we are trying to do, and usually without the pedophile wanting to change.
Well, that's half the problem right there then. Somebody who does not want to change, won't. This counts doubly if the person in question doesn't see the need, morally, practically or otherwise.
The other half of the problem as you rightly said is that changing sexual orientation doesn't really work. However, I'm not convinced that paedophiles are an "orientation". And, assuming for a moment that they are, it doesn't automatically follow that their orientation is hardwired.
We tend to think of sexuality in humans as being a very basic, hardwired brain function, but that's largely because it's had several billion years of evolutionary pressure to make it that way. Since child molestation is not an evolutionarily selective trait, I'm not convinced it has to operate on the same level.
Of course, homosexuality isn't evolutionarily selective either, but there's some reason to think of that as being crossed wiring; ie men getting the attraction criteria normal to women and vice versa. So in that instance, the wiring is still working as intended, it's just the reverse of the usual intent. I can't see how that same sort of situation would arise when children are involved, since human beings are pretty strongly wired not to find the very young attractive (evolution again - no reason to be attracted to someone too young to breed).
Your idea flies in the face of logic. By saying that pedophilia is caused by being violated as a child, then what about the vast number of people who were violated as a child that do not become offenders?
I can't even begin to explain how illogical this argument is. It's not even wrong. So instead I'm going to paraphrase it.
Your idea flies in the face of logic. By saying that lung cancer is caused by smoking, then what about the vast number of people who smoked all their lives, that do not develop cancer?
Of course, in this instance, lung cancer can be developed through means other than smoking, just as I strongly suspect that paedophilia can come about without having been molested. But there is a clear correlative relationship, and a likely causative mechanism, in both cases.
There is a well documented cycle in which someone who has been abused (not necessarily sexually, mind) becomes an abuser. You see the same thing in domestic violence cases. Person A is fucked up, takes it out on person B, possibly causing them to become just as fucked up, taking it out on person C, lather, rinse repeat. Cycle continues until an outside force acts upon it. Hell, sometimes I think that's half the strife in human history right there.
Note that in the above example, it is not certain that person B will become as fucked up as person A. Nor is it certain they will go on to share their misery with person C. Choice, chance and circumstance must be taken into account. Hence why the abused do not always become the abusers. It's merely possible, not certain, maybe not even all that likely in any one case.
Some idiot (we've got plenty here tonight) is going to chime in saying that this somehow excuses the guilty party, and that therefor I'm absolving them of responsibility. I'm not. Understanding the how and why of human behaviour does not equate to condoning it in my books. I would however argue that while we might not be able to cure paedophilia, we can probably prevent it. Break the cycle, help the victims recover and prevent the guilty from re-offending, and there will be fewer new paedophiles.
...certain video games (MMORPG's) thrive on addiction and are many times more addictive than others.
I keep seeing this "MMOs are made to be addictive" argument pop up. I don't think people have generally thought it through well enough to see the holes in it. I'll grant you that they are addictive, but not because the designers thought that was the best way to make money.
We'll use WoW as are baseline MMO, since it currently tops the market, at least in the english speaking world. Blizzard gets far less money from box sales, so we'll ignore those in our equation and focus on subscriptions.
Players pay a variable, but capped, rate (baseline is $15/month, less if you commit for a longer span) to access the game servers. So the gross profit per subscriber is fixed at about $180/year, or less. However, the net cost per subscriber is fluid. Bandwidth costs money, server centres cost money, support staff cost money. The more hours a player logs in, the more of these resources will be spent upon them, and the less of that $180 winds up as net profit.
A player who plays less earns Blizzard more than an addict, since they're paying the same monthly fee as someone online 24/7, yet use less resources. Based on that, what possible reason would they have to addict people? It doesn't make any financial sense. And what, if anything, motivates a corporation more than money?
Addicts cost them money. Money spent keeping the servers up during peak loads. Money spent paying for bandwidth. Money spent designing new content, as they grow tired of the old and become malcontent. Money they don't get back, because the addict is paying the same flat rate as everyone else. Hell, if cigarette companies sold smokes on a subscription basis, do you think for a second they'd up the nicotine content?
Before somebody chimes in with the very obvious "addicts will stay subscribed longer", let me point out the flaws in that argument. Addicts can and do quit, often after burning out altogether. You can only abuse something for so long before if fucks up the rest of your life, enough for you to seek help, or for your loved ones to force help upon you.
If the players don't quit, it's damn easy for them to move on instead - WoW inherited a bunch of EQ addicts when it came out, and some of them have since moved on to WAR or LotrOL or some such. They are, after all, MMO addicts, not addicts of that particular game.
The ideal cash cow that Blizzard, or anybody else in the business, wants is a non-addicted, semi-serious gamer. Not a fully casual one, since they don't tend to stay on long; someone into the game enough to keep playing, but not into it so much that they get hooked.
And lo and behold, what features have they added? Fluff content (festivals and the like) that keeps the casual crowd amused. Competition that keeps the PvPers at each other's throats. A rest system that rewards players for spending time away from the game, or leveling alts. Daily quests to appeal to people who only log into the game seven times a week.
These are not features that appeal to, or help hook, MMO addicts, and yet despite this (or rather, because of this), the game outstrips all of it's similarly themed competitors.
It seems to me that the only ways to make money off of MMO addiction are to charge by the hour, or open a clinic to "cure" the addicts.
However often people try and persuade the greater bulk of humanity of our own ignorance, it just doesn't stick. We don't deal with uncertainty that well. On some level, people would much rather be sure of themselves, and wrong, than unsure, but right. We'd rather cement our preconceptions as "truth", no matter how flimsy they may be.
Even if what the guy quoted from TFA is saying is blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, it nonetheless needs to be said, said simply, and repeated.
Slightly more on-topic; I do not personally doubt that games can and do addict people, but I've seen enough of addicts to know that gaming addiction is not a serious problem, as some seem to think.
We refer to addiction as if it were something a small minority suffer. Our attitudes toward that minority range from viewing them as degenerates, to viewing them as victims, but few if any people see them as normal. The reality is that addiction is far more widespread than that, and the sufferers far less remarkable.
Want a good example? I'll bet good money that there are innumerable coffee drinkers here on/. Some of us probably drink the equivalent of four or more cups a day. If this describes you, the try and see how long you can go cold turkey, no caffeine at all (and that includes chocolate and soft drinks). You might or might not last, but you will suffer withdrawal in fairly short order.
Now, if you're the sort who views addicts as abnormal, you'll likely go into denial about this. You either won't try quitting in the first place (the "I know I can quit any time I want, so I don't need to prove it to myself by actually trying" method), or you'll try and write off the caffeine withdrawal symptoms as something else entirely. You aren't craving, you're just having a bad day, because you never really woke up without your morning cup. That sort of thing.
Truth is, human beings addict rather easily. Nicotine, opiates and amphetamines are just the extreme examples; we get hooked on just about anything mood altering. That includes pleasurable activities that alter moods purely through neurological feedback.
So are there gaming addicts? Yes. It's a strictly psychological addiction rather than the mix of physiological and psychological addictions that accompany alcohol or caffeine or what have you, so it's a lot less serious from a health perspective, but it's still real. Thing is it's not special. Any human activity that is remotely pleasurable has the same risk, and statistically is going to have addicts. Does this mean we should reject those activities entirely? No, thanks. Life as a puritan is just too dull to be called living.
Idiots from the moral majority pipe up "but gaming addicts spend all their money/lose their jobs/neglect their kids". Well, so do addicts of any different stripe. And in some cases there are more tangible risks associated with being hooked psychologically - sex addicts run high risks for STDs, gambling addicts can find themselves in debt to people you really don't want to owe money too, food addicts have all the risks of obesity (and if they go the bulimic route, even more serious health problems arise). Enact ridiculous measures to try and halt one addiction, and they'll find something else to abuse. It's not about the substance or activity being abused, it's about what the abuser does about it.
Psychological addicts have the simple (if not always easy) option of seeking help and quitting, something that the more serious forms of addiction often inhibit. Heroin or alcohol withdrawal can kill you; gaming withdrawal makes you grumpy. Given the membership numbers in groups like AA and NA, it's safe to say that chemical addiction can be beat in spite of this.
There was work done on "clean" nuclear weapons, from the earliest beginnings, and also recently under the Bush administration, especially in context of "tactical nukes".
It also created some diplomatic tension, as it was internationally seen as further proliferation as it would lower the inhibition threshold to actually use a nuclear weapon.
Hmm, didn't know about that Bush administration stuff. Sounds like something they'd do though.
However, my point as to why we built dirty bombs and your point about proliferation, are the same point.
To the mindset of the engineers making these 3-stage "dirty" bombs, the use of one bomb would mean the use of all bombs, and the resultant nuclear holocaust would be the end of civilization, possibly the end of our species.
See there? That's a no-first-use attitude right there on the part of the weapon designers. You and I are saying basically the same thing about why the 3-stage bombs were made, we're just going at the subject from different angles.
And what happened to the other 8 kilos of Plutonium necessary to reach critical mass?
That's ten kilos of plutonium to make a bare sphere go critical. You're well informed, but using the figures for the minimum critical mass.
I realize that this next bit comes from Wikipedia, whom I generally wouldn't cite in situations like this. However, it's a subject I know a bit more than most about, so I'll vouch that in this instance Wiki has it right:
This is applied in implosion-type nuclear weapons, where a spherical mass of fissile material that is substantially less than a critical mass, is made supercritical by very rapidly increasing Ï (and thus Σ as well), see below. Indeed, sophisticated nuclear weapons programs can make a functional device from less material than more primitive weapons programs require.
Plain english version for those readers just tuning in: You don't need to amass very much fissile material to make a bomb, provided you get everything else right. And the amount of fissile material used is the most important factor in determining fallout from a pure fission device.
Now, on to the next point. See the opening paragraph of my previous post?
I'll preface this by stating that I think the stuff in TFA is idiotic. Partly from a radiation and proliferation standpoint, partly because we already have perfectly good used for old bombs (for one thing, turning the fissile material into reactor fuel). But more than those reasons, because the methods proposed for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons all strike me as being colossal overkill - like using thermite to perform household repairs.
I actually agree with you that using nukes for civil engineering is a bad idea. So I'd agree that no bomb is better than a "clean" bomb. My point is more that you can actually make that clean bomb work, for some values of the word "clean".
As long as the only sources of fallout are nuclear daughter products from the initial fissile core, and the neutron activated matter from the blast site, the total fallout will remain tolerably low. I wouldn't want to visit the blast site immediately, but the problem of poisoning people downwind is largely averted.
And before someone else weights in here with "any fallout is too much", I'd like to candidly point out that we already pump plenty of radioactive heavy metal into the air by burning coal, are already exposed to radon seeping from the ground in our own homes, and get zapped by a measurably dangerous amount of ionizing radiation every time we go to the dentist to get x-rayed, or the beach to get a tan. We're tougher than most people think where radiation is concerned. So, for that matter, is the environment - see the returning wildlife around Chernobyl for proof of this
I'll preface this by stating that I think the stuff in TFA is idiotic. Partly from a radiation and proliferation standpoint, partly because we already have perfectly good used for old bombs (for one thing, turning the fissile material into reactor fuel). But more than those reasons, because the methods proposed for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons all strike me as being colossal overkill - like using thermite to perform household repairs.
That being said, your specific objection - that you don't see how to make a nuclear weapon with little fallout - is based on your knowledge of modern military nukes. They don't have to be built that way.
The amount of fissile material needed to make a bomb is small. We're talking on the order of a kilo or two of plutonium here. Older designs needed more than that primarily because we hadn't mastered miniaturization of the bomb components. With a decent neutron reflector, high grade of fissile fuel, implosive type detonation system and other improvements, the actual amount of radioactive crud in the system to begin with is small.
Moreover, the more efficient you make the bomb, the less fissile material is left over after you detonate it. This is the stuff that your burning to generate the initial blast after all; you don't want leftovers.
There are still radioactive daughter products, but in relative terms, those matter less. And a general rule of thumb is that the more radioactive something is, the shorter its half life is going to be - the nastiest stuff decays first. Meaning that the only really serious byproducts we need to worry about are the bioactive ones like Strontium 90 - the ones where radiation is not the sole metric of organic harm.
So, the fission core need not produce that much fallout. The bulk of the explosive energy can come from fusion, which does not produce radioactive byproducts, though it can render the matter near ground zero radioactive by way of neutron bombardment. Again, this is less serious than you might think - 2 stage hydrogen bombs produce a fraction of the amount of fallout per blast energy than fission only or 3 stage bombs.
In a modern nuclear weapon however, the bomb does not rely solely upon fusion to amplify the initial blast. The tamper of a typical thermonuclear warhead is made of depleted uranium, which fissions merrily when bombarded by the neutron radiation given off by the fusion stage.
Because the tamper is essentially the casing that holds the rest of the bomb together, it masses quite a bit more than either the lithium-deuterium mixture used for the fusion stage or the weapons-grade uranium or plutonium used for the primary stage. The amount of radioactive crud leftover from the vapourized and fissioned tamper is huge. This, and not the rest of the bomb, is where the terrible spectre of radioactive fallout comes from in a modern nuke.
Subtract this, make the tamper out of iron or lead or some such, and the bomb becomes far cleaner than you'd expect. Two kilos of spent plutonium and some neutron irradiated dirt is far less to worry about.
(You might wonder why we don't build them this way to begin with. Truth is, we built the nuclear arsenal of the cold war with the implicit assumption that we would not use it, save in the more dire circumstances. To the mindset of the engineers making these 3-stage "dirty" bombs, the use of one bomb would mean the use of all bombs, and the resultant nuclear holocaust would be the end of civilization, possibly the end of our species. Against that, a little more fallout hardly seemed to matter. For a bomb we intent to use, and use peacefully, fallout is a much more important consideration.)
Or maybe moving at close to the speed of light relative to the Earth's surface?
Hell, both put together, and you've got a delicious, hyper-kinetic anti-Twinkie with enough potential energy to punch a hole in the crust.
Plus, we don't have to assume it's snack sized; a Twinkie large enough to feed a small family for a few years is still a Twinkie. (This assumes that the small family in question is likewise made of antimatter of course.) I'm pretty sure Twinkieness is a question of composition and shape, not mass. It only needs to be small enough not to change shape into something untwinkie by way of self-gravitation.
Assuming a three ton rest mass Twinkie comprised of antiparticles moving at 0.9 c, and we get exactly the sort of simulated sugary Twinkopalypse the GP warned us about.
If any religion could do that in a modern progressive democratic state, the fundies in the States would have done it already. And in fact, in the case of the stuff about abortion, gays and women you mentioned, the religious right have already tried.
The reason they failed is that countries that have high standards of living, high literacy rates, free elections and judicial oversight of the government don't allow that shit.
Find me an example of such a country that does the stuff you mentioned. Go on, just one. Iran? Syria? Afghanistan? Come on, those are backwaters. Yeah, some of them may have wealth (oil wealth in the hands of the few for the most part), but that isn't a good barometer for civil liberty.
None of them have free elections, none of them have governments that are answerable to the courts. Nor have they ever in most cases, and in fact, the times in the past where they've been freer than in the present, were also times when the religious loonies were sidelined by the moderates (Iran is a good example of this).
It wouldn't matter if every single religious nutjob in the States changed from Christian to Muslim. They'd be the same assholes they are now, and they'd fail just as miserably to bring about the theocracy your post details. It's not the faith that matters, it's the environment in which it's practised.
There are a couple reasons I wouldn't expect anything large. The more obvious reason is that, if there were large native lifeforms (plant, animal or what have you), they'd be the first to die off. Generally, the bigger you are, and the higher up the food chain, the harder an ecological catastrophe hits you.
Since Mars hasn't be suitable to most forms of life for ages, and since it seems likely it became gradually less and less habitable as time wore on, it stands to reason that larger hypothetical Martians would be long gone. Small, survivable life forms would stick around a lot longer, possibly even to the present day. The odds of finding something frozen in the (geologically) recent past are a good deal better than the odds of finding anything from a couple hundred million years ago.
The less obvious reason is that I doubt there ever were large Martian lifeforms. There's a world of difference (pardon the pun) between being totally ecologically sterile and being Earth-like, and while I'd wager that Mars probably had something alive sometime in it's history, I doubt it ever got much past bacteria, and maybe simple plants. Too cold for one thing, and too dry. I've seen a couple different theories about how Mars was in the past, but nothing I've read suggests abundant heat, or water, or a thick atmosphere.
Granted I don't like to assume that the standards for life on Earth are the same as the standards for life elsewhere, but since we don't have any other basis for comparison, that assumption will have to stand. Plus, if living things adapted easily to extreme cold and scarcity of liquid water, you'd expect the poles here to be host to a larger variety of life. A world only slightly more hospitable than Antarctica doesn't seem like the best place to find big fauna.
What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.
Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.
Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.
Also depends on the person's habits. Some gamers snack at their machines, some don't. Some people who do snack will eat right, some won't. I'll guarantee that that alone will make a huge difference.
The likeliest outcomes are going to be somewhere between scrawny and obese. A sedentary lifestyle, gaming motivated or otherwise, isn't going to do good things for muscle tone and endurance, but it won't affect weight the same way for everyone.
I really, really hope you aren't claiming that 33,261 number based on number of posts on the main page. That would be somewhat akin to me referring to the 24,800,000+ people on slashdot, based on the number of posts to date.
First up, WOWdetox is open for anyone to post on, so you can bet on trolls and spam bots, plus people simply being contrary. Hell, you can bet on those regardless. Even if they've got strict moderation, the post count will probably go up for each poster, regardless of whether their comment gets deleted.
And I don't see any limit on posts per person, so it's not unreasonable to assume that there are many cases of single persons posting multiple times. Possibly many, many times, depending on their nature. Frankly, I am not inclined to wade through thirty odd thousand backlogged comments to try and take a stab at how many times per poster is average, but I'm going to bet it's a lot more than one.
Also, totally ignoring the question of how many people WOWDT actually has, you do realize that you've just stumbled into Argumentum ad populum fallacy territory, right? "Many people say this, so it must be true"?
This "addiction" subject is really fascinating. Aren't we all addicted to food? If you take food away from me, wouldn't I go nuts too? What about money, women, and cattles? What about life?
Actually, it is possible to be pathologically addicted to sex, food or money. Well, the money one's debatable, but there's some pretty compelling evidence for it. For the food one, you don't have to look that far - you've probably seen such people if you frequent fast food restaurants, even if they didn't stand out from the rest of the clientele. Eating disorders can run either way after all - vast overeating, or self-starvation, and the overeating behavior is classic addict.
The tricky part is that everyone needs to eat. Everyone in modern society needs at least some money to get by. (Almost) everyone needs to screw. That isn't addiction, that's biology, social necessity and plain old hormones.
When you stop eating to live, and start living to eat, then you start calling it addiction.
Most of the cases I've run into of "death by gaming" boil down to extreme lack of self care. Which is often present in addicts - ie, your typical malnourished junkie - but not in and of itself a sign of addiction. To draw an analogy, it's like how drinking and driving can kill you, but doesn't always indicate alcoholism (or even heavy habitual drinking - there are cases of DUI accidents occurring simply because the individual lacked the experience to judge their own level of intoxication). OTOH, it would be irresponsible to claim a lack of correlation between drunk driving and alcohol dependency - the correlation is there, but you can't assume one equals the other without examining each case in detail first.
A better rule of thumb for determining whether somebody is addicted to something is to ask them if they still enjoy it. Most people don't realize that your average addict has long since passed the stage where they want to quit, but are no longer able to. Your average sex addict doesn't enjoy boinking, your average alcoholic doesn't want to drink anymore, and your average smoker would love to quit (and probably has tried to at least once). This is one of the reasons why intoxicating substance use has a high rate of addiction - the brain chemistry gets literally rewired, to the point where stopping is traumatic. People have died from withdrawal, while others have developed psychosis, suffered from hallucinations, attempted suicide, and generally been miserable as hell.
"Addiction" gets applied far to frequently to abuse or overuse of any kind. Human stupidity and lack of common sense must be given their due, as must simple hedonism and self destructiveness. Real addiction is pathological. It might very well be purely psychological, with no chemical basis (or at least no external chemical basis), but on some level it's become a disease upon the affected person, and often times they'll be the first to admit it. Take the bottle away from a problem drinker, and the problem goes away; take the bottle away from an alcoholic and all hell breaks loose.
So, to get back on topic, I would define a gaming addict as a gamer who continues to play to great excess, despite a desire to quit. Somebody for whom turning it off, taking a break or unplugging is traumatic enough to make them jump right back in.
Works for me. Now go invent a matter-energy converter and we'll be set:-)
(I think I did mention that direct conversion of matter into energy solves all the Venusian problems nicely. Of course, it solves just about any problem centered around energy. Funny that.)
In terms of efficiency, you're leaving the mass of the thrusters behind with the station. It would only cost the same in terms of fuel spent to achieve launch, which is not the only issue. The package being launched could rely totally on inertia if it came to that.
Moreover, depending on what sort of technology you had, you might consider using something like ion engines for the spin control thrusters, which in turn means you'll be firing off less reaction mass at a higher speed.
I was thinking this approach would work best if the engines in question operated constantly, instead of the short burns associated with modern chemical rockets and cold-gas thrusters. The departing craft gets a 1G kick out the door, which represents the force of many spin thrusters over a long time period.
As for the need to decelerate at the station, the approach makes far, far more sense in the context of refueling and resupply. Your hypothetical craft arrives running on fumes, refuels, replaces its air supply, then moves down to the outer edge to launch again. As a way station between the Earth's surface, and the rest of the solar system, this arrangement is quite plausible.
You are correct. I was trying to convey that, but upon rereading what I wrote, I realize I explained myself rather badly. I should have said that the Coriolis force is less of an issue if the 1G section is further out from the center axis.
Regardless, wider station = gentler Coriolis force, assuming the spin is intended to produce the same G-force at the outer edge of the station.
Time it right, and you've just achieved an easy launch. Your departing craft/junk/whatever gets a quick boost away from the station. In particular, this could be useful if you're using the station as a transport hub, which I believe I mentioned as an obvious reason to build them - you dock at the center axis, and leave by moving "down" to the outer hull and dropping free into space.
You'd need to keep adding to the station's angular momentum to make up the difference, but that's no biggie. Compared to actually building an orbital habitat, putting thrusters on it to maintain position and spin is a minor detail.
You are absolutely correct however, in that access to zero-G for manufacturing and the like would need to be at the center hub.
Something in the ballpark of 10^29 Joules. And that's just for the rotational energy, not for any heating effects.
Hmmm, do you have that figure in VW bugs or libraries of congress?:-P
I looked it up too BTW. Far as I could tell, that's about a hundred trillion times the power of your garden variety 1MT nuke. So all we really need is a few trillion very, very large bombs, and perhaps something like a pair of Orion drives sticking out from opposite sides of the equator facing west, and we're set:-)
Wouldn't need to rely 100% on the wind either. Propulsion systems for a floating city are a must anyways, so you may as well use them to adjust your position.
Might make the most sense to put the city in perpetual daylight. The power spent on station-keeping would be offset by the more abundant solar energy. Outrunning the sunset would be easy when it creeps along the surface so slowly, even if the winds didn't decide to cooperate.
For the biological approach to work, you'd need to add a lot of water to the mix. Venus is pretty damn dry.
Hydrogen is a common element elsewhere in the solar system, and could be combined with local oxygen. Think a few billion boatloads of Jovian atmosphere airlifted (pardon the pun) to Venus. But that involves moving a massive amount of matter to Venus, comparable to the task of moving massive amounts of matter away. The task is monumental regardless.
Also, since the local oxygen is already tied up as CO2, you'd liberate huge quantities of carbon by synthesizing the water. I'm kinda picturing a planet-wide ocean, smothered in soot. Or hydrocarbons, if we're willing to go the extra mile with the hydrogen importing. An improvement, to be sure, over what it's like now, but no more habitable to us personally.
Re:"LV-426 Shake-and-bake" Terraforming...
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Floating Cities On Venus
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, I wouldn't list Venusian chemistry as the primary barrier to terraforming. Yeah, there's acid and CO2 out the ying-yang, but there are other, bigger problems.
The atmosphere is incredibly dense. Think "deepest trench in the ocean floor" dense. We'd need to get rid of most of it. Burying it seems unwise, if only because all it would take is one major geological upheaval to undo all our hard work.
That leaves dragging vast amounts of mass up past escape velocity. We'd also need to make sure that the gas didn't subsequently get pulled back onto the surface by the planet's gravity, which means doing more than just bottling it on the surface and decompressing it in orbit. Barring teleportation, artificial black holes, or direct conversion of matter into energy, this problem may be unsolvable.
On the plus side, any measure that we could use to eliminate the gas could probably also be used to retool the atmospheric chemistry. In other words, if we solve the pressure problem, the problems of acidity and CO2 levels become moot.
Additionally, Venus' rotational period is too long. Venusian days are on the order of two hundred and forty Earth days. If the surface were otherwise habitable, in terms of chemistry and pressure, you'd still get extremes of temperature during the day/night cycle. The current level of insulation prevents this - the whole planet is blanketed, so that sunlight never reaches the surface, and heat gets spread evenly. A less dense atmosphere would pave the way for scorching days and freezing nights, not unlike Mercury (though admittedly less so if the surface isn't in vacuum).
Increasing the planet's angular momentum would solve this, but the sheer amount of energy needed is mind-bending. I'm not even sure what spinning up a world would do to it's surface or internal structure. Forget centuries, we'd need a millennium or two to fix this.
Now, that being said, I've long believed that attempting to predict future technological advances is futile. Past attempts at prediction bear this out. I do not like to say that something is impossible, because it is all too likely I'll be proven wrong in the long run.
It is entirely possible that at some point in the future, some unknown or presently implausible techniques may exist for dealing with the listed problems. However, there is not a single thing we can do now, or in the foreseeable future, to drastically change Venus into something remotely habitable. If we wanted to live there, my choice would be the way mentioned in TFA, since that at least we could do if we really put our minds to it.
You can simulate comfortable gravity easily enough on a large station. Coriolis force is less of an issue further out from the center axis. Build yourself a ring or cylinder big enough, and you'd never know the difference.
On a station using centrifugal force (OK, centripetal force for the pedantic), you can even choose the gravity level most appropriate to the task you desire - closer to the axis of rotation for low-G, closer to the outer hull for earth-G. And zero-G is just outside the nearest airlock.
You can't simulate lack of gravity on a planet though. Nor can you change the gravity from whatever the local value is to what you want/need it to be.
Zero-G is advantageous most of the time from a tech perspective (gravity is just another design constraint), and from the perspective of using the station as a jumping off point for the rest of the solar system, since there's no need to climb out of yet another gravity well. The main need for gravity is keeping people's bones healthy, and making sure they can cope with the return home one day - spin gravity will cover these.
Not that those are reasons not to go build aerostats on Venus, but they are strong arguments in favor of orbitals for the nearer future. Plus, if we ever want to tap into the resources of this system, the asteroid belt is our best bet by far, and putting stations out there (either by converting existing rocks, or building completely man-made habs) is feasible.
Whoops, just saw the reference to Lysenko in your post. Dunno how I missed that the first time. My bad.
Still, how can you label Stalin "pro-evolution" if you know about Lysenko? Are you sure you understand how much opposition there was to evolution under Stalin? Whatever he believed personally, he set the clock on Russian evolutionary biology back a hundred years or more.
Slashdot Mirror
that is what we are trying to do, and usually without the pedophile wanting to change.
Well, that's half the problem right there then. Somebody who does not want to change, won't. This counts doubly if the person in question doesn't see the need, morally, practically or otherwise.
The other half of the problem as you rightly said is that changing sexual orientation doesn't really work. However, I'm not convinced that paedophiles are an "orientation". And, assuming for a moment that they are, it doesn't automatically follow that their orientation is hardwired.
We tend to think of sexuality in humans as being a very basic, hardwired brain function, but that's largely because it's had several billion years of evolutionary pressure to make it that way. Since child molestation is not an evolutionarily selective trait, I'm not convinced it has to operate on the same level.
Of course, homosexuality isn't evolutionarily selective either, but there's some reason to think of that as being crossed wiring; ie men getting the attraction criteria normal to women and vice versa. So in that instance, the wiring is still working as intended, it's just the reverse of the usual intent. I can't see how that same sort of situation would arise when children are involved, since human beings are pretty strongly wired not to find the very young attractive (evolution again - no reason to be attracted to someone too young to breed).
Your idea flies in the face of logic. By saying that pedophilia is caused by being violated as a child, then what about the vast number of people who were violated as a child that do not become offenders?
I can't even begin to explain how illogical this argument is. It's not even wrong. So instead I'm going to paraphrase it.
Your idea flies in the face of logic. By saying that lung cancer is caused by smoking, then what about the vast number of people who smoked all their lives, that do not develop cancer?
Of course, in this instance, lung cancer can be developed through means other than smoking, just as I strongly suspect that paedophilia can come about without having been molested. But there is a clear correlative relationship, and a likely causative mechanism, in both cases.
There is a well documented cycle in which someone who has been abused (not necessarily sexually, mind) becomes an abuser. You see the same thing in domestic violence cases. Person A is fucked up, takes it out on person B, possibly causing them to become just as fucked up, taking it out on person C, lather, rinse repeat. Cycle continues until an outside force acts upon it. Hell, sometimes I think that's half the strife in human history right there.
Note that in the above example, it is not certain that person B will become as fucked up as person A. Nor is it certain they will go on to share their misery with person C. Choice, chance and circumstance must be taken into account. Hence why the abused do not always become the abusers. It's merely possible, not certain, maybe not even all that likely in any one case.
Some idiot (we've got plenty here tonight) is going to chime in saying that this somehow excuses the guilty party, and that therefor I'm absolving them of responsibility. I'm not. Understanding the how and why of human behaviour does not equate to condoning it in my books. I would however argue that while we might not be able to cure paedophilia, we can probably prevent it. Break the cycle, help the victims recover and prevent the guilty from re-offending, and there will be fewer new paedophiles.
...certain video games (MMORPG's) thrive on addiction and are many times more addictive than others.
I keep seeing this "MMOs are made to be addictive" argument pop up. I don't think people have generally thought it through well enough to see the holes in it. I'll grant you that they are addictive, but not because the designers thought that was the best way to make money.
We'll use WoW as are baseline MMO, since it currently tops the market, at least in the english speaking world. Blizzard gets far less money from box sales, so we'll ignore those in our equation and focus on subscriptions.
Players pay a variable, but capped, rate (baseline is $15/month, less if you commit for a longer span) to access the game servers. So the gross profit per subscriber is fixed at about $180/year, or less. However, the net cost per subscriber is fluid. Bandwidth costs money, server centres cost money, support staff cost money. The more hours a player logs in, the more of these resources will be spent upon them, and the less of that $180 winds up as net profit.
A player who plays less earns Blizzard more than an addict, since they're paying the same monthly fee as someone online 24/7, yet use less resources. Based on that, what possible reason would they have to addict people? It doesn't make any financial sense. And what, if anything, motivates a corporation more than money?
Addicts cost them money. Money spent keeping the servers up during peak loads. Money spent paying for bandwidth. Money spent designing new content, as they grow tired of the old and become malcontent. Money they don't get back, because the addict is paying the same flat rate as everyone else. Hell, if cigarette companies sold smokes on a subscription basis, do you think for a second they'd up the nicotine content?
Before somebody chimes in with the very obvious "addicts will stay subscribed longer", let me point out the flaws in that argument. Addicts can and do quit, often after burning out altogether. You can only abuse something for so long before if fucks up the rest of your life, enough for you to seek help, or for your loved ones to force help upon you.
If the players don't quit, it's damn easy for them to move on instead - WoW inherited a bunch of EQ addicts when it came out, and some of them have since moved on to WAR or LotrOL or some such. They are, after all, MMO addicts, not addicts of that particular game.
The ideal cash cow that Blizzard, or anybody else in the business, wants is a non-addicted, semi-serious gamer. Not a fully casual one, since they don't tend to stay on long; someone into the game enough to keep playing, but not into it so much that they get hooked.
And lo and behold, what features have they added? Fluff content (festivals and the like) that keeps the casual crowd amused. Competition that keeps the PvPers at each other's throats. A rest system that rewards players for spending time away from the game, or leveling alts. Daily quests to appeal to people who only log into the game seven times a week.
These are not features that appeal to, or help hook, MMO addicts, and yet despite this (or rather, because of this), the game outstrips all of it's similarly themed competitors.
It seems to me that the only ways to make money off of MMO addiction are to charge by the hour, or open a clinic to "cure" the addicts.
^What he said.
However often people try and persuade the greater bulk of humanity of our own ignorance, it just doesn't stick. We don't deal with uncertainty that well. On some level, people would much rather be sure of themselves, and wrong, than unsure, but right. We'd rather cement our preconceptions as "truth", no matter how flimsy they may be.
Even if what the guy quoted from TFA is saying is blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, it nonetheless needs to be said, said simply, and repeated.
Slightly more on-topic; I do not personally doubt that games can and do addict people, but I've seen enough of addicts to know that gaming addiction is not a serious problem, as some seem to think.
We refer to addiction as if it were something a small minority suffer. Our attitudes toward that minority range from viewing them as degenerates, to viewing them as victims, but few if any people see them as normal. The reality is that addiction is far more widespread than that, and the sufferers far less remarkable.
Want a good example? I'll bet good money that there are innumerable coffee drinkers here on /. Some of us probably drink the equivalent of four or more cups a day. If this describes you, the try and see how long you can go cold turkey, no caffeine at all (and that includes chocolate and soft drinks). You might or might not last, but you will suffer withdrawal in fairly short order.
Now, if you're the sort who views addicts as abnormal, you'll likely go into denial about this. You either won't try quitting in the first place (the "I know I can quit any time I want, so I don't need to prove it to myself by actually trying" method), or you'll try and write off the caffeine withdrawal symptoms as something else entirely. You aren't craving, you're just having a bad day, because you never really woke up without your morning cup. That sort of thing.
Truth is, human beings addict rather easily. Nicotine, opiates and amphetamines are just the extreme examples; we get hooked on just about anything mood altering. That includes pleasurable activities that alter moods purely through neurological feedback.
So are there gaming addicts? Yes. It's a strictly psychological addiction rather than the mix of physiological and psychological addictions that accompany alcohol or caffeine or what have you, so it's a lot less serious from a health perspective, but it's still real. Thing is it's not special. Any human activity that is remotely pleasurable has the same risk, and statistically is going to have addicts. Does this mean we should reject those activities entirely? No, thanks. Life as a puritan is just too dull to be called living.
Idiots from the moral majority pipe up "but gaming addicts spend all their money/lose their jobs/neglect their kids". Well, so do addicts of any different stripe. And in some cases there are more tangible risks associated with being hooked psychologically - sex addicts run high risks for STDs, gambling addicts can find themselves in debt to people you really don't want to owe money too, food addicts have all the risks of obesity (and if they go the bulimic route, even more serious health problems arise). Enact ridiculous measures to try and halt one addiction, and they'll find something else to abuse. It's not about the substance or activity being abused, it's about what the abuser does about it.
Psychological addicts have the simple (if not always easy) option of seeking help and quitting, something that the more serious forms of addiction often inhibit. Heroin or alcohol withdrawal can kill you; gaming withdrawal makes you grumpy. Given the membership numbers in groups like AA and NA, it's safe to say that chemical addiction can be beat in spite of this.
There was work done on "clean" nuclear weapons, from the earliest beginnings, and also recently under the Bush administration, especially in context of "tactical nukes".
It also created some diplomatic tension, as it was internationally seen as further proliferation as it would lower the inhibition threshold to actually use a nuclear weapon.
Hmm, didn't know about that Bush administration stuff. Sounds like something they'd do though.
However, my point as to why we built dirty bombs and your point about proliferation, are the same point.
To the mindset of the engineers making these 3-stage "dirty" bombs, the use of one bomb would mean the use of all bombs, and the resultant nuclear holocaust would be the end of civilization, possibly the end of our species.
See there? That's a no-first-use attitude right there on the part of the weapon designers. You and I are saying basically the same thing about why the 3-stage bombs were made, we're just going at the subject from different angles.
And what happened to the other 8 kilos of Plutonium necessary to reach critical mass?
That's ten kilos of plutonium to make a bare sphere go critical. You're well informed, but using the figures for the minimum critical mass.
I realize that this next bit comes from Wikipedia, whom I generally wouldn't cite in situations like this. However, it's a subject I know a bit more than most about, so I'll vouch that in this instance Wiki has it right:
This is applied in implosion-type nuclear weapons, where a spherical mass of fissile material that is substantially less than a critical mass, is made supercritical by very rapidly increasing Ï (and thus Σ as well), see below. Indeed, sophisticated nuclear weapons programs can make a functional device from less material than more primitive weapons programs require.
Critical Mass
Plain english version for those readers just tuning in: You don't need to amass very much fissile material to make a bomb, provided you get everything else right. And the amount of fissile material used is the most important factor in determining fallout from a pure fission device.
Now, on to the next point. See the opening paragraph of my previous post?
I'll preface this by stating that I think the stuff in TFA is idiotic. Partly from a radiation and proliferation standpoint, partly because we already have perfectly good used for old bombs (for one thing, turning the fissile material into reactor fuel). But more than those reasons, because the methods proposed for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons all strike me as being colossal overkill - like using thermite to perform household repairs.
I actually agree with you that using nukes for civil engineering is a bad idea. So I'd agree that no bomb is better than a "clean" bomb. My point is more that you can actually make that clean bomb work, for some values of the word "clean".
As long as the only sources of fallout are nuclear daughter products from the initial fissile core, and the neutron activated matter from the blast site, the total fallout will remain tolerably low. I wouldn't want to visit the blast site immediately, but the problem of poisoning people downwind is largely averted.
And before someone else weights in here with "any fallout is too much", I'd like to candidly point out that we already pump plenty of radioactive heavy metal into the air by burning coal, are already exposed to radon seeping from the ground in our own homes, and get zapped by a measurably dangerous amount of ionizing radiation every time we go to the dentist to get x-rayed, or the beach to get a tan. We're tougher than most people think where radiation is concerned. So, for that matter, is the environment - see the returning wildlife around Chernobyl for proof of this
I'll preface this by stating that I think the stuff in TFA is idiotic. Partly from a radiation and proliferation standpoint, partly because we already have perfectly good used for old bombs (for one thing, turning the fissile material into reactor fuel). But more than those reasons, because the methods proposed for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons all strike me as being colossal overkill - like using thermite to perform household repairs.
That being said, your specific objection - that you don't see how to make a nuclear weapon with little fallout - is based on your knowledge of modern military nukes. They don't have to be built that way.
The amount of fissile material needed to make a bomb is small. We're talking on the order of a kilo or two of plutonium here. Older designs needed more than that primarily because we hadn't mastered miniaturization of the bomb components. With a decent neutron reflector, high grade of fissile fuel, implosive type detonation system and other improvements, the actual amount of radioactive crud in the system to begin with is small.
Moreover, the more efficient you make the bomb, the less fissile material is left over after you detonate it. This is the stuff that your burning to generate the initial blast after all; you don't want leftovers.
There are still radioactive daughter products, but in relative terms, those matter less. And a general rule of thumb is that the more radioactive something is, the shorter its half life is going to be - the nastiest stuff decays first. Meaning that the only really serious byproducts we need to worry about are the bioactive ones like Strontium 90 - the ones where radiation is not the sole metric of organic harm.
So, the fission core need not produce that much fallout. The bulk of the explosive energy can come from fusion, which does not produce radioactive byproducts, though it can render the matter near ground zero radioactive by way of neutron bombardment. Again, this is less serious than you might think - 2 stage hydrogen bombs produce a fraction of the amount of fallout per blast energy than fission only or 3 stage bombs.
In a modern nuclear weapon however, the bomb does not rely solely upon fusion to amplify the initial blast. The tamper of a typical thermonuclear warhead is made of depleted uranium, which fissions merrily when bombarded by the neutron radiation given off by the fusion stage.
Because the tamper is essentially the casing that holds the rest of the bomb together, it masses quite a bit more than either the lithium-deuterium mixture used for the fusion stage or the weapons-grade uranium or plutonium used for the primary stage. The amount of radioactive crud leftover from the vapourized and fissioned tamper is huge. This, and not the rest of the bomb, is where the terrible spectre of radioactive fallout comes from in a modern nuke.
Subtract this, make the tamper out of iron or lead or some such, and the bomb becomes far cleaner than you'd expect. Two kilos of spent plutonium and some neutron irradiated dirt is far less to worry about.
(You might wonder why we don't build them this way to begin with. Truth is, we built the nuclear arsenal of the cold war with the implicit assumption that we would not use it, save in the more dire circumstances. To the mindset of the engineers making these 3-stage "dirty" bombs, the use of one bomb would mean the use of all bombs, and the resultant nuclear holocaust would be the end of civilization, possibly the end of our species. Against that, a little more fallout hardly seemed to matter. For a bomb we intent to use, and use peacefully, fallout is a much more important consideration.)
Or maybe moving at close to the speed of light relative to the Earth's surface?
Hell, both put together, and you've got a delicious, hyper-kinetic anti-Twinkie with enough potential energy to punch a hole in the crust.
Plus, we don't have to assume it's snack sized; a Twinkie large enough to feed a small family for a few years is still a Twinkie. (This assumes that the small family in question is likewise made of antimatter of course.) I'm pretty sure Twinkieness is a question of composition and shape, not mass. It only needs to be small enough not to change shape into something untwinkie by way of self-gravitation.
Assuming a three ton rest mass Twinkie comprised of antiparticles moving at 0.9 c, and we get exactly the sort of simulated sugary Twinkopalypse the GP warned us about.
If any religion could do that in a modern progressive democratic state, the fundies in the States would have done it already. And in fact, in the case of the stuff about abortion, gays and women you mentioned, the religious right have already tried.
The reason they failed is that countries that have high standards of living, high literacy rates, free elections and judicial oversight of the government don't allow that shit.
Find me an example of such a country that does the stuff you mentioned. Go on, just one. Iran? Syria? Afghanistan? Come on, those are backwaters. Yeah, some of them may have wealth (oil wealth in the hands of the few for the most part), but that isn't a good barometer for civil liberty.
None of them have free elections, none of them have governments that are answerable to the courts. Nor have they ever in most cases, and in fact, the times in the past where they've been freer than in the present, were also times when the religious loonies were sidelined by the moderates (Iran is a good example of this).
It wouldn't matter if every single religious nutjob in the States changed from Christian to Muslim. They'd be the same assholes they are now, and they'd fail just as miserably to bring about the theocracy your post details. It's not the faith that matters, it's the environment in which it's practised.
There are a couple reasons I wouldn't expect anything large. The more obvious reason is that, if there were large native lifeforms (plant, animal or what have you), they'd be the first to die off. Generally, the bigger you are, and the higher up the food chain, the harder an ecological catastrophe hits you.
Since Mars hasn't be suitable to most forms of life for ages, and since it seems likely it became gradually less and less habitable as time wore on, it stands to reason that larger hypothetical Martians would be long gone. Small, survivable life forms would stick around a lot longer, possibly even to the present day. The odds of finding something frozen in the (geologically) recent past are a good deal better than the odds of finding anything from a couple hundred million years ago.
The less obvious reason is that I doubt there ever were large Martian lifeforms. There's a world of difference (pardon the pun) between being totally ecologically sterile and being Earth-like, and while I'd wager that Mars probably had something alive sometime in it's history, I doubt it ever got much past bacteria, and maybe simple plants. Too cold for one thing, and too dry. I've seen a couple different theories about how Mars was in the past, but nothing I've read suggests abundant heat, or water, or a thick atmosphere.
Granted I don't like to assume that the standards for life on Earth are the same as the standards for life elsewhere, but since we don't have any other basis for comparison, that assumption will have to stand. Plus, if living things adapted easily to extreme cold and scarcity of liquid water, you'd expect the poles here to be host to a larger variety of life. A world only slightly more hospitable than Antarctica doesn't seem like the best place to find big fauna.
What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.
Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.
Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.
Also depends on the person's habits. Some gamers snack at their machines, some don't. Some people who do snack will eat right, some won't. I'll guarantee that that alone will make a huge difference.
The likeliest outcomes are going to be somewhere between scrawny and obese. A sedentary lifestyle, gaming motivated or otherwise, isn't going to do good things for muscle tone and endurance, but it won't affect weight the same way for everyone.
I really, really hope you aren't claiming that 33,261 number based on number of posts on the main page. That would be somewhat akin to me referring to the 24,800,000+ people on slashdot, based on the number of posts to date.
First up, WOWdetox is open for anyone to post on, so you can bet on trolls and spam bots, plus people simply being contrary. Hell, you can bet on those regardless. Even if they've got strict moderation, the post count will probably go up for each poster, regardless of whether their comment gets deleted.
And I don't see any limit on posts per person, so it's not unreasonable to assume that there are many cases of single persons posting multiple times. Possibly many, many times, depending on their nature. Frankly, I am not inclined to wade through thirty odd thousand backlogged comments to try and take a stab at how many times per poster is average, but I'm going to bet it's a lot more than one.
Also, totally ignoring the question of how many people WOWDT actually has, you do realize that you've just stumbled into Argumentum ad populum fallacy territory, right? "Many people say this, so it must be true"?
I'd draw the line this way.
When you want to quit one game, but don't, that means you have standards and the game isn't living up to them.
When you want to quit gaming, but can't, that means you've got a problem.
This "addiction" subject is really fascinating. Aren't we all addicted to food? If you take food away from me, wouldn't I go nuts too? What about money, women, and cattles? What about life?
Actually, it is possible to be pathologically addicted to sex, food or money. Well, the money one's debatable, but there's some pretty compelling evidence for it. For the food one, you don't have to look that far - you've probably seen such people if you frequent fast food restaurants, even if they didn't stand out from the rest of the clientele. Eating disorders can run either way after all - vast overeating, or self-starvation, and the overeating behavior is classic addict.
The tricky part is that everyone needs to eat. Everyone in modern society needs at least some money to get by. (Almost) everyone needs to screw. That isn't addiction, that's biology, social necessity and plain old hormones.
When you stop eating to live, and start living to eat, then you start calling it addiction.
Most of the cases I've run into of "death by gaming" boil down to extreme lack of self care. Which is often present in addicts - ie, your typical malnourished junkie - but not in and of itself a sign of addiction. To draw an analogy, it's like how drinking and driving can kill you, but doesn't always indicate alcoholism (or even heavy habitual drinking - there are cases of DUI accidents occurring simply because the individual lacked the experience to judge their own level of intoxication). OTOH, it would be irresponsible to claim a lack of correlation between drunk driving and alcohol dependency - the correlation is there, but you can't assume one equals the other without examining each case in detail first.
A better rule of thumb for determining whether somebody is addicted to something is to ask them if they still enjoy it. Most people don't realize that your average addict has long since passed the stage where they want to quit, but are no longer able to. Your average sex addict doesn't enjoy boinking, your average alcoholic doesn't want to drink anymore, and your average smoker would love to quit (and probably has tried to at least once). This is one of the reasons why intoxicating substance use has a high rate of addiction - the brain chemistry gets literally rewired, to the point where stopping is traumatic. People have died from withdrawal, while others have developed psychosis, suffered from hallucinations, attempted suicide, and generally been miserable as hell.
"Addiction" gets applied far to frequently to abuse or overuse of any kind. Human stupidity and lack of common sense must be given their due, as must simple hedonism and self destructiveness. Real addiction is pathological. It might very well be purely psychological, with no chemical basis (or at least no external chemical basis), but on some level it's become a disease upon the affected person, and often times they'll be the first to admit it. Take the bottle away from a problem drinker, and the problem goes away; take the bottle away from an alcoholic and all hell breaks loose.
So, to get back on topic, I would define a gaming addict as a gamer who continues to play to great excess, despite a desire to quit. Somebody for whom turning it off, taking a break or unplugging is traumatic enough to make them jump right back in.
Works for me. Now go invent a matter-energy converter and we'll be set :-)
(I think I did mention that direct conversion of matter into energy solves all the Venusian problems nicely. Of course, it solves just about any problem centered around energy. Funny that.)
In terms of efficiency, you're leaving the mass of the thrusters behind with the station. It would only cost the same in terms of fuel spent to achieve launch, which is not the only issue. The package being launched could rely totally on inertia if it came to that.
Moreover, depending on what sort of technology you had, you might consider using something like ion engines for the spin control thrusters, which in turn means you'll be firing off less reaction mass at a higher speed.
I was thinking this approach would work best if the engines in question operated constantly, instead of the short burns associated with modern chemical rockets and cold-gas thrusters. The departing craft gets a 1G kick out the door, which represents the force of many spin thrusters over a long time period.
As for the need to decelerate at the station, the approach makes far, far more sense in the context of refueling and resupply. Your hypothetical craft arrives running on fumes, refuels, replaces its air supply, then moves down to the outer edge to launch again. As a way station between the Earth's surface, and the rest of the solar system, this arrangement is quite plausible.
You are correct. I was trying to convey that, but upon rereading what I wrote, I realize I explained myself rather badly. I should have said that the Coriolis force is less of an issue if the 1G section is further out from the center axis.
Regardless, wider station = gentler Coriolis force, assuming the spin is intended to produce the same G-force at the outer edge of the station.
You say that like it's a bad thing :-)
Time it right, and you've just achieved an easy launch. Your departing craft/junk/whatever gets a quick boost away from the station. In particular, this could be useful if you're using the station as a transport hub, which I believe I mentioned as an obvious reason to build them - you dock at the center axis, and leave by moving "down" to the outer hull and dropping free into space.
You'd need to keep adding to the station's angular momentum to make up the difference, but that's no biggie. Compared to actually building an orbital habitat, putting thrusters on it to maintain position and spin is a minor detail.
You are absolutely correct however, in that access to zero-G for manufacturing and the like would need to be at the center hub.
Something in the ballpark of 10^29 Joules. And that's just for the rotational energy, not for any heating effects.
Hmmm, do you have that figure in VW bugs or libraries of congress? :-P
I looked it up too BTW. Far as I could tell, that's about a hundred trillion times the power of your garden variety 1MT nuke. So all we really need is a few trillion very, very large bombs, and perhaps something like a pair of Orion drives sticking out from opposite sides of the equator facing west, and we're set :-)
Wouldn't need to rely 100% on the wind either. Propulsion systems for a floating city are a must anyways, so you may as well use them to adjust your position.
Might make the most sense to put the city in perpetual daylight. The power spent on station-keeping would be offset by the more abundant solar energy. Outrunning the sunset would be easy when it creeps along the surface so slowly, even if the winds didn't decide to cooperate.
For the biological approach to work, you'd need to add a lot of water to the mix. Venus is pretty damn dry.
Hydrogen is a common element elsewhere in the solar system, and could be combined with local oxygen. Think a few billion boatloads of Jovian atmosphere airlifted (pardon the pun) to Venus. But that involves moving a massive amount of matter to Venus, comparable to the task of moving massive amounts of matter away. The task is monumental regardless.
Also, since the local oxygen is already tied up as CO2, you'd liberate huge quantities of carbon by synthesizing the water. I'm kinda picturing a planet-wide ocean, smothered in soot. Or hydrocarbons, if we're willing to go the extra mile with the hydrogen importing. An improvement, to be sure, over what it's like now, but no more habitable to us personally.
Actually, I wouldn't list Venusian chemistry as the primary barrier to terraforming. Yeah, there's acid and CO2 out the ying-yang, but there are other, bigger problems.
The atmosphere is incredibly dense. Think "deepest trench in the ocean floor" dense. We'd need to get rid of most of it. Burying it seems unwise, if only because all it would take is one major geological upheaval to undo all our hard work.
That leaves dragging vast amounts of mass up past escape velocity. We'd also need to make sure that the gas didn't subsequently get pulled back onto the surface by the planet's gravity, which means doing more than just bottling it on the surface and decompressing it in orbit. Barring teleportation, artificial black holes, or direct conversion of matter into energy, this problem may be unsolvable.
On the plus side, any measure that we could use to eliminate the gas could probably also be used to retool the atmospheric chemistry. In other words, if we solve the pressure problem, the problems of acidity and CO2 levels become moot.
Additionally, Venus' rotational period is too long. Venusian days are on the order of two hundred and forty Earth days. If the surface were otherwise habitable, in terms of chemistry and pressure, you'd still get extremes of temperature during the day/night cycle. The current level of insulation prevents this - the whole planet is blanketed, so that sunlight never reaches the surface, and heat gets spread evenly. A less dense atmosphere would pave the way for scorching days and freezing nights, not unlike Mercury (though admittedly less so if the surface isn't in vacuum).
Increasing the planet's angular momentum would solve this, but the sheer amount of energy needed is mind-bending. I'm not even sure what spinning up a world would do to it's surface or internal structure. Forget centuries, we'd need a millennium or two to fix this.
Now, that being said, I've long believed that attempting to predict future technological advances is futile. Past attempts at prediction bear this out. I do not like to say that something is impossible, because it is all too likely I'll be proven wrong in the long run.
It is entirely possible that at some point in the future, some unknown or presently implausible techniques may exist for dealing with the listed problems. However, there is not a single thing we can do now, or in the foreseeable future, to drastically change Venus into something remotely habitable. If we wanted to live there, my choice would be the way mentioned in TFA, since that at least we could do if we really put our minds to it.
You can simulate comfortable gravity easily enough on a large station. Coriolis force is less of an issue further out from the center axis. Build yourself a ring or cylinder big enough, and you'd never know the difference.
On a station using centrifugal force (OK, centripetal force for the pedantic), you can even choose the gravity level most appropriate to the task you desire - closer to the axis of rotation for low-G, closer to the outer hull for earth-G. And zero-G is just outside the nearest airlock.
You can't simulate lack of gravity on a planet though. Nor can you change the gravity from whatever the local value is to what you want/need it to be.
Zero-G is advantageous most of the time from a tech perspective (gravity is just another design constraint), and from the perspective of using the station as a jumping off point for the rest of the solar system, since there's no need to climb out of yet another gravity well. The main need for gravity is keeping people's bones healthy, and making sure they can cope with the return home one day - spin gravity will cover these.
Not that those are reasons not to go build aerostats on Venus, but they are strong arguments in favor of orbitals for the nearer future. Plus, if we ever want to tap into the resources of this system, the asteroid belt is our best bet by far, and putting stations out there (either by converting existing rocks, or building completely man-made habs) is feasible.
Whoops, just saw the reference to Lysenko in your post. Dunno how I missed that the first time. My bad.
Still, how can you label Stalin "pro-evolution" if you know about Lysenko? Are you sure you understand how much opposition there was to evolution under Stalin? Whatever he believed personally, he set the clock on Russian evolutionary biology back a hundred years or more.