Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
A reduction in population growth in an already crowded world is a bad thing in your books?
Seriously, what the hell? The old ways that people like to paint a rosy picture of, the one with no birth control and sex directly leading to procreation, can be seen in all it's glory in modern Africa. In fact, the limit on human population growth throughout the vast majority of our history was a low average life expectancy and a high infant mortality rate. This is somehow better than a world in which sex doesn't always lead to babies? This is the world you strive for?
No thanks. My girlfriend and I will keep using birth control until or unless we both decide we want to bring another human being into the world. To hell with the medeval trappings of the Vatican and their ideological compatriots.
I did as you instructed (had to google where that "outside" place was). Shortly after I looked up, I was hit in the eye with bird shit. Was that what I was supposed to be looking for? Because I think most birds aren't nuclear powered...
Every single atom of carbon in biofuel has to come from somewhere. The only source of carbon they're consuming is atmospheric Co2. Therefor, they cannot release more carbon into the atmosphere than they take in during plant growth, due to conservation of matter. QED
What other source for carbon do you propose they'd use? Their only inputs are sunlight, soil, water and air. Water is just hydrogen, oxygen and dissolved impurities (and any dissolved Co2 will have come from the atmosphere), carbon in the soil is also part of the carbon cycle (ie, is comprised of living things that get their carbon from the same places the plants do), and the carbon in the air is a zero sum game if the only combustion is coming from biomass. The energy input is sunlight, and while that can convert Co2 to stored carbon via biological action, it cannot alter the amount of carbon in the cycle.
The only reason we have a net increase in atmospheric carbon from fossil fuels is because they're outside of the carbon cycle - ie, they have been stored underground for millions of years, and only through our actions are they added to the air. Burning anything that is already a part of the carbon cycle cannot add to the total amount of atmospheric Co2.
Sorry, I don't mean to flame you, but it irritates me when people are presented with a scientific explanation for why things work/don't work in plain english and just don't seem to get it. Biofuels cannot release more carbon into the air than they take out of it. Ever. If they did, they'd be some sort of perepual motion machine, working despite the ironclad laws of conservation of matter and energy.
But this thread is about getting net energy out of biofuels. If you need to use fission to make water for fuel, then just use the energy directly. Battery technology is improving all the time. An intermediate liquid fuel may be required in some cases, but the direct use of electric power should take care of most urban requirements.
Ah, yes, but you're mistaking the source of energy here. The putative nuclear plant isn't being used to store energy in the fuel - sunlight and photosynthesis are. The nuke plant is being used to provide fresh water for the plants. It is still a power input, but an indirect one, which means that it's maximum output is probably much smaller than the total power input involved in making the biofuel.
Conversely, with battery power, all of the energy has to come from some man made power generator. Solar panels could store the same energy per square meter of land used as biofuel crops, but then you're up against manufacturing costs, whereas plants are essentially self-assembling.
Plus, we'd use desalination plants and irrigation for a hell of a lot more than just biofuel production. After all, fresh water is a valuable resource regardless, and increasing our production capability can't hurt.
I don't think fusion is going to save us this time. It has been a long way off for a long time.
Perhaps, but it is easier to accept the idea of something like a nuclear economy if we work from the assumption that we're going to upgrade to fusion later. To draw an analogy, it's somewhat like renting while saving up for a home (this assumes there are no mortgages available, or that housing prices need to come down first). Fusion may be a long way off, but if we keep developing the technology, we'll eventually break even on it.
Actually, desalination means centralized power generation. We generally don't use oil for that.
Using modern technology, that would mean nuclear, coal or (in some areas) passive power (hydro, solar, wind, etc). The latter option isn't going to work everywhere, but building a nuke plant or two should solve the water problem rather nicely. In places where tidal power is available, you also have an abundance of salt water, though that does raise issues regarding transporting the desalinated water, or selecting our biofule agricultural land to be near the ocean. Using coal would contribute to gobal warming, but even then we get the economic benefits from using biofuel over oil, since coal isn't in short supply or in the hands of unfriendly nations.
Using probably future technologies, fusion would work wonders. Fusion plants scale up better than they scale down, which is exactly what we'd want for a desalination facility. Orbital solar is another possibility along the same lines. Even without such technologies, a more modern fission reactor design would be an improvement over using existing nuclear plants - something like an integeral fast reactor or a pebble bed reactor for instance.
Ay, I agree with you here. And I suppose I hadn't thought about that angle for the gay-bashers - blaming the infected I mean. To be fair, many of the vehemently anti-gay people I've met personally do beleive in the whole "God's punishment" garbage, so I'd kinda assumed that they wouldn't care what specifically causes the disease, as long as it targets a group their religion condemns. I'd forgotten that not all homophobes are religious.
But my basic point remains - the AIDS controversy and surrounding pseudoscience is different from the examples listed at the beginning of this thread (Lysenkoism, creationism and social darwinism). A few crackpots believing that HIV does not cause AIDS is not the same as a powerful individual or organization forcing pseudoscience on the masses to support its agenda. I guess the difference I see is that pseudoscience like Lysenkoism really can be damaging (it set back the biological science in Russia by decades).
It's a matter of scale or severity; bad science in the name of homeopathy can do a little bit of damage, whereas bad science in the name of political ideology or religion can do a lot of damage.
Homophobes don't really care what causes the disease. For them, it's not the vector, but rather its type of victim that matters.
Peddlers I'll believe. Ditto jackasses. Neither has much in the way of political clout however. For just about anything medical or scientific you'll have that lot arguing with the mainstream. They aren't on par with, say, Stalin and Lysenkoism, which is the comparison the person I responded to made - nobody would argue that homeopathic types have as much influence on our society as Stalin did on Soviet Russia.
As for politicians, I have seen what you're talking about, but that seems to be confined to Africa.
I see why those people benefit from bad fringe science, but they aren't on par with the examples given by the OP (Lysenkoism, creationism, and social darwinism). I.e. there aren't powerful people or groups pushing bad science on the masses to justify their ideology.
Both of which are already curable with antibiotics.
crabs, pregnancies
Both are just minor passengers. The former goes away with treatment, the latter after 9 months or less. Reminds me of an old joke: "Life, an STD that's 100% fatal in all who contract it".
herpes
This is the one I'd worry about. It's still incurable and more contagious than any of the others in your list.
However, stop and think about this for a second. If we can cure HIV/AIDS, then we've found a way to expunge the body of a retrovirus. Compared to that, how hard would it be to get rid of something like herpes? They're both viral, and AFAIK herpes doesn't have the immune system complications, or the tendancy to mutate, that HIV does.
Anyway, I'm not sure if there is a political angle to the whole AIDS/HIV controversy, outside of places like South Africa. With Lysenkoism, Creationism and social Darwinism, there are all obvious benefactors from propegating bad science, respectively Stalin, fundamentalist christians and racists. Who benefits from the bad science here?
Saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV is essentially a pseudoscientific view ("crackpot" as you put it), but it doesn't benefit anyone with money or power to try and make it look like actual science. Unless there's some angle I'm missing.
Right, because nobody ever caught aids without having unprotected sex with strangers first. Not one single person, nope. (/sarcasm off)
What about blood transfusions, broken condoms, infected partners that picked it up via adultery, rape victims and dumb kids who don't know any better (since we don't teach them safe sex, and they're too hormoned-up not to fuck)? That doesn't even get into the mess over in Africa. Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person simply due to the fact that many of the dying got that way from carelessness?
An ounch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That doesn't mean however that you can always prevent bad things from happening, or that we shouldn't care enough to try and find a cure.
And by the way, your arguement can be twisted for just about anything. Why should we try to develop a cure for cancer? Those people should have known to get themselves checked up (many cancers can be detected early, via screening, thereby removing the need for any miracle cure), and should have known to avoid carcinogens (do you check everything you eat?). Yet to take that stance both condemns people for honest mistakes, and condemns the blamelessly unlucky along with the careless by denying them a cure as well.
Well, from TFA they seem to be approving this for cuts of meat that you don't cook (like the kind that go on a cold sandwitch).
With that in mind, "fresh" isn't guaranteed, and cleanly prepared isn't the consumer's job, its the meat-packing companiy's. It's not like with raw hamburger or chicken where the buyer is going to cook the stuff themselves before eating it.
Given the choice between either irradiating or phage-treating the stuff, or else risk giving their customers food poisoning, which should the packing companies choose?
Given how easy it is to recolonize your intestinal bacteria, how do you know they don't periodically get plagued by naturally occuring phages? At most, you'd get digestive problems for a litte while, then the problem would go away the next time you ate a meal with the right strain of bacteria in it...
Point taken. However, "survival strategy" generally doesn't imply conscious decision, rather it implies what the virus has specifically developed for. In this context, the virus has evolved to infect bacteria, which are quite different from human or animal cells. It's not a question of whether it is "wise" for it to infect those cells, but whether it even could in the first place.
As to ancient viruses jumping species from bacteria to animal cells, what makes you think that humans and modern animals are anything like the first multi-cellural organisms, aside from the obvious point of having more than one cell? So far as I know, immune systems didn't develop until well after organisms became multi-cellular, due to the fact that such systems require specialized dedicated cells evolved to fight infection.
It's much easier to see a disease organism jumping from a single celled organism to a cluster of cells that have only just begun to act as a group, than it is to see a virus that had no prior evolutionary adaptation to immune responses infect a complex organism with an immune system. The "arms race" between animal cells and viruses to develop/survive immune responses accounts for why modern viral infections are capable of surviving an assault by the human immune system, whereas bacteriophages lack those millions of years of adaptation.
I am aware of no examples of bacteriophages jumping species to animals. Presumably they do share a common ancestor with the common cold, but that's likely so far back that using that common ancestor as proof that they could jump to humans is illogical.
Ever had strong antibiotics? One of the bits of advice they give you is to eat stuff like yogurt once you're done the treatment.
The reason for this is that antibiotics will kill off your own symbiotic bacteria in addition to the infection they're supposed to cure. However, replacing those same intestianal bacteria is incredibly easy with the right foodstuffs.
What's more, a virus whose survival strategy is to infect bacteria doesn't really gain anything from trying to infect animal cells. When was the last time we had any infection, with or without human intervention, that made such an enourmous leap? Hell, it's hard enough for disease organisms to jump from one similar species of animal to another, let alone from bacteria to animals. Even examples like bird flu are going from one large, warm blooded animal to another.
I'd actually think it more likely that the bacteriophages would go after the bacteria living in our digestive system, which would likely cause many of the same problems that a round of antibiotics does - ie, diarhea - but which is also simple to cure by recolonizing your intestines with those same bacteria (no colonizing your colon jokes please). So the cure for the bacteriophage run amok B-movie style would be... yogurt actually.
Technically, any acceleration in orbit will, by definition, change that orbit. Orbit is, after all, simply a balance between your velocity relative to the body you're orbiting and that same body's gravity. If your hypothetical probe is in solar orbit, and undergoes acceleration (in any direction), then the path of its orbit will change accordingly. Orbit isn't a physical link between bodies remember; there is no orbital "tether" linking them, merely a balance of equal forces.
You can't really "build up" velocity relative to the sun without either closing the distance to it, or moving further away. If you do close the distance, then you're back to the proposed slingshot orbit, whereas if you increase the distance, you're doing what the Voyager probes did in the first place: leaving the solar system. The very act of "breaking orbit" is the act of accelerating away from the body you're circling.
I kinda assumed you meant a trajectory that brought the accelerating probe closer to the sun first (for power reasons), then put it on an outbound parabolic trajectory by doing a close orbit around the sun or an inner planet. That is a classic slingshot trajectory, but assuming the probe is under constant acceleration, it won't take a decade to complete. The faster you accelerate the probe, the less time it will spend in the inner system, no matter what path it takes.
What you might be able to do is slingshot the probe around more than one body, say Venus first and then Mercury, but I'm not sure if there is any possible path it can take that will give you signifigantly more total time under acceleration in the inner system. Simply put, there is no way to impart a signifigant amount of acceleration while keeping the probe in the same place; the faster your velocity relative to the sun, the sooner you'll either hit it or escape its gravity well.
I think the term you're looking for is "slingshot orbit". Basically, the probe travels towards the sun at first, then uses the mass of one or more of the inner planets, or perhaps the sun itself, to alter its trajectory to take it out of the system. The pathway of the craft becomes something like a parabolic orbit, starting at the earth and ending on an escape trajectory.
Coupled with a solar/ion propulsion system, this would indeed work. You accelerate along a pre-planned trajectory, building up speed, and then use the mass of, say, Venus to launch the probe out of the system. By the time you're outside the range where solar power is a useful option, you've already used up all the fuel you're carrying for your ion drive. You then simply switch to a small RTG to provide power to the communications system, computer and scientific instruments, and coast out of the solar system.
However, the person I replied to specifically asked if it was possible to maintain an outward bound acceleration for a decade or so, and I said probably not. What we're talking about here with the slingshot idea would still be closer to what the original Voyager probes did (except that they used chemical propulsion, and their slingshot bodies were the outer planets instead of the inner ones, IIRC).
See the part of my post that talks about the political hurdles involving fission:-) I don't see anything wrong with that approach, but getting it past the general public wouldn't be easy.
Plus, what sort of nuclear power are we talking about here? Basic fission power (like a PWR or PBMR)? Then you have to consider the problems associated with running a miniaturized version of the reactor, with all its attendant moving parts and pressurized componants, for N* years (provide your own value for N).
Automation and redundancy will help alleviate these problems, but will add to the mass of the craft, and bring a whole new set of technical considerations into play. If we want to add automatic repair and maintainance systems, then we'd have to develop them first - and remotely operating them won't work at a latency of ~20-30 hours. Bear in mind that more of the maintainence will have to happen at the end of the reactor's life than at the beginning, which means the probe will be further away.
Building in redundancy is a better solution, but will increase the mass of the reactor, and the longer we want to keep it running, the more redundant systems we'd have to add. This doesn't even get into the problems associated with shielding the instruments, since high energy ionizing radiation can wreak havok with sensitive systems, and shielding is heavy. If your power source is giving off signifigant levels of radiation, you can forget about adding instruments for measuring those same types/wavelengths in deep space.
Using RTGs (like Voyager's) instead is a better solution, but an ineffecient one. You're trading a system that has many breakable moving parts for one that does not, but that also doesn't have anywhere near the energy output per unit of mass.
Plus, 100+ years of life? What fuel are you using? How much do you intend to carry with you? You could certainly get a lot of juice out of something that recycles it's waste, like an integral fast reactor, but no matter how you slice it, the longer you intend to operate the reactor, the more starting fuel it must carry. Plus, you've then got to have an equivalent amount of fuel for the ion drive, to make use of all that power, nevermind the aforementioned maintainace and repair considerations.
Mind you, even with all that taken into account, a probe with nuclear power + ion propulsion would still blow right by a probe launched via chemical rockets and made to coast all the way out of the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, what the hell? The old ways that people like to paint a rosy picture of, the one with no birth control and sex directly leading to procreation, can be seen in all it's glory in modern Africa. In fact, the limit on human population growth throughout the vast majority of our history was a low average life expectancy and a high infant mortality rate. This is somehow better than a world in which sex doesn't always lead to babies? This is the world you strive for?
No thanks. My girlfriend and I will keep using birth control until or unless we both decide we want to bring another human being into the world. To hell with the medeval trappings of the Vatican and their ideological compatriots.
So, like office workers and deadlines?
Did you not read his post?
Every single atom of carbon in biofuel has to come from somewhere. The only source of carbon they're consuming is atmospheric Co2. Therefor, they cannot release more carbon into the atmosphere than they take in during plant growth, due to conservation of matter. QED
What other source for carbon do you propose they'd use? Their only inputs are sunlight, soil, water and air. Water is just hydrogen, oxygen and dissolved impurities (and any dissolved Co2 will have come from the atmosphere), carbon in the soil is also part of the carbon cycle (ie, is comprised of living things that get their carbon from the same places the plants do), and the carbon in the air is a zero sum game if the only combustion is coming from biomass. The energy input is sunlight, and while that can convert Co2 to stored carbon via biological action, it cannot alter the amount of carbon in the cycle.
The only reason we have a net increase in atmospheric carbon from fossil fuels is because they're outside of the carbon cycle - ie, they have been stored underground for millions of years, and only through our actions are they added to the air. Burning anything that is already a part of the carbon cycle cannot add to the total amount of atmospheric Co2.
Sorry, I don't mean to flame you, but it irritates me when people are presented with a scientific explanation for why things work/don't work in plain english and just don't seem to get it. Biofuels cannot release more carbon into the air than they take out of it. Ever. If they did, they'd be some sort of perepual motion machine, working despite the ironclad laws of conservation of matter and energy.
Conversely, with battery power, all of the energy has to come from some man made power generator. Solar panels could store the same energy per square meter of land used as biofuel crops, but then you're up against manufacturing costs, whereas plants are essentially self-assembling.
Plus, we'd use desalination plants and irrigation for a hell of a lot more than just biofuel production. After all, fresh water is a valuable resource regardless, and increasing our production capability can't hurt.
Perhaps, but it is easier to accept the idea of something like a nuclear economy if we work from the assumption that we're going to upgrade to fusion later. To draw an analogy, it's somewhat like renting while saving up for a home (this assumes there are no mortgages available, or that housing prices need to come down first). Fusion may be a long way off, but if we keep developing the technology, we'll eventually break even on it.
This is slashdot. Don't you think you're puting the cart before the horse? JPEGs can't get pregnant...
Actually, desalination means centralized power generation. We generally don't use oil for that.
Using modern technology, that would mean nuclear, coal or (in some areas) passive power (hydro, solar, wind, etc). The latter option isn't going to work everywhere, but building a nuke plant or two should solve the water problem rather nicely. In places where tidal power is available, you also have an abundance of salt water, though that does raise issues regarding transporting the desalinated water, or selecting our biofule agricultural land to be near the ocean. Using coal would contribute to gobal warming, but even then we get the economic benefits from using biofuel over oil, since coal isn't in short supply or in the hands of unfriendly nations.
Using probably future technologies, fusion would work wonders. Fusion plants scale up better than they scale down, which is exactly what we'd want for a desalination facility. Orbital solar is another possibility along the same lines. Even without such technologies, a more modern fission reactor design would be an improvement over using existing nuclear plants - something like an integeral fast reactor or a pebble bed reactor for instance.
Ay, I agree with you here. And I suppose I hadn't thought about that angle for the gay-bashers - blaming the infected I mean. To be fair, many of the vehemently anti-gay people I've met personally do beleive in the whole "God's punishment" garbage, so I'd kinda assumed that they wouldn't care what specifically causes the disease, as long as it targets a group their religion condemns. I'd forgotten that not all homophobes are religious.
But my basic point remains - the AIDS controversy and surrounding pseudoscience is different from the examples listed at the beginning of this thread (Lysenkoism, creationism and social darwinism). A few crackpots believing that HIV does not cause AIDS is not the same as a powerful individual or organization forcing pseudoscience on the masses to support its agenda. I guess the difference I see is that pseudoscience like Lysenkoism really can be damaging (it set back the biological science in Russia by decades).
It's a matter of scale or severity; bad science in the name of homeopathy can do a little bit of damage, whereas bad science in the name of political ideology or religion can do a lot of damage.
Yes, I did. I focused on the diseases listed by the person I replied to, and he never mentioned hep C. I suppose we both forgot to include it.
Homophobes don't really care what causes the disease. For them, it's not the vector, but rather its type of victim that matters.
Peddlers I'll believe. Ditto jackasses. Neither has much in the way of political clout however. For just about anything medical or scientific you'll have that lot arguing with the mainstream. They aren't on par with, say, Stalin and Lysenkoism, which is the comparison the person I responded to made - nobody would argue that homeopathic types have as much influence on our society as Stalin did on Soviet Russia.
As for politicians, I have seen what you're talking about, but that seems to be confined to Africa.
I see why those people benefit from bad fringe science, but they aren't on par with the examples given by the OP (Lysenkoism, creationism, and social darwinism). I.e. there aren't powerful people or groups pushing bad science on the masses to justify their ideology.
Luckily, it's easily curable. Unfortunately, the cure is a rather unpopular one...
Both are just minor passengers. The former goes away with treatment, the latter after 9 months or less. Reminds me of an old joke: "Life, an STD that's 100% fatal in all who contract it".
This is the one I'd worry about. It's still incurable and more contagious than any of the others in your list.
However, stop and think about this for a second. If we can cure HIV/AIDS, then we've found a way to expunge the body of a retrovirus. Compared to that, how hard would it be to get rid of something like herpes? They're both viral, and AFAIK herpes doesn't have the immune system complications, or the tendancy to mutate, that HIV does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Anyway, I'm not sure if there is a political angle to the whole AIDS/HIV controversy, outside of places like South Africa. With Lysenkoism, Creationism and social Darwinism, there are all obvious benefactors from propegating bad science, respectively Stalin, fundamentalist christians and racists. Who benefits from the bad science here?
Saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV is essentially a pseudoscientific view ("crackpot" as you put it), but it doesn't benefit anyone with money or power to try and make it look like actual science. Unless there's some angle I'm missing.
Right, because nobody ever caught aids without having unprotected sex with strangers first. Not one single person, nope. (/sarcasm off)
What about blood transfusions, broken condoms, infected partners that picked it up via adultery, rape victims and dumb kids who don't know any better (since we don't teach them safe sex, and they're too hormoned-up not to fuck)? That doesn't even get into the mess over in Africa. Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person simply due to the fact that many of the dying got that way from carelessness?
An ounch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That doesn't mean however that you can always prevent bad things from happening, or that we shouldn't care enough to try and find a cure.
And by the way, your arguement can be twisted for just about anything. Why should we try to develop a cure for cancer? Those people should have known to get themselves checked up (many cancers can be detected early, via screening, thereby removing the need for any miracle cure), and should have known to avoid carcinogens (do you check everything you eat?). Yet to take that stance both condemns people for honest mistakes, and condemns the blamelessly unlucky along with the careless by denying them a cure as well.
Well, from TFA they seem to be approving this for cuts of meat that you don't cook (like the kind that go on a cold sandwitch).
With that in mind, "fresh" isn't guaranteed, and cleanly prepared isn't the consumer's job, its the meat-packing companiy's. It's not like with raw hamburger or chicken where the buyer is going to cook the stuff themselves before eating it.
Given the choice between either irradiating or phage-treating the stuff, or else risk giving their customers food poisoning, which should the packing companies choose?
Given how easy it is to recolonize your intestinal bacteria, how do you know they don't periodically get plagued by naturally occuring phages? At most, you'd get digestive problems for a litte while, then the problem would go away the next time you ate a meal with the right strain of bacteria in it...
Point taken. However, "survival strategy" generally doesn't imply conscious decision, rather it implies what the virus has specifically developed for. In this context, the virus has evolved to infect bacteria, which are quite different from human or animal cells. It's not a question of whether it is "wise" for it to infect those cells, but whether it even could in the first place.
As to ancient viruses jumping species from bacteria to animal cells, what makes you think that humans and modern animals are anything like the first multi-cellural organisms, aside from the obvious point of having more than one cell? So far as I know, immune systems didn't develop until well after organisms became multi-cellular, due to the fact that such systems require specialized dedicated cells evolved to fight infection.
It's much easier to see a disease organism jumping from a single celled organism to a cluster of cells that have only just begun to act as a group, than it is to see a virus that had no prior evolutionary adaptation to immune responses infect a complex organism with an immune system. The "arms race" between animal cells and viruses to develop/survive immune responses accounts for why modern viral infections are capable of surviving an assault by the human immune system, whereas bacteriophages lack those millions of years of adaptation.
I am aware of no examples of bacteriophages jumping species to animals. Presumably they do share a common ancestor with the common cold, but that's likely so far back that using that common ancestor as proof that they could jump to humans is illogical.
Ever had strong antibiotics? One of the bits of advice they give you is to eat stuff like yogurt once you're done the treatment.
The reason for this is that antibiotics will kill off your own symbiotic bacteria in addition to the infection they're supposed to cure. However, replacing those same intestianal bacteria is incredibly easy with the right foodstuffs.
What's more, a virus whose survival strategy is to infect bacteria doesn't really gain anything from trying to infect animal cells. When was the last time we had any infection, with or without human intervention, that made such an enourmous leap? Hell, it's hard enough for disease organisms to jump from one similar species of animal to another, let alone from bacteria to animals. Even examples like bird flu are going from one large, warm blooded animal to another.
I'd actually think it more likely that the bacteriophages would go after the bacteria living in our digestive system, which would likely cause many of the same problems that a round of antibiotics does - ie, diarhea - but which is also simple to cure by recolonizing your intestines with those same bacteria (no colonizing your colon jokes please). So the cure for the bacteriophage run amok B-movie style would be... yogurt actually.
Technically, any acceleration in orbit will, by definition, change that orbit. Orbit is, after all, simply a balance between your velocity relative to the body you're orbiting and that same body's gravity. If your hypothetical probe is in solar orbit, and undergoes acceleration (in any direction), then the path of its orbit will change accordingly. Orbit isn't a physical link between bodies remember; there is no orbital "tether" linking them, merely a balance of equal forces.
You can't really "build up" velocity relative to the sun without either closing the distance to it, or moving further away. If you do close the distance, then you're back to the proposed slingshot orbit, whereas if you increase the distance, you're doing what the Voyager probes did in the first place: leaving the solar system. The very act of "breaking orbit" is the act of accelerating away from the body you're circling.
I kinda assumed you meant a trajectory that brought the accelerating probe closer to the sun first (for power reasons), then put it on an outbound parabolic trajectory by doing a close orbit around the sun or an inner planet. That is a classic slingshot trajectory, but assuming the probe is under constant acceleration, it won't take a decade to complete. The faster you accelerate the probe, the less time it will spend in the inner system, no matter what path it takes.
What you might be able to do is slingshot the probe around more than one body, say Venus first and then Mercury, but I'm not sure if there is any possible path it can take that will give you signifigantly more total time under acceleration in the inner system. Simply put, there is no way to impart a signifigant amount of acceleration while keeping the probe in the same place; the faster your velocity relative to the sun, the sooner you'll either hit it or escape its gravity well.
Of course, a round of anti-biotics will clear that right up!
I think the term you're looking for is "slingshot orbit". Basically, the probe travels towards the sun at first, then uses the mass of one or more of the inner planets, or perhaps the sun itself, to alter its trajectory to take it out of the system. The pathway of the craft becomes something like a parabolic orbit, starting at the earth and ending on an escape trajectory.
Coupled with a solar/ion propulsion system, this would indeed work. You accelerate along a pre-planned trajectory, building up speed, and then use the mass of, say, Venus to launch the probe out of the system. By the time you're outside the range where solar power is a useful option, you've already used up all the fuel you're carrying for your ion drive. You then simply switch to a small RTG to provide power to the communications system, computer and scientific instruments, and coast out of the solar system.
However, the person I replied to specifically asked if it was possible to maintain an outward bound acceleration for a decade or so, and I said probably not. What we're talking about here with the slingshot idea would still be closer to what the original Voyager probes did (except that they used chemical propulsion, and their slingshot bodies were the outer planets instead of the inner ones, IIRC).
See the part of my post that talks about the political hurdles involving fission :-) I don't see anything wrong with that approach, but getting it past the general public wouldn't be easy.
Plus, what sort of nuclear power are we talking about here? Basic fission power (like a PWR or PBMR)? Then you have to consider the problems associated with running a miniaturized version of the reactor, with all its attendant moving parts and pressurized componants, for N* years (provide your own value for N).
Automation and redundancy will help alleviate these problems, but will add to the mass of the craft, and bring a whole new set of technical considerations into play. If we want to add automatic repair and maintainance systems, then we'd have to develop them first - and remotely operating them won't work at a latency of ~20-30 hours. Bear in mind that more of the maintainence will have to happen at the end of the reactor's life than at the beginning, which means the probe will be further away.
Building in redundancy is a better solution, but will increase the mass of the reactor, and the longer we want to keep it running, the more redundant systems we'd have to add. This doesn't even get into the problems associated with shielding the instruments, since high energy ionizing radiation can wreak havok with sensitive systems, and shielding is heavy. If your power source is giving off signifigant levels of radiation, you can forget about adding instruments for measuring those same types/wavelengths in deep space.
Using RTGs (like Voyager's) instead is a better solution, but an ineffecient one. You're trading a system that has many breakable moving parts for one that does not, but that also doesn't have anywhere near the energy output per unit of mass.
Plus, 100+ years of life? What fuel are you using? How much do you intend to carry with you? You could certainly get a lot of juice out of something that recycles it's waste, like an integral fast reactor, but no matter how you slice it, the longer you intend to operate the reactor, the more starting fuel it must carry. Plus, you've then got to have an equivalent amount of fuel for the ion drive, to make use of all that power, nevermind the aforementioned maintainace and repair considerations.
Mind you, even with all that taken into account, a probe with nuclear power + ion propulsion would still blow right by a probe launched via chemical rockets and made to coast all the way out of the solar system.