Now you can generate the fuel of the future yourself and launch a rocket into orbit! This new hydrogen fuel technology uses water to generate the hydrogen fuel needed to thrust a sleek rocket 200 feet into the sky.
Biofuel schemes all overlook the amount of energy needed to grow the plants in the first place, like the gas/petrol in that harvester over there, which itself consumed a lot of fuel to create it.
Sigh...
Okay, let's throw some numbers out, just for laughs. These are pulled out of my rear-end numbers and they could very well be wrong. But I'm using them to make a point.
Take our dear ol' American Harvester. Let's say it takes a thousand gallons of oil to build one. Let's say it takes a thousand gallons of oil to cultivate the field of whatever you're using to make biofuel.
The part of the equation you're missing is, how much biofuel do you get out of it? Let's say you get the equivalent of 750 gallons of oil out of the field you spent 1000 gallons of oil to cultivate. Well, then it's probably not worth it. Let's say you get the equivalent of 1500 gallons of oil. Well, you'll be net positive in year 3. Remember, you don't have to buy a new American Harvester every year.
So the question is will you get a positive return? If so, at what point will it exceed the energy investment? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?
Virtually all schemes for "alternatives" to oil amount to "can you please burn 10% more of it over there, where I'm not looking? Thank you. I feel so much better now."
Well, there are some advantages to doing it "over there."
It's certainly easier/cheaper to install pollution controls or upgrade, say, 100 oil-burning powerplants that power 100,000 electric cars than it is to upgrade 100,000 gasoline-powered cars.
Also I think an EVA from a Soyuz would be out of the question on safety grounds.
Well, you can Spacewalk out of a Soyuz--Soyuz 4 & 5 did it. The problem being that you don't have an airlock (or, more accurately, the capsule is the airlock), so everybody gets to Spacewalk.
Companies do have long term planning. If there was a capitalist interest in immediately setting up factories on the moon (for immensely profitable "moon crystals") economic lobbies would be clamoring for the US government to do just that.
See where it's confusing?
Part of the problem is that Companies may do long term planning, sure, but this kind of investment--as you point out--will not see a return for decades. If I was in my 30s and invested in a start-up company that was going to build solar collectors on the moon and beam back electricity, I doubt I would see a return on investment in my lifetime.
There are a bunch of reasons for this but I can break it down: It's really hard to do. Thus, the government is spending the money figuring out how to do the common stuff that everybody will need--things like providing breathable air for long periods of time, water, food, etc. Once our tax dollars have been spent figuring that stuff out, then private business may be more interested in figuring out what might be accomplished in this "new frontier." If you will, they've lowered the barrier to building a solar collector on the moon by figuring out how to get there, how to build stuff, and how to keep people alive. So the investment becomes less--all private enterprise needs to figure out is how to build a solar collector and how to get the electricity from there to here.
You may be right. Perhaps beaming power from the moon isn't economically feasible. Perhaps giant moon crystals won't have an economic benefit. Perhaps the Moon will become the equivalent of Antarctica--someplace to do research and an exotic tourist attraction. But, personally, I have no problem with my tax dollars being spent to find out.
Using humans to explore Mars would not be very efficent at all.
Consider the Mars rovers. They're not just cruising around Mars looking at stuff. Their movements are planned. The robots don't "look around" for anything interesting. They go from the site that was interesting in Satellite Shot #1 to the site that was interesting in Satellite Shot #2. There are plenty of examples on the Apollo mission of an astronaut saying, "Hey! Look at that!" and walking over and picking it up. Such a thing is not done with rovers.
There are good reasons for this. Remember that the delay in sending and receiving. At the closest, it's about 13 minutes. At the most distant, it's about an hour-and-a-half. So by the time someone watching a camera of the trip says, "Hey! Look at that!", the rover has driven past it.
Also, the current rovers don't go very fast. I think the current record is 800 FEET (About 243 METERS) in one day. I think a human could make better time and still be able to spot something interesting along the way and pick it up. So for efficiency, I think a human wins--especially if you give them a rover.
Apparently the largest amount of samples brought back to Earth in one mission was about 250 lb., so you could probobly at least triple that.
Just for laughs, I did some checking.
The 6 Apollo missions that went to the moon brought back 841 pounds of moon rocks. The Soviet Union sent robots to the moon to collect samples. The 3 missions that went to the moon to collect samples brought back about three-quarters of a pound.
I'll admit, I'm not as big a fan as I was. I miss Jack...
Personally, I'd've just shut it down. Send Jack into retirement, Jackson to Atlantis, Carter to Area 51, and Teal'C back to the Jaffa. Wait a year and try to talk Richard Dean Anderson into an SG-1 movie.
Well, there's the WiFi factor, which I think will be very cool. I don't care so much about being able to buy music on my music player, but being able to use an iPod and Airport Express without having to lug a computer around is a nice idea. I assume that Roku and Slim Devices will support this.
Another interesting thing as part of the WiFi realm is Internet Radio or IPTV.
At this point it's about pride at Microsoft because none of their peripheral vendors can make a dent in Apple's market share. They knock-off the iTunes and buy a bunch of media ads for the holiday sell-a-thon.
Actually, it may be marketing ploy.
iPod, iPod, iPod. It's all you ever hear. Consumers don't want Zen, don't want Sansa, don't want iRiver. They've never heard of these guys. They want iPod, iPod, iPod. It's the only thing out there.
Well, Microsoft will come along and say, "Hey! There is an alternative," and have the marketing clout to back it up.
That might get people looking at something other than the iPod. "Should I buy an iPod? Or should I buy a Zune? Oh Look--there's a Zen and a Sansa and they're great little players, too! Maybe I'll get one of those."
It depends on how it works. Remember, having a monopoly is not illegal. Using the monopoly to gain ground in another market is.
So if a Microsoft's competitor approaches Dell and say "We'll give you one million dollars to feature our software" and Microsoft comes up and says, "We will give you one million and one dollars", I think that's fine.
If Microsoft says, "And the way we'll pay for it is we'll give you one million and one dollars worth of free Windows licenses", BZZT! Thanks for playing!
Yes, I'd want to Justice Department watching over Microsoft's shoulder when they do this. But I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to be able to compete with others.
Sesticulus raises a similar idea [...] "Invariably if I'm in a public place, there will be someone I find attractive and I will think "hey now". I've never had someone come up and slap me for thinking rude thoughts, so at the very least, women I find attractive, as a rule, do not have telepathy.
That assumes that these are things that, if you will, percolate up the old brain stem to the point where we recognize we are reading thoughts. From what I understand, the brain doesn't necessarily work that way. Lots of data from lots of senses comes into play and we attach different importance to each of them. An example would be the sense of taste--it's made up both the olfactory senses in your nose and the chemical senses in your tongue.
Consider this scenario: You're in the public place. You see the woman. You look her up-and-down and think, "Hey now." The woman turns around and sees you looking her over and thinks, "Gads. What a jerk." Well, obviously, there was no telepathy involved here. She saw you looking at her like a hungry dog at a piece of meat and immediately knew what you were thinking. But what made her turn around at that moment? Was it just a coincidence? Obviously, it had to be. There's no way she could have known what you were thinking.
Or, her "sixth sense" told her there was a potential mate/threat/whatever. Automatic reaction was to look around for it. When she saw you looking her over, she figured she'd found the target of the problem (since the feelings went away) and the rest of her senses allowed her to form a better picture of what was happening and since she never really knew why she was looking around (lower brain function caused the reaction), she wouldn't chalk it up to telepathy.
Remember, there are tons of things that we do that we don't consciously do. A simple example is we pull our hands away from hot things. There's no conscious decision there. We know why we did it, sure, but there was no higher-brain decision process involved.
That's why I said, as part of this, NASA can't be in on it. Arguably, this would have been done by the military.
Here's the scenario I came up with. This is pure fantasy on my part--I'm making it up and I don't believe it. It's just an entertaining fantasy to begin the game with.
The LEM has some sort of problem that requires parts of it be redesigned. There is absolutely no way that it will be ready for use before Kennedy's deadline of "the end of the decade." But it has become vitally important for the US to hit Kennedy's deadline because we know the Russians are also trying to make it to the moon in the same timeframe. What to do? If we don't make the end of the decade, we're going to have a lot of Americans howling. If we don't do it ASAP, the Russians might beat us. There's no way to do it, though, because the LEM problems.
So we must fake Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 to show up the Russians--Apollo 12 was done to show the Russians that we can do it twice and it wasn't a fluke.
That's the why of the game. Given this, here's some comments.
Keeping secrets is a difficult thing if more than one person knows that secret. Inevitable someone is going to spill the beans, either accidently or on purpose.
Fair enough. However, who's going to believe him?
In our scenario, the moon-landings were not all fake. Just two. The reason to fake the missions has it's basis in patriotism, so you could easily convince people to keep it secret. And even if one spills the beans, who's going to believe him? NASA says it was real--and they believe it because they weren't part of the conspiracy. There are only six people in the public eye--Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean--who have to keep the secret. After all, if Neil Armstrong said it was fake, I'm going to believe him. If John Schmoe said it was fake and he knows because he set up the fake cameras in the desert, I'm not going to buy it.
Even if no hard evidence is found, there will always be enough circumstantial evidence to piece the program together.
But circumstantial evidence is just that--circumstantial. People won't necessarily believe it, especially with enough voices saying that it really did happen and they know because they were there.
Also remember that there's a lot of national pride tied up in this. Anyone who says we didn't land on the moon is certainly not a patriot.
I agree that the conspiracy nuts are usually way out in left field. But how many people would you need to fake the video portion? I don't think you'd need that many people...
TV may be low resolution, but there were several things you could see that still would have only been possible in an airless environment and a substantially lower gravity.
Like what? I'm not asking be snotty or anything...
I love working out how you could fake the moon landings. Not that they were fake, but could it be done with 1969 technology in such a way that no one at NASA would be aware of it? I agree, I hear these stories of advanced computer graphics and I shake my head. NASA cannot be in on the joke--they have to believe that they have sent people to the moon.
For example, the video from Apollo 11 was in Black and White. This is far easier to manipulate than color and probably within the realm of 1969 analog technology. If you need bright light and sharp shadows, it's pretty much an adjustment to the contrast curve. I'm sure somebody could have built a camera to give grainy images with the appropriate contrast in order to hide wires and things like that.
Any attempt at a rational discussion with a conspiracy theorist quickly devolves into a flurry of conjecture and hypothesis with no logical foundation. Occam's Razor be damned.
Well, I think it's purely for entertainment purposes. Like I said, I think it's entertaining to think about how it could be done. But, after awhile, the complexity becomes overwhelming. You can, arguably, fake the video on the moon. But how do you fake the video from the CSM? That was color and much better quality. What about the film--both still and 16mm video--shot on the moon? And the moon rocks? They have to be able to pass the test by scientists. What about the reflectors and other instruments? They have to really be on the moon. It wouldn't do to have an earthquake in California and--amazing coincidence--one on the moon at the exact same time.
At this point, as you say, Occam's Razor applies. It would be easier to land people on the moon than to fake landing people on the moon.
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True. Damn those journalists! Don't they know that when they report things like this, the terrorists win?! :^)
NASA's still working on it.
Okay, let's throw some numbers out, just for laughs. These are pulled out of my rear-end numbers and they could very well be wrong. But I'm using them to make a point.
Take our dear ol' American Harvester. Let's say it takes a thousand gallons of oil to build one. Let's say it takes a thousand gallons of oil to cultivate the field of whatever you're using to make biofuel.
The part of the equation you're missing is, how much biofuel do you get out of it? Let's say you get the equivalent of 750 gallons of oil out of the field you spent 1000 gallons of oil to cultivate. Well, then it's probably not worth it. Let's say you get the equivalent of 1500 gallons of oil. Well, you'll be net positive in year 3. Remember, you don't have to buy a new American Harvester every year.
So the question is will you get a positive return? If so, at what point will it exceed the energy investment? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?
Well, there are some advantages to doing it "over there."
It's certainly easier/cheaper to install pollution controls or upgrade, say, 100 oil-burning powerplants that power 100,000 electric cars than it is to upgrade 100,000 gasoline-powered cars.
What's worse is that Hoosiers will own it!
"What the fuck's a 'Radio Picture'?!"
"TV for Helen Keller!"
Part of the problem is that Companies may do long term planning, sure, but this kind of investment--as you point out--will not see a return for decades. If I was in my 30s and invested in a start-up company that was going to build solar collectors on the moon and beam back electricity, I doubt I would see a return on investment in my lifetime.
There are a bunch of reasons for this but I can break it down: It's really hard to do. Thus, the government is spending the money figuring out how to do the common stuff that everybody will need--things like providing breathable air for long periods of time, water, food, etc. Once our tax dollars have been spent figuring that stuff out, then private business may be more interested in figuring out what might be accomplished in this "new frontier." If you will, they've lowered the barrier to building a solar collector on the moon by figuring out how to get there, how to build stuff, and how to keep people alive. So the investment becomes less--all private enterprise needs to figure out is how to build a solar collector and how to get the electricity from there to here.
You may be right. Perhaps beaming power from the moon isn't economically feasible. Perhaps giant moon crystals won't have an economic benefit. Perhaps the Moon will become the equivalent of Antarctica--someplace to do research and an exotic tourist attraction. But, personally, I have no problem with my tax dollars being spent to find out.
There are good reasons for this. Remember that the delay in sending and receiving. At the closest, it's about 13 minutes. At the most distant, it's about an hour-and-a-half. So by the time someone watching a camera of the trip says, "Hey! Look at that!", the rover has driven past it.
Also, the current rovers don't go very fast. I think the current record is 800 FEET (About 243 METERS) in one day. I think a human could make better time and still be able to spot something interesting along the way and pick it up. So for efficiency, I think a human wins--especially if you give them a rover.
Just for laughs, I did some checking.
The 6 Apollo missions that went to the moon brought back 841 pounds of moon rocks. The Soviet Union sent robots to the moon to collect samples. The 3 missions that went to the moon to collect samples brought back about three-quarters of a pound.
I'll admit, I'm not as big a fan as I was. I miss Jack...
Personally, I'd've just shut it down. Send Jack into retirement, Jackson to Atlantis, Carter to Area 51, and Teal'C back to the Jaffa. Wait a year and try to talk Richard Dean Anderson into an SG-1 movie.
Ah. Didn't know that. How'd the appeal go? I can't find any references to that...
But you make a good point. Isn't Stargate SG-1 on?
Currently?
Well, there's the WiFi factor, which I think will be very cool. I don't care so much about being able to buy music on my music player, but being able to use an iPod and Airport Express without having to lug a computer around is a nice idea. I assume that Roku and Slim Devices will support this.
Another interesting thing as part of the WiFi realm is Internet Radio or IPTV.
iPod, iPod, iPod. It's all you ever hear. Consumers don't want Zen, don't want Sansa, don't want iRiver. They've never heard of these guys. They want iPod, iPod, iPod. It's the only thing out there.
Well, Microsoft will come along and say, "Hey! There is an alternative," and have the marketing clout to back it up.
That might get people looking at something other than the iPod. "Should I buy an iPod? Or should I buy a Zune? Oh Look--there's a Zen and a Sansa and they're great little players, too! Maybe I'll get one of those."
Aw, c'mon. At least give him a "funny" mod!
C'mon, look at the pictures! It's obvious that it landed somewhere on Earth...
(Explanation--at least in regards to the PathFinder pictures--is here.)
Why not? We all know there were Whalers on the Moon...
It depends on how it works. Remember, having a monopoly is not illegal. Using the monopoly to gain ground in another market is.
So if a Microsoft's competitor approaches Dell and say "We'll give you one million dollars to feature our software" and Microsoft comes up and says, "We will give you one million and one dollars", I think that's fine.
If Microsoft says, "And the way we'll pay for it is we'll give you one million and one dollars worth of free Windows licenses", BZZT! Thanks for playing!
Yes, I'd want to Justice Department watching over Microsoft's shoulder when they do this. But I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to be able to compete with others.
Consider this scenario: You're in the public place. You see the woman. You look her up-and-down and think, "Hey now." The woman turns around and sees you looking her over and thinks, "Gads. What a jerk." Well, obviously, there was no telepathy involved here. She saw you looking at her like a hungry dog at a piece of meat and immediately knew what you were thinking. But what made her turn around at that moment? Was it just a coincidence? Obviously, it had to be. There's no way she could have known what you were thinking.
Or, her "sixth sense" told her there was a potential mate/threat/whatever. Automatic reaction was to look around for it. When she saw you looking her over, she figured she'd found the target of the problem (since the feelings went away) and the rest of her senses allowed her to form a better picture of what was happening and since she never really knew why she was looking around (lower brain function caused the reaction), she wouldn't chalk it up to telepathy.
Remember, there are tons of things that we do that we don't consciously do. A simple example is we pull our hands away from hot things. There's no conscious decision there. We know why we did it, sure, but there was no higher-brain decision process involved.
...and it only cost $435 dollars!
Here's the scenario I came up with. This is pure fantasy on my part--I'm making it up and I don't believe it. It's just an entertaining fantasy to begin the game with.
The LEM has some sort of problem that requires parts of it be redesigned. There is absolutely no way that it will be ready for use before Kennedy's deadline of "the end of the decade." But it has become vitally important for the US to hit Kennedy's deadline because we know the Russians are also trying to make it to the moon in the same timeframe. What to do? If we don't make the end of the decade, we're going to have a lot of Americans howling. If we don't do it ASAP, the Russians might beat us. There's no way to do it, though, because the LEM problems.
So we must fake Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 to show up the Russians--Apollo 12 was done to show the Russians that we can do it twice and it wasn't a fluke.
That's the why of the game. Given this, here's some comments.
Fair enough. However, who's going to believe him?
In our scenario, the moon-landings were not all fake. Just two. The reason to fake the missions has it's basis in patriotism, so you could easily convince people to keep it secret. And even if one spills the beans, who's going to believe him? NASA says it was real--and they believe it because they weren't part of the conspiracy. There are only six people in the public eye--Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean--who have to keep the secret. After all, if Neil Armstrong said it was fake, I'm going to believe him. If John Schmoe said it was fake and he knows because he set up the fake cameras in the desert, I'm not going to buy it.
But circumstantial evidence is just that--circumstantial. People won't necessarily believe it, especially with enough voices saying that it really did happen and they know because they were there.
Also remember that there's a lot of national pride tied up in this. Anyone who says we didn't land on the moon is certainly not a patriot.
I agree that the conspiracy nuts are usually way out in left field. But how many people would you need to fake the video portion? I don't think you'd need that many people...
We had to take the time to patch XP, test those, then move them over to Vista, test those...
Vista is now scheduled to be released to OEMs in the second quarter. No, we won't say what year...
I love working out how you could fake the moon landings. Not that they were fake, but could it be done with 1969 technology in such a way that no one at NASA would be aware of it? I agree, I hear these stories of advanced computer graphics and I shake my head. NASA cannot be in on the joke--they have to believe that they have sent people to the moon.
For example, the video from Apollo 11 was in Black and White. This is far easier to manipulate than color and probably within the realm of 1969 analog technology. If you need bright light and sharp shadows, it's pretty much an adjustment to the contrast curve. I'm sure somebody could have built a camera to give grainy images with the appropriate contrast in order to hide wires and things like that.
Well, I think it's purely for entertainment purposes. Like I said, I think it's entertaining to think about how it could be done. But, after awhile, the complexity becomes overwhelming. You can, arguably, fake the video on the moon. But how do you fake the video from the CSM? That was color and much better quality. What about the film--both still and 16mm video--shot on the moon? And the moon rocks? They have to be able to pass the test by scientists. What about the reflectors and other instruments? They have to really be on the moon. It wouldn't do to have an earthquake in California and--amazing coincidence--one on the moon at the exact same time.
At this point, as you say, Occam's Razor applies. It would be easier to land people on the moon than to fake landing people on the moon.