the problem with the Alcubierre drive, is it requires "Exotic matter" to make it work. which is science speak for "We have not conclusively proven that this does not exist. Also, we have no evidence that it exists"
well, if you didn't have anything better to do, (like say, wars, disease, famine, drought, reality TV, ect.) I suppose you could divert a lot of resources into developing the technology needed to build a massive enough generation ship to make a large enough colony survive the journey.
(i'm thinking on the order of, hollow out one of Mars' moons, fit it with solar sails and fusion based propulsion, spin that bitch like a top, fill the inside with farms and people and technology and send it on its merry way).
but yes, it is an overly optimistic assumption that generation arks would work.
that obviously creates the question: "Why did they start with such a bat shit insane hypothesis?".
because based on the data they presented(created?) they peg life as starting at a point where the universe in general probably would have been hostile to its existence. What reason is there for alleging that? That is what confuses me about this whole thing.
have you ever known your average Joe Consumer to actually pay attention to getting the right wattage bulb for his lamp?
"I want this to be brighter, so i'll just stick a 120 watt bulb in there"
and then the house burns down because the lamp shade is full of dead moths, and a 120 watt bulb in a 40 watt fixture.
why did he use Twitter to verbally horse around with a buddy on such a touchy-assed subject? I mean, there are many, many less public means of doing that.
Because the whole thing was a microsoft ploy to see how bad the fallout will be when they ACTUALLY announce always on network requirements?
No, our punishment for april fools day is later in the week, when the associated press runs some of the bullshit from today as a real news story. (In their grand tradition of not paying attention to what the hell they are doing.)
It took me a while, but I finally figured out what the hell he meant by '2 Dimensional' It seems that the original Roku interface was a lot like the 'Photo Stream' or 'Album Stream' in apple products. Scroll left or right, and it pages through 200 channels. Now, its more like the Xbox home screen, with several channels displayed per page, in a block, and you can navigate up down left and right in that page.
Thats the thing people don't get about space stations. In a space station, the difference in pressure between the inside and the outside is 1 atmosphere. It is *NOT* like a balloon, its more like a bucket. You add air until it is full, and then you stop. Because the station is a rigid body (mostly) the air just sits inside it. The ISS leaks about a pound of air a day incidentally, and when they had a 'bad' leak they could not find, it was leaking 5 Lbs. of air a day. At that rate of air loss, it was described in an article as the equivalent of moving from sea level to a location at 2500 feet over the course of a day. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3882962/#.UTFbAq4Q3mY
the point is, a hole in a space station, while not a good thing, is not the catastrophic world ending 'sucked out into space' moment the way the movies describe it.
You need to read "Leviathan Wakes' by James S.A. Corey. I preemptively apologize, because its the first in a series of 3 books, and the third one does not come out until mid-summer, but therein, several of the various potato-shaped moons in the solar system have been converted into habitats by mining out the resources inside, then spinning them up over many many years to create centrifugal gravity for the tunnels inside. It even mentions that the 'cheep' living quarters, up near the axis of rotation make some people sick because of the Coriolis effect. Any ways, I love the series because of its rather bleak and realistic look at space travel. It only assumes a *few* marvelous upgrades in technology (mainly pertaining to nuclear powered thrust) but the brass tacks of going anywhere involves being miserable for long periods of time.
Leading to my statement "The sum total of human knowledge is less a list of 'how to do things' but is more a much larger list of 'The many ways to do things that do not work.' "
Don't believe me? Just try teaching someone how to do some technical task; inevitably, they will eventually ask 'why don't you just do X?' and there is usually an answer to the effect of "because it makes Y happen, and Y tends to remove your eyebrows' or some such. We know a thousand ways that are ineffective at sending a person to orbit. we know of half a dozen or so that tend to work pretty well ever time.
remember 'You will go to the moon!' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will_Go_to_the_Moon_(book) ? I made my mom read me that book so many times, she eventually recorded it to a cassette tape so i could just listen to it and turn the pages in the book.
And if the entire population of the world lived in the density of suburban america, It would make a city of 4 person per family suburban homes that would fill Texas. Not that this information adds to the dialogue, I just find it interesting.
I was about to post the same thing. *to the parent* the original point of HDR, when done correctly, is to make photographs and other pictures appear more realistic than a normal photograph. Part of the disconnect is, people are not used to photos looking the way your eyes would see that scene in real life. Also, people started using HDR 'artistically' with odd settings to achieve 'magical' effects where you see *past* what your eyes naturally see.
Slashdot Mirror
Our race has little interest in a voyage to even the nearest star if it is going to take that long.
That's because we're just not bored enough yet. Give us a few more thousand years to run out of other things to do.
the problem with the Alcubierre drive, is it requires "Exotic matter" to make it work. which is science speak for "We have not conclusively proven that this does not exist. Also, we have no evidence that it exists"
well, if you didn't have anything better to do, (like say, wars, disease, famine, drought, reality TV, ect.) I suppose you could divert a lot of resources into developing the technology needed to build a massive enough generation ship to make a large enough colony survive the journey.
(i'm thinking on the order of, hollow out one of Mars' moons, fit it with solar sails and fusion based propulsion, spin that bitch like a top, fill the inside with farms and people and technology and send it on its merry way).
but yes, it is an overly optimistic assumption that generation arks would work.
that obviously creates the question: "Why did they start with such a bat shit insane hypothesis?".
because based on the data they presented(created?) they peg life as starting at a point where the universe in general probably would have been hostile to its existence. What reason is there for alleging that? That is what confuses me about this whole thing.
"because all the advanced ones figured out that there is no practical way to move about the galaxy?"
my grammar betrayed me. I meant 'That' in the context of "that particular kickstarter project' I think i may have accidentally 'nouned' kickstarter.
why don't I believe any of the claims that kickstarter is making? It just feels... like a scam....
have you ever known your average Joe Consumer to actually pay attention to getting the right wattage bulb for his lamp?
"I want this to be brighter, so i'll just stick a 120 watt bulb in there"
and then the house burns down because the lamp shade is full of dead moths, and a 120 watt bulb in a 40 watt fixture.
+1 funny. +1 sad. +1 Probably going to happen.
To bad I'm out of Mod Points.
boy i hope so, I really want to tame a Hatzegopteryx to ride!
why did he use Twitter to verbally horse around with a buddy on such a touchy-assed subject? I mean, there are many, many less public means of doing that.
Because the whole thing was a microsoft ploy to see how bad the fallout will be when they ACTUALLY announce always on network requirements?
My question is, how many of them where saying "I have a *bong* in my bag" and the squirrel minded TSA agent just heard "bomb".
No, our punishment for april fools day is later in the week, when the associated press runs some of the bullshit from today as a real news story. (In their grand tradition of not paying attention to what the hell they are doing.)
this. Also, we need to cancel april fools day from now on on the internet.
It took me a while, but I finally figured out what the hell he meant by '2 Dimensional' It seems that the original Roku interface was a lot like the 'Photo Stream' or 'Album Stream' in apple products. Scroll left or right, and it pages through 200 channels. Now, its more like the Xbox home screen, with several channels displayed per page, in a block, and you can navigate up down left and right in that page.
Its still a retarded way to describe the problem.
So letting a genocidal tyrant kill off hundreds of thousands of his own people would have been better? Thanks for straightening that out for me.
Your probably thinking of the kuiper belt, which it is past. Voyager 1 is like 14,000 years from the inside edge of the Oort cloud.
not a remake, a prequel. (whose timeline ends literally 5 seconds before the start of the original).
Thats the thing people don't get about space stations. In a space station, the difference in pressure between the inside and the outside is 1 atmosphere. It is *NOT* like a balloon, its more like a bucket. You add air until it is full, and then you stop. Because the station is a rigid body (mostly) the air just sits inside it. The ISS leaks about a pound of air a day incidentally, and when they had a 'bad' leak they could not find, it was leaking 5 Lbs. of air a day. At that rate of air loss, it was described in an article as the equivalent of moving from sea level to a location at 2500 feet over the course of a day. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3882962/#.UTFbAq4Q3mY
the point is, a hole in a space station, while not a good thing, is not the catastrophic world ending 'sucked out into space' moment the way the movies describe it.
You need to read "Leviathan Wakes' by James S.A. Corey. I preemptively apologize, because its the first in a series of 3 books, and the third one does not come out until mid-summer, but therein, several of the various potato-shaped moons in the solar system have been converted into habitats by mining out the resources inside, then spinning them up over many many years to create centrifugal gravity for the tunnels inside. It even mentions that the 'cheep' living quarters, up near the axis of rotation make some people sick because of the Coriolis effect. Any ways, I love the series because of its rather bleak and realistic look at space travel. It only assumes a *few* marvelous upgrades in technology (mainly pertaining to nuclear powered thrust) but the brass tacks of going anywhere involves being miserable for long periods of time.
Leading to my statement "The sum total of human knowledge is less a list of 'how to do things' but is more a much larger list of 'The many ways to do things that do not work.' "
Don't believe me? Just try teaching someone how to do some technical task; inevitably, they will eventually ask 'why don't you just do X?' and there is usually an answer to the effect of "because it makes Y happen, and Y tends to remove your eyebrows' or some such. We know a thousand ways that are ineffective at sending a person to orbit. we know of half a dozen or so that tend to work pretty well ever time.
i'd never head that idea before, but it actually makes a lot of sense. minimal effort creating maximal usable space, with little lost material.
remember 'You will go to the moon!' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will_Go_to_the_Moon_(book) ? I made my mom read me that book so many times, she eventually recorded it to a cassette tape so i could just listen to it and turn the pages in the book.
And if the entire population of the world lived in the density of suburban america, It would make a city of 4 person per family suburban homes that would fill Texas. Not that this information adds to the dialogue, I just find it interesting.
I was about to post the same thing. *to the parent* the original point of HDR, when done correctly, is to make photographs and other pictures appear more realistic than a normal photograph. Part of the disconnect is, people are not used to photos looking the way your eyes would see that scene in real life. Also, people started using HDR 'artistically' with odd settings to achieve 'magical' effects where you see *past* what your eyes naturally see.