The fact is, there is a proven link between physical health, and mental ability.
Yes, and that link is (mental ability) -> (higher probability of good physical health), because smart people usually know that a) being an obese, sickly couch potato is no fun, and diabetes and heart attacks suck royally and b) the human body needs maintenance and can take some things only in moderation, or it will turn into an obese, sickly couch potato, become diabetic and/or have heart attacks.
I'm sure Dr. Hawking would disagree. And many others, too.
And the often-quoted Latin phrase refers to completely different things - the "obvious" one in the context being what to pray for ("You should pray for a healthy mind and a healthy body, (not the bazillion of other things contemporary Romans asked the gods for.)"), and the more hidden one (since the author Juvenal was a satirist) being "It would be nice if all these healthy bodies (that he's seeing everywhere, athletes, sport idols, etc) also had healthy minds in them (which they usually don't)."
Let's say you're 18, on the vocational track of your high school, and suddenly you decide that you're actually pretty smart and you want a white-collar job and you want to go to university. Guess what? You are screwed! Forget about it. You already made that choice back when you were 16. There is no mind-changing!
In that case, the implementation is flawed, not the system itself. In Germany, for example, you can change your mind at almost any time and switch school tracks. Of course, if you're aiming for a higher level of education, this means more more since you'll have to make up for all the stuff you've missed so far. Heck, you can even get any diploma after you've finished school. If you find out after 10 years of work that you'd rather pursue an academic career, and you're willing to put lots and lots of work into it, there's no one telling you that you can't do that.
Let's take France as an example, since I'm most familiar with it. If you're starting your third year of university and you decide that math is not for you and you'd rather go into engineering, guess what? Back to the end of the line! You get to start over from freshman year. Never mind that 90% of your courses would still apply. Never mind that you already know calculus backwards and forwards; take it again! You've just wasted two years of your life?
That, and the following example, sound like an absurdly flawed implementation of a basically workable system if true. Here in Germany, several of my classmates changed their majors, and they were able to carry over all applicable credit hours.
But, hey, if I wanted to start Ph.D. studies in the States, I'd have to do all this GRE standardized test BS again, nevermind that I already did it and was actually received an offer for Ph.D. studies once. I guess the testing companies want their share of my money regardless.
The American system is vastly better in this respect, and as a result I think it works a lot better at teaching creativity and free thinking, as well as adapting to each person's individual needs.
The American system, at least up to and including B.x. levels, rewards doing your homework and memorizing your stuff. _Very_ little creativity and free thinking required to ace it, just do your work and don't be lazy or sloppy.
Consider "devoweling". You go through their post, or use software, to remove each and ever vowel.
Then you blame it on a strange technical glicht you'll investigate ASAP.
It's too obvious. I'd much rather manipulate their posts so that only the first couple of words appear, or the last couple of words, or just a number of contiguous words from the posting. Blame it on "packet loss" or "server hickups".
I would assume that the polar regions of Venus could be habitable, and something could be done with the rest (power generation ? Robotic operations ? Underground habitats ?)
If you manage to get enough water on the planet (via comet/chunks of space ice/whatever), you could also try to pump the heat around the planet, cooling the habitats on the "day" side and heating the habitats on the "night" side. Having a few thousing kilometers of pipes and pumps probably isn't rocket science, just plumbing.
Well, that's the point. IF we could go and get rid of all the CO2 on Venus, which is a pretty tall order, we would then have a planet that would bake on one side while freezing on the other. It would still be completely unlivable. The planet just sucks.
Well, we have places on Earth where night and day are half a year long, each. I would assume that the polar regions of Venus could be habitable, and something could be done with the rest (power generation ? Robotic operations ? Underground habitats ?). The atmosphere (and getting rid of it, somehow) is the largest problem.
In an infinitely long thread, you are absolutely certain to have at least one mention of every single concept, object, philosophy and idea ever known to humanity, because of the way probability works.
Only if the thread is irrational (just like you can find any combination of numbers in pi or e). In a nice, rational thread, you'll eventually get repetitions and the thread will loop back to itself.
Eh, I seriously doubt that is going to be much of a problem. Thermal pollution IS a significant issue on Earth, ask anyone thats run a power plant...
Well, on the moon, you don't even have the option to pollute thermally into the atmosphere or the hydrosphere. You can get rid of waste heat by radiation (fairly inefficient) or maybe by somehow sinking it into the regolith, but I doubt that that's feasible.
Yeah, I disagree. Nobody is going to do dirty stuff INSIDE their controlled environment!
The problem is that on a lunar base, most of the dirt will need to be recycled (especially anything containing carbon), so venting it outside may be the energetically worse choice than keeping it inside and recycling it.
Once you have engineering experience in space environments I suspect those issues are not going to be any bigger than they are anyplace.
Well, you're probably going to do everything robotically, but even simple things like farming are going to be a lot more expensive than on Earth. And the robots that are farming aren't working in manufacturing.
The equipment we put in space now deals with all the same considerations, and they don't appear to be all that difficult to deal with.
True, but then we don't have an large-scale equipment outside of LEO or even on the surface of another celestial body. And satellites do get struck by micrometeorites or space junk once in a while.
And why exactly would our hypothetical Lunar Civilization NOT have that capability?
Well, if Earth lets themselves be boxed in, they're pwned. Hence, they're going to fight any attempt of a colony setting up their own communications infrastructure around Earth tooth and claw.
This happens mainly in the apocalypses, and it is a relatively minor problem, affecting only a small number of verses.
My favorite is actually Job 12, 10. The more "literal" translations imply that every living thing has a soul, while the more theologically slanted translations go through great lengths to avoid that.
Also in the longer term I wonder just how much more expensive it will be to live on the Moon say, where energy is far more available,
I doubt that. And for most forms of large-scale energy generation, you're lacking one thing: An easily available way to sink heat (on Earth, you've got rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere).
pollution is not a concern,
Pollution is a _huge_ concern, because it will put extra strain on the life support facilities before it can be removed from the "inside" and dumped somewhere on the "outside", and the moon base will have a lot less "environment" to dilute the pollution than Earth. And if the people on the moon somehow come up with minimum-pollution ways of manufacturing and generating energy, Earth will have them, too.
Inevitably their technical capabilities will surpass any possessed by Earth
Possibly, but they will still have to expend way more energy, material, labor and research just to keep themselves alive.
Consider, once you build something on the Moon or in space, it is THERE, no wind erodes it, no floods or hurricanes damage it.
Consider, once you build something on Earth, it doesn't get hit by micrometeorites, the solar wind, solar flares or other cosmic radation.
And any launch from Earth must be energetic and thus can't really be 'stealthy'.
That might be a point, but unless you've got a spy satellite network around Earth, they can just launch/thrust when you can't see it.
What I propose instead is to put a heat pump system - think window AC unit or dehumidifier, into the mix. It pulls the energy in a very active fashion from the expelled air, putting it in the incoming air.
Congratulations, you've just described a condensation dryer. Not sure whether they sell those in the stone-age land of appliances (US), but on the other side of the pond they're fairly popular if you don't have a way to exhaust the air to the outside and don't want to get your place all humid and moldy. The newer, more expensive ones do actually use a heat pump, the less expensive ones use a regular, passive heat exchanger.
The length of the day doesn't really change the solar energy input into the system.
In fact, it just makes Venus' example more dramatic. If it wasn't for the massive greenhouse effect, Venus' night side should be freezing - which it isn't. It's pretty much the same hellhole as the day side.
Everything Earth does in space is going to be 10-100x more expensive than what your Lunar Civilization can do.
Just supporting the population of the lunar base is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than supporting the same number of people on Earth. And you're not doing any space operations yet, just making sure that there's no population shrinkage from lack of breathable air, food, water, power, etc. And the effort the lunar base sticks into bringing the cost of life support down Earth can easily put into making space launches less expensive (space elevator, electro-magnetic launch system, etc)
Webhosting is only a utility for a very loose definition of utility (most common definitions wouldn't include it). Come back when you've added, say, telecommunications services (as in: your company is actually responsible for getting data from point A to point B, you offer phone/internet/etc services) to your portfolio, and then we might consider you a utility provider.
ROFL! The military position of any decent infrastructure on the Moon would TOTALLY dominate near-earth space.
You've read too much Heinlein.
You have limitless power and throwaway mass you can easily hoist to Earth. While Earth has to send its weapons UP the gravity well. Good luck Earth.
You have to send weapons up the gravity well, too. A smaller one, but still a gravity well. And nukes aren't terribly heavy.
And who says that Earth would just sit idly while build up your own military ?
Also, Earth can take hits _much_ better than your fragile little base on the moon. You hit a city on Earth - people die. Earth hits something critical in your little base (power, life support, heck, what _isn't_ critical in space), and the environment (or lack thereof) takes care of the rest, or at least vastly amplifies the destructive effect. Additionally, Earth has an atmosphere that takes care of most objects that aren't either very massive or shielded for re-entry. Even if Earth doesn't use nukes, they can hit you with _much_ smaller rocks than you'd have to throw back at Earth.
Within a few decades of being self-sufficient any lunar or free space facility would achieve breakout military capability,
Good luck doing that before Earth notices. You're still within easy communication reach, and nothing you do will go unnoticed.
One person going off his rocker and tossing a standard grenade at this bubble would cause the entire city to crash to the surface and melt.
You can have plenty of air chambers and redundancy. Just like you can't get a (helium-filled) airship to crash just by puncturing one or two of the helium chambers.
Can anyone tell me if anyone's looked into the possibilities of these excessive pressurized rock planets having superconductors on the surface considering the recent advances in presurized metals becoming superconductors at room temps?
Room temperature on Venus is 450C. Good luck getting anything to superconduct there. You may have much, much better luck on Mars, or even farther out. Hey, that might make creating an artificial magnetosphere for Mars much, much easier if you don't have to cool the superconductors that much.
Comebined with the fact there's a lot of acid, how electrically active is such a planet?p
There's some lightning.
(Mars, afaik, would be terraform resistant due to lack of a protective magnetosphere to keep the atmo around)
If we're talking superconstructions, how about creating an artificial magnetosphere ? That should only be a matter of size, superconductors, and power plants to supply juice to the whole thing...
Thus, the curious mind might be tempted to reasonably ask, why is Venus not 2250 times as hot as the earth?
Because no one who knows the science behind it and is in their right mind would suggest a completely linear relationship between "mass of CO2 in the atmosphere" and "surface temperature of planet". You can linearize it around a point, but the difference between Venus and Earth is so massive that a linearization for one of the planet will be completely bogus if applied to the other. (The heat loss by radiation, for example, is proportional to the fsckin' 4th power of the temperature. And that's just one of lots of nonlinearities.)
Or, conversely, if we examine the two knowns of CO2 planetary heating in the entire human experience, we could probably conclude that a doubling of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere would yield a fraction of a degree in heating, not the massive amounts of heating preached to us by the IPCC.
CO2 amounts for about 10% of the total greenhouse effect on Earth (i.e. the difference in temperature between an atmosphere-less black body receiving the same solar irradiance (-18C), and the actual avergae temperature of Earth's surface (14C) )... so about 3.2 degrees.
The problem with Earth is that _any_ warming will trigger a number of positive feedback effects, such as increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (which is also a greenhouse gas, and amounts for a whopping 36% of the total greenhouse effect mentioned above), liberating trapped methane from clathrates and previous permafrost areas, reducing the planets albedo by reducing ice cover, etc, etc.
Let's say the doctor thinks you have cancer of some sort, but he needs an MRI to confirm his diagnosis. How many months or years will you have to wait for that?
Well, where I live, that'll happen extremely quickly. Somehow, MRI machines have popped up even in the total neck of the woods where I live, and they need to keep them busy by doing MRIs for frickin' _knee pain_. And yes, I've had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing the spread of these things from "2 in the whole country, and your case _better_ warrant use of them, i.e. you've got a brain tumor or something similar" in 1984 to "Oh, your knee hurts ? Come in next week and we'll take a MRI to see where the problem is".
If it turns out to be a particularly nasty form of cancer, what are the odds you'll still be alive when there's an opening at the radiology clinic?
Pretty good, from all the various cancer cases I was able to observe in my circle of friends and relatives. The only person who died before receiving treatment never actually went to the hospital, because he believed all he needed was fresh air and sunshine for the lump to go away.
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The problem is that's it is an even bigger amplifier of noise, nonsense and flat-out BS. Hence, the S/N ratio drops considerably.
The fact is, there is a proven link between physical health, and mental ability.
Yes, and that link is (mental ability) -> (higher probability of good physical health), because smart people usually know that a) being an obese, sickly couch potato is no fun, and diabetes and heart attacks suck royally and b) the human body needs maintenance and can take some things only in moderation, or it will turn into an obese, sickly couch potato, become diabetic and/or have heart attacks.
When a body is healthy, the brain is healthy.
I'm sure Dr. Hawking would disagree. And many others, too.
And the often-quoted Latin phrase refers to completely different things - the "obvious" one in the context being what to pray for ("You should pray for a healthy mind and a healthy body, (not the bazillion of other things contemporary Romans asked the gods for.)"), and the more hidden one (since the author Juvenal was a satirist) being "It would be nice if all these healthy bodies (that he's seeing everywhere, athletes, sport idols, etc) also had healthy minds in them (which they usually don't)."
Let's say you're 18, on the vocational track of your high school, and suddenly you decide that you're actually pretty smart and you want a white-collar job and you want to go to university. Guess what? You are screwed! Forget about it. You already made that choice back when you were 16. There is no mind-changing!
In that case, the implementation is flawed, not the system itself. In Germany, for example, you can change your mind at almost any time and switch school tracks. Of course, if you're aiming for a higher level of education, this means more more since you'll have to make up for all the stuff you've missed so far. Heck, you can even get any diploma after you've finished school. If you find out after 10 years of work that you'd rather pursue an academic career, and you're willing to put lots and lots of work into it, there's no one telling you that you can't do that.
Let's take France as an example, since I'm most familiar with it. If you're starting your third year of university and you decide that math is not for you and you'd rather go into engineering, guess what? Back to the end of the line! You get to start over from freshman year. Never mind that 90% of your courses would still apply. Never mind that you already know calculus backwards and forwards; take it again! You've just wasted two years of your life?
That, and the following example, sound like an absurdly flawed implementation of a basically workable system if true. Here in Germany, several of my classmates changed their majors, and they were able to carry over all applicable credit hours.
But, hey, if I wanted to start Ph.D. studies in the States, I'd have to do all this GRE standardized test BS again, nevermind that I already did it and was actually received an offer for Ph.D. studies once. I guess the testing companies want their share of my money regardless.
The American system is vastly better in this respect, and as a result I think it works a lot better at teaching creativity and free thinking, as well as adapting to each person's individual needs.
The American system, at least up to and including B.x. levels, rewards doing your homework and memorizing your stuff. _Very_ little creativity and free thinking required to ace it, just do your work and don't be lazy or sloppy.
How is it valid to design something that could fail if simply left on for too long?
Um, about anything will fail if left on for too long. Especially if it has moving parts.
It's too obvious. I'd much rather manipulate their posts so that only the first couple of words appear, or the last couple of words, or just a number of contiguous words from the posting. Blame it on "packet loss" or "server hickups".
What if they have another account and just go check ? Or, if it's a forum that can be read without logging in, they just check that way ?
If you manage to get enough water on the planet (via comet/chunks of space ice/whatever), you could also try to pump the heat around the planet, cooling the habitats on the "day" side and heating the habitats on the "night" side. Having a few thousing kilometers of pipes and pumps probably isn't rocket science, just plumbing.
Well, we have places on Earth where night and day are half a year long, each. I would assume that the polar regions of Venus could be habitable, and something could be done with the rest (power generation ? Robotic operations ? Underground habitats ?). The atmosphere (and getting rid of it, somehow) is the largest problem.
Who the hell runs from a 2 year bid at a club fed?
People who make a living peddling v146ra to people dumber than they are ?
In an infinitely long thread, you are absolutely certain to have at least one mention of every single concept, object, philosophy and idea ever known to humanity, because of the way probability works.
Only if the thread is irrational (just like you can find any combination of numbers in pi or e). In a nice, rational thread, you'll eventually get repetitions and the thread will loop back to itself.
Well, on the moon, you don't even have the option to pollute thermally into the atmosphere or the hydrosphere. You can get rid of waste heat by radiation (fairly inefficient) or maybe by somehow sinking it into the regolith, but I doubt that that's feasible.
Yeah, I disagree. Nobody is going to do dirty stuff INSIDE their controlled environment!
The problem is that on a lunar base, most of the dirt will need to be recycled (especially anything containing carbon), so venting it outside may be the energetically worse choice than keeping it inside and recycling it.
Once you have engineering experience in space environments I suspect those issues are not going to be any bigger than they are anyplace.
Well, you're probably going to do everything robotically, but even simple things like farming are going to be a lot more expensive than on Earth. And the robots that are farming aren't working in manufacturing.
The equipment we put in space now deals with all the same considerations, and they don't appear to be all that difficult to deal with.
True, but then we don't have an large-scale equipment outside of LEO or even on the surface of another celestial body. And satellites do get struck by micrometeorites or space junk once in a while.
And why exactly would our hypothetical Lunar Civilization NOT have that capability?
Well, if Earth lets themselves be boxed in, they're pwned. Hence, they're going to fight any attempt of a colony setting up their own communications infrastructure around Earth tooth and claw.
This happens mainly in the apocalypses, and it is a relatively minor problem, affecting only a small number of verses.
My favorite is actually Job 12, 10. The more "literal" translations imply that every living thing has a soul, while the more theologically slanted translations go through great lengths to avoid that.
I doubt that. And for most forms of large-scale energy generation, you're lacking one thing: An easily available way to sink heat (on Earth, you've got rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere).
pollution is not a concern,
Pollution is a _huge_ concern, because it will put extra strain on the life support facilities before it can be removed from the "inside" and dumped somewhere on the "outside", and the moon base will have a lot less "environment" to dilute the pollution than Earth. And if the people on the moon somehow come up with minimum-pollution ways of manufacturing and generating energy, Earth will have them, too.
Inevitably their technical capabilities will surpass any possessed by Earth
Possibly, but they will still have to expend way more energy, material, labor and research just to keep themselves alive.
Consider, once you build something on the Moon or in space, it is THERE, no wind erodes it, no floods or hurricanes damage it.
Consider, once you build something on Earth, it doesn't get hit by micrometeorites, the solar wind, solar flares or other cosmic radation.
And any launch from Earth must be energetic and thus can't really be 'stealthy'.
That might be a point, but unless you've got a spy satellite network around Earth, they can just launch/thrust when you can't see it.
What I propose instead is to put a heat pump system - think window AC unit or dehumidifier, into the mix. It pulls the energy in a very active fashion from the expelled air, putting it in the incoming air.
Congratulations, you've just described a condensation dryer. Not sure whether they sell those in the stone-age land of appliances (US), but on the other side of the pond they're fairly popular if you don't have a way to exhaust the air to the outside and don't want to get your place all humid and moldy. The newer, more expensive ones do actually use a heat pump, the less expensive ones use a regular, passive heat exchanger.
The length of the day doesn't really change the solar energy input into the system.
In fact, it just makes Venus' example more dramatic. If it wasn't for the massive greenhouse effect, Venus' night side should be freezing - which it isn't. It's pretty much the same hellhole as the day side.
Just supporting the population of the lunar base is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than supporting the same number of people on Earth. And you're not doing any space operations yet, just making sure that there's no population shrinkage from lack of breathable air, food, water, power, etc. And the effort the lunar base sticks into bringing the cost of life support down Earth can easily put into making space launches less expensive (space elevator, electro-magnetic launch system, etc)
I am a for profit utility provider so I'm evil?
Webhosting is only a utility for a very loose definition of utility (most common definitions wouldn't include it). Come back when you've added, say, telecommunications services (as in: your company is actually responsible for getting data from point A to point B, you offer phone/internet/etc services) to your portfolio, and then we might consider you a utility provider.
You've read too much Heinlein.
You have limitless power and throwaway mass you can easily hoist to Earth. While Earth has to send its weapons UP the gravity well. Good luck Earth.
You have to send weapons up the gravity well, too. A smaller one, but still a gravity well. And nukes aren't terribly heavy.
And who says that Earth would just sit idly while build up your own military ?
Also, Earth can take hits _much_ better than your fragile little base on the moon. You hit a city on Earth - people die. Earth hits something critical in your little base (power, life support, heck, what _isn't_ critical in space), and the environment (or lack thereof) takes care of the rest, or at least vastly amplifies the destructive effect. Additionally, Earth has an atmosphere that takes care of most objects that aren't either very massive or shielded for re-entry. Even if Earth doesn't use nukes, they can hit you with _much_ smaller rocks than you'd have to throw back at Earth.
Within a few decades of being self-sufficient any lunar or free space facility would achieve breakout military capability,
Good luck doing that before Earth notices. You're still within easy communication reach, and nothing you do will go unnoticed.
You can have plenty of air chambers and redundancy. Just like you can't get a (helium-filled) airship to crash just by puncturing one or two of the helium chambers.
Room temperature on Venus is 450C. Good luck getting anything to superconduct there. You may have much, much better luck on Mars, or even farther out. Hey, that might make creating an artificial magnetosphere for Mars much, much easier if you don't have to cool the superconductors that much.
Comebined with the fact there's a lot of acid, how electrically active is such a planet?p There's some lightning.
Because the weather forecast for all of Venus' surface is: Cloudy, 450 C, 92 bar pressure.
If we're talking superconstructions, how about creating an artificial magnetosphere ? That should only be a matter of size, superconductors, and power plants to supply juice to the whole thing ...
Thus, the curious mind might be tempted to reasonably ask, why is Venus not 2250 times as hot as the earth?
Because no one who knows the science behind it and is in their right mind would suggest a completely linear relationship between "mass of CO2 in the atmosphere" and "surface temperature of planet". You can linearize it around a point, but the difference between Venus and Earth is so massive that a linearization for one of the planet will be completely bogus if applied to the other. (The heat loss by radiation, for example, is proportional to the fsckin' 4th power of the temperature. And that's just one of lots of nonlinearities.)
Or, conversely, if we examine the two knowns of CO2 planetary heating in the entire human experience, we could probably conclude that a doubling of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere would yield a fraction of a degree in heating, not the massive amounts of heating preached to us by the IPCC.
CO2 amounts for about 10% of the total greenhouse effect on Earth (i.e. the difference in temperature between an atmosphere-less black body receiving the same solar irradiance (-18C), and the actual avergae temperature of Earth's surface (14C) ) ... so about 3.2 degrees.
The problem with Earth is that _any_ warming will trigger a number of positive feedback effects, such as increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (which is also a greenhouse gas, and amounts for a whopping 36% of the total greenhouse effect mentioned above), liberating trapped methane from clathrates and previous permafrost areas, reducing the planets albedo by reducing ice cover, etc, etc.
Well, where I live, that'll happen extremely quickly. Somehow, MRI machines have popped up even in the total neck of the woods where I live, and they need to keep them busy by doing MRIs for frickin' _knee pain_. And yes, I've had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing the spread of these things from "2 in the whole country, and your case _better_ warrant use of them, i.e. you've got a brain tumor or something similar" in 1984 to "Oh, your knee hurts ? Come in next week and we'll take a MRI to see where the problem is".
If it turns out to be a particularly nasty form of cancer, what are the odds you'll still be alive when there's an opening at the radiology clinic?
Pretty good, from all the various cancer cases I was able to observe in my circle of friends and relatives. The only person who died before receiving treatment never actually went to the hospital, because he believed all he needed was fresh air and sunshine for the lump to go away.