Even though I am not di-or-paraplegic, I had a rash when I read the title and the summary. I didn't even know such studies were underway!
Why... such studies have been underway for quite a while. In fact, "repairing" spinal cord damage is one of the holy grails of science, that's unfortunately always at least two decades away. It's a bit like controlled, energy-positive nuclear fusion.
Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.
Messenger would have been a golden opportunity to try a solar sail.
You usually don't want to try new and untested propulsion methods on a half-a-billion-dollars science mission. You pick a cheaper mission that has testing the new propulsion method as one of its main objectives, while doing some science on the side, e.g. SMART-1.
Here's a hypothetical for someone more knowledgable on the subject: if we had a spacecraft capable of faster than light travel (think Starship Trooper troop carriers or Alien quadrilogy mining ships)
Hm, it's been a while since I watched the movies, but isn't space travel in the Alien series a long and tedious sub-light process that requires the crew to spend much of their time in cryosleep ?
Would you calibrate it off Earth's known position in space (is it known?) and go from there or could you go off the stars your computer can see and identify - and would they move enough (relative to your position) to give you an accurate speed and direction?
You could probably use other objects of interest, not just stars - for example pulsars. Just like on the Voyager golden records.
What we should actually be doing is building massive solar panels in orbit around the sun, so many that they gather all the energy emitted by the star.
The Goldilocks zone of course being the area around the sun where liquid water can exist. Not too hot and not too cold.
I think that any star that has all of its energy collected by solar panels doesn't have a Goldilocks zone anymore. Even Venus would freeze over in that case.
Why would you buy it? What on earth can you do with this?
If you have to ask the last question (i.e. you cannot name at least five things you would do with it), then you geek license is revoked immediately. Have a nice day.
Heck, the thing can run Nethack. Do you need _more_ reasons to buy one ?
We have been scanning the skies with powerful equipment and so far have come up with little to no evidence of such transmissions.
Erm, hate to bust your bubble, but we've scanned part of the sky, and in a very narrow frequency range, for transmissions that must have been meant for crossing interstellar distances. If there was another Earth circling around Alpha Centauri, we'd have no idea it was there.
We already have the technology to image planets in other star systems, it's just that no one is willing to spend the money on it. By throwing enough money at the problem, we could already detect and analyze Earth-like worlds around other stars.
So, if the aliens have our level of technology or better, and are willing go through the effort, they could easily find Earth.
Now I may be missing something here, but when last I checked, the government's responsibility to the people was to protect them from threats to their safety, both domestic and foreign.
That other galaxy is just in the way of new intergalactic superhighway. What's blasting a whole galaxy to smithereens compared to reaching all the interesting places in less that a billion years ?
When the govenrment is involved in education the government will teach it's agenda to your kids.
Not in a system where teachers are government officials that cannot be fired except for truly outstanding circumstances (no, "not teaching the current governments agenda" doesn't count here).
One of the main applications for this will be when galvanic isolation of the components is required. This has fairly little to do with fuel tanks, but is interesting for various medical applications, applications in humid environments, and so on.
Or perhaps considered that's why only a few diesels for 2008 have finally cleaned up their act enough to actually be legal for sale in the US and are still in the highest polluting category of cars?
As long as you measure pollution in (pollutants)/(unit of fuel burned), even a 1000 mpg diesel wouldn't be legal, but a 10 mpg H3 would.
Keep in mind that Diesel engines seem to get such great mileage because their fuel is more energy-dense.
Diesel engines are also more efficient due to much higher compression ratios. Even if diesel fuel had the same energy content as gasoline, the diesel-powered vehicle would get a better mileage.
If a gasoline engine got 35mpg, you could expect a Diesel of the same efficiency to get 39mpg. What you really want to compare is how much carbon they emit per mile.
Even in the latter, modern diesel engines can easily kick any gasoline engines butt. (Unless you run the gasoline engine with fuels that contain less carbon than gasoline, like autogas or natural gas).
As an aside, what proof is there that oil is NOT being produced inside the Earth at the same or even a greater rate than it is being harvested by extraction?
The simple fact that this planet isn't flooded with oil yet should suffice.
Oil has been extracted for, what, two full centuries now ? And our planet would have had, what, a couple of hundred million years to make oil ? That would mean that we should basically be swimming in the stuff, which we aren't. So oil formation, whether biotic or abiotic, happens at a time scale that's several orders of magnitude slower than oil extraction by humans.
Any civilization that has the means to send anything our way (death star, killer robots, whatever) also has the means to detect our little rock and that there are some highly unusual things about it.
Just think about what we could do with a few advanced versions of Hubble out in the Kuiper belt. And any civilization capable of crossing interstellar distances is probably even more advanced than that.
In short: "They haven't found us yet." definitely is not the reason that we haven't been contacted by aliens. It's "they don't exist/are too far away", "they don't have the technology either" or "they're not interested/don't want to".
A laser need to be shined in to your eyes to blind you.
And you're willing to bet your eye on that ? I'm afraid you just lost. Get your information about laser safety from a real book about it instead of pulling it out of your ass, and you might be able to keep your eye.
If this laser is shined into your eyes, your head will be vaporized.
Most likely. But irrelevant.
You can look at a laser, as long as the beam isn't shone(shined?) directly into your remaining eye.
This thing is powerful enough that a diffuse (not even specular) reflection will ruin your eyesight in less time than it will take you to blink.
Sure, they'll receive a hard slap on the wrists and a very stern talking-to. Maybe even a dishonorable discharge. Anything more severe will only happen if it's politically opportune or really unavoidable (i.e. they've committed really depraved atrocities instead of just regular ones).
For the U.S., that's the scarier scenario, since we don't have any nearby ICBM-capable nations that are likely to fire them at us. But lots of our allies do.
Isn't the point of an ICBM that you don't have to be "nearby" to hit your target (as in Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) ? If you're already close to your target, use an artillery shell or a cruise missile.
Evaluating the massive bombings of World War II as failures is misguided as those bombings destroyed much German and Japanese infrastructure which was key in an Allied victory.
They were failures in the sense that they could have been more effective at stopping the Axis' military if a larger percentage of the bombs had actually been dropped on critical infrastructure (factories, refineries, railway stations, airfields and the like) instead of incinerating the population centers and trying to "break enemy morale". "Morale bombing" didn't work. It didn't work for the Germans against England, it didn't work for the Allies. But it sounds better to the ears of politicians than "We knock that factory out and make sure it stays out.".
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Why
Even though the issue is of personal importance to me, I won't be holding my breath until a good solution comes out.
You usually don't want to try new and untested propulsion methods on a half-a-billion-dollars science mission. You pick a cheaper mission that has testing the new propulsion method as one of its main objectives, while doing some science on the side, e.g. SMART-1.
Hm, it's been a while since I watched the movies, but isn't space travel in the Alien series a long and tedious sub-light process that requires the crew to spend much of their time in cryosleep ?
Would you calibrate it off Earth's known position in space (is it known?) and go from there or could you go off the stars your computer can see and identify - and would they move enough (relative to your position) to give you an accurate speed and direction?
You could probably use other objects of interest, not just stars - for example pulsars. Just like on the Voyager golden records.
Funny
The Goldilocks zone of course being the area around the sun where liquid water can exist. Not too hot and not too cold.
I think that any star that has all of its energy collected by solar panels doesn't have a Goldilocks zone anymore. Even Venus would freeze over in that case.
If you have to ask the last question (i.e. you cannot name at least five things you would do with it), then you geek license is revoked immediately. Have a nice day.
Heck, the thing can run Nethack. Do you need _more_ reasons to buy one ?
Erm, hate to bust your bubble, but we've scanned part of the sky, and in a very narrow frequency range, for transmissions that must have been meant for crossing interstellar distances. If there was another Earth circling around Alpha Centauri, we'd have no idea it was there.
So, if the aliens have our level of technology or better, and are willing go through the effort, they could easily find Earth.
Don't forget skiing. Forget Aspen, Mars is the new place to be.
Republic: The position of head honcho in the country isn't hereditary.
Democracy: People get to vote on stuff. (Stuff being representatives, bills, or other things depending on the flavor of democracy)
Where did you "check" that ?
That other galaxy is just in the way of new intergalactic superhighway. What's blasting a whole galaxy to smithereens compared to reaching all the interesting places in less that a billion years ?
Not in a system where teachers are government officials that cannot be fired except for truly outstanding circumstances (no, "not teaching the current governments agenda" doesn't count here).
One of the main applications for this will be when galvanic isolation of the components is required. This has fairly little to do with fuel tanks, but is interesting for various medical applications, applications in humid environments, and so on.
As long as you measure pollution in (pollutants)/(unit of fuel burned), even a 1000 mpg diesel wouldn't be legal, but a 10 mpg H3 would.
How about you stop kidding yourself ?
Diesel engines are also more efficient due to much higher compression ratios. Even if diesel fuel had the same energy content as gasoline, the diesel-powered vehicle would get a better mileage.
If a gasoline engine got 35mpg, you could expect a Diesel of the same efficiency to get 39mpg. What you really want to compare is how much carbon they emit per mile.
Even in the latter, modern diesel engines can easily kick any gasoline engines butt. (Unless you run the gasoline engine with fuels that contain less carbon than gasoline, like autogas or natural gas).
The simple fact that this planet isn't flooded with oil yet should suffice.
Oil has been extracted for, what, two full centuries now ? And our planet would have had, what, a couple of hundred million years to make oil ? That would mean that we should basically be swimming in the stuff, which we aren't. So oil formation, whether biotic or abiotic, happens at a time scale that's several orders of magnitude slower than oil extraction by humans.
Just think about what we could do with a few advanced versions of Hubble out in the Kuiper belt. And any civilization capable of crossing interstellar distances is probably even more advanced than that.
In short: "They haven't found us yet." definitely is not the reason that we haven't been contacted by aliens. It's "they don't exist/are too far away", "they don't have the technology either" or "they're not interested/don't want to".
And you're willing to bet your eye on that ? I'm afraid you just lost. Get your information about laser safety from a real book about it instead of pulling it out of your ass, and you might be able to keep your eye.
If this laser is shined into your eyes, your head will be vaporized.
Most likely. But irrelevant.
You can look at a laser, as long as the beam isn't shone(shined?) directly into your remaining eye.
This thing is powerful enough that a diffuse (not even specular) reflection will ruin your eyesight in less time than it will take you to blink.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety
Military members are held responsible.
Sure, they'll receive a hard slap on the wrists and a very stern talking-to. Maybe even a dishonorable discharge. Anything more severe will only happen if it's politically opportune or really unavoidable (i.e. they've committed really depraved atrocities instead of just regular ones).
Isn't the point of an ICBM that you don't have to be "nearby" to hit your target (as in Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) ? If you're already close to your target, use an artillery shell or a cruise missile.
They were failures in the sense that they could have been more effective at stopping the Axis' military if a larger percentage of the bombs had actually been dropped on critical infrastructure (factories, refineries, railway stations, airfields and the like) instead of incinerating the population centers and trying to "break enemy morale". "Morale bombing" didn't work. It didn't work for the Germans against England, it didn't work for the Allies. But it sounds better to the ears of politicians than "We knock that factory out and make sure it stays out.".
What if you believe that your adversary is easily beatable ? Why not go out and beat him right now, just to, you know, make some facts ?
"Crowd ? What crowd, sir ?"