Huh, 2 tablespoons of Mercury weigh a pound? What planet are these guys living on? They're off by a factor of _ten_ (22 tablespoons of Mercury weigh about a pount, assuming 15 ml per Tsp).
Its main advantage is that it is a very easily portable and storable form of energy
I'd like you to carry a two dozen kilowatt-hours of electric energy down the stairs and store them for a year, and I'll do the same with two dozen kilowatt-hours of, say, energy stored in chemical form. Can you guess who just picked the easier job?
Electric energy is fairly easy to distribute (however, chemical energy comes close), and is extremely versatile. It sucks at basically everything else (storage density/decay, efficiency, etc).
There's already a crapton of mercury in the environment. So much in fact, that it's becoming dangerous to eat too much fish. They absorb it, it never leaves their system, and then you eat them.
The question is: Do you spew more craptons of mercury into the environment by using incandescent lamps (since you need more power and hence need to burn more mercury-containing coal), or by using CFLs?
Isn't that what the story in the link is mainly about?
Now that you mention it, yes. Why a product that's been on the market for years now is considered _news_ is beyond me, though. Or is it just that the US is lagging so far behind in lighting technology that is actually is _news_ over there?
Stick a halogen light bulb inside an incandescent light bulb. That's what they sell around here to replace incandescent bulbs once they're no longer sold. Nice spectrum, no warm-up time, longer lifetime than the incandescent bulb it replaces, 30% less energy used compared to the incandescent.
Does this experiment mean we'll be seeing some sort of plasma weapon any time soon?
On most things we want to kill, bullets work just fine. Also, any kind of plasma weapon is probably totally useless if not in a vacuum, and marginally useful in a vacuum (can probably be deflected or dispersed with a big frickin' magnet).
Scenario 1: Humans land at the safest and therefore most boring possible site on the planet, drive a few miles per day for a few days, and return with some rocks and soil.
Right now, there aren't any boring landing sites for a manned Mars mission.
I'd pick 2. Robots may be slow, but they have the time.
They're still quite a ways from interesting tasks that would be trivial for a human. Like checking out a Martian cave. Or getting a good description of the texture of the soil. Or even the most simple mechanical repair tasks.
Also, considering that a fission powered ion engine has the potential of reducing trips to other planets from several years to several months, it would probably total-dose exposure of the crew (given the same level of protection for each mission).
That's a good point.
Perhaps this can be circumvented by finding fissile material on asteroids and turning that into nuclear fuel.
I think there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. To refine fissile material, you need huge amount of equipment and power. And to get all of that into space and to where it's needed, you'll probably need nuclear power.
A robot that can perform these tasks as well as a human would either be as shitty as a human, weigh a few orders of magnitude more, or decide that humans are obsolete and start a war of annihilation somewhere during the testing phase.
Seriously. A human could walk a few miles on Mars, turn over a few rocks, avoid getting stuck on a rock, dig a one-meter deep hole, make sure those interesting soil samples from the hole actually end up inside the analyzer, and maybe grab a flashlight and have a look inside that interesting-looking cave on Mars, all in one day. You'd probably need one robot for each of these tasks, providing that you know well ahead of time that you're going to face them (oops, didn't anticipate the interesting-looking cave? Well, those Martian cave paintings are going to go undiscovered, then).
Colonizing such a region is about THE STUPIDEST IDEA I could ever imagine.
You're not looking at the bright side. There are no terrorists, and, if you hurry, no commies, either.
Also, are you really suggesting that the crew of a moon base walk around in space suits all the time? What's that "base" part for, then? And a leak in a space suit isn't a death sentence, at least not immediately.
Energy supply is the biggest problem out around Saturn so we would have to lose our phobia about operating fission reactors in space. Ion drives have very high specific impulse. With enough power it should be able to push a manned spacecraft. I also think we should look into building a hybrid fission/ion drive. In theory you could go:
The problem here is shielding. If you stick a fission reactor on an unmanned craft, you can get away with much less shielding than if you stick it on a manned craft. And with more shielding comes more weight.
But the reality is, just pulling some parts out and putting some new ones in took hours and hours of grueling labor.
Are you talking about Hubble or the ISS now? Hubble was never meant to be serviced in space, that's why it was such a pain in the rear to do so. The ISS was designed to be modular, and they've been quite successful at adding new modules to it.
All those people who talk about how freakin' pointless the ISS was will completely forget about everything that was learnt about living safely in a vacuum when we start permanently living on the Moon.
Add the latest Hubble maintenance mission to the list. That was an exercise in doing repairs while in space, without the dire consequences (apart from a few hundred million bucks) if it failed.
Aiming the thing would be the easy part; decelerating once in the moon's gravity well and in the right orientation not to kill everyone is a bit harder with a ballistic lander.
I think either the acceleration from the trebuchet or the subsequent burning up in the atmosphere on the way up would make decelerating into moon orbit a moot point.
Unless, of course, your trebuchet is several kilometers high and you can clear most of the atmosphere while being accelerated by the thing.
Hm. I wonder if we'll ever see an electro-magnetic launch system. It'd be a megaconstruction, but just think about the advantages like the efficiency of electromagnetic propulsion or the simple fact that the payload doesn't need to lug all the fuel around.
I shudder to think how many probes could be sent to Mars for the price of a single human being.
Did you also think about how much more successful a human being could be in dealing with the little problems that pop up during a mission, like getting clumpy soil samples into an analyzer or getting stuck in the sand?
Not to mention being able to move a few miles per day, not per year.
Mars has a toxic atmosphere (0.01% Earth pressure, primarily CO2).
Err... the atmosphere of Mars is hardly toxic. The partial pressure of CO2 isn't anywhere near levels required for toxicity. Of course, it doesn't contain oxygen in the partial pressure range required by humans, but that makes it about as toxic as breathing a mix of 99.9% Nitrogen and 0.1% CO2. Fatal, yes, but not because of anything toxic in the gas mixture.
If you want toxic, try everyone's favorite hellhole, Venus. Sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, etc. But of course, if you happen land on Venus, toxic compounds in the atmosphere are going to be the least of your worries.
My University here in the U.S. already rents out textbooks. One downfall that I have noticed from this is that people do not take care of their textbooks when they are not paying for them.
They _are_ paying for normal wear and tear with their rent, and if the people at the university aren't smart enough to make them pay for any damage that exceeds normal wear and tear, well, that's their problem.
But it's very interesting, nonetheless. The real question is: Does the plant tame the predator, or does the predator domesticate the plant?
Btw, no one tagged this story "symbiosis"? I can't seem to tag stories.
'In moderation drinking alcohol and not taking acetaminophen or taking acetaminophen and not drinking alcohol or not taking acetaminophen and not drinking alcohol is safe?'
In moderation drinking alcohol NAND taking acetaminophen is safe.
Hell make the label really explicit to say something like "DO NOT EXCEED 2000MG PER DAY OR YOUR LIVER WILL EXPLODE!!!!"
That's going to be really funny for people who travel abroad. "Hey, I took 2000mg of acetaminophen and 2000mg of paracetamol, and my fscking liver exploded?! WTF?"
Seriosly. As an European, I was totally lost trying to find paracetmol in the US, finally thinking that it's banned or something. Of course, that was before I found out that acetaminophen is exactly the same thing.
The question I ask is, why on earth do we allow branding of drugs?
Because most people are too dumb to remember and/or pronounce words like para-acetylaminophenol, iso-butyl-propanoic-phenolic acid or acetylsalicylic acid.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, 2 tablespoons of Mercury weigh a pound? What planet are these guys living on? They're off by a factor of _ten_ (22 tablespoons of Mercury weigh about a pount, assuming 15 ml per Tsp).
I'd like you to carry a two dozen kilowatt-hours of electric energy down the stairs and store them for a year, and I'll do the same with two dozen kilowatt-hours of, say, energy stored in chemical form. Can you guess who just picked the easier job?
Electric energy is fairly easy to distribute (however, chemical energy comes close), and is extremely versatile. It sucks at basically everything else (storage density/decay, efficiency, etc).
Great. A light bulb that draws a watt of power (or more) even when it's off! The utility companies are going to love it.
There's already a crapton of mercury in the environment. So much in fact, that it's becoming dangerous to eat too much fish. They absorb it, it never leaves their system, and then you eat them.
The question is: Do you spew more craptons of mercury into the environment by using incandescent lamps (since you need more power and hence need to burn more mercury-containing coal), or by using CFLs?
Now that you mention it, yes. Why a product that's been on the market for years now is considered _news_ is beyond me, though. Or is it just that the US is lagging so far behind in lighting technology that is actually is _news_ over there?
And the really scary thing: Compared to the other two of the big three, Ford is still doing quite well.
Stick a halogen light bulb inside an incandescent light bulb. That's what they sell around here to replace incandescent bulbs once they're no longer sold. Nice spectrum, no warm-up time, longer lifetime than the incandescent bulb it replaces, 30% less energy used compared to the incandescent.
Does this experiment mean we'll be seeing some sort of plasma weapon any time soon?
On most things we want to kill, bullets work just fine. Also, any kind of plasma weapon is probably totally useless if not in a vacuum, and marginally useful in a vacuum (can probably be deflected or dispersed with a big frickin' magnet).
Right now, there aren't any boring landing sites for a manned Mars mission.
I'd pick 2. Robots may be slow, but they have the time.
They're still quite a ways from interesting tasks that would be trivial for a human. Like checking out a Martian cave. Or getting a good description of the texture of the soil. Or even the most simple mechanical repair tasks.
That's a good point. Perhaps this can be circumvented by finding fissile material on asteroids and turning that into nuclear fuel.
I think there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. To refine fissile material, you need huge amount of equipment and power. And to get all of that into space and to where it's needed, you'll probably need nuclear power.
Means our robots are too shitty.
A robot that can perform these tasks as well as a human would either be as shitty as a human, weigh a few orders of magnitude more, or decide that humans are obsolete and start a war of annihilation somewhere during the testing phase.
Seriously. A human could walk a few miles on Mars, turn over a few rocks, avoid getting stuck on a rock, dig a one-meter deep hole, make sure those interesting soil samples from the hole actually end up inside the analyzer, and maybe grab a flashlight and have a look inside that interesting-looking cave on Mars, all in one day. You'd probably need one robot for each of these tasks, providing that you know well ahead of time that you're going to face them (oops, didn't anticipate the interesting-looking cave? Well, those Martian cave paintings are going to go undiscovered, then).
Colonizing such a region is about THE STUPIDEST IDEA I could ever imagine.
You're not looking at the bright side. There are no terrorists, and, if you hurry, no commies, either.
Also, are you really suggesting that the crew of a moon base walk around in space suits all the time? What's that "base" part for, then? And a leak in a space suit isn't a death sentence, at least not immediately.
http://www.asi.org/adb/04/03/08/suit-punctures.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-37
The problem here is shielding. If you stick a fission reactor on an unmanned craft, you can get away with much less shielding than if you stick it on a manned craft. And with more shielding comes more weight.
But the reality is, just pulling some parts out and putting some new ones in took hours and hours of grueling labor.
Are you talking about Hubble or the ISS now? Hubble was never meant to be serviced in space, that's why it was such a pain in the rear to do so. The ISS was designed to be modular, and they've been quite successful at adding new modules to it.
Add the latest Hubble maintenance mission to the list. That was an exercise in doing repairs while in space, without the dire consequences (apart from a few hundred million bucks) if it failed.
I think either the acceleration from the trebuchet or the subsequent burning up in the atmosphere on the way up would make decelerating into moon orbit a moot point.
Unless, of course, your trebuchet is several kilometers high and you can clear most of the atmosphere while being accelerated by the thing.
Hm. I wonder if we'll ever see an electro-magnetic launch system. It'd be a megaconstruction, but just think about the advantages like the efficiency of electromagnetic propulsion or the simple fact that the payload doesn't need to lug all the fuel around.
Shut up or you can walk the rest of the way.
Did you also think about how much more successful a human being could be in dealing with the little problems that pop up during a mission, like getting clumpy soil samples into an analyzer or getting stuck in the sand?
Not to mention being able to move a few miles per day, not per year.
Err ... the atmosphere of Mars is hardly toxic. The partial pressure of CO2 isn't anywhere near levels required for toxicity. Of course, it doesn't contain oxygen in the partial pressure range required by humans, but that makes it about as toxic as breathing a mix of 99.9% Nitrogen and 0.1% CO2. Fatal, yes, but not because of anything toxic in the gas mixture.
If you want toxic, try everyone's favorite hellhole, Venus. Sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, etc. But of course, if you happen land on Venus, toxic compounds in the atmosphere are going to be the least of your worries.
My University here in the U.S. already rents out textbooks. One downfall that I have noticed from this is that people do not take care of their textbooks when they are not paying for them.
They _are_ paying for normal wear and tear with their rent, and if the people at the university aren't smart enough to make them pay for any damage that exceeds normal wear and tear, well, that's their problem.
But it's very interesting, nonetheless. The real question is: Does the plant tame the predator, or does the predator domesticate the plant? Btw, no one tagged this story "symbiosis"? I can't seem to tag stories.
'In moderation drinking alcohol and not taking acetaminophen or taking acetaminophen and not drinking alcohol or not taking acetaminophen and not drinking alcohol is safe?'
In moderation drinking alcohol NAND taking acetaminophen is safe.
The benefits extend to all of mankind, and the abuse only impacts those who willfully choose to abuse the drugs.
Most people aren't able to diagnose drug psychosis on themselves, much less treat it correctly.
Hell make the label really explicit to say something like "DO NOT EXCEED 2000MG PER DAY OR YOUR LIVER WILL EXPLODE!!!!"
That's going to be really funny for people who travel abroad. "Hey, I took 2000mg of acetaminophen and 2000mg of paracetamol, and my fscking liver exploded?! WTF?"
Seriosly. As an European, I was totally lost trying to find paracetmol in the US, finally thinking that it's banned or something. Of course, that was before I found out that acetaminophen is exactly the same thing.
Because most people are too dumb to remember and/or pronounce words like para-acetylaminophenol, iso-butyl-propanoic-phenolic acid or acetylsalicylic acid.