Well, the ultimate fear from increasingly successful transplantation therapies is hardly political. Grab Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man," if you haven't read it already, for a preview of what might happen in (say) AD 2090 when your/. karma falls to "Terrible"...
So, any prospect of a genetic test that can be done in utero before, say, 10-12 weeks gestation? I gather you're not talking a SNP, more's the pity, but a good genetic test would be a God-send. It's hideous to abort your 3-month-old fetus, but nothing compared to watching your little boy or girl die.
Amen, brother. When I went to college in 1980 I couldn't afford a TV of my own (I recall them being expensive, $300 in 1980 dollars, and besides since I left a girl back home I had to save all my dough to spend on phone bills). So I just stopped watching it. Haven't since. Not a "statement" or moral choice -- just never found enough time or desire, I suppose.
So that'll be 25 years without watching the tube come September. Only problem is the odd looks when I completely miss TV-culture references. Like Mr. or Dr. Steinfeld and some show about friends ("Friends"?). Means nothing to me. Nor have I seen any "Star Trek" shows since the original, although I do understand that there are about eleventy-two subvarieties of it now, with talking robots and stuff.
I've considered explaining I've just returned from twenty years in the Australian outback, but I can't do the accent.
No, journalists don't make it up out of thin air. Well, unless we're talking about fringe publications like The New York Times or The New Republic...or, er, the BBC itself, come to think of it. But I digress.
Anyway, if the reporter could have gotten one of the mission PIs or any prominent climatologist to voice this idea on the record, he would have. An anonymous "expert" can be anyone at all. It can be any random fool with a PhD, or the local high-school teacher, for all we know. The fact that he had to go with a limp and vague "people say..." tells you a lot, if you read between the lines a bit.
Furthermore, he didn't quote his "experts," and this tells you a lot, too. Maybe he asked an expert whether this mission might return some data that gives some insight into Terrestrial global warming, however small, and the expert laughed and said "Sure! Anything's possible!" And there's your "expert opinion." Only, the reporter can't quote him precisely because it would clearly not be the same thing as Herr Professor Doktor furrowing his brow and saying "We MUST have zis mission or ze race is doomed, I tell you, DOOMED to boil in the fetid heat of its own emissions!" (Cue dramatic music...) Again, if the reporter could have gotten someone to make a definite strong statement ("The Venus Express will tell us what we can expect from global warming here on Earth, and that's important."), he would have done so and used it. Remember the Sherlock Holmes reflection on the dog that failed to bark in the night.
As for the second part of your comment, sure, extra data is always helpful, if only marginally so. No doubt data from Venus isn't utterly worthless in terms of insight into Earth's atmosphere. No one's going to refuse to look at it, if they get it for free. But pay 220 million euros to get it??! That much bread will buy a lot of stratospheric balloon missions, or open-ocean buoys, or supercomputer simulation time, or experiments in the upper-atmosphere simulation chamber, or -- but you get the idea.
You raise an important point, and I do realize the facts you point out strike a lot of young scientists rather like a smack across the face with a dead fish, but I rather think your facts support my case.
You see, first of all the best students and post-docs don't have to get jobs in sales and marketing. They do get jobs as PIs in top private labs. If you're in the field, you know that already. (Although if you want to point out that "top" may often not mean 100% "top scientifically" and contain a generous portion of "schmoozed with the right people at conferences," "did the flashiest research," "had the best-connected adviser" or just plain "lucky" I won't disagree.) So the prospect of a great job in private industry is motivating work in the university lab before graduation.
And, furthermore, while being a pharma salesman may not be the starry-eyed young scientist's initial dream, 100 G's a year can really soften the blow. People get used to trading notions of a Nobel Prize for living in a nice house on a good street and being able to afford a vacation on Maui every year. The 30s are all about compromising with your young dreams anyway. So I think the fact that people are willing to take those jobs, and they pull people through graduate school, just underlines the fundamental capitalist fact that very little motivates the individual better than good wages.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I've been both a grad student and post-doc myself, and also a faculty member recruiting and supervising them, and my experience says you're flat wrong. Of course, everyone in science will tell you they do it for pure love of discovery. Yup, just like all politicians tell you they run for office just for the pure love of serving their country.
But try actually taking away any hope of decent money (and "decent" for bright and capable people does not mean "average"). Try telling graduate students living in roach motels scraping by on Top Ramen that they will always make $19,000 a year and never be able to buy a nice house and a second car, raise a family, afford top-quality health care, pay back the student loans and take out a new set for the kids' college eduaction -- and you will see the supply dry up in no time flat.
Of course, I applaud your present pure motives. Indeed, the American science research industry counts on them. Do you have any idea what it would cost to replace you with a cynical 32-year-old with equivalently high and marketable skills, but with a family to support and a retirement for which to plan?
Ask yourself why graduate students and post-docs work so hard in school on their research. Or you could go ask them. Some (very) small percentage of them will go on to university positions, but the bulk of them will go work in private industry.
That is, people in university work to do very good research, and are willing to work for peanuts, because it translates into excellent job offers later, from, yes, drug companies, or even the opportunity to join a new start-up and retire rich on your stock options at age 35.
Which means the increased efficiency of the university is an illusion, caused by the fact that a huge chunk of their costs (the wages you have to pay brilliant and talented workers) are paid by private industry, later, after graduation.
Of course it won't. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% CO2 (Earth's is 0.03%). The solar flux is four times higher. There are no oceans on Venus, and indeed all the Venerian water seems to have vanished, possibly as a result of that increased solar flux. And finally, there is no biosphere, and we know the Earth's biosphere has a profound effect on its atmosphere (and vice versa).
If the goal is understanding CO2 and climate change, the atmosphere to study is right over our heads (which saves a lot on shipping costs). Obviously any competent scientist knows this, and so none of them would be so silly as to propose spending umpty millions sending a few instruments to Venus to study global warming on Earth.
I expect this little comment in TFA is a fanciful addition by the BBC to suit their own agenda. Pity they can't leave that agenda on the editorial page, however. It can make the scientists involved look like axe-grinding fools, which in turn makes it that much harder to convince undecided ordinary people to study the climate responsibly and seriously. With "friends" like the BBC, I'd say serious climatologists need no enemies.
I would say the general problem with this is: what's in it for the bacteria? On Earth prokaryotes use sunlight to split CO2 and water because they get reduced carbon to build themselves. So if you want to train them to munch on other carbon-containing compounds (e.g. raw sewage or light industrial chemical waste), it can be done, as long as they still get their carbon atoms. You can get them to adapt some of their existing carbon-containing molecule crunching pathways to crunch your target molecules.
But on the Moon, what you've got is oxidized metals, presumably lots of iron, magnesium, aluminum, and so forth -- and very little oxidized carbon. I expect bacteria generally have no mechanisms for reducing these metal oxides because there's no reason to do such a thing on Earth. They're just not interested in shiny steel carapaces or pure copper wiring. So it would be pretty hard, if not impossible, to modify bacteria to do it on the Moon. You'd have to try to build completely new biochemical pathways. Easier just to build a solar-powered smelter, I'd think.
That said, I do think one could hope to take a page from the bacterium's book. Think nanotech smelters, that is, instead of acres of pipes and furnaces. Some kind of nanomachine that would harvest UV-vis photons from the Sun and use them to directly electrochemically reduce metal oxides. That way you don't need to be burning precious low-molecular-weight fuels to power your factory.
Say, how did they get into poverty in the first place? I mean, it's not like China got a late start in the civilization horse race, eh? Wasn't it Mao and the Great Leap "Forward" that were responsible for much of the economic stagnation that plagued China from the early 50s to the late 70s? I thought things only improved when Mr. Little Red Book was shelved and a desperate Party quietly took a few pages from the manifestos of the imperialist running dogs, things like free markets and such.
It would be ironic, yes. Also astonishing and unlikely, since no one in the business seems to give much of a damn about zero-G fabrication. I don't think it's likely to be important myself -- although I'm no biotech expert at all -- on the basic molecular physics consideration that, on the scale of molecules, the force of gravity is a ridiculously small perturbation. It's hard to think of many systems which are so delicate that gravity can make or break the manufacturing process. Space would arguably be far more valuable as a very cheap enormous ultrahigh vacuum chamber, but unfortunately this chamber is flooded with nasty high-energy radiation.
Actually, I can't persuade myself that space is useful in any serious way for any kind of manufacturing. Hence the real reasons I support space travel enthusiastically are more or less just manifest-destiny expand-or-die arguments. I feel in my bones (i.e. without any articulable rational reason) that cultures that stop looking outward, which no longer produce an excess of men seeking new places to take insane risks with their lives, become moribund and flaccid, and then suddenly die when the next unexpected environmental perturbation comes along.
For this reason, I'm unimpressed with massive and cautious state-sponsored exploration, fleets of ships with all the amenities, safety cushions for everyone, and gold dinner service for the embarked king. I'd look for a crop of wild-eyed unshaven adventurers, in a motley collection of vessels with wildly varying motives and methods and a high mortality rate. The weird look of Rutan's Space Ship One compared to the conservative look of the Shenzhou, and the fact that the Starchaser rocket exploded in everbody's view at the XP Cup shindig in Las Cruces versus the fact that the Chicoms tightly monitor public access to their launches does much to relieve me of any concern that the PRC is now the place to be if you're an egomaniac pioneer with quite possible The Right Stuff, even in aerospace.
Eh, this is the problem with Stalinist top-down economic planning. The Chicoms are fighting the last (economic) war here. I seriously doubt the future belongs to the nation that makes best progress in rocket technology, semiconductors, or high-energy materials physics for that matter. Sure, these things are important, but they are well-developed, mature fields of research, and there's no indication that Holy Cow Wow low-hanging fruit breakthroughs are just waiting to happen.
But it's a different story in biotech, nanotech or even funky networked software, which are areas where the US is megaparsecs ahead of the Chinese and if anything pulling away. Sure, a new cadre of starry-eyed Chinese metallurgists and aerospace engineers are going to have influence on the future, make stuff that people in the rest of the world -- say, in Southeast Asia or Africa -- are going to want to buy.
But what about the American firm that comes up with proteomics-based individualized cancer therapies that double lung cancer survival rates? Or a little in utero genetic magic that can cure cystic fibrosis or guarantee perfect vision and superior resistance to infection in every newborn child? How about a vaccine against Alzheimer's so everybody can be as sharp in their 90s as they were in their 50s? Cure for AIDS? Rapid-response antiviral technology that can snuff out avian flu before it gets started? Networking applications infrastructure that make it plausible for most of us to work anywhere without commuting further than from the bedroom to the home office? Nanoscopic fuel cells that let portable electronics work for days or weeks at a time off the electric grid? Any of those future-tech possibilities seems to me way more lucrative to bring to the international market in 2050 than the ability to build rockets or memory chips that are 5% more efficient than anyone else. So if I were buying stock in countries based on their R&D focus, I'd pass up the Chinese as slugfeet, based on their 1960s-era research focus.
Maybe it's just because I remember hearing similar arguments about Korean and Japanese innovations in steel- and auto-making in the 1980s, when American business was jumping out of heavy industry and getting into such weird niche vanity businesses like personal computers. (I mean, who the heck needed a computer on every single desk, just to play Solitaire and Zork and customize the fonts on your letters? Geez, you want computations, go to the computer center and punch a deck like everybody else...)
Very similar complaints are raised all the time about US literacy rates, per capita health care or pharmaceutical costs, and so forth and so on. Any small and more homogenous country with a top-heavy government is going to seem "better" by these measures than the US, often, first of all, because the US is a motley collection of seriously varying communities, with a relatively weak and small central government. What works for and is valued by urban New York City twentysomething hipster stockbrokers is not the same as what works for and is valued by the 65-year-old rural Wyoming farmwife, mother of five and grandmother to twenty. Having a heterogeneous market in which all kinds of people can find their solution is expensive.
Additionally, when you expect technology innovation all the time, that also costs. You can provide any service cheaper if you surf off other people's R&D, but if you have to do it yourself -- if as a nation you expect to be living on the technology frontier -- then you've got to pay more. I think a pretty strong case can be made that most (I don't say all) innovations in networked computer technology are being made in the US. Well, that adds to the price for basic service.
Finally, why would the average or per-capita performance even be interesting to the/. crowd? Is this a social justice forum or a geek forum??! I dunno about the rest of you, but I want to live in the country that's blazing trails, technology-wise, and I expect that means it will cost a little more, and there will be more of the oopsies and confusions that accompany being on the bleeding edge.
In other words, metaphorically speaking I don't give a damn about living in a country where Joe Average can buy a Kia Sportage for a more modest price if I can live in a country where it's possible to buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis or rocket-cars half a decade before anyone else in the world can.
Gee, why not just dab a black felt-tip pen on the dot? You get one more piece of random printer scuz on your doc, oh well, which your recipient hardly notices -- even if it's fake $20 bill, probably -- and your identity is secure enough.
Quite right! I agree the engineering of appropriate coatings is a complex and demanding art -- I did not mean to imply otherwise! Nor is CVD diamond much more than, at this point, a fascinating research-worthy possibility, so far as I know. I thought it would be interesting to the OP, that's all.
Yes, I lived. I wasn't even seriously ill. But, on the other hand, I was only on the top for 30 minutes or so, and the weather was fine, and I was in my mid-20s.
If, on the other hand, a Chinese train broke down at 16,000', the weather might well be bad, the people on board might be in their 50s or 60s, and rescue might not come for three or four days -- since, of course, they put the train in because getting up there is difficult.
I certainly agree most people could probably go to 16,000' air pressure for a short time without serious ill effect, and many people could go longer. But I also think it's not unlikely that quite a number of normal not-fit non-acclimatized people, middle-aged or older, would if left at 16,000' feet at -15 C for two or three days, without much water and food, be quite seriously affected. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, I walked up Longs. For some reason, I'm not comfortable with technical climbing and I've never really done any, although I've tried it out a little in parks. There's just some "unnaturalness" to it that I feel, so that even when I can do it, it isn't fun. It's just work. Don't flame me -- I'm not saying people who do it are nuts -- I think it's just a matter of taste, and it so happens that technical climbing doesn't suit mine. I realize that means I'm never going up Denali or Everest, but that's OK, I'm happy enough noodling around on lower peaks, and I'm a bit old for that kind of stuff anyway.
I have to wonder if this stuff isn't going to be pushed into fairly niche applications, even in the military. These days it seems far more likely that the military uses some variety of remote sensing. You put some cameras up, and you look at the picture on a screen. Even if you have to bring a lot of spare cameras -- because they keep getting shot off -- it could still be cheaper than trying to make a thoroughly bulletproof window through which to look with your own eyes.
And, of course, the camera plus display is not limited to human eyeball capabilities. It can easily show you the scene in infrared, or, soon, maybe, millimeter and submillimeter radar. Or it can be magnified, or presented fisheye wraparound, or your intelligence info can be nicely superimposed --- say, all your friends lightly shaded green, all your enemies in red, with a bright cross on your target, et cetera.
So will the future really belong to superduper armor? Maybe not. Maybe it will belong to, say, exceedingly small cameras that can be deployed all over the outside of your craft, or on tiny drones nearby.
I don't want to give the wrong impression...I did succeed in climbing Longs, don't get me wrong. I just felt like crap at the top, and if I'd stayed any real time at all, I think my decisions would have started declining in quality. But, yeah, I did it right. I lived in Boulder for about a month. I climbed a few lower peaks in RMNP first. I started at the base about 5 AM and made it to the top about noon, as I recall. And I do know about water, yes, and I drank plenty. Longs was not my first peak, although it was -- and remains -- my highest.
Nor was it a question of training. I was in great shape. I'd run the San Francisco Marathon in 3:25 the year before. I was running 6-10 miles a day, and swimming 3 miles a weak. I ran several 10Ks that year in the Denver area, including the Elbert Reflections up around 7000-8000'.
I think it's just I'm not particularly good at altitude. Plenty of people can do it without my problems. But, on the other hand -- and this is my point -- I also know plenty of people are worse at altitude than me, like the person I went up Gorgonio with last year. And, indeed, on Longs there was no shortage of people turning around before that last scramble up to the peak, looking sick and feeling awful.
It seems to me -- although I'm no physician -- that a substantial amount of how you do at altitude on any given day is your genetic make-up and some weird imponderables that are hard to predict, and harder to affect by training, eating right, et cetera. There's a certain random factor that seems to come into play, and for some people on some days it's fine, and for others on other days it's a disaster.
Anyway, all I'm saying is 16,000' is nothing to be taken lightly by ordinary people. Indeed, it's my impression that people in general take altitude sickness far less seriously than they should.
First the average person is just fine at 16,500. Yeah, they will be a bit light headed, but nothing too bad...
I don't know about that. When I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado, about 14,000', I was sick as a dog and couldn't really think straight. And that's after living two months in Boulder (5150'). I recall recently climbing Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California (11,500') with someone else, and we had to turn back at about 10,000' because she got seriously disoriented and out of breath, the first signs of altitude sickness.
Now, it could be I don't know any average people, but my personal experience says that 16,000' would be pretty serious without acclimatization, especially if, like me, you're no longer that young. I would certainly hesitate to try it without knowing I had oxygen standing by.
For one thing, the *first* thing that goes wrong when you have altitude sickness is your judgment. You start to make dumbass decisions, and lose track of time, and wander in your thoughts. Indeed, this mental dullness is suspected by some people for the climbing disaster on Everest in 1996 described by Jon Krakauer in his absorbing book, Into Thin Air.
Give it a little time, eh?
on
Space Tourism?
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You could have said much the same thing about John Cabot, adventurer, who while seeking the rich reward of a sea route to China discovered North America in 1496. Indeed, more than a century was to pass after Columbus and Cabot before anyone even thought about getting serious about living in the New World and planted a colony here, and it took a further century after that before a viable colonist civilization emerged.
Early exploration is always touch-and-go, just getting in and out for a quick look (and, yah, its motives are often crass, personal and quite unrelated to any collective social good).
But probably that's a good thing. It seems sensible to take brief quick looks all over the place before we begin a grand plan and giant investment, so the grand plan has a better chance of being a grand success than a grand flopperooni.
I mean, doesn't the present sad history of the Space Shuttle program or ISS itself demonstrate the dangers in an ambitious, costly, grand plan? Maybe it's a good idea to let random crazies --- um, I mean enthusiasts, of course, yup -- just noodle around in space doing whatever they feel like, until some clear trend worth general investment emerges.
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Well, the ultimate fear from increasingly successful transplantation therapies is hardly political. Grab Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man," if you haven't read it already, for a preview of what might happen in (say) AD 2090 when your /. karma falls to "Terrible"...
So, any prospect of a genetic test that can be done in utero before, say, 10-12 weeks gestation? I gather you're not talking a SNP, more's the pity, but a good genetic test would be a God-send. It's hideous to abort your 3-month-old fetus, but nothing compared to watching your little boy or girl die.
Amen, brother. When I went to college in 1980 I couldn't afford a TV of my own (I recall them being expensive, $300 in 1980 dollars, and besides since I left a girl back home I had to save all my dough to spend on phone bills). So I just stopped watching it. Haven't since. Not a "statement" or moral choice -- just never found enough time or desire, I suppose.
So that'll be 25 years without watching the tube come September. Only problem is the odd looks when I completely miss TV-culture references. Like Mr. or Dr. Steinfeld and some show about friends ("Friends"?). Means nothing to me. Nor have I seen any "Star Trek" shows since the original, although I do understand that there are about eleventy-two subvarieties of it now, with talking robots and stuff.
I've considered explaining I've just returned from twenty years in the Australian outback, but I can't do the accent.
No, journalists don't make it up out of thin air. Well, unless we're talking about fringe publications like The New York Times or The New Republic ...or, er, the BBC itself, come to think of it. But I digress.
Anyway, if the reporter could have gotten one of the mission PIs or any prominent climatologist to voice this idea on the record, he would have. An anonymous "expert" can be anyone at all. It can be any random fool with a PhD, or the local high-school teacher, for all we know. The fact that he had to go with a limp and vague "people say..." tells you a lot, if you read between the lines a bit.
Furthermore, he didn't quote his "experts," and this tells you a lot, too. Maybe he asked an expert whether this mission might return some data that gives some insight into Terrestrial global warming, however small, and the expert laughed and said "Sure! Anything's possible!" And there's your "expert opinion." Only, the reporter can't quote him precisely because it would clearly not be the same thing as Herr Professor Doktor furrowing his brow and saying "We MUST have zis mission or ze race is doomed, I tell you, DOOMED to boil in the fetid heat of its own emissions!" (Cue dramatic music...) Again, if the reporter could have gotten someone to make a definite strong statement ("The Venus Express will tell us what we can expect from global warming here on Earth, and that's important."), he would have done so and used it. Remember the Sherlock Holmes reflection on the dog that failed to bark in the night.
As for the second part of your comment, sure, extra data is always helpful, if only marginally so. No doubt data from Venus isn't utterly worthless in terms of insight into Earth's atmosphere. No one's going to refuse to look at it, if they get it for free. But pay 220 million euros to get it??! That much bread will buy a lot of stratospheric balloon missions, or open-ocean buoys, or supercomputer simulation time, or experiments in the upper-atmosphere simulation chamber, or -- but you get the idea.
You raise an important point, and I do realize the facts you point out strike a lot of young scientists rather like a smack across the face with a dead fish, but I rather think your facts support my case.
You see, first of all the best students and post-docs don't have to get jobs in sales and marketing. They do get jobs as PIs in top private labs. If you're in the field, you know that already. (Although if you want to point out that "top" may often not mean 100% "top scientifically" and contain a generous portion of "schmoozed with the right people at conferences," "did the flashiest research," "had the best-connected adviser" or just plain "lucky" I won't disagree.) So the prospect of a great job in private industry is motivating work in the university lab before graduation.
And, furthermore, while being a pharma salesman may not be the starry-eyed young scientist's initial dream, 100 G's a year can really soften the blow. People get used to trading notions of a Nobel Prize for living in a nice house on a good street and being able to afford a vacation on Maui every year. The 30s are all about compromising with your young dreams anyway. So I think the fact that people are willing to take those jobs, and they pull people through graduate school, just underlines the fundamental capitalist fact that very little motivates the individual better than good wages.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I've been both a grad student and post-doc myself, and also a faculty member recruiting and supervising them, and my experience says you're flat wrong. Of course, everyone in science will tell you they do it for pure love of discovery. Yup, just like all politicians tell you they run for office just for the pure love of serving their country.
But try actually taking away any hope of decent money (and "decent" for bright and capable people does not mean "average"). Try telling graduate students living in roach motels scraping by on Top Ramen that they will always make $19,000 a year and never be able to buy a nice house and a second car, raise a family, afford top-quality health care, pay back the student loans and take out a new set for the kids' college eduaction -- and you will see the supply dry up in no time flat.
Of course, I applaud your present pure motives. Indeed, the American science research industry counts on them. Do you have any idea what it would cost to replace you with a cynical 32-year-old with equivalently high and marketable skills, but with a family to support and a retirement for which to plan?
Er, but the original request was for something that emitted light without emitting heat.
Ask yourself why graduate students and post-docs work so hard in school on their research. Or you could go ask them. Some (very) small percentage of them will go on to university positions, but the bulk of them will go work in private industry.
That is, people in university work to do very good research, and are willing to work for peanuts, because it translates into excellent job offers later, from, yes, drug companies, or even the opportunity to join a new start-up and retire rich on your stock options at age 35.
Which means the increased efficiency of the university is an illusion, caused by the fact that a huge chunk of their costs (the wages you have to pay brilliant and talented workers) are paid by private industry, later, after graduation.
Of course it won't. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% CO2 (Earth's is 0.03%). The solar flux is four times higher. There are no oceans on Venus, and indeed all the Venerian water seems to have vanished, possibly as a result of that increased solar flux. And finally, there is no biosphere, and we know the Earth's biosphere has a profound effect on its atmosphere (and vice versa).
If the goal is understanding CO2 and climate change, the atmosphere to study is right over our heads (which saves a lot on shipping costs). Obviously any competent scientist knows this, and so none of them would be so silly as to propose spending umpty millions sending a few instruments to Venus to study global warming on Earth.
I expect this little comment in TFA is a fanciful addition by the BBC to suit their own agenda. Pity they can't leave that agenda on the editorial page, however. It can make the scientists involved look like axe-grinding fools, which in turn makes it that much harder to convince undecided ordinary people to study the climate responsibly and seriously. With "friends" like the BBC, I'd say serious climatologists need no enemies.
A laser.
What do I win?
No, no, the day to worry is when a product releases an Inc., i.e. starts up its own company.
I would say the general problem with this is: what's in it for the bacteria? On Earth prokaryotes use sunlight to split CO2 and water because they get reduced carbon to build themselves. So if you want to train them to munch on other carbon-containing compounds (e.g. raw sewage or light industrial chemical waste), it can be done, as long as they still get their carbon atoms. You can get them to adapt some of their existing carbon-containing molecule crunching pathways to crunch your target molecules.
But on the Moon, what you've got is oxidized metals, presumably lots of iron, magnesium, aluminum, and so forth -- and very little oxidized carbon. I expect bacteria generally have no mechanisms for reducing these metal oxides because there's no reason to do such a thing on Earth. They're just not interested in shiny steel carapaces or pure copper wiring. So it would be pretty hard, if not impossible, to modify bacteria to do it on the Moon. You'd have to try to build completely new biochemical pathways. Easier just to build a solar-powered smelter, I'd think.
That said, I do think one could hope to take a page from the bacterium's book. Think nanotech smelters, that is, instead of acres of pipes and furnaces. Some kind of nanomachine that would harvest UV-vis photons from the Sun and use them to directly electrochemically reduce metal oxides. That way you don't need to be burning precious low-molecular-weight fuels to power your factory.
You mean ionized sodium, not the neutral stuff. A world of difference, chemically speaking.
Say, how did they get into poverty in the first place? I mean, it's not like China got a late start in the civilization horse race, eh? Wasn't it Mao and the Great Leap "Forward" that were responsible for much of the economic stagnation that plagued China from the early 50s to the late 70s? I thought things only improved when Mr. Little Red Book was shelved and a desperate Party quietly took a few pages from the manifestos of the imperialist running dogs, things like free markets and such.
It would be ironic, yes. Also astonishing and unlikely, since no one in the business seems to give much of a damn about zero-G fabrication. I don't think it's likely to be important myself -- although I'm no biotech expert at all -- on the basic molecular physics consideration that, on the scale of molecules, the force of gravity is a ridiculously small perturbation. It's hard to think of many systems which are so delicate that gravity can make or break the manufacturing process. Space would arguably be far more valuable as a very cheap enormous ultrahigh vacuum chamber, but unfortunately this chamber is flooded with nasty high-energy radiation.
Actually, I can't persuade myself that space is useful in any serious way for any kind of manufacturing. Hence the real reasons I support space travel enthusiastically are more or less just manifest-destiny expand-or-die arguments. I feel in my bones (i.e. without any articulable rational reason) that cultures that stop looking outward, which no longer produce an excess of men seeking new places to take insane risks with their lives, become moribund and flaccid, and then suddenly die when the next unexpected environmental perturbation comes along.
For this reason, I'm unimpressed with massive and cautious state-sponsored exploration, fleets of ships with all the amenities, safety cushions for everyone, and gold dinner service for the embarked king. I'd look for a crop of wild-eyed unshaven adventurers, in a motley collection of vessels with wildly varying motives and methods and a high mortality rate. The weird look of Rutan's Space Ship One compared to the conservative look of the Shenzhou, and the fact that the Starchaser rocket exploded in everbody's view at the XP Cup shindig in Las Cruces versus the fact that the Chicoms tightly monitor public access to their launches does much to relieve me of any concern that the PRC is now the place to be if you're an egomaniac pioneer with quite possible The Right Stuff, even in aerospace.
Eh, this is the problem with Stalinist top-down economic planning. The Chicoms are fighting the last (economic) war here. I seriously doubt the future belongs to the nation that makes best progress in rocket technology, semiconductors, or high-energy materials physics for that matter. Sure, these things are important, but they are well-developed, mature fields of research, and there's no indication that Holy Cow Wow low-hanging fruit breakthroughs are just waiting to happen.
But it's a different story in biotech, nanotech or even funky networked software, which are areas where the US is megaparsecs ahead of the Chinese and if anything pulling away. Sure, a new cadre of starry-eyed Chinese metallurgists and aerospace engineers are going to have influence on the future, make stuff that people in the rest of the world -- say, in Southeast Asia or Africa -- are going to want to buy.
But what about the American firm that comes up with proteomics-based individualized cancer therapies that double lung cancer survival rates? Or a little in utero genetic magic that can cure cystic fibrosis or guarantee perfect vision and superior resistance to infection in every newborn child? How about a vaccine against Alzheimer's so everybody can be as sharp in their 90s as they were in their 50s? Cure for AIDS? Rapid-response antiviral technology that can snuff out avian flu before it gets started? Networking applications infrastructure that make it plausible for most of us to work anywhere without commuting further than from the bedroom to the home office? Nanoscopic fuel cells that let portable electronics work for days or weeks at a time off the electric grid? Any of those future-tech possibilities seems to me way more lucrative to bring to the international market in 2050 than the ability to build rockets or memory chips that are 5% more efficient than anyone else. So if I were buying stock in countries based on their R&D focus, I'd pass up the Chinese as slugfeet, based on their 1960s-era research focus.
Maybe it's just because I remember hearing similar arguments about Korean and Japanese innovations in steel- and auto-making in the 1980s, when American business was jumping out of heavy industry and getting into such weird niche vanity businesses like personal computers. (I mean, who the heck needed a computer on every single desk, just to play Solitaire and Zork and customize the fonts on your letters? Geez, you want computations, go to the computer center and punch a deck like everybody else...)
Very similar complaints are raised all the time about US literacy rates, per capita health care or pharmaceutical costs, and so forth and so on. Any small and more homogenous country with a top-heavy government is going to seem "better" by these measures than the US, often, first of all, because the US is a motley collection of seriously varying communities, with a relatively weak and small central government. What works for and is valued by urban New York City twentysomething hipster stockbrokers is not the same as what works for and is valued by the 65-year-old rural Wyoming farmwife, mother of five and grandmother to twenty. Having a heterogeneous market in which all kinds of people can find their solution is expensive.
/. crowd? Is this a social justice forum or a geek forum??! I dunno about the rest of you, but I want to live in the country that's blazing trails, technology-wise, and I expect that means it will cost a little more, and there will be more of the oopsies and confusions that accompany being on the bleeding edge.
Additionally, when you expect technology innovation all the time, that also costs. You can provide any service cheaper if you surf off other people's R&D, but if you have to do it yourself -- if as a nation you expect to be living on the technology frontier -- then you've got to pay more. I think a pretty strong case can be made that most (I don't say all) innovations in networked computer technology are being made in the US. Well, that adds to the price for basic service.
Finally, why would the average or per-capita performance even be interesting to the
In other words, metaphorically speaking I don't give a damn about living in a country where Joe Average can buy a Kia Sportage for a more modest price if I can live in a country where it's possible to buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis or rocket-cars half a decade before anyone else in the world can.
Gee, why not just dab a black felt-tip pen on the dot? You get one more piece of random printer scuz on your doc, oh well, which your recipient hardly notices -- even if it's fake $20 bill, probably -- and your identity is secure enough.
Quite right! I agree the engineering of appropriate coatings is a complex and demanding art -- I did not mean to imply otherwise! Nor is CVD diamond much more than, at this point, a fascinating research-worthy possibility, so far as I know. I thought it would be interesting to the OP, that's all.
Yes, I lived. I wasn't even seriously ill. But, on the other hand, I was only on the top for 30 minutes or so, and the weather was fine, and I was in my mid-20s.
If, on the other hand, a Chinese train broke down at 16,000', the weather might well be bad, the people on board might be in their 50s or 60s, and rescue might not come for three or four days -- since, of course, they put the train in because getting up there is difficult.
I certainly agree most people could probably go to 16,000' air pressure for a short time without serious ill effect, and many people could go longer. But I also think it's not unlikely that quite a number of normal not-fit non-acclimatized people, middle-aged or older, would if left at 16,000' feet at -15 C for two or three days, without much water and food, be quite seriously affected. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, I walked up Longs. For some reason, I'm not comfortable with technical climbing and I've never really done any, although I've tried it out a little in parks. There's just some "unnaturalness" to it that I feel, so that even when I can do it, it isn't fun. It's just work. Don't flame me -- I'm not saying people who do it are nuts -- I think it's just a matter of taste, and it so happens that technical climbing doesn't suit mine. I realize that means I'm never going up Denali or Everest, but that's OK, I'm happy enough noodling around on lower peaks, and I'm a bit old for that kind of stuff anyway.
For coatings, you want CVD diamond. Here's a little overview.
I have to wonder if this stuff isn't going to be pushed into fairly niche applications, even in the military. These days it seems far more likely that the military uses some variety of remote sensing. You put some cameras up, and you look at the picture on a screen. Even if you have to bring a lot of spare cameras -- because they keep getting shot off -- it could still be cheaper than trying to make a thoroughly bulletproof window through which to look with your own eyes.
And, of course, the camera plus display is not limited to human eyeball capabilities. It can easily show you the scene in infrared, or, soon, maybe, millimeter and submillimeter radar. Or it can be magnified, or presented fisheye wraparound, or your intelligence info can be nicely superimposed --- say, all your friends lightly shaded green, all your enemies in red, with a bright cross on your target, et cetera.
So will the future really belong to superduper armor? Maybe not. Maybe it will belong to, say, exceedingly small cameras that can be deployed all over the outside of your craft, or on tiny drones nearby.
I don't want to give the wrong impression...I did succeed in climbing Longs, don't get me wrong. I just felt like crap at the top, and if I'd stayed any real time at all, I think my decisions would have started declining in quality. But, yeah, I did it right. I lived in Boulder for about a month. I climbed a few lower peaks in RMNP first. I started at the base about 5 AM and made it to the top about noon, as I recall. And I do know about water, yes, and I drank plenty. Longs was not my first peak, although it was -- and remains -- my highest.
Nor was it a question of training. I was in great shape. I'd run the San Francisco Marathon in 3:25 the year before. I was running 6-10 miles a day, and swimming 3 miles a weak. I ran several 10Ks that year in the Denver area, including the Elbert Reflections up around 7000-8000'.
I think it's just I'm not particularly good at altitude. Plenty of people can do it without my problems. But, on the other hand -- and this is my point -- I also know plenty of people are worse at altitude than me, like the person I went up Gorgonio with last year. And, indeed, on Longs there was no shortage of people turning around before that last scramble up to the peak, looking sick and feeling awful.
It seems to me -- although I'm no physician -- that a substantial amount of how you do at altitude on any given day is your genetic make-up and some weird imponderables that are hard to predict, and harder to affect by training, eating right, et cetera. There's a certain random factor that seems to come into play, and for some people on some days it's fine, and for others on other days it's a disaster.
Anyway, all I'm saying is 16,000' is nothing to be taken lightly by ordinary people. Indeed, it's my impression that people in general take altitude sickness far less seriously than they should.
First the average person is just fine at 16,500. Yeah, they will be a bit light headed, but nothing too bad...
I don't know about that. When I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado, about 14,000', I was sick as a dog and couldn't really think straight. And that's after living two months in Boulder (5150'). I recall recently climbing Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California (11,500') with someone else, and we had to turn back at about 10,000' because she got seriously disoriented and out of breath, the first signs of altitude sickness.
Now, it could be I don't know any average people, but my personal experience says that 16,000' would be pretty serious without acclimatization, especially if, like me, you're no longer that young. I would certainly hesitate to try it without knowing I had oxygen standing by.
For one thing, the *first* thing that goes wrong when you have altitude sickness is your judgment. You start to make dumbass decisions, and lose track of time, and wander in your thoughts. Indeed, this mental dullness is suspected by some people for the climbing disaster on Everest in 1996 described by Jon Krakauer in his absorbing book, Into Thin Air.
You could have said much the same thing about John Cabot, adventurer, who while seeking the rich reward of a sea route to China discovered North America in 1496. Indeed, more than a century was to pass after Columbus and Cabot before anyone even thought about getting serious about living in the New World and planted a colony here, and it took a further century after that before a viable colonist civilization emerged.
Early exploration is always touch-and-go, just getting in and out for a quick look (and, yah, its motives are often crass, personal and quite unrelated to any collective social good).
But probably that's a good thing. It seems sensible to take brief quick looks all over the place before we begin a grand plan and giant investment, so the grand plan has a better chance of being a grand success than a grand flopperooni.
I mean, doesn't the present sad history of the Space Shuttle program or ISS itself demonstrate the dangers in an ambitious, costly, grand plan? Maybe it's a good idea to let random crazies --- um, I mean enthusiasts, of course, yup -- just noodle around in space doing whatever they feel like, until some clear trend worth general investment emerges.