There have been ill spent investments before, appealing to authority won't change that.
I don't question the part of your argument where you want to keep resources in orbit. The issue is with shipping them to earth. Then you have to ponder the energy spent on transport. If you can get it with less energy from earth (almost a given) then mining asteroids won't do anyone any good.
Here is a link going into more detail. http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol3/pmofld1a.htm I particularly like: "This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive.". So energy is the catch, either nature has invested it already or you have to invest it to concentrate ores.
Slashdot got dumbed down, which may explain the anti-technology trend.
The other thing is that the asteroid mining thing may only be viable for really rare but useful stuff.
The thing is there could be realistic concerns about energy efficiency regarding mining asteroids that could be a deal breaker. Notice that asteroids probably have there minerals finely mixed since there is little geological activity there to concentrate ores.
I don't know how rare earths behave. If they are available in similar concentrations in either place then we can stay on earth.
The energy situation is worth pondering though, and some opposition to fancy tech might result if it is not energy efficient.
You had the opportunity to say something different in your first statement, but no you just had to go with the usual "she could have prevented it".
You could have reminded us that some men have the wrong protocol for dealing with women that show a little bit more.
It also took you a while to arrive at a slightly more reasonable position, far too long for the crowd to notice anyway. Do you think anybody is reading/rating our discussion after that much time has passed?
Amusingly I'm doing a similar thing like you now. Let me ask you to think for the people you are dealing with. If you don't have a socially conservative position which I made an attempt at criticising, your chance was in the first comment.
"That said, I've never been the type to play with people like that, or "teach them a lesson", but there is no denying that there are people out there who do these things. If you don't want to fall victim to it, don't dress and act in ways that invite it."
While you might feel tempted to call yourself a realist, you are still blaming the victim for attracting those vaguely named things you would never do.
"I did fail to proofread prior to posting, but you will note the correction I posted immediately after."
I noticed after I sent the reply.
"There is no danger that I am doing serious damage by simply not associating with someone who acts in a way I find unacceptable. If you wish to argue this further, please go into great detail regarding how, by not interacting with someone, I am causing any damage at all."
Well, assuming that people like/need to communicate with others, withholding that possibility can make them feel isolated and some get depressed. I would grant you the right to be stressed out by unnecessarily talkative people, but your behaviour could erect some "wall of silence" if copied. I remember situations where I felt about silence like that.
Also ghettoization happens not only because some party builds a wall around another group but because people move closer to similarly minded people, here is an example:
"To take just one example: a large number of Muslim teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, reputedly an enlightened institution with liberal outlook and social sensitivity, prefer to live in Muslim-dominated colonies or ghettos rather than on university campus after 1992."
I personally think we should rather try to live all mixed up, if we claim we live in the same country. While you are not that far yet, ghettoization is the next step.
Regarding the "great damage", I could point you to the Origins of violence paper by Prescott, that appeared around 1975 in the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". While we are not talking about bringing up children, I have the suspicion that it is still important for the larger society. Personally I would rather follow the precautionary principle regarding my social interactions.
Don't worry it is an english language website. Also there is some nudity.
I just went to some erotic massage training course over the weekend, one woman there said that she has stopped judging people. I wished more people were like that. But yes, I find the society of promiscuous people relaxing, I'm almost ready to move into some sort of ghetto:).
So assuming that slut means promiscuous woman, I never used the word actually, would you still discriminate (giving them less respect than the ones that follow your standards) against people who give physical contact and sex away too (according to your standards?) freely?
I can understand that you wouldn't want to marry a promiscuous woman, just what you mean with giving respect is too vague to me.
Assuming you are monogamous, you still interact with people that can behave slutty. Will you still act differently towards them even if you have no sexual interest?
You do understand that limiting other peoples reproductive and social behaviours can seriously harm their well-being. Given that these are core aspects of our existence (what your parents never had sex?) the danger that you are doing serious damage is far too great.
This is good information the so labelled should immediately use, and escape to a civilized part of the world.
I always stop at Jewellers shops because I almost became one. One British/Iranian colleague was always unsettled by this, thinking I'm not certain of my orientation, mostly head up - feet down in case you need to know. My fellow citizens are never bothered by this though, this is satisfactory.
Women who understand men should still be treated decently.
I totally enjoy looking at girls in skimpy clothes, and are grateful that they are that liberal about it. Most of them know reasonably well what they are doing, why bother worrying about it.
What I fail to understand is that you label some woman as bad even though you actually want her and obviously enjoy sex. Maybe if you treat her decently first, you both could still be happy?
I'm not worried about reserves so much, as about production decline.
The Bundeswehr paper is useful if you want to get an overview of the different peak oil predictions. Figure 9 is interesting. Ok, I should have said coming decades.
You know, you have to collect that solar energy in space somehow. To replace the 164TWh I get from the 96 million barrels of oil per day I would at 1.3KW/m^2 need a solar cell area of 5260 km^2. This is a 1:1 replacement not one based on energy quality.
The annual production of 200kt PV silicon will - using 50um silicon wafers - lead to 3051 years until completion.
The amount of silicon in the whole area would be 610 Mt. At 1000$ per pound to orbit that would cost you 1.2e+15 bucks.
I'm rather shocked than awed about the 3000 years, all-right. The 100% efficient cells were thrown in, because efficiency doesn't matter all that much seeing the outcome, since it would only shave an order of magnitude off. Somebody might also come up and suggest to use direct solar, that would be covered by this as well.
Figure out how long it would take to replace oil based energy input to society with solar electric energy, and stand in awe. Also don't hold your breath. Feel free to assume that solar cells are 100% efficient.
"Dr. Alice Stockham was taken to court and forced to give up teaching the practice of Karezza in the United States of America. Like many other of the sex reformers, Stockham was arrested by Anthony Comstock.[23] Comstock was backed by Morris Ketchum Jessup, an American millionaire philanthropist who was a founder of the New York YMCA and the Museum of Natural History. Together, they established the New York Committee for the Suppression of Vice which attracted many prominent, powerful and wealthy Americans including J. P. Morgan. Comstock lobbied in Congress for a stronger federal antiobscenity and antireproductive control law."
Notice how a selfcentered gang of capitalists just had to let America grow. This happened around the year 1880-90. Some Pope became involved in this some time later joining the growth gang.
I mean, I don't really mind, this runaway growth thing had to happen some time. Evolution doesn't select for sensible resource usage, it selects for greatest energy input at highest efficiencies. Even the high probability that the majority of mankind ever in existence has to be involved in the resulting extinction phase is obvious since exponential growth just has this multiplicative property.
I'm not sure I'm interpreting the Maximum power principle correctly but it feels right. But hey I might be wrong, after all we could "Stand on Zanzibar".
There are EROI figures around that place the 1:1 Oil EROI point at around 2030 to 2050. An EROI of 3:1 is needed for society to function supposedly, hard to separate Oil from other sources of energy though.
Here is a paper regarding the projected Oil EROI. www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf
"This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive. The relative costs of scarce and abundant metals will become even more disparate in the future on Earth as well as in space."
Coincidentally this substitution frequently means higher energy requirements, there is a paper called "The Age of Substitutability" that makes this requirement. Solar power may not even be the cheapest way out, given its thin distribution. I would expect us to go to space once we have solved the energy problem we are facing on earth. This isn't even just energy availability but also the decreasing ore concentration that requires greater energy inputs, even as far as abundant metals are concerned.
Also don't forget that ores in space probably are less concentrated in space, because hydrothermal processes aren't available to the degree we have them on earth, yet another reason to look for watery planets out there.
"This assumption -- that understanding a system's constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system -- is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science."
Well, it seems as if "explainable system" complexity has an upper, human, limit.
Interestingly people like Joe Tainter think that societies hit their limits by increasing energy requirements through increasing complexity. We may actually be testing our own limits as well.
Here is one more snippet from Wired:
"...they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways."
An energy efficient tool to help us think, i.e. not other humans, would be nice. Also notice that this limitation might also limit our engineering capabilities.
When he enters the real world he may figure out that a lot of code he will touch isn't exactly created through "software engineering" either.
He is exactly the type who is in for a nasty surprise, unless he can enter a field where peoples lives depend on his software, like aviation, defense, and maybe medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been ill spent investments before, appealing to authority won't change that.
I don't question the part of your argument where you want to keep resources in orbit. The issue is with shipping them to earth. Then you have to ponder the energy spent on transport. If you can get it with less energy from earth (almost a given) then mining asteroids won't do anyone any good.
Here is a link going into more detail.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol3/pmofld1a.htm
I particularly like: "This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive.". So energy is the catch, either nature has invested it already or you have to invest it to concentrate ores.
Slashdot got dumbed down, which may explain the anti-technology trend.
The other thing is that the asteroid mining thing may only be viable for really rare but useful stuff.
The thing is there could be realistic concerns about energy efficiency regarding mining asteroids that could be a deal breaker. Notice that asteroids probably have there minerals finely mixed since there is little geological activity there to concentrate ores.
I don't know how rare earths behave. If they are available in similar concentrations in either place then we can stay on earth.
The energy situation is worth pondering though, and some opposition to fancy tech might result if it is not energy efficient.
So is the following to your liking or more yellow journalism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAE-xqFr0iQ
No, we need all the energy to deal with the problems global warming may cause, also to continue growth. Beyond that gas flows much faster than oil.
This is my sarcastic contribution of the day, although it might turn out to be reality.
Also if past performance is any indication the sun is going to cook us all.
"But as long as the industry tends to exclude more than half of the potential workforce,"
Men are expendable, why don't we keep it that way, and waste them on irrelevant stuff.
Sweet!
http://xkcd.com/305/
Naw, porn sucks, people should just have sex. Also porn doesn't give you any physical contact, which according to some is important.
You had the opportunity to say something different in your first statement, but no you just had to go with the usual "she could have prevented it".
You could have reminded us that some men have the wrong protocol for dealing with women that show a little bit more.
It also took you a while to arrive at a slightly more reasonable position, far too long for the crowd to notice anyway. Do you think anybody is reading/rating our discussion after that much time has passed?
Amusingly I'm doing a similar thing like you now. Let me ask you to think for the people you are dealing with. If you don't have a socially conservative position which I made an attempt at criticising, your chance was in the first comment.
Alright, let me have a look at your first post:
"That said, I've never been the type to play with people like that, or "teach them a lesson", but there is no denying that there are people out there who do these things. If you don't want to fall victim to it, don't dress and act in ways that invite it."
While you might feel tempted to call yourself a realist, you are still blaming the victim for attracting those vaguely named things you would never do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
They don't all bring you down, that is an overgeneralization.
I don't need a psych degree to understand that.
Goodby Mr. Troll.
"I did fail to proofread prior to posting, but you will note the correction I posted immediately after."
I noticed after I sent the reply.
"There is no danger that I am doing serious damage by simply not associating with someone who acts in a way I find unacceptable. If you wish to argue this further, please go into great detail regarding how, by not interacting with someone, I am causing any damage at all."
Well, assuming that people like/need to communicate with others, withholding that possibility can make them feel isolated and some get depressed. I would grant you the right to be stressed out by unnecessarily talkative people, but your behaviour could erect some "wall of silence" if copied. I remember situations where I felt about silence like that.
Also ghettoization happens not only because some party builds a wall around another group but because people move closer to similarly minded people, here is an example:
"To take just one example: a large number of Muslim teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, reputedly an enlightened institution with liberal outlook and social sensitivity, prefer to live in Muslim-dominated colonies or ghettos rather than on university campus after 1992."
From here:
http://twocircles.net/2010apr14/living_together_separately_ghettoization_muslims.html
I personally think we should rather try to live all mixed up, if we claim we live in the same country. While you are not that far yet, ghettoization is the next step.
Regarding the "great damage", I could point you to the Origins of violence paper by Prescott, that appeared around 1975 in the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". While we are not talking about bringing up children, I have the suspicion that it is still important for the larger society. Personally I would rather follow the precautionary principle regarding my social interactions.
Here is a link:
http://www.violence.de/
Don't worry it is an english language website. Also there is some nudity.
I just went to some erotic massage training course over the weekend, one woman there said that she has stopped judging people. I wished more people were like that. But yes, I find the society of promiscuous people relaxing, I'm almost ready to move into some sort of ghetto :).
So assuming that slut means promiscuous woman, I never used the word actually, would you still discriminate (giving them less respect than the ones that follow your standards) against people who give physical contact and sex away too (according to your standards?) freely?
I can understand that you wouldn't want to marry a promiscuous woman, just what you mean with giving respect is too vague to me.
Assuming you are monogamous, you still interact with people that can behave slutty. Will you still act differently towards them even if you have no sexual interest?
You do understand that limiting other peoples reproductive and social behaviours can seriously harm their well-being. Given that these are core aspects of our existence (what your parents never had sex?) the danger that you are doing serious damage is far too great.
This is good information the so labelled should immediately use, and escape to a civilized part of the world.
I always stop at Jewellers shops because I almost became one. One British/Iranian colleague was always unsettled by this, thinking I'm not certain of my orientation, mostly head up - feet down in case you need to know. My fellow citizens are never bothered by this though, this is satisfactory.
Women who understand men should still be treated decently.
I totally enjoy looking at girls in skimpy clothes, and are grateful that they are that liberal about it. Most of them know reasonably well what they are doing, why bother worrying about it.
What I fail to understand is that you label some woman as bad even though you actually want her and obviously enjoy sex. Maybe if you treat her decently first, you both could still be happy?
I'm not worried about reserves so much, as about production decline.
The Bundeswehr paper is useful if you want to get an overview of the different peak oil predictions. Figure 9 is interesting. Ok, I should have said coming decades.
http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/Peak%20Oil_Study%20EN.pdf
The daily production came from the CIA factbook from 2009. I have seen their number elsewhere.
You know, you have to collect that solar energy in space somehow. To replace the 164TWh I get from the 96 million barrels of oil per day I would at 1.3KW/m^2 need a solar cell area of 5260 km^2. This is a 1:1 replacement not one based on energy quality.
The annual production of 200kt PV silicon will - using 50um silicon wafers - lead to 3051 years until completion.
The amount of silicon in the whole area would be 610 Mt. At 1000$ per pound to orbit that would cost you 1.2e+15 bucks.
I'm rather shocked than awed about the 3000 years, all-right. The 100% efficient cells were thrown in, because efficiency doesn't matter all that much seeing the outcome, since it would only shave an order of magnitude off. Somebody might also come up and suggest to use direct solar, that would be covered by this as well.
My own back off the envelope calculation gives me around 70000 years. Other people got around 500 years.
You will find out that as soon as oil peaks (in the next ten years I would think) it will be extremely hard to implement any alternative technologies.
Have a look at the following article by somebody who is more suited to explain the topic:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
You should read the rest of his site too, also trying to do the math yourself can help.
Don't be fooled by the 150 years until depletion, it is way more interesting to figure out how much net energy society has available.
Figure out how long it would take to replace oil based energy input to society with solar electric energy, and stand in awe. Also don't hold your breath. Feel free to assume that solar cells are 100% efficient.
Oh sweeeet I was just waiting for the combination of time and the birth rate reduction thing.
Since I'm reading Slashdot and are procreationally challenged, I have taken a keen interest in the subject.
Here is what I have found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coitus_reservatus
"Dr. Alice Stockham was taken to court and forced to give up teaching the practice of Karezza in the United States of America. Like many other of the sex reformers, Stockham was arrested by Anthony Comstock.[23] Comstock was backed by Morris Ketchum Jessup, an American millionaire philanthropist who was a founder of the New York YMCA and the Museum of Natural History. Together, they established the New York Committee for the Suppression of Vice which attracted many prominent, powerful and wealthy Americans including J. P. Morgan. Comstock lobbied in Congress for a stronger federal antiobscenity and antireproductive control law."
Notice how a selfcentered gang of capitalists just had to let America grow. This happened around the year 1880-90. Some Pope became involved in this some time later joining the growth gang.
I mean, I don't really mind, this runaway growth thing had to happen some time. Evolution doesn't select for sensible resource usage, it selects for greatest energy input at highest efficiencies. Even the high probability that the majority of mankind ever in existence has to be involved in the resulting extinction phase is obvious since exponential growth just has this multiplicative property.
Oh, here is a link to the power principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
I'm not sure I'm interpreting the Maximum power principle correctly but it feels right. But hey I might be wrong, after all we could "Stand on Zanzibar".
There are EROI figures around that place the 1:1 Oil EROI point at around 2030 to 2050. An EROI of 3:1 is needed for society to function supposedly, hard to separate Oil from other sources of energy though.
Here is a paper regarding the projected Oil EROI.
www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf
I'm sure we could measure the mass of the garden gnome through inertial measurements.
You know accelerate the thing real hard and then measure the dent it leaves in the wall of the wall of the vacuum chamber.
Maybe we can get the weight through ballistic measurements in the vacuum chamber? Where it lands is determined by gravity.
Solving our problems here means solving our problems in space:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol3/pmofld1a.htm
"This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive. The relative costs of scarce and abundant metals will become even more disparate in the future on Earth as well as in space."
Coincidentally this substitution frequently means higher energy requirements, there is a paper called "The Age of Substitutability" that makes this requirement. Solar power may not even be the cheapest way out, given its thin distribution. I would expect us to go to space once we have solved the energy problem we are facing on earth. This isn't even just energy availability but also the decreasing ore concentration that requires greater energy inputs, even as far as abundant metals are concerned.
Also don't forget that ores in space probably are less concentrated in space, because hydrothermal processes aren't available to the degree we have them on earth, yet another reason to look for watery planets out there.
People are natural causes too!
Now if they just wouldn't insist to be some sort of animated machine of some sort.
"This assumption -- that understanding a system's constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system -- is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science."
Well, it seems as if "explainable system" complexity has an upper, human, limit.
Interestingly people like Joe Tainter think that societies hit their limits by increasing energy requirements through increasing complexity. We may actually be testing our own limits as well.
Here is one more snippet from Wired:
"...they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways."
An energy efficient tool to help us think, i.e. not other humans, would be nice. Also notice that this limitation might also limit our engineering capabilities.
When he enters the real world he may figure out that a lot of code he will touch isn't exactly created through "software engineering" either.
He is exactly the type who is in for a nasty surprise, unless he can enter a field where peoples lives depend on his software, like aviation, defense, and maybe medicine.