Actually, assuming that the would operate the plants, actually the corporations who control the power grid would want fusion power to succeed-- fusion power plants fit very well into their business model.
... Deuterium-Tritium can be picked up off the ground, but not on planet earth.
Not on any planet. Tritium has a 12.3 year half-life; it doesn't exist naturally.
Someone is going to have to go to the moon and get a bucket of the stuff.
You're thinking of Helium-3, another possible fusion fuel. (One that's harder to ignite, but once it's ignited, easier to produce electrical power from).
The Mirror Fusion facility was closed at the bequest of the Oil and Uranium industries. Many people don't seem to understand that these companies will do whatever it takes to protect their profits even if it means that the rest of the world suffers. Just look at the climate debate.
That's unlikely. Fusion would be a baseload electric power source, and that doesn't compete against oil (it competes against coal).
Now, fast forward twenty years to 2009, and the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) perfectly aware of that.
And, really, even if electric cars become popular, there are no shortage of uses for petroleum. The oil companies have nothing to worry about from fusion, their product is not going to go away, and they know it.
Perhaps Cringely doesn't have a clear idea what sort of debris we are dealing with here.
No, he doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what debris is, or what orbital energy is, or how orbits work, or how BIG space is.
It is reasonable to clear debris up from Earth orbit... but not the way he proposes.
I'm afraid I have to agree with the people saying that this is not a workable idea. He needs to put some numbers to it. He's going to catch basketball sized objects in a net? Have he thought about what happens when a massive object hits something at several miles per second? I'd say, picture trying to catch a howitzer shell in a net, but, actually, artillery shells are snail-paced compared to orbital velocities. Here's a comparison: imagine that you're catching dynamite, and it explodes the instant you touch it, sending out shrapnel in all directions. Got that in your imagination? OK, it's a lot worse than that.
(And if the answer is, well, make sure you come up on it at slow relative velocity... that means that you have to essentially match orbits with each piece of debris. This is unrealistically expensive in terms of delta-V.)
Also, has he thought about the relative size of the net needed to sweep out a few trillion cubic kilometers of space?
What bothers me is that, back in the 70s, LIvermore built the Mirror Fusion Test Facility, at a cost of somewhat over a billion dollars, to test a fusion concept. The project was cancelled by the Reagan administration the day the facility was finished.
Do we have more stick-to-it spirit these days? Or is this another few billion dollars spent with no other purpose than to improve the economy of Livermore, California?
Well, there was no mention at all of this in the Wikipedia article on Beck, so I added a section mentioning it. After a considerable edit war where several people deleted most of the text (stating it wasn't "notable" enough to have any of the details in the article), it's been pared down to a single very short paragraph at the end.
Seems notable to me. But, at least it's mentioned.
Once we have reached the "peak", how long will it take to actually "run out"?
Forever.
We don't "run out." What happens is that the production decreases, and the price increases, so production heads asymptotically toward (but never reaching) zero production rate. As the price rises it becomes economically feasible to extract harder and harder to recover oil, and production never stops.
The anthropogenic contributions to the atmospheric greenhouse-effect gasses are produced predominantly by coal burning. There's plenty of coal; nobody's predicting that we've reached "peak coal" yet.
Switching, say, from gasoline-powered cars to electric-powered cars, where the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, will have only minor effect on greenhouse gas emissions, but it would have a major effect on the balance of trade (since we'd stop sending so many trillions of dollars to the middle East).
So, no, "climate change" and "peak oil" are two different things.
Many professors or would be professors have little to no skill or training as instructors.
Quite true. The university system rewards publications, not teaching. It's amusing that, to teach first grade, you have to take several years of classes and a couple of student teaching-assignments to get a certificate, but to teach college, you need to have only a good background in research.
Of course, as far as I can tell from talking to my friends who are teachers, 95% of the content of the educational curriculum is worthless. (I do occasionally hear praise for about 5% of it.)
And if we were overflowing in riches right now, I'd say let's go for it.
But the practical fact of the situation is that space exploration is only one miniscule part of science, and it is very, very expensive.
The correct statement is "space exploration is only one miniscule part of science, and it is ridiculously cheap."
At the moment, the whole NASA budget-- research, robotic exploration, human exploration, aeronautics, all of it-- is less than half of a percent of the federal budget. Too small to even see on the pie charts. That's cheap cheap cheap.
Here's my proposal. Let's fund NASA with five percent of the US military budget-- that is, for every dollar the military gets, a nickel goes to NASA. This will have the result of roughly tripling NASAs funding. Sound good?
... I say we all point our collective WiFi antennae up and try and see the first person to connect up to their network. Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
It makes one orbit every 90 minutes, so the visibility from a ground station is a lot less than that!
Maybe you meant 90 seconds? that's more like right.
...Space travel entails a very large barrier to any competitive entities surviving long enough to be profitable. The X-prize provided a near term reward which spurred tons of research into cheap sub-orbital space flight and now there's some rudimentary space industry that can be used to get the ball rolling.
Well, fond as I am of the X-prize and the various entities who are trying to make a go at suborbital tourism, it's worth pointing out that they are going after the sub-orbital tourism market. The vehicles making hops to 100 kilometer altitude for sightseeing are pretty cool, but there's a vast delta-V from there to orbit-- these vehicles are not "going to get the ball rolling" if you're talking about orbit: they don't get to orbit, don't get close to orbit, don't get anywhere near to getting close to orbit.
well... their extrapolation for the entire species as it stands is worthless, but their prediction of the path of evolution for this town certainly has merit....
And if nobody moves into or out of Framingham for the next 250 years, we can check their predictions! (That is, as long as the social and environmental conditions in Framingham don't change in 250 years, either).
Symmetry plays a large role in physiology, so it would be very unlikely to see an evolutionary step that leads to 3 boobs. Lateral symmetry dictates that you'd be more likely to see 4 or 6 before that.
Bob54321 wrote:
Well, we can have lateral symmetry of three....
( . )( . )( . )
Yes, but that requires a change in symmetry pattern. That doesn't happen.
Broken symmetry happens a lot (the liver, for example, or flounder, or the assymetrical claws of lobsters), But not change from paired to centered.
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. The average I read was close to 6 per family.
You should consider reading something that actually quotes facts someday, instead of Rush Limbaugh, or whoever it is you get your made-up facts from.
So, yes, the trend will be for short-fat women. But the trend in rich families will still be for tall, thin women. I wonder if our race will bifurcate into two separate species someday.
No, by the logic you just quoted, the fat women are fat because they're poor-- you just told me that the fatness was because of "the abundance of cheap fattening food combined with jobs that are not physically intensive means the poor can get fat. " That's not hereditary.
In any case, the birth statistics you quoted imply that the "tall, thin, rich" women die out, and are replaced from the pool of "short, fat, poor" women (whose progeny become tall and thin, before they die out and are replaced in turn.) So the species doesn't bifurcate (at least, not according to the logic you give).
The logic is not sound. First, modern humans have been in our current form for something like ten thousand generations; ten generations is trivial. Second, Framingham MA is a far too small a portion the human ecological range to extrapolate from-- unless this trend holds equally well in Addis Ababa, Singapore, Kiev, Kyoto, and the Brazilian rainforest, it has no meaning to human evolution whatsoever.
Giving birth earlier and later menopause all sound like things that would improve selective fitness... but the question is, if they really are selected for, why weren't they selected for five thousand years ago? (Lower blood pressure and lower chloresterol are two that I can understand perhaps a little better-- the problems with heart trouble may have not been quite so much of a problem ten generations ago, when most humans did a lot more physical exercise just to stay alive).
I am wondering if the money being spent on a manned space program is just wasted. With the davances in robotics, we could be scooping up Martian soil, Europan ice, and goo from Saturn's moons and bringing it home for a fraction of putting a man on Mars.
These are not, or shouldn't be, mutually exclusive. Clearly picking up a sample of Martian soil and bringing it back to Earth is going to prove out some technologies that are useful for human missions.
Robots and humans can, and should, work together. But, ultimately, it's not about the robots-- it's about us. The goal should be extending our civilization out beyond the Earth.
(...and, in a final comment, let me note that you may be vastly optimistic about how hard it is to return samples from the Jupiter and Saturn systems. These are some very very difficult missions.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, assuming that the would operate the plants, actually the corporations who control the power grid would want fusion power to succeed-- fusion power plants fit very well into their business model.
... Deuterium-Tritium can be picked up off the ground, but not on planet earth.
Not on any planet. Tritium has a 12.3 year half-life; it doesn't exist naturally.
Someone is going to have to go to the moon and get a bucket of the stuff.
You're thinking of Helium-3, another possible fusion fuel. (One that's harder to ignite, but once it's ignited, easier to produce electrical power from).
The Mirror Fusion facility was closed at the bequest of the Oil and Uranium industries. Many people don't seem to understand that these companies will do whatever it takes to protect their profits even if it means that the rest of the world suffers. Just look at the climate debate.
That's unlikely. Fusion would be a baseload electric power source, and that doesn't compete against oil (it competes against coal).
Now, fast forward twenty years to 2009, and the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) perfectly aware of that.
And, really, even if electric cars become popular, there are no shortage of uses for petroleum. The oil companies have nothing to worry about from fusion, their product is not going to go away, and they know it.
Perhaps Cringely doesn't have a clear idea what sort of debris we are dealing with here.
No, he doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what debris is, or what orbital energy is, or how orbits work, or how BIG space is.
It is reasonable to clear debris up from Earth orbit... but not the way he proposes.
I'm afraid I have to agree with the people saying that this is not a workable idea. He needs to put some numbers to it. He's going to catch basketball sized objects in a net? Have he thought about what happens when a massive object hits something at several miles per second? I'd say, picture trying to catch a howitzer shell in a net, but, actually, artillery shells are snail-paced compared to orbital velocities. Here's a comparison: imagine that you're catching dynamite, and it explodes the instant you touch it, sending out shrapnel in all directions. Got that in your imagination? OK, it's a lot worse than that. (And if the answer is, well, make sure you come up on it at slow relative velocity... that means that you have to essentially match orbits with each piece of debris. This is unrealistically expensive in terms of delta-V.)
Also, has he thought about the relative size of the net needed to sweep out a few trillion cubic kilometers of space?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
Do we have more stick-to-it spirit these days? Or is this another few billion dollars spent with no other purpose than to improve the economy of Livermore, California?
Seems notable to me. But, at least it's mentioned.
That's assuming you get right definition of "EC". Everyone here seems to assume that googling things will give you the correct or relevant answer.
For example, I googled it and E. Coli doesn't want Oracle in Athens to predict what Apollo will say.
EC = "Educational Comics". They originally published educational stuff, but these days all they publish is Mad Magazine, I think.
I'm not sure why they care if the Oracle purchases the sun.
Once we have reached the "peak", how long will it take to actually "run out"?
Forever.
We don't "run out." What happens is that the production decreases, and the price increases, so production heads asymptotically toward (but never reaching) zero production rate. As the price rises it becomes economically feasible to extract harder and harder to recover oil, and production never stops.
The anthropogenic contributions to the atmospheric greenhouse-effect gasses are produced predominantly by coal burning. There's plenty of coal; nobody's predicting that we've reached "peak coal" yet.
Switching, say, from gasoline-powered cars to electric-powered cars, where the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, will have only minor effect on greenhouse gas emissions, but it would have a major effect on the balance of trade (since we'd stop sending so many trillions of dollars to the middle East).
So, no, "climate change" and "peak oil" are two different things.
Well, I'd object to their purchasing the sun as well!!
Many professors or would be professors have little to no skill or training as instructors.
Quite true. The university system rewards publications, not teaching. It's amusing that, to teach first grade, you have to take several years of classes and a couple of student teaching-assignments to get a certificate, but to teach college, you need to have only a good background in research.
Of course, as far as I can tell from talking to my friends who are teachers, 95% of the content of the educational curriculum is worthless. (I do occasionally hear praise for about 5% of it.)
How is this anything new? It was reported on slashdot last year.
Is "interplanetary" part of the unlimited calling package?
And if we were overflowing in riches right now, I'd say let's go for it.
But the practical fact of the situation is that space exploration is only one miniscule part of science, and it is very, very expensive.
The correct statement is "space exploration is only one miniscule part of science, and it is ridiculously cheap."
At the moment, the whole NASA budget-- research, robotic exploration, human exploration, aeronautics, all of it-- is less than half of a percent of the federal budget. Too small to even see on the pie charts. That's cheap cheap cheap.
Here's my proposal. Let's fund NASA with five percent of the US military budget-- that is, for every dollar the military gets, a nickel goes to NASA. This will have the result of roughly tripling NASAs funding. Sound good?
The effect is the signal, not the noise.
That's their belief, yes.
Sorry, let me put the commas into the right place in your sentence:
they have found an effect, buried in data, that is almost entirely background noise.
... I say we all point our collective WiFi antennae up and try and see the first person to connect up to their network. Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
It makes one orbit every 90 minutes, so the visibility from a ground station is a lot less than that!
Maybe you meant 90 seconds? that's more like right.
...Space travel entails a very large barrier to any competitive entities surviving long enough to be profitable. The X-prize provided a near term reward which spurred tons of research into cheap sub-orbital space flight and now there's some rudimentary space industry that can be used to get the ball rolling.
Well, fond as I am of the X-prize and the various entities who are trying to make a go at suborbital tourism, it's worth pointing out that they are going after the sub-orbital tourism market. The vehicles making hops to 100 kilometer altitude for sightseeing are pretty cool, but there's a vast delta-V from there to orbit-- these vehicles are not "going to get the ball rolling" if you're talking about orbit: they don't get to orbit, don't get close to orbit, don't get anywhere near to getting close to orbit.
well... their extrapolation for the entire species as it stands is worthless, but their prediction of the path of evolution for this town certainly has merit....
And if nobody moves into or out of Framingham for the next 250 years, we can check their predictions! (That is, as long as the social and environmental conditions in Framingham don't change in 250 years, either).
BadAnalogyGuy wrote:
Symmetry plays a large role in physiology, so it would be very unlikely to see an evolutionary step that leads to 3 boobs. Lateral symmetry dictates that you'd be more likely to see 4 or 6 before that.
Bob54321 wrote:
Well, we can have lateral symmetry of three....
( . )( . )( . )
Yes, but that requires a change in symmetry pattern. That doesn't happen.
Broken symmetry happens a lot (the liver, for example, or flounder, or the assymetrical claws of lobsters), But not change from paired to centered.
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. The average I read was close to 6 per family.
You should consider reading something that actually quotes facts someday, instead of Rush Limbaugh, or whoever it is you get your made-up facts from.
So, yes, the trend will be for short-fat women. But the trend in rich families will still be for tall, thin women. I wonder if our race will bifurcate into two separate species someday.
No, by the logic you just quoted, the fat women are fat because they're poor-- you just told me that the fatness was because of "the abundance of cheap fattening food combined with jobs that are not physically intensive means the poor can get fat. " That's not hereditary.
In any case, the birth statistics you quoted imply that the "tall, thin, rich" women die out, and are replaced from the pool of "short, fat, poor" women (whose progeny become tall and thin, before they die out and are replaced in turn.) So the species doesn't bifurcate (at least, not according to the logic you give).
Giving birth earlier and later menopause all sound like things that would improve selective fitness... but the question is, if they really are selected for, why weren't they selected for five thousand years ago? (Lower blood pressure and lower chloresterol are two that I can understand perhaps a little better-- the problems with heart trouble may have not been quite so much of a problem ten generations ago, when most humans did a lot more physical exercise just to stay alive).
Although sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
But when you get down to the bottom of it, it tends to the left.
The ./. tld? I think I like it.
I am wondering if the money being spent on a manned space program is just wasted. With the davances in robotics, we could be scooping up Martian soil, Europan ice, and goo from Saturn's moons and bringing it home for a fraction of putting a man on Mars.
These are not, or shouldn't be, mutually exclusive. Clearly picking up a sample of Martian soil and bringing it back to Earth is going to prove out some technologies that are useful for human missions.
Robots and humans can, and should, work together. But, ultimately, it's not about the robots-- it's about us. The goal should be extending our civilization out beyond the Earth.
(...and, in a final comment, let me note that you may be vastly optimistic about how hard it is to return samples from the Jupiter and Saturn systems. These are some very very difficult missions.)