The problem isn't that there are no planets in more distant orbits; it's that the Kepler Space Telescope is designed to detect occultations, when a planet passes between the star and us. I am frankly ASTONISHED that Kepler has discovered SO MANY planets in so close to the parent star, but a civilization in the Tau Ceti or even Alpha Centauri system would never be able to detect the Earth - because none of our planets ever occult the Sun from their viewpoint.
Look up in the night sky, and imagine those distant (and very hypothetical!) civilizations orbiting those many, many stars and trying to find US.. Using a Kepler-type telescope, ONLY civilizations that are pretty darn close to the ecliptic would be able to detect OUR solar system.
For Kepler to have discovered so many planets, there must be planetary systems around virtually every star out there. There may be a trillion stars in the Milky Way. If only one in a million planets host anything even remotely resembling "life", there must be a million planets with some form of life.
A "prank" would be a text saying "Ignore previous text, all may yet be well". Texting a drug deal to your parents may, if they're on the rigid side, land you in jail.
Niven described "scrith" as being partially opaque to neutrinos, while ordinary matter is essentially unaffected by neutrinos. So "partially collapsed matter" might be a good description.
However, the "gravity" of the Ringworld is created by spinning the Ringworld at a velocity that produces approximately 1g of centrifugal force; the gravity isn't generated by the mass of the Ringworld itself. (Niven is writing _FICTION_, which only needs to be plausible; it doesn't need to be mathematically exact. But good science fiction must have some connection to reality....) The walls, as you noted, prevent the atmosphere from escaping. (The atmosphere is spinning with the rest of the Ringworld, and is subject to the same apparent centrifugal forces.) But depending on the fine-ness of your control of gravity, you could prevent the atmosphere from escaping with much lower walls, or even without walls.
If you haven't read the books, then I can HIGHLY recommend them. Extraordinarily well written.
Sorry; I do not recall that the Humans or Pak of Niven's "Known Space" universe had developed artificial gravity. Otherwise, the walls of the Ringworld wouldn't have needed to be 1000 miles high. That would put an ENTIRELY different light on things. (The Puppeteers had, but that was much later...)
Of course, _we_ haven't developed artificial gravity yet, either. Nor FTL drive, which the Humans purchased from the Outsiders.... Perhaps we should hope to be discovered by the Outsiders before we're discovered by the Kzinti.
A friend of Niven's wrote a "science fact" article examining the structural requirements and size of the Ringworld. Assuming 100% efficiency in transmuting elements from hydrogen to scrith, a half-dozen jovian planets would do it, I seem to recall. Given that Kepler has already found hundreds, that shouldn't be an issue. We pick up the planets there, move them here, and convert them to scrith enroute. Given the several millennium timeline of this Gantt chart, travel time shouldn't be that big an issue.
Permit me to point out that the Larry Niven who wrote "Ringworld" is the same Larry Niven who (with Jerry Pournelle) wrote both "Footfall" and "The Mote in God's Eye" in which asteroids were used as projectile weapons. And both were great fans of Robert Heinlein, who used the same idea in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".
Of course, the concept of using "falling rocks" as weapons is not especially innovative; we've been using it since Ugghhh the Caveman used in in 500,000 BC.
Please note that any such solar event would almost certainly last several hours, and in 12 hours the night side would BE the day side. That was the major logical flaw in the Larry Niven story "Inconstant Moon".
And Third-ed. Further, PCs - ANY kind of computer - is generally of virtually NO use in the average elementary school classroom. First, the kids need to be able to read. Second, they need to be able to think at least SOMEWHAT logically, and computers are of no assistance in these areas.
AFTER the kid can read, THEN perhaps there's a place for the PC as a research tool.
Far better than a tablet or laptop computer would be an e-reader like a Kindle, to lighten the backpack load of books. Dead-tree textbooks don't make a whole lot of sense any longer.
Color me astonished; I like playing WoW, but not enough to pay $5,700 per year to do it. I suspect that he's one of the very few who is that idio\\\\dedicated to do so.
Duplicate ACCOUNTS? Unlikely; you have to PAY for accounts. But each real cash-paying player may have up to 50 different ALTernate characters. You just can't have all of them online at once.
A slide rule? That was easy; it's a mechanical calculator that doesn't need batteries. Our ancient Underwood typewriter was a "word processor with no screen or memory".
For books aimed at the 12-15 demographic from 1950, Robert Heinlein's "juvenile" series has stood the test of time EXCEPTIONALLY well. Novels like "Space Cadet", "Tunnel in the Sky", "Starman Jones", "Between Planets" and "The Rolling Stones" are still engrossing and great reads. (My son, now 26, loved them when he was 13.) Each book features a fairly smart (but generally not genius level) protagonist, faced with various challenges, and learns some basic life lessons that are still generally in vogue. A few, such as "Podkayne of Mars", even features a female lead character.
Heinlein did BADLY miss one aspect of technology; he predicted everything EXCEPT cheap portable computers and higher level programming languages. But the stories themselves are still visionary.
I don't see the problem; if you are at work, accessing the internet on a business-owned computer and/or connected to a business network, shouldn't you be working on the BUSINESS'S work, and not your own shopping or banking?
Since you're just repeating your unsupported assertion, I'll repeat my response;
You don't know that, and it can't be proven. You might be correct - but your assertion isn't proof.
The facts are that there are a small but corrupting number of BAD TEACHERS who cannot teach and who cannot be fired. Because nothing happens to them, other teachers who COULD be better don't bother to try, or don't try as hard. Administrators who don't demand excellence won't get it - and there's a small number of corruptly bad administrators as well. Who ALSO cannot be fired.
Yes, yes, most teachers are good, and really try, and are really dedicated. But the ones who aren't don't deserve to be paid forever.
You don't know that, and it can't be proven. You might be correct - but your assertion isn't proof.
The facts are that there are a small but corrupting number of BAD TEACHERS who cannot teach and who cannot be fired. Because nothing happens to them, other teachers who COULD be better don't bother to try, or don't try as hard. Administrators who don't demand excellence won't get it - and there's a small number of corruptly bad administrators as well. Who ALSO cannot be fired.
Yes, yes, most teachers are good, and really try, and are really dedicated. But the ones who aren't don't deserve to be paid forever.
Robert Bruce Thompson, former writer of computer manuals, has spent the last five years or so broadening his horizons. He has a Home Astronomy book which is quite good (I have a copy) and has written a series of Home Lab books for Biology, Chemistry, and he has one coming out soon on Forensic Chemistry.
I'm aware of this; the deed to my property specifically excludes, for example, any oil, gas or "asphaltum". But when the government flies over my fenced backyard with high-resolution cameras without a warrant, then my "privacy" has been invaded. Every court in the land will tell you this.
But police officers are often given far more leeway because they are police officers - and in fact, they should be given LESS leeway. They're supposed to know the law, and to uphold it - and sometimes they don't. And the punishment for a police lawbreaker should be more severe BECAUSE he has violated his oath as a police officer.
I would support the police use of drones for law enforcement and security purposes, on one condition which would certainly be unacceptable to the police.
EVERY police officer who uses a drone for any unauthorized purpose should be convicted of a felony and imprisoned for a minimum of a year. Every unneeded flight over a backyard; lock him up! Every observation of your children if not in the course of actual police business; lock him up. Every abuse - into the slammer.
I would support the same penalty for every participant in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong address, or based on an obviously perjured warrant, AND with every police supervisor who went along with it. I'm fine with giving the cops the POWER to do their jobs, but only if it is accompanied with the RESPONSIBILITY that goes along with using that power lawfully and wisely. The police are too often careless and arrogant in the use of their power, and often abuse their authority. Police officers have an extraordinary level of power and authority; they should be held to a far higher than normal standard of behavior.
The only STUPID part of the article is the idea of bringing the metals or ores back to Earth. Considering what it costs to lift a gram of ANYTHING into orbit, wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to keep it up there? Or, "up HERE", given that the people who do most of this work will be UP THERE, building space stations and power satellites.
Up there, power from sunlight is free and essentially unlimited. (We can presume that we're not talking about LEO orbits that spend half the time in shadow,,,) There's no reason that some small but substantial fraction of the human race shouldn't be living OFF of the Earth within the next 200 years.
Climate cycles don't happen in one lifetime, or even three; the coldest part of the last cycle was in the 1600s, and the distinct warming trend was fastest in the mid-1800s. We're talking about cycles that last several centuries; you wouldn't have noticed the change.
There's reason to believe that we're near the peak of THIS cycle. For example, the ice on the coast of Greenland has recently melted to reveal the foundations of the Viking dairy farms.
Which brings us to the crux of the AGW argument; most people agree that the Earth has been warming for a few hundred years. But WHY? Is this a natural cycle, running so slowly that we short-lived humans can't appreciate? Or did we CAUSE this? Al Gore and the warmists believe that human beings are essentially to blame, and he wants to go back to a pastoral - nay, PRIMITIVE - lifestyle. A lifestyle that won't Earth's current population. And I think he wants to be in charge of what's left.
I'm not a climate scientist, but my degree is in engineering physics, so I'm not entirely untrained. I think that if there are problems going forward, most of the problems are amenable to technological mitigation. The warmists don't want technology.
Rosy, there are a great number of genuine scientists who do not agree with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. There IS NO consensus, and failed divinity students like Al Gore have been unable to manufacture one artificially. Do we need to continue to do research on the subject? Absolutely. Which is PRECISELY what the AGW fanatics don't want; they already KNOW the answer, and the time for action is NOW, even though the "action" that they want probably wouldn't solve the problems that they claim we face.
The fact that the Hadley Climate Unit folks tried to fraudulently manipulate the data..... the fact that James Hansen refuses to release the data and algorithms that underlie his claims..... these aren't the actions of reputable scientists. These are the actions of hucksters. Which is exactly the sort of "PANIC NOW AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!!!!!" prescriptions that we're seeing.
If the problem is CO2 being released into the atmosphere, then why don't they support nuclear power?
Sorry; the data says it HAS BEEN a cycle. It was warm in Roman times; it was cold in the Middle Ages. It was warm in the 9th-12th centuries - warm enough for the Vikings to find grape vines in "Vinland", which we now know was Labrador. Then it got cold in the 1300s, enough to freeze the Greenland coastline so that the Vikings couldn't get back into their former homes. In 1776, the Hudson River froze so solidly that General Washington's troops dragged cannons across the ice.
In the mid-1800's, it started to get warm again. The Hudson no longer freezes, and in Hans Christian Andersen's neighborhood, you can no longer ice-skate. The trend, at the moment, is upward. But the historical record gives us pretty clear hints that the upward trend probably won't continue. And even the IPCC data indicates that there has been NO temperature increase in the last 10 years, even though the mathematical models said there SHOULD HAVE BEEN an increase. They were even writing emails to each other about how to "hide the decline" in the temperature data, because the DATA didn't agree with the MODEL.
See? Data. As the stockbrokers tell us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", but Jim Hansen wants us to bet the entire economy that the 2,000 year cyclical behavior will suddenly jump up and never come down again. I didn't believe that when the gold bugs wanted me to buy gold, and I didn't believe the "It can only go higher!" assurances that the local realtors were giving me in 2005. And I don't believe it now from the Warmies.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't that there are no planets in more distant orbits; it's that the Kepler Space Telescope is designed to detect occultations, when a planet passes between the star and us. I am frankly ASTONISHED that Kepler has discovered SO MANY planets in so close to the parent star, but a civilization in the Tau Ceti or even Alpha Centauri system would never be able to detect the Earth - because none of our planets ever occult the Sun from their viewpoint.
Look up in the night sky, and imagine those distant (and very hypothetical!) civilizations orbiting those many, many stars and trying to find US.. Using a Kepler-type telescope, ONLY civilizations that are pretty darn close to the ecliptic would be able to detect OUR solar system.
For Kepler to have discovered so many planets, there must be planetary systems around virtually every star out there. There may be a trillion stars in the Milky Way. If only one in a million planets host anything even remotely resembling "life", there must be a million planets with some form of life.
Which this is becoming....
A "prank" would be a text saying "Ignore previous text, all may yet be well". Texting a drug deal to your parents may, if they're on the rigid side, land you in jail.
Niven described "scrith" as being partially opaque to neutrinos, while ordinary matter is essentially unaffected by neutrinos. So "partially collapsed matter" might be a good description.
However, the "gravity" of the Ringworld is created by spinning the Ringworld at a velocity that produces approximately 1g of centrifugal force; the gravity isn't generated by the mass of the Ringworld itself. (Niven is writing _FICTION_, which only needs to be plausible; it doesn't need to be mathematically exact. But good science fiction must have some connection to reality....) The walls, as you noted, prevent the atmosphere from escaping. (The atmosphere is spinning with the rest of the Ringworld, and is subject to the same apparent centrifugal forces.) But depending on the fine-ness of your control of gravity, you could prevent the atmosphere from escaping with much lower walls, or even without walls.
If you haven't read the books, then I can HIGHLY recommend them. Extraordinarily well written.
Sorry; I do not recall that the Humans or Pak of Niven's "Known Space" universe had developed artificial gravity. Otherwise, the walls of the Ringworld wouldn't have needed to be 1000 miles high. That would put an ENTIRELY different light on things. (The Puppeteers had, but that was much later...)
Of course, _we_ haven't developed artificial gravity yet, either. Nor FTL drive, which the Humans purchased from the Outsiders.... Perhaps we should hope to be discovered by the Outsiders before we're discovered by the Kzinti.
A friend of Niven's wrote a "science fact" article examining the structural requirements and size of the Ringworld. Assuming 100% efficiency in transmuting elements from hydrogen to scrith, a half-dozen jovian planets would do it, I seem to recall. Given that Kepler has already found hundreds, that shouldn't be an issue. We pick up the planets there, move them here, and convert them to scrith enroute. Given the several millennium timeline of this Gantt chart, travel time shouldn't be that big an issue.
Permit me to point out that the Larry Niven who wrote "Ringworld" is the same Larry Niven who (with Jerry Pournelle) wrote both "Footfall" and "The Mote in God's Eye" in which asteroids were used as projectile weapons. And both were great fans of Robert Heinlein, who used the same idea in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".
Of course, the concept of using "falling rocks" as weapons is not especially innovative; we've been using it since Ugghhh the Caveman used in in 500,000 BC.
Please note that any such solar event would almost certainly last several hours, and in 12 hours the night side would BE the day side. That was the major logical flaw in the Larry Niven story "Inconstant Moon".
Amazing! Not only;
1. First Post
2. Entirely Accurate
3. Eminently Reasonable
4. Properly Focused
If I ever got any Mod points, and if there were a category for "Brilliant", you'd get them. Nicely done!
And Third-ed. Further, PCs - ANY kind of computer - is generally of virtually NO use in the average elementary school classroom. First, the kids need to be able to read. Second, they need to be able to think at least SOMEWHAT logically, and computers are of no assistance in these areas.
AFTER the kid can read, THEN perhaps there's a place for the PC as a research tool.
Far better than a tablet or laptop computer would be an e-reader like a Kindle, to lighten the backpack load of books. Dead-tree textbooks don't make a whole lot of sense any longer.
Color me astonished; I like playing WoW, but not enough to pay $5,700 per year to do it. I suspect that he's one of the very few who is that idio\\\\dedicated to do so.
Duplicate ACCOUNTS? Unlikely; you have to PAY for accounts. But each real cash-paying player may have up to 50 different ALTernate characters. You just can't have all of them online at once.
A slide rule? That was easy; it's a mechanical calculator that doesn't need batteries. Our ancient Underwood typewriter was a "word processor with no screen or memory".
For books aimed at the 12-15 demographic from 1950, Robert Heinlein's "juvenile" series has stood the test of time EXCEPTIONALLY well. Novels like "Space Cadet", "Tunnel in the Sky", "Starman Jones", "Between Planets" and "The Rolling Stones" are still engrossing and great reads. (My son, now 26, loved them when he was 13.) Each book features a fairly smart (but generally not genius level) protagonist, faced with various challenges, and learns some basic life lessons that are still generally in vogue. A few, such as "Podkayne of Mars", even features a female lead character.
Heinlein did BADLY miss one aspect of technology; he predicted everything EXCEPT cheap portable computers and higher level programming languages. But the stories themselves are still visionary.
I don't see the problem; if you are at work, accessing the internet on a business-owned computer and/or connected to a business network, shouldn't you be working on the BUSINESS'S work, and not your own shopping or banking?
That's easy; they are all "1". The datum of "97" is clearly experimental error, to be discarded.
Since you're just repeating your unsupported assertion, I'll repeat my response;
You don't know that, and it can't be proven. You might be correct - but your assertion isn't proof.
The facts are that there are a small but corrupting number of BAD TEACHERS who cannot teach and who cannot be fired. Because nothing happens to them, other teachers who COULD be better don't bother to try, or don't try as hard. Administrators who don't demand excellence won't get it - and there's a small number of corruptly bad administrators as well. Who ALSO cannot be fired.
Yes, yes, most teachers are good, and really try, and are really dedicated. But the ones who aren't don't deserve to be paid forever.
You don't know that, and it can't be proven. You might be correct - but your assertion isn't proof.
The facts are that there are a small but corrupting number of BAD TEACHERS who cannot teach and who cannot be fired. Because nothing happens to them, other teachers who COULD be better don't bother to try, or don't try as hard. Administrators who don't demand excellence won't get it - and there's a small number of corruptly bad administrators as well. Who ALSO cannot be fired.
Yes, yes, most teachers are good, and really try, and are really dedicated. But the ones who aren't don't deserve to be paid forever.
Robert Bruce Thompson, former writer of computer manuals, has spent the last five years or so broadening his horizons. He has a Home Astronomy book which is quite good (I have a copy) and has written a series of Home Lab books for Biology, Chemistry, and he has one coming out soon on Forensic Chemistry.
http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Biology-Experiments/dp/1449396593/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339121015&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments/dp/0596514921/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1339121015&sr=8-4
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Astronomical-Wonders-Observer/dp/0596526857/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1339121015&sr=8-7
I'm aware of this; the deed to my property specifically excludes, for example, any oil, gas or "asphaltum". But when the government flies over my fenced backyard with high-resolution cameras without a warrant, then my "privacy" has been invaded. Every court in the land will tell you this.
But police officers are often given far more leeway because they are police officers - and in fact, they should be given LESS leeway. They're supposed to know the law, and to uphold it - and sometimes they don't. And the punishment for a police lawbreaker should be more severe BECAUSE he has violated his oath as a police officer.
I would support the police use of drones for law enforcement and security purposes, on one condition which would certainly be unacceptable to the police.
EVERY police officer who uses a drone for any unauthorized purpose should be convicted of a felony and imprisoned for a minimum of a year. Every unneeded flight over a backyard; lock him up! Every observation of your children if not in the course of actual police business; lock him up. Every abuse - into the slammer.
I would support the same penalty for every participant in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong address, or based on an obviously perjured warrant, AND with every police supervisor who went along with it. I'm fine with giving the cops the POWER to do their jobs, but only if it is accompanied with the RESPONSIBILITY that goes along with using that power lawfully and wisely. The police are too often careless and arrogant in the use of their power, and often abuse their authority. Police officers have an extraordinary level of power and authority; they should be held to a far higher than normal standard of behavior.
The only STUPID part of the article is the idea of bringing the metals or ores back to Earth. Considering what it costs to lift a gram of ANYTHING into orbit, wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to keep it up there? Or, "up HERE", given that the people who do most of this work will be UP THERE, building space stations and power satellites.
Up there, power from sunlight is free and essentially unlimited. (We can presume that we're not talking about LEO orbits that spend half the time in shadow,,,) There's no reason that some small but substantial fraction of the human race shouldn't be living OFF of the Earth within the next 200 years.
Climate cycles don't happen in one lifetime, or even three; the coldest part of the last cycle was in the 1600s, and the distinct warming trend was fastest in the mid-1800s. We're talking about cycles that last several centuries; you wouldn't have noticed the change.
There's reason to believe that we're near the peak of THIS cycle. For example, the ice on the coast of Greenland has recently melted to reveal the foundations of the Viking dairy farms.
Which brings us to the crux of the AGW argument; most people agree that the Earth has been warming for a few hundred years. But WHY? Is this a natural cycle, running so slowly that we short-lived humans can't appreciate? Or did we CAUSE this? Al Gore and the warmists believe that human beings are essentially to blame, and he wants to go back to a pastoral - nay, PRIMITIVE - lifestyle. A lifestyle that won't Earth's current population. And I think he wants to be in charge of what's left.
I'm not a climate scientist, but my degree is in engineering physics, so I'm not entirely untrained. I think that if there are problems going forward, most of the problems are amenable to technological mitigation. The warmists don't want technology.
Rosy, there are a great number of genuine scientists who do not agree with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. There IS NO consensus, and failed divinity students like Al Gore have been unable to manufacture one artificially. Do we need to continue to do research on the subject? Absolutely. Which is PRECISELY what the AGW fanatics don't want; they already KNOW the answer, and the time for action is NOW, even though the "action" that they want probably wouldn't solve the problems that they claim we face.
The fact that the Hadley Climate Unit folks tried to fraudulently manipulate the data..... the fact that James Hansen refuses to release the data and algorithms that underlie his claims..... these aren't the actions of reputable scientists. These are the actions of hucksters. Which is exactly the sort of "PANIC NOW AND GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!!!!!" prescriptions that we're seeing.
If the problem is CO2 being released into the atmosphere, then why don't they support nuclear power?
Sorry; the data says it HAS BEEN a cycle. It was warm in Roman times; it was cold in the Middle Ages. It was warm in the 9th-12th centuries - warm enough for the Vikings to find grape vines in "Vinland", which we now know was Labrador. Then it got cold in the 1300s, enough to freeze the Greenland coastline so that the Vikings couldn't get back into their former homes. In 1776, the Hudson River froze so solidly that General Washington's troops dragged cannons across the ice.
In the mid-1800's, it started to get warm again. The Hudson no longer freezes, and in Hans Christian Andersen's neighborhood, you can no longer ice-skate. The trend, at the moment, is upward. But the historical record gives us pretty clear hints that the upward trend probably won't continue. And even the IPCC data indicates that there has been NO temperature increase in the last 10 years, even though the mathematical models said there SHOULD HAVE BEEN an increase. They were even writing emails to each other about how to "hide the decline" in the temperature data, because the DATA didn't agree with the MODEL.
See? Data. As the stockbrokers tell us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", but Jim Hansen wants us to bet the entire economy that the 2,000 year cyclical behavior will suddenly jump up and never come down again. I didn't believe that when the gold bugs wanted me to buy gold, and I didn't believe the "It can only go higher!" assurances that the local realtors were giving me in 2005. And I don't believe it now from the Warmies.