Firefly was many things.. Hard sci fi was not one of them. I mean where do you start? Personalized interplanetary travel, but no food? No robotic armies? Not even proper body armor. They are all at the same time so advanced to have personal space travel, and yet so primitive that its the wild west.
I really enjoyed the show. But it was never even consistent with itself let alone real physics.
Yea, and then there all these buggy whip manufactures without jobs as well... Think of their children.
We are not worse off when we don't need to spend every waking hour working just to have enough to eat. It was like that once upon a time. But some clever dick decided to plant stuff and make it easier to gather. The rest is history. A much better history at that.
A what does that have to with it clear application? The prototype wasn't a 747 so there was no clear use?
Flight did have clear applications right from the start (aka it wasn't the first manned flight...). Just because the first plane did not realize all those applications is irrelevant.
The radiation wouldn't kill the astronauts, not even on the return trip.
Eh... yes it would... with pretty high probability especially with a 3+ crew. At least one is going to have a bad time of it, its not like you spend only a week on the surface. Cancer treatments would be hard to take with you.. Its a really big dose and that is without a CME or flare. The actual dose is hard to predict without a space craft design. Turns out the thin outer layers increase the dose inside. But its really marginal with the most optimistic dose rates.
And yet we still don't have a reason do send a person. Seriously what can they do that a teleoperated/autonomous robot can't. Other than die horribly and painfully on international tv?
Going to mars really is that much harder. For one your crew will be almost dead by the time they get there without some serious radiation shielding magic (don't forget we have about 10 metric tons of air per m2 for shielding on earth). Then there is life support etc for the much longer duration. Completely closed system have not been demonstrated at all. Even for one way trips, mars is a much much harder challenge. Delta V doesn't even get close to considering how much harder it is. And yet already that makes it look quite a bit harder.
A quick BOTE calculation give a deltaV of 19.5km/s for mars compared to 15.7km/s for the moon. Assuming 4500m/s LOX/LH rocket we need mass ratios of 76 for mars compared to 33 for the moon. And that is without any return trip. Including a return trip makes these numbers far worse. Of course this is why its suggested to create your own local rocket fuel.
That is pure 100% pseudoscience. It violates quite a few fundamental laws which we don't believe can be violated. Like the conservation of energy and momentum. It also doesn't even stack up to plain old math and experiment. Or emag theory is pretty rock solid. Its why your cell phone works as well as it does. Also we have things like this floating around (microwave cavities), and yet we observe no such magical force. Case in point no experiment has. Its right up there with the latest cold fusion fiasco.
Satellites are not manned, flight had clear uses right from the start. Manned space flight has been a waste of time and money. It was and is nothing more that a international pissing contest. That is why you can fly around the world for a reasonable price, but space is still inaccessible. It currently has no purpose. Neither does a manned moon/mas base. There is nothing that machines can't do better, cheaper and more politically secure than manned anything in space.
Do you even know how much 3He is up there. Its like an average of 1ppb. You need the biggest mining operation ever, on the moon and you need to process billions of tons of material with 100% efficiency, and after all that you only have enough 3He for a few power stations, oh and these are imaginary power stations because 3He fusion is about 50x harder than DT fusion that we *can't* do. Its a made up reason because even the manned moon based fans can't come up with anything better.
Seriously... if that is the best list you can come up with, then you have only proved my point. This is not the same as exploring the new world. We are not talking about "manned missions or no missions", we are talking about bases on mars or the moon with people in them that need lots of heavy, fragile life support equipment that get cancer with a few measly months basking in the cosmic ray background. And for what? What will they do that a person here on earth can't do with the correct application of teleoperated and autonomous robotics?
So i am bad at spelling or remembering names and make lots of typos. Sue me. The Navy has also funded cold fusion and anti gravity. It really is *not* a feather in the hat of legitimacy.
I did not insult Bussard. I pointed out that both experiments and Theory is against the idea, if you read that as an insult then science is not for you. Being dead changes nothing. Also i said nothing about Focus fusion. Point in fact Eric has addressed the specific criticisms that I pointed out. While Bussard just ignored them, or claims can't just not apply, but then never says why they wouldn't when they clearly do apply. Nor did i say defund anything (though *I* wouldn't throw a penny at the polywell). I said a diverse portfolio is a good idea. That is fund many approaches. Polywell has had very little independent reviews and almost nothing public or peer reviewed, this is in strong contrast with the focus fusion team. I do keep up with the literature. Or at least try too.
Legitimate dark horses in fusion (ie don't require magic): General Fusion and other pulse compressed magnetized concepts. DPF (aka focus fusion, but then people have been working on this for 30 years too!), Colliding RFC. Note none of them have shown operating parameters even close to either Tokamaks or ICF. The mainstream is still closer on every metric that matters.
Note that if plasma's did what we expected we would have had fusion 60 years ago. All these methods could easily come undone as so many previous attempts have or come across problems that take time to fix like main stream concepts. Its a lot more tricky than people outside the field understand. But we have come a very very long way and have a much better understanding of how it works.
Another interesting fact about Tokamaks. When the Russians published their results in the west, no one believed them because it was just so much better than anything else (something like 100x better!). It wasn't until a team of scientists went over to Russia to independently verify their claims that folks on this side of the iron curtain believed them.
You know a experimental power station that cost about 10-20B over the 20-30 year lifetime is in fact not that expensive at all. Note that a plain old nuke plant cost about 10B to build. And a cool 1B even for a 1GW coal plant. Hydro cost even more.
Did you also know that plasma containment is getting better *faster* than Moore's law? In the last 20 years there has been a increase in containment of something like well over a million (can't be bothered looking it up). Also did you know that the ITER crowed have *never* been given the budget they expected. So the joke of 20 years always is strongly based on the fact they have not had the finding they said they would need for that to be true. Also even new fission is going to take 20-30 years to validate, before wide scale deployment.
We are in this energy thing for the long haul. 20 years even 60 years of sustained investment is the kind of long term planning we need to be doing. Sure we should have a more diverse portfolio, even the ITER guys have at times strongly supported that (other times they have been told to keep their mouths shut). But the whole "my fusion idea is better and cheaper but the baaad ITER people are taking all the money" is false. A bunch of scientist killed the SCC years back because they thought the money not spent on that particle accelerator would be available to them. It wasn't. They got no increase and set back particle physics 20 years. Fact is these R&D items are tiny line items in government funding programs, its not a zero sum game. kill one and there is *more* reason to kill another. Not less. ITER is not stealing anyone's funding. Kill it and that money goes away.
Finally the Buzzard Polywell really tries to pretend a whole bunch of both theory and experimental results are wrong. The facts are that the probability of a T nuclei and a D nucli undergoing fusion is >1000x more than the chance they scatter off each other. Thus they *always* thermalize faster than they fuse. Add electrons, and again energy sapping ion electron collisions are 1000x more likely giving there energy up as x rays. For any other reaction those numbers are far far worse.
Well fusion is easier for electricity since it does not really matter if it masses a 1000 tons. So since we can't do the later we can't do the former.
Antimatter does not need gamma ray reflectors. When a proton and and a antiproton combine you get Pions. Not gamma rays. About 1/3 is each of the pi+,pi- and pi0. The pi0 does almost immediately decay into gammas and there goes about 1/3 of the energy. But the pi+ and pi- live for long enough and are moving pretty close to the speed of light. Since they are charged they can be directed by a magnetic nozzle. So we can even without much magic (other than generating and storing antimatter) have a antimatter engine with about 50% or even fairly close to 66% efficiency.
Even with 50% efficiency you can get away with pretty reasonable mass ratios for start stop upwards of 50% the speed of light.
However the only gamma ray reflector we could do a a dense block of Tungsten that is heated to close to its melting point by all rearward directed gammas. And a mirror system to send the radiated energy (from the white hot W block) backwards. It would need a rather thick block of Tungsten... so your probably going to be slower than not having it. An interesting calculation to work out for the evening perhaps.
Aluminium smelters don't run on coal because its too expensive. Aluminum is almost exclusively produced with hydro in locations where there is cheap hydro, ore is shipped to those locations. Well that was the case at least until the Chinese came up with a gigaton of C02 a day process...
If Aluminum was so difficult it would cost more (its pretty cheap really). Its not in fact harder than many common materials.
You can't make them defect free for thermal dynamic reasons unless they are really really short. All a bit of radiation, like say when the cable is in space, and you get even more defects.
Yes. Its dislocations, and grain structure in metals at least. For thermodynamic reasons there are always a few atoms misplaced, or missing. Sliding of atoms along crystal planes (can be mitigated with proper alloys and heat treatment) or movement due to dislocations happen at much lower forces than if it where "perfect" Note perfect is not possible. CNT have the dislocation problem. There has been at least one paper to suggest that it cannot have the bulk strength required for a space elevator for example.
New Zealand has the same kinda of rules. I purchased a game that did not run on my machine at all despite being above the minimum required on the box. The shop of course said that there are no returns once the package is open. Sorry but that is *not* the law, its what they want you to believe. I did get my money back when i pointed out the law, and also reminded them that i can in fact get legal aid for such matters in NZ for free.
The game was unplayable on hardware it claimed to be playable on. That is not fit for its intended purpose. Note in NZ they can replace the item or refund at their discretion, and you can't claim "damages" caused by the fault.
The universe is not required to consider that it is in fact wasting space. Nor is it required to match desires or expectations. For example going faster than the speed of light may in fact be impossible.
There really is no answer as of yet. This doesn't really change anything other than confirm what was already expected: a lot of earth like planets around. The really hard stuff is life and more importantly intelligent life. It could be really really rare. Hell even multicellular life may be the really really hard evolutionary jump. At this point its guess work. The universe could simply be very devoid of life with perhaps the chance of intelligent life in a galaxy like being something like 100:1. Hence we are alone.
Of course things could be the other way round and there be many intelligent species in a galactic back yard.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefly was many things.. Hard sci fi was not one of them. I mean where do you start? Personalized interplanetary travel, but no food? No robotic armies? Not even proper body armor. They are all at the same time so advanced to have personal space travel, and yet so primitive that its the wild west.
I really enjoyed the show. But it was never even consistent with itself let alone real physics.
Why not just let people who don't like a topic/post/story not click on it? I mean its not like you are made to read every front page story now is it.
Yea, and then there all these buggy whip manufactures without jobs as well... Think of their children.
We are not worse off when we don't need to spend every waking hour working just to have enough to eat. It was like that once upon a time. But some clever dick decided to plant stuff and make it easier to gather. The rest is history. A much better history at that.
Increasing the utility of labor is a good thing.
A what does that have to with it clear application? The prototype wasn't a 747 so there was no clear use?
Flight did have clear applications right from the start (aka it wasn't the first manned flight...). Just because the first plane did not realize all those applications is irrelevant.
The radiation wouldn't kill the astronauts, not even on the return trip.
Eh... yes it would... with pretty high probability especially with a 3+ crew. At least one is going to have a bad time of it, its not like you spend only a week on the surface. Cancer treatments would be hard to take with you.. Its a really big dose and that is without a CME or flare. The actual dose is hard to predict without a space craft design. Turns out the thin outer layers increase the dose inside. But its really marginal with the most optimistic dose rates.
And yet we still don't have a reason do send a person. Seriously what can they do that a teleoperated/autonomous robot can't. Other than die horribly and painfully on international tv?
Going to mars really is that much harder. For one your crew will be almost dead by the time they get there without some serious radiation shielding magic (don't forget we have about 10 metric tons of air per m2 for shielding on earth). Then there is life support etc for the much longer duration. Completely closed system have not been demonstrated at all. Even for one way trips, mars is a much much harder challenge. Delta V doesn't even get close to considering how much harder it is. And yet already that makes it look quite a bit harder.
A quick BOTE calculation give a deltaV of 19.5km/s for mars compared to 15.7km/s for the moon. Assuming 4500m/s LOX/LH rocket we need mass ratios of 76 for mars compared to 33 for the moon. And that is without any return trip. Including a return trip makes these numbers far worse. Of course this is why its suggested to create your own local rocket fuel.
That is pure 100% pseudoscience. It violates quite a few fundamental laws which we don't believe can be violated. Like the conservation of energy and momentum. It also doesn't even stack up to plain old math and experiment. Or emag theory is pretty rock solid. Its why your cell phone works as well as it does. Also we have things like this floating around (microwave cavities), and yet we observe no such magical force. Case in point no experiment has. Its right up there with the latest cold fusion fiasco.
Satellites are not manned, flight had clear uses right from the start. Manned space flight has been a waste of time and money. It was and is nothing more that a international pissing contest. That is why you can fly around the world for a reasonable price, but space is still inaccessible. It currently has no purpose. Neither does a manned moon/mas base. There is nothing that machines can't do better, cheaper and more politically secure than manned anything in space.
Do you even know how much 3He is up there. Its like an average of 1ppb. You need the biggest mining operation ever, on the moon and you need to process billions of tons of material with 100% efficiency, and after all that you only have enough 3He for a few power stations, oh and these are imaginary power stations because 3He fusion is about 50x harder than DT fusion that we *can't* do. Its a made up reason because even the manned moon based fans can't come up with anything better.
Seriously... if that is the best list you can come up with, then you have only proved my point. This is not the same as exploring the new world. We are not talking about "manned missions or no missions", we are talking about bases on mars or the moon with people in them that need lots of heavy, fragile life support equipment that get cancer with a few measly months basking in the cosmic ray background. And for what? What will they do that a person here on earth can't do with the correct application of teleoperated and autonomous robotics?
We are a tool making species. Use the right tool.
You are seriously using a game to assert the truthiness of space exploration? Well in that case I think we shouldn't go because the of the Zerg.
We had the tech, but not the money. Are we going to have the money by 2033?
We have the money, it is just that we prefer to spend it on other things.
Seriously, what is a moon base good for? Low G golf?
So i am bad at spelling or remembering names and make lots of typos. Sue me. The Navy has also funded cold fusion and anti gravity. It really is *not* a feather in the hat of legitimacy.
I did not insult Bussard. I pointed out that both experiments and Theory is against the idea, if you read that as an insult then science is not for you. Being dead changes nothing. Also i said nothing about Focus fusion. Point in fact Eric has addressed the specific criticisms that I pointed out. While Bussard just ignored them, or claims can't just not apply, but then never says why they wouldn't when they clearly do apply. Nor did i say defund anything (though *I* wouldn't throw a penny at the polywell). I said a diverse portfolio is a good idea. That is fund many approaches. Polywell has had very little independent reviews and almost nothing public or peer reviewed, this is in strong contrast with the focus fusion team. I do keep up with the literature. Or at least try too.
Legitimate dark horses in fusion (ie don't require magic): General Fusion and other pulse compressed magnetized concepts. DPF (aka focus fusion, but then people have been working on this for 30 years too!), Colliding RFC. Note none of them have shown operating parameters even close to either Tokamaks or ICF. The mainstream is still closer on every metric that matters.
Note that if plasma's did what we expected we would have had fusion 60 years ago. All these methods could easily come undone as so many previous attempts have or come across problems that take time to fix like main stream concepts. Its a lot more tricky than people outside the field understand. But we have come a very very long way and have a much better understanding of how it works.
Another interesting fact about Tokamaks. When the Russians published their results in the west, no one believed them because it was just so much better than anything else (something like 100x better!). It wasn't until a team of scientists went over to Russia to independently verify their claims that folks on this side of the iron curtain believed them.
You know a experimental power station that cost about 10-20B over the 20-30 year lifetime is in fact not that expensive at all. Note that a plain old nuke plant cost about 10B to build. And a cool 1B even for a 1GW coal plant. Hydro cost even more.
Did you also know that plasma containment is getting better *faster* than Moore's law? In the last 20 years there has been a increase in containment of something like well over a million (can't be bothered looking it up). Also did you know that the ITER crowed have *never* been given the budget they expected. So the joke of 20 years always is strongly based on the fact they have not had the finding they said they would need for that to be true. Also even new fission is going to take 20-30 years to validate, before wide scale deployment.
We are in this energy thing for the long haul. 20 years even 60 years of sustained investment is the kind of long term planning we need to be doing. Sure we should have a more diverse portfolio, even the ITER guys have at times strongly supported that (other times they have been told to keep their mouths shut). But the whole "my fusion idea is better and cheaper but the baaad ITER people are taking all the money" is false. A bunch of scientist killed the SCC years back because they thought the money not spent on that particle accelerator would be available to them. It wasn't. They got no increase and set back particle physics 20 years. Fact is these R&D items are tiny line items in government funding programs, its not a zero sum game. kill one and there is *more* reason to kill another. Not less. ITER is not stealing anyone's funding. Kill it and that money goes away.
Finally the Buzzard Polywell really tries to pretend a whole bunch of both theory and experimental results are wrong. The facts are that the probability of a T nuclei and a D nucli undergoing fusion is >1000x more than the chance they scatter off each other. Thus they *always* thermalize faster than they fuse. Add electrons, and again energy sapping ion electron collisions are 1000x more likely giving there energy up as x rays. For any other reaction those numbers are far far worse.
Yes i am a nuclear scientist. Or at least i was.
Case in point, there was a recent paper that showed (theoretically) that a 90+% magnetic nozzle should be possible.
More like Pie pie
Well fusion is easier for electricity since it does not really matter if it masses a 1000 tons. So since we can't do the later we can't do the former.
Antimatter does not need gamma ray reflectors. When a proton and and a antiproton combine you get Pions. Not gamma rays. About 1/3 is each of the pi+,pi- and pi0. The pi0 does almost immediately decay into gammas and there goes about 1/3 of the energy. But the pi+ and pi- live for long enough and are moving pretty close to the speed of light. Since they are charged they can be directed by a magnetic nozzle. So we can even without much magic (other than generating and storing antimatter) have a antimatter engine with about 50% or even fairly close to 66% efficiency.
Even with 50% efficiency you can get away with pretty reasonable mass ratios for start stop upwards of 50% the speed of light.
However the only gamma ray reflector we could do a a dense block of Tungsten that is heated to close to its melting point by all rearward directed gammas. And a mirror system to send the radiated energy (from the white hot W block) backwards. It would need a rather thick block of Tungsten... so your probably going to be slower than not having it. An interesting calculation to work out for the evening perhaps.
Asbestos is in fact a nano fiber with the damage being done mechanically. We do have a precedent that airborne CNT could be really really bad for you.
Aluminium smelters don't run on coal because its too expensive. Aluminum is almost exclusively produced with hydro in locations where there is cheap hydro, ore is shipped to those locations. Well that was the case at least until the Chinese came up with a gigaton of C02 a day process...
If Aluminum was so difficult it would cost more (its pretty cheap really). Its not in fact harder than many common materials.
You can't make them defect free for thermal dynamic reasons unless they are really really short. All a bit of radiation, like say when the cable is in space, and you get even more defects.
Yes. Its dislocations, and grain structure in metals at least. For thermodynamic reasons there are always a few atoms misplaced, or missing. Sliding of atoms along crystal planes (can be mitigated with proper alloys and heat treatment) or movement due to dislocations happen at much lower forces than if it where "perfect" Note perfect is not possible. CNT have the dislocation problem. There has been at least one paper to suggest that it cannot have the bulk strength required for a space elevator for example.
Single crystals still have dislocations. They still have macroscopic strength below bond strength.
You should see what the new eWaste laws are like then!
New Zealand has the same kinda of rules. I purchased a game that did not run on my machine at all despite being above the minimum required on the box. The shop of course said that there are no returns once the package is open. Sorry but that is *not* the law, its what they want you to believe. I did get my money back when i pointed out the law, and also reminded them that i can in fact get legal aid for such matters in NZ for free.
The game was unplayable on hardware it claimed to be playable on. That is not fit for its intended purpose. Note in NZ they can replace the item or refund at their discretion, and you can't claim "damages" caused by the fault.
It seems to keep getting a little closer with each return orbit.
That is not how orbital mechanics works. In fact close approaches change the orbit rather drastically.
The universe is not required to consider that it is in fact wasting space. Nor is it required to match desires or expectations. For example going faster than the speed of light may in fact be impossible.
There really is no answer as of yet. This doesn't really change anything other than confirm what was already expected: a lot of earth like planets around. The really hard stuff is life and more importantly intelligent life. It could be really really rare. Hell even multicellular life may be the really really hard evolutionary jump. At this point its guess work. The universe could simply be very devoid of life with perhaps the chance of intelligent life in a galaxy like being something like 100:1. Hence we are alone.
Of course things could be the other way round and there be many intelligent species in a galactic back yard.