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#276 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Why "New Technology" Is Not a Panacea » 2021-10-29 19:07:49
That's just a loaded assertion. Yes the costs add up but do they add up to more than nuclear, coal, and gas?
As things stand in many parts of the world solar plus storage is already way cheaper than nuclear.
The direction of travel for solar, wind and storage is clear: down. down, down.
If the convenience aspect of charging a Tesla is an actual selling point, then it's typically done at night after returning home from work, when there is no more sun and wind to provide electric power, which means that power comes from natural gas and coal.
If you're saying we need to go all in on nuclear if we wish to switch to an all-electric society, then yes, I agree. Though you do get wind at night I suppose. But charging batteries during the day, then transmitting the power at night to charge more batteries... those losses are going to add up.
#277 Re: Human missions » Musk now the richest individual on the planet » 2021-10-28 18:35:42
The clue is in the title "family". This is Musk's personal wealth being referenced.
Musk, Gates and Bezos own companies and stock. The Old Rich own COUNTRIES through owning the political class. The uber rich are Trillionaires, with a T, not a mere B. I saw an article several years ago that estimated the worth of the Rothschild family at $500 Trillion.
Musk, Bezos, and Gates are all pikers by comparison.
#278 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Prometheus Fuels Lower Cost Than Fossil Fuels » 2021-10-28 17:42:14
Louis,
These fuels don't contain any Sulfur, no aromatic hydrocarbons (Benzene, Toluene, etc), and also produce lower NOx emissions. If you can obtain both light and heavy hydrocarbon fuels without drilling, without fracking, and without refineries, for less money than it costs to extract crude oil from the ground, then it wins on cost, the reduced pollution from combustion is an added bonus, and we take the environmental extremists' play toy away from them, so that everyone can see them as the petty wannabe tyrants that nearly all of them truly are. In the end, we will use the cheapest product on offer that both provides energy when demanded and does nothing to increase atmospheric CO2 levels.
Good news on the pollution. Makes it much more attractive.
You can also add it wins out on energy independence - certainly for the USA, where the fuel could be produced in the South West states economically I expect.
Some people, like you, don't want nuclear power. Your real reason for not wanting it is that you're terrified of radiation due to Hollyweird movies that have the most tenuous connections to reality. However, after we moved away from the real reason, you said it costs too much while absolutely refusing to address the fact that 100% of all the wind and solar and battery infrastructure has to be replaced at least every 25 years, rather than every 75 years using solar thermal and nuclear thermal, and all of it was made using copious quantities of hydrocarbon fuels. Even if we made longer lasting wind turbine blades or photovoltaic cells, none of the control electronics will last for 25 years and that's where much of the true cost is. How can a piece of Silicon smaller than your fingernail cost hundreds to thousands of dollars? The energy and labor that went into making it, that's how.
I think my "fear" of nuclear is perfectly valid and proven. I recall being on holiday in Greece shortly after the events at Chernobyl. No lamb was available on the menu despite Greece being maybe over a 1000 miles from the epicentre. We couldn't eat lamb from Wales for several years - and the UK is thousands of miles away. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly in some ways, the terrorist threat is not something I've imagined...
It is possible the Flight 93 terrorists were planning to attack a nuclear power station. Al Queda certainly had an interest in attempting to do so. And the following report makes clear nuclear power stations were never built to withstand a Jumbo Jet being flown into it at 600 MPH. It's anyone's guess what damage would be caused by such an attack (and there are many other potential terrorist attack targets).
https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/ … tpr222.pdf
So you can't just brush off either the threat of accidents and terrorism as you have a tendency to do.
As I have made clear nuclear power is a much option for Mars because there you really can site your power stations away from human settlements and human agriculture and the threat of terrorism is neglible in any case. Moreover, nuclear heat would be useful on Mars for terraformation. So, I am not ruling that out, though it's clearly not going to be at the heart of the early missions.
Anyway, I told you I was agnostic about what the solution is, but I'm not agnostic on costs or environmental damage from excessive resource consumption trying to compensate for the dilute and intermittent nature of the energy provided by the wind and sunlight. Playing the "hide the true cost game" is a waste of time as well. Consumers inevitably pay for the total cost of the solution, but our working poor and middle class can least afford the cost increases associated with "electrical / electronic everything". Consumers pay more for power in Germany than in the US, because more expensive energy costs more money, period and end of story.
I agree consumers (or taxpayers or both) pay for the total cost. However, we can also see how technology has already and will continue to transform the cost profile of green energy. Once technology delivers on storage, we will see the total green energy system cost start to get much closer to the cost of green energy at source. There are so many promising technologies available for storage now, that I feel confident the storage solution is going to be resolved. If battery costs continue to fall and storage density continues to improve (to say 0.3 KwH per Kg), it becomes economical eventually for countries in more northerly latitudes to send 500,000 ton battery tankers to be charged in desert areas further south or even to go "sun fishing" themselves on the oceans. One 500,000 ton tanker might have a total charge of 150 GwHes - probably something like 18% of UK current electricity usage on one day. So a fleet of maybe 20 such vessels travelling between Morocco or the South Atlantic and the UK could probably provide all our current electricity needs (but of course wind energy and other green energy sources can supply a large proportion as well).
Regarding environmentalism, I don't want to live in a toxic wasteland. I'm pretty sure nobody else does, either. Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, and Mercury used in electronics, like all commercial solar panels and batteries and electronics, are toxic forever. Most radioactive substances eventually decay into stable elements, and tiny quantities or radioactive wastes are involved by way of comparison. Anyway, that's my beef with electronic everything and attempting to store a week's worth of power in batteries or tanks of hot salts / metals / rocks. Sure, storing something is better than losing everything, but hydrocarbons will still be usable hydrocarbons six months into the future. You can push fuel through a pipeline to consume old stock in vehicles and then refresh it with new stock produced by wind and solar power. How do you consume old electrons if you don't need them for a month or two at a time? You can't, obviously. The material consumption and pollution associated with electronic everything is bat guano crazy. A never-ending waste stream of millions of tons of non-recyclable and/or toxic electronic waste is an absurdity. We need to kill the idea of planned obsolescence, bury it some place nobody will ever find it- kinda like Jimmy Hoffa, and reject the infatuation with faddish "new-ness", and embrace ultimate durability to minimize the need for recycling. New doesn't mean better, old doesn't mean better, accomplishing the same basic task in an even more practical way means better- to my way of thinking.
I think you are probably stuck in the past on recycling. Huge strides have been taken in dealing with the recycling challenges of green energy. Cheaper green energy allows for more sophisticated (and costly) recycling techniques.
You can have wind and solar backed by hydrocarbon energy storage, or you can attempt to use some combination of solar / wind / nuclear to electrify absolutely everything, for whatever good that will do humanity. If it was practical and economic to electrify everything, then we would've done so by now. It's not, because it requires too much energy and therefore cost, and that's why we haven't done so already.
That's not clear at all. Electric power lines for trucks on motorways could make a lot of sense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
Individual truck operators can't afford to put the infrastructure in place. But once it's there it becomes a very economical means of transport for them. (See from 2:20).
I can tell you that no matter what type of computer hack you attempt against my mechanical engine car, you're not moving it anywhere without direct physical access. You won't be able to turn it on, turn it off, or run it into a building while I'm driving around inside of it. It simply won't matter in the slightest if a nuclear war, computer virus, software glitch, or solar storm manages to fry every last microchip and battery on the planet. If I have a manual starter, my combustion engine will start and run and provide reliable service, period. I can fix it with a wire brush, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a socket wrench set. There are guys who machine the mating surfaces of existing engine blocks and cylinder heads using sandpaper and a sheet of glass. Yes, power tools are great to have when they work, but instant gratification costs real money. That "hand machining" process takes about 1 to 2 hours per head, about the same time for the top deck of the engine block, but no machine shop equipment and services are required. Absent many thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, any electronically-controlled engine or battery becomes a very stylish but otherwise useless paperweight the moment that some sensor, wiring connection, or microelectronic component fails. I want less of that, and more user-control over my own technology. Apart from washing machines / dryers / refrigerators / ovens, I'm not a big fan of non-repairable appliances.
I've already shown in another thread that a Tesla is about 50% to 60% more efficient than a modern naturally aspirated gasoline engine, after all the inefficiencies of electrical power transformation are taken into account, at the expense of being more than twice the initial purchase price of a comparable car, and utterly impossible to recycle in a meaningful way. It's so much more costly that the price differential represents around a half million miles of driving, by which point the mechanical parts of both vehicles are junk. The door handles on a Tesla cost as much to replace as my entire engine, because its based on a ridiculous electronic design wherein no expensive electronics are required, much less desirable to have.
It's still early days. SAIC/General Motors have come up with a mass market low price EV costing something like $4000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ytqr8T05OU
The 500MWac Aktina solar project near where I live produces 631MWdc, meaning 131MWe worth of power is lost before the power touches the transmission lines. That implies that at least 20% of the power produced is lost at the solar farm, merely by converting it from DC to AC. I think that's an absurdity for a power generation technology widely touted for its efficiency. That means to assure nameplate power output over 25 years, by which time panel output has degraded to 85% of initial output, you need a bare minimum of a 35% over-capacity. All the conversions between the farm and your outlet lose another 10% to 15% of the energy transmitted, which is why it's utterly impractical to produce power in Africa and then ship it to the UK using undersea power cables. 131MW of power is enough to produce quite a bit of fuel for energy storage. If we had that much waste energy to play with on Mars, for example, then we could refuel our Starship within a few months or so. Anyway, the fuel produced onsite can then be pumped through a series of pipelines, at minimal transport cost. For a solar thermal planet, it could be used onsite and the power pushed through the same infrastructure at night, negating the requirement for two or more separate power plants.
All these new technologies are opening up lots of opportunities for more efficient ways of operating.
#279 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Climate Change - History and Forecasts » 2021-10-28 14:31:12
We seem to be living in an age of hysteria.
As a corrective may I suggest climate hysterics read this about the coldest winter on record in the Antarctic at the South Pole. It occurred in...oh wait a minute, it occurred this year:
https://spectator.org/a-freezing-antarc … s-records/
Does this mean the AGW theory is completely wrong? No. Not necessarily. Should it give us pause for thought? Yes.
Other clues are that the hurricane season in the Caribbean was worse in the decades of the 1940s and 1960s compared with recent decades. Also, I have not seen one credible record of an island going under the waves because of rising sea levels (not sinking land, natural shifts in estuarine silt deposits and currents, leaky limestone, and collapsing coral).
#280 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » Prometheus Fuels Lower Cost Than Fossil Fuels » 2021-10-28 14:16:25
Regarding Reverse Combustion (RC), it's clear that cost is the key factor, not energy efficiency.
If the cost of electricity from fossil fuels is 6 cents per KwHe but you can achieve RC by using cheap solar power (which in some cases can generate electricity at 1.8 cents per KwHe*), then even if you are using more energy to create the energy, the cost could still be cheaper than the fossil fuel. This isn't surprising in the sense that fossil fuels have to be dug up or sucked up out of the Earth, stored and then transported a long way. An onsite solar power facility using onsite free fuel (photons) has a head start from that point of view.
As Kbd points out, the great advantage here is that the RC fuels are a very flexible form of energy storage.
Of course, whether we want to carry on using such fuels if they cause pollution issues is another matter.
* The energy could be viewed as having an even lower marginal cost if we are talking about using surplus solar power.
#281 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-27 19:11:15
Louis,
Our son, despite just starting his nursing training, is already working the COVID ward at the hospital, because that's how desperately short of bodies we are in a city that, at least according to numbers, has the problem "under control" (whatever the hell that means). Houston has one of the most well-developed health care systems in the entire country.
I hope all goes well with your son. But this is a familiar tale. Why after 18 months and having many tens of billions of dollars and pounds thrown at the problem can't the authorities deal with the problem. In the UK we had about 5 "Nightingale" (isolation) hospitals ready to come into operation last year but they were never activated in any meaningful sense. Have we seen lots of training of auxillary nurses and ICU doctors, plus expansion of ICU? Er - no. Virtually nothing. It's almost like they don't want to be able to deal with this challenge isn't it?
None of what you've posted that I've read thus far has made me think any differently about the utility of vaccines, but I'm of the opinion that you go to war with the entire military, not one part of it.
I definitely agree you fight with the full range of your military. But that is exactly what has NOT been happening. There has been virtually no public info on the importance of Vit D for instance and certainly no free distribution of the Vitamin to the whole populace. Likewise the medical estbalishment has sought to ruibbish Ivermectin, HCQ and other treatments. In India (Uttar Pradesh state) they virtually wiped out Covid byh distributing health kits to all households including Ivermectin and Vit D.
1. Current vaccines are, according to data, far less effective against the latest variants of COVID. I don't have an explanation as to why vaccine development hasn't maintained pace with the virus, but the vaccines currently in use were and are highly effective against stopping serious illness from the original strains.
You need to compare Covid vaccines with all other vaccines. Covid vaccines are probably the worst performing vaccines in the last 50 years.
2. People who are fully vaccinated generally suffer less severe symptoms. This is merely a rule-of-thumb, and there are exceptions to every rule. There are no silver bullets in medicine, which is why I think having prevention (vaccines), treatment (drugs), and transmission disruption schemes (social distancing) in place are all equally important. No single measure is a replacement for all other measures. Natural immunity only works if you have it. If you don't, then the results range from mild illness to death. If we could tell who would get seriously ill, then we could rely upon specific measures for specific people, but we can't tell, so we don't. We know what the death rate was before and after the vaccine.
"People who are fully vaccinated generally suffer less severe symptoms." I think this contention is becoming less and less tenable.
We know in most countries where there has been mass vaccination that the majority of people in ICUs with Covid are vaccinated people.
The only question is whether it is a disproportionate number.
3. My definition of effectiveness has nothing to do with sniffles or whether or not you can transmit the virus to others.
Well please enlighten us as to your definition because I have yet to come across an "indiustry-standard" definition.
4. Outside of places where the government murders people based upon lack of adherence to orthodoxy, mandates work about as well as you'd expect, which is to say not at all.
That might sound cute but not if you are living under a government that seeks to emulate the worst totalitarian dictatorships on Earth.
5. Due to the inexcusably poor "lack of foresight" of the scientists who we put up on pedestals, where they probably don't belong, we're going to have to learn to live with the virus. Everyone is going to get it eventually, and there's no stopping that now.
I like my chances better with a vaccine, you like your chances better without one. To each his own. The only constant that I've asked of everyone on this forum is to consult with a real medical doctor, not something they've read from someone posting something you agree or disagree with, on the internet. Asserting that anyone without medical training knows more than a doctor of 20+ years strains credulity, to say the least. I never assumed I knew more about either brain tumors or pregnancy than my wife's OBGYN, merely because I was right one time about one aspect of what happened to her. To that point, your beliefs won't be able to bring you back from the dead if it turns out that you have no natural immunity to COVID, and end up on a ventilator. There's a reason they call medicine "a practice", rather than "a science". Nobody can guarantee a specific result, no matter how much they know, nor how much practice they've had.
Three generations of my Uncle's family are dead because of this plague, and the two survivors were seriously injured. The youngest child will probably heal over time as she grows up. Her mother may never be off Oxygen again, and if the virus comes back around, it may very well finish what it started. As always, time will tell.
I wish good luck with your choices and I sincerely hope they work out for you.
Exactly. These are our choices and no one else's. I don't criticise your choice, and you don't criticise mine. I am very sorry to hear of the effect on your family. My own feeling is that had we encouraged social mixing among the younger and healthy population from the outset (rather than discouraging it) we would have achieved herd immunity much earlier and the "at risk" population would have been much better safeguarded as a result. As it is I feel we have created maximum risk for people who are vulnerable.
#282 Re: Not So Free Chat » JOBS Jobs Jobs why are there none » 2021-10-27 18:51:24
I wasn't suggesting people go to restaurants alone on Mars! It's just they won't need to interact with staff. Via mobile phones or equivalents, they will simply be able to order up their meals which will be delivered by robots to their tables. As always a major part of the experience will be for most people who you are with. But I think a lot of effort will be put into creating a nice atmosphere on Mars using music, vegetation, lighting. and vistas. I think it's naive not to think that part of what you pay for on Earth when you visit a restaurant is for staff to act as though you have superior status. I say "act" adivsedly as in most restaurants staff probably don't feel that the customers have superior staff - they just realise the acting is part of the deal. With more elite restaurants it's a different dynamic. The staff do indeed know the clientele have higher social status.
Louis,
I go to restaurants to interact with other people, to see and talk to them, not to assert that I'm any better or worse than them. It's the same reason to go to a bar, or a movie, or a sports game, or a convention, or to see family members and friends, etc. I wait on people all the time, and unless they specifically try to belittle me, I presume that the interaction is for sake of the interaction, aka, "part of being human".
#283 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-27 17:43:30
Let's just say this ain't the polio vaccine. 
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urg … u/comments
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/all … e/comments
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/sco … y/comments
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/a-v … e/comments
Louis,
louis wrote:1. Advanced age is not of relevance to this discussion. You can be old and have a functioning immune system or you can be old and have a poorly functioning immune system. Being old of itself is not the determinant of whether you are going to get Covid and die.
Age is relevant because extremely old people die at much higher rates than younger people, with or without COVID-19, with or without immune system issues. I never stated that age alone determines whether or not someone will die of anything, but the older you get, the more frail your body becomes. There are exceptions to many rules, but I've yet to see an exception to that rule.
louis wrote:2. Generally true.
Generalizations are useful because while there are frequently exceptions to most rules, they don't disprove the rule.
louis wrote:3. I bet you can't even define what is meant by "vaccine efficacy". The "efficacy" declines I believe simply because more people die or get seriously ill as time goes on ie they were never very effective vaccines to begin with AND also I believe the PCR tests do register people with vaccine spike protein as "Covid" cases. The vaccine manufacturer themselves state that Covid-like symptoms are a recognised side-effect of the vaccine - so having Covid-style symptoms doesn't mean you have Covid necessarily. Wherever the vaccines have been introduced we have seen a sudden sharp rise in "Covid" cases immediately afterwards.
Here's how I define "vaccine efficacy":
If getting a vaccine lowers your chance of never leaving a hospital alive, because your lungs look like Swiss cheese after COVID wrecks them, then I consider a vaccine that prevents that from happening to be "efficacious".
If you get the sniffles or a fever for a day while your vaccine-trained immune system fights off the virus, I don't consider that to be a lack of efficacy. Furthermore, I don't consider the fact that you can still be a carrier of a microscropic particle like a virus, despite never falling ill yourself, to be a lack of vaccine efficacy. The vaccine protects the person who is vaccinated. If 99%+ of the people on the planet have a vaccine, then the literal handful of real medical exceptions then benefit from "herd immunity" having been achieved, because the virus loses its host reservoir that it requires to replicate and continue to exist in the wild. Sure, it'll simply mutate and then circle back around for another pass. It's an arms race if ever there was one, but humanity's continued existence depends on us winning nearly every single battle.
louis wrote:4. You don't seem able to follow this. Not everyone who is unvaccinated has chosen ("elected") to be unvaccinated. A significant number of the unvaccinated are simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death to be vaccinated. In the UK that number might be 100,000 or 200,000 and they will be more or less certain to die at some point over the next two years and many of them will acquire Covid shortly before their death. It could well be 20% of the figure since respiratory failure is one of the main ways such people die. When total deaths from Covid are so low, as they are now, that will totally skew the picture. A huge proportion of "Covid" deaths are going to be among "involuntarily" unvaccinated people.
No, I understand that part, which is why there should be medical exemptions for those people. Are you a medical exception, or simply someone who doesn't want to take the vaccine because something bad happened to one of your children from a vaccine, ages ago?
louis wrote:5. We can't "determine" but we can undertake a statistical analysis. Someone who has been rejected for Covid vaccination because they are too ill and weak, is going to be much more likely, statistically, to die from Covid than someone who can have the vaccination.
How many of those people are there, versus the number of people who just want to be contrarians for sake of contrarianism?
louis wrote:I think it's always a huge "tell" that governments and Lockdownists generally never want to compare health outcomes for healthy unvaccinated and healthy vaccinated people. Whyever not? I think there is a reason - they don't want to focus on what is the foundation of good health: a properly functioning immune system. I am not saying the immune system solves all health problems, but you can't have good health without it.
If you go back and read my posts from a year ago, you'll find that I was against lockdowns and the media spreading virus-related fear-based paranoia / hysteria, even back then. I had some fairly pointed exchanges with "clark with a k", where he is now. My position hasn't changed since then.
I don't care who's in charge, whether I agree with their politics or not, lockdowns and ironclad mandates are fear-based paranoia masquerading as "caring about other people", when the only evidence that exists is that people don't care about others, and there's scant evidence that they even care about themselves.
But enough about the past, since we can't change it.
How can you determine if someone's immune system is functioning properly? No two are the same, not even amongst identical twins.
How can you determine if someone is healthy or unhealthy?
If the virus had a 50% mortality rate, I'm guessing you'd still be here claiming that they were unhealthy in some way, and that we shouldn't be vaccinating people, because we need to have an endless academic debate while half of humanity drops dead, due to whatever rationalization your mind can concoct.
When it comes to those core beliefs, you and GW are cut from the exact same cloth. It's a shame that neither of you recognize it. You're two different sides of the same irrationality. One is terrified about what will happen if we do, the other terrified about what will happen if we don't.
I'll move beyond the terror and tell you what will happen, though, no matter what you do. Given enough time, both of you, everyone you know, and everyone you care about, will all die. It's only a matter of time, and whether or not you're still alive to see it with your own eyes. There are a very limited number of things you or anyone else can do to change the timeline and virtually nothing that anyone can do to change the ultimate outcome.
However, while you're here, if you make prudent decisions, then you could feasibly extend that timeline by some indeterminate amount. To me, that's worth the sacrifices made. I love my wife and children and the rest of my family in the here and now, despite knowing and even accepting what the ultimate outcome is- that they will all die no matter what I do. My feelings remain unchanged. While I'm here I will do whatever I can do, in order to ensure that they live to see their next sunrise, no matter how righteous or how truly awful. Everyone has their own bit of irrationality baked into their thought process, and I'm certainly no exception to that rule.
Life is the ultimate Faustian bargain, isn't it?
#284 Re: Not So Free Chat » JOBS Jobs Jobs why are there none » 2021-10-27 17:35:26
As far as Mars goes the last thing we'll want to be doing is sending out chefs and waiters from Earth at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to live in a high tech environment that they may not feel too good about in any case.
Restaurants on Mars should really be 99% robotic including food delivery, food storage, food prep, cooking, waiting on tables, washing up and cleaning. I'm not sure they would even need permanent staff - maybe a team of people would check on a whole series of restaurants ensuring that hygiene standards are all good. I think personally I'd be happy with a robot restaurant. I know some people feel the need to assert their status through being waited on by human beings. I don't feel that need at all. I am interested in the quality of the food and the ambience. I can imagine a base on Mars within the first 20 years where the pioneers had a choice of robot restaurants to eat in and that is probably where most people would eat of an evening. Ideally I think restaurants would have a view over the Mars landscape.
I've referenced Moley robotics several times here. But this might be closer to the reality of restaurants on Mars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z26tJeeI6cU
I just watched a Miso Robotics commercial demonstrating a robot preparing pretty much all of the food in a fast food restaurant's kitchen.
There might be a $15 minimum wage for 1 or 2 employees per shift, but they will be the only people getting paid.
As soon as the robotics companies figure out how to reliably package the food, then it'll be 1 employee per shift.
#285 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-27 14:46:58
I may be missing something re the journey time but surely the increase from 100 to 175 tons cargo must be coming from a reduction of some 75 tons in the weight of engines, fuel/propellant and dry mass? Is that not the case? If it is, then the journey time should presumably remain the same I am presuming, as the overall mass remains the same.
There doesn't need to be a huge battery mass required if you are making hydrogen (or methane) and oxygen - burn the hydrogen to power a steam generator (well you'd actually take several). But there will already be large battery installations on each Starship.
Yes, I don't know who's right about solar power at the surface. It is certainly the case that on Mars because of the dust content in the atmosphere, the light is much more diffuse and so, while the mid-sol maximum may be less than the earth equivalent as a % of total solar power during the sol, at either end of the sol, solar power is stronger than would otherwise be the case, as the light is bouncing in all directions. I also understand the Mars wobble means that solar power is more evenly distributed over the year.
Louis any increase is due to performance increases in engines and dry mass reduction. The other thing that makes the final change is the transit time which will get longer as the payload mass increases. Dam that math stuff....
Δv - Desired Change In Rocket's Velocity
vₑ - Effective Exhaust Velocity
m₀ - Initial Mass (Rocket Plus Contents Plus Propellant)
m₁ - Final Mass (Rocket Plus Contents)
Δv = vₑ ln(m₀ / m₁)Here is the reference system for fuel manufacturing
https://marspedia.org/images/thumb/a/a2 … uction.pngIts says 13,000 kwhr a day with the 100w m^2 panels getting 10 hrs each day or creating 1 kwhrs.
Mars does not receive 10 hours of sunlight at full power for that to work.
With no battery mass stated...
There is no mass for the co2 collection and processing and there is none given for the water gathering let alone that mass for melting and cleaning the water....
It also will take 6 of these units to get the fuel delivery in a 500 day not 678 day mars cycle to refill a single starship for return home.
#286 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-26 14:07:47
An interesting presentation.
Not least, the suggestion that a Starship will be able to carry 175 tons of cargo - I have assumed 100 tons max before now.
He doesn't explain what the "average" insolation means. Average for the whole planet or for areas of maximum insolation?
I think the mass estimate for a solar solution is too high, because with such clement conditions on Mars (low force winds and no precipitation to speak of) we don't need the robust scaffolding required on Earth. In fact, it might be simpler to take more solar panelling and simply lay it out on the ground or rest it on wires strung between lightweight poles, or on inflatable supports. Whatever, I suspect you can probably reduce the mass estimate by at least 30%. 13,000 sq metres sounds like a lot but it's only 114 x 114 metres.
The suggestion that we would need to rely on dirty ice is not persuasive. NASA/JPL have identified 97%-plus pure ice a few feet below the surface in the Erebus mountains region. And that is a good area to land and start a first base (as recommended by JPL).
Discovering that your ice source is going to be further away than expected is not going to be a huge tragedy as long as you have enough transporter rovers to keep up a good supply chain. We might need maybe 4 x 2 ton robot rovers to transport ice back to the base. You would have to work to a "worst case scenario" - so maybe working anywhere up to 50 kms away from the base.
I think his idea for dispensing with the need for propellant production on Mission One is very interesting and should be investigated further.
A lot of things become possible if each Starship can take 175 tonnes to Mars. For one thing, a couple of Starships could carry the methane (220 tonnes) for a Starship return journey. You would then only need to produce as ISRU 780 tonnes of oxygen on the surface of Mars. But electrolysis is a pretty simple process as I understand it and can easily be scaled up. We could then just vent the hydrogen or use it as a power reserve.
This would reduce the mass required for the solar power solution and for CO2 concentration.
I'm beggining to think that might be the best way forward, applying the "KISS" principle.
Here's an excellent presentation by Marcus House on a method of doing an Earth Return w/o ISRU; there are lots of numbers involved and talk about Isp, electricity needed on Mars , and kinda shoots down the exclusively Solar power production using very nicely calculated information. The guy really talks fast so be prepared to watch several times ad stopping to look at the tables he presents.
#287 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-26 13:21:08
I seem to recall that I made a personal calculation that if they could achieve orbital flight by December 2021 then they might just be able to land humans in 2026/27. There would be about two years or more for testing and development of cargo Starships and about four years for testing and development of human portage Starships.
From AIAA's email newsletter "the daily launch" for today. It appears they are ready to go except for the regulatory approval. Note that test firing a vacuum engine on the surface is necessarily a short event, because the flow in the bell is separated. This upsets the balance of heating and cooling. Run it too long, and you destroy the bell, and probably the entire engine. -- GW
Elon Musk Says Starship Could Undergo Orbital Flight Test Next Month
SPACE (10/22) reported that Elon Musk tweeted on Friday, “If all goes well, Starship will be ready for its first orbital launch attempt next month, pending regulatory approval.” Federal Aviation Administration approval for SpaceX’s launch license is still pending.CNBC (10/22) reported that SpaceX conducted two test firings of the Starship’s engines on Thursday “as the company prepares for the rocket’s first orbital launch while the Federal Aviation Administration reviews its license request.”
Spaceflight Now (10/22) reported that Thursday’s test “was the first test-firing of a Raptor vacuum engine mounted to a Starship rocket.”
#288 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Corporate Government » 2021-10-25 16:37:24
Seems like you never learn from history Robert. The US military effectively split in two before they conducted the American Civil War. A federal military force can never be a guarantor of peace. The USSR fell apart when its supposedly free constituent parts started exerting their freedom. In the UK we had King v Parliament in the 1640s even though they were theoretically part of the same system.
You seem always to deny the reality of human nature. We are social primates with an inordinate interest in individual status and a strong bias towards using violence to settle disputes. Culture can direct some of our innate impulses but it can't eradicate them.
And Federal Police can only arrest Municipal Police if they are strong enough to do so.
One of my bullet points in post #170 was the federal government would maintain a military. The primary purpose of that military is to ensure cities don't go to war with eachother. And a city-state may be unsatisfied with being restricted to a city.
I envision police of the capital city doubling as federal police until population is large enough to justify a separate federal police service. But only federal laws will apply outside city limits. City bylaws of the capital city only apply within city limits. One task iof the federal police is if municipal police attempt to enforce town/city bylaws outside town/city limits, the federal police will stop them. If necessary federal police will arrest municipal police.
#289 Re: Martian Politics and Economy » Corporate Government » 2021-10-24 17:52:24
This thread is only about Mars in a cautionary way now!
But to keep it brief, the now well known saying "If you're getting Flak it means you're over the target" applies completely to Trump.
We all know Trump's character faults but in terms of politics he was flying over the targets and that's what triggered all the reactions: opiate epidemic, non functioning NATO, Pharma scams, Deep State, Clinton crime family, China, Green nonsense, bogus senators like McCain...you name it, he attacked the target.
Trump's great failure was to always see the solution in terms of people not ideology. His solution always was "I've got this great guy who's gonna sort it all out - he's doing a great job". Fatal. Half of his appointees were Deep State plants who used his major character flaw (vanity), showering him with false praise, to gain his trust and then totally abuse it.
#290 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-21 17:03:51
1. Advanced age is not of relevance to this discussion. You can be old and have a functioning immune system or you can be old and have a poorly functioning immune system. Being old of itself is not the determinant of whether you are going to get Covid and die.
2. Generally true.
3. I bet you can't even define what is meant by "vaccine efficacy". The "efficacy" declines I believe simply because more people die or get seriously ill as time goes on ie they were never very effective vaccines to begin with AND also I believe the PCR tests do register people with vaccine spike protein as "Covid" cases. The vaccine manufacturer themselves state that Covid-like symptoms are a recognised side-effect of the vaccine - so having Covid-style symptoms doesn't mean you have Covid necessarily. Wherever the vaccines have been introduced we have seen a sudden sharp rise in "Covid" cases immediately afterwards.
4. You don't seem able to follow this. Not everyone who is unvaccinated has chosen ("elected") to be unvaccinated. A significant number of the unvaccinated are simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death to be vaccinated. In the UK that number might be 100,000 or 200,000 and they will be more or less certain to die at some point over the next two years and many of them will acquire Covid shortly before their death. It could well be 20% of the figure since respiratory failure is one of the main ways such people die. When total deaths from Covid are so low, as they are now, that will totally skew the picture. A huge proportion of "Covid" deaths are going to be among "involuntarily" unvaccinated people.
5. We can't "determine" but we can undertake a statistical analysis. Someone who has been rejected for Covid vaccination because they are too ill and weak, is going to be much more likely, statistically, to die from Covid than someone who can have the vaccination.
I think it's always a huge "tell" that governments and Lockdownists generally never want to compare health outcomes for healthy unvaccinated and healthy vaccinated people. Whyever not? I think there is a reason - they don't want to focus on what is the foundation of good health: a properly functioning immune system. I am not saying the immune system solves all health problems, but you can't have good health without it.
Louis,
Fact #1: The uptake of the vaccines is highest in the advanced age groups, across all countries where the vaccines are administered.
Fact #2: The people who need the vaccine the most, because they're most at risk of serious illness from the virus, are in the advanced age groups.
Fact #3: The real world efficacy of the existing vaccines against the latest strains of COVID is far less than it was against the early strain of the virus, but for some reason, probably related to money, we're not updating our vaccines to keep pace with the virus.
Fact #4: The people who elect not to get the vaccine and use their "natural immunity" instead, die at a rate that is minimally 5 times higher than those who elect to take the vaccine, to as much as 50 times higher. Orders of magnitude have meaning.
Fact #5: Apart from risk factors for virtually any respiratory disease (prior or concurrent respiratory illnesses, advanced age, obesity, immune system compromise, major organ damage, etc), we can't take a random person from any age group and determine who will or won't become seriously ill and die after they're infected with the virus.The age groups of people who are dying at the highest rates are the most vaccinated group people, which also happens to be the advanced age groups. As a result of advanced age, they're far more likely to die of any cause, because they're naturally closer to dying with or without one more straw (COVID-19) piled on, to help break the camel's back.
Our Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, fell into that group. He had severe immune system compromise and was in the process of dying from cancer, but COVID, which his vaccines didn't protect him against (because vaccines are developed to target specific strains of bacteria or viruses), was the straw that broke the camel's back. Would he have died from those complications anyway, without COVID ever existing? Most likely, but again, that was not what happened in objective reality. The fact that he was severely immuno-compromised, yet vaccinated anyway, flies in the face of your assertion that medical doctors are not recommending vaccination for this group of people (because those medical doctors, who you choose to ignore if their opinions don't mirror your own, know that if that group does become severely ill from COVID, then they're highly likely to die as a result.
The people in those advanced age groups keep dying at higher rates for 3 reasons:
1. As you pointed out, they are already old and frail, so their immune systems are less able to fight back against COVID-19.
2. The real world efficacy of the present vaccines against the mutated strains of COVID-19 is around 39%, not 96%.
3. There is no "natural immunity" against an engineered virus that our highly educated morons concocted in a laboratory, that was specifically engineered to be both highly infectious and virulent.In summary, the data in the graph that SpaceNut posted shows quite clearly that people using their "natural immunity alone", do not fare nearly as well against COVID-19. The unvaccinated die at a rate 5X to 50X higher than the vaccinated. Across the entire human population, we're talking about many millions of people who would have otherwise lived to see another day, had they been vaccinated.
#291 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-21 04:41:42
These comparisons are very skewed for two simple reasons: (a) if you are very ill and close to death the medical profession won't vaccinate you because you will likely die as a result of the vaccination (so the "unvaccinated" population includes the very ill and weak people who don't appear in the "vaccinated" category) and (b) rather than looking at all disease fatalities it compares only Covid deaths.
A far more appropriate comparison would be between healthy unvaccinated people and healthy vaccinated people, looking at all disease outcomes.
The age difference is in for vacinated versus those which have chosen not to.
COVID death risk for age groups by vaccination statushttps://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/QeWt9qMLIL_ZWP8CpsxIEQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtoPTI4OTtjZj13ZWJw/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/9oWIsAZuH7vIjTCfR3SqUQ--~B/aD00OTI7dz0xMjAwO2FwcGlkPXl0YWNoeW9u/https://media.zenfs.com/en/axios_articles_623/6cb6d9f75ad81f80c88ac362d97e986c
#292 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-19 18:50:48
Felix is back from his hols. Thanks goodness since I find he is the best explainer out there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cbjk8aloEM
Still no clarity on when we might expect an orbital launch.
#293 Re: Not So Free Chat » Shipping & Ports the Supply Chain Problems » 2021-10-18 16:20:46
No one knows for sure but the World Economic Forum (the Davos lunatics) did predict that supply chain problems would occur...and we know they have ways of making things happen.
There are some political movements that thrive on stability and some that thrive on crisis. The Green-Globalist-PC-Woke-Leftist alliance thrives on crisis.
We also seen this with fuel shortages in England back and forth between Britain and France with Brexit and any kind of delay impacts supply. When the ship went sideways in the Suez Egypt, it started to cost the global economy and add to a European Chip shortage acorss some nations of the EU. Then we now see a California problem, it seems to have a social political element to it adding to a backlog of international cargo vessels, with fuel price hikes, an economic downturn, the Covid lockdowns and Crona numbers the small stores and restaurant and businesses and consumers were already feeling the squeeze of a global supply chain under duress. Biden wants some Cranes and Trucks to now work 24/7 get companies like UPS, FedEx working even more, business and people have moved out of California some famous celebrity and engineer like Musk have publically stated they werwe moving out, as people leave empty homes, crime can go up and more move out adding to more labor shortages, the biggest driverfor any delays and backlog in California might be the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Secretary Buttigieg defends taking weeks off with his 'husband' during the crisis and warns supply chain crisis will go into 2022 or longer while US Presdient Biden is expected to talk more on ‘supply chains’. The Southern California ports seem to say they are under staffed and over worked and deny Biden's appeal for non stop operations.
#294 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-18 09:02:58
Not sure if you are aware of this but counting can sometimes be used to make things called "graphs". Look at the graphs and you will see steadily rising health outcomes throughout the twentieth century - largely attributable to shorter working hours, better schooling, improved public health, housing quality improvements, and access to health care. When vaccination became significant and standard, really from the early 50s onwards, the improvements continued. However, since multiple vaccination programmes got a grip in the 1990s we have seen children's health outcomes decline rapidly in the UK (also in the USA I believe). We are now in many regions seeing health outcomes go into reverse across the whole population.
Vaccination is not improving health outcomes. And be under no illusion: Big Pharma wants to replace natural immunity with vaccination - not 10 or 20 or even 50 vaccines but hundreds, to be administered orally in multiple doses. It's a public health nightmare.
Louis,
Sorry, but basic math and ye olde math skills, better known as "counting", flies in the face of the notion that vaccines are overrated. Fewer people have died since their invention and widespread use. That is a mathematical fact, at least for people who practice the dark art of "counting". I'm simply asking why we're not keeping pace with current events, now that our illustrious Democrats are in charge of the country. I stayed silent on the matter until it became blatantly obvious that we've gone right back to dithering about, instead of working on the current problems.
I don't care if President Biden is the country's most popular dementia patient, he needs to either do his job or the Democrats need to get someone who will. Every time we put Democrats in charge, they revert back to "I'm not responsible, it's the other guy's fault, quit asking me to do my job, because I don't know how." I'm pretty sick of that crap. If you want to be a leader, then lead. If not, then learn how to follow or stay the hell out of the way while better men and women get things done.
Edit:
Oh, and in case the point is abundantly clear, I'm pretty sick of the current Republicans sticking their thumbs up their butts and watching the Democrats put on their clown show while also doing nothing useful for the country. I'm going to vote for new people in the coming election. All of them need to go. Any politician who doesn't start moving the ball down the field within their first year in office needs to get automatically recalled, by law, for failure to due their duty. President Trump, or Tulsi Gabbard, or Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis are the only people I'd vote for President at this point. The rest of those clowns, from both parties, couldn't make money running a lemonade stand in the middle of the Sahara, selling lemonade to people dying of thirst. That's how utterly useless I think they are.
#295 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-18 06:30:54
Even eventual death is not certain now that Jeff Bezos is on the case! Although, I guess - statistically - you would have to die some time from an accident or major negative event like an asteroid impact, or collapse of the Sun...you couldn't live forever.
I do think (some*) vaccines should be in the medical cabinet but compared with good foetal care, good parenting, good housing, good clean air, good nutrition, good gut health, good levels of exercise, good natural immunity and so on, I think they are currently vastly overrated.
* Not respiratory pathogen vaccines
Louis,
I'm not looking for agreement from anyone, I'm looking for serious thought given to having as many options as possible to solve a very complex problem, so long as the options used are all viable options. We're way, way past containment now, for example, so that's not a viable response, and why that utter nonsense they're doing in Australia is both horrifying and insufferably stupid. All of humanity can't be locked down for years on end. People still have to eat, if nothing else. When you go to war, you take the aircraft carriers / submarines / fighter jets / tanks / artillery / infantry... In other words, the entire military, not some specific part of it, presuming the goal is to win the war.
We have people here who think vaccines are silver bullets, people who think drugs are silver bullets, and people who think they can avoid all human-to-human interactions with the rest of humanity.
There are no "silver bullets" in medicine and there never have been. I don't have a working crystal ball and never met anyone who did, so I can't predict what the future will bring, but if history is any indicator, then holding out hope for one is probably a waste of time.
Apart from eventual death, there are no other certain outcomes in life. Life is about what happens between the beginning and the end, and everything we do between those two points is what matters most (to my way of thinking).
Relying solely on medications or solely on vaccines is like going to war with the sheath welded onto your bayonet or an empty magazine well where a fully loaded magazine should be present. Neither of those situations make any sense to me at all.
If your life literally depended upon all of your weapons working as intended, then why in the world would anyone intentionally handicap themselves in that way?
#296 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » 2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases » 2021-10-17 18:48:26
I agree with all you write but would add that the health disaster we are seeing unfold before our eyes (we have high excess death rates now in the UK) is also the result of corruption not just scientific hubris.
Big Pharma has corrupted honest scientific research and has also corrupted politicians (not that many of them need much persuading). China has corrupted the WHO and made it an instrument for implementing its foreign policy. Big Pharma working with Big Tech have become corruptly involved in politics e.g. deliberately targetting Trump's comments and delaying announcement of the vaccine development. The medical establishment have been corrupted by Big Pharma money and Big Government money. They have allowed themselves to become ideological creatures and have effectively abandoned the doctor-patient relationship. I'm referring here more to medical ideology. Medical ideology is a construct of ideas that are not rooted in science or observable data. Extreme vaccine ideology (promoted by Big Pharma) has now taken over the whole medical establishment, so that they have signed up to the project to replace our natural immunity (developed and honed over literally billions of years of evolution) with hundreds of vaccines (which they hope to administer orally in multiple form). There is absolutely no evidence this will provide better health outcomes than if we invested in other resources such as health education, vitamin and minerial supplements and so on. But routine multiple vaccination for the whole population will earn Big Pharma trillions and doctors millions at least. But - like a lot of Marxist ideology - the provax ideology has the advantage of being fairly simple while appearing complex and providing a seemingly plausible framework of understanding.
From the National Institute of Health's Website:
From the study:
Of the top 5 counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies 4 of them as “High” Transmission counties. Chattahoochee (Georgia), McKinley (New Mexico), and Arecibo (Puerto Rico) counties have above 90% of their population fully vaccinated with all three being classified as “High” transmission. Conversely, of the 57 counties that have been classified as “low” transmission counties by the CDC, 26.3% (15) have percentage of population fully vaccinated below 20%.
Since full immunity from the vaccine is believed to take about 2 weeks after the second dose, we conducted sensitivity analyses by using a 1-month lag on the percentage population fully vaccinated for countries and US counties. The above findings of no discernable association between COVID-19 cases and levels of fully vaccinated was also observed when we considered a 1-month lag on the levels of fully vaccinated (Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Figure 2).
We should note that the COVID-19 case data is of confirmed cases, which is a function of both supply (e.g., variation in testing capacities or reporting practices) and demand-side (e.g., variation in people’s decision on when to get tested) factors.
...
The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants. Other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination rates. Such course correction, especially with regards to the policy narrative, becomes paramount with emerging scientific evidence on real world effectiveness of the vaccines.For instance, in a report released from the Ministry of Health in Israel, the effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39% [6], substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96% [7]. It is also emerging that immunity derived from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be as strong as immunity acquired through recovery from the COVID-19 virus [8]. A substantial decline in immunity from mRNA vaccines 6-months post immunization has also been reported [9]. Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10].
In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.
AN INCREASE IN THE RATES OF HOSPITALIZATIONS AND DEATHS, RESPECTIVELY, AMONGST THE FULLY VACCINATED...?
WAS THAT AN ADMISSION THAT A SINGULAR STRATEGY FOR SOLVING AN INCOMPREHENSIBLY COMPLEX PROBLEM LIKE A GLOBAL PANDEMIC IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA?
STIGMATIZING POPULATIONS CAN DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD?
YOU DON'T SAY... GEE WHIZ, DOC, YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT IT TOOK AN ENTIRE GROUP OF MD'S AND PHD'S, STARING AT A VERITABLE MOUNTAIN OF EVIDENCE, TO FIGURE THAT ONE OUT? GOOD GRIEF. NO WONDER WE'RE SO SCREWED.
IN SUMMARY, EVEN AS EFFORTS SHOULD BE MADE TO ENCOURAGE POPULATIONS TO GET VACCINATED IT SHOULD BE DONE SO WITH HUMILITY AND RESPECT.
IN OTHER WORDS, A "PERSONALITY TRAIT" THAT HAS NEVER BEEN DEMONSTRATED BY LIARS / LAWYERS / POLITICIANS / MEDIA PERSONALITIES (WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?), SINCE I'VE BEEN ALIVE (ALMOST 41 YEARS AND COUNTING). AND YES, LOTS OF OTHER GROUPS ARE EQUALLY TO BLAME.
WE'RE NOW LIVING IN DERPISTAN. IT'S A GLOBAL ALLIANCE OF IDIOTS WITH AN IDEOLOGY, BUT I'M NOT INTERESTED IN BEING A GOOD LITTLE DERPISTANI TRIBESMAN WORSHIPING AT THE ALTAR OF HERP, PRAYING FOR MY RATION OF FLERP, WITH THE REST OF THE DERPS.
One could easily be forgiven for thinking that this was never about science or "following the science", but rather "following the policy narrative". Narratives are stories. Stories are "made-up" nonsense to entertain the unwitting or entranced with the BS of the story teller. As long as it's understood by everyone that the BS is for "entertainment purposes only", there's no harm and no foul. When it's masquerading as "science", some of us have a MAJOR problem with that. Why, you might ask? BECAUSE BS IS NOT SCIENCE!
FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS "DO THE HERPTY DERP"!
DON'T BE A "GROUPIE" OF ANY PERSON OR IDEOLOGY WITH AN AGENDA, UNLESS YOU'RE 100% ONBOARD WITH WHATEVER WEIRD AND NUTTY NONSENSE COMES OUT OF THE 3 POUND UNIVERSES INVOLVED (THAT MASS OF GREY MATTER THAT NEUROLOGISTS CALL "A BRAIN", EVEN IF IT'S TOTALLY EMPTY OR FILLED WITH NONSENSE).
DO YOUR OWN THINKING, OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.
I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT THERE'S NOTHING MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A "FAILURE TO THINK BEFORE YOU ACT". THERE ARE ONLY A CERTAIN NUMBER OF SPECIFIC RESPONSES TO SPECIFIC SITUATIONS THAT PRODUCE RESULTS THAT ARE MERELY SURVIVABLE, LET ALONE DESIRABLE OUTCOMES TO HAVE.
CONSULT YOUR OWN MEDICAL DOCTOR FOR MEDICAL ADVICE AND SEEK MULTIPLE OPINIONS IF YOU DOUBT THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF ONE "EXPERT" VERSUS ANOTHER, NOT INTERNET WEBSITES, NOT THIS FORUM, NOT YOUR NEIGHBOR WHO KNEW A GUY WHO DID / DID NOT HAVE A VACCINE OR DRUG OR MAGIC TALISMAN, WHO DID OR DID NOT DIE FROM COVID, ALL BECAUSE HE DID OR DID NOT DO THE FUNKY CHICKEN DANCE.
DO NOT BLINDLY FOLLOW THE IDEOLOGY OF ANYONE, AT ALL OR EVER.
DO NOT THINK FOR ONE SECOND THAT ANYONE, REGARDLESS OF EDUCATION OR EXPERIENCE LEVEL, IS INCAPABLE OF MAKING CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES. THERE'S AN INVERSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION / EXPERIENCE AND THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE AND LEARN FROM ONE'S OWN MISTAKES. SIMILARLY, NO AMOUNT OF INTELLIGENCE CONFERS THE ABILITY TO RATIONALLY RESPOND TO A CRISIS WHEN IDEOLOGY IS INVOLVED. OFTEN TIMES, IRRATIONAL FEAR AND PARANOIA, ESPECIALLY WHEN MIXED WITH IDEOLOGY, ARE ALLOWED TO COMPLETELY OVERRIDE LOGICAL DECISION MAKING SKILLS. LONG STORY SHORT, TELL OTHER PEOPLE HOW GREAT YOUR OWN SPECIAL BRAND OF BS IS, AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE, BUT NEVER EVER START BELIEVING IT, BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE IDEOLOGY AND CATASTROPHE INTERSECT.
ANYONE WHO THINKS THEY'RE INFALLIBLE OR THAT THEY SIMPLY "KNOW" SOMETHING WITHOUT PROPER EVIDENCE, OR SOMEONE THEY TRUST SAID SOMETHING THAT THEY THEN CHOSE TO BELIEVE OR GO ALONG WITH, OUT OF IGNORANCE, IS "EXHIBIT A" FOR WHY BOTH BAD IDEAS AND "GROUP THINK" (THE NOTION THAT "NONE OF US IS AS STUPID AS ONE OF US"- ANOTHER ASSERTION UTTERLY LACKING FOR EVIDENCE, LET ALONE PROPER EVIDENCE) ARE SO TERRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE TO HUMANITY.
#297 Re: Life support systems » Mars Water regolith soils 1 foot depth only » 2021-10-17 17:06:53
As far as I know, there are no KRUSTYs for sale at the moment and unlikely to be in a timeline that works with Space X's plans. They would delay launch approval in any case.
Musk would certainly have no problem buying them. He's now the richest man on the planet, worth $230 billion. He supports solar power for a Mars mission.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … erson.html
Nothing that I have read about this reactor concept indicates the involvement of molten salt. The core is a cast slug of uranium-molybdenum alloy, with a single control rod passing through a cylinder running up the middle. Heat pipes run up the outside of the slug, between the slug and the beryllium reflector. The heat pipes carry liquid sodium, which transfers heat through a convection to the Stirling motors. A simple and elegant design.
The main sticking points with KRUSTY are: (1) Relatively poor power to weight ratio. The problem here is high neutron leakage from a core so small, requiring a lot of fissile fuel per unit power and a large reflector. (2) Use of highly enriched uranium. This makes the unit expensive per unit power and politically difficult, as pure 235U is basically bomb material. Musk can probably arrange to buy these units, but it will cost him.
The really good thing about the Kilopower units is that after a decade of operation they shutdown, with 99% of the fissile 235U still in place. They provide excellent starter material for heavy water aqueous homogenous reactors, which we can build on Mars using old Starship fuel tanks. Using Martian thorium blankets, or thorium nitrate blended into a single tank along with uranium nitrate; these reactors provide us with all of the starting materials for an expanding Martian breeder reactor programme.
#298 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-16 07:12:15
Your figures sound about right...Space X did commission a study previously and I think they come up with a figure of 600Kws for producing the rocket fuel. But if you are using solar power that would mean you need a bigger capacity than that...1Mw or more.
No Krusty has been developed for Mars. It's a non-starter in terms of Space X's timeline and would no doubt, in any case, make launch approval even more fraught.
I think we're going to have more than 300 days. Does anyone have the figures for mission duration over the next 10 years. With cargo ships landing two years ahead of humans, you could certainly make a start with automated dehumidifiers and automatic electrolysing.
So we have a value for the water to electrolysis and what we need is the electrical energy required to do so.
25 hrs x 300 sols is 7,500 hrs total
540,000 kg / 9 kg = 60,000
60,000 x 50 kwhr = 3,000,000 kwhr
3,000,000 kwhr / 7,500 hr = 400 kwThat's a big power source....400kw constant delivery for 25 hr sols at a duration of 300 sols to break down the Water to collect, separate and store of 540mT...
A single Krusty is 10 kw x 25 = 250 kwhr / 50kw hr = 5 x 9kg of water = 45 kg per sol x 300 sols = 13,500 kg
40 KRUSTY units would need to be supplied just to get the water divided up for hydrogen to go into the sabatier reactor...assuming the total water amount is waiting for a single unit.So to get that number down we are going to up the number of units that break the water down to get the through put up with power source going up.
#299 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2021-10-15 17:07:35
GW,
I don't think it's a question of faith. I think it's just that the satellites around Mars are pretty sophisticated and there is lots of cross-checking between the various instruments on board.
I think you're confusing two things there aren't you - spectrometer analysis and radar findings? Radar findings show the presence specifically of ice, not hydrogen. The radar signal from ice is very different from other materials.
My understanding is that the MRO satellite is the principal source of info on water presence. The MRO has a Spectrometer for identifying key minerals. I think this is used to identify the chemical signatures, like hydrogen, coming from the ground. And yes you could be in the presence of hydrated minerals (although I think the experts can detect some differences). But then there are other instruments on board.
The "Mars Climate Sounder" can, amongst other things measure the amount of water in vertical columns above the ground. Presumably that helps identify the presence of water on the ground at any particular locality.
The Mars Color Imager uses ultraviolet violet as a reverse indicator of water presence through determining ozone prevalance. That too, gives a good indication of ground water presence.
Then there is the all-important radar. It is the Shallow Subsurface Radar on MRO which can penetrate to roughly 500 metres below Mars’ surface that gives information about underground layers of ice. My understanding is that radar-dervied results from rock, aggregates or even impure ice are totally different from the results you get from nearly pure ice.
On top of that, visual imagery can be used to ascertain geological features that confirm the presence of ice e.g. bulges in crater walls etc. If you were getting lots of water indicators from other instruments but no geological signs of ice presence on the ground you'd know something wasn't right. Geology doesn't lie. But of course in places like Erebus Montes there are geological signs of ice presence all over the place!
https://mars.nasa.gov/files/mro/MRO-060303.pdf
All these sorts of instruments will have been tested around Earth where you easily confirm how accurate they are at predicting presence of various materials. That is why JPL/NASA has such high confidence in them. It's not blind faith!
As for robots, we know robots are fine at a huge range of tasks including mining on Earth. Referencing software failures for AI vehicles in densely populated urban centres is meaningless (robot taxis work fine in Phoenix). The cargo Starships will be fitted with advanced coms - far better than what NASA has been using. Likewise the robots will be much much faster and more powerful. I would envision first cargo landing robot rovers to maybe weigh in at something like 1500 kgs, have powerful cameras and real time HD video connection to the cargo ships, and would possibly capable of speeds of 20 MPH. You'd probably have a bulldozer robot to clear a path of boulders where necessary.
As for your tale from Jezero Crater there you are talking about establishing what occurred millions of years ago.
This is about what is present now. If a lake were currently present in Jezero Crater we could detect its presence with the MRO's multiple instruments.
Louis:
Yes, the hydrogen is detected with ground-penetrating radar. It is a fairly high probability that the hydrogen is within simple water. But, another possibility is that it is within hydrated minerals. You don't know until you go there and look. There was, is, and always will be, no substitute for ground truth.
The Perseverance team just confirmed this with the news release that said the ground-level views told them there definitely had been a lake in Jezero Crater, and that views from orbit simply could not determine that with certainty. So if you don't believe me, then ask them.
As for robots doing everything for crews on Mars, no I don't think so. Robots/AI can only do or perceive what it was programmed to do or perceive. They do NOTHING outside what is in that programming. A robot strolling into a pasture here on Earth will only see what it is programmed to look for. It will not see the unexpected new discovery. It simply cannot see or perceive the unexpected. And the unexpected happens all the time.
Plus, there's the "garbage-in, garbage-out law" effect. You put bad data in, it screws up or misbehaves. Like the driverless cars that keep turning down the dead-end residential street in San Francisco, forcing them to turn around and drive back out. There's bad data in whatever map they are using. Car after car makes the same mistake about every 5 minutes or so, all day and all night, for some days now.
Personally, I believe your great faith in remote sensing and in robots/AI is misplaced. Events on the ground (that I have nothing to with) say so, quite clearly.
GW
#300 Space Policy » Dim Prince acting for globalists condemns space tourism » 2021-10-14 19:46:21
- louis
- Replies: 4
Most Britons wish our (not very bright) Royals would keep their noses out of politics.
Prince William has now come out and criticised space tourism because...er...because...he can't really think of a good reason. Got to save this planet first. Well that's an argument against all tourism, really, not just space tourism. But then William is very thick. Problem is the Royals are always jetting off to nice places for holidays. They like their holidays.
Space tourism is going to be vital to making us a space-faring species. And that in turn is going to be vital to achieving all sorts of things which will help save this planet e.g. using off planet resources from the asteroid belt, developing green energy further eg with orbital solar and finding new ways of doing things e.g. agriculture which will allow us to feed humanity without robbing animals of their habitat.