You are not logged in.
What if there the reality of TANSTAAFL is due to fixed minds? Those that are born into money, do they apply as well? If however you are talking about business etiquette then that maybe so.
I am not talking about business, or etiquette, but the way the world works: physics, or natural philosophy as it used to be called in Scottish universities.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
The evidence that I have indicates differently.
The triumph of hope over experience, more like.
Every one of your many hundreds of predecessors, from the Bishop of Chester back in the 1670s on, had 'evidence' that their own particular variation of the overbalancing wheel was certain to work but not one of them could ever actually make it work. Unsurprisingly, because the whole concept is utter baloney. This is one of the most certain facts there is in the world. That's because so many people have tried and so many have all utterly failed--the overbalancing wheel is one of the most certainly false ideas in the history of the human race.
Remember the fiction of communicators used by the original Star Trek series. It's no longer fiction, a large amount of the population use mobile phones.
So? What happened to people being 'beamed up'? Why are we still waiting for 'warp drive'?(*) One could go on... There's an amusing and very informative book by Lawrence Krauss called 'The Physics of Star Trek' you should read.
(*) I'll give you something else to chew over. In terms of the Theory of Relativity, faster-than-light travel, if possible, would be indistiguishable from time travel.
And what's the best evidence that neither is possible? The complete lack of time-tourists, of course.
The machine I am making is not an antigravity device, it is a Gravity Wheel
Yes, I'm sorry, that was my mistake.
Your Gravity Wheel would seem to be a classic version of perpetual motion machine known as the "Overbalancing Wheel".
One of the first people recorded to have suggest this sort of device was John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who in the 1670s proposed a number of machines like this that relied upon "The Natural Affection of Gravity". Naturally neither the good bishop nor any of the hundreds of people since that time who have each thought they were original inventor of the overbalancing wheel have every been able to make it work.
So why cannot it work?
The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the energy of an isolated system is constant. What that means is you can't get something for nothing.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of an isolated system increases in the course of a spontaneous change. What that means is that you're going to get less out than went in.
Or to put it another way, the philosophy of Star Trek is not as accurate or relevant or true as the philosophy of Robert A Heinlein: TANSTAAFL(*)
(*)There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
The axle keeps bending under the weight of the 6 arms.
Doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that an antigravity machine can't support its own weight?
Have you considered giving the thing a quick coating of cavorite, as recommended by Mr Wells?
Uh, I was under the impression this forum was about Mars, not military planning for World War III.
Do you think we could get back on-message, guys?
Supersonic torpedos armed with a tactical nuclear warhead would render a Mobile Offshore Base more of a target than an asset, no?
Doesn't something have to be an asset in order to be a worthwhile target?
Isn't it neat how, in a couple of billion years (or something like that), the Earth and the Moon will be at eachother's synchronous orbit points. Now that would be a cool way to build a space elevator -- a bridge between planets.
But it's such a looooooong time to wait...
The solar system works as a apparent perpetual motion machine.
Apparent, but not real.
Tidal forces will eventually cause all planets and other objects in the solar system to fall towards and then into the sun. In actual fact things will never get to that point for the earth, as the sun will become a red giant before this happens to a significant extent, swallowing the four terrestrial planets in the process.
Examples of the tidal effect are numerous, but the rings of Saturn are the best known. The rings are the detritus of a satellite that eventually spiralled down to within the Roche limit, at which point the tidal effect of Saturn's gravity is greater than the gravitational attraction of the particles making up the satellite, causing it to break up and form the rings.
The earth's moon will eventually, billions of years from now, spiral down to the earth's Roche limit and break up into rings too. Already, the reason that the same hemisphere always faces the earth is due to tidal forces, as is the lengthening of the earth's day from about 10 hours a couple of billion years ago to the 24 hours we know today.
Technically it is possible to build an apparent perpetual motion machine. That is to say, a machine that is gaining energy from a source which we cannot identify or masure
ANTIcarrot, What you are saying is a machine might look like a perpetual motion machine because we don't have sufficient knowledge about how it functions.
I grant you that. But in the end, it will turn not to be a perpetual motion machine. Either it has a source of energy we did not know about yet, or we are victims of a conjuring trick.
If I do get this wheel working today or tomorrow and I am very confident I will, then the impossible will be possible and our understanding of energy will be changed.
Our understanding of energy, and everything else...
I'll believe it when I see it. Or more exactly, when it is certified by people we can trust to know what they are talking about.
Lauder is not so far from Edinburgh. Persuade a professor of physics at Edinburgh University that your machine really works, and you will start to convince people generally. Not before.
Without a Gravity drive how do we develop antigravity?
Just run this past me one more time:
How does a gravity drive get us antigravity?
Feyona, what concerns me is not ant's state of mind, but rather that the machine he tells us he is building is utterly incapable of working for more than one basic reason, and as such should not be taken seriously.
The most basic of these basic reasons is that his contraption is a perpepual motion machine, which is to say if it worked it would get something for nothing. The Universe is just not built like that.
Put simply, a perpetial motion machine is a machine (or any other process) that is more than 100% efficient. That is impossible, period.
Whatever sort of society develops on Mars, it is not going to happen by means of impossible machines... by magic.
In order to extract energy, gravity has to change over time.
According to the Theory of Relativity, gravity is a geometric phenomenon rather than a force. Therefore it does not have to change and does not extract energy.
Alternatively, Quantum Theory would lead us to believe gravity is a quantum particle (like an electron or a photon) called a graviton, which no-one has managed to detect yet. Such a particle does not 'extract energy' in any meaningful sense to us in the macroscopic world.
If you can resolve (mathematically and precisely) the descriptions of gravity in these two theories, you would have produced the holy grail of modern physics, the Theory of Quantum Gravity, and be well on your way to the ultimate, a Theory of Everything and a sure-fire Nobel Prize in Physics.
So far this challenge has Stephen Hawkings and friends beat, but I look forward to your suggestions.
Rxke, my knowledge of the Russian language is somewhere between almost nil and nonexistant, but from looking at the only English-language document you referred to, their scramjet does look somewhat home-made; perhaps even to primitive for the X-prize contenders....
Sometimes I wonder if the Russians may not turn out to have the inestimable advantage in this space game of having almost no money. It means they have to think hard and innovatively, instead of just throwing money at a problem.
We all know the story of the millions NASA spent on developing a pen that's ink would flow and thus write in zero gee. The Russian solution? A good old fashioned pencil.
Imagine that repeated thousands of times, and how the costs would tumble.
Ant, do any of the following apply to you:
male, age 17-22 ...
melkor, in reply to one of my earlier post he said he was aged 43. More details are there, earlier in the thread, although they seem like gibberish to me. I had asked him how old he was because I wondered if he was an ill-educated and confused youngster.
And, as for the topic, I really don't see the gravity wheel becoming useful for interplanetary transportation.
I believe that what he thinks he's on the point of inventing is an antigravity machine, which if it were possible would certainly revolutionise interplanetary transportation, not to mention interstellar transportation.
However, the history of science and technology is littered with examples of antigravity machines promised by their so-called inventors, who then fail to come up with the goods with depressing regularity. An added twist in the case of this so-called 'gravity wheel' is that it's a perpetual motion machine into the bargain, which has the virtue(?) of making it doubly impossible.
But it would be handy if it worked, like it would be handy Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were real, and if pigs had wings into the bargain.
I mean, even if it works, what's a spinning piece of cardboard going to get you?
Hah! I'll remind you that another Scotsman (ant lives in Scotland) John Logie Baird invented television back in the 1920's, and he used a spinning piece of cardboard to make his earliest models work.
So there!
Rxke -- yeh, that's it. Thanks.
"You have already voted in this poll" I'm told.
Well, I've not, but that's what I'm told.
...no politicians should be allowed to run for administrative office who are connected in any way with the petroleum industry.
Or are lawyers.
How do you produce the parts for the nuclear reactor, wind turbine, solar panels, and hydro plant without fossil fuels?
If coal, oil, etc. are used to make plastics and so forth, they are not employed as fuels but raw materials. Therefore, as the original question asks about fuels only, LOX/LH2 wins with a technical knockout.
:band:'
Suppose you needed to put up 2000tons/month. How easy would it be to scale up production of such vehicles?
How many unemployed or underemployed shipyards are are there around the world? I don't think that's an issue, especially if you can reuse Stage One (see below)
If you're launching thousands of tons of steel alongside your cargo, then it might make sense to reuse that steel in SPS construction.
The 'Sea Dragon' variety of BDB is a two-stage-to-LEO system. The heavy, 1" thick steel body of Stage One (propelled by LOX/kerozine) is supposed to parachute into the ocean, where it is recovered. In fact, it would be so solidly built it probably would survive and be reusable after refurbishment. If so, the shipyards are unlikely to be overloaded with work.
Stage Two, more conventionally built (although still very large) and probably propelled by LOX/LH2, would be expected to enter orbit with the payload, so perhaps something can be done with it although I'm not convinced just how useful it will be.
Thanks, I liked the last sentence of the first paragraph of the link. "Experiments are still needed to measure the speed of light in media such as air and water."
But did you read on, as immediatey following that remark there is this:
Is c, the speed of light in vacuum, constant?
At the 1983 Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures, the following SI (Systeme International) definition of the metre was adopted: The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
This defines the speed of light in vacuum to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s. This provides a very short answer to the question "Is c constant": Yes, c is constant by definition!
Well that's that, end of discussion. Love it or loath it, c is a fixed, exact value.
If that screws up the theory behind your gravity wheel, that's no surprise to most of us.
I understand the maximum speed of light based on metres as it has been measured, nearly 3*10^8. That's 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum as tested and retested.
299,792,458 m/s is indeed the generally accepted value of c. It is not the maximum or minimum or average or anything else value, except the ONLY value of c. If you want to learn more about c, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/R … .html]take a look at this.
An interesting note is that the 360 degrees in a circle can be obtained by 10 times the sum of 8.
Eight whats? Or do you mean 10 times 8? But that's 80, not 360. And what on earth has this got to do with the velocity of light?
(How old are you?)
I don't see any reference to quantum string theory, or the uncertainty principle.
Nor to the Theory of Evolution, which seems to have passed you by.
The Gravity Wheel and all your facile 'theories' are childish gibberish. Come back when the Gravity Wheel has been conclusively proven to work in front of reputable independent witnesses, or cease making a laughing stock of yourself.
At least, that's my advice if you want to take it.
Why do you assume that I was writing about oil or other fossil fuels? I certainly was not... There are other earth-based alternatives for generating energy. (Solar, nuclear, and many more)
SSPS is solar power, on an industrial scale, in space where it is many times more efficient than it ever can be on earth.
Nuclear will be needed too, on a large scale, alongside SSPS. Nuclear power stations have a long lead-time to get onstream, but SSPSs will have an even longer one, at least at first before virtually all the materials needed to build one can be obtained off-earth.
Earth-based solar, wind, tide, etc. power does not amount to more than a few percent of power generation today. They probably can never amount to more than about 10% and are intrinsically not consistent or reliable- earth-based solar power goes away at sunset; windpower dies on a calm day; no-one has figured out how to make tide power work yet--and none of them are actually cheap: the very opposite in fact.
Okay, so riddle me this: Where exactly is this vast demand for energy, that cannot be easily met by cheaper investments earth-side? Even with cheaper launch costs? Which customer is lined up for SPS?
Customers for SSPS? How about everyone who uses energy, be it to heat their home, travel, run a business, and so on and on and on...?
Oil is going to come to a sudden stop one fine day, and sooner rather than later, not so much because there's none left as because the Middle East situation will make it impossible to get it extracted and back to the West. SSPS is the way out of this.
I can see a market for space tourism - but I really don't see one of SPS.
Most of this thread has been to argue about the validity of space tourism; there seems to be general agreeement by this point that while there is a possible market for little hops like the one made by Spaceship One, orbital tourism is just not realistic--unless you can find several thousand billionaires who like spending anything up to $5 million each so that they can seriously risk their lives.
I thought one of the lessons from the shuttle was that not spending the money up front can screw you later on? The second sentence works both ways.
Hah! A good point, ANITcarrot. The second sentence does work both ways.
But there's an optium scale, and optimum time too, of investment...
To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born,
and a time to die,
A time to plant,
and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
There is certainly a school of thought which says more should have been invested at the beginning to make what became Shuttle a two-stage fully reusable system. I can certainly say now, with the advantage of hindsight(g) that I am not one of them. I think it is clear today that the development cost of such a pair of vehicles back in the 1970's would have been truly collosal; the project would never have got funded, or even worse, would have been abandoned half way when funding was stopped.
For your information, I believe I would have favored making the first stage 100% reusable and leaving the second stage to be various things, depending on the mission -- a small reusable crewed vehicle, a larger non-recoverable cargo module, a module for a Mars vehicle, or whatever. That would have supplied (hopefully) cheaper access in a much more flexable way, and of course the recoverable first stage would not have to be subject to the extreme aerodynamic conditions of re-entry, making it cheaper to design and build. But what's done's done. We have to move on.
For all its many and various faults, Shuttle did not depend on original research in the matter of propulsion systems. One of my main objections to the idea of an aerospace plane (for example) as this point in the proceedings is that it would require very considerabe time and money on developing new propulsion systems which either don't exist yet or are in their extreme infancy--and compared with BDB would deliver a tiny payload. The beauty of something like BDB is that it does not need vast R&D; it's just a good old fashioned fire-and-go rocket, writ large. To spend $40 or $50 billion development money on some other way of lifting very large payloads would seem pointless, a waste of money, the pursuit of technical improvement for no other reason than it would be interesting technically. That would be wrong.
And yet Shuttle cost a fortune... and costs a fortune to operate too.
BDBs may have practical upper limits on thier size and cost/kg that aren't immediately apparent.
Yes. We do know (from detailed studies for Sea Dragon and other similar proposals) that a 20,000 ton GLOW BDB could place 500 tons in LEO for about $750/kg, and a 30,000 ton GLOW BDB could place 800 tons in LEO for about $500/kg--that's the one I've 'used' to build the SSPS's
So push things just a little more, to say 40,000 tons GLOW, and we must be approaching something like 1,100 or 1,200 tons in LEO for about $400/Kg.
(30 or 40 thousand ton GLOW vehicles... you can see why these things are built in shupyards and launched at sea. Real spaceships!!)
How far can we extrapolate this model? I dunno, but I'd think a 100,000 ton GLOW BDB is quite feasable, but a million ton BDB (delivering maybe 50,000 tons or so to LEO!!!) might have problems.
Project..come up with a drive that works without fossil fuels.
LOX/LH2.
Produce the LOX and the LH2 by eletrolysis of H2O, the elctricity coming from hydro, nuclear, wind generation, etc.
That was a dawdle. (g)