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#726 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-10 00:01:33
Tom:
The GEO altitude of 22,300 miles corresponds to a speed-of-light delay around 0.2 sec, two-way. That's just speed-of-light physics.
You are going to kill lots of people exposed to multi-tera-watt microwave radiation in that 0.2 second interval, even neglecting however long it takes your software to respond to a perceived problem, which is then inherently 0.2 sec too late, or more. Period.
What can you cook in your microwave if it is set to 0.2 seconds?
Not a whole lot! if you put a bowl of ice cream in your microwave and you set it for only 1 second, you ice cream will not melt. The rectenna is over a wide area, I kind of doubt the microwave intensity will be higher than in your standard microwave oven. I don't think anyone will cook in 0.2 seconds of microwave exposure. I think you are setting the bar too high to prove that it will fail. I might also add, what are the safegards to prevent someone from drinking a gasoline at a gas station? Maybe gasoline is not safe, as we can't ensure that someone won't drink the stuff!
That is simply inherent in the microwave-transmitted model of O'Neill's vision, given the extremely low conversion efficiency inherent in what he proposed. And we know nothing (nothing !!!!!) any better today!
How many millions do you want to kill for a Murphy's Law problem? We have known about the lethality of microwave radiation since early/before WW2, when my father-in-law was first exposed to it.
You make it sound like an atomic bomb! So you aim the microwave beam at Los Angeles for 0.2 seconds and suddenly everyone in that city is dead!
USN radars killed a lot of folks on ships in port, circa 1938-1941,
Well then, how come we didn't use it against the Nazis, instead of using microwave radars to detect German airplanes, how about just frying them out of the sky?
not to mention the ones who died from exposure in combat theaters. My father-in-law served with equipment causing these problems until he retired in 1958. The VA was still checking for exposures like this when my father-in-law died in the late 1990's.
That was a long time to cook. Seems to me he lived a long time, you sure he didn't just die of old age?
Not to mention fuel oil in the water (he had 3 ships blown out from under him), and his presence at the Pacific atomic tests (both Bikini Able and Baker!). The VA nearly freaked out over this the last time I brought him in, before he died. I was personally there. The technician really did freak out. Most of those exposed to such things had already died by that time.
This man, for the last 30 years of his life, invariably woke up thinking it was 1943, when he was actively opposing the Japanese in the Aleutians, with nothing but a 0.45 caliber 1911 Colt pistol. He quite obviously had extreme PTSD, decades before such a term had ever been defined. But the pistol, that's a weapon I know well, having shot Navy Expert with it in 1969.
I'm actually even better with a long gun, having used them all my long life here in Texas (I have killed birds in flight with a .22). I put bullets-through-the-same-hole with an iron-sight M-1 Garand at 200 yards, about that same time, while I was in the USN at the Annapolis Academy. My personal M-1 there had a 1942 serial number and a 12-inch bayonet, but the bloodstains were long gone. The USMC captain who watched me shoot was utterly amazed, until I told him where I was from. Since then, I have been absolutely lethal with buckshot in a 12-gauge at a dead run against a running target, out here on the farm, for over 30 years.
We had my father-in-law in private care before he died, which as it turned out was much better for him. He was completely senile-dementia-destroyed, but on a timescale an order of magnitude, or two, longer than typical Alzheimer's. This dementia was then combined atomic radiation, chemical, and microwave damage. There's no doubt about that, there were no other influences on him.
Usually when I cook something in my microwave oven, it just gets hot.
There was no other recourse, either, as all these effects have been politically redefined as "nothing to worry about", thanks to the GOP, mainly. My wife and I paid for all of his care.
You really need to consider the real consequences of what you propose on these forums. Please go educate yourself about these effects. What you proposed just above is utterly and completely ignorant in its historically-demonstrated effects upon real people.
GW
Lots of people get Alzheimers, lot of people get Demensia, its hard to prove an environmental cause of it. If someone doesn't die immediately the cause of death is speculation. Someone gets exposed to microwave radiation and 30 years later, he dies of cancer, maybe it was the radiation or maybe it was something else, I really is hard to tell. Most battlefields are unhealthy places. If I was you, I would be afraid to do anything different, for fear of it causing cancer. There is also a rumor that immunization causes down syndrome, a lot of people think that, but it has not been proven. So may parents refuse to immunize their children, their children get sick and they spread disease to other people!
#727 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Laser Sail to Alpha Centauri, followed by human upload and download » 2016-09-09 23:36:13
The thing is, you could send multiple people through digitization, one after another, while the same beam would have to be focused on a light sail for years.
100 trillion
The human body, consisting of about 100 trillion cells, carries about ten times as many micro-organisms in the intestines. The metabolic activities performed by these bacteria resemble those of an organ, leading some to liken gut bacteria to a “forgotten” organ.
I believe this is the level of complexity that defines who we are, so we would have to upload this information, transmit it by laser across 4.37 light years, and then reconstruct it at the other end. I think a laser that is 100 km wide is capable of doing this. Whether the person on the other end is the same person is an interesting question, if he has the same memories as the original, he would think he was.
#728 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-09 12:39:10
2-10 watts of incandescent light from a 1200 watt microwave is one lousy conversion efficiency.
That has always been one of the two biggest bugaboos for SPS designs.
The other has been the danger posed by the microwave beam to people on the ground if aiming fails in some way. That's a Murphy's Law inevitability.
GW
Very easy to safeguard, you design the Solar Power Satellite to automatically shut off when it doesn't receive a signal from the microwave rectenna ground station, and you power that signal from the electricity produced by the microwaves that it receives. You design the SPS to send the microwave beam for only the fraction of a second it takes to reach Earth and for a signal to be sent back to the SPS. If the SPS doesn't receive that signal, it automatically shuts off. Basically if the rectenna receives no power it send to signal to the SPS to "stay on", and so it shuts off!
#729 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Laser Sail to Alpha Centauri, followed by human upload and download » 2016-09-09 12:32:41
Sending information is cheaper than sending matter, as you don't have to accelerate the light up to near the speed of light, it is already traveling at the speed of light. The actual "travel time" is the light speed distance, plus the time it takes to transfer the file containing all the cellular positioning, state, and connection information of the human body you wish to transfer, the original is not destroyed in this process, so a duplicate is made at the destination star. If you agreed to undergo this process, from your point of view, you would stand a 50/50 chance of being either the duplicate or the original when you woke up. Either the copy or the original would have a legitimate claim of being you, since both would have all the memories that you have, since those memories are part of your cellular data.
#730 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-09 07:59:49
Why wouldn't it work? Ever put an incandescent light bulb in your microwave oven and then turn it on? I did once. The light bulb glowed, that shows that yes indeed microwaves can indeed be converted into electricity! I saw it happen myself!
#731 Re: Interplanetary transportation » Laser Sail to Alpha Centauri, followed by human upload and download » 2016-09-09 07:57:31
It requires nanotech to happen, Nanotech can also get us into space and even mine the Uranium.
#732 Interplanetary transportation » Laser Sail to Alpha Centauri, followed by human upload and download » 2016-09-09 00:08:09
- Tom Kalbfus
- Replies: 8
The first part is to get a laser sail to Alpha Centauri, for that you need a 26 terawatt laser array, a Fresnel zone plate lens, a 100 km wide decelerator stage light sail, and a 30 km wide payload stage. This is the conventional part. We'll assume the payload stage carries nanotech assemblers, the light sail, once it reaches the Alpha Centauri system, sails around using starlight, once it matches velocity with the system, and it look for an asteroid of the right type. From that asteroid is assembles a laser receiver about 100 km wide, replicating itself a number of times to do this job, it then transmits back to the Solar System the location and orbit of the receiver so its location can be predicted ahead of time.
Now comes the time to transmit the first astronaut to Alpha Centauri.
First the astronaut undergoes a process called "reversible biostasis", his body is flooded with nanoassemblers which halt all biological processes in his body at the cellular level, while preserving all the information needed to restart that process later, that information is then uploaded to a computer and transmitted to the 26 terawatt laser, which then becomes a communications laser, it beams the cellular information of that astronaut to the awaiting laser receiver in the Alpha Centauri system, then the biostasis is reversed, the astronaut wakes up as if nothing has happened to him, he goes on to live his live on Earth or in the Solar System as usually. About 4.37 years later, the laser signal is received, the information is downloaded to a bunch of nanoassemblers that use that information to make a copy of that astronaut in biostasis, the assemblers then reverse that biostasis, and a copy of that astronaut wakes up in the Alpha Centauri Sytem ready to do some exploring.
What do you think of this idea? It would be a lot cheaper than bringing the original astronaut to the Alpha Centauri system. From the astronaut's point of view, he has a 50/50 chance of either waking up in the Solar System or at Alpha Centauri, as far as either version of him is concerned, he is the original and the other is a copy, both have the exact same memories and personality when both wake up, one 4.37 years after the other.
#733 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-08 22:19:20
As for the possible need for synthetic gravity, if you can do Hyperloop, surely you can do synthetic gravity on the Moon.
On the other hand, you can just rotate people on and off the Moon on whatever schedule you like. I think people could do a tour of duty on the Moon for the same length of time as people do tours on the International Space Station, so the harmful effects should be the same or less than that of the ISS, then you jus send them home, where they can recover from the effects of low gravity, and then resume normal life. One could have a rotating space station in orbit around the Moon, and then teleoperate robots on the lunar surface, from the comfort of a rotating 1-G space station in low orbit around the Moon. A bunch of comsats will make communications continuous between the station and the robots on the surface with a time delay of only a fraction of a second. The Moon is 3476 km in diameter, and the speed of light is 300,000 km/second. Lets assume comsats and a space station that orbit at 100 km above the surface, the maximum distance a signal will have to cross is 100 km up to the first satellite + 0.5 * 3674 * pi + 100 = 5971 km We'll make this 6000 km for easier math. (6,000 km) / (300,000 km/sec) = 0.02 seconds time delay, that is one fiftieth of a second, and given than humans can perceive only time intervals s short as one fifteenth of a second, that will seem pretty much instantaneous to human operators in orbit around the Moon. This is less than the amount of time it takes a nerve impulse to travel from the brain to finger tips, the extra one fiftieth of a second won't be noticed at all.
#734 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-08 11:19:48
How does this fit into the picture? Gerard O'Neill never mentioned using these as heavy lift launchers. I think one of the first things they could do is fit the components of a Moon base, along with mining equipment and a mass driver. One of the big obstacles to getting this project off the ground is te cost of lifting things to orbit. A nuclear Orion is among other things an SSTO. Instead of waiting for some mythical future tech to develop, we can start launching these things with known science. I get tired of waiting, maybe we have to do something drastic to get space colonization going. if the anti-nuke people don't like it, maybe they should turn their efforts to see to it that bad people in the Middle East don't get their own nuclear weapons, but seeing how they dn't care aout that, they don't have a decent leg to stand on. Maybe Trump will do it, I can see, he's not afraid to offend people, and he is into real estate, he can put his name on the colony in big letters!
#735 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-07 23:47:16
It's time to return this thread to its original topic.
All I can say about Tom's vision of utopia with its altruistic financial giants that pay the welfare checks for an idled population, is that it flies in the face of over 10 millennia of demonstrated human behavior throughout recorded history. Unfettered, greed and immorality swamp everything. They always have, no matter what technologies were available, and so they always will. Robots are just another technology. They do not change that fundamental picture.
Let me play the Devil's advocate for a moment, lets say you are a greedy corporation, and you just found a way to totally automate your entire corporation including the management, so you no longer employ anybody, so who do you sell to? How do you earn a profit if there is no one with money who can buy your product because they are all unemployed?
You see without some redistribution, you have no customers, so the government takes a percentage of your profit and gives it to your customers so they can buy what you are selling, problem solved!
#736 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-07 23:42:34
I know a lot of people are desperate to get to Mars, but... I actually hold to the "orbit first" approach. Get a decent station up there, with it's own construction shack and depot, and learn about how best to put together spacecraft (from Terran components, of course) and transfer fuel. Then, we go back to Luna, whilst making plans for Mars, and also look at sending retrieval missions to small asteroids. At some point, we'll want the station to go for at least six months without any resupply.
The two aims would be to (1) learn how to survive long duration spaceflight, testing out spin gravity, radiation protection, repair etc; and (2) to learn how to assemble and manufacture stuff - spacecraft, habitats, furniture, and other such stuff - in space, ideally using in space resources.
You mean build the station in Low Earth orbit with Mars landers attached and then use a low thrust high efficiency rocket to move it into Mars orbit, and then send a crew there t inhabit it?
#737 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-06 19:36:34
Is there any way to tone down the political nuclear as we know that its time for all nations to grow up with this level of power as it does have great potential to those that can control it for the future of the world's peoples.
With regards to the material we have a choice to go small for orbit an beyound and for surface use on other planets as a developmentstep. I think until we can show no meltdowns are possible or some other sever happenings that could have a dier results to man in any surounding area where it is used we will always have resistance to making use of nuclear.
I just want equal time for Orion, that's all! If we give $400 million to a nation that wants to build nuclear weapons, we should also spend $400 million to build an Orion Spaceship, I'd say fair is fair, if people that want to kill me are getting $400 million from my government to build nuclear weapons, I'd say we should spend at least that amount on building a nuclear Orion.
#738 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-06 16:43:11
Can we have a discussion about what methods of nuclear propulsion would be useful within Earth's atmosphere (i.e. advantages and disadvantages) instead of talking about the politics of certain groups of people who have or don't have nuclear weapons?
This is a technical discussion forum and the subject of your original post pertains to using nuclear pulse detonation propulsion for super heavy lift required for colonization of Mars. We do have a forum for discussion of political agendas, if that's your cup of tea. Personally, I come here for the interesting technical discussions. I can turn on the TV to virtually any channel and get someone's opinion on politics.
Wasn't my idea to go political, I was Roberts. I'm just comparing the relative risks between an atomic bomb spaceship, and evil people that we are letting develop nuclear weapons, and with a bit of sarcasm, I'm stating that our fear of nuclear weapons must not be that great since we are letting dangerous people build them. It was Robert that started talking about Israelis and politics.
#739 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-06 15:43:21
A number of years ago, the President of France said many countries have technology to stop a missile. He said if Iran tried to launch a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead at Israel, France would stop the missile before it got 10 metres above the ground. And France would then nuke Iran. I had posted on this forum that someone should say that. Yea! But then NATO allies got him to retract that statement.
Israel has nukes. Arab countries are going to panic until they have nukes as a counter threat.
Seems to me the Arab countries are more afraid of Iran, than of Israel. There is a difference between a responsible nation and an irresponsible one. Iran is an irresponsible nation, it employs suicide bombers, and uses terror tactics in pursuit of its objectives, it seeks to dominate the middle east and is therefore a threat to all establishment powers, and I don't think you want an Islamic Theocracy ruling the World do you? But that is Iran's objective, and such an objective is incompatible with World peace, so letting Iran have nuclear weapons is threat to the survival of the human race, just as surely as an asteroid impact is.
But they can't use the Nukes. If Israel does, then Arab nukes would be launched. If any Arab country nukes Israel, then NATO would sanction turning that Arab country into a radioactive hole in the ground. If not French nukes, then the fact France feels that would would give permission for the US to do it. And Israel would definitely launch their unless they were disabled. MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction.
All the more reason to build an atomic bomb spaceship to get away from all that religious lunacy that threatens to destroy the human race!
In one war, Arab countries invaded Israel and it looked like they were going to win. Israel ordered deployment of their nuke. A bomber took off for an Arab target with a nuclear bomb. However, a small Israeli force managed to halt progress of a major Arab attack force several times their size, and hold them long enough for Israel's main force to arrive. So the attack was thwarted. Israel recalled their bomber, it turned around and returned to base without dropping the bomb. This demonstrates the danger of just one side having the bomb.
If one side had the nuclear bomb, there wouldn't be as many casualities, there wouldn't be mutually assured destruction, Israel would use only as many nuclear bombs as it takes to defeat the enemy that is invading it, and that would be much fewer than an even-handed two way volley of nukes that you advocate. the problem is there are a lot of Islamic fanatics in the middle east that wouldn't be deterred by Mutually assured destruction, so Islam + Nuclear weapons = A threat to the survival of the human race!
Perhaps a nuclear deterrent would stop wars, stabilize the Middle East.
And perhaps it won't, Muslim fanatics don't seem to have the same survival instinct that the rest of the human race does, there are just too many suicide bomber running around blowing themselves up, and allowing them to have nukes is a very bad idea! But if you aren't afraid of that, then I think we should go full bore with that atomic bomb spaceship to save what members o the human race we can from that Islamic Nuclear threat!
I would prefer neither side have nuclear weapons, but I don't get a say. Just trying to figure out what's going on. Once Israel got nuclear weapons, it was a matter of time before at least one Arab country would too.
Why is that, why are Arabs naturally expected to hate Jews?
My understanding is the Iranian deal would let Iran have nuclear reactors for commercial power only, not weapons. We'll see how that works out.
And if it doesn't work out, then we lose our cities and millions of people who live and work in them, are you willing to take that risk? If you are, then you wouldn't mind an atomic bomb spaceship, because the risks of that are much less than a nuclear armed Iran.
#740 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-06 15:17:34
One possibility is to set aside one sphere for humans and another for AIs. For example we could let loose a bunch of AIs with instructions to terraform planets wherever they find them (excluding native life of a certain complexity or better) and then construct linear accelerator/decelerators to get us to them as quickly as possible. The lineacs would have shipping containers that are 100 meters wide, and perhaps 300 meters long, we construct ships that fit into them, the Lineacs the accelerate the shipping containers at 1-G if there are living human passengers inside. the ships provide a number of diversions to keep the humans busy while they are in transit, and then they are decelerated, and released from the shipping containers to fly their ships in the destination star system, perhaps to settle on a newly terraformed planet. It would take time to build the lineacs and time to terraform the planets, I'm not sure which could be built faster, as rogue planets would have to be found to build the lineacs out of. The machines would build more of themselves and terraform planets and build a transportation network of these accelerators all throughout the galaxy, and it would probably take close to half a million years to do all this.
#741 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-06 11:16:11
For the sake of clarity, I will say this: free market economies are the most powerful engine of creation humans have ever devised. But they absolutely require enforced rules for fair play, or they inherently devolve in a slave labor situation controlled by a few giants at the top.
Why only a few? Why can't everyone be at the top? The reason why there are few at the top is because they rely on human laborers to keep them at the top, if you replace those humans with AI machines, then the machines will become our "slaves" and everyone will be at the top, the is no reason why they shouldn't be. You have to adjust your way of thinking when you introduce strong AI into the equation. The traditional assumptions you use about the many poor and the few rich no longer fit the situation. The rich need a lot of nonrich working fr them to support their lifestyle, it doesn't matter how they got rich, the fact that they rely on so many non-rich to support their lifestyle means there is a limit percentagewise on how many people can actually be rich relative to the rest of us, but with AI machines, that percentage can go all the way to 100%, and we can build machines so that they don't mind being laborers, and that they do whatever we tell them to do.
#742 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-06 11:07:58
Wait. What? Tom wants everyone to be on welfare their whole lives?
...
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Personally, I'm looking forward to being able to get everything custom made, because of people moving from routine factory jobs back into the craft system. With the glut of labour, and the implosion in the cost of living, it will be very affordable.
What's the harm in that? We already have Social Security, we simply expand it to include every adult, anyway humans couldn't build this stuff, there are not enough humans around to do it, and it would be very expensive to pay people to do it, so it would not get done. the only way to build it is with machines. You want to terraform Mars, you need machines to d most of the work, this is not something humans have ever done before, to entirely and deliberately transform an entire planet! That is an unprecedented scale that's never been worked on before.
#743 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-06 11:02:41
The "ready-to-go" version of pulse propulsion technology is the 1959-vintage shaped-charge fission technology. We can build more compact fission devices today, that would also be "ready-to-go" technology. Nothing else is "ready-to-go". If you wait for technology development, usually you do not fly. That's an important lesson from history.
Consider the 1959 fallout estimate: launching a 10 or 20 thousand ton ship into space from the surface was equivalent in fallout to a 10 megaton warhead test in the atmosphere. That means we could build and launch a half a dozen of these for less detrimental radiation effects than either Chernobyl or Fukushima. And THAT comparison might actually help make the case to the public.
The Starfish Prime shot over Johnston Island in 1962 revealed the EMP effect as a crashed telephone system and a damaged power grid 900 miles away in Hawaii, before the advent of the more vulnerable solid state electronics. That was a handful of megatons about 200 miles up.
BTW, this EMP threat was long ignored, and still is ignored, in strategic defense planning (small nukes do more EMP damage than blast/fire damage, if exploded around 50 miles up, where heat shields and precision guidance are not needed).
What all that really means is you have be very careful where you build and launch these pulse propulsion things, and you must fly them straight out into space to very high-altitude orbits to avoid EMP damage on the ground. Cis-lunar space would be a very good place to base and park these things. Inverse square reduction really helps a lot with EMP.
As for Tom's worries about the Iranians, it remains to be seen whether the nuke deal does any real good (so, yes, there have been efforts to control Iranian nuke ambitions). We'll see, soon enough.
But history does have a little-remembered example to offer about controlling Iranian behavior. Remember how the US embassy hostages were released almost the moment Reagan was first sworn in?
Do you remember why? (Few do, reporting on that was suppressed. And still is.)
Reagan privately let the Iranians know that he would nuke Tehran within minutes of taking office, if those hostages were still held. Carter would not do that, which is why they did not release them until Reagan actually took the oath. But release they did, and before the nuclear "trigger" could be turned over to him. They made sure Reagan knew within seconds of being sworn in, to prevent being destroyed.
Blackmail really does work, even with evil religious extremists like the Iranian "government".
GW
Nuclear pulse technology could also be used to life heavy payloads into space that otherwise couldn't be lifted, such as for instance a mass driver for installation on the Moon. If we want to give O'Neill's vision a shot, and Orion Spacecraft couldn't certainly give it a big boost! We might also have a secondary drive in the Orion spaceship. Use the bombs to get into space, and once in orbit we ignite the secondary drive, such as a large nuclear powered ion or plasma drive, that we couldn't otherwise lift into orbit.
#744 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-06 10:55:27
Tom Kalbfus wrote:GW Johnson wrote:Sure, fusion pulse propulsion is better than fission, although you are talking about hundred-thousand ton ships instead of ten-thousand ton ships. Scale affects effectiveness, as I have indicated.
The EMP thing is mitigated by distance: no LEO, only out near the moon. Inverse square law.
Otherwise, I think the resistance to explosion propulsion is more emotional than rational. Not that emotional resistance ain't real, because it is.
It may be some time yet before we as a planetary society outgrow this nonsense. But until we do, colonization on a mass scale makes no sense anyway.
GW
They don' seem too emotionally resistant to Iran having nuclear weapons, because I see they are doing nothing to stop Iran from getting them, so I guess there is no emotional resistance to nuclear weapons anymore, since people have lost their fear of Iran having them!
Iranian nukes are not a non-issue to the voting public, but they tend to be concerned with issues that threaten them imminently. People would worry and bother endlessly about the fallout. It won't matter how small it is, people aren't generally very good at understanding quantitative arguments when it comes to radiation. What they will understand is that you are exposing them to radiation that could cause them cancer, for the sake of some boondoggle project that they don't understand and aren't interested in. Every ache and pain they get will be attributed to the fallout from your nuclear rocket. There would be a tidal wave of international condemnation.
Work on pure fusion propulsion would largely solve the problem, but is unlikely to achieve sufficient power density to be useful for space launch. Nuclear thermal propulsion would reduce operational fallout, but that advantage would be undone with the first accidental explosion of a NTR. In any event, it offers very little economic advantage. The development and operational costs would tend to swamp any operational advantages that you might gain from an NTR SSTO.
Lets do cost versus benefit. What is the cost of Iran having nuclear weapons?
One is they might start a nuclear war, they could deliberately target US cities, since they have announced their hatred of us time and time again, yet that doesn't seem to bother us, we fine with letting the Iranians develop nuclear weapons despite all their hatred and their "Death to America" chants and all that, and maybe they believe God is on their side, and that God would not let them come to any harm if they launch an all out nuclear missile barrage of the United States, once they feel they have enough nuclear missiles t thoroughly thrash they United States. What's the benefit of Iran having nuclear weapons? I can't see any.
What's the benefit of an Orion Spaceship?
We get cheaper access to space,
we can send enough people to Mars to actually make a difference,
By openly using such nuclear weapons, we demonstrate to the World that we have them and may actually use them, should some nitwit country decide that now is a good time to send out terrorists on a suicide mission to kill American citizens, maybe they'll have second thoughts about that.
The cost is a little extra radioactivity in the air, but if we are so deathly afraid of nuclear weapons, why are we letting the Iranians have them? The only conclusion I can come to is that we aren't deathly afraid of nuclear weapons anymore, that we aren't concerned hat Iran might use them to blow up our cities, for whatever reason, on a nuclear Jihad. So fine, I guess there is no reason not to use them to launch a spacecraft either! Might as well get the benefit of a nuclear spaceship, if we can't get the safety that these nuclear nonproliferation agreements and treaties are supposed to ensure! If the clock is ticking away towards doomsday, and the current administration isn't doing a thing about it, then we might as well try to safe what humanity we can and get some people off the Earth with the same technology that threatens to destroy us!
#745 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-06 04:51:01
To build the thing otherwise would require trillions of human beings in spacesuits. Do you want to terraform a planet and have standin room only? With AI, you can have a lot of room to expand into, because the AIs once their job is complete, do not need to be fed, do not need a place to live, they can be shut down and stored some place out of he way. Humans are always "on" until they die! If you create trillions of human beings to do something, they are still around once the task is completed and you need to do something about them. If you want to build a world with 160 times the surface area of he Earth, it would be nice if you could have a lot of space to expand into rather than having a cylinder that is just big enough to accommodate the crowd that just built it!
#746 Re: Science, Technology, and Astronomy » What is the status today of O'Neill's vision today? » 2016-09-05 18:34:05
Tom:
In terms of your own politics, look at the constitutional requirement phrase "promote the general welfare". How is not managing high-paying job loss in accord with that fundamental constitutional requirement?
You cannot answer that question. No one can. It is absolutely unjustifiable. Period.
The way automation has NOT been regulated or managed in this country, it typically eliminates 10 or 20 manual production jobs while creating only 1 or 2 robot supervision/maintenance jobs. That is a net 10:1 job loss rate for automating things. Just what the f**k are all 300+ million of us supposed to do for a living in a regime like that?
Nothing, your labor wont be required, the people that own the means of production will still pay their taxes, and the people that don't have jobs will still vote won't they. Use your imagination, what do you think would happen if such a thing were to occur? the government has no problem spending money, it can send a welfare check to everyone who doesn't have a job, and it wouldn't be inflationary, because people wouldn't be required to work, the economy won't need human labor, the machines do all the work, the machines grow the food, pick the crops, package the food, put it on a truck, drive he truck to the local supermarket, unload the truck, and then put it on the shelves, you buy the food with your welfare check, take it to he automated cashier and purchase your food, and you automated car takes you home, quite simple really!
Your propensity to advance automating everything runs dead against every moral principle known to man, including Christ's admonition to love your neighbor as yourself. You hypocrite!!!!!
If you automate everything, all you really have to do is vote, and the government will send you a check, why shouldn't they buy your vote, with automation, you vote is very cheap, all they need to do is print money and the machines will produce stuff for you to buy with that money, no one needs to work for a living! Automation will come whether you like it or not! The task before us is to make the best use of it for our society! People working for a salary or wage makes things expensive. Machines work for free!
Automation is a godsend, if we automate enough, we can house the homeless, no skills on their part is necessary, we just give them homes, the machines build them at no cost except in raw materials that the machines extract themselves. No need for rich or poor, everyone is rich, no reason why they shouldn't be. with automation we can build O'Neill colonies, giant ones, as large as we like! We can move into space, get off the Earth, the wildlife can recover when mankind's presence is reduced, everyone wins! Who wouldn't want that?
Why is it surprising to anyone (including you) that rust belt city-center ghettoes are hot beds of crime, when there is nothing else for those folks to do for a living but crime? Their jobs were destroyed by automation and offshoring.
That's because people still need to work for a living, not all jobs were eliminated, we still need goods and services produced by people, just not as many people as before. So basically you want to keep things expensive by keeping the human labor content. Medicine requires a lot of human labor, that is why its so expensive! I'd rather automate that, the ore humans involved the more expensive it is! Space travel is expensive because too many humans are employed to get a satellite into orbit!
So I have to ask, why are you so obviously dead-set on robots doing everything? Just what do you expect humans to do for a living in a market economy? I have never heard you (or any other arch-conservative) answer THAT question! Because you cannot.
You need to stop assuming that people will need to work for a living. You ever hear of social security? You can lower the age of social security to 18, and then every adult will qualify, and why couldn't we do that? with full automation, there is no reason why we couldn't. Give everyone a social security check, hat would make everyone equal, why wouldn't you like that?
#747 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-05 18:11:17
Sure, fusion pulse propulsion is better than fission, although you are talking about hundred-thousand ton ships instead of ten-thousand ton ships. Scale affects effectiveness, as I have indicated.
The EMP thing is mitigated by distance: no LEO, only out near the moon. Inverse square law.
Otherwise, I think the resistance to explosion propulsion is more emotional than rational. Not that emotional resistance ain't real, because it is.
It may be some time yet before we as a planetary society outgrow this nonsense. But until we do, colonization on a mass scale makes no sense anyway.
GW
They don' seem too emotionally resistant to Iran having nuclear weapons, because I see they are doing nothing to stop Iran from getting them, so I guess there is no emotional resistance to nuclear weapons anymore, since people have lost their fear of Iran having them!
#748 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-05 18:09:00
Gary, we're talking about governments of countries. In the 1990s, the United States was not allowed to enter Afghanistan to arrest Osama bin Laden, so they sent in B-52 bombers to drop bombs on Al Qaeda's training camp. Outrage over that was used as recruitment, they ended up with more fighters. They moved training to a cave so dropped bombs could reach them. So Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile sent into the camp. Of course outrage over that resulted in more recruitment, they ended up with more fighters again. What's the difference between that vs a truck bomb? Just expense of the weapon, no ethical difference.
The reason countries of the UN created the Outer Space Treaty is they don't trust Russia or the US government to send into space charges that can only be used for propulsion. That will be used as a Trojan Horse to launch nuclear weapons in space. "Oops! We dropped one of our propulsion charges right on your national leader's palace! Sorry. It exploded with more force than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima? A charge for space propulsion could never survive entry into the atmosphere, and isn't configured to deliver that kind of destruction? You must be mistaken. But we will send a puppet to become the new leader of your country, a figure head who takes orders from junior functionaries in our national capital."
That's what they're worried about. Even if charges are designed to not be effective, even if they aren't supposed to have atmospheric entry vehicles, such weapons will be launched anyway. Purpose built nuclear weapons, hidden among the propulsion charges.
And you are aware that a nuclear explosive detonated in LEO will cause an EMP that will fry electronics on the ground. So it doesn't even need an entry vehicle to do massive damage.
You realize that Israel's nuclear program started with an American ship carrying enough bomb-grade uranium to fabricate many warheads. This ship was sent into waters close to Israel, and just happened to have no solders onboard to defend it. Then Israeli commandos raided the ship and stole all the uranium. There was an official statement of protest. "Bad Israel!" Slap on wrist. Israel was allowed to keep all the uranium. Do you really think that was an accident? Do you understand now why certain countries treat the United States as no more trustworthy than Russia? Or did you know that? This is what comes to mind when you say "willful ignorance".
Why should we care? Russia isn't our primary enemy, our primary enemy is a bunch of non-nuclear powers that want nuclear weapons so they can attack us, and our government is doing nothing to stop them from getting them. So I guess is no one is worried about a nuclear armed Iran, no one should be worried about an atomic bomb propelled spaceship either! You can't convince me that they are afraid of the US using atomic bombs to propel its spaceships, if they aren't afraid of a nuclear armed Iran. I think Iran is more likely to use atomic bombs on people, that an atomic bomb propelled spaceship.
#749 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-05 18:02:43
The Outer Space Treaty prohibits any weapon of mass destruction in space. Established through the UN, signed and ratified by 104 countries including the United States and Russia. That puts an end to Orion right there.
I found a couple papers from NASA working on micro fusion thrusters. For Star Trek fans, yes the RCS thrusters used by Enterprise D on Star Trek - The Next Generation (ST-TNG) was micro-fusion thrusters. NASA is working on it. My question, could this be scaled up for primary propulsion?
Engineering of the Magnetized Target Fusion Propulsion System - 2002
Magnetized Target Fusion Propulsion: Plasma Injectors for MTF Guns - 2003
The UN isn't too popular in this country anyway, it failed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of North Korea, and Iran wants some, and our president just sent them $400 million to get started on their Nuclear program so they can target US cities, everyone is cheating and proliferating nuclear weapons anyway, so why should we let a stupid treaty that everyone else is ignoring stop us from building an Orion Space Ship? Not building one is not making any of our cities safer from nuclear attack!
#750 Re: Human missions » Project Orion Mars Colony » 2016-09-05 09:46:48
I don't see nuclear weapons being restricted, if Russia and the United States are helping the Iranians of all people to get them! If people think nuclear bombs are safe in the hands of Iranian Clerics and Islamic fundamentalists, then I don't see the danger of employing them for space flight. I mean Barack Obama is fine with the Iranians having nukes, so I think nuclear explosions to propel a spaceship into space is much safer than that! I mean I'm just using logic! For one thing, people piloting the spacecraft won't try to kill people with those nukes, and the Iranians will! In fact the Iranians having these nukes is all the more reason to build this spacecraft, as the Iranians will threaten the human race! Their fanaticism and willingness to die along with their possession of nukes is a threat to us all!