New Mars Forums

im a led zeppelin fan.  more recent stuff, dream theater and green day.

if weve progressed this far with quantum tunneling by now, surely a century from now we'll be able to do some of what you suggested

no.  like ive said, all we had to do was wait off the coast of Japan.   they surrendered in the end anyway, didnt they?  the japanese were already discussing surrender before hiroshima.  get your facts right.

so i kinda had the right idea?

i doubt it.  if its kept under the rug until it becomes mainstream, it can work.  just call it "highly advanced propulsion technology"

i just did a biology paper, and part of it was research on future spinal injury treatments.  medications are being developed that stimulate enzymatic and protein activity (for bone repair).  i don't see why this couldn't be done on mars.

60 minutes does a decent job of covering global issues.  CNN is decent, but i could never respect the media nowadays for various reasons.

1) Reporters don't care about anything but their story.  I don't see why our reporters have to be spies for the world, divulging our battle plans.  Yes, I know, there's little chance to lose, but maybe I want to be a little surprised if we come in from Kuwait instead of Saudi Arabia.

2) I just saw a report today about Cardinal Law.  The poor guy has been disgraced, and the reporter is saying on national television that he wants a quiet withdrawal from public service.  That means he doesn't want you outside his house talking about the Catholic Church's scandal!!!.  Not that I'm Catholic, or I condone the scandal, but give the guy a break. 

3) How many times does the media use a terrible event for profit?  I did not have to see the tape of the dog gassings by al Qaeda a hundred thousand times.  And I didn't have to see the 9/11 videos still being played 6 months later.  it's so transparent.  I don't need them to tell me how to "commemorate" (for lack of a better word) the incident. 

4) Twisting stories to make stories.  I know people who have experienced this personally, and it's disgusting.

I could keep going, but I'd rather not.

and we could have afforded it.  all it would have taken was leaving our ships off the coast.  where are the casualties in that?

the war was ending anyway.  we just wanted to speed it up.  an invasion wasnt necessary.

with the prices of dvd-rw drives coming down, and the fact that a dvd-rw disc has the potential to hold five gigabytes(!) of data, dvd-rw's could very well become the new media of choice for anything.  why bother with huge, highly priced hard drives, when you will soon be able to get a dvd-rw for about the price of an 80 GB hard drive, and a 5 GB disc for about $3.50 apiece now (wait 3 months, theyll likely be 2-2.50)  here are my calculations.

assuming in 3 months, they are $150 (current price for a decent new DVD burner drive bottoms at $200, and that drops post-holidays).  this is the price of a 100 GB hard drive.  but now, you can get unlimited numbers of dvd-rw's for say, $2.50 apiece.  100 of these costs $369 now, lets say, $300 by march.  so, 500 Gb of data for $450 dollars total.  this much money could get you about 300 GB of hard disk space. 

the upshot, its portable!  you could store huge amounts of data  on a small CD, bring it to any computer with a DVD drive (not even a burner, a DVD drive costs about $50), and access the information.  this opens up a world of possibilities. 

beyond this, mini-cd's (not minidiscs, those are different) are out too.  with data compression on the rise, it is not inconceivable that within a year, we will have discs about twice the size of a quarter, than can store 5 GB of data or more.  entire libraries of information could be stored in the palm of your hand. 

handheld computers are on the way.

if the fallout can be contained, then it would be very attractive.  maybe a specially designed shield around the launch site.  if it could be designed so that pulses were only needed at the launch site, and not in the atmosphere, then all the radiation from launch could be contained within the launch site.  once outside of the atmosphere, the danger is gone.

if there is a way to contain most of the radiation so that the fallout is very low, im all for it.  2 million tons is like a space carrier.  almost like a mining town.  2 of those could be a permanent asteroid mining base.  if it works, its beautiful.  we could have thousands of people living in space, mining asteroids, harvesting helium 3, whatever. 

but safety is the big issue.  all that i care about is a level of containment.  how effective would lead shielding be?