New Mars Forums

This is one reason I'm very much in favor of Earthbased nuclear power plants.  People are always afraid of the radioactive "waste" but they fail to realize that the crap being pumped into the atmosphere from coalburning plants releases significant amounts of radiation into the environment itself because of the uranium that is naturally mixed in with the coal.   A nuclear powerplant is designed so that there is very little release of radiation into the environment outside of the reactor containment whereas a coal burning plants takes no measures to stop release of radiatio.  And additionally, nuclear waste is far easier to deal with in a sanitary manner than trying to deal with billions of tons of coal ash that is often radioactive itself for reasons already mentioned.  A handful of uranium will generate as much power as whole traincar load of coal.  Now tell me which produces less waste?  I should add to that unlike oil, uranium could keep us powered for thousands of years at current power usages if we were to employ breeder reactors to make more fissionables.

lol, I like that analogy even though I think Soph was more worried about what to do with the actual physical waste rather than the radiation itself (which space is full of of course.)

Thanx!  I guess I'm a certified babbling lunatic now.

Isolating groups of people from each other would definately accelerate evolution.  I've read about a number of biologists who think that human biological evolution might not progress much further on this planet because the gene pool is too large and there aren't many groups that exist in isolation long enough for any significant biological change to really take root.  At least I think that's the way the reasoning goes.

Could you explain further what you mean when you say the light doesn't arrive distorted?  I can think of an image being distorted from it's original form due to things like the influence of gravity on the light before it reaches the ccd, but I think that's not the type of thing your talking about.  Anyways, about the relativity thing, for us the observers, we would be able to observe possible distortions because we don't exist in "frozen time" like the light itself does.  It would take infinity for the light to realize it has been messed with somehow but not for us.  I'm not sure though if were both on the same page.

Relativity would make it mathematically impossible to exceed lightspeed, so according to current understanding it appears improbable that we could exceed that limit.  However, I believe that warp drive just folds space, or basically compresses the distance, so it might be possible to traverse huge distances without actually needing to exceed the speed of light.  I know one thing though something like that will never happen until we can generate so much energy that the sun looks like a 9 volt battery in comparison.

I couldn't agree more.  I think we should just buy Soyuz capsules from Russia or buy a license to produce them.  It seems a lot easier and cheaper than totally reinventing the wheel.  I wonder how these new return ships will be lifted to the station.  If we use the space shuttle for the task we could definately save money just hiring Russia to launch Soyuz capsules using their own launchers.

Of course it's about oil.  Just imagine the impact it would have on the world if some madman, namely Saddam Hussein, decided to conquer all of his neighbors and became the sole owner of most of the world's oil.  I think people are forgetting that Saddam actually took it upon himself to invade and occupy a sovereign country and it would be lunacy and idiocy to let that psychopath run free and do as he wishes.  I have no love for Saddam Hussein.  Even though I'm not really jumping on the bandwagon in support of going to war, I really won't lose sleep at night if someone manages to use Saddam's head as a soccer ball.

Jeremy Rifkin and his ilk aren't worried so much about the unintended consequences that could arise due to nanotech but rather the intentional use of it as a weapon and for other negative uses.  Personally I think we'll be able to solve most of these issues and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle once it's let out.  You can try to ban it all you want but it'll eventually surface.  It's just too promising and personally I think we should work on it.  I think the neo-luddites see nanotech and everything else for that matter with the same eyes that the original luddites spied the mechanized weaving machines.  They just don't realize the enormous beneficial uses that nanomachines could be used for.  Uses which outweight the negative aspects in my opinion.  But then again maybe your right, the law of unintended consequences may do us in and cause us all to die from horrible indigestion. 

If you mean "completely safe" as in absolutely 100% certain that no failure could ever occur the answer would have to be no.  But I think the risk can be brought acceptably low.  RTGs for instance are highly durable and have a lot of redundancy as far as safety goes.  Not only is the shell harder than hell to crack but the fuel itself is encapsulated in such a way that if the plutonium were released to the environment it would fall in large, insoluable chunks that wouldn't pose a grave respiratory threat and would make cleaning up the released plutonium a lot easier.  But of course nothing is fail safe.  It just depends on how much risk you can tolerate.   Nuclear fuel that isn't intended for immediate use could probably be stored in a fashion similiar to that of plutonium in RTGs.

Interesting question.  Since nano-machines could be as small as a few carbon molecules in length/width it's possible organisms might develop defenses against them but I'm betting on the fiendishly ingenious brains to win out.    I just hope nobody falls in the septic tank.  No telling what those little bugs might do to you.  You'd have to have a good containment system that would destroy the nanotech if they get released from their environment.  Not sure how you'd go about doing that.  Just another sticky problem that might lead to the end of mankind as we know it.

I certainly won't be the one to argue against the possibility that radical new technologies could come along and totally make our discussions about elevators and rockets seem outdated and primitive.  Personally I hope it happens!   Who knows, Shaun might be rubbing our faces in it when that first anti-grav ship glides easily and quietly out past the atmosphere and toward Mars.

To solve the slow spiralling problem we could just use a simpler version of the Earth return vehicle that would dock with cycler in orbit and just shoot the crew back to Earth once the cycler begins it orbital maneuvers around Earth.  Instead of outfitting the ERV with six months of suppliies it would only need enough to keep the astronauts alive for the time it takes to get back from the cycler to Earth.  Additional ERV's could be hooked up the cycler that would also act as landing craft that would carry inflatable habs to be set up at the landing site.

I share your sentiment that nanotechnology will be truly revolutionary.  I think instead of us fighting over this rock advanced nanotechnology could instead create such an abundance of goods that we will see no need to fight over resources.  Once we understand how to put things together atom by atom we could literally use nanotech to assemble much of what we need from food to tools.  Of course we'll need a lot of computing power to do that but if we refine the art of quantum computers we could construct computers that would use the atoms in the devices themselves as informational and computing resources that would far exceed the computing power of anything we have today.  Nanotech especially has promise for medical applications.  It might become possible in the future to use nanotech to build artificial organs such as livers and stomachs.  If Ray Kurzweil's visions come to pass we could even create intelligent AI "fogs" that could polymorph into anything at will.  There's even speculation that if we are being visited by extraterrestrials that they may not be coming here in large spaceships but rather could be sending dust sized or smaller probes that utilize nanotech to Earth that would just mix in with the millions of tons of dust that fall to Earth annually and escape our detection.