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For Calliban re return to the forum:
It is good to see your ID back in the Active list.
The Admins made an attempt to contact you immediately after the onset of the recent outage caused by a spammer attack.
We were unsuccessful, because your secure email service (very politely) refused to forward our message. I presume the reason is that our email address is not on your approved contact list. Please add our NewMarsMember email address to your approved contact list. Then! Please notify us so we can initiate a contact to verify the email is good.
We don't ask much of our members, but having a valid email address is something that it seems to me is reasonable to request.
Here is the earlier post ...
For Calliban re secure email service...
During the recent outage, Admins reached out to you to let you know we were continuing to meet at the "Lifeboat" site (new-mars.org/phpBB3/)
However, it turned out our contact email is not in your "approved" list, so your secure email provider courteously informed us we would not be permitted to send email to you. However, interestingly, they ** did ** respond to our inquiry with a personal, very courteous, business-like explanation. What it boils down to is that we are in need of you adding us to your approved contact list.
We would like you to add newmarsmember{at}gmail.com to your approved list, and then notify us via Housekeeping that your account is ready for a test.
We will then send you a test message.
We would like to have everyone up to date within some reasonable period of time.
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Thanks. It is good to see the forum up and running again.
I think my original e-mail has gone inactive. I will update with a new one this week.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Thank you for getting to that peski little thing we call email
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I keep getting this message when attempting log-on:
'Bad CSRF hash. You were referred to this page from an unauthorized source.'
Any idea what this means?
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #404
What the message you quoted "means" depends upon the point of view of the recipient.
To kbd512, that message probably means something very specific about an issue that arose in the complex Internet environment as the PHP software of our web site tries to deal with issues that arise due to the asynchronous nature of traffic.
To a lay person like me, that message suggests that a cookie got lost. When you open a session with NewMars.com/forums, a cookie with a hexadecimal code is stored on your device. That code gets passed back and forth between your device and the host servers, and if a single bit gets lost in all that movement, then the host or the client raises a flag, and the flag might look like the message you reported.
Your report implies the message is happening to you more than it should. I have seen the error, but so rarely that I can't remember what was going on at the time. The fact your packets have to travel across an ocean and then across an entire continent should NOT ordinarily have any effect on the reliability of the connection, but I introduce that fact as something that might (or might not) be involved.
Timing might be an issue, but that is harder for me to evaluate. There is a timer on a session with NewMars.com/forums. I don't know what the exact time interval is (I think it may be a variable controlled by an Admin like SpaceNut or kbd512). However, ordinarily, the host simply asks you to log back in if the session has expired. This is irritating if we have been trying a long post, or if we got a phone call and time passed between one sentence and the next. I have found that the solution is to open a new tab while keeping the one with the post right were it was. I log back in, and the browser creates a new session cookie. Then (if all goes well) I open the tab with the post that failed, and run preview to refresh the post and then submit. If all has gone well, and the browser remembers the new cookie, then the post succeeds.
The Internet environment is unbelievably complex due to the asynchronous nature of transactions. I attempted to learn how to deal with that when I was working on something for SpaceNut. I learned about creating transactions that wait for a response in JavaScript, and made some progress, but never mastered the technique to the point I could build an entire application. Instead, I fell back up on an older technique involving use of timers in programming. The older technique works, but it is not elegant by a long shot.
I documented all that work quite thoroughly. There should be a topic about Javascript, and the work done to develop asynchronous processing for SpaceNut was documented but I don't remember where.
All that said, I would definitely be interested in details about what was going on when you next get one of these dropped cookie flags.
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For Calliban re post in kbd512's topic about the use of pure carbon atoms to operate a fuel cell.
The key concept here is to break Carnot!
Thank you for the timely reminder of an alternative Carnot limited energy transformation using carbon slurry (if I understand your post correctly).
It is ** good ** to have your ID showing up in the forum from time to time, so I'm posting here to avoid overwriting your ID in the Active list.
kbd512 created a long post about the Chinese research.
The goal here is to beat Carnot, and the challenges are many, as kbd512 has pointed out.
Thank you for pointing out that the original link has gone stale! I will attempt to find a replacement.
The idea (as I remember it) is to use abundant natural energy supplies to isolate carbon atoms so they can be fed directly into a fuel cell to liberate electricity while delivering pure CO2 with no soot. Nuclear energy, wind, solar, wave and even tidal energy are all potentially capable of isolating carbon from CO2 in the air, so potentially any Nation can get off fossil fuel dependency.
The present time is a wake up call for many who are still dependent upon fossil fuel.
I'll try to find a link to the research.
PS ... your email is still showing as the secure service that politely declined to forward.
Update: The links have been refreshed: https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 18#p239218
The best link appears to be the original from Interesting Engineering.
I'd appreciate your analysis of the potential for this attempt to break Carnot. We have plenty of hot air and steam already in play, so a bit more won't hurt.
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For Calliban re kbd512's post https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 76#p239276
kbd512 may well have some good points to consider ...
From my perspective, the energy pouring out of the Sun that we are wasting because we humans do not yet seem to know how to collect it is like the Niagara Falls and we are using a pinwheel to collect energy.
The Chinese appear to be working toward an energy storage and deliver system that is superior to any other system here-to-fore invented.
Breaking the Carnot barrier is the key. All the fussing around with molecules is just window dressing from my perspective.
The key is to provide an aircraft or other vehicle with the means to deliver power in the quantity needed for as long as possible in as reliable a way as possible.
Your ongoing argument with the CATO Institute is of great interest to me.
Each of you seems (to me at least) to be talking past the other.
I read recently that the point of view of the CATO Institute is shared by a (to me surprising) number of right wing entities. The theme is that human ingenuity is the answer to every problem.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that you have a powerful argument (pun not planned) in advocating the supply of energy as the answer to every problem (I'm obviously over simplifying your argument).
Most of us seem to me to be struggling with scarcity, as is most of the human race.
The CATO Institute and their Right Wing friends would probably argue that human ingenuity can deal with scarcity.
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tahanson43206,
We already have 65% thermal-to-electrical conversion efficiency, and most combined cycle plants can manage 60% average efficiency when they're run at continuous load. An extra 15% to 20% efficiency increase confers no night-and-day efficiency improvement, especially when it's associated with a series of preprocessing refinement steps to create nearly-pure Carbon as a fuel source and then consuming that fuel source to make electricity. You understand that every energy conversion, chemical transformation process, and consumables-dependent input increases cost and losses, don't you? If you don't think making nearly-pure Graphite out of coal will be energy-intensive, then I don't know what to tell you. You only do stuff like that when you have no other alternative.
Grinding 1,000kg of coal to 10 micrometer diameter will use about 10% of the energy in the coal. Mining coal requires an average of 58kWh/t, more if it's a lower grade or hard to get to. Coal provides a rough average of 2,200kWh/t, so consuming 10% of it's energy is 200kWh/t. That's only the first step. There are many more preprocessing steps after that to remove the heavy metals, including high temperature processes. Regardless, that's 12% to 15% of the energy consumed before the coal can have the metal poisons removed. I'll bet almost anything that takes at least 5% more energy, and likely 10% more. That functionally erases any thermal-to-electrical efficiency advantage over a combined cycle gas turbine power plant. If you capture the CO2 afterwards, that's another 5% (supersonic CO2 compressor) to 10% (10+ stage conventional compression) of the energy.
We "broke the Carnot limit", but then somehow generated less usable electrical power output than if we had instead used a heat engine and CO2 capture. The catalysts don't last for six months, though, so I'm not too worried about this latest Rube Goldberg machine making less power with something that won't, inside of a year.
Put another way, if you want a closed loop system, why not start with pure CO2? That's far easier to do, especially with Gallium alloys, and if you capture most of the plant output then you also have no emissions, but without further complexifying the process. React what will be actually pure Carbon in the fuel cell, so maybe you won't ruin the catalyst in less than a year and then have to rebuild what is likely to be the most expensive part of the plant.
Edit:
My math was wrong on this. 2,200kWh/t is what you typically get from a steam plant. You can theoretically get an average of 8,000kWh/t of coal in terms of thermal output. Unfortunately, if you use molten oxide electrolysis to chemically separate the contaminants from coal, that electrical power input will substantially exceed 8,000kWh/t, which is why this made so little sense to me, but that is what you would do if you wanted pure Graphite at the end of the process.
Last edited by kbd512 (2026-05-11 19:52:51)
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For Calliban re gravity and possible detection of rogue planets in deep space, or large masses outside the Kuiper belt...
Your recent discussion with Void about Nitrogen atmosphere around cold objects included mention of the influence of gravity on the effect you were studying.
This post is more of an inquiry than anything else... The LIGO equipment placed in service on Earth in recent years has achieved some success in detecting collision of black holes. Such equipment may not be able to detect masses as small as a planet when installed on Earth, but I'm wondering if the idea might be tried in space, for (possible) detection of smaller objects.
The premise of my inquiry may be faulty, since LIGO is (apparently) able to detect changes in the strength of gravity caused by massive disturbances, but a rogue planet (or Planet 9 for that matter) would just be quietly bending space-time in their vicinity, and otherwise doing little to call attention to themselves.
I ran a quick check with Google, and the most promising instrument it found is a cosmic lens detector. That would seem most likely to work well for objects on the scale of galaxies, which can and do bend light coming from behind them. To detect a lens as small as a planet would (I presume) require precision not yet available. Perhaps a cosmic lens detector might be able to detect a large mass it if were close by.
There may be a theoretical limit to how well a "cosmic lens" detector might work with planet sized objects.
An instrument able to measure curvature of space-time would be handy. However, I suspect that any such instrument will embody whatever curvature is present, so it would never be able perceive a difference compared to uncurved space-time.
I'm hoping these speculations ,may inspire ideas along this line.
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For Calliban re Windmill progress ...
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 56#p239456
Thanks for this update, and for the helpful picture showing the new configuration.
Your patience is surely being tested by the challenges Ma Nature is giving you, but I am curious to know if a vertical power transfer pole might allow the wind apparatus to deliver power closer to the ground, where not only the tumbler but perhaps other mechanical devices might reside?
I'm vaguely remembering that the Canadians may have tried a vertical tower at one point, but my recollection is that their experiment was attempted with a huge structure that led to bearing failure. Perhaps the scale of your design might be more forgiving?
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For Calliban re email from gent who wrote a paper on fusion...
We have received an email from a gent who has written a paper about fusion.
I suspect the gent has missed something important, because he has arrived at an overly optimistic conclusion.
However, the knowledge of science advances when new ideas are offered, even when they are wrong.
You are the ONLY member of the forum with actual knowledge of nuclear physics.
I don't want to impose upon your valuable time. I think that I should look at the paper first to be sure it is plausible at a first tier level.
Never-the-less, I'm opening this point of contact in case the paper passes my first reading.
(th)
Recruiting High Value members for NewMars.com/forums, in association with the Mars Society
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For Calliban re new posts on home project and subterranean hydrogen...
Thank you for both these posts! We are in a time of modest activity, so it is good to see your two encouraging reports.
A logical follow on to your report about hydrogen is that there would appear to be money to be made for the groups that can organize themselves to use this unexpected resource effectively. It would be helpful if sensor technology could reveal the locations of these deposits, Please let us know if you see any news along that line.
Your stone cutting table looks sturdy, and the color scheme blends in nicely with the landscape.
I notice that in particular because I was asked to paint some new bright copper watering pipes, and the color chosen was a dark green to (hopefully) blend in with the greenery to be watered.
We live in an area where enterprising thieves are in the business of removing copper that is above ground, whether it is carrying gas or liquid or not.
Please add updates about the performance of the stone cutter as they become available.
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For Calliban re new post on arc jet propulsion ....
Thanks for providing this innovative idea to the forum collection!
My question is about the aluminum to wrap the projectile cylinders.
Presumably this covering must be brought from Earth and used sparingly for a long voyage. Your post described a thin layer of aluminum ? sputtered ? onto the outer surface of each cylinder. My question is ... how much aluminum is needed to achieve the needed efficiency?
If we start with a ton of aluminum, and collect the filler mass from asteroids and moons as we travel, it seems to me our journey will be limited only by that starting load of aluminum.
You did not mention power source but I presume solar panels can provide the power needed.
Void asked an interesting question about the exhaust entering the Earth's atmosphere. I picked up on your suggestion of Martian moons.
This propulsion method should work in the asteroid belt, except for the dim sunlight.
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I don't know how much aluminium would be needed. It is there to provide shock heating of the bulk propellant and to provide ions once vaporised, through which an electric arc is established. The arc would vaporise the propellant once it is established. Vacuum plating can produce coatings that are literally a few atoms thick. That may be enough. Of course, this kind of arrangement requires that fuel is manufactured. First as ceramic rods and then coated. That is a complex operation that would add weight and complexity to a space craft.
An alternative would be to sort through regolith grains to get some of about the right size. These are then injected into the engine and we use a laser to ablate enough material from the surface to set up a conduction path. That increases the energy requirements of the process, but may be logistically simpler.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re Arc Jet Propulsion ...
It appears we do not have a topic by that title...
We could add one if you think the method has enough promise .... It seems to me that a deep space vessel (manned or not) with sufficient energy available from a nuclear device of some kind, would benefit from the efficiency of this system.
The mass of the fuel preparation system would seem to me modest compared to the mass used for propellant over the course of a long voyage. A mass driver would also have significant mass requirements for the acceleration track and for the related hardware. Your fuel making apparatus might look like a bargain compared to that.
It just occurred to me that the device you proposed ** is ** a mass driver, with the individual mass elements as small as the Universe allows. This might lead to significant benefits for long duration acceleration.
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For Calliban re Aaron and his sheep....
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 05#p239805
I decided to take a chance on the link you provided, and felt well rewarded.
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For Calliban re your post about the IPO....
GW Johnson wrote a longish email inspired by your post.
I'm trying to figure out where to put it.
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For Calliban re thermal energy storage using carbon...
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 42#p239842
Thanks for a very nice addition to the topic!
I only had time to view part of that video this morning, but get the impression this system might work at a large scale.
You and kbd512 were talking about automotive applications of various energy storage methods a while back.
I wonder if the solid carbon storage system would work at that scale?
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