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...and why the authorities have decided to explain all of these away as "defrost patterns" or "dry ice" or other nondescript, boring items?
"Nondescript" and "boring" are in no way synonymous with incorrect. Often the truth seems more boring than fantasy. These explanations are not coverups; they are the most likely explanations. Scientists generally apply the principle of Occam's razor, which in this case strongly favors "boring" explanations.
GCNRevenger wrote:
Dook wrote:
Everything in your post is either wrong, insane, or a combination of the two.I think that I can safely agree with Dook on this one for once.
Yes, I will make it a three way agreement on this.
I'm afraid I must agree with these three. I particularly didn't like the phrase "For a habitat lander the Size of a space shuttle, with a year of food and supplies. ONE WAY. " One way and only a year of food and supplies! What then? Let them die? That's not a good way to colonize a planet in my opinion. And $20 billion just to go there and die a year later. I don't think people will be lining up to join.
Although a lunar elevator may be possible with today's technologies, it may actually be easier just to develop the nanotube technology we need to build an Earth-based elevator, and it would certainly be more beneficial to the world. Indeed, once we have an elevator from Earth it will be easier to get the supplies and people we need to build one on the moon up there.
I also wonder if it is really worthwhile to mine lunar PGMs when they can be had in much higher concentrations directly from the asteroids.
There are certainly reasons to go to the moon and in time to build a space elevator there, but I don't really think it should be a top priority.
I think it is good that the Centennial Challenges is including something for space elevator technologies. Space elevators may not be the immediate future, but ultimately, I think, they will be the answer to getting lots of people and stuff into space cheaply and reliably.
http://www.space.com/news/051009_spaceshot.html
An interesting idea at any rate. I might play it depending on how good the game is and what I think my chances of actually winning are (probably about 0). Still if it's a fun game anyway, it could attract a lot of people. It's certainly a novel way to get passengers and to market a game.
It seems one of the biggest benefactors of nanotech research right now is the Pentagon which I have to be honest scares the hell out of me. I don't want to see the advancement of technology going in a direction that facilitates oppression of people by governments, corps, or whatever.
I was thinking the same sort of thing recently when I read about that Pentagon sponsored robot race. The autonomous navigation technology they were developing could be used for a lot of constructive things (exploring Mars for example, or aiding rescue operations in disaster stricken areas). But they want to build these things to more efficiently kill people. The worst thing is that if NASA or FEMA or something had wanted funding to do this same thing, they probably would have been turned down.
Gas prices are already insane and going to get worse. Now is the time for alternate fuel. I would make conversion kits that include in-wheel electric motors for all 4 wheels. That means full time 4-wheel-drive without a transmission or differential. In-wheel motors use high torque and relatively low speed for direct drive, one motor revolution per wheel revolution. No energy loss to gears and no crank case oil or transmission fluid. Differential is entirely electronic. Those motors could also act as regenerative brakes, generating electricity to recharge the battery as you brake. Rare earth magnets make electric motors stronger and lighter. Hydrogen fuel storage in a fibreglass tank with special polymer liner and carbon nanotube fill. The CNT fill binds hydrogen to store 3 times as much before the same pressure is reached. Fibreglass tank capacity is only limited by pressure.
Although hydrogen could certainly be a good replacement fuel for cars, I wonder how many people would want to convert to hydrogen cars when there are no hydrogen stations yet. Could a car that recycles its hydrogen by capturing and electrolyzing the water it creates be made? I guess that would be essentially an electric car storing its energy in fuel cells instead of batteries; I 'm not sure if that would be better or worse than regular electric. Also creating hydrogen (by electrolyzing water) requires electricity generated usually by burning fossil fuels, making it an imperfect alternative. I think such technologies as V2G hybrids are the most likely near-term advances. Still nothing wrong with developing hydrogen cars, I guess.
Good luck if you start any of these businesses; all the techs you mention would be quite useful to the world I think.
With the Republican Party being looked at as a pack of self serving Traitors by an America feeling betrayed, Abandoned, Subverted, Corrupted, and Fed upon by Evil, Is this the Beginning of the End for the Republicans?
I doubt it. Plenty of people are still being fooled by Bush, Rove, and the rest of the administration. The view of the party that you present is that of its strongest enemies only. People have at various times predicted the death of one or the other party, but it has not come to pass. Besides, there will always be liberals and conservatives whatever there parties may be called. On the whole, I dislike the Republican party more than I dislike the Democratic party, but I don't think that replacing either party with another like-minded one (as the replacement would inevitably be) would change much.
Fran de Aquino on the other side has an nice website about his theory which he has presented AFAIR at CERN and he has made successful trials to produce an antigravity-drive!
I googled Fran de Aquino and found some stuff on his theories, most of which I didn't really understand. He seemed to claim to have demonstrated an antigravity effect my running electricity through a certain type of wire; I admit I didn't really understand most of it. This was a small experiment seeming to show a certain effect, not a dramatic levitation of anything, so it wouldn't necessarily make headlines, but it is also in need of verification by other scientists if it is to be taken seriously. Overall de Aquino's ideas seem questionable, but he doesn't seem like a complete crackpot either.
Information CANNOT be transmited FTL. Why? Because if it also causes some information to be transmited backwards in time to some observers, causing causality violations.
Quantum entanglement seems to provide a method by which information is transmitted FTL, and I would not be surprised if we find a way to use it to communicate one day. I am not sure, however, how this would involve transmitting any information back in time.
About the Casimir effect: I have often heard that it could theoretically be a source of free energy. Is this true, or would extracting zero-point/vacuum energy that way decrease the total ZPE.
If Mars successfully broke away, it would also inevitably break down and create its own countries, which may or may not receieve backing from "sister" countries on Earth.
Would it? The US broke away from Britain, and it is still one country (although the Civil War temporarily divided it).
I think that the most likely scenario is separate city-states. Some will be governed by Earthly powers (although with some autonomy) and some will be fully independent. Someone will probably try to set up a Martian UN, and they may succeed, but it will not be a planetary government. Treaties and alliances will exist between the states (perhaps they will even all agree to some sort of non-agression pact) and in some cases there may be multiple states controlled by a single government. But the states will be mostly independent of each other.
I very much doubt that the American government would institute any program of racial discrimination in exploring space or colonizing Mars. We've come a long way in ending racial discriminatioin in many areas, and in 30-40 years we should be a lot further than we are now. I don't think we're going to regress when we go into space. Besides, any politician who suggested such a thing would be effectively ending his career. Space, will I hope, be a place of greater equality than Earth is now. If you go into the space program or space sciences, then when the time comes to pick colonists, you should be a good candidate regardless of your race.
I think that the best option for something like a warp drive would be to establish a network of wormholes connecting distant places. Certainly we won't be doing this tomorrow, but eventually we may well find a way to create wormholes or find a way to use naturally occurring ones that may be found near black holes.
And I believe accessability is not the problem, culture is. A culture that demands personal responsibility -- whether economic, parental, or civic -- also demands responsibility for their behaviour with something as serious as firearms.
I agree that culture is a major part of the problem, but as long as the culture is not ideal, accessibility is also an issue. I agree with Clark that those people who can't responsibly handle guns shouldn't be allowed to own them. If eventually that doesn't apply to anyone, then that's good, but I wouldn't count on it happening.
Also Red, you mention Canada as being non-violent: have you ever been there? Though there will always be exceptions (Out of a dozen or so trips up there I think I met him once) they are some of the lovelest and most polite people anywhere. Isn’t it possible the difference could be cultural, rather than the result of gun laws?
Yes I have been to Canada, although I wasn't really drawing on personal experience but on things I have read. (I have very little personal experience with guns anywhere.) And yes the difference is quite possibly cultural. If so I just wish we could have that kind of culture.
Dude, listen! I respect the right to own a gun. However, I can see the writing on the wall. To me, it makes more sense to head the anti-gun lobby off at the pass and disassociate from the idiots who misuse guns. By doing so, those who support gun ownership can ensure that outright bans never gain the necessary majority to affect an actual ban.
To many nutters want to make this a fight based on principle alone, and it is ultimately a losing proposition. I don’t want to see a ban in place, I would rather see a compromise which is at least acceptable to my own sensibilities (and I believe most gun rights advocates) while there is still an opportunity to make an arrangement to our benefit.
If a good moderate compromise can be formed, it could probably find broad support among people on both sides of the issue and would probably be a good thing. Ideally this compromise should allow people to have guns if and only if they won't cause trouble with them. Unfortunately I haven't seen many proposals that would fit this criterion, and I suppose that anything in reality must fall short of the ideal.
So basically they're scrapping the no first use idea. Let's hope all the other nations with nuclear weapons don't follow suits. Even the Soviet dictators realized that they didn't have the right to attack first with nukes. And Bush still doesn't get it. Unbelievable.
The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
What a great way to spread radiation, germs, or chemicals all over the place.[/i]
But many people treat "licensing" as a back-door ban, make the licensing requirements so strict and the fees so high that no one can get one.
I do not think that this view can be taken seriously. The fact that many ordinary people do own guns essentially proves it false. Licensing, at least at present, is not very restrictive at all and is the least we can do to protect people from violent crime. I understand why many people would oppose an outright ban on guns, but to say that licensing is infringing on their rights is really going too far.
I find that the "If guns are banned or even licensed, we can't rebel against tyranny should the need arise view" (especially when talking about just licensing) to be incompatible with the "If guns are illegal/restricted criminals will get them and ordinary people won't" view. If guns are still available even when restricted or banned, then if we really need to rebel we can still get them. Sure it would be a bit harder, but any successful rebellion would need good organization and a way of getting supplies to its army so it could supply them with guns. It would also need tanks, fighter-plans, and warships for that matter which most civilians don't have.
There are many countries where far fewer people are killed with guns than in the US, and they are not countries with repressive regimes. Canada, I think is one example. There are ways to decrease the murder rate without decreasing the rate of successful self-defense. (Also, I beleive that many more people are murdered with guns than are stopped from murdering by them. Thus they are doing more harm than good.)
My two main questions are:
1)How will they raise the capital to go to Mars?
2)How will they, being a for-profit company, make a profit once they get there?
I'm not saying they can't do it; I hope they can, but there are many problems they will have to overcome. Business will certainly follow if others go to Mars, but can they lead the way. It seems difficult. It costs a lot to get there and will be a long time before Mars can make money.
I am not sure but i think a human body would need 10^28 bytes. If each cell was a single byte. I remembered this from "Physics of Star Trek".
A cell is very complex, you could not store all its information in a single byte. You would need to record the states and relative positions of every particle making up the body. But maybe that's were the 10^28 number comes from, since it seems rather large for the number of cells in the body. That's 10 octillion bytes i think.
The overlords of tyranny can look forward to having their brains scrambled by multidimensional fields and corpses turned inside out by Quantum interference generators.
I hope we can find better applications of quantum theory than killing each other. (Quantum computers, instant communication over long distances, and the teleportation we've been discussing are some possibilities.)
All the $ going for homeland security
The really bad thing is that all that money hasn't helped them respond to Katrina. Although homeland security was intended particularly for terrorist attacks, it is also supposed to help with natural disasters. And I doubt it would have done better in a terrorist attack. If Katrina can be considered a test of homeland security and government disaster response, the gov and homeland security have failed it.
LO
I think there will be much more money spent for rebuilding oil rigs than for that all the New Orleans miserables, all which couldn't have an own house a car, an insurance will be left behind when emotion risen by the catastrophe will will be forgotten.Guess which companies will get the money ?
little help :"H.......ton" and friends
Sadly, that is probably true.
As for Iraq, I doubt that Bush will either remove or add troops for a while since there would be strong opposition to either move.
With this coming from China urges action against threat of militarization of outer space we are getting closer everyday to not ever seeing weapons in space.
It seems that there is serious public and international opposition to militarization of space. This may allow us to proceed for a while with exploration without weapons, although I doubt that we can keep weapons out of space forever. A threat of space militarization at this time that will decrease with increased space presence and settlement is that fighting in space could destroy all our space-based infrastructure and sattelites and basically force us to start over again, thus setting us back even farther. I think that if our chief goal is space exploration, we should try to keep weapons out of space as long as possible but make sure no one else has them either.
A related issue is if we ever begin to explore outside the solar system, should we bring weapons with us in case we meet other hostile species? I think that we should definitely try to make peace with any extraterrestrials that we meet, but having some weapons onboard may not be a bad idea. However, you should make sure that the crew doesn't have access to them if there is any danger of fighting amongst themselves.
The only reason things dont happen is that they arn't being done.
Very true. But that doesn't mean it's easy to just do them. We have a finite amount of resources and a lot of things to use them for. (And often they are poorly allocated.) People often advocate one cause that they beleive is good or productive or promotes advancement such as feeding the poor, exploring space, finding a cure for cancer, etc. All these things are important, so we spend some of our resources on each of them. But spending all our resources in one place would be a mistake, because other things wouldn't get done at all. The world could fairly quickly and effectively solve one or two of its problems if it put all its resources towards that goal, but at the expense of leaving all the other problems unattended to (and probably worsening for lack of care). Thus we advance slowly in a number of areas.
I read a report several years ago about a couple of Australian scientists. Who teleported a message in a laser beam.
That used quantum entanglement, a very promissing area of research. But they didn't really transport the beam, they transported the information needed to rebuild it, or rather an exact copy of it. Getting this to work on humans or even material objects of any reasonable size requires disassembling them and transferring the state of every particle that makes them up onto new particles at the destination via entanglement. I would never use such a teleporter on myself because I don't like the idea of being dissassembled and because I am not positive that we are nothing more than the qunatum states of billions of particles. But I wouldn't mind using a wormhole or some other method of teleportation that brings the actual matter that comprises me from one place to another while skipping all the space in between. Once the wormhole was proven safe that is.
It seems strange that they chose psychic teleportation as the most likely. If I understand correctly and they are talking about teleportation by some unknown ability of the mind, it seems to me that wormholes and entanglement would be more fit for research because:
1) These processes are better understood scientifically and seem to be possible. Thus we have a place to begin and a reasonable chance of success.
2) If psychic teleportation is possible, quite doubtful, it is likely to involve wormholes and/or entanglement. Of course, if it works on an as yet unknown principle, it would be of great interest and importance to physics.
I'd say that wormholes are our best bet for teleportation of people or equipment. Entanglement will, however, give us quantum computers and real-time communication and robot control at any distance.
Uh, I'd prefer they DON'T catch on. Government, including NASA, can't seem to accomplish anything without it costing about 10x what it'd cost if done by a corporation or other non-government entity. So they'd keep costs high and skim off those customers who are willing to pay the higher price - doubly discouraging private investment in an affordable elevator. Sort of like the shuttle did...
True. Of course a private space elevator isn't guaranteed to solve these problems, although it's probably better than the government. I was more expressing surprise that they hadn't been doing it, than commenting on whether they should or shouldn't.
we really need something that can easily bring stuff into and out of space with no problems.
Scramjet and space elevator seem like our two best bets to me.