tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post3392332410043699852..comments2024-03-29T06:22:47.638-07:00Comments on CONTRARY BRIN: Queries on Quora... and track the comet landing!David Brinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-83092497563213157712014-11-15T03:56:16.301-08:002014-11-15T03:56:16.301-08:00Anon,
"Instead of assuming space/Mars advocat...Anon,<br /><i>"Instead of assuming space/Mars advocates must be deluded fools who "forget" obvious issues, you might ask yourself whether they might have seen the same issues, but were motivated to think of ways around some of them."</i><br /><br />How about not assuming that I've not been following this issue for at least 3 decades and aren't well aware of the plans offered by advocates.<br />Paul451https://www.blogger.com/profile/12119086761190994938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-77283953806800002872014-11-14T16:51:04.801-08:002014-11-14T16:51:04.801-08:00onwardonwardDavid Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-76564764506988576112014-11-14T16:03:01.211-08:002014-11-14T16:03:01.211-08:00I'm waiting for the Facebook comments to start...I'm waiting for the Facebook comments to start. I've an article with links to each Republican President since Carter lost and the executive actions they did for immigration reform and the like. That being Ronald Reagan, who when Congress couldn't pass a fix to immigration reform went and did an executive action doing just that... and both Bushes. Or in other words: precedent. <br /><br />Rob H.Acacia H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07678539067303911329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-72058238644768853092014-11-14T15:51:18.033-08:002014-11-14T15:51:18.033-08:00matthew, I predict something such as this:\https:/...matthew, I predict something such as this:\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8Jumperhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11794110173836133321noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-8727543616504033202014-11-14T15:06:19.066-08:002014-11-14T15:06:19.066-08:00Paul S-B we received your package and your daughte...Paul S-B we received your package and your daughter's wonderfully done tableau. Terrific! We'll take a picture soon and post it online.David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-83943038821339765882014-11-14T13:07:14.560-08:002014-11-14T13:07:14.560-08:00Robert, that link was pure gold.
Anyone else thi...Robert, that link was pure gold. <br /><br />Anyone else think that the President's movement on immigration reform is basically a dare to Republican Congress to try impeachment? I smell some rope-a-dope going on there. It looks like McConnell is going to try filing a lawsuit on executive orders on immigration to throw some meat to the Red base. Any takers on a bet that it will not suffice? Will we then get impeachment, government shutdown, or both?matthewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17757867868731829206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-63382200202744187292014-11-14T08:39:59.157-08:002014-11-14T08:39:59.157-08:00@Alfred Differ
Let me clarify - by "trade&quo...@Alfred Differ<br />Let me clarify - by "trade" I was referring to conventional movement of conventional physical goods. But yes, there's a broader sense of the term, by which the sort of services I described could be considered "trade with Earth".<br /><br />About the only thing that might have high enough value to bring back from Mars, is scientific rock samples. And after a first few batches, the value of those will fall radically (we didn't keep going back for more moon rocks). What's more, it'd clearly be far cheaper to send a robotic sample return mission.<br /><br />The best case, for having humans on Mars that physically ship stuff to Earth to justify the expense of their mission, would be finding fossils. If we find actual life, we might be even more willing to send people to study it - but slower to bring it back to Earth, so again the physical shipment of "stuff" from Mars would be smaller.<br /><br />And again - we won't keep humans on Mars long, if they can't become almost entirely self-sufficient. A decade of sending supplies and replacement scientists is the best we might hope for with current costs, even with the whole world cooperating. Slash the cost of resupply by a factor of 100, and a small permanent station with permanent residents might be possible.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-72892484014090499282014-11-14T04:14:59.123-08:002014-11-14T04:14:59.123-08:00Robert, thanks for that glimmer of hope. The weath...Robert, thanks for that glimmer of hope. The weather has turned bleak of late and my serotonin levels were getting pretty low. Personally I would be happy to see these carnosaurs go extinct, nut I have argued before that America needs more political parties. The idea of there being only one party sounds just a little too Soviet for comfort.Paul Shen-Brownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-32030236655687606372014-11-13T22:33:03.882-08:002014-11-13T22:33:03.882-08:00Going more into politics, here is a rather stark l...Going more into politics, <a href="http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2014/11/the-missing-story-of-the-2014-election/" rel="nofollow">here is a rather stark look at the Republican options for 2016 and reasoning why the 2014 election was a death knell for the Republican Party</a>. This was written BY a Republican, mind you, and is a rather cautionary tale. Sadly, I doubt the firebrand Republicans will listen to it, which is a shame. Because it would be nice to see Republicans embrace sanity... and see if it's contagious. <br /><br />Rob H.Acacia H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07678539067303911329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-53246615358694231182014-11-13T21:57:02.790-08:002014-11-13T21:57:02.790-08:00Dear Laurent,
Sorry it took me awhile to get back...Dear Laurent,<br /><br />Sorry it took me awhile to get back - work has been busy. I would like to look at the demographic data again, but the difference between 47 and 49 years might not be significant. If you look at the curve starting from the end of the Pleistocene, it is very obviously exponential (though with a noticeable dip during the Age of Faith, but that dip was more than recovered by the 18th Century). It may just be a matter of scale. Any curve looks smooth if you look at it over a long enough range, but gets more jagged or lumpy when you zoom in.<br /><br />However, if this is a real trend and not just a short-term phenomenon, there are a couple thing sit could indicate. One is that we are nearing carrying capacity and that exponential J-curve is turning into a logistic S-curve. In other words, our population is beginning to level off as we reach the limits of what the world can support. That transition is not always smooth, though. There are often short periods of time when the population goes above K temporarily, then quickly swings back down below the K line.<br /><br />The more frightening possibility is that we overshoot K by so much that we degrade the environment to the point of reducing the carrying capacity of the land itself, leading to a catastrophic population crash. The Demographic Transition might be just the thing, or it might be a day late and a dollar short.<br /><br />The problem with making predictions is that humans have the capacity to increase K through technological change (from hunting to farming, later to industrial farming). I remember 2 years ago hydrologists were saying that the human population had already exceeding the capacity of the water cycle to produce sufficient fresh water - a major source of stress leading to violent conflicts especially in the drier parts of the world. We have a technology to deal with this, but right now reverse osmosis is extremely expensive and uses a lot of energy, so it will only save the anatomy of the wealthy. But you never know when some bright souls will come up with something better. <br /><br />As to the elite classes who so often make such foolish choices, they are clearly a huge part of the problem (as are the fools who vote for them, if they even have that choice). I get the impression that you would find much to agree with in Thorstein Veblen's analysis of the parasitical nature of the wealthy classes.Paul Shen-Brownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-86018803557527633822014-11-13T18:50:14.071-08:002014-11-13T18:50:14.071-08:00'A hundred tribbles?' (See how long that l...'A hundred tribbles?' (See how long that limit stays ;-)<br /><br />On reflection, biggest one, for me, is why the wormhole was where it was.Tony Fiskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14578160528746657971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-22821015363353088432014-11-13T16:25:05.340-08:002014-11-13T16:25:05.340-08:00"I could concoct a hundred quibbles. Maybe I ..."I could concoct a hundred quibbles. Maybe I will, someday. But it is the best movie I have seen in this century."<br /><br />I feel the same way about it that I feel about Existence: There are a hundred things wrong with it. But there are a hundred things RIGHT with it too! And the latter outweighs the former, doesn't it?Nicholas MacDonald-Wuhttp://www.nicholasmacdonald.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-48033618483067161152014-11-13T15:16:13.089-08:002014-11-13T15:16:13.089-08:00Trade aimed at space projects near Earth is trade ...Trade aimed at space projects near Earth is trade with Earth. <br /><br />Ignoring trade with Earth is to ignore how every other human migration in our history has succeeded. We don't actually go all that far from our available markets and then we return occasionally and sell or trade stuff. Bringing stuff back is done if the trade value is high enough. That is why Mars colonists must be involved in trade related to space projects. That is where the value will be.Alfred Differhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01170159981105973192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-66700830298631122682014-11-13T14:51:24.443-08:002014-11-13T14:51:24.443-08:00Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla has a Phi...Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla has a Philae status update <a href="http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/11131025-philae-status-a-day-later.html" title="Good news... and bad" rel="nofollow">here</a>Tony Fiskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14578160528746657971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-61912031250017653452014-11-13T14:42:20.820-08:002014-11-13T14:42:20.820-08:00@Alex Tolley/Paul451:
Instead of assuming space/M...@Alex Tolley/Paul451:<br /><br />Instead of assuming space/Mars advocates must be deluded fools who "forget" obvious issues, you might ask yourself whether they might have seen the same issues, but were motivated to think of ways around some of them. <br /><br />For example, we're already seeing new technologies that can help reduce the mass that must be shipped from Earth to bootstrap and support a colony. We'll have a lot more and better production tools by the time we are ready to colonize Mars. <br /><br />Getting to the point of bootstrapping a Mars colony is a matter of a long process of breaking space expansion into development steps that are each economically justified. <br /><br />The key to economic justification is to forget the idea of trade with Earth, and recognize that we already have strong economic motivations in space. There are many things we want to do in space (science, satellites), which could become a lot cheaper with incremental space infrastructure investment. <br /><br />Anything that makes it substantially cheaper to get stuff "out there" will in turn allow us to do more, justifying further investment to lower costs further.<br /><br />It's not a recipe for "instant Mars colony, just add water" - but it can work, given time.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-75945916518430074022014-11-13T14:42:01.029-08:002014-11-13T14:42:01.029-08:00Power, profit...
control.
8 of Philae's 10 in...Power, profit...<br />control.<br /><br />8 of Philae's 10 instruments seem to be functional. ESA is being very ginger with the other two since they involve moving parts and they don't want to risk dislodging Philae from where it is. The ice screws didn't work either*. This is probably because the harpoons failed, and the craft bounced a couple of times before fetching up against a cliff. While cliff is currently cutting off a lot of sunlight and limiting power, this may change over time. I also suspect it will eventually be found to have stopped Philae from sliding off the head entirely.<br /><br />*Someone's suggested using the ice screws to hop around. I don't think they'll be doing that anytime soon. (Also, power)Tony Fiskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14578160528746657971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-50211142588572072682014-11-13T13:18:19.315-08:002014-11-13T13:18:19.315-08:00The top 1% of households by income in the US has a...The top 1% of households by income in the US has a lower limit of $394,000 per year.<br /><br />The top 10% has a lower limit of around $145,000 per year.<br /><br />There's poor deluded souls out there who believe that the middle class extends up to $250,000 a year. We elected those guys.<br /><br />I used to think I was middle class, but I was wrong. Our household is in the upper 10%.<br /><br />The reason for thinking this is that even with a good income, there's no financial security.<br /><br />It's not all about profit. A good portion of it is about power.<br /><br />But back to the comet. That stuff is really, really cool. The idea of being able to send something on a 4 billion mile trip to rendezvous with something 400 million miles away travelling at 80,000 miles an hour that's 2.5 miles across is pretty heady stuff.raitonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-54230023007982986102014-11-13T11:49:56.654-08:002014-11-13T11:49:56.654-08:00Anon,
"The working classes only own maybe 25%...Anon,<br /><i>"The working classes only own maybe 25% of the total wealth in america."</i><br /><br />{laughs} Oh if only the working class owned 25% of the total wealth in America, what wonders we would see.<br /><br />In the real world, the bottom 80% of Americans own less than 20% of US wealth. The bottom 60% owns around 5%. The bottom 40% is in net debt.<br /><br />Alex Tolley,<br /><i>"what is the justification for going. Setting up a colony that is economically isolated and dependent on supplies from Earth is just a huge sink that will fail. So far I have seen no rationale for spending such capital."</i><br /><br />And that's something so many advocates forget. They see Mars as some kind of "virgin Earth" minus {shrug} something {handwave} we can work around. They don't recognise that Mars lacks everything that makes Earth "Earth" except the part about being round and having a solid surface.<br /><br />Worse are the terraforming advocates, who are the "underpants gnomes" of space advocacy. (1. Send a handful of missions to Mars. 2 ?? 3. Terraforming 4. Second Earth.) Interestingly, most methods for significant terraforming require very little contribution from any Martian colonists, but enormous amounts of non-Mars resources (nitrogen from Titan or Triton, comets or Saturnian ring-ice for water) and major in-space construction (planet-scale solar reflectors), so if you wanted to terraform Mars, the last thing you should do is support missions <i>to Mars</i>. Any settlers on Mars would be not just a worthless waste of resources, but probably in the way.Paul451https://www.blogger.com/profile/12119086761190994938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-62115588352757094042014-11-13T09:28:40.590-08:002014-11-13T09:28:40.590-08:00Well, once they were settled, they used screws on ...Well, once they were settled, they used screws on the feet to attach to the comet. It should stay on until the sun causes enough melting/sublimation/gas bursting to dislodge it.sociotardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11697154298087412934noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-20023664022666215702014-11-13T03:37:25.368-08:002014-11-13T03:37:25.368-08:00My understanding is that philae is tenuously on th...My understanding is that philae is tenuously on the comet, after bouncing, still, a wonderful performance by a device in cold and vacuum for a decade. This needs to be repeated with updated probes, to different comets, hopefully including some on their first descent from the Oort cloud, so we get some notion of what a typical comet is.Tim H.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-9588977098424668022014-11-13T01:53:37.170-08:002014-11-13T01:53:37.170-08:00really good check this out,pleasehttp://jump.gooff...really good check this out,pleasehttp://jump.gooffers.net/aff_c?offer_id=6430&aff_id=19064Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-32258339088936480552014-11-12T21:36:58.315-08:002014-11-12T21:36:58.315-08:00Just saw INTERSTELLAR in an IMAX theater. It was ...Just saw INTERSTELLAR in an IMAX theater. It was worth it.<br /><br />I could concoct a hundred quibbles. Maybe I will, someday. But it is the best movie I have seen in this century.David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-11886136823811187892014-11-12T21:36:02.926-08:002014-11-12T21:36:02.926-08:00Daniel F. I truly respect your passion and faith. ...Daniel F. I truly respect your passion and faith. However, you'll note that you do not mention the simple fact that members of other faiths also pray. And that majorities of them report receiving personal and passionately connecting senses of validation from their own prayers, in by far most cases validating the stories that their parents told them.<br /><br />This has been reported as far back as William James. The reflex to call THEIR religious experiences invalid, but your own to be True, is the all-too human response. Though it is kind of a sad and self-serving and incurious one. <br /><br />I suggest other theories should be considered. Paramount would be that God does NOT consign people to hell (or privilege) just because they believe different things their parents told them.David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-16894378062480643852014-11-12T21:29:47.534-08:002014-11-12T21:29:47.534-08:00All the technical issues are pretty much "jus...<i>All the technical issues are pretty much "just engineering" - we know how to do them (in theory), we just need to apply the money and time to make them practical, reliable, etc.</i><br /><br />The issues are economic - i.e. what is the justification for going. Setting up a colony that is economically isolated and dependent on supplies from Earth is just a huge sink that will fail. So far I have seen no rationale for spending such capital. Alex Tolleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01556422553154817988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-44432328728586924292014-11-12T18:40:32.929-08:002014-11-12T18:40:32.929-08:00A million people on Mars mostly just takes will, m...A million people on Mars mostly just takes will, money and time, applied to a strategy of building outward to keep reducing costs. We have to move past only doing one-shot science robots and national pride missions.<br /><br />(Orbital fuel depots are the next build-outwards step, once Musk gets the cost to orbit low enough to create sufficient trans-orbital traffic to justify the depots.)<br /><br />But the one real problem we MUST solve, is cancer. To make living beyond Earth acceptable, people have to have confidence that if/when they get cancer due to elevated radiation exposure, they'll almost certainly survive.<br /><br />Sure, we can live in outer-space fall-out shelters, and only go out on the surface rarely. But a million people won't go to or be born on Mars (or Luna or an asteroid), without solving cancer.<br /><br />All the technical issues are pretty much "just engineering" - we know how to do them (in theory), we just need to apply the money and time to make them practical, reliable, etc.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com