Comment Tom Swift (Score 1) 289
Golly gee wiz. It's Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane!
Wait, no Gamma in space? What about the gamma ray bursts? Too far away?
You might say that. Gamma ray burst occur in other galaxies. Way to far away to be harmful.
Such a burst inside our galaxy would probably be strong enough to cause a mass-extinction event on the entire Earth, so any astronauts who were killed would have plenty of company.
What do you think is going to be powering these space vehicles?
Solar power arrays. The insane Luddite activists went absolutely ballistic about the Cassini space probe with its piddling 72 pounds of plutonium in a sub-critical RTGs. Do you seriously believe that the activists and the politicians they control are going to allow NASA to put an actual full-scale nuclear reactor on a booster rocket?
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but NASA wants active shielding for the sorts of natural radiation astronauts encounter in space. Cosmic rays, solar flares, and the Van Allen radiation belts. All of which are charged particles.
As a general rule, one only encounters neutrons, gamma rays, and x-rays from artificial sources, such as nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
So unless NASA is contemplating starting a space war with alien invaders from another solar system, they will be well served by active shielding.
According to this article
there is a percentage of users where that procedure does NOT fix the problem. In those cases, Microsoft advises the user to return the phone to the place of purchase to obtain a replacement phone.
Sounds like the correct use of the term "bricked" to me.
from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert Heinlein
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
I have a few notes on space combat, lasers, railguns, stealth, tactics, delta v, nuclear shaped charges, ship design, and whatnot on my website. I am not a Ph.D, but many of the people who contributed are.
Not just The Space Merchants. From Technovelgy
"Chicken Little from Pohl and Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants [1952].
"Carniculture from H. Beam Piper's Four-Day Planet [1961].
"Pseudoflesh from Frank Herbert's Whipping Star [1969].
"Vat-Grown Meat from William Gibson's Neuromancer [1984].
"Food brick" from Larry Niven's Ringworld [1970]
"ChickieNobs from Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake [2003].
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
