Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Hobbit (Score 4, Informative) 278

I love how these things are all "you simply have to do..." Like one goes out and collects the atmosphere with a butterfly net and splits it with a butcher's knife. Or like just goes and "gets a smelter and a foundry going".

Do these people have any clue how complex these sorts of industrial systems are? They have hundreds of thousands of components, all of which can break, and some of which are massive. The more you scale it down, the less efficient it becomes. And systems engineered on Earth don't just magically work on Mars too. You can't just dump heat into a river or the air, your gravity is significantly lower, and you've got electrostatic dust that clings to everything. And everyone output feedstock you want requires half a dozen or so input feedstocks, not counting all of the parts that can break - and they will break. And not all of these feedstocks can be gotten from the same location.

Let's just pick one little part of what you just wrote. "pass the CO over iron oxide dust" (we'll ignore everything leading up to getting and transporting that CO2). First off, if you literally do just that, you'll get nothing. The reaction needs to be done *hot*. And it can't be just "passing it over", it has to be thoroughly mixed. But then you get ready-to-use steel right? Wrong. Because you don't have "iron oxide dust". First off, you don't have any fine "dust" in mineable quanties, the blowing surface dust is spread over overthing, not accumulated in big pits ready for you to dig up.You at best have sand; at worst, solid rock. Most sands are not going to made of a majority iron oxide (if they have any sizeable quantities at all). Iron ore deposits are places where iron has been *concentrated* by geological processes, it doesn't make up the majority of basalts. And even cementations of iron-rich clay concentrates aren't 100% iron oxide. Whatever you mine (which means mining equipment, which means big, expensive, complex devices), you need to break it up, which means rock crushers, (which mean big, expensive, high wear devices), transport (haulers - more expensive devices), etc. At the mill it's going to go through a range of hoppers, conveyors, etc, all of which will wear and break. In addition to your ore and CO, you need a wide range of fluxing agents to separate out the stuff you don't want and to produce a usable product. The most critical of your fluxing agents is limestone, which on Earth mainly comes from deposits of marine microorganisms. Fat lot of luck finding that on Mars. So you need to mine less common calcium carbonate sources like travertine. More mining equipment. Hey, do you expect to find your travertine ten feet from your iron ore? Yeah, best of luck finding that, you've got to drive! Just hope you don't have to drive hundreds of kilometers, eh? Of course that's just one of a variety of fluxing agents you'll be wanting to add, there are many, for varying purposes. Anyway, once you've got your big molten mess (consuming ridiculous amounts of energy, orders of magnitude more than we've ever fielded offworld), you need to do something with it as you stream it out. Okay, then of course you have your slag skimmers. Hey, how long do you think that parts dripped in a stream of molten iron last? And you need to do something with your slag, so get your equipment to haul it away (after you've cooled it) ready as well. Speaking of cooling, normally we'd use water for that and just let it boil off for cooling, but on Mars it's a precious commodity, so go add more complexity for recapture and cooling! So now we've got a stream of mostly pure steel, but we're not even CLOSE to having usable parts.... (I'll stop here, as I don't want to spend all day on this).

I get it, you have a basic understanding of the chemical formulas for making a couple products. Well, here in the real world, a simple chemical formula is not enough. Real world processes are far more expensive and complex. They don't just pop together by waving a magic wand where you say, "you just do X and Y, and poof you have a habitat!"

In the real world, we're not even 1% of the way to the point where we could set up a working steel mill on Mars. Not. Even. Close.

Humans living on Mars can't just "bootstrap" themselves like some sort of colonist stepping off of the Mayflower. They're entirely dependent on modern technology just to live. Well, unfortunately, modern technology is produced by extremely complicated global supply/dependency chains. You can't just chisel a CO2 scrubber out of a chunk of granite.

Comment Re:Hobbit (Score 0) 278

Indeed, it's far easier to build a hab on Earth that you know will work and launch it. We're about as close to being able to build complex structures on Mars out of local materials as we are to being able to send a probe to alpha centauri: vague, general ideas with little real-world engineering and no practical experience.

Even the simplest "local materials" concept - building a hab on Earth with the structural strength to bear a thick layer of regolith, launching it, then dumping the regolith on top - requires engineering, launching and landing a "martian excavator", which would be a multi-billion dollar program. Certainly more expensive than say the Curiosity rover. I'd wager in the 5-10 billion range, after all is said and done (not counting the hab itself).

Or were they picturing people spending half a year outside in space suits working with picks and shovels and burning the caloric equivalent of many tonnes of food and other consumables and wearing through their space suits, all while being exposed to a high radiation flux?

Comment Re:They're missing the point... (Score 1) 278

You life a life of adventure and challenge, and die young in one of the many tragic accidents that your inhospitable environment causes on a regular basis.

Fair enough, many climb Mount Everest for no better reason.

You pioneer a new way of life,

Well mostly you'll be living in a bunker living off a long supply chain from Earth. It'll be a lot like living on a submarine that you mostly endure rather than pioneer. Many will envy you going, not so many the actual living conditions.

and there's a good chance of your name going down in history books.

Name the third guy to set foot on the moon. I'm not saying there's no fame, but there's many easier ways to celebrity status. Except if you're the next Neil Armstrong.

You contribute to something that may change the course of history.

True. But I imagine it'll be a rather unglamorous and unthankful task. Remember that you're a million miles away from any fans or fame, no vacations or time off and it's unlikely any amount of money will get you fresh bacon and eggs.

And as for changing the world, they won't send you up there just to be a warm body. If you can change the world up there, you can probably change the world down here too. There's thousands of people who can say they contributed to the Apollo program, even though they never went to the moon.

Comment Re: This seems foolproof! (Score 1) 94

I counted four lanes, but you're right, it's actually only two lanes, the other half is a rail line. So half of what I accounted for being rail rather than road totally justifies $60k per square meter!

And bridges! Wow, no road has ever included bridges before! We're not talking the Danyang–Kunshan here, they're little bridges over a little river. And the terrain of the valley bottom would be considered "flat" by the standards of many countries, such as Japan. I drive on roads with more elevation change than that every time I go to my land.

There's absolutely zero reason for a 28 mile road through the countryside to cost 9.4 billion dollars. None. The longest road tunnel in the world is over 15 miles long and cost a grand total of $113 million. In Sweden, where wages are tenfold what they are in Russia.

(Lastly, I have no clue what you mean by "original source video". )

Comment Re: This seems foolproof! (Score 2, Interesting) 94

That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price

$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.

Comment Re:Corruption? In Russia? (Score 1) 94

Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?

Comment Re:This seems foolproof! (Score 4, Insightful) 94

This is, after all, the same country whose 28 mile road to the Olympics cost more than if they'd covered the whole road with gold medals two layers thick. ;)

Concerning this privatization, the only question that remains is, which friend of Putin is going to get to "buy" the space agency at a " fair market value" ;)

Comment Re:Why do this in the first place? (Score 3, Insightful) 90

Why do this in the first place?

Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.

Comment Re:Lets be honest here (Score 2) 106

My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.

Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.

Comment Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending (Score 3, Interesting) 236

The same thing happened to OS X and iOS. What once was clear and easy to understand is now pretty and mostly useless.

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...

Comment Re:I'll believe it when I see it... (Score 1) 119

Its not that simple. You can't just recover it from nuclear reactor waste because it's mixed in with other isotopes of plutonium, and isn't in that great of quantities to begin with. So first off you have to reprocess nuclear waste to extract the neptunium - which again, itself isn't in very great quantities, it takes a lot of waste, and most places don't want to do waste reprocessing to begin with due to cost and liability issues. You then have to make neptunium targets and expose them to a neutron flux - that is, using neutronicity that could otherwise be used for power generation or other valuable purposes (it takes a lot of neutrons to make a tiny bit of Pu238). Pu238 should be more thought of as a manufactured product than as a byproduct of particular types of nuclear reactors.

There are a few other candidates for use as space power sources that actually are waste products, but they're all significantly worse performers. There are two other alternatives. One is to make a Sterling RTG, which was in development, but funding has been cut off (it's also kind of tricky because you have to ensure that something with moving parts will operate for decades in the harsh environment of space). The other is to make an actual nuclear reactor. This means almost limitless power, but it comes at the expense of not only massive development costs and public opposition, but a large minimum size and massive radiator requirements, as well as the same reliability challenges of sterling generators.

There's no easy solutions. Except, of course, to stop bloody wasting plutonium once we have it.

Comment Re:Eurofututre (Score 1) 743

Europe is too diverse to be able to sustain a single currency without tensions that can lead to disaster.

And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.

Comment Re:Not Surprising (Score 2) 743

Almost no nation can pay off all of their debts right now. The Greeks are basically being told to either capitulate or find some way, without further borrowing, to pay off all of their debts in short order. To put this in prospective, what if somebody told you that you had to pay off all of your student loans this month and your home mortgage next month. Even people with good jobs couldn't do this. The same with nations.

Bullshit. The largest creditor to Greece is the EFSF and they're not paying a dime on the principal until 2023. They're choking just trying to pay interest and no, taking up more credit card debt to pay off this month's credit card bill is not a sustainable way to go. They do have a problem in that their GDP is going down, meaning they earn less to pay interest with. That will eventually make paying back the principal harder too, but that's not their short or even medium-term problem. They can't even manage their debt, much less repay any of it.

Comment Re:Greece's Welfare State is Unsustainable (Score 2) 743

Keep in mind that the past four years of bank loans from the ECB have not been to save Greece. What they were really designed to do was to keep the card game running long enough to let EU insiders and favored national banks unload Greek bonds, and to reduce their exposure to Greek default risks long enough to put European taxpayers onto the hook in the inevitable event of a Greek default. They pretended to save Greece, and Greece pretended to reform. And now here we are.

Yes, today >75% of Greek's debt is either the EFSF, ECB, bilateral loans from EU members or the IMF. Some was bought significantly below the nominal value though, so the net loss will be somewhat less. Of course at the time they very reasonably feared another wave of dominoes falling, either in the banking market or due to a jump in national debt interest rates. They bought time to show the other countries are past the peak and on a slow recovery and they built a giant insulating buffer. Some got bailed out, but Greece may also fall without triggering another crisis in the EU economy.

This is why I don't think Greece really understands the position they're in now compared to the position they were in a few years ago. The Greek government is pushing the EU into a corner where it would be politically unacceptable to make it look like Syriza won. At the same time everybody can see that the austerity isn't working very well, so if the EU decides it's better to let them crash and rebuild and at the same time put the blame at Syriza's feet now might be a great time. They're not just playing with fire, they've set themselves on fire and is gambling that the EU will put it out.

Slashdot Top Deals

Have you reconsidered a computer career?

Working...