they're terrified that the government is going to sweep in and take them away for...what reason again?
Control. I guess I need to state the obvious, that an unarmed population is easier to control than an armed one. Weapons are just another form of power like knowledge or freedom.
The typical fuel to air mass ratio of jet engines is a couple percent, and at highest at the stoichiometric ratio of about 6%. This is small enough that it gets rounded down to zero in a lot of calculations. For something like a turbofan, it is even more air.
Sounds significant to me. Not really sure what the point of most of the rest of your post was since I didn't imply that the original AC's observation was physically incorrect.
You can change the length of a tether to balance forces of things going up and down, to remove the need for engines to provide that force and resorting back to using the Earth as a reaction mass essentially.
I'll have to think about that.
RTGs have nowhere near the engine power required.
Unless, of course, you don't require anywhere near the engine power required.
No other mode of transportation has to carry its own reaction mass and throw it away. Not bicycles, cars, trains, ships, submarines, or airplanes.
Actually, jet airplanes do. A significant portion of their thrust comes from the mass of jet fuel, oxidized and ejected out the rear of the jet engine.
Second, every single mode of transportation has reaction mass. For modes that travel on ground, the Earth itself is the reaction mass. For airplanes, it's mostly pushing air. For boats, it's pushing water.
Finally, it makes no sense to talk about transportation modes that don't go where you want them to go. Rockets are horribly inefficient in comparison to cars, but cars can't drive to space. While there are ideas, such as the space tether for making a genuine road to space, they rely on having enough economic activity from Earth to space to make them viable. That market has to be created by a less efficient mode of transportation first.
Even then, space tethers and similar systems need some sort of reaction mass to keep the system from getting pulled down over time by all the payloads coming up. But that need not be provided by a high thrust chemical engine.
And it's very likely that massively clustering them to get the thrust up will required a nuclear reactor to power them. 6/10ths of an *ounce* of thrust for 4 kW power input.
No, you primarily need more power. They aren't tubes limited, they're power limited.
An Ion thruster (of any variety) is not *remotely* a replacement for a nuclear thermal engine.
Unless of course, you don't need an engine with high thrust to weight which is the case in most space activities. And nuclear thermal won't be used for boosting stuff from Earth's surface, the most important high thrust application. I just don't see your argument.
People don't do that anymore, so we need a different solution.
People don't plan for the future anymore. People don't fund blue sky science anymore. People aren't responsible for themselves anymore. People don't think for themselves anymore.
Because why bother when you can have government do all of that for you?
Actually, liberals do want to pay for government programs... that's WHY democrats have a more favorable view of taxes; as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr said: "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."
But not with their own money. You can with like-minded people step up and pay for all the social programs you want. Simultaneously, you would completely eliminate any "conservative" criticism because they wouldn't have a say in how things run.
That you could get civilization without all that eye-rolling.
Or releasing genetically modified mind blowingly hot humans into areas with human overpopulation issues, so that all the offsprings or grandkids are infertile.
I think it more likely that someone will engineer a sexually transmitted disease which induces infertility and is tailored to ethnic groups that they don't like.
No, if your population had 1000 births but 1000 deaths in a given period of time, you are not experiencing population growth.
If you have positive population growth, it isn't because your population is experiencing a negative rate of deaths.
The ugly fact is that in low food conditions, more people die faster. This is not good for population growth.
And yet population growth still happens. As I noted, birth rate goes up too and there are plenty of examples of places over the past century that had low food supply yet still had high population growth rates. It's only when a society transitions to not enough food per person to keep everyone alive (which incidentally happens frequently during a war or famine so that it's not just a slight change in food per person), that we transition into higher death rates than birth rates.
My point here is that the dynamic between population growth and decline doesn't gradually nose over as food supply and wealth dwindles.
The original response was to your notion that developed world affluence keeps population growth in check. I'm pointing out that wealth actually helps populations grow. I generalize wealth creation as the result of capitalism, and opposition to it as socialism.
And I'm pointing out that you are merely wrong here. We have lots of evidence that wealth at all levels of modern human development correlates with lower population growth. Your generalization is wrong as well. Capitalism is not defined as things good for society, such as creation of wealth, and socialism as things bad for society, such as taking wealth away. They are merely somewhat different approaches to similar problems.
Chinese and Venezueleans may call themselves socialist, but if their action is to support an activity that ultimately helps grow wealth (which in turn grows the population), they are actually supporting capitalism. Socialism is to reject that activity out of some twisted sense of obligation to some "greater good".
So call them "socialists" because of their actions then. It's a silly argument to make and again depends on a white hat/black hat view of capitalism and socialism which isn't true.
I personally heavily favor capitalism in a society, but I don't make the mistake of discounting socialism policies just because because they don't work at the huge doses that have been tried over the past couple hundred years.
I don't know that you could call anyone in Chinese government truely socialist anymore. The only socialist programs I can think about is the big projects they do, and their central planning (power, infrastructure....).
Bingo. Environmentalism is not socialism. It is a third independent attribute. Another example of this is the antics of the former USSR which among other things nearly destroyed the Aral Sea.
Remember we're talking about population growth. It's not just about reproduction, but whether you can sustain a growing population.
No, population growth is about reproduction not sustainability. It's an ugly fact that poorer people have more children even in low food conditions.
They're forces that push against each other.
Ok, I see your use here. I'll just point out that "opposite forces" quickly lose their meaning when there are more than two forces in play.
But that's what socialists want. If they had their way (and some will say they do in some places), they would implement policies which restrict oil production and consumption. I say they scream bloody murder because currently, the socialists aren't winning that battle.
I disagree. Chinese socialists aren't on board with this and they're a huge part of the group. Socialists from oil-producing countries aren't on board either (eg, Venezuela).
But having said that , I do believe the shrillness of the arguments for global warming has a lot to do with losing the overall war for that.
Except for the fact that 1 affluent human uses more resources than 10 not so affluent.
Think about it. If we were somehow to hold affluence constant, the affluent population will have shrunk slightly, while the not so affluent population will grow exponentially. Even a small population of not so affluent will eventually consume more than a vast affluent population, unless you check their population growth somehow.
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
