The first is certainly correct. I understand what you mean about the second quote, but we DO want them to have access to the output of nuclear power (as well as other efficient and sustainable power sources).

It may be that we don't want them to have easy means of producing nuclear weapons from the waste of those power plants, but the principles of nuclear weapons are sufficiently simple and well-known that pretty much any national actor can produce them if they want to at this point. Doing so would attract significant international attention, however, and if push comes to shove there are plenty of national actors that would bring a lot of military might to the battle.

I agree with you about the needs for a portable energy carrier with high density, but for this use case hydrogen could be a viable alternative if you had a power source so plentiful that you could ignore the efficiency losses in producing it. Input water and energy, get hydrogen. I, for one, believe that if we get some cheap or essentially free energy sources* many of the climate problems would be attenuated to a manageable level.

*simple and efficient production and energy distribution from a Beowulf cluster of ocean wave generators, efficiend wind or solar energy, automated space-based production (an unlimited number of microwave-beaming orbital power stations), fusion. The possibilities are endless, and some are even just engineering problems :)

That's a very good point, thank you :)

BTW, I don't really think this elevator would be practial and useful enough to actually make sense to produce. It's a huge engineering project in order to make it just a bit easier to get stuff to the Moon, and there might be better and more ways to accomplish that. Let's build a Lofstrom loop instead :)

Still, I find the idea nifty enough that it is worth pondering. Besides, a lot of scientific- and engineering breakthroughs startet with either "That's strange..." or "What if..".

Our cars didn't have motors, so we had to CARRY them around wherever we went! Sure put a restraint on our vacations.

"Why are the Jones'es always vacationing in the next town over, while we have to camp in our car in the middle of nowhere?"
"It's because they are so poor they don't have a car. Now shut up, you spoiled brat, and pick up your corner again"

Couldn't that be a feature? You attach to the cable when it's closest to Earth, and let the Moon drag you out for a couple of weeks before starting the climb? You'd save _some_ energy, at least :)

It is pretty rudimentary scientific knowledge that stuff in a geostationary orbit orbits the earth once a day. It is also similarly rudimentary knowledge that the moon orbits the earth in a period much longer than that. With the information given in the summary (elevator "would be anchored on the moon and stretch some 200,000 miles toward Earth until hitting the geostationary orbit height"), it's not that hard for someone with a *very* basic understanding of orbital mechanics who is also familiar with the basics of space elevators to understand that the endpoint of the elevator closest to earth will NOT be in a geostationary orbit.

I'm not sure why you're complaining about this, but I suspect that you missed the *height* in "geostationary orbit height" (or that you don't understand one or more of the concepts mentioned), and you want the mistake to not be yours. Relax, it happens, then you learn.

I'm not even sure why you feel that it would need to have a geostationary orbit speed, which is relatively hard to reach. What makes this really nifty is that you can launch something to the terminus using significantly less energy than that required to reach a true geostationary orbit, for which you'd first have to get up to that height and then pour on some km/s of Delta-V (which requires that you bring the reaction mass to do that, and the fuel to lift *that* again).

Then you can have it attach to the cable and crawl to the moon along it without needing to also bring the reaction mass/fuel a rocket would need to get it the rest of the way. Since the distance to the moon varies you could even save energy by attaching when it's at its closest to earth (requiring the lowest launch Delta-V), and then have the moon pull you further out of the Earth's gravity well before starting to climb.

The fact that you only would need electrical power an no reaction mass will surely entail significant savings. If you don't mind an extended transit time you could probably power it by solar panels, making the rest of the transit simple and essentially free (I haven't done the calculations, so this might be an infeasibly long time for useful payload masses and realistic solar panel sizes).

If you feel that I'm also childish I'd prefer that you keep it to yourself.

Layman here, but as I understand it, you have at least two problems with an energetic kinetic impact:

1) The concentrated damage in a small area from a single, large impact. A sea strike can be devastating and destroy many coastal areas from the resulting tsunamis, while a land strike would statistically be very likely to occur in a sparsely populated area. Still sucks for those finding themselves at that spot, though.

2) The dissipation of energy and matter in the atmosphere, which can have catastrophic effects lasting years for a large impact.

The first problem would probably be worse for a single impact than for a load of rubble to hit the earth. Much of it would incinerate on entry, and if the destruction happened sufficiently early a lot would simply miss the earth.

Even if all the pieces of a shattered asteroid hit the earth it seems to me that the consequences of #2 would probably be smaller than if it impacted in one piece, as less matter would be thrown up into the atmosphere. Many of the pieces would not be large enough to contribute to an "atom winter".

So, it seems like it's better to send a nuke if early deflection is not possible.

This cluster obviously needs storage to match. How about a five disk floppy RAID providing 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage?

Mine are road-legal studs, protruding only 1.2mm from the surface of the knobs. On tarmac the rubber will be in contact with the road, making me able to drive and brake almost as normal. I allow for a little longer brake distance. I wouldn't do wheelies on ice or lean down too far, but the grip on ice is more than enough for normal driving. Curves are comparable to riding on gravel. Brake distance increases to about double, so you have to allow for that. Overall I'm impressed with the traction I get, and for the daily commute it's all I need.

That is appealing to me, but would probably not fly with the big companies. American laws are relatively cheap to buy.

It's a long time since i read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, but IIRC he argues that a mandatory renewal in order to keep rights would be a huge improvement on the current situation even if the cost were $100 or free. The gist is that it would make available and save a lot of art that would otherwise be lost forever.

For instance it's not feasible to contact the participants in a movie/descendants of same to obtain permission for transferring old decaying cellulose films to a digital format, and a lot of movies from the 50's are decaying beyond recovery because of this.

Sheet music that didn't sell well, but can be useful for researchers and others can not be distributed because it's very difficult to even determine who the current rights holder is, let alone contact that person and get permission for a work they have never heard about. They might not even know that their grandfather wrote music.

If it were possible for Disney to keep making money on the soon-to-be centennarian mouse while requiring everyone to actually make a trivial effort to keep the rights to works they actually make money from we'd be a long way ahead of where we are now. You could even do something like making the fee non-trivial, but reimbursable on proof of actual profit from the work.

4) jail truck drivers who idle in a single lane road until there's a 150m gap, then close the distance and repeat.
5) teach people to actually accelerate and merge from on-ramps.

Get yourself a suitable bike and tyres, and you're good to go :)

I live in Norway. I bought a used Yamaha WR250R, put studded knobbies on it, and started winter riding on it a few weeks back. With these tyres slippery roads are no problem for a non-novice driver, in fact my very first winter trip on this bike was in a veritable snow storm with the roads covered by 15-20cm of fresh snow. Gravel, trail or dirt track experience is a bonus, but not necessary. I have ridden a manual Vespa with studless winter tyres for several winters as well, it's doable.

While not common among motorcyclists even in Norway, there are quite a few that ride all seasons. Many prefer smaller street legal dual sports like the DRZ 400S, WR250R and Honda CRF250L/Rally. Adventure-style bikes like the TransAlp, Africa Twin and BMW GS bikes are also very well suited.

I'm sure you can get someone to produce studded tyres in PA as well, if you're interested drop me an email (guess my gmail address from my username) and I'll provide details :)

Probably not intellectually incapable, but I think that the many young drivers greatly overestimate their own abilities. Including when they're driving alone.

To use myself as an example: at 19 I had lightning reflexes and good technical driving abilities, but to think back at how I sometimes drove then (including driving alone) gives me the shudders nowadays (I'm 40). If something unexpected had happened I could have killed myself or someone else due to sheer inexperience. Maybe luckily for me, something unexpected happened while driving at only 50 km/h which caused me to not be able to brake to a stand-still in a moment of inattention, and I hit the car in front of me. Entirely my fault, no injuries to anyone, but substantial material damages. It made me realise how much one needs to expect the unexpected when driving in traffic.

So, nowadays, I'm a very careful driver. I believe that between my 20 years experience and my previously mentioned (but diminishing as the years go by) technical driving abilities I'm at a peak of my lifetime safe-driver-factor. Still, contrary to most men, I consider myself only an average driver. It goes downhill from here, and I'll drive accordingly. My insurance is very, very cheap, and in my case I think it matches the risk :)

And, I have onions on my belt, or something. Sorry for the rambling.

That statement should disqualify you from driving a car. While pedestrians are supposed to behave, it's YOUR responsibility to make sure that you never drive in a way that makes it possible for you to run over a pedestrian (or hit other cars, for that matter). It's also insane to insist on driving at the speed limit regardless of circumstances. You're still responsible for being able to stop for *anything* that happens to suddenly be in the road, including a kid running after his ball. You're not "allowed" to run over the kid just because you adhered to some maximum speed limit posted.

No, you shouldn't need a "reasonable expectation" to behave like a mindless robot when it comes to speed limits. Sure, the speed limit posted is a *maximum speed limit*, and it's illegal to exceed it. It's not a mandatory minimum speed. You don't have to "expect" that someone will be stepping into the road, you are expected to be able to stop for whichever hindrance might possibly come into your way.

Oh hell, why am I wasting time. It's not "OK" to hit someone at 25 mph. To wrap it up, I hope you didn't mean what you wrote :)

If you did mean it as stated, I'm out of the discussion. Have a nice day.