SMART 1 on its way
Robert Sneddon
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3146124.stm
It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
the Moon.
--
Email me via nojay (at) nojay (dot) fsnet (dot) co (dot) uk
This address no longer accepts HTML posts.
Robert Sneddon
James Nicoll
Robert Sneddon <no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Details of the launch are at:
>
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3146124.stm
>
> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>the Moon.
I just read a collection of Bova stories which try to do something
that isn't quite as fashionable now as it was 30 years ago, incorporate
details of the New New Solar System into the background (And he's
incorporating material within months of its discovery, if I have the
publication dates correct). There's one "unrealistic" bit, though, that
a Mysteriously Efficient Fusion Drive (MEFD) will allow us to zip around
the solar system at high fractions of a g and at the same time most of
humanity will stay poor [1] even though those ships imply vast power
generation.
Aside from _Wreck of the River of Stars_ is there much new
SF that features a realistic solar system (that is, based on models
unpdated more recently than 20 years ago) and "plausible" transportation
systems, limited to a few hundred km/s and accelerations that are
either low or of short duration?
1: Bova uses social moronitude and a slight increase in temperature to
disrupt the economy on Earth, thus proving we need to industrialize space.
In Bova's works all problems have the same solution: "We must go into space."
--
It's amazing how the waterdrops form: a ball of water with an air bubble
inside it and inside of that one more bubble of water. It looks so beautiful
[...]. I realized something: the world is interesting for the man who can
be surprised. -Valentin Lebedev-
Daniel Silevitch
James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <nc39tWArMrd$Ew...@nojay.fsnet.co.uk>,
>Robert Sneddon <no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Details of the launch are at:
>>
>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3146124.stm
>>
>> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>>the Moon.
>
>SF that features a realistic solar system (that is, based on models
>unpdated more recently than 20 years ago) and "plausible" transportation
>systems, limited to a few hundred km/s and accelerations that are
>either low or of short duration?
Gerard O'Neill, of space colony fame, wrote a book called 2081 which
looked at human society at that date. Roughly 1/3 of the book was fiction,
the story of a resident of an asteroid colony visiting Earth, and the
remaining portions were non-fiction explanations of how the various bits
of future-tech could come to pass.
(flips through book)
Space travel was via ion drives, with electric power being supplied by big
lasers in close solar orbit. A side effect of this technology is that
ship scheduling is a Big Deal, as the lasers need to know what direction
to point. The first interstellar manned ship, powered by an antimatter
drive, was being launched at the beginning of the book.
It's interesting to note that a lot of the advances that O'Neil expects in
information systems have either already arrived or are close at
hand. Things like refrigerators that automatically reorder when staples
run low, and wearable transponders that allow people to pick up objects in
a store and just walk out, with the billing handled automatically.
-dms
James Nicoll
Daniel Silevitch <dms...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>In article <bl6rq4$5f6$1...@panix2.panix.com>,
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>In article <nc39tWArMrd$Ew...@nojay.fsnet.co.uk>,
>>Robert Sneddon <no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Details of the launch are at:
>>>
>>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3146124.stm
>>>
>>> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>>>the Moon.
>>
>> Aside from _Wreck of the River of Stars_ is there much new
>>SF that features a realistic solar system (that is, based on models
>>unpdated more recently than 20 years ago) and "plausible" transportation
>>systems, limited to a few hundred km/s and accelerations that are
>>either low or of short duration?
>
>Gerard O'Neill, of space colony fame, wrote a book called 2081 which
>looked at human society at that date. Roughly 1/3 of the book was fiction,
>the story of a resident of an asteroid colony visiting Earth, and the
>remaining portions were non-fiction explanations of how the various bits
>of future-tech could come to pass.
>
Unfortunately, it's almost a quarter of a century old so
I wouldn't call it 'new'.
James Nicoll
In general, small islands tend to have small economies. A lot
of island nations are relatively poor.
Also, because of how biodiversity works they tend to be less
diverse per area than large land masses.
Has anyone done an SF setting where the solar system is colonized
and the belt is a collection of relatively poor nationlettes whose economies
are fairly unconnected to the Big Economies of the system, rocks whose life
support systems are prone to unscheduled simplications?
Captain Button
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>Subject: Re: Realistic medium term solar systems (Re: SMART 1 on its way)
>From: James Nicoll
>Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp.
>Date: 28 Sep 2003 13:17:51 -0400
>Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
>
> On a slight tangent
>
> In general, small islands tend to have small economies. A lot
>of island nations are relatively poor.
>
> Also, because of how biodiversity works they tend to be less
>diverse per area than large land masses.
>
> Has anyone done an SF setting where the solar system is colonized
>and the belt is a collection of relatively poor nationlettes whose economies
>are fairly unconnected to the Big Economies of the system, rocks whose life
>support systems are prone to unscheduled simplications?
Not our solar system, but Joan D. Vinge's Heaven Belt System might fit. It
was a rich system where people lived in all sorts of artifical habitats.
Then came a big war which killed most of the population and destroyed
almost all the techonological resources. IIRC, at the time of the stories
set there, there are three surviving communities. The Demarchy, with the
most remaining tech and industry, which is computer-moderated athenian
democracy without much in the way of constitutional safeguards. There is a
community around one of the gas giants, who trade volatiles like hydrogen
to the Demarchy, and a planet-based society on a planet that isn't
habitable without artifical environments.
Stories are "Media Man", a sequel [mumble], the fixup of those two, and the
seperate novel _ Outcasts of the Heaven Belt _.
The belt civilizations in _ The Gripping Hand _ sound like they are this
way, with added problems from Motie population dynamics. But we don't see
much about them except for a couple of the bigger and stronger ones.
I think there a lot of small and vulnerable space habitats in the
background of _ Voice of the Whirlwind _ by Walter Jon Williams, with added
fun due to technological secrecy making economics chaotic.
--
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Captain Button - but...@io.com
Peter D. Tillman
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> I just read a collection of Bova stories which try to do something
> that isn't quite as fashionable now as it was 30 years ago, incorporate
> details of the New New Solar System into the background (And he's
> incorporating material within months of its discovery, if I have the
> publication dates correct)... [snip]
>
> Aside from _Wreck of the River of Stars_ is there much new
> SF that features a realistic solar system (that is, based on models
> unpdated more recently than 20 years ago) and "plausible" transportation
> systems, limited to a few hundred km/s and accelerations that are
> either low or of short duration?
I can think of two offhand, both shorts, so you may have missed them:
Michael Swanwick, "Slow Life" (02, Hugo winner), is a fine sketch of how
manned planetary exploration might really take place, say 50 years on.
He plans a novel with the same theme:
"The other novel  which Iąm in the early stages of researching  will
be straight science fiction, a voyage of discovery to one of the moons
of the Solar System with Lizzie OÄ…Brien, the protagonist of Å‚Slow Life,Ë›
currently on the Hugo ballot. A lot of the pleasure of that story lay in
re-imagining what near-future space exploration will really be like. For
example, in the short story  which in the novel Iąm going to pretend
never happened  the astronauts have to spend a lot of their time
providing chirpy upbeat answers to idiotic questions from the Internet.
Once said, itÄ…s obvious that the first people who go to Mars will
inevitably be stuck with this chore. But IÄ…m hoping to achieve more
serious things as well!"
http://www.themodernword.com/features/interview_swanwick.html
2) Alex Irvine's new Å‚Pictures from an ExpeditionË› (F&SF 9-03) imagines
an early-21st century Mars expedition, paid for by Bill Gates, and how
the expedition members become soap-opera stars (+/-). Very nice story.
Plus there's the fairly recent Bisson novel _Voyage to the Red Planet_
(1990, not that recent, I guess), one of the first major stories on
planetary exploration as mass entertainment. Definitely goes
over-the-top, but in an entertaining, Bisson-ish fashion.
Also Bisson, "I Saw the Light" (02):
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/bisson2/bisso
n21.html
Now, 'realistic' is a bit slippery when you're talking Bisson, but this
is a credible portrait of what might happen if we again needed Men on
the Moon, soon. Cool story, highly recommended.
Incidentally, here's a great foto of Bisson & family, straight out of
the double-wide: http://www.terrybisson.com/biblio.html
Oh, I should add Michael Cassut's wonderful "More Adventures on Other
Planets" (01):
www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/cassutt/cassutt1.htm
l [watch the wrap!]
Rating: "A," maybe "A+". The unexpected romance between Elements
Rebecca & Earl, on Europa, sorta kinda....
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/nonfiction/otherplanets.htm
Not to be missed.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Book Reviews: http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/A3GHSD9VY8XS4Q/
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/nonfiction/index.htm#reviews
http://www.sfsite.com/revwho.htm
Htn963
>Has anyone done an SF setting where the solar system is colonized
>and the belt is a collection of relatively poor nationlettes whose economies
>are fairly unconnected to the Big Economies of the system, rocks whose life
>support systems are prone to unscheduled simplications?
Wasn't Gully Foyle tattooed on one of these asteroid kingdoms in _Stars
My Destination_? And iirc, Bruce Sterling's _Schismatrix_ features a riotously
colonized asteroid belt, albeit it was set far down the future.
Slightly off-tangent example: the anime series _Cowboy Bebop_[1] is set
in a fully colonized solar system after the earth's surface has been rendered
uninhabitable after the moon was disintegrated in a rift gate accident --
unpredictable moonrock peltings a la Heinlein's TMiaHM if you will.
[1] I'm not overly fond of anime or jazz (actually, I can't stand jazz) but
this one was smart, hip, and technically impressive, featuring probably the
best originally composed music (including blues and ballads) for any shows
I've seen.
--
Ht
|Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
--John Donne, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions"|
Damien Sullivan
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>publication dates correct). There's one "unrealistic" bit, though, that
>>a Mysteriously Efficient Fusion Drive (MEFD) will allow us to zip around
>>the solar system at high fractions of a g and at the same time most of
>>humanity will stay poor [1] even though those ships imply vast power
>>generation.
>
>Would cheap, inexhastible power necessarily do anything about
>poverty? Fusion powered generation plants would eliminate coal
>fired ones *if* fusion was economical enough. It would reduce
Yeah, there's Total Cost. Especially if the fusion is neutron-rich and dirty.
Or if it's good at propulsion but not at electricity generation per se.
Dirtiness might be fixed by having modified drives in orbit beaming down
microwave power, in a bastard version of SPS, but there's still cost.
>the need for petroleum some, but very likely vehicles would
>still burn gasoline and diesel. Finally, even if fusion did
With cheap energy you could make your own hydrocarbons, even if you didn't go
the hydrogen fuel cell route.
>make fossil fuels obsolete, that would be a big "hooray!" for
>the westernized world, but would plunge the Islamic world into
Except for Norway, Texas, and Alaska. At least Alaska has a Permanent Fund.
"Maybe Texas isn't part of the westernized world."
>doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
>really ammount to more "wealth" for everyone? Raw materials
>and the ability to convert them into things like, say, AIDS
>drugs, will remain as expensive as ever. Moreso, since one of
Raw materials aren't that expensive I think, and have been getting cheaper --
cf. Simon and Ehrlich bet, or Greenspan's "the GDP now weighs what it did N
years ago but is 5 times bigger." And cheap energy would make them cheaper --
marginal mining and extraction could be cheaper, as would recycling. Exact
result depends on how energy or labor intensive a process is, of course, but
I'm sure energy would have an effect.
>the developed world, namely oil, will be worth less. Fusion
>won't grow more food, or make people have fewer children.
Actually it can grow more food -- controlled environment agriculture is
limited by the cost of the energy for controlling the environment.
But if you're making the point that cheap energy without the tools to exploit
it, or without a stable wealth-accumulating society to exploit it all, or an
adaptive society able to cope with the disruptions, wouldn't magically make
poverty go away, then yeah. I'm sure North Korea could still starve with
fusion.
-xx- Damien X-)
Andrew Plotkin
>
>
> But even if fusion meant cheap electricity for everyone (and I
> doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
> really ammount to more "wealth" for everyone? Raw materials
> and the ability to convert them into things like, say, AIDS
> drugs, will remain as expensive as ever. Moreso, since one of
> the developed world, namely oil, will be worth less. Fusion
> won't grow more food, or make people have fewer children.
It gives cheap fresh water, which should solve food problems
*somewhere*.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
phil hunt
>
>Would cheap, inexhastible power necessarily do anything about
>poverty?
Yes
> Fusion powered generation plants would eliminate coal
>fired ones *if* fusion was economical enough. It would reduce
>the need for petroleum some, but very likely vehicles would
>still burn gasoline and diesel.
If the free power had a high enough energy to weight ratio, it would
be used directly.
If not, electric cars could be used -- charging them up wouldn't be
a problem except for long journeys, all parking spaces would have
(free, naturally) powerpoints.
Or some chemical fuel would be used, which could be made cheaply
with free power. (Hydrogen?)
>Finally, even if fusion did
>make fossil fuels obsolete, that would be a big "hooray!" for
>the westernized world, but would plunge the Islamic world into
>poverty.
No it wouldn't. Many Islamic countries, including the most populous
ones, don't have significant amounts of oil. Indonesia, Malaysia,
Bangladesh etc would benefit enormously from free energy.
The ones that do have lots of oil also have lots of arid land. Well,
free energy means cheap desalination, which means deserts can be
turned into farmland.
>(I admit, I would have a hard time trying to feel sorry
>about that.) Yes, yes, everyone will benefit in the long run from
>not putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere, but will the poor
>people get any richer because of fusion?
No idea. But cheap energy (whether fusion or not) *would* help the
poor. Electric lighting, air conditioning and refrigeration would
become affordable by everyone. Marginal lands wouldn't be, because
irrigation schemes could supply cheap water.
>I suppose that the
>cost of fossil fuels would plummet,
It wouldn't matter if they did. Chemical fuels could be made cheaply
-- imagine the whole Sahara growing crops for fermentation into fuel
alcohol.
--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
Paul F. Dietz
> To be used in a personal automobile, the fusion reactor would have to
> be not only lightweight but idiot-proof.
And the car would have to be *really big*, since there's a lower
limit to how thick effective radiation shielding can be -- and you
need radiation shielding even with 'clean' fusion fuel cycles,
since side reactions producing enough neutrons and gammas to quickly
kill anyone near an unshielded reactor.
Paul
phil hunt
Ah, but we're talking of a magic not-currently-existant technology.
Perhaps it won't have problems with neutron and gamma radiation.
phil hunt
>
>In article <slrnbnf0ci...@cabalamat.cabalamat.com>,
>phil hunt <ph...@cabalamat.org> wrote:
>>
>>If the free power had a high enough energy to weight ratio, it would
>>be used directly.
>
>be not only lightweight but idiot-proof.
Why? Cars today aren't.
>>If not, electric cars could be used -- charging them up wouldn't be
>>a problem except for long journeys, all parking spaces would have
>>(free, naturally) powerpoints.
>
>Yeah, right. Who's going to put in all those powerpoints for free?
It'd cost less to install them than streetlights -- electrical
sockets aren't expensive. Plenty of streetlights get installed.
>Running the fusion plants will cost something, as will disposing of
>certain neutron-irradiated waste products.
I was talking about free energy, not necessarily fusion energy.
>>The ones that do have lots of oil also have lots of arid land. Well,
>>free energy means cheap desalination, which means deserts can be
>>turned into farmland.
>
>Again with the "cheap". Do the Arab countries that desalinate seawater
>a) do it without buying western equipment and help,
No, but they could do if the energy was free. Why? because energy
efficiency wouldn't be an issue. The basic technological concepts
should be familir to anyone who's ever seen condensation.
>and b)use it for
>irrigation?
IIRC yes to some extent. They could do much more so if the energy
was free.
>>No idea. But cheap energy (whether fusion or not) *would* help the
>>poor. Electric lighting, air conditioning and refrigeration would
>>become affordable by everyone. Marginal lands wouldn't be, because
>>irrigation schemes could supply cheap water.
>
>The infrastructure will still cost money, and again, water is *not*
>plentiful.
Of course it is. Ever seen a picture of the earth from space?
> Even with free energy, will desalinated water really be
>cheap enough for the poorest people to use it for irrigation?
For *the poorest*? maybe not. But it'll certainly be cheap enough
for millions to use.
> And
>what will the Greens do when they see the amoung of brine being
>dumped back into the oceans from the desalination plants?
Nothing of consequence. In any case, the salt originally came from
the oceans, so it isn't making trhem more salty.
>Actually, I believe it came to light during the "cold fusion"
>fiasco that many Greens hope we *never* discover a cheap, clean,
>inexhaustible energy source.
It's irrelevant what they hope.
>>>I suppose that the
>>>cost of fossil fuels would plummet,
>>
>>It wouldn't matter if they did. Chemical fuels could be made cheaply
>>-- imagine the whole Sahara growing crops for fermentation into fuel
>>alcohol.
>
>1) Synthetic fuels are not cost effective at present, and won't be
> until the cost of crude goes up significantly.
Or the cost of synthetics come down.
>2) The Sahara is at least in part a natural desert; do we know that
> irrigating a natural desert is necessarily a good idea,
> environmentally speaking?
We won't, until we've tried it. Certainly it would make it more
friendly for life. It'd be nice to preserve some in its natural
state, of course.
James Nicoll
Captain Button <but...@io.com> wrote:
>In article <bl753v$db6$1...@panix3.panix.com>,
>jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>>Subject: Re: Realistic medium term solar systems (Re: SMART 1 on its way)
>>From: James Nicoll
>>Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp.
>>Date: 28 Sep 2003 13:17:51 -0400
>>Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
>>
>> On a slight tangent
>>
>> In general, small islands tend to have small economies. A lot
>>of island nations are relatively poor.
>>
>> Also, because of how biodiversity works they tend to be less
>>diverse per area than large land masses.
>>
>> Has anyone done an SF setting where the solar system is colonized
>>and the belt is a collection of relatively poor nationlettes whose economies
>>are fairly unconnected to the Big Economies of the system, rocks whose life
>>support systems are prone to unscheduled simplications?
>
>Not our solar system, but Joan D. Vinge's Heaven Belt System might fit.
That's a good example of what I had in mind. Thanks.
James Nicoll
Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
>
>I can think of two offhand, both shorts, so you may have missed them:
>
>Michael Swanwick, "Slow Life" (02, Hugo winner), is a fine sketch of how
>manned planetary exploration might really take place, say 50 years on.
>He plans a novel with the same theme:
>
>"The other novel  which Iąm in the early stages of researching  will
>be straight science fiction, a voyage of discovery to one of the moons
>of the Solar System with Lizzie OÄ…Brien, the protagonist of Å‚Slow Life,Ë›
>currently on the Hugo ballot. A lot of the pleasure of that story lay in
>re-imagining what near-future space exploration will really be like. For
>example, in the short story  which in the novel Iąm going to pretend
>never happened  the astronauts have to spend a lot of their time
>providing chirpy upbeat answers to idiotic questions from the Internet.
>Once said, itÄ…s obvious that the first people who go to Mars will
>inevitably be stuck with this chore. But IÄ…m hoping to achieve more
>serious things as well!"
> http://www.themodernword.com/features/interview_swanwick.html
Drool. Want now.
Erik Max Francis
> Ah, but we're talking of a magic not-currently-existant technology.
> Perhaps it won't have problems with neutron and gamma radiation.
Then it wouldn't be a fusion reactor. Reaction equations don't lie.
--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Where are they?
\__/ Enrico Fermi
Bill Snyder
wrote:
>phil hunt wrote:
>
>> Ah, but we're talking of a magic not-currently-existant technology.
>> Perhaps it won't have problems with neutron and gamma radiation.
>
>Then it wouldn't be a fusion reactor. Reaction equations don't lie.
Depends on just how _much_ magic we're willing to postulate. Suppose
a) that the containment is one of E. E. Smith's force fields, and b)
that it's possible to open a "window" in the infrared, while leaving
the thing opaque to everything else. (Come to think of it, didn't
Niven's General Products hulls pass visible light and gravity, while
stopping 'most everything else?)
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
James Nicoll
Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>In article <bl6rq4$5f6$1...@panix2.panix.com>,
>James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>that isn't quite as fashionable now as it was 30 years ago, incorporate
>>details of the New New Solar System into the background (And he's
>>incorporating material within months of its discovery, if I have the
>>publication dates correct). There's one "unrealistic" bit, though, that
>>a Mysteriously Efficient Fusion Drive (MEFD) will allow us to zip around
>>the solar system at high fractions of a g and at the same time most of
>>humanity will stay poor [1] even though those ships imply vast power
>>generation.
>
>fired ones *if* fusion was economical enough.
Well, the Bova fusion plants seem to be cheap, as this indirect
example may show. Assume the Rock Rat ships are 100 tonnes. We know
they do the Earth-Belt at a a quarter gee, so the total delta vee is
about 1,600 km/s. The most efficient use of energy (t oget the lowest
value possible for this BOTEC) is when the mass ratio is about 4,
so the exhaust velocity is around 1150 km/s. This means the Ek of
the reaction mass stream is about 6.6x10^11 J/kg. Since the mass
ration is 4, and the dry mass 100,000 kg, the total energy generated
is about 2x10^17 J or about 5.5x10^10 kilowatt hours. At three cents
a kWhr, that's almost 1.7 million dollars of electricity burned per
trip, about 17 dollars a kilogram (Which is actually pretty cheap,
around the cost of the fuel for modern rockets[1]).
Now, most of the Rock Rats seem not to be millionaires, so my
unrigorous gut feeling is that the fusion must be cheaper than our
current 3 cents a KwHr (4.3 in CDN).
> It would reduce
>the need for petroleum some, but very likely vehicles would
>still burn gasoline and diesel. Finally, even if fusion did
>make fossil fuels obsolete, that would be a big "hooray!" for
>the westernized world, but would plunge the Islamic world into
>poverty. (I admit, I would have a hard time trying to feel sorry
>about that.)
Texas, Alaska and Alberta as well (As well as a bunch of
other oil-producing regions, like Scotland). Texas has other industries
and so might simply shift activity to other fields but Alaska already
has to be supported by the rest of the US. What kind of a drain would
an oil-less Alaska be?
Luckily, Alberta has beef and someday they may even be allowed
to export it.
>Yes, yes, everyone will benefit in the long run from
>not putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere, but will the poor
>people get any richer because of fusion? I suppose that the
>cost of fossil fuels would plummet, and therefore the less
>developed countries that still used them (I assume fusion will
>be expensive to build) would be able to afford more.
I don't get the impression from the Bova stories that the
ship plants are costly or massive.
>But even if fusion meant cheap electricity for everyone (and I
>doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
>really ammount to more "wealth" for everyone? Raw materials
>and the ability to convert them into things like, say, AIDS
>drugs, will remain as expensive as ever. Moreso, since one of
>the methods the third world had for buying these things from
>the developed world, namely oil, will be worth less. Fusion
>won't grow more food, or make people have fewer children.
Fusion may make it cheaper to get the raw materials used
in commodities, though. The more energy one has to play with, the
greater the number of options. If energy is cheap enough, you can
just distill rock plasma for its components. Stand well back,
though.
That ap for fusion may work against space exploitation, since
we have rocks on Earth.
My understanding is that we have enough food to feed the
planet (although Bova's world may not, due to the Greenhouse Cliff).
We just don't have in place systems that will put food in front of
people who need it (or rather, we have in place mechanisms to
prevent that).
And the tendency of people to have fewer kids as income
grows is reasonably well demonstrated.
1: It's the labor costs that make it expensive to sent things to orbit.
Peter D. Tillman
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
> In rec.arts.sf.written, Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > But even if fusion meant cheap electricity for everyone (and I
> > doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
> > really ammount to more "wealth" for everyone? [snip]
>
> It gives cheap fresh water, which should solve food problems
> *somewhere*.
>
Umm. You still need to build the plant (boiler, condenser, etc etc),
then pipe the water to the consumer. The [Persian] Gulf states have BIG
desalination plants, using (ims) 'free' natural gas (that would
otherwise be flared off), and the cost of water produced is something
like 0.3 cents/gallon (US). WAY too high for irrigation, except maybe
backyard tomatos <g>.
Not that I'm opposed to cheap power, mind. [Or free gas!] But capital
costs will never go away.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
James Nicoll
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>
>> In rec.arts.sf.written, Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > But even if fusion meant cheap electricity for everyone (and I
>> > doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
>> > really ammount to more "wealth" for everyone? [snip]
>>
>> It gives cheap fresh water, which should solve food problems
>> *somewhere*.
>>
>
>Umm. You still need to build the plant (boiler, condenser, etc etc),
>then pipe the water to the consumer. The [Persian] Gulf states have BIG
>desalination plants, using (ims) 'free' natural gas (that would
>otherwise be flared off), and the cost of water produced is something
>like 0.3 cents/gallon (US). WAY too high for irrigation, except maybe
>backyard tomatos <g>.
Aren't tomatos a form of waste? Like zucchinis? Supply is
always far greater than demand.
phil hunt
>
>> Ah, but we're talking of a magic not-currently-existant technology.
>> Perhaps it won't have problems with neutron and gamma radiation.
>
>Then it wouldn't be a fusion reactor. Reaction equations don't lie.
According to an alien friend of mine, if you fuse handwavium and
unobtainium, you don't get any harmful radiation or other toxic
waste. Just clean, cheap energy.
John Schilling
>On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 21:23:56 -0700, Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote:
>>phil hunt wrote:
>>> Ah, but we're talking of a magic not-currently-existant technology.
>>> Perhaps it won't have problems with neutron and gamma radiation.
>>Then it wouldn't be a fusion reactor. Reaction equations don't lie.
>According to an alien friend of mine, if you fuse handwavium and
>unobtainium, you don't get any harmful radiation or other toxic
>waste. Just clean, cheap energy.
The problem is that if you have handwavium and unobtanium in the same
reactor, the handwavium-unobtanium reaction dominate but there's always
a bit of handwavium-handwavium fusion on the side, and that's where the
radiation comes from.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Mike Combs
>
> The problem is that if you have handwavium and unobtanium in the same
> reactor, the handwavium-unobtanium reaction dominate but there's always
> a bit of handwavium-handwavium fusion on the side, and that's where the
> radiation comes from.
Ow! Your right hand hit my eye!
--
Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."
Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"
Daniel Silevitch
John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
>ph...@cabalamat.org (phil hunt) writes:
>
>
>>According to an alien friend of mine, if you fuse handwavium and
>>unobtainium, you don't get any harmful radiation or other toxic
>>waste. Just clean, cheap energy.
>
>
>The problem is that if you have handwavium and unobtanium in the same
>reactor, the handwavium-unobtanium reaction dominate but there's always
>a bit of handwavium-handwavium fusion on the side, and that's where the
>radiation comes from.
That problem can be minimized if you add a small amount of bogosium,
around 0.5-1%, to the mix. It acts as a catalyst for the h-u reaction,
which raises the rate of h-u well above that of h-h. Thus, you can run the
reactor at the same power with a much lower h-h flux, and correspondingly
lower radiation output.
One has to be careful, however. Too much bogosium will result in
non-trivial amounts of b-b fusion, which also generates signficant amounts
of radiation.
-dms
Gene Ward Smith
>One has to be careful, however. Too much bogosium will result in
>non-trivial amounts of b-b fusion, which also generates signficant amounts
>of radiation.
Doesn't matter--all of that radiation is totally bogus.
Bill Snyder
wrote:
You have clearly not spent time in an environment with a high bogon
flux.
Daniel Silevitch
I wouldn't be so fast to trivialize the problem, if I were you. The
radiation produced by b-b fusion consists primarily of bogonium rays
(b-rays for short), with the remainder in gammas and neutrons. When b-rays
impact on normal heavy-metal atoms (gold or above, IIRC), they cause the
nucleii to transmute into administratium, and everyone knows how hazardous
even trace amounts of Ad can be.
-dms
George William Herbert
>Would cheap, inexhastible power necessarily do anything about
>poverty? Fusion powered generation plants would eliminate coal
>the need for petroleum some, but very likely vehicles would
>still burn gasoline and diesel. Finally, even if fusion did
>make fossil fuels obsolete, that would be a big "hooray!" for
>the westernized world, but would plunge the Islamic world into
>poverty. (I admit, I would have a hard time trying to feel sorry
>not putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere, but will the poor
>people get any richer because of fusion? I suppose that the
>cost of fossil fuels would plummet, and therefore the less
>developed countries that still used them (I assume fusion will
>be expensive to build) would be able to afford more.
>
>doubt the facilities will be that cheap to run) would that
>and the ability to convert them into things like, say, AIDS
>drugs, will remain as expensive as ever. Moreso, since one of
>the methods the third world had for buying these things from
>the developed world, namely oil, will be worth less. Fusion
>won't grow more food, or make people have fewer children.
There's a clear trickle-down effect. As raw materials get cheaper
they are used more and more and are distributed more and more.
If power gets *really* cheap, even if distribution doesn't
get any cheaper, there are things that can be done to reduce
material costs a whole lot. The primary cost driver in
Aluminum production is electricity, for example. It could
be cheaper per pound than steel if electricity costs went
to approximately zero. If electricity were ridiculously
cheap, you could even use ionization and magnetic separation
(calutrons) to pour rock into a factory and get iron, silicon,
etc. out the far side. There are almost certainly more optimized
cheaper processes than that, though.
Also, it depends a lot on the size and cost of the production
facilities for cheap inexhaustable power. Are they plants you
can build for a million dollars? If so, even very poor countries
will be able to buy and install a large number of them.
Is it cheaper to just plonk one down every 100 km than
run long high voltage power transmission lines around
the country? Every 10 km? Every small villiage?
All sorts of variables at work.
Not so cheap? There are still ways they can effect people's
lives at a distance. Plonk one down on a piece of oceanfront
land and start scooping up and electrolyzing water to get hydrogen
gas for energy purposes. Run the hydrogen up existing natural
gas pipelines. If for some reason hydrogen doesn't work so well,
then capture CO2 at the plant by fractionally liquefying the
atmosphere, then use the Sabatier process to make methane,
and distribute that instead.
Want to drill a hole in a mountain? Why spend large amounts of
capital on a drilling machine when you can just use electrically
powered plasma torches to turn rock into lava. Cheap mining and
tunneling.
Have a large mountain range which is hard for people to get over,
moving goods between the coast and inland? See above.
Need building materials? Melt granite (or whatever other rock is
convenient) into bricks.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
phil hunt
>
>>Nothing of consequence. In any case, the salt originally came from
>>the oceans, so it isn't making trhem more salty.
>
>waste heat into the ocean near the desalination plant. I can't
>see the greens tolerating that. SO long as the only places using
>desalination are Arab countries with legal systems unfriendly to
>foreign infidels, you don't see many Greenpeace protesters at
>desalination plants; expect that to change.
If the desalination plants are vitally necessary, the protestors
won't get very far, any more than in they tried to shut down all
power stations in the UK.
Isaac Kuo
>On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 17:51:32 +0000 (UTC), Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>Would cheap, inexhastible power necessarily do anything about
>>poverty?
>Yes
[...]
>>(I admit, I would have a hard time trying to feel sorry
>>about that.) Yes, yes, everyone will benefit in the long run from
>>not putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere, but will the poor
>>people get any richer because of fusion?
>No idea. But cheap energy (whether fusion or not) *would* help the
>poor. Electric lighting, air conditioning and refrigeration would
>become affordable by everyone. Marginal lands wouldn't be, because
>irrigation schemes could supply cheap water.
There are two things which immediately pop into my mind when
pondering the effects of oodles of cheap power:
1. Desalination, as has already been mentioned, would become
cheap and this would revolutionize the world's water supply.
Not only would this boost supplies near coastlines, it
could be used deep inland to decontaminate polluted water
and recycle waste water into pure water.
and
2. Aluminum becomes much cheaper, possibly much cheaper than
steel. This could result in lighter cheaper stronger trucks,
trains, cars, aircraft, etc. Titanium may also become
pretty cheap. After a couple generations, the term "heavy
metal" might sound like a quaint oxymoron.
Isaac Kuo
John Schilling
>In article <slrnbnf5c1...@cabalamat.cabalamat.com>,
>phil hunt <ph...@cabalamat.org> wrote:
>>>To be used in a personal automobile, the fusion reactor would have to
>>>be not only lightweight but idiot-proof.
>>Why? Cars today aren't.
>And when someone causes an explosion and/or fire while tinkering with
>their car, they usually harm only themselves and anyone else immediately
>adjacent to the car. When cars catch fire on the freeway due to poor
>maintenance, usually no other vehicles are harmed. Just about the only
>time a car explodes in actual use is when you run it into something, and
>even then the explosion is well short of the full potential of the
>gasoline as a fuel-air explosive.
>I trust idiots with chemical power sources, because I have to. I am
>not willing to trust idiots with fusion.
Why not? Chemical reactions are self-sustaining at STP, thus a fuckup
with a chemical power source can lead to a fire or explosion in the
fuel *tank*, releasing the entire stored energy content of the vehicle.
With fusion, only the fuel actually in the engine can react, and once
the reaction exhibits enough uncontrolled violence to break the engine,
no further fusion can occur.
The idea that a fusion reactor can become a fusion bomb if mishandled,
however common it may be in SF, is even *more* wrong than the idea that
a fission reactor can become a fission bomb.
George William Herbert
>Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>>Nothing of consequence. In any case, the salt originally came from
>>>the oceans, so it isn't making trhem more salty.
>>
>>It is raising the concentration of salt *and* dumping buttloads of
>>waste heat into the ocean near the desalination plant. I can't
>>see the greens tolerating that. SO long as the only places using
>>desalination are Arab countries with legal systems unfriendly to
>>foreign infidels, you don't see many Greenpeace protesters at
>>desalination plants; expect that to change.
>
>If the desalination plants are vitally necessary, the protestors
>won't get very far, any more than in they tried to shut down all
>power stations in the UK.
More important point: salt is a valuable industrial chemical,
and is generally non-toxic, and pumping hot brine back into
the ocean is not required of desalination plants.
If you do need to dispose of it, then it's trivially easy
to disperse it in a manner that avoids significant environmental
impact. It just takes more pipes.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Eric Edwards
>The problem is that if you have handwavium and unobtanium in the same
>reactor, the handwavium-unobtanium reaction dominate but there's always
>a bit of handwavium-handwavium fusion on the side, and that's where the
>radiation comes from.
Yes, it's always in the form of the Particle of the Week. You don't
need heavy shielding for that, just a hypo spray containing ludicrous
immunizing potion.
--
Use the From: header. Sending mail to ese...@news8.exile.org
or ese...@news7.exile.org will only result in frustration.
LukeCampbell
> phil hunt <ph...@cabalamat.org> wrote:
>
>>Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>Nothing of consequence. In any case, the salt originally came from
>>>>the oceans, so it isn't making trhem more salty.
>>>
>>>It is raising the concentration of salt *and* dumping buttloads of
>>>waste heat into the ocean near the desalination plant. I can't
>>>see the greens tolerating that.
<snip>
> More important point: salt is a valuable industrial chemical,
> and is generally non-toxic, and pumping hot brine back into
> the ocean is not required of desalination plants.
>
> If you do need to dispose of it, then it's trivially easy
> to disperse it in a manner that avoids significant environmental
> impact. It just takes more pipes.
In particular, hyper saline water is denser than the less salty stuff.
Most of the oceans life lives on the continental shelves and the highest
layers of the ocean. The abyssal plains and continental slopes have a
lot of area and little life. Just make a pipe that goes from your
desalination plant to the edge of the continental shelf. The
concentrated brine will sink, forming a "river" flowing down the edge of
the continental slope. This will give you plenty of time for the hyper
saline river to mix with the surounding ocean water as it flows down to
the abyssal plain.
If you are doing a _lot_ of desalination (and I mean an amount
comparable to the amount of natural "desalination" of seawater due to
evaporation) you might worry about messing up the ocean's "conveyor
belts" that handle the overturn and long distance transport of surface
water to the deeps and vice versa. The subsequent shutting down of,
say, the Gulf Stream would have significant environmental consequences.
I doubt that the desalination sufficient to just irrigate some deserts
would be sufficient to do this (although I have not worked through any
estimates so feel free to come up with your own conclusions).
Luke
Danny Sichel
> It wouldn't matter if they did. Chemical fuels could be made cheaply
> -- imagine the whole Sahara growing crops for fermentation into fuel
> alcohol.
... owned by whom?
John Schilling
>On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:59:21 +0000 (UTC), Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>>Nothing of consequence. In any case, the salt originally came from
>>>the oceans, so it isn't making trhem more salty.
>>It is raising the concentration of salt *and* dumping buttloads of
>>waste heat into the ocean near the desalination plant. I can't
>>see the greens tolerating that. SO long as the only places using
>>desalination are Arab countries with legal systems unfriendly to
>>foreign infidels, you don't see many Greenpeace protesters at
>>desalination plants; expect that to change.
>If the desalination plants are vitally necessary, the protestors
>won't get very far, any more than in they tried to shut down all
>power stations in the UK.
But that's because they were trying to shut down *existing* power
stations. Greenpeace protesters at actual desalination plants would
be no more effective.
Greenpeace, however, knows this and will send its protesters to the
sites where construction workers are about to break ground on what
would eventually become desalinization plants were Greenpeace not
to stop them.
And yes, protesters demonstrably can prevent the construction of
even vitally necessary infrastructure. Just not, as already noted,
in the Arab (or otherwise non-Western) world. Yet.
lal_truckee
> ph...@cabalamat.org (phil hunt) writes:
>>If the desalination plants are vitally necessary, the protestors
>>won't get very far, any more than in they tried to shut down all
>>power stations in the UK.
>
>
>
> But that's because they were trying to shut down *existing* power
> stations. Greenpeace protesters at actual desalination plants would
> be no more effective.
Tortola (British Virgin Island
lal_truckee
oops ... ) uses desalination - no protestors, and
no particularly oppressive culture, either (other than they won't let me
stay indefinately.)
Johnny1A
Hard to say. This is one of those calculations that depends on dozens
of other factors. Alaska is oil-dependent, but it _does_ have other
natural resources that _could_ potentially be valuable. OTOH, large
swaths of Alaska are held by the Federal Government in various forms,
making them less accessible, and often the (economically) best markets
are not politically convenient. OTOH again, Federal expenditures in
Alaska are useful income. Back and forth.
>
> Fusion may make it cheaper to get the raw materials used
> in commodities, though. The more energy one has to play with, the
> greater the number of options. If energy is cheap enough, you can
> just distill rock plasma for its components. Stand well back,
> though.
>
> That ap for fusion may work against space exploitation, since
> we have rocks on Earth.
That's another one of those highly dependent calculations. Make space
exploitatin cheaper, make Earthside exploitation cheaper, but
Earthside exploitation has environmental considerations that space
exploitation doesn't, but safety factors figure into space mining,
etc.
We just can't say, with current knowledge, where the balance would
fall. The moreso since some of the factors are highly
subjective/political, like the willingness of the public to tolerate
danger/pollution.
>
> And the tendency of people to have fewer kids as income
> grows is reasonably well demonstrated.
> 1: It's the labor costs that make it expensive to sent things to orbit.
Among other things.
Shermanlee
phil hunt
>On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 19:05:21 GMT, psm...@svpal.org (Gene Ward Smith)
>wrote:
>
>>In article <qK_db.11$Z4....@news.uchicago.edu>, dms...@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel Silevitch) wrote:
>>
>>>One has to be careful, however. Too much bogosium will result in
>>>non-trivial amounts of b-b fusion, which also generates signficant amounts
>>>of radiation.
>>
>>Doesn't matter--all of that radiation is totally bogus.
>
>You have clearly not spent time in an environment with a high bogon
>flux.
I've worked for British Telecom, does that count?
phil hunt
>
>Greenpeace, however, knows this and will send its protesters to the
>sites where construction workers are about to break ground on what
>would eventually become desalinization plants were Greenpeace not
>to stop them.
>
>And yes, protesters demonstrably can prevent the construction of
>even vitally necessary infrastructure.
When and where?
>Just not, as already noted,
>in the Arab (or otherwise non-Western) world.
phil hunt
Does it matter? The laws of physics work the same for everyone.
Bill Westfield
the thing opaque to everything else. (Come to think of it, didn't
Niven's General Products hulls pass visible light and gravity, while
stopping 'most everything else?)
An annoying and common mistake. While atomic particles and E&M spectrum
outside the visible all have their own nasty little quirks, E&M waves inside
the visible range will do a fine job of cooking you in sufficient quantity.
BillW
Bill Snyder
wrote:
Sure, but in the context of a power reactor, that appears to me to be
a feature rather than a bug.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:54isnaq...@cypher.cisco.com:
I'd thought that was explicit in at least some of the stories--
that a standard-issue GP hull was no protection against laser
weapons, for example. (Fortunately, the Ringworld explorers had a
stasis generator as well.) GP hulls didn't render their passengers
invulnerable (their limitations were a plot point right at the
beginning with "Neutron Star", and another was revealed in
"Flatlander")-- they were just proof against a wide variety of
potential threats.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
e...@ekj.vestdata.no
> BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that tomatoes were
> poisonous as recently as the early twentieth century? From time to
> time I hear someone tell a story about a grandmother who thought
> tomatoes were poisonous.
I don't know, and kinda doubt it about the tomatoes, but I know for a
fact it was true about potatoes.
In Nnorway for example, some people thougth that growing under the
earth, and visually as some sort of ugly clumps on the roots of a plant
made them the fruit of the devil (or equivalent), I guess the fact that
they're pretty inedible uncooked didn't help.
It took some convincing to make people accept potatoes and start growing
them, much of which, interestingly enough, was done by the church which
had some priests wise enough to see that the new plant, growing well
also in colder climates, would be a useful addition to the menu.
To this day Norwegian has kept the word "potetprest", literally
"potato-priest" used for a priest, or other religious person which also
has the will and ability to look at the practical down-to-earth side of
things.
This *did* take place somewhat earlier than the start of the 20th
century though.
Sincerely,
Eivind Kjørstad
Leif Magnar Kj|nn|y
<e...@ekj.vestdata.no> wrote:
>
>To this day Norwegian has kept the word "potetprest", literally
>"potato-priest" used for a priest, or other religious person which also
>has the will and ability to look at the practical down-to-earth side of
>things.
Yeah. "Blah blah sermon God blah sin blah Heaven blah blah; and don't
forget to grow potatoes".
Reportedly, the potato priests had something of an uphill struggle
until someone figured out how to make booze out of potatoes.
--
Leif Kjønnøy, Geek of a Few Trades. http://www.pvv.org/~leifmk
Disclaimer: Do not try this at home.
Void where prohibited by law.
Batteries not included.
Tina Hall
> BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that
> tomatoes were poisonous as recently as the early twentieth
> century? From time to time I hear someone tell a story about
> a grandmother who thought tomatoes were poisonous.
My grandmother (I think, some adult from my younger years,
anyway) just said there's 'Blausaeure' (my dictionary says that
is 'hydrocyanic acid' or 'prussic acid') in or right beneath the
skin. Certainly no deadly amount, unless you'd eat them by the
kilos (or tonnes, whatever, quite a great big lot anyway).
I have less reason to doubt her than I have to doubt random
Americans. <g> Is there any reliable confirmation either way?
> On the other hand, an UL to the effect that zucchini is
> poisonous would be a good thing.
Why?
Tina
Mark Atwood
>
> In Nnorway for example, some people thougth that growing under the
> earth, and visually as some sort of ugly clumps on the roots of a plant
> made them the fruit of the devil (or equivalent), I guess the fact that
> they're pretty inedible uncooked didn't help.
Huh?
I love raw potatoes.
Extremely edible, crunchy, and tasty.
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
David Allsopp
<m...@pobox.com> writes
>e...@ekj.vestdata.no writes:
>>
>> In Nnorway for example, some people thougth that growing under the
>> earth, and visually as some sort of ugly clumps on the roots of a plant
>> made them the fruit of the devil (or equivalent), I guess the fact that
>> they're pretty inedible uncooked didn't help.
>
>Huh?
>
>I love raw potatoes.
>
>Extremely edible, crunchy, and tasty.
IIRC, potato cell walls are so thick that humans can't digest the contents
unless they're weakened by cooking, so you're just eating lots of fibre.
This may be a piece of junk that got lodged in my memory, but the Law Of
Usenet Errors should now give you pukka information.
--
David Allsopp Houston, this is Tranquillity Base.
Remove SPAM to email me The Eagle has landed.
Stewart Robert Hinsley
writes
>In particular, hyper saline water is denser than the less salty stuff.
>Most of the oceans life lives on the continental shelves and the highest
>layers of the ocean. The abyssal plains and continental slopes have a
>lot of area and little life. Just make a pipe that goes from your
>desalination plant to the edge of the continental shelf. The
>concentrated brine will sink, forming a "river" flowing down the edge of
>the continental slope. This will give you plenty of time for the hyper
>saline river to mix with the surounding ocean water as it flows down to
>the abyssal plain.
*Warm* hypersaline water reaching areas of the seabed where methane
clathrates are present might have significantly undesirable
consequences.
(One theory for the end-Permian extinctions is that the Siberian Traps
put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to raise the global temperature 10
degrees; when the oceans warmed enough to release the inventory of
methane clathrates that was another 10 degrees, and bye-bye ecosystem.)
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley
Derek Lyons
>On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 20:42:29 -0300, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com> wrote:
>>phil hunt wrote:
>>
>>> It wouldn't matter if they did. Chemical fuels could be made cheaply
>>> -- imagine the whole Sahara growing crops for fermentation into fuel
>>> alcohol.
>>
>>... owned by whom?
>
>Does it matter? The laws of physics work the same for everyone.
It matters a great deal if one's goal is to reduce poverty.
A Sahara sized crop, grown by a massive conglomerate using machines
will have decidely different local economic effects that multiple
smaller regions produced by independents.
D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:
Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html
Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html
Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to o...@io.com, as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.
LukeCampbell
Stewart Robert Hinsley wrote:
> In article <3F78C0D5...@uci.edu>, LukeCampbell <lwca...@uci.edu>
> writes
>
>>In particular, hyper saline water is denser than the less salty stuff.
>>Most of the oceans life lives on the continental shelves and the highest
>>layers of the ocean. The abyssal plains and continental slopes have a
>>lot of area and little life. Just make a pipe that goes from your
>>desalination plant to the edge of the continental shelf. The
>>concentrated brine will sink, forming a "river" flowing down the edge of
>>the continental slope. This will give you plenty of time for the hyper
>>saline river to mix with the surounding ocean water as it flows down to
>>the abyssal plain.
>
>
> *Warm* hypersaline water reaching areas of the seabed where methane
> clathrates are present might have significantly undesirable
> consequences.
True, but if it is warm, it wouldn't sink as well (or at all, depending
on salinity and temperature). Best to cool it on its journey to the
continental shelf through contact with the surrounding seawater.
Luke
Craig Richardson
>e...@ekj.vestdata.no writes:
>>
>> In Nnorway for example, some people thougth that growing under the
>> earth, and visually as some sort of ugly clumps on the roots of a plant
>> made them the fruit of the devil (or equivalent), I guess the fact that
>> they're pretty inedible uncooked didn't help.
>
>Huh?
>
>I love raw potatoes.
>
>Extremely edible, crunchy, and tasty.
ObSF: Cerebus. "Next time, leave the skins on. That's the best
part!"
--Craig
--
I start to wish Bob Melvin would walk out to the mound, ask Freddy if he
was injured, and then kick him in the balls so he can call in an
emergency replacement from the bullpen --Derek Zumsteg in BP, 5/13/2003
Erik Max Francis
> An annoying and common mistake. While atomic particles and E&M
> spectrum
> outside the visible all have their own nasty little quirks, E&M waves
> inside
> the visible range will do a fine job of cooking you in sufficient
> quantity.
Sure, but that's what they had the stasis fields for.
--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && &tSftDotIotE
/ \ There are defeats more triumphant than victories.
\__/ Montaigne
Erik Max Francis
> The idea that a fusion reactor can become a fusion bomb if mishandled,
> however common it may be in SF, is even *more* wrong than the idea
> that
> a fission reactor can become a fission bomb.
Sure, and it's quite correct to say that fission reactors cannot become
fission bombs. However, as Chernobyl demonstrates, improper usage can
result in massive contamination, all without an actual nuclear
explosion.
Catastrophic damage to a fusion reactor certainly would not result in a
fusion explosion, but that doesn't mean that the hot plasma inside
escaping and exposing the irradiated internals of the fusion chamber to
the open air would be harmless. Just as with fission, you can have
fusion reactor accidents that cause damage, even though they come
nowhere near a fusion explosion.
Now in the case of tiny fusion reactors that would small enough (and
feasible enough) to put into cars, this may or may not still be a
problem. But dismissing the possibility simply because fusion reactors
are "safer" than fission reactors is misguided.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:bl9qnc$qqt$1...@reader2.panix.com:
>...
> BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that tomatoes
> were poisonous as recently as the early twentieth century? From
> time to time I hear someone tell a story about a grandmother who
> thought tomatoes were poisonous.
It's at least widely reported that tomatoes were thought to be
poisonous (by Americans as well as Europeans) into the 19th century,
due to their being part of the nightshade family. I haven't found
any sort of primary source cite, but it shows up in such usually
reliable sources as snopes.com.
I've also heard that acting on this belief, a servant tried to poison
George Washington by serving him tomatoes. That, I'm inclined to
class as a legend, pending evidence.
don't spam me]@slater.net Joe Slater
<msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>It's at least widely reported that tomatoes were thought to be
>poisonous (by Americans as well as Europeans) into the 19th century,
>due to their being part of the nightshade family. I haven't found
>any sort of primary source cite, but it shows up in such usually
>reliable sources as snopes.com.
Crossbred tomatoes can get a bit funny, especially if they breed with the
virus-resistant root stock. This may have encouraged the belief.
jds
Robert Carnegie
<bi...@cypher.cisco.com> writes
If there's enough of them. Visible light is fairly easy to block - but
will then heat up whatever you're using to block it, of course. Heat,
we can live with.
I happen to have a planet between me and the Solar System's
major light source at the moment, but if I didn't I could still sit in
the dark if I wanted to.
Is it anywhere established, or contradicted, that a GP hull lets in
only a certain amount of visible radiation, enough to see by -
beyond that, its force field can absorb or reflect excess energy?
You'll see that I'm thinking of something like the sunglasses that
change darker in brighter light. So in ordinary daylight, you see
ordinary light; inside Mercury's orbit, the GP hull tones it down?
Robert Carnegie at home, rja.ca...@excite.com at large
--
Surely no-one has read down to here. (from author Warren Ellis)
Robert Carnegie
Sneddon <no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes
> Details of the launch are at:
>
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3146124.stm
>
> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>the Moon.
Not in this story, but I know /someone/ compared it to a toaster, at
least in mass and approximate shape. Someone other than me.
So, Macintosh users, remember the Flying Toasters? Looks like
they've taken another giant leap forwards...
Bill Snyder
Contradicted, IIRC; in "At the Core," Schaeffer has to keep changing
to a higher and higher grade of sunglasses as his ship draws nearer
and nearer to <spoiler>
John M. Gamble
And the reason he had to resort to sunglasses is that he turned
down the puppeteer's offer to paint the hull, which seemed to
be S.O.P.
--
-john
February 28 1997: Last day libraries could order catalogue cards
from the Library of Congress.
Steve Coltrin
>>>Is it anywhere established, or contradicted, that a GP hull lets in
>>>only a certain amount of visible radiation, enough to see by -
>>>beyond that, its force field can absorb or reflect excess energy?
>>>You'll see that I'm thinking of something like the sunglasses that
>>>change darker in brighter light. So in ordinary daylight, you see
>>>ordinary light; inside Mercury's orbit, the GP hull tones it down?
>>
>>Contradicted, IIRC; in "At the Core," Schaeffer has to keep changing
>>to a higher and higher grade of sunglasses as his ship draws nearer
>>and nearer to <spoiler>
>
> And the reason he had to resort to sunglasses is that he turned
> down the puppeteer's offer to paint the hull, which seemed to
> be S.O.P.
And/or the selectively and directionally opaque gimmick that
_Lying Bastard_ and/or _Hot Needle of Inquiry_ had wasn't available yet.
(I don't know how plausible it is for a substance to be opaque along
one direction but transparent along most.)
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org WWVBF?
"Whoever wrote it has a brain disorder, and should write more." - Ay Eye
David Silberstein
Gene Ward Smith <psm...@svpal.org> wrote:
>In article <qK_db.11$Z4....@news.uchicago.edu>,
>dms...@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel Silevitch) wrote:
>
>>One has to be careful, however. Too much bogosium will result in
>>non-trivial amounts of b-b fusion, which also generates signficant
>>amounts of radiation.
>
>Doesn't matter--all of that radiation is totally bogus.
It is very well documented that bogon radiation can cause severe
physical abnormalities. While some of these abnormalities are
somewhat beneficial, there are often dangerous or unpleasant
side-effects as well -- mild to severe deformities, reduced
intelligence, etc. Even when there are no obvious external
physical changes, demonstration of bogon-induced physical
abilities can lead to social stigma.
See the journals FF, SM, H, X-M, etc.
Bryan J. Maloney
thusnews:Xns9406A9747412...@130.133.1.4:
> nos...@nospam.com (Paul Ciszek) wrote in
> news:bl9qnc$qqt$1...@reader2.panix.com:
>>...
>> BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that tomatoes
>> were poisonous as recently as the early twentieth century? From
>> time to time I hear someone tell a story about a grandmother who
>> thought tomatoes were poisonous.
>
> It's at least widely reported that tomatoes were thought to be
> poisonous (by Americans as well as Europeans) into the 19th century,
> due to their being part of the nightshade family.
That would be amazing, given the tomato recipes in 19th-century US
cookbooks and the great frequency with which they graced 19th-century US
gardens.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:Xns9406EC7925B80d...@206.141.193.32:
Why so? The 19th century lasted a hundred years and included many
people spread far and wide. Would it likewise be amazing that
belief that nuclear energy would never amount to anything persisted
well into the twentieth century, despite the existence in that
century of thousands of nuclear weapons and power plants and
countless books on the subject?
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<cavag...@sbcglobal.nmungemungt> wrote:
>"Michael S. Schiffer" <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> nattered on
>thusnews:Xns9406A9747412...@130.133.1.4:
>
>> It's at least widely reported that tomatoes were thought to be
>> poisonous (by Americans as well as Europeans) into the 19th century,
>> due to their being part of the nightshade family.
>
>That would be amazing, given the tomato recipes in 19th-century US
>cookbooks and the great frequency with which they graced 19th-century US
>gardens.
No, it's not amazing at all -- the 19th century lasted a hundred
years, and the discovery that tomatoes aren't poisonous was made in
the first decade. Ninety years was plenty of time to plant those
gardens and publish those cookbooks.
David Tate
>
> My grandmother (I think, some adult from my younger years,
> anyway) just said there's 'Blausaeure' (my dictionary says that
> is 'hydrocyanic acid' or 'prussic acid') in or right beneath the
> skin. Certainly no deadly amount, unless you'd eat them by the
> kilos (or tonnes, whatever, quite a great big lot anyway).
>
> I have less reason to doubt her than I have to doubt random
> Americans. <g> Is there any reliable confirmation either way?
My understanding is that the cyanide concentration goes way up if the
potato wasn't properly buried, and was exposed to sunlight while
growing. But I hardly count as "reliable confirmation" on this topic.
Ah, here we go. From the University of Maryland website:
http://www.life.umd.edu/classroom/BSCI124/lec30.html
=============================================================
2. Saponins (e.g. tomatine in tomato, solanine in potato)
a. Natural soaps (as in century plants (Agave))- develop bubbles but
poke holes in membranes (by aggregating cholesterol)
b. Causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea
c. Solanine present in potato (Solanum tuberosum) - most of plant
except tubers is poisonous. Tuber contains solanine too, but toxic
dose is about 100 potatoes. Green potatoes (which turn green after
exposure to sunlight) can cause fatal poisonings. Green and damaged
potatoes are even more toxic.
==============================================================
David Tate
LukeCampbell
Also, the 19th century can hardly be considered a homogeneous culture
permeated by homogenous beliefs. In 21st century USA, for example,
there are still people who believe that hognose snakes are deadly
venomous "blow adders" or "spreading vipers", although they are known to
zoology (and many reptile keeping hobbyists) to be harmless to humans.
I can easily see similar mismathces between belief and reality
persisting in many areas even though the truth is both known to many and
available to any who look into it.
Luke
Bill Westfield
only a certain amount of visible radiation, enough to see by -
beyond that, its force field can absorb or reflect excess energy?
Well, the impression I get is that they're widely believed to look
transparent, from the outside, under most circumstances. I claim they'd
better look like mirrors from the outside, most of the time (ie even at 1au
from a small G-type star) if they're not going to make cooked inhabitants.
In that case, they'd "look" pretty much the same as statis fields, and you
wouldn't be able to tell as you approached a ship whether it was in statis
or just a GP hull...
I said it was a common mistake, so I'm not just complaining about Niven's GP
hulls. Most recently, I read Duane's "So you Want to be a Wizard" to my
daughter. In it, we have Fred, a sentient white hole, who is careful to
emit only "harmless spectra" around his human friends.
I happen to have a planet between me and the Solar System's
major light source at the moment, but if I didn't I could still sit in
the dark if I wanted to.
But it would get harder and harder as you get less and less between you and
your light source. Say white paint reflects 99.9% of incident radiation in
the visible spectra (and that's all you have.) Get up to 1000W/cm^2 of
incident radiation, and your white paint cooks, burns, melts, and does other
things that are not good if that's all you're hiding behind...
BillW
SkyeFire
>
> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>the Moon.
18 MONTHS? Heck, it's only a quarter-million miles! I could *walk* faster
than that!
(Well, okay, maybe not. Lemme get my calculator... Okay, no. But for a
straight-line approximation of 250,000 miles, 24hr days, and 30days/month, it
works out to about 20mph, which is not hard for a good runner, though difficult
to sustain for quite that long...)
Hm. Haven't read the article yet, but I'd bet they're using fuzzy-boundry
orbits.
Robert Sneddon
<skye...@aol.com> writes
>In article <nc39tWArMrd$Ew...@nojay.fsnet.co.uk>, Robert Sneddon
><no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>>
>> It may be the slowest-ever moonprobe, taking eighteen months to get to
>>the Moon.
>
> 18 MONTHS? Heck, it's only a quarter-million miles! I could *walk* faster
>than that!
> Hm. Haven't read the article yet, but I'd bet they're using fuzzy-boundry
>orbits.
Solar-powered xenon ion engine, very low thrust (2 grammes I believe),
but continuously spiralling outwards until capture by the Moons' gravity
then (I assume) deceleration down to a low Lunar orbit. They fired up
the engine to try it out and it seems to work OK. The probe is going to
spend a lot of time in the Van Allen belts which is a worry. They
*think* it's armoured well enough.
--
Email me via nojay (at) nojay (dot) fsnet (dot) co (dot) uk
This address no longer accepts HTML posts.
Robert Sneddon
David Cowie
> 18 MONTHS? Heck, it's only a quarter-million miles! I could *walk*
> faster than that!
> (Well, okay, maybe not. Lemme get my calculator... Okay, no. But
> for a
> straight-line approximation of 250,000 miles, 24hr days, and
> 30days/month, it works out to about 20mph, which is not hard for a good
> runner, though difficult to sustain for quite that long...)
How about cycling?
In recent years the *average* speed for the Tour de France has been close
to 25 mph, and rather faster than that on flat stages. No Alpine passes on
the route to the moon :)
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Labyrsman
>
>>2) The Sahara is at least in part a natural desert; do we know that
>> irrigating a natural desert is necessarily a good idea,
>> environmentally speaking?
>
> We won't, until we've tried it. Certainly it would make it more
> friendly for life. It'd be nice to preserve some in its natural
> state, of course.
>
>
Actually, there is no such thing as a natural desert. All archeological
studies show that the Sahara used to be well watered, filled with all sorts
of life, animal as well as plant. It was created by the changing climate,
which in turn acerbated the change from life giving to life threatening.
One thing that could come out of this is that changing the Sahara to a
fertile plain again, would give us a place to put our collected organic
garbage and wastes to provide the needed organic material back into the
system, which would be as needed as the water. Take some of those old rust
bucket tankers and use them to ship the liquidified solid wastes from
Europe and America to wherever fertilizers are needed.
John
"Paul Ciszek" <nos...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:blisiv$2f7$1...@reader2.panix.com...
>
> In article <MSGID_2=3A2437=2F22.13=40fidonet...@fidonet.org>,
> Tina Hall <T.H...@railroad.robin.de> wrote:
> >Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On the other hand, an UL to the effect that zucchini is
> >> poisonous would be a good thing.
> >
> >Why?
>
> It would hopefully lead to people planting less of it. As it is,
> many people resort to deceptive means to try to get other people to
> eat the zucchini they have grown.
>
I don't know if it's known outside australia, but there's a member of the
squash family known as the choko. Once planted, nothing short of a flame
thrower and irradiating the soil will stop it from producing a bumper crop
of revolting watery sqash thingies every year. You can't give them away.
Jake McGuire
> 18 MONTHS? Heck, it's only a quarter-million miles! I could *walk* faster
> than that!
> (Well, okay, maybe not. Lemme get my calculator... Okay, no. But for a
> straight-line approximation of 250,000 miles, 24hr days, and 30days/month, it
> works out to about 20mph, which is not hard for a good runner, though difficult
> to sustain for quite that long...)
It's also 250,000 miles *up*. Which is somewhat of a different story.
-jake
Chris Thompson
At 1g equivalent, better to think of it as 4000 miles up, 250000 miles
on the flat, and then 170 miles down...
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk
Nancy Lebovitz
Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>In article <MSGID_2=3A2437=2F22.13=40fidonet...@fidonet.org>,
>Tina Hall <T.H...@railroad.robin.de> wrote:
>>Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On the other hand, an UL to the effect that zucchini is
>>> poisonous would be a good thing.
>>
>>Why?
>
>It would hopefully lead to people planting less of it. As it is,
>many people resort to deceptive means to try to get other people to
>eat the zucchini they have grown.
I've raised the question of "why don't people grow less zucchini",
and didn't get a coherent answer.
My tentative theory is that zucchini is very tempting to grow because
it thrives so reliably but people repress their memories of how much
excess squash(?) they end up with.
Perhaps there's a market for a zucchini variety which produces plenty
of pretty vines and little fruit.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Now, with bumper stickers
Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"
Default User
> Perhaps there's a market for a zucchini variety which produces plenty
> of pretty vines and little fruit.
Of course, the grower could do that just by regularly pinching off
shriveled blossoms. It's also a good idea to pick the fruit when very
small, rather than allowing them to achieve "as lang's my arm" status.
The small ones are more versatile and tastier, use them in salads,
stir-fry, cut in strips for snacks, etc.
Brian Rodenborn
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
[zucchini]
> Of course, the grower could do that just by regularly pinching off
> shriveled blossoms. It's also a good idea to pick the fruit when very
> small, rather than allowing them to achieve "as lang's my arm" status.
> The small ones are more versatile and tastier, use them in salads,
> stir-fry, cut in strips for snacks, etc.
My husband's family, when he was a child, went off for a 3-week
vacation that overlapped the end of zucchini season. They discovered when
they came back that individual zucchini do not, effectively, HAVE a
maximum size. They keep getting bigger till you pick them. That was ever
after known as 'The Year of the Invasion-Of-The-Body-Snatchers Zucchini'
in family lore ...
--
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
elo...@fishdragon.com - website: http://www.fishdragon.com/
"Move, D'Argo. Let Mommy shoot it." - Chiana (in Farscape)
David Tate
>
> I've raised the question of "why don't people grow less zucchini",
> and didn't get a coherent answer.
>
> My tentative theory is that zucchini is very tempting to grow because
> it thrives so reliably but people repress their memories of how much
> excess squash(?) they end up with.
The key to zucchini is to PICK THEM SMALL. If your zucc gets more
than about 4 inches long, it's past its prime. Picking them small
ensures both superior flavor and texture, and serves to limit sheer
volume.
> Perhaps there's a market for a zucchini variety which produces plenty
> of pretty vines and little fruit.
My 19th floor mostly-enclosed balcony produces long lush vines,
gorgeous flowers, and no fruit. That was not by design, but
apparently the pollinators can't get at them, and my attempts at hand
pollination were unsuccessful. Perhaps if I took them to dinner and a
movie first...
David Tate
Nancy Lebovitz
Default User <first...@company.com> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
>
>> Perhaps there's a market for a zucchini variety which produces plenty
>> of pretty vines and little fruit.
>
>Of course, the grower could do that just by regularly pinching off
>shriveled blossoms. It's also a good idea to pick the fruit when very
They could, but it's obvious that a great many people don't. You might
as well have a plant which accomodates people's behavior.
>small, rather than allowing them to achieve "as lang's my arm" status.
>The small ones are more versatile and tastier, use them in salads,
>stir-fry, cut in strips for snacks, etc.
Garrett Wollman
Paul Ciszek <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that tomatoes were
>poisonous as recently as the early twentieth century? From time to
>time I hear someone tell a story about a grandmother who thought
>tomatoes were poisonous.
Both tomatoes and potatoes are members of the nightshade family, along
with belladonna, datura, and henbane. (Belladonna, taxonomically
/Atropa belladonna/, is the ``deadly nightshade'' itself, but all are
poisonous to some extent.)
It's a curious thing how quickly some food habits have become
culturally ingrained. There are a large number of western-hemisphere
food plants which have become very strongly identified with
eastern-hemisphere cultures, and this has all happened in the last few
hundred years.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every
wol...@lcs.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own
Opinions not those of| search for greater freedom.
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. ___ (2003)
Default User
>
> On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Default User wrote:
> > The small ones are more versatile and tastier, use them in salads,
> > stir-fry, cut in strips for snacks, etc.
>
> My husband's family, when he was a child, went off for a 3-week
> vacation that overlapped the end of zucchini season. They discovered when
> they came back that individual zucchini do not, effectively, HAVE a
> maximum size. They keep getting bigger till you pick them. That was ever
> after known as 'The Year of the Invasion-Of-The-Body-Snatchers Zucchini'
> in family lore ...
How did these monstrosities taste? If they are like the big ones I've
had, not very good. They might have made interesting jack-o-lantern's
though.
Brian Rodenborn
Labyrsman
>
> In article <Xns9408C5557E7D1L...@204.122.16.44>,
> Labyrsman <Laby...@eski-add-a-mo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>Actually, there is no such thing as a natural desert.
>
> That's a load of biomass.
>
> The most obvious example is the entire continent of Antiarctica, which
> has been a desert for as long as it has occupied its current position
> on the Earth's surface, yet hasn't had a human population until quite
> recently. Closer to home, there are parts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona,
> and New Mexico that are desert and have never been farmed, by either
> Native Americans or Europeans. Note that overgrazing-- which is
> responsible for a good chunk of the Sahara-- would not have been a
> factor in pre-Columbian America, as the indigenous people did not have
> any domesticated grazing animals.
>
>
Overgrazing is responsible for the last few centuries of expansion true.
However it was expanding before that as a result of man's stupidity.
Cutting down the forests in Lebanon, Syria, Libya and the like, removed a
crucial step in the water cycle. This in turn caused the weather systems
that delivered water to the interior to slowly stop and allow the Sahara to
come into existence. Now I am not trying to say that without man, there
wouldn't be a desert at all but it would be about 95% reduced in size and
wouldn't be a single huge mass but seperated by various fertile areas.
As far as the American Southwest, much of it used to be farmed and well
done by the Hopi, Zuni and Anasazi among others. Notice even in our
Southwest, climatologically it is arid, not desert, there is a difference,
at least to my instructor's and collegues. As for the actual bits of being
farmed, I can tell you it is the same today, there are still places in
Missouri, Arkansas, the Dakota's, that haven't been farmed and probably
never will be, mainly due to the lack of water, horizontal space, too much
water or some other confluence of problems. Does this mean that these
areas are also deserts?
All archeological
>>studies show that the Sahara used to be well watered, filled with all
>>sorts of life, animal as well as plant. It was created by the
>>changing climate, which in turn acerbated the change from life giving
>>to life threatening.
>
> But the climate change-- until the last few centuries-- was a natural
> process. The Sahara grows and shrinks over the course of the Ice Age
> cycle, but that cycle is not humanity's fault. We merely enlarged the
> Sahara with overgrazing this time aroung.
>
> --
> Please reply to: | "Evolution is a theory that accounts
> pciszek at panix dot com | for variety, not superiority."
> Autoreply has been disabled | -- Joan Pontius
Conrad Hodson
> > More important point: salt is a valuable industrial chemical,
> > and is generally non-toxic, and pumping hot brine back into
> > the ocean is not required of desalination plants.
> >
> > If you do need to dispose of it, then it's trivially easy
> > to disperse it in a manner that avoids significant environmental
> > impact. It just takes more pipes.
>
> In particular, hyper saline water is denser than the less salty stuff.
> Most of the oceans life lives on the continental shelves and the highest
> layers of the ocean. The abyssal plains and continental slopes have a
> lot of area and little life. Just make a pipe that goes from your
> desalination plant to the edge of the continental shelf. The
> concentrated brine will sink, forming a "river" flowing down the edge of
> the continental slope. This will give you plenty of time for the hyper
> saline river to mix with the surounding ocean water as it flows down to
> the abyssal plain.
It actually won't mix that much, if experience with ocean currents and
heavy brines in power ponds and the like are any clue.
>
> If you are doing a _lot_ of desalination (and I mean an amount
> comparable to the amount of natural "desalination" of seawater due to
> evaporation) you might worry about messing up the ocean's "conveyor
> belts" that handle the overturn and long distance transport of surface
> water to the deeps and vice versa. The subsequent shutting down of,
> say, the Gulf Stream would have significant environmental consequences.
> I doubt that the desalination sufficient to just irrigate some deserts
> would be sufficient to do this (although I have not worked through any
> estimates so feel free to come up with your own conclusions).
>
As you point out, natural distillation of water vapor goes on in Nature on
a very large scale, enough to depress sea level in places such as the
Mediterranean and the Red Seas, and generate substantial ocean currents.
These typically flow into the evaporative areas as surface currents, as
denser briny water sinks and flows out near the bottom. Since most
coastal deserts lie next to areas of high sea evaporation, perhaps the
brines might be piped to the nearby areas where the natural ones are
beginning their flow out of the area. This sort of discharge pattern
might add half a knot to the speed of the currents, without screwing up
their overall patterns.
Or, as was suggested, the salts could be regarded as assets instead of
waste products. With really cheap energy, electrochemistry might be
worthwhile on a greater variety of sea salt chemicals--the way we already
get our magnesium.
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
>
> Catastrophic damage to a fusion reactor certainly would not result in a
> fusion explosion, but that doesn't mean that the hot plasma inside
> escaping and exposing the irradiated internals of the fusion chamber to
> the open air would be harmless. Just as with fission, you can have
> fusion reactor accidents that cause damage, even though they come
> nowhere near a fusion explosion.
>
> Now in the case of tiny fusion reactors that would small enough (and
> feasible enough) to put into cars, this may or may not still be a
> problem. But dismissing the possibility simply because fusion reactors
> are "safer" than fission reactors is misguided.
In particular, what are those reactors made of? If it turns out that the
handwavium needed to make them work is an alloy shell of
tellurium-cadmium-mercury amalgam, and failure mode involves reactor
fires, they could be quite nasty without any nuclear hazard at all. Just
as uranium is more hazardous for its simple chemical toxicity than its
radioactive emissions.
Conrad Hodson
Conrad Hodson
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Paul Ciszek wrote:
>
> > BTW, is it really true that some Europeans thought that tomatoes were
> > poisonous as recently as the early twentieth century? From time to
> > time I hear someone tell a story about a grandmother who thought
> > tomatoes were poisonous.
It was widely believed in Europe in the first century or two after they
were introduced from the New World, but most people got a clue after that.
It's possible that somebody's granny still didn't have the word a hundred
years ago, but I doubt it.
The way the original notion seems to have gotten started involved the
circumstances that the King of Spain laid standing orders on all explorers
to bring back useful new plants they found in cultivation as they
explored. Well, tomatoes were sent back from Mexico by Cortez after he
and the smallpox virus had conquered the place, but AFAIK he just sent
back the seeds, and there was a certain language barrier because neither
Aztecs nor Spaniards had had much time to learn each others' tongues yet.
I can imagine a scenario something like this: Cortez or some officer sees
these red fruits in some marketplace. Terrified Indian vendor, perhaps
with a sword at his throat and certainly with a semi-competent translator
nearby, is asked how the fruits are grown. He stammers something to the
effect of "Easy to grow, just let the fruit rot and plant the seeds, easy,
here, take them all!" Cortez ships them off to the king as per orders,
with those instructions. His Majesty hands them off to the royal
gardener, who shrugs and puts in another row of Wierd Foreign Shit.
Eventually these funny-smelling plants come up, and the gardener pulls
some and hands them off to the cook, who makes a salad of them. The royal
poison-taster, and three cooks' helpers who scrounged food while the head
cook wasn't looking, all fall miserably ill. Because tomatoes really are
poisonous--every part of the plant but the fruit. And it would be very
easy, given the shaky communications involved, for the point that you
_only_ eat the fruit to not make it all the way to the Spanish gardener
and cook. The Indian vendor may have even intended it that way--Montezuma
had his own revenge, now Ixtatl will have his too.
If someone makes a salad out of potato plants, the same thing happens.
Conrad Hodson
George William Herbert
>> > If you do need to dispose of it, then it's trivially easy
>> > to disperse it in a manner that avoids significant environmental
>> > impact. It just takes more pipes.
>>
>> In particular, hyper saline water is denser than the less salty stuff.
>> Most of the oceans life lives on the continental shelves and the highest
>> layers of the ocean. The abyssal plains and continental slopes have a
>> lot of area and little life. Just make a pipe that goes from your
>> desalination plant to the edge of the continental shelf. The
>> concentrated brine will sink, forming a "river" flowing down the edge of
>> the continental slope. This will give you plenty of time for the hyper
>> saline river to mix with the surounding ocean water as it flows down to
>> the abyssal plain.
>
>It actually won't mix that much, if experience with ocean currents and
>heavy brines in power ponds and the like are any clue.
It's easy to make it mix. You just need to know the parameters
in which mixing occurs versus continued separation of the fluids,
and interact them within those parameters.
Sufficiently small jets of high velocity will mix turbulently
very efficiently in very short distance, and aren't hard to
set up ...
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
SkyeFire
jamc...@yahoo.com (Jake McGuire) writes:
>
>> 18 MONTHS? Heck, it's only a quarter-million miles! I could *walk*
>faster
>> than that!
>> (Well, okay, maybe not. Lemme get my calculator... Okay, no. But
>for a
>> straight-line approximation of 250,000 miles, 24hr days, and 30days/month,
>it
>> works out to about 20mph, which is not hard for a good runner, though
>difficult
>> to sustain for quite that long...)
>
>It's also 250,000 miles *up*. Which is somewhat of a different story.
>
Note to self: understated tongue-in-cheek sarcasm doesn't work on UseNet.
ObRL: several years ago, when I was part of the Artemis Society working
group that later became Transorbital, we spent a *lot* of time dealing with
this very problem. Some people were extremely bullish on the idea of using ion
propulsion (the terms "ant's fart of thrust" was used a great deal), but the
systems people dug in their heels over spending that kind of time in the VA
belts. And since we were anticipating a shoestring budget (a badly-chewed
shoestring, at that), sufficient rad-hardening was problematic, not to mention
hard on the *mass* budget as well.
One of the funny things that happened was that we found a launch slot as
secondary cargo that could have given us more than enough mass, but turned out
to be *volume* limited -- one of the ideas we looked at was making a
banana-shaped vessel that would "unfold" after bus separation, but that had
some real CG problems for landing. Plus it added one more major point failure
option, and he launch provider might have disliked the idea.
Earl
news:Pine.SUN.4.56.03...@garcia.efn.org:
And to point out the crazy family group that is being described:
Tomatoes contain a powerful alkaloid tomatine -- in the
leaves.
The potato contains solanine in the leaves (and in tubers
exposed to light or which are germinating)
Tobacco contains nicotine -- one of the deadliest poisons
Deadly Nightshade contains ????
All are members of the same family and were unknown to Europeans
as food. The alkaloids are simple poisons to control the
preditors that eat the plant -- such as insects and people.
Similar poisonous plants are found in the American Southwest --
LoccoWeed (selenium) a cattle killer, and in South Africa --
Gift Plant (gift as in German for poison)(sodium fluoroacetate)
especially deadly to canines.
William December Starr
Default User <first...@company.com> said:
>> My husband's family, when he was a child, went off for a 3-week
>> vacation that overlapped the end of zucchini season. They
>> discovered when they came back that individual zucchini do not,
>> effectively, HAVE a maximum size. They keep getting bigger till
>> you pick them. That was ever after known as 'The Year of the
>> Invasion-Of-The-Body-Snatchers Zucchini' in family lore ...
>
> How did these monstrosities taste? If they are like the big
> ones I've had, not very good. They might have made interesting
> jack-o-lantern's though.
If "zucchini" is the same thing as "zucchini squash" then any such
jack-o-lantern would probably last about eight minutes. Zucchini
squash is part of the food supply for my angry iguana and my
experience is that even when refrigerated the damn things will,
given the slightest excuse, rot to a mush.
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
Mark Atwood
>
> It's a curious thing how quickly some food habits have become
> culturally ingrained. There are a large number of western-hemisphere
> food plants which have become very strongly identified with
> eastern-hemisphere cultures, and this has all happened in the last few
> hundred years.
When I watch "Iron Chef" and see potatoes as a basis for what is
described as an "old traditional japanese dish", I go "huh"?
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mark Atwood
[re tomatoes]
> Eventually these funny-smelling plants come up, and the gardener pulls
"funny-smelling"?
Michael S. Schiffer
news:m3isn3q...@khem.blackfedora.com:
> wol...@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) writes:
>> It's a curious thing how quickly some food habits have become
>> culturally ingrained. There are a large number of
>> western-hemisphere food plants which have become very strongly
>> identified with eastern-hemisphere cultures, and this has all
>> happened in the last few hundred years.
> When I watch "Iron Chef" and see potatoes as a basis for what is
> described as an "old traditional japanese dish", I go "huh"?
I know what you mean, but I wonder: how old does something have to
be before it's old and traditional? Is it absolute, or relative to
the age of the culture? (Even Usenet can be said to have
traditions, after all.)
Either way, though, I do wonder what east and south Asian cuisine
looked like before the introduction of western hemisphere
ingredients. (Not, you understand, interested enough to do any
research. But enough that I'd be interested in hearing if anyone
knows. :-) )
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
r.r...@thevine.net
>Conrad Hodson <con...@efn.org> writes:
>[re tomatoes]
>> Eventually these funny-smelling plants come up, and the gardener pulls
>
>"funny-smelling"?
Tomatos have a very distinct smell to them... sort of sharp and
peppery. I'm not sure if that's enough to classify them as
"funny-smelling", but it does set them apart in the average back-yard
garden.
Rebecca
John
"Daniel Silevitch" <dms...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:Rh0eb.15$Z4....@news.uchicago.edu...
> In article <bl9vo3$2k1l$1...@borg.svpal.org>,
> Gene Ward Smith <psm...@svpal.org> wrote:
> >In article <qK_db.11$Z4....@news.uchicago.edu>,
> >dms...@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel Silevitch) wrote:
> >
> >>One has to be careful, however. Too much bogosium will result in
> >>non-trivial amounts of b-b fusion, which also generates signficant
amounts
> >>of radiation.
> >
> >Doesn't matter--all of that radiation is totally bogus.
>
> I wouldn't be so fast to trivialize the problem, if I were you. The
> radiation produced by b-b fusion consists primarily of bogonium rays
> (b-rays for short), with the remainder in gammas and neutrons. When b-rays
> impact on normal heavy-metal atoms (gold or above, IIRC), they cause the
> nucleii to transmute into administratium, and everyone knows how hazardous
> even trace amounts of Ad can be.
>
But in the case of a car crash, the adminstratium will encase the entire
vehicle in a thick layer of red tape, and ensure the entire process slows
down to a crawl.
So it's a safety feature.
Steve Coltrin
> In article <Xns940BBD7795F0...@130.133.1.4>,
> Michael S. Schiffer <msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
>>
>>Either way, though, I do wonder what east and south Asian cuisine
>>looked like before the introduction of western hemisphere
>>ingredients. (Not, you understand, interested enough to do any
>>research. But enough that I'd be interested in hearing if anyone
>>knows. :-) )
>
> I wonder the same thing myself-- especially since, according to the
> National Geographic Global Pursuit trivia game, the most used spice
> in the world is red pepper, a new world plant.
I'm told chile controls the acidity in kimchee, and allows longer
fermentation.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org WWVBF?
"Whoever wrote it has a brain disorder, and should write more." - Ay Eye
Robert Carnegie
<spco...@omcl.org> writes
>begin jga...@ripco.com (John M. Gamble) writes:
>
>>>>Is it anywhere established, or contradicted, that a GP hull lets in
>>>>only a certain amount of visible radiation, enough to see by -
>>>>beyond that, its force field can absorb or reflect excess energy?
>>>>You'll see that I'm thinking of something like the sunglasses that
>>>>change darker in brighter light. So in ordinary daylight, you see
>>>>ordinary light; inside Mercury's orbit, the GP hull tones it down?
>>>
>>>Contradicted, IIRC; in "At the Core," Schaeffer has to keep changing
>>>to a higher and higher grade of sunglasses as his ship draws nearer
>>>and nearer to <spoiler>
>>
>> And the reason he had to resort to sunglasses is that he turned
>> down the puppeteer's offer to paint the hull, which seemed to
>> be S.O.P.
>
>And/or the selectively and directionally opaque gimmick that
>_Lying Bastard_ and/or _Hot Needle of Inquiry_ had wasn't available yet.
>
>(I don't know how plausible it is for a substance to be opaque along
>one direction but transparent along most.)
That sounds like polarisation. /We/ can do that. You could take
apart a busted watch or calculator and play with the polarised
glass...
What you might want more, though, is directionally selected
reflectivity. Well, how about zillions of tiny mirrors in the material -
prism surfaces inside a crystal structure, perhaps - that reflect
incident energy back to where it came from?
Btw, does anyone really understand (I'm reading in
rec.arts.sf.written) the argument that became prominent recently,
about invented materials with a negative refractive index? There
was something in it about constructing "atoms" for the refractive
material that actually are relatively large particles with unusual
properties, and I came away thinking that the whole thing was in
one sense a fake, but a kind of fake that /works./
(There was something about either radioastronomy or radar, I
forget which, where, if I got this straight, the "atoms" were going to
be the size of small coins, or hex nuts??)
I can't remember what they planned to do with it, either. Look into
it and see the backs of their own heads?
Robert Carnegie at home, rja.ca...@excite.com at large
--
Surely no-one has read down to here. (from author Warren Ellis)