OT: Space Station Fun

A know-it-all is someone who obnoxiously pretends to know a great deal about topics they only know superficially.

A pedant will lecture you about it.

Irrelevant Bonus Fact: Did you know opossums are the only North American marsupials?

(Bonus irony included at no extra charge.)

Grins, James Arthur

But we were debating the utility of remotely controlled experiments in Earth orbit. They don't need to be autonomous.

Sagan seems to have missed that billions are already busily manufacturing bad copies of themselves, blissfully unconcerned about planets or consequences.

His premise is, accordingly, empirically contradicted.

Cheers, James Arthur

It is spelled MARSUPILAMI, and it looks like this:

:-)

The math has been done on moving Earth to a higher orbit. It just takes a little energy and a lot of precision. There's lots of rotational inertia in the asteroid belt, and it takes very little energy to slingshot an asteroid into a near-earth flyby, transferring inertia. Just do one of them every ten thousand years or so.

The asteroid nuke thing should work. Ablate a few million cubic meters off one surface and it will high-tail the opposite way.

low tail, at best, and in millimeters.

A rocket functions by sustained vectored explosive thrust, not popgun bursts.

Use a hundred nukes to carve out a perfect parabola in a single location on the rock, then lite off a couple hundred more within that cone in sequence and then *maybe* get some push. And that ONLY AFTER you find a way to stop it from rotating and orient the cone correctly to make said push. But it better be way out past Jupiter when you meet with it to get all that done in time.

But a rocket might have tons of fuel to burn. A nuke could ablate megatons off the surface of a comet or asteroid.

No, just detonate a megaton nuke a couple of kilometers from the rock. All the blast and light and gamma rays will deposit their energy in a thin surface layer of rock or ice. The mass ablated off will be gigantic. It's a flyby, no rondezvous needed, no tricky mechanisms. We have the nukes.

The sooner it's done, the less push is needed to make it miss Earth. Which is why we need a lot of telescopes, and the hardware to make the push.

Finally a use for the ISS, as a place to stage the interceptor rockets, maybe.

But what is their motivation for wasting all that energy? They're not replicating *them*.

We don't have it because we blew all the money on the shuttle.

OK...?

You must be on drugs.

Hey! I'll bet these may have been first "grown in space"...

The memristor.

All of that mass has to be lifted anyway, well, assuming you didn't mine the materials and make them in orbit. TANSAAFL.

How do you get the materials and fuel into LEO? Rope ladder and Sherpas? TANSTAAFL.

No, it's obviously you who doesn't get it. Certainly it matters. Energy is energy. Cost is cost. You're adding to both.

If I could understand what you said, it would still be wrong.

Have you ever heard of "staging"?

Fuel is free? Lift vehicles are free?

So now you not only have to lift the spacecraft into space but its manufacturing facility, as well. Good plan.

You're quite wrong but conservation of energy has never been your strong suit, DimBulb.

And manufacturing in space comes free?

That's what staging is for.

Cars don't need to be either, but that's where we're going. Military drones are going the same way.

Not sure it was a lower cost, at all. The N1, alone, was pretty damned expensive in both rubles and lives.

NO, not in this design. Even a staged craft that takes off from Earth has to be designed with planetary escape excursion event dynamics built into the design. The forces and vibration and atmospheric buffeting

A space STAGED design means the craft needs NO terrestrial launch design dynamic requisites. The fuel used to get the gear that far up is SAVED inasmuch as one no longer needs it just to get it up. A launch from space takes far less energy from THAT POINT onward. It matters not what it took to stage it there. ALL of the craft's design AND its fuel considerations are for mission adjustments and retro-fire events, not terrestrial escape.

None of the excursion craft design needs any aerodynamic shape at all.

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Feb 2015 10:18:01 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I just came across this:

Smallest bacteria ever.

The mars probes were positive about life in the dirt over there. (Viking was positive, and the latest ones were positive).

With less than 0.2 microns we do not even know, are not sure, what is living in our own drinking water, let alone body.

Life _EVERYWHERE_.

If you think of the logic, even if the first reproducing configuration happened by chance, it only needs ONE lottery win and it reproduces no end. This reminds me of the old electronics design rule: "If it can fail it will".

Translated to this subject: "If if can happen, it will". There are trillions (actually more than trillions) chemical reactions possible on a proto-earth or other planet. Life HAS to happen. quote me!

It makes more sense to work with probable explanations, rather than highly improbable ones.

That is a completely unjustifiable claim, no matter how it was meant and how it is interpreted (which could be in many ways).

Almost every attempt to extrapolate science or civilisation by a decade has failed - what makes you think you can extrapolate a few thousand years? Even if science is up to the task, why would you think anyone would have the resources, money, time, and political will to invest in something that would give such a tiny rate of return, over such an absurdly long time-span? About the only thing consistent enough to make predictions is human greed and short-sightedness - we will have ruined the earth and driven ourselves into a new dark ages long before anyone is sending probes to the nearest neighbours, never mind sending massive quantities of biological seeds to massive numbers of star systems.

I've seen possum families wandering the sidewalks here at night. We're a couple of blocks from Glen Canyon, where we have raccoons and coyotes and skunks and hawks, too.

Some of the local "exterminators" trap nuisance critters and toss them into the canyon instead of killing them.

It's cool to have this stuff in the middle of one of the densest-populated cities in the USA.