OT: Space Station Fun

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You do go on and on about us as if there were something wrong with 
the US's founding fathers being tax evaders, but had we followed 
your lead, and acquiesced, we'd be just another British colony 
doling out dollars and British "justice" to your underlings.

You certainly know twaddle. You live it.

You're lying again but that's certainly not news.

Both evolution and civilization seem to make, on the average, progress, although the details can be noisy. Somewhere in the universe, it's likely that a civilization did manage to make it 1000 years ahead of our current levels technical and social progress; and probably some didn't. Heck, it's like evolution: the species that you see around are the ones that got lucky and survived and evolved.

Chaotic systems can make average progress. Turbulent flow is chaotic, but a fan still moves predictable amounts of air.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

That's a better argument than you've had so far.

However, if our current civilisation gets wiped out by "noise" (world war, disease, meteor strike, etc.), it's going to be a lot harder for the next lot that comes along, now that we have dug up much of the accessible coal, oil, and metallic minerals that we have relied on. If something knocks us back to the stone age, the bronze age is not going to happen when there is no copper and tin around.

r.

It's called brain-storming. It helps if the participants know more about th e subject than you appear to know about electronics. Most electronic system design is carried out more prosaically, by using the latest device or tech nique to do the same old job better or more cheaply, but occasionally peopl e will look for radically different solutions. When they find them, they ta ke longer than two weeks to reduce to practice.

He probably means Jon Gertner's "The Idea Factory - Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" ISBN 978-1-59420-328-2.

Most of the great innovations from Bell Labs didn't depend on brainstorming , but quite a few of them did depend on having a lot of clever people with very diverse expertise on the same site. Jon Elston singles out the silicon solar cell - originally called a "solar battery" as a prime example of the advantages of propinquity.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The Curie's - mother and daughter - had little to do with uranium fission. You might have been thinking of

who never got closer to the US than Sweden. She was Jewish, and had left Germany before she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out the theory of nuclear fission.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

There will be lots of copper (pipes, wires) and tin (lead-free electronics in junkyards) and bronze (Statues of Stalin and Reagan) around, all already mined!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

rown

,so

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ue to

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order.

.

onsidered most advanced."

y HAS to follow, or people simply die,

es no longer a civilization.

when reaching the moon,

hile they cannot do basic math,

monitored like a child 24/7 to

king over.

hat even makes you more stupid.

ially N Americans,

republican wars,

efinition of 'advanced'.

China has its own space station,

huge loans from Japan, China, etc,

orld, no long term vision, no clear line,

n' will all be washed away.

f the technological advances and skilled workforce for which it's best know n.

ak of the Empire, French was considered the universal language.

Only by the French.

English isn't universal - only wide-spread. The fact that American scientis ts refuse to read scientific papers in any language other than English (and are reluctant to read papers published in non-American journals that aren' t Nature) has made English a scientific lingua franca, as Latin used to be.

There are quite a few English speakers around - the US accommodates the big gest single collection of English speakers, but the UK and the former Briti sh Empire collectively accommodate more.

on

Since the US was part of the British Empire when it became English-speaking , it seems odd to deny the primacy of the British Empire in spreading the l anguage.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

He just doesn't want it to be "The Night Chicago Died"...

On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Mar 2015 14:09:07 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Well, I lived for 4 years in a Indian style ashram, 'ora et labora' or in English 'pray and work', that is an other investigative part of my life, I try things. Happiness does not depend on the size of your house, or the amount of money in your pocket.

But modern society like US is in fact a make believe world, and sells on the promise that if you buy this and this, THEN you will be happy. So like a dog with a bone in front of its nose you run and run and run, everybody does it, your friends do it, your enemies do it, so it must be right. And your priest tells you to go fight for that bone. It is all illusion I recall, you.. OTOH playing with all the toys is interesting and can keep your busy all your life.

So, and good thing too.

On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Mar 2015 16:51:38 -0600) it happened John Fields wrote in :

From a mil POV, a fraction of a m/s change would hit the enemy... (You Did Not Read It Here).

On a sunny day (Mon, 02 Mar 2015 02:37:08 +0100) it happened David Brown wrote in :

No, that cannot be correct? The stuff does not leave earth (not yet anyway), they just dig up the waste, Ipods, cars, silverware, and manuals how to reuse it. Much simpler for them. Some stuff may even still work.

Of course the elements don't leave the earth (although some might end up deep in the sea). But it is all in different forms, different compounds, and different structures. The ancient Egyptians had no problem digging lumps of gold out of rock using stone tools - they would not have managed to isolate it from a pile of dead telephones even if the phones have a higher percentage gold by weight.

Yes, but delivered as 10000 x 2MT would be even more devastating.

There is a "just right" goldilocks size for maximum devastation if you intend to trash the planet with MT class warheads.

Ballpark 10^9 /day at 10^-3 g each ~ 1T/day (taking a high estimate)

Most of which burn up in the upper atmosphere harmlessly producing magnetic black dust you can recover from plastic gutters with a magnet. The odd kg or tens of kg chunk ends up in the ocean sometimes on land.

Say 400T year to include all meteorites and 50km/s = 5x10^4m/s as a typical impactor speed.

So as a single impactor it would be KE=1/2.400.25x10^8 J = 5x10^11 J

If I have done the sums right that would be a 120T TNT airburst which might break a few windows on the ground but probably not much more damage unless it came in very steep.

Idle missile defence computer systems often research meteor streams (and space junk) when they can see no other data of interest and have published some interesting papers on the topic. eg

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Mon, 02 Mar 2015 10:43:56 +0100) it happened David Brown wrote in :

I dunno, it is easy to make a fire and melt some stuff. But look what you will find : say you find a BACO, things like that will probably survive. How many years did it take for people to come up with nuts and screws, I mean, plenty of nuts around of course, but the mechanical ones.. Aping is at the basis of humanity (or apes if you will), so getting clear examples of how to do it in large quantities would give them a head start. Of course species would not fall back that far likely, some would still use available technology.

Clear sheet metal in the form of scrap cars is easier to use than ore, etc etc.

Our house makes us happy. Our bed and our showers and our coffee pot make us happy. Our cars make us happy. My oscilloscopes make me happy. I suppose we are fairly physical creatures.

Being busy and productive makes most people happy.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

But one thing about that still bugged me, could not figure it out: What music would he play when he watches Washington burn ?? (Like Nero was playing I don't know what). Some country and western, or some Williams song, or 'Rawhide?'

*was watching that old Blues Brothers movie, still on hardidks), no, did not figure. And then this song came to me: 'Toole/impossibledream-lyrics.htm

Could be :-)

Again, the object is to change the orbit, by circa 1 m/s. If it breaks up the object in the process, that shouldn't matter. An ablation push might not break it up, and likely would move all of it, intact or not.

Knowing more about the structure of comets and asteroids would certainly help plan the mission. Sounds like the "dirty snowball" conjecture was wrong.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

That requires a rondezvous and a landing. A nuke would work with a flyby.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com