your leader has daunting decision

[BudBuddha]

Gee Benji, no matter what you do or say, you are always the same young, lovable duece you always have been, smug in your arrogance, insulting and dismissive in your retorts. That doesn't make you any closer to correct, but at least you are predictable.

"Experimental Design" was actually a 3rd year required course for my psych major, one of the 4 majors I was working on at that time. You cannot forget that I spent more years at university than you have been alive thus far, can you? Do not worry though, you will eventually be able to catch up with me, if you keep working hard at it........for a few decades.

"Course I won't be sitting still waiting for you.......

My favourite university class was actually (graduate) Combinatorics, which you have no doubt taken as a spurious elective in your' spare time and will be thrilled to tell us all about...when you get the time. The cap for that class (IMHO) was the CIA presentation on why we should all go work for them after.....no doubt you enjoyed that as well.

I am not going to explain exactly how those ion drives are performing better than chemical rockets. You are smart enough to Google that up yourself and become enlightened on your own. Try a few of the science mags if Google fails you on that.

There is a charity out there that is quietly buying the old, surplus and outdated solar cell panels off of the after - market, hooking them up with a few old electronics and giving them out as systems for free to backwater villages in India and Africa. This is giving those places radio and tv broadcasts, electrical lighting and pumping well water for them. Yeah, solar is still expensive for direct conversion to electricity, but the passive heating panels work well now and they are pretty cheap to build. The technology is indeed improving quickly, from amorphous substrates to efficiency increases up to 42% for new cells vs 12% - 14% for the old single crystal cells. The number of working solar systems is impressive now, when we get some kind of transmission/storage scheme together they are going to make a significant difference in how we do stuff.

Here is a link to a low budget direct - gain solar heating panel design for Northern latitudes:

http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/Astro/SC_Types.html

The type 3 design works the best, it is what I have.

[Flood]

Watch shuttle launch live!

Very cool.


http://www.spacevidcast.com/live/?STS-127-take5

[Modular Moon]

Watch shuttle launch live!

Very cool.


http://www.spacevidcast.com/live/?STS-127-take5

that is a nice site than you

it looks like we should reconsider ion powerplants a technology we had previously cast aside prematurely it would seem



New Ion Drive Could Get Us to Mars Quickly
Saturday, July 25, 2009

It's a revolutionary new space propulsion system that may get us to Mars a lot faster.

The biggest hindrance to a manned Mars mission is the sheer amount of time it takes to get there — six months using conventional rocket engines.

All that time, astronauts would be subjected to harsh solar radiation, from which people on Earth — and aboard the space shuttle — are protected by the Earth's magnetic field.

But a new twist on an old idea may cut the Mars travel time to six weeks.

The As Astra Rocket Company is developing a new ion engine, New Scientist magazine reports.

Conventional ion engines blast a small stream of charges particles to propel a spacecraft. They start slow but can build up tremendous speeds over time.

Still, the regular ion engine wouldn't get us to Mars very fast.

So Ad Astra uses superpowered magnets to heat the ion stream — and would mount a nuclear reactor on a Mars-bound craft to make it even more powerful.




MM

[jesus]

that's all nice and wishy washy, but the fact is you are not going to produce the power output with batteries or hydrogen cells long enough to move a ship or plane, period. nothing you said even remotely addresses that point. great, nikola tesla had some crude robotics down almost 200 years ago. he was also probably humanity's greatest physics geniuses, and he had no answer to this problem either. not even close.

Tesla invented an electric car that didnt need batteries. Just a small receiver. I guess that makes you wrong again, he had that 'problem' whipped.

[benjammin]

tesla's wireless transmission of power was a shitty parlour trick at best, and that technology still sucks. not to mention i was specifically talking about motors that need more power than batteries can provide anyway. try again.

budbuddha, nothing you just said addresses the point you were trying to dismiss in the first place: that technology is nowhere close to being able to replace the combustion engine for many of the applications we need to live like this. shipping. air travel. heavy industry, particularly hydraulic machinery, etc. nor any explanation why in response to my pointing that out you felt the need to go off on a tangent about an experimental design course that makes your opinion superior, or how i want to rape the planets somehow. i think we can produce most or all of our ELECTRICAL consumption renewably with existing technology, but that power is just not versatile enough. fossil fuel is totally portable and offers very high energy/volume. the replacement for that is still pretty far in the future.

[jesus]

tesla's wireless transmission of power was a shitty parlour trick at best

lol, the man responsible for virtually our whole electric system was probably best known for his shitty parlour tricks

[Hax]

If Tesla was around today, even he'd admit powering cars using inductive currents makes no sense. Conventional electric rails a la slot car or overhead lines with roof pantographs (nearly century old streetcar tech) combined with batteries for roads greater autonomy on not so equipped makes far better sense.

[BudBuddha]

budbuddha, nothing you just said addresses the point you were trying to dismiss in the first place: *** that technology is nowhere close to being able to replace the combustion engine for many of the applications we need to live like this.

The "***" is where you have left what we call an "implied qualifier". When we read that, we assume that you are stating something along the lines of "as far as I know". You though, do not know that, nor do I. To the contrary, I am aware that much research and development is currently going on that addresses this very issue. Hybrid autos are currently available and mass market electrics are due out starting next year. As those are built, the bugs will get worked out and they will get better.

This is reminiscent of the old "you just can't make a car that doesn't need lead in the fuel" argument or the "there is no replacement for the asbestos in auto brakes" contention that I once heard much to - do about. Now we take those changes for granted and our city air is much cleaner than it once was. Now it is time to take yet another step forward and go all electric, even if it means that we must change how we do some stuff and develop some new things. We call that "progress".

Yeah, Tesla was right about that "120 volts alternating current" thing Edison disagreed with him on. I notice that radar, radio and fluorescent lighting seems to still be around as well. Good job, Nicola!

[JapanFreak]

It's never possible to rationalise basic research when there's even one hungry mouth to feed if one wants to wear those blinkers. The problem is that basic research is what makes everything else involving technology possible, and there almost no possible way to even make informed guesses about where money spent on basic research might pay huge dividends. There will always be want and hungry mouths and there will always also be a need for basic research. If that's too hard to get your head around, then just don't- it won't be any less true for your not having done so.

I think that most of us accept that the real challenge in the coming years is going to be food and water shortages here in Earth. I'd guess that the money would be better spent on research here on Earth. Our seas are in peril and people are throwing money at the moon. We don't need 'space' to push the boundaries of research, we could do that here. What we can't do is fill the seas up with spy satilltes and weapons in order to keep those hungry mouths from rising up and killing whitey on the moon.

[Hax]

Food and water shortages as well as the dying oceans are no mystery to solve and have almost nothing to do with how money is spent. The elephant in the room nobody wants to address is human overpopulation, and the answer to all those problems is beyond simple: fewer humans. Breeders don't generally like facing up that they are the real problem though.