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Stories about science, the future, and weird true things.
San Francisco, 9:37 AM
Sun Nov 22
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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07:01 AM
[news.bbc.co.uk]
#tips
11/21/09
Not to mention that we have speech and technology, and have shown the ability to make other species extinct entirely by accident...
It doesn't much matter if supermonkeys somehow become the norm, we still win easily.
-Kle.
11/21/09
Weze allz gonna dyze?
11/21/09
[lhc.web.cern.ch]
11/21/09
[www.boston.com]
11/21/09
"A thumb, middle finger, and tooth removed from the corpse of Galileo Galilei, lost for a century, have been recovered. The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze are planning to put the relics on display next year.
I think the middle finger should be installed facing the Vatican."
That last line is just priceless!
11/21/09
Note the similarity between the LHC picture above and The Time Tunnel? Tune in next week for the exciting return of Tony Newman and Doug Phillips.
11/21/09
11/21/09
and the Internets go to.....
11/21/09
The question now is: will Tony come back singing?
One thing is for sure: the best (for the LHC) is indeed yet to come.
11/21/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
@gorehound: If resemblance is any indication then yea, I'd say we're doomed.
11/20/09
I have huge love for the LHC, but I can't help thinking everytime I see it, that it contains all the essential components of the largest circular mass driver [en.wikipedia.org] we could ever conceive of building.
For the love of G.K.O'Neill [en.wikipedia.org] (and Carl Sagan), why haven't we been able to get an international consortium together to build that?
For merely half of the cost of the LHC (or 25% of it, if it had been built in parallel with the LHC), we'd have a facility capable of launching several hundred tonnes of cargo into low earth orbit, all day, every day, for mere dollars-a-pound, for ever!
[The one in the photo is an artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver that was tech-spec'd and costed down to the last nut and bolt, a quarter of a century ago. Seriously, WTF?]
11/21/09
"artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver"
Vacuum has nothing to do with whether the mass driver is linear or circular. Moreover, considering that the Moon is much smaller than the Earth, any track laid down on its surface has a larger curvature than a similar track laid down on the Earth's surface, so a lunar mass driver isn't actually linear.
11/21/09
It is not the avowed (and wholely laudatory) purpose of the the LHC, that prompted my observation.
It is the fact that 60 countries pooled their fiscal, technological, intellectual and far more importantly (for the mass driver) their industrial resources, for a purpose that (as you say) can be of no immediate benefit to them [other than the (very considerable) benefit of participating in a purely scientific research endeavour].
There is a huge commonality of basic technologies between any superconducting supercollider (which is what the LHC is) and a mass driver.
Shorn of all its scientific research related equipment and sensors (ATLAS etc.) the LHC is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate the smallest amounts of mass possible, to relativistic (near light) speed.
An earthbound mass driver is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate [that's the point of it being circular, it allows lower g-forces on the cargo than a linear mass driver (you just send the cargo round and around until it reaches launch escape velocity)] a reasonable amount of cargo mass (kilos or tonnes) to earth escape velocity [17,000 mph (if you don't mind mixing an imperial measure with metric)] .
The LHC required an order of magnitude increase in the industrial production of superconducting materials, superconducting magnets, manufacturing and control technologies and trained a new generation of engineers to design, manufacture, deploy, operate and maintain them.
Most of these people (and the facilities that were created to fulfil this demand) are now unemployed (at least to any meaningful purpose and many in actuality) and will remain so for the foreseable future.
Not the most desirable result.
If you want to advance our understanding of the world (and the universe), the best way to do it is to combine as many countries (and scientists and technicians and bureaucrats) and their resources to achieve (and utilise) cheap, continuous access to space (orbital and deep space exploration and facilities, optical, radio, gamma, x-ray telescopes etc. etc)
[The fact that the original lunar mass driver was envisioned as a linear driver rather than circular (see earlier paragraph) was because its sole purpose was to accelerate 'buckets' of inert mass [either ore for orbital processing, or refined lunar products, aluminium, titanium and iron alloys, water (as ice) [the anticipated availability of which has now been recently confirmed :) ], Helium 3 (!) etc.] in as short a distance as possible, to minimise the total mass of manufactured components needed in the open vacuum available on the lunar surface.
It was a 'bootstrap' enabling technology, allowing the later building of much, much longer lunar surface linear drivers, capable of operating with accelerations compatible with organic materials, fragile manufactured components and living creatures (including and especially humans).
In actuality a linear drive would still be unacceptably long [much as this reply is:) ] operating at these acceleration levels on the lunar surface, as it still needs to be geometrically straight (or 'level', for a circular drive) in order to avoid the unacceptable lateral accelerations caused if it were to attempt to follow, rather than ignore completely (as the LHC does) the curvature of the planet's (0r moon's) surface.
It's a practical engineering cost/ benefit decision that dictates linear drive on the 'open to vacuum' lunar surface for cargo, circular drive for 'man-rated' purposes everywhere and circular drive for all purposes on the (or below) earth surface, where the drive must operate in a created and sustained vacuum, until its 'payload' has reached the required speed and is released tangentially from the circular drive.
In to the atmosphere (and very, very rapidly out of it) in the case of a mass driver and through a further vacuum and into an instumented target in the case of all superconducting supercolliders such as the LHC.]
I hope you appreciate the depth of commonality between these two disparate goals and the technologies needed (and already created with the LHC) to achieve them.
It is a truely fascinating area, where a great deal of time, thought, expertise and capital (most of it personal, rather than private or governmental) has been spent by many incredible people (some sadly, no longer with us) in the turning of a theoretical possibility, into a practical, fully engineered and costed probability.
I hope you find the wikipedia links (and their additional links) that I appended to my original comment rewarding, as it is only through more widespread knowledge, that this probabilty will be actualised.
Ad Astra.
11/20/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
(Not literally, though. It would probably break.)
11/20/09
11/21/09
11/20/09
What do you mean they can shoot with their feet?
11/20/09