[JimmyT]

vansig wrote:

I find your lack of imagination disturbing. Believe me we will be able to colonize EVERYTHING once we have fusion power.

Sure! Even in the Antarctic ice!

… as long as the cities are flexible enough and mobile enough 🙂

it’s not about whether we are able.

Antarctica is off limits by international treaty.
Fusion will not change that, and i dont want to change that.

I’d rather be mining minerals on asteroids

The only reason all nations have supported this agreement is because it is a practical impossibility at this point. Nations one and all will quickly abandon this treaty under one pretense or another if it becomes viable.

[JimmyT]

Mount such a robot on a truck to service solitary generators with little down time? Might be able to service several in a days time.

Have to be very carefull about leaving a invisable trail of radioactive carbon dust traveling from site to site. Even if radioactive for only a few hours.

[JimmyT]

There may well be good reasons to colonize Antarctica. Think of the vast mineral wealth which surely exists on that largely unexplored Continent. Unexplored at least from a geological standpoint.

[JimmyT]

Sorry for the delayed response. Been busy.

Yes you are right; we need to define what we mean by top and bottom of galaxies. I suggest the following definition:

It is pretty much accepted as Cannon that all spiral galaxies have at their core a super massive black hole. Maybe not the globular clusters, but the spiral ones. When this black hole is “feeding” it emits a one sided jet and we call it a quasar. This is really an outward manifestation of the orientation of the black hole’s magnetic field. Its magnetic moment, if you please.

I suggest that we call the side which emits the jet “top”.

Now, if the right-hand rule is universally true. (And I believe it is.) As viewed from the top all galaxies must rotate in the same direction. And as a corollary: the direction of rotation of a galaxy “clockwise or counter clockwise” will tell you which side will squirt out the jet if/when the black hole becomes active.

Or is my thinking on this muddled?

Yang and Lee and Madam Wu showed that CP invariance violation is demonstrated at atomic scales in the early 60’s. This would show that it is demonstrated in larger structures as well.

With regard to the antimatter question. I misunderstood. I reread the referenced paper. Makes sense now.

[JimmyT]

Interesting speculation, but I personally don’t buy it. This would suggest that galaxies which have opposite rotation would be comprised of antimatter.
I know what the standard comeback is for this criticism. It’s “The galaxies are so far apart that this can happen”. But I don’t buy this either. We have too many observations of colliding galaxies. With no apparent mutual annihilation events in evidence.
If rotational twisting of space is the reason for this parity violation it has to be at some larger scale then galaxies. (Hard to imagine but possible)

[JimmyT]

Brian H wrote: Did You Know?
And if not, why not? %-P 😆

Thanks Brian, I think that this one’s even more informative than the first one!

[JimmyT]

I saw a report recently on about an experiential advertising program which they are developing in England. It involves those LED bill boards, but with a twist. As you walk by cameras figure out who you are using facial recognition, then it figures out just what add to play to you based (I suppose) on your previous buying patterns.

[JimmyT]

JimmyT wrote:

Projections and predictions are easy to make, but they’re only as good as the facts they are based on. Facts become outdated very quickly. Any projection involving human behavior is even more difficult. Predicting the arrival of future technology, and what its impact will be at that time, is even more prone to extreme error, but it’s fun to try anyway. The pace of innovation is accelerating, so the world will be very different in 30 or 50 years. I can’t say how or how much it will be different, but it will be like the early 1900s compared to now. We are just scratching the surface of nano-tech, gene manipulation, fusion, brain mapping, social communication, robotics and AI. With even moderate advances in each of those areas, the future possibilities are awesome.

For years I have quoted or referred to an idea first put forward by the late Arthur Clark:

He basically stated that our view of the future tends to be linear. That is, we tend to foresee as much change in the next 50 years as has occurred in the last 50. The next 10 as has occurred in the last 10… etc.

But that’s not the way that progress occurs. It occurs exponentially. And the interesting thing about that is… If you take any linear equation starting at the zero zero axis and overlay it with any exponential equation. For at least a little bit the exponential equation will lie underneath the linear one. But eventually the exponential equation will always cross over and become greater than the linear equation.

So from a forecasting standpoint: our short term predictions tend to overstate progress. But long term our predictions tend to understate progress.

Just came across this video which illustrates how change is indeed occurring exponentially. http://youtu.be/cL9Wu2kWwSY

[JimmyT]

Breakable wrote:

Projections and predictions are easy to make, but they’re only as good as the facts they are based on. ..

..
So from a forecasting standpoint: our short term predictions tend to overstate progress. But long term our predictions tend to understate progress.
I would tend to agree with Aaron on this one. You can clearly see from mid-age posters that a lot of over-optimistic predictions failed to materialize
(flying cars, automated houses, futuristic cities, outer-planet colonies),
but they would have materialized in case fission became the source of plentiful, cheap and safe power, but it did not.

There is no disagreement here. The time intervals implied by Clark’s equations are arbitrary. Clearly the magazine covers and posters were overly optimistic. But perhaps we are still in that early stage where the linear view does surpass reality on some time frame. Perhaps looking ahead one century is not enough.

Cheap plentiful safe power is the goal here. So again, maybe they are just premature. As for the flying cars. Well, I just can’t wait for them to come crashing down on us surface dwellers as some nitwit is talking on his/her cellphone while flying his/her car. Some of the predictions were just not thought out.

[JimmyT]

AaronB wrote: Projections and predictions are easy to make, but they’re only as good as the facts they are based on. Facts become outdated very quickly. Any projection involving human behavior is even more difficult. Predicting the arrival of future technology, and what its impact will be at that time, is even more prone to extreme error, but it’s fun to try anyway. The pace of innovation is accelerating, so the world will be very different in 30 or 50 years. I can’t say how or how much it will be different, but it will be like the early 1900s compared to now. We are just scratching the surface of nano-tech, gene manipulation, fusion, brain mapping, social communication, robotics and AI. With even moderate advances in each of those areas, the future possibilities are awesome.

For years I have quoted or referred to an idea first put forward by the late Arthur Clark:

He basically stated that our view of the future tends to be linear. That is, we tend to foresee as much change in the next 50 years as has occurred in the last 50. The next 10 as has occurred in the last 10… etc.

But that’s not the way that progress occurs. It occurs exponentially. And the interesting thing about that is… If you take any linear equation starting at the zero zero axis and overlay it with any exponential equation. For at least a little bit the exponential equation will lie underneath the linear one. But eventually the exponential equation will always cross over and become greater than the linear equation.

So from a forecasting standpoint: our short term predictions tend to overstate progress. But long term our predictions tend to understate progress.

[JimmyT]

Is it possible that the magnetic field from the “Blake Coil” needs to be highly symmetrical to achieve repeatability?

[JimmyT]

He is talking about vacuum tube technology. Which is essentially what his device is. That technology was almost totally displaced by solid state devices. Transistors and diodes and such.

The plasmas in vacuum tubes are not in equilibrium. They do not have a Maxwellian energy distribution.

That having been said, I really don’t think he (Dr Bussard) was ever going to reach the density/confinement times/temperatures needed to achieve ignition using his methodologies.

There were some advantages to the old vacuum tube technologies. You could achieve a higher level of amplification in a single stage with them then with solid state devices. They were quirky beasts though. Always displaying wierd harmonics, (Feedback). They kept trying to overcome these problems by adding extra grids. The first tube amplifiers were triodes, containing just an electron emitter, a control grid and a collector. The final ones were pentodes. Containing three grids between the emitter and the collector. They were energy hogs too. Last I knew radio stations still used tube technology for their final amplification stage while broadcasting because they were capable of higher wattage.

Any amplification device is essentially a switch. If the diamond/laser switches ever get fully developed then I’m sure they will be used as amplifiers.

[JimmyT]

There is a caveat to biodigestion. The microorganisms involved require warm temperatures. Warmer than we have here in North America during the half of the year. So you have to provide some heat source to warm the digester, and this somewhat lessens the benefit. They use this method extensively in India where the temperatures are somewhat warmer year-round.
Now, if we only had some source of low level waste heat to do that. Hmm…..

[JimmyT]

This may not answer the question, the question being an economic one. But South Africa decided several decades ago to limit their economic dependence on imported oil. They had extensive coal reserves but little oil. So much of the country’s liquid hydrocarbon needs are met (NOW) by synthetic fuel made by the Fischer-Tropsch method using Lurgi gassifiers. The name of the state run company is SASOL.

[JimmyT]

NoSmoke wrote:

If p-B11 does work, and works well, would p-N14 also be a good possibility (not sure if there would be any great incentive to go there though).

If the neutrons produced by p-B11 side reactions are not energetic enough to induce radioactivity, what happens to them (do they decay or just hang around)?

There is a good reason to prefer boron (atomic number 5) to nitrogen(atomic number 7) as a fuel. It’s the problem of minimizing x-ray emissions. X-ray emission increases with the square of the atomic number … so boron has 25 times the x-ray emissions of hydrogen. Nitrogen would have 49 times the emissions of hydrogen. Almost twice as much.

Note: All this talk of x-rays can get confusing. These x-rays are not the reaction x-rays which we talk of harvesting for energy. (although some of them might be recaptured in this way) These are x-rays given of throughout the compression phase and reaction phase, and which tend to cool the reactants. They also tend to be somewhat softer (longer wavelength, less energy) than the reaction x-rays.

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