1

Technology / Re: Could private space flight have taken off earlier? Why now?

« on: 21/10/2013 23:55:42 »

Jeff Greason, founder of XCOR, said this of the Challenger disaster:
"As a student at CalTech, with no special expertise in the area, I had heard of the problem with the O-rings. When the Challenger disaster occurred, i said, 'that looks like an O-ring problem. But it can't be - they already solved that problem."
He then goes on to talk of his feeling of frustration with the culture of NASA and the American aerospace industry that inspired him to found XCOR. Elon Musk talks of similar frustration. Both men left the computer / internet industry to found rocket companies. Both men feel that the approach NASA and companies like Boeing were taking to reaching space was fundamentally flawed. Musk is focussing on reuseable rockets, Greason and Burt Rutan are focussing on space planes.
Both these tactics seem like things that could have been developed a long time ago. Was there some reason they couldn't be?
DeGrasse Tyson referred specifically to hauling freight to LEO, that it should have been a job handed over to private industry long ago. I'm not sure what video i saw that in, but i believe he said 'decades' ago. He doesn't believe for a second that SpaceX or anyone else in private industry can get to Mars, much less establish a colony. That he still feels requires much deeper pockets and the ability to take risk that only a government can endure
How long ago did launching satellites for private groups develop into a profitable endeavour? Is that what made the difference?

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Technology / Could private space flight have taken off earlier? Why now?

« on: 21/10/2013 21:23:34 »

I watched Niel Degrasse Tyson the other day say private space flight should have happened a long time ago. He's an expert, but i still kind of wonder if that is unfair.
Space X, the Skylon project, XCOR, Virgin Galactic, Planetary Resources, Orbital Sciences (although they have been around for a while and seem pretty old guard) - why is this happening now?

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: What killed my dog - anaphylaxis, africanized bees, overdose?

« on: 25/09/2013 21:29:40 »

We are in a small town in central Mexico. The vet we use is as good as it gets. He has come to trust my husband's ability with animals, so he does things like leave syringes with prepared meds for him to inject later. And he left her with an I.V..

The bees arrived uninvited from the local environment. Whatever they are, there are plenty more like them around. There hive boxes are quite near a railway line, trains often toot as they pass. Firecrackers go off very often with very loud bangs whenever people in the community celebrate something. The contractor tends the garden for absent landlords. He was just using a weed-whacker. That is something he has done every couple of weeks for the last four months. My husband uses one too, in fact. None of these things caused the hive to swarm.

We asked the contractor what had happened, and he said the weed-whacker was a new, bigger model, and that maybe he got too close and some debris hit the bee box.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: What killed my dog - anaphylaxis, africanized bees, overdose?

« on: 25/09/2013 20:46:14 »

I see at the link there is actually no anti-venom for Africanized bees. I don't know what her treatment was then.

Today i found a half-length mesh bee-suit by the front door of the house, and realized my husband had placed it there in case of emergency. If i had found it yesterday, i could have saved her. I was panicked, i didn't take the steps i needed to take. She had a good life, if it wasn't that i know i could have saved her if i'd known what to do, i wouldn't really feel bad.

Thanks for the info and link, i guess that settles it.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: What killed my dog - anaphylaxis, africanized bees, overdose?

« on: 25/09/2013 20:39:06 »

She weighed maybe 25 kg, and was 9 years old. She was in decent shape for her age. My husband was home a while ago and said when he arrived to help yesterday she left the front gate as he was driving in. He said her head was covered in bees. He almost opened the door to get her in, but his nephew was in the car too. By the time he had recovered our bee suits from the garage and we had suited up, she was gone. I didn't see her like that. I had no idea it got that bad.

But i thought once she got the treatment, she would be okay. It was maybe an hour and a half before the vet got there and gave her the shots. They called it an anti-venom.

The bees will be moved this evening to a friend's rural property. This area is farms, but that neighbour is too close.

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Physiology & Medicine / What killed my dog - anaphylaxis, africanized bees, overdose?

« on: 25/09/2013 16:28:29 »

We're pretty upset right now about losing our dog last night. I just don't feel sure what happened, and i'd like to know.

We have bees. A contractor for a neighbour upset them yesterday and they swarmed. She was stung a lot. She took off in the chaos and we didn't recover her for maybe an hour, we found her a kilometer away. The vet came to the house. I didn't see the treatment, but there was at least one injection, and he left her with an I.V. drip attached to her and we had two more needles we were supposed to give her today. She had been lethargic before he got here but she was exhausted and in pain. She didn't throw up, i didn't see any drooling. She refused water and food. She has been stung before, in fact once she was stung a number of times during another bee fiasco (we thought would never be repeated).

We thought she was out of danger. She was woozy but we attributed that to the painkillers and continuing exhaustion. She was wagging her tail sort of at random so i thought she was high. She vomitted a little once, but was clearly conscious, i just cleaned it up. An hour after that from another room we heard her howl in alarm, once, for a few seconds. By the time we reached her she was already unconscious. She convulsed once a few seconds after that, and that was it.

This is Mexico, and the bees are wild - they moved into our property and we decided not to kill them. We have had them for several years. From what we know, they could be a mixed breed, crossed with Africanized bees.

The vet has looked after our animals for years, i trust him. But i want to search farther afield for an explanation, because if what he gave her was a factor, he might not answer honestly, good man though he is. What i have found so far online doesn't give me a clear picture of what killed her. I feel terrible that i didn't get her safely inside sooner, didn't see signs she was in danger in the evening, didn't know what to do. :-'(

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New Theories / Re: Life: Does it show that Entropy has a challenger?

« on: 09/10/2012 17:10:11 »

damocles - oooooo. That clears some things up. It was brash of me to involve entropy in this.
I need to find a way to frame my philosophical inclinations in scientifically sound terms. I'll probably take another stab at some point.

butch, once intelligence expands beyond a certain point, nothing can destroy it, except possibly another intelligence. The likelihood of natural occurrences destroying an intelligence spread across several star systems or further approaches nil.

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New Theories / Re: What if we find life beyond the Earth, how does physics get rewritten?

« on: 09/10/2012 16:56:22 »

A recent episode of The Big Bang Theory (all hail!) mentioned the anthropic principle, and i looked it up and got to the version called the final anthropic principle, or the omega point, according to the thinking of Frank Tipler, but better explored by David Deutsch.
It has been attacked as wishful thinking, but i would prefer to call it emotionally speculative. When it comes to philosophies of everything, which i'd say thinking types always have to come up with sooner or later, one's personal preferences of course are primary determinants. But if you stay within the bounds of logic and scientific method, what's to complain about? Such world views function as personal inspiration, and to others mostly as pointers reminding one of how very, very little we know, and how certain it is that there are great big things out there we can't imagine and would never expect.

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New Theories / Re: Life: Does it show that Entropy has a challenger?

« on: 06/10/2012 03:49:23 »

Damocles, i will most certainly look for that book. I may not get to it for a couple of years, as i have mentally tiring things on my plate, but it is a matter of sufficient passion for me to pursue.

But i'll still suggest that reducing net entropy may well be possible for an intelligence that manages to organize on a scale that is sufficiently fine. I naturally loved this phys.org post on an experiment seeming to validate the possibility of Maxwell's demon.

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New Theories / Re: What if we find life beyond the Earth, how does physics get rewritten?

« on: 05/10/2012 18:14:42 »

I'm finally getting back to this, i got distracted.
The discussion  of chaos and feedback on that BBC show gets towards what i am trying to look at, but i agree with yor_on - life is another ball game. The current math describing the emergence of order is the beginning of the answer, maybe.
Perhaps i just yearn for a more vigorous sense of wonder in science. For instance, there is a large camp, i understand, building in the world of physics asserting that either time doesn't really exist, or that it is a dimension which doesn't inherently move  in any particular direction. Doesn't that immediately imply that from a broader perspective we don't have access to, ordered systems are connected across all time? And doesn't that then mean that if an intelligence could access that broader perspective and act across it, its organizing actions, from our perspective, would seem to spontaneously arise at a certain moment and then develop? And if our own intelligence isn't extinguished, doesn't it seem inevitable that we would eventually be that intelligence that bridges that veil? Say it takes a billion years to reach that point, so what? Once you do, you are god. Almost literally, minus the quaint anthropomorphism and moralism.
I remember when every scientist (who got on tv) claimed that finding life elsewhere was extremely unlikely because it was just too complex to arise twice. I suppose that the diligence necessary to good science makes this seem like just too many speculative leaps, but they seem to me like solid probabilities. How can we propose that time doesn't fundamentally exist or doesn't fundamentally have a direction, and then assume that nothing lives outside the limitations imposed by time? Especially since the scales are quickly tipping towards a world-view in which the arising of life is commonplace.

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New Theories / What if we find life beyond the Earth, how does physics get rewritten?

« on: 04/09/2012 00:30:51 »

I'm taking another stab at this one, i had a much longer-winded version. If we find life elsewhere, which seems increasingly plausible, how could that not imply that the universe has a powerful tendency to organize into incredibly complex systems? After all, one of the most fundamental aspects of life is that it adapts and spreads, as much as possible. Once it becomes intelligent, something that strikes me as bound to happen where ever a biosphere reaches sufficient complexity, the imperative to spread becomes astronomical - unless the intelligent species is destroyed, it will eventually spread beyond its own planet. Any discovery of life elsewhere, all the more if we discover it more than once, is a powerful indication that the universe is organizing on a vast scale, and that this is inherent in its nature. That mechanism would need to be described.

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New Theories / Re: Life: Does it show that Entropy has a challenger?

« on: 04/09/2012 00:10:13 »

It always confounds me when i find something fascinating and apparently nobody else does. Is it too controversial? Is it too broad? Do people shy away from anything that says 'god', even if the concept is being cited only to better visualise a self-organizing mechanism inherent to our universe?
What if we find life in a dozen different places in the next 50 years, something that no longer seems so unlikely? Imagine a different redrafting of fundamental physics if you will, but it still seems to be that it would have to start struggling with how it is that extremely, excruciatingly highly organized systems keep popping up, and then go about spreading as much as possible.

In an effort to make this more 'commentable', i'm going to start a new thread like that last paragraph. Hopefully taking that angle makes it a worthy conversation. Salud.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 03/09/2012 23:56:17 »

Well, i only used the word laughable in relation to what a supernova at 10 ly would do.  It is a serious problem, i don't discount that.

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New Theories / Life: Does it show that Entropy has a challenger?

« on: 01/09/2012 20:05:28 »

We are all waiting to see if there is life on other planets, searching for it with increasing fervour as our ability to do so balloons. Piecemeal indications seem to show that the preconditions for life occur far more often than we suspected or dared hope even a decade ago. We are also learning that life can survive in circumstances far more hostile than we believed in the recent past. Many have reflected on the sea-change in human attitude that would follow the discovery of any life elsewhere in the universe, be it only lowly micro-organisms.

The public dialogue never seems to explore what this would imply about the universe itself. If we are not the only instance of life anywhere, ever, the idea of life being a stupendous fluke would be dealt a huge blow. So what is the alternative to that? Wouldn't that necessarily imply that the universe tends to spawn life where conditions permit? And does that not then also imply that the universe has a tendency towards organization, not just in isolated pockets, but as part of its very fabric? That however fundamental entropy is, all the forces and properties and particles of the universe add up to the creation of extraordinary organization as well, that could potentially be of similar power?

However speculative that is, the scope of its implications is so big i think it deserves a big place in our collective consciousness. Especially since it is increasingly plausible. Even more especially since we are the most elaborate example known of that process. Sure, lots of other organisms are just as complicated and specialized as we are, but we are the only one single-mindedly programmed to go out and create more organization, everywhere. We hate entropy. If we are not ourselves destroyed by chaos we can't control, we will attack chaos on every front possible. Currently we kind of hate ourselves for the destruction we have caused in our new capacity as rulers of the Earth. The chaos we have caused, the entropy we have increased. Once we make it through this phase, we'll do everything possible to put a stop to that nonsense. That may seem inconsequential, if we imagine ourselves in 100 years. But what if we imagine ourselves in 10,000 years? A million years?

Perhaps we will soon discover the first tentative signs of life elsewhere in our galaxy. If we don't, the case here is not disproved. What would disprove it is no life elsewhere, and our own destruction. I too am concerned that this is possible, but i think the window for such a possibility will close within a thousand years. If we aren't destroyed, and we don't find life elsewhere, we will set about creating it where ever possible, and giving it the power to spread as quickly as possible. Despite the astronomical barriers, i'd say an intelligent species - one that we have made, that is better adapted, if we ourselves are insufficient - will live on another planet thanks to human effort within 200 years. In another solar system. Soon after, many other solar systems will be in the same state. At that point, there is no known cataclysm, even on intergalactic scales, that could wipe us out. Then you have only to read Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, or hear David Deutsch talk about our place in the cosmos to get another perspective on what i'm talking about. We'd mount all out war on entropy. We might do a pretty good job of it.

Never mind which side would eventually win such a battle. Is not the implication still that the universe, due to its inherent properties, not only produces life, but produces intelligence? Nothing succeeds like intelligence, whether it be the ability to think abstractly, or the ability to accurately calculate in a fraction of a second the actions necessary to capture prey, or escape from a predator, or the observational tools to locate food. Separating the emergence of intelligence from the emergence of life, and separating the emergence of life from the fundamental operations of the universe, is a false division. In broad terms, it is why we argue about god. Mock the simplistic nature of god concepts if you will, but some concepts are not so simplistic, and anyhow, perhaps the point is that even in the childhood of our species, just now drawing to a close, we recognized and tried to express the fundamental truth that we are the culmination, in our astronomical neighbourhood, of the universe's act of creation. That our purpose is to propagate that creative force to the best of our ability. That this isn't random, it is intentional, for lack of a better word. Call it a god principle, if you will.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 01/09/2012 17:57:45 »

graham.d - now that it is Saturday, i'm tackling that excellent arxiv article. Thanks for supplying the link!

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 01/09/2012 17:56:32 »

yor_on, environmental issues are indeed going to get a lot worse before they get better, and i for one believe that we will be forced to do extensive environmental engineering in order to avoid a cataclysm. Perhaps that is why i am more interested in post-apocalyptic fiction that i used to be, and why it is so in fashion in general. But i have faith in humanity. We have not quite become as gods, but considering how powerful we have become, how quickly, i don't think we should be too hard on ourselves for our rookie screw-ups. Give us another 50 to 100 years, and we will be the caring stewards of the earth, the role evolution has obviously placed upon us.

Anyhow, it is deserving of another thread. I imagine there are several. From a post-supernova standpoint, our little seasonal ozone holes are laughable.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 31/08/2012 16:18:58 »

I am confused by some parts of the New Scientist article. 130 ly is very close, but i thought the atoms from the shock wave travelled so slowly they wouldn't be closely associated with affects from the radiation waves even in geological time. Guess i'm wrong there. And i'm confused about why marine molluscs are the species that really got it. Even living under several meters of water? Are they just the species that show up in the fossil record, but many other species died too (especially plants)?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 30/08/2012 23:21:23 »

Btw, i'm guessing that when the New Scientist article said 'Clayton says 60Fe would be blasted towards Earth when high energy neutrons from the supernova core smack into iron atoms in its outer shell.', what it meant was that neutrinos were blasted towards Earth and created 60Fe when they interacted with iron atoms already in the crust. Allow me to take a moment to express how much it annoys me when science magazines, of whatever reputation, make mistakes like this. I'd adore being paid to write that stuff, how many people get that chance? And yet these mags have so much staff who are obviously shaky on a lot of 1st year university science, and even their editors don't catch it. And the public is mis-informed.

(Scratch that re: this New Scientist article - a closer reading shows i didn't get it right. But still. I jump the gun partly because i've found errors in mags so often.)

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the Earth be affected by a supernova really close by, say 10 ly?

« on: 30/08/2012 23:10:14 »

So, a few days after the gamma ray burst, when the small number of people who had sufficient warning and an option stick their heads out of their bomb shelters or sub-basements or subway tunnels or what have you on the planet's near side, they'd find all people, plant and animal life on the surface dead or dying from massive gamma radiation doses. The whole planet would still be dealing with the ultraviolet radiation that follows the GRB, meaning even on the far side, most or maybe all vegetation would be dead or dying, and all animal life not able to take sufficient shelter would be nastily sun-burnt (dying-star-burnt). A stripped off ozone layer would make that even worse, and ground-level ozone may also have been generated in sufficient quantities to affect living organisms. Marine organisms would be alright, unless they were sensitive to the huge inundation of normally rare isotopes of various elements generated by the radiation, or they were affected by the run-off of rotting dead stuff from the land.

Presumably all electronics on the near side would be fried, and maybe most of the stuff on the far side too.  Extreme weather would likely occur for decades.

Who needs zombie apocalypse shows? I'd rather watch this series.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do you calculate the total heat energy absorbed by a solid heated on 1 side?

« on: 30/08/2012 22:37:11 »

Wow, that's neat about the Austrian technique and the power of clippings and rot.

I got data on the specific heat of the material we want to use, its thermal conductivity, and on the light energy that falls on each m2 on an average day of each month in our building location. I have put together a spreadsheet with that data, and the data on heat loss through the building envelope, based on a rough plan, and it seems that we can reasonably hope to extend the dates when it would be a comfortable temperature inside to between about mid-March to the end of November. I think we could also keep it above freezing most of the rest of the year. The building would be done in summer so it would start out warm. Also, we plan to install insulated shutters that would cover all the south windows (the only windows) whenever there isn't enough sun to justify them being open, and the whole foundation will be just as well insulated as the exterior walls - something i think people sometimes neglect in projects like this.

After a while i started to worry, though, that the thick floor and walls would not suck up all the heat energy coming in the windows on sunny days fast enough to avoid losing a big portion of it back out the windows - that the air would heat up more and pass the heat right back to the windows. I have read that greenhouses heat up surprisingly quickly on sunny days even in very cold weather, but of course the heat isn't held, and shortly after sundown they are as cold as ever. The situation we are contemplating is very different, but the problem of temperature fluctuation has some similar dynamics. Thus the struggle with how quickly the heat gets absorbed - not how much will penetrate a given thickness, or how much that raises the (average) temperature of the mass being heated, but how much heat gets into it, total, each hour, when subjected to the heat source of sun directly on it, or air that is warmer than it is. The energy needed to heat it adequately does indeed come in the windows, according to my data. But will it stay there? There's the rub.

After scrounging data some more, and doing a very rough graph of the heat absorption curve and a simplistic calculation of the area under it, it seems that it will, handily. But i'm still going over that.

Your name seems familiar. Did i talk to you about this project before? I've been playing with ideas for many months.