741–750 of 754 posts
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That's because that number is a reference to a plurality of years, not a plurality of trillions.
If you say so, I guess I'm just wrong about this. Thank you for trying to clarify for me, instead of just downvoting me into oblivion like everyone else.
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Moore's Law applied to DNA complexity hints that life could be way older than Earth itself: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...
I suspect something's not right, on their graph, mammals are on the top, but this flower has 50 times bigger genome than a human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_japonica
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> could have been You write like its all over. Pretty odd.
No, it's written like a thought on how we as a species would have evolved given the possibility of visiting a close planet instead of the moon at the same age of technology. I mean with closer proximity it would have been a race to a neighboring planet rather than touching down on the moon, and where we are now we could have feasibly accomplished interplanetary travel without issue already. His comment doesn't even b…
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> Asteroid mining on any sort of commercial scale is far future, not near future. Even with fully reusable rockets, asteroid mining wouldn't be profitable; anything we need can be obtained cheaper on Earth. It's certainly in the future, it just all depends on what is far to you. Many companies who want to get in on this are hoping to attempt within the next 10-15 years (obviously commercial mining would come some yea…
That's not how it would work. Incoming kinetic projectiles are just as vulnerable to defensive systems as ballistic missiles. Hit it hard enough and you can knock out the guidance system. They would need very precise and sensitive guidance systems to hit anything from orbit. Space enthusiasts constantly underestimate costs and schedules. Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean that the engineeri…
Not true at all. Kinetic projectiles would have no guidance system. It's just a big, dumb piece of tungsten. That's it. You would have to hit it hard enough to make sure that, when it hits, it won't cause damage. This means near complete vaporization. That's very energy intensive.
Ballistic missiles, however, simply need to have their payload exploded at almost any distance away from the target to reduce its power to near nothingness.
> If there is large-scale asteroid mining in my lifetime then I'll eat my hat.
Not sure how old you are but if you're under 40 and not planning on dying sooner than average then, in my opinion, you should start looking up hat recipes :D. At least I hope but it depends because the primary customer for asteroid mining is going to be space companies and government agencies like NASA. A disruptive political system that prevents said purchases could hamper progress significantly.
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If you say so, I guess I'm just wrong about this. Thank you for trying to clarify for me, instead of just downvoting me into oblivion like everyone else.
I don't think you're "just wrong," there's definitely some ambiguity. You can use "trillions" to denote the scale or magnitude of a value and also to denote a denomination.
Even the term "hundreds" alone seems to carry less ambiguity than its superiors, thousands, billions, etc. The higher the quantity, the more imprecision when using the plural form. I guess I was just trying to encourage a little more precision when talking astronomically, though retroactively I see that I could have been less of a dick about it.
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51.0.1 32bit. Don't ask me why I'm running 32bit FF, this is news to me as well.
I'd be more inclined to ask why it worked for you in that exact version, but not for me in the very same one. (Mine might be 64-bit, but I can't see that making a difference here.)
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>One of my scale numbers is, everything between Jupiter and the Sun masses less than 2 Earths -- Venus, Mars, Mercury, the Moon, and all the asteroids mass less than the Earth. Is that correct? Venus alone is about 90% the size of Earth, and Mars roughly 33%. It really seems like all those bodies put together should be greater than 1 Earth mass (but less than 2 Earth masses).
That's size, not mass. Venus is about 81% Earth's mass, and Mars is only a little over 10%. Mercury gets you another 5.5%, the Moon (as above) another 1.2%, and the asteroids are negligible. In the outer solar system, it's basically all the Galilean Moons + Titan. ETA: Hmm, or maybe those are surface gravity numbers you're thinking of?
I do find it really interesting and a little mind-boggling that the Moon, as huge as it is, with a good 1/6 of Earth's gravity, only has 1.2% of Earth's mass. Same with Mars: a good 1/3 of Earth's gravity, but a mere 10% of its mass. I really thought there'd be more direct correlation between mass and gravity than that. Of course, surface gravity is related to mass with both density and radius, but still, I would have assumed that the densities of these bodies would have been rather similar, as they're all small, rocky worlds.
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That's not how it would work. Incoming kinetic projectiles are just as vulnerable to defensive systems as ballistic missiles. Hit it hard enough and you can knock out the guidance system. They would need very precise and sensitive guidance systems to hit anything from orbit. Space enthusiasts constantly underestimate costs and schedules. Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean that the engineeri…
> Incoming kinetic projectiles are just as vulnerable to defensive systems as ballistic missiles. Hit it hard enough and you can knock out the guidance system Not true at all. Kinetic projectiles would have no guidance system. It's just a big, dumb piece of tungsten. That's it. You would have to hit it hard enough to make sure that, when it hits, it won't cause damage. This means near complete vaporization. That's ve…
As for asteroid mining, hope doesn't count for anything. There is no shortage of essential raw materials here on Earth. No one is going to commit the hundreds of billion $ necessary to do it on more than a trial basis. There's simply no economic incentive nor is there political will to spend that money. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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How about intergalactic densities?
Don't know the number off the top of my head, but it should be considerably less. It should also be highly varying as some galaxies live in pretty densely packed environments (galaxy clusters), which some live in very open environments like our own galaxy.
[1]: http://www.universetoday.com/30280/intergalactic-space/
[2]: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25378/how-vacuous-is-intergalactic-space/25379#25379