OT: Radios

[Nikademus]

It was last night.

see? I have a future in relationship counceling
[:'(]

[Kwik E Mart]

...i retract my last comment on hearing disco...after much more thought, i believe there would be three potential songs one would hear in this situation...

1) Elton John's "Rocket Man"
2) The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star"
3) Radiohead "How to Disappear Completely"

...of course, which song one would hear is all relative...

[Nikademus]

"Microsize Boy"

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Treetop64

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

You know the old saying....."Don't do as I do......DO AS I SAY!!!"

ah....the GF/Sig. Other "Double Standard" Never ever point it out. A couch will be in your immediate future.

It was last night.

Interesting you all seem to think this is a loss for you and not her. Maybe work on your technique(s)? [8D]

[Nikademus]

Ha!

[:)]

[Treetop64]

The phallus is infallible. Truth. But that can't always be exclusively counted on to temper the unpredictably extreme gyrations of the other party's emotional state.

[danlongman]

Keep your heads down and don't bunch up!
One shot might get us all!
If you think you know what you're doing, Treetop, tell the world
before the fem-posse finds you and kills you.
Any man who learned how to win in such a situation has not
live to tell the tale.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Treetop64

The phallus is infallible. Truth. But that can't always be exclusively counted on to temper the unpredictably extreme gyrations of the other party's emotional state.

So why do you end up on the couch and not the unhinged party?

[Treetop64]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

ORIGINAL: Treetop64

The phallus is infallible. Truth. But that can't always be exclusively counted on to temper the unpredictably extreme gyrations of the other party's emotional state.

So why do you end up on the couch and not the unhinged party?

Well, "that" didn't happen.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: danlongman

If there were radio transmissions originating on your ship or the Space Civic beside you doing the same speed you would receive them. At light speed any transmission from behind you
couldn't catch you. The signals from sources laterally separated would be wierdly distorted. I do not know about the signals from sources ahead of you closing speed would in fact be 300000 km/sec + 300000 km/sec exceeding "c".
Regardless there will always be punks driving around in the middle of the night in space with their stereos set to 11 blasting out hiphopcrap. And if you stopped suddenly all the signals from behind you would arrive at once and
your Tivo would blow up killing all aboard....the Tori Spelling radiation from 90210 alone would do it.

The signals would never exceed the speed of light, even relative to anything else. To someone traveling .99c, someone traveling in the opposite direction at .99c would have a closing velocity around .9992c. The key equation that influences everything is the square root of 1-v^2/c^2.

Bill

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

If I missed someone saying so, if you are traveling near the speed of light and the radio transmitter were moving at the same speed and same direction either in front of you or behind you, there would be no doppler shift so you would hear your Slim Whitman or whatever it is you listen to just fine. [:D]

On the OT, I believe we are in the early stages of an extiction event on the scale of the end of the Permian period. I pretty much agree with wdolson's estimate but I usually just say 1 billion. Besides a new ice age (which actually began about a thousand years back{don't quote me on that, I'm forgetting when exactly the current ice age cycle began, I might be way off as in much longer ago}) extreme drought over much of what is now arable land caused by the climate disturbance would also lower the limit. I'm afraid about 90% of all life from all the Kingdoms of life will disappear, and our own species will go extinct earlier rather than later. Al Gore is an optimist, I think the damage is already done and the outcome irreversible now. Our only chance would be if someone can figure out how to remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide and methane from the upper reaches of our atmosphere. If it could be done I'd guess the cost would be something like a million times what the Apollo Moon program cost, and the Congress will never pay for that. Sorry to be such a downer.

Technically we are in a warm period of an ice age that started about 1 million years ago. This warm period started about 14,000 years ago. Before that the Earth was locked in ice in the northern and southern regions for about 20,000 years. Many parts of the Earth remained ice free and there was a lot more land in the equatorial region because the oceans were much lower than today. The Mediterranean existed, but it was probably about the size of a couple of the great lakes. The places at sea level now were way up in the mountains.

The ice was not uniform across the globe. On the west coast it only came down as far as Seattle (same latitude as Montreal), but was down to about NY City in the east. Most of modern Europe was unusable. The Pacific Rim was very different from the Atlantic. As the oceans fell, the Aleutians turned into a mountain range separating the Arctic from the Pacific. About half of Alaska was ice free as a result, though it was probably pretty cold. The western US deserts were pretty nice with high rainfall and lush vegetation. The San Joaquin Valley in California that now grows 50% of the US's produce was mostly a giant inland sea.

About 1000 years ago we had the Medieval Warming where world temperatures were much warmer than today. During this time the vikings explored westward and set up self sustaining colonies in Iceland and Greenland. Greenland was called Greenland because the southern end of it was grassland. England was known for it's fine wines.

About 1600 this reversed and we went into what's called the Little Ice Age which lasted until about 1850. The Little Ice Age didn't have ice sheets or anything, but the winters were much colder than they are now. Ice skating on the Thames in winter was pretty common. The New World was settled by Europe during this period.

From 1850 to now, the world has been warming a bit. So far it hasn't been as dramatic as the Medieval Warming, but it could go that way. We only have monastery records to indicate how the Warming started and they are very subjective. On the other hand, world weather spiked hotter in the 1930s (one of the hottest decades in modern world history), then settled into a cooling trend from 1940 to 1975 before warming again. The winter of 1944-45 was one of the coldest in Western Europe in 100 years. Along the US west coast the coldest winter on record was 1949-50. It snowed in Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest set snow fall records.

The ice records from Lake Vostok, which is one of the best long range histories of world icing going back over 100,000 years shows that major ice periods are often preceded with a spike up in world temperatures. The resolution of the data can't tell if the spike lasts for a couple of years or 50, but it's usually very short in geologic time. It is possible that we're starting an icing period. It's about time for it to start. The relatively ice free periods usually last 10,000-15,000 years, so we're on the long side for the window now.

Most geologists look at the climate and say "who knows what happens next". The geologic record shows that the last 100 years is not terribly clear of anything significant. It could mean nothing, small shifts one direction or another, or a major shift not seen in recorded human history. We don't have enough data to know.

Bill

[danlongman]

The signals would never exceed the speed of light, even relative to anything else. To someone traveling .99c, someone traveling in the opposite direction at .99c would have a closing velocity around .9992c. The key equation that influences everything is the square root of 1-v^2/c^2.

Bill

I do not purport to understand relativity, but I am still afraid of Tori Spelling radiation. If I am standing at point "B" with radiating sources to my right at "A" and left "C". How fast are these Tori Spellings on either side approaching each other relativity speaking?

[Knavey]

ORIGINAL: armin

First people need to realize that Star Trek and Star Wars will never happen.

WRONG...FAIL...BORKED ANSWER!

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...cue music!

Star Wars HAPPENED!

[zzodr]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

You assume an initial boost and then coasting. A constant acceleration craft could go interstellar distances in much less itme, relativistic effects notwithstanding. There are several technologies in theoretical range of that, solar sails being one.

A great, now-old, juvenile novel about this is Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" about stellar exploration using constant-boost "torch ships" coupled with telepathic twins who are able to communicate outside relativistic norms. Outside the hard-science fun it's an interesting social commentary on what might happen between twins when one ages and the other essentially does not. The last chapter always made me think really hard when I was a kid reading these great books. Picture Magellan lost at sea for 500 years, and after sacrifice and great hardship is re-found and brought home on a 747 in an afternoon.

Yeah thats nice and all but I was referring to manned craft.
And a solar sail isn't going to work too well in interstellar space once you go past the heliopause of a nearby star.

[mdiehl]

nd a solar sail isn't going to work too well in interstellar space once you go past the heliopause of a nearby star.

Well, but does it have to? If a solar sail generated some small amount of thrust constantly out to the heliopause, wouldn't the spaceship-beastie be moving pretty fast?

[zzodr]

ORIGINAL: mdiehl


Well, but does it have to? If a solar sail generated some small amount of thrust constantly out to the heliopause, wouldn't the spaceship-beastie be moving pretty fast?

Fast in race car terms, yes, very. Fast as in travelling to another star system? No.
Voyager 1 is now entering this area where the solar energy from our Sun is negligible.

In 100 days a sail could reach 16,000 kilometers per hour (10,000 miles per hour); in one year it could reach 58,000 kilometers per hour (36,000 miles per hour). In just three years, a solar sail could reach a speed of over 160,000 kilometers per hour (100,000 miles per hour). At that speed you could reach Pluto in less than five years. In comparison, the New Horizons misson to Pluto, using chemical propulsion and a gravity-assist from Jupiter, is planned to take nine years to reach its target.

Still, 160,000 kilometers per hour (100,000 miles per hour) is still only 0.00015 the speed of light. It would take about 1,000 years for a solar sail to reach one-tenth the speed of light, even with light shining on it continuously. This emphasizes just how hard interstellar flight is.

http://www.discoversolarenergy.com/solar/sails.htm

[wdolson]

The human race may travel to the stars someday, but it will take first a major scientific breakthrough followed by some pretty serious technological breakthroughs. If it ever happens, it will be a very long time.

Right now we are about where ancient Romans people were dreaming about 747s. The concept of flight existed, but nobody had a clue how to make it happen for anything other than birds. For FTL we don't even have any examples we can look at (unless you want to believe stories of downed UFOs which are within the realm of remote possibility, but are, at minimum, unproven to the general public).

Bill

[LoBaron]

We are definitely one or several major scientific breakthroughs away from reaching the stars, or even the outer planets in timespans that justify
the effort.

What currently seems to be the big problem, is that the attributes of our universe which are most promising for those breakthroughs are at the smallest
possible scale, right down to Planck. A few hundred years ago your average scientific experiment exploring the macroscopic or microscopic realm
may have cost a small fortune for a human, now doing the same costs a small fortune for several countries.

Christian Huygens and his colleagues would not have imagined that, in a few hundred years, pushing back the boundary of macro- and microcosm would not require
a couple of well placed optical lenses and mirrors, but a high precision device with 30 years built time, 26km circumference, and the energy consumption of a small country.

What I really hope is that in the future the global developement remains stable enough that there are the funds available to fuel such projects.

[geofflambert]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

England was known for it's fine wines.

No no no no NO! That's impossible!

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: zzodr

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

You assume an initial boost and then coasting. A constant acceleration craft could go interstellar distances in much less itme, relativistic effects notwithstanding. There are several technologies in theoretical range of that, solar sails being one.

A great, now-old, juvenile novel about this is Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" about stellar exploration using constant-boost "torch ships" coupled with telepathic twins who are able to communicate outside relativistic norms. Outside the hard-science fun it's an interesting social commentary on what might happen between twins when one ages and the other essentially does not. The last chapter always made me think really hard when I was a kid reading these great books. Picture Magellan lost at sea for 500 years, and after sacrifice and great hardship is re-found and brought home on a 747 in an afternoon.

Yeah thats nice and all but I was referring to manned craft.
And a solar sail isn't going to work too well in interstellar space once you go past the heliopause of a nearby star.

"Time For the Stars" does involve manned craft.

Solar sails work to boost the craft for a LONG time while near the home star. Larry Niven also posited a system where large spaceborne lasers beamed light energy to the sailing craft once they were outside the heliopause. Onboard fuel would be needed to decelerate at the destination.