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So you think you can be a reality TV producer

I watch as little television as I can, and most of it by accident.

Whenever I do catch an eyeful, it usually consists of one of three things: a talking heads news channel, organized sportsball, or a Reality TV show. The first I try to ignore (they're usually triangulated on the tabloid newspapers with added eye candy, then dumbed down: as information sources this century, TV news channels are useless). The sportsball I leave to my spouse (who is prone to lecturing me interminably about Manchester City). But the latter phenomenon—Reality TV—has all the grisly attention-grabbing potential of a flaming school bus careening out of control into a public execution: I basically have to leave the room in a hurry to avoid having my eyeballs sucked right out of my head by the visual media equivalent of internet clickbait. (Luckily, my glimpses into this surreal hell-world are usually transient, a side-effect of my spouse channel-hopping between football matches.)

What makes Reality TV shows so addictive?

The sector is dominated by a couple of competing recipes. As in so many mature markets, there's an 80/20 split between a dominant incumbent and an insurgent that isn't quite successful enough to overturn a monopoly but is too tenacious to die. Think Android/iPhone, or car/pick-up truck (that latter died about a decade ago in the US).

In the case of rTV shows, the 20% insurgent is about people demonstrating competence. Mythbusters was the classic competence-porn show (although it deteriorated into the explosion-of-the-week club after a few seasons): using science!!! and workshop/lab work to evaluate the plausibility of urban legends is basically the Lawful Good of Reality TV AD&D alignments. Other competence rTV shows include: a team of dudes acquire a car wreck and restore it to good-as-new condition, a former special forces soldier/scout troop leader is dumped on a desert island and demonstrates survival skills, and so on.

But the other 80% of rTV shows are incompetence porn.

Incompetence porn Reality TV, as pioneered by Big Brother, usually aims to get the audience to laugh at or mock the participants in a contest designed to humiliate the subjects. Instead of dropping a fit expedition leader on a desert island, the show dumps a bunch of washed-up B-list celebs in a wilderness of mosquitos and no soft toilet paper. Or perhaps it's a bunch of Armani-suited sociopaths in a boardroom where they're expected to pitch business start-up proposals at a washed-up B-list business celeb like Alan Sugar (or, in the American version of "The Apprentice", a certain mobbed-up New York property speculator with shady Russian banking connections). Back-stabbing is a given in the celebrity/sociopath driven variant of rTV, as incompetent contestants are shoved out of the show at every episode until only the most obliviously egocentric remains.

(Note that regardless of anything else, the survivor selection criterion in all Reality TV isn't "competence", be it at wilderness survival or boardroom brown-nosing: it's entertainment value. Because these shows, despite the name, aren't about reality, they're showbiz.)

But these aren't the worst.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a depraved abyss of egocentricity skull-fucking the dessicated remains of bad taste, featuring the family of child beauty pageant contestant Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson, a participant in another rTV show titled *Toddlers and Tiaras". Wikipedia goes on to note, "On October 24, 2014, TLC cancelled the series after four seasons after cast member June 'Mama June' Shannon was seen with the man who molested her oldest child and is father to another of her children, prompting Shannon to admit to Entertainment Tonight that the two men are both registered sex offenders." It was followed on TLC by Mamma June: From Not to Hot, which "documents June "Mama June" Shannon's weight loss transformation from 460 to 160 pounds (209 to 73 kg)."

(I think you can see where this is going.)

On the UK side of the abyss we still have some pretense at documentary film-making, but it's implausible to claim that such delights as Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (which, by the way, is racist as fuck) and Benefits Street (TLDR: poverty porn) are anything other than an attempt to spray-tan the hellish prurience of American cable rTV with a thin veneer of voyeuristic enquiry.

And I've barely scratched the surface. Reader, I have not watched these shows: but for every Say Yes to the Dress—which serves at least some social utility function, even if it's only to encourage the conspicuous consumption of couture products—there's a Three Fat Brides One Thin Dress (presented by the odious lifestyle/diet grifter Gilian McKeith) which is basically undisguised goggle-eyed fat-shaming with a side-order of cat-fight enforced heteronormativity.

So, where am I going with this?

I present, for your delectation, my pitch for the ultimate rTV show:

Pitch Me is "The Apprentice", only for sociopathic Reality TV producers.

In "Pitch Me", five deranged low-rent cable TV showrunners compete for network funding to make their show.

The show itself follows the tried and tested reality TV format of targeting a despised demographic, whose humiliation the audience can delight in —television producers. In a straight-up rip-off of the format of "The Apprentice", six showrunners are are forced to compete for the approval of a successful producer. (Jamie Hyneman would be a perfect choice to act the role of "successful producer"—his sardonic wit would be perfect for savaging the contestants and his track record in co-fronting "Mythbusters" through an epic 17 seasons gives him the necessary profile). The contestants are required to jump through increasingly humiliating hoops as they select showrunners and would-be stars, arrange studio and location shoots, deal with the inevitable messy melt-downs of industry outsiders who are frankly not bright enough to see past the temptation of being on TV to the reality they're basically on display to be mocked, and to willingly abase themselves in pursuit of a prize—backing for the first season of their reality TV show.

Yes, the ultimate rTV show is about the producers. Only one of them can win! Their career in TV is at stake! Roll up, roll up, to see the Hollywood sharks tear into one another at full throttle! There's blood in the water and it's going to be brutal!

I have some example pitches to share with you:

On Incel Bride Hunt, six committed incels—two anti-feminist fans of Jordan Peterson, two misogynistic homophobes in total denial of their own Tom of Finland fantasy lives, and a pair of plain old-fashioned quiverful alt-right white supremacists—compete to marry a real live woman: the losers get blow-up dolls. (Reader: there might be fewer than six losers, but it's not a safe bet.)

So You Want To Be President is simply a re-cut (with sarcastic commentary and jokes about breeding a bulletproof Kennedy) of the US presidential primaries for whichever party doesn't currently have custody of the nuclear football.

My Big Fat Gastric Bypass can usefully repurpose the Gillian McKeith formula, but generalize it by not requiring the contestants to want to look good in a posh frock: the winner gets a bypass, the runners-up get tapeworm eggs.

Three EU Citizens, one Permanent Right to Remain features sensible, young, well-educated and personable foreigners who are forced to spend lots of money and squirm through the napalm-coated burning tunnel of Kafkaesque Home Office paperwork required of every successful consultant neurosurgeon or professor of international relations wishing to live in the UK for more than five microseconds after Brexit. Thrilling reality TV as a 5am raid by Border Force agents grabs an eminent Canadian law professor, who failed to punctuate a submission using the Oxford comma rule, and packages him for deportation to Nicaragua via cruise missile! Enough said.

On My Fur Baby's Wedding, contestant's cats and dogs get the full Bridezilla treatment—especially thrilling when we match a Leonberger with a barely-housetrained Cheetah.

And then there's Pitch Me Again, a pleasingly recursive entrant to the competition which serves as a benchmark for the other contestants—if you can't beat the show you're appearing on, then obviously what you're pitching lacks mass audience appeal!

So.

What's your submission for a slot on Pitch Me?

(Please leave your entry in the comments below. Maximum length 50 words—this is your attempt to get a toe in the door, not a detailed submission—we want the sizzle, not the steak. Submissions welcome from everyone regardless of prior lack of TV production experience: in fact, contestants with prior experience will be handicapped).

1689 Comments

1:

Heal Thyself

Think a combination of Dr Phil, Hoarders, and Ninja Warrior

Mentally ill contestants discuss their troubles with pseudo-doctor, show documentary-porn of their problems, then they run through a brutal obstacle course to win a year's worth of therapy from a real doctor if they complete it in time

2:

Obviously my pitch only works in America for now, but soon Boris will sell off the NHS and then we can roll out a UK version

3:

I am repulsed by reality porn more than you are by sports on TV. I'll pass on this one for now. [eyeroll]

4:

Take Off... Take an existing show (see above), and have the contestants compete to be the ones who take off and nuke the site from orbit!

5:

Shhhh: Sixteen publicity seeking hate mongers (Katie, Piers etc.) shut in solo hotel suites for four months. Only interaction via custom mobile app — faked to convince each one they're winning. IRL none of this is broadcast — the show is them recovering their audience after 4 months of radio silence.

6:

Ick. I have the same reaction to incompetence porn that you and I have to boiled Brussels sprouts. Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs at least had some entertainment and social value. Survivor and Big Brother et al kick off my gag reflex and make me want a memory wipe.

7:

[Not part of the 50 words, but I'll be checking in again around 200. I prefer nature and science porn as brain bleach.]

The pitch, and this is from a real TV show:

"We will spend US $20 billion in ad buys, about $10 billion to re-elect Donald Trump, about $10 billion to unseat him. You [the TV industry] get to figure out how to use it effectively, and for every failure, we give more to the internet and social media."

Background: yes, the buzz is that the US presidential campaign will blow through US $10-20 billion by November. If (like me) you've made the mistake of getting even minimally politically active, most of your email time has for months been devoted to deleting emails pleading for more donations.

This is by far the biggest reality show on television right now, and until Citizen's United is overturned, it will keep growing by each cycle.

I'm just unclear on who is pitching who in this.

8:

Adrian: I wouldn't watch it, but I really want somebody to make your show for us all!

9:

The USAian version of Changing Rooms, Trading Spaces, was also fun, if formulaic.

10:

Inside the Senate Cloakroom
Watch 53 U.S. Senators pitch the best excuses not to present evidence or witnesses during the 2020 Impeachment trial.
Bonus Round: New evidence refuting central defense of the incumbent president is released during the trial.
Winner gets no-expense paid access to the winter Whitehouse in Mar-a-Lago. If Senate successfully votes down witnesses, winner will be in consideration as the VP running mate for 2020!

11:

Casting Couch STD on Love Island

Six producers -- male and female -- are asked to guess what the diagnosis is for each image in an edition of "The British Journal of Sexual Medicine", and whether any of their fellow competitors have it.

Much amusement is derived from the "will he? won't she?"

12:

After Trump won the 2016 primaries, I remember thinking that the 2020 Republican primaries would be a not very guilty pleasure, as every swivel eyed, bigoted lunatic in the GOP competed to replicate Trump's strategy and complete the destruction of the party.

Because of course Trump couldn't win the 2016 general election.

Sigh.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an Iowa.

13:

So, you want to live? Have a bunch of death row inmates abase themselves for a chance to be represented by a competent lawyer. (actually use a gloryhound instead of a competent lawyer)

So, you want do die? Have a bunch of terminally ill patients, in constant pain, abase themselves for a chance to be euthanized.

Rip-off the fur Take an already existing rTV show, and do everything the same, only everyone is wearing a fursuit. For extra points, use the above described shows.

14:

Come now, there are far worse than TV producers .... either or both of Politicians or Estate Agents "Estate!" The Sharkiest gets to win, by competing to sell to the marks the gottiest, most run-down, but suoerficially-impressive heap of mouldering real estate they can find OR "Politicos!" Where the competition is to "sell" ( get most viewer-votes ) the worst possible either Fascist or communist or "relgious" meme as an deliberate piece of party policy.

Problem is that I think the second one is already running, just that we haven't been told it's actually a TV ramp, yet.

15:

Who Wants Club Fed? Convicted or soon-to-be convicted high-profile sleazeballs (e.g. Harvey Weinstein, Roger Stone, etc.) compete to see which one of six will go to a minimum security prison, while the others get special sphincter training. Crocodile tears and fake soulful confessions every week!

16:

My pitch is to make this, but as a Black Mirror episode.

17:

Can I nominate Weinstein as the winner of this show, right now?

18:

Wrt. Politicos, I believe the past three-plus years can be best explained by the parsimonious assumption that Donald Trump only ran for President to bootstrap his next Reality show ("So you want to be President") only he accidentally overran the target and now he's left owning the franchise. Which is extremely expensive to maintain -- $10-20Bn for a successful re-election campaign -- hence the extra special heaping serving of grift.

19:

Don't you mean the loser (only the winner gets minimum security)?

20:

@18: And as with his other business ventures, he's using other people's money and will walk away from the debts he leaves.

21:

YELLOWCAKE: based on "THE AMAZING RACE" but recruit teams of alt-right/Qbert competitors and use conspiracy theory material as clues. Over the course of the season teams compete to find and open a buried treasure chest The chest contains a prize rarer than gold itself; used reactor fuel rods.

-- Steve

22:

Three MPs, one brown paper bag: The Fake Sheikh is back and this time it's competitive!

23:

Reading the description for Benefits Street has finally cured me of my long-lingering Anglophilia. Not even Boris Johnson completely eradicated it, but Channel Four just managed.

24:

Harvey Weinstein is dead! Point?

25:

Crosstown Traffic

Australia's six state government public transport ministers have their chauffeur driven ministerial cars removed, and are forced to get around exclusively on the buses, trains and trams they neglect administer.

Snigger as their factional rivals plot against them in meetings they're an hour late for.

Thrill as they're crash tackled by thuggish ticket inspectors.

Gurgle with delight when a cancelled train means they're one minute late to connect with a bus which only runs every 90 minutes, triggering a psychotic break, or at least some questioning of the merits of privatisation- much the same thing to Australia's political class.

26:

That's news to me - when did that happen?

27:

You got the wrong abuser: Jeffrey Epstein is dead, Harvey Weinstein is very much alive and standing trial.

28:

Yeah, I didn't list Epstein because he's no longer a player.

29:

You're welcome to delete or change the relevant posts then.

30:

You’re Stupid Because You’re Poor

A sham court room show, in which a rich white lady hears both sides of a small-claims court conflict, then roundly castigates everyone involved for at least ten minutes. In exchange for this ritual humiliation, all damages are paid from the show’s budget.

(I may have just been at the laundromat while Judge Judy was on again...)

31:

monkey tennis?

32:

I don't have a show yet, but one of the celebrity contestants needs to be Chuck Tingle.

33:

The Virtue Signal Six contestants try to be the best possible enlightened tolerant human being. Competitive categories include:

micro-scale environmental responsibility macro-scale environmental responsibility economic inequality racial tolerance lifestyle tolerance cultural tolerance political activism educational outreach

34:

@33: Only interesting as they fail.

35:

A sham court room show, in which a rich white lady hears both sides of a small-claims court conflict

Let's pick an easy starting topic: the Romance Writers of America v. Courtney Milan racism dust-up. Our rich white lady rTV judge should be able to settle it all in just one episode!

(Bonus points if she's a blond from Alabama who says "bless my soul" a lot and declares that she can't possibly be racist, she has a black nanny.)

36:

I fail to see why you hold virtuous actions in contempt. Are you by any chance auditioning for a slot on Fox TV?

37:

@36: Honestly, isn't this just the setup for every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation?

38:

Virtuous actions that you do to make yourself look wonderful, not to actually accomplish anything useful.

39:

You're assuming that people who sink considerable effort into virtuous actions do so out of a narcissistic impulse rather than because they think they're doing the right thing.

I call bullshit on your concern trollong, and here is your yellow card.

40:

Righto. Delete them if you want.

41:

Nope, not deleting: leaving them in place as a useful lesson in things that don't quite merit a red card (but are still questionable).

42:

24 Hours To A&E

Phone vote triage. Who gets a bed? Who gets judged fit to work?

43:

Who (the f---) Do You Think You Are?

An unrestrained attack on the lives of the -vict- contestants, unclear as to whether points are assigned for stamina or messiness of exit.

44:

@42: Please forgive an ignorant USAian - I assume you're not talking about the Arts and Entertainment Network?

45:

Given that I have just had to do it, take 6 CEOs of 'modern' electronic/Web retail organisations, given them a pseudonym, and working through each of those systems in turn, require them to set them up for a user with slightly unusual requirements - e.g. someone partially disabled. Then ask for their comments on the process, and how well they did. Extra giggles occur when they fail as dismally on their own system as on their competitors.

First 6 programmes (my task). Buy and set up a smartphone that is capable of talking to hearing aids via Bluetooth, for an occasional mobile phone user (i.e. one who might use it only in bursts, every few months).

Later programs could be to find out what product or solution best fits a requirement from Web pages concerned mostly with marketing. And so on.

46:

Accident and Emergency, ER as it would be there.

One more while I'm at it: Gogglepox: Aspiring cub reporters bid for a career with a major network by reporting on a major pandemic.

47:

Dave P @ 44 A&E Stands for "Accident & Emergency" the outside-admissions section of any UK hospital. ( You call them "ER" ?? )

48:

Then there's the truly sick & entirely-questionable version of @42 "Repeat sessions with UC" Where contestents have to beat the arseholes from Crapita (etc) to get their Universal Credit/Disabilitypayments. Extra points & benefits for excessive grovelling & subservience. Useful training for post-Brexit Britan, come to think of it ....

49:

'scape the matrix: Six B-list genre SF writers attempt to (i) confirm that we're living in a simulation and then (ii) prove that they're right by escaping. Losers get "left behind" (TM).

50:

I WANT TO BE AN ASTRONAUT:

Each season 6 trainees compete for a seat on a SpaceX Dragon into LEO/visit to ISS. Each episode would highlight an aspect of training, physical and psychological testing, SCUBA qualification, jet piloting, EVA training, etc. Behind the scenes, bunk rooms and locker rooms.

51:

That's actually (a) interesting and (b) plausible, not to mention (c) being entirely practical -- you'd go talk to NASA or SpaceX and do a fly-on-the-wall documentary about astronaut selection and training.

Alas, I'm going to disqualify this one for not having the essential rTV trait of contempt: at worst, it might be framed as competence porn.

52:

@46 and 47: Thanks - our equivalent is the Emergency Room (ER). Which gets me considering:

Satan in Hell Six health care executives are infected with treatable chronic diseases. They then, without assistance, have to negotiate their own bureaucracies to attempt to get payment for their treatments approved. The losers go through their savings and investments leaving their families destitute.

53:

This is currently a US-only program, but it might be coming to the UK soon!

54:

That proposal is great ... but only in America. It won't fly in the UK, or indeed most of the rest of the developed world: too implausible ("bureaucracies ... get payment ... treatments approved" -- treatment approval is the job of doctors, not executives, and is delivered without regard to ability to pay).

55:

Actually Dale’s suggestion should be disqualified since it was already done, more or less. Remember the ‘Brit to Mir’ project from circa 1991? The one that provided Helen Sherman with the ride of lifetime? I was particularly pissed because I made it through several levels of selection for it. I got to move to Silicon Valley by way of compensation, so there was that.

56:

Real Wealth.

A cross-Pond show. Six couples, all of whom have been required to show their federal/national income tax forms to prove they are each worth over $10M, compete to come up with the sleaziest scheme to scam people with an income half the median income or less out of half a year's income. The winners must reach $10M in one month.

The losers become the actual slaves of the winning couple for one year, living in low-income housing on the back 40 acres of the winners' estate. Sex, or anything else, on demand is what the winners get from the losers.

First show: the Trumps, the McConnells, and Lindsey Graham and wife, with Bojo, Smaug, and May....

57:

The Naked Royal (The lions, tigers and bears edition) Three teams of paparazzi are given assignments in different locations around the world with the goal to deliver the title photo-essay. A savanna in Tanzania, a jungle in Malaysia and a forest in British Columbia deliver on the parenthetical subtitle. The Canadian target is promised to be a shirtless Harry Windsor, chopping firewood. Only at the end to we learn this is actually a local namesake, a spring board champion and recently paroled violent offender. Similar twists occur in Kuala Lumpur and on the Serengeti.

58:

Dreaming Of A Better Time

We use the promise of a soapbox to lure a bunch of slavery apologists into reconstructions of the Confederacy, classical Sparta, and Plato's Atlantis. The soapbox is, of course, used to give them something to stand on so the other contestants get a better view of the floggings.

Who will give the safeword first?

59:

Pleeeeeeease let the final episode surprise reveal be the lovingly-maintained guillotine the production crew have gifted the "slaves" in order to make their gratitude to the winning couple appropriately clear?

60:

@54: Actually, one segment of the US population had "socialized" medicine for a long time - the US military, where indeed treatment approval was the job of doctors and treatment was not based on ability to pay. That system, too, has been degraded over the past twenty years by the beancounters.

Our experience of the German healthcare system proved the superiority of what we call in the US single-payer healthcare. Although still covered by a private insurer, the Foreign Service Benefit Plan, they were hands-off for the treatment of my wife's breast cancer, including chemotherapy and surgery, totaling billing in excess of 50,000 Euro.

61:

Not at 200 yet?

Okay, here's another one:

Take two teams of reality show creators (equal in number and roles). The teams take turns: For two shows (presumably two weeks), one team is running the show, the other is the contestants. Then they switch. Format of mini-contest (aside from no one getting eliminated in any way) is entirely up to the team running the show that week, within the constraints of a budget controlled by the real showrunners.

At the end, the winning team is determined by independent analysis of viewership and social media response. Whichever group created the more popular contests wins. The winners get a cash prize and the opportunity to come back and defend their title on the next series. Winners of three in a row (teams or individuals on the teams) are permanently disqualified from future competitions, to keep it fair.

62:

OUT! A twist on big brother: Ten same-sex contestants. Each is told there is one gay contestant, but there isn't. Daily challenges: Successfully completing them as a group raises the pot of money the final winner takes home.

Each week, they vote secretly to eliminate one contestant. If they choose the gay one (there isn't one), he/she wins the pot, otherwise, the last straight contestant wins the pot.

(slightly too long with 71 words)

The mechanics incentivize the contestants to behave in a way they think is gay, for the laughs of the mentally corrupt on the other side of the screen.

Added spice: The challenges are things considered by the contestants to be either stereotypically straight or gay for their sex. (determined by extensive survey before the contest)

More spice: If a contestant actually comes out during the show, the rules do not change.

This show possibly already exists, but I was too chicken to check. Or I want to preserve my last shreds of faith in humanity.

63:

Firstly, your pitch is almost terrifyingly well optimized to foster homophobia. Secondly, it's rooted in the false premise that homosexual/heterosexual is a black/white binary choice, rather than a gray-scale spectrum. (Hint: bisexuals exist. So do asexuals. And intersex. And trans. And for example men who have sex with men (MSMs) who self-identify as straight. And so on ...)

64:

and Lindsey Graham and wife

cough Lindsey Graham famously has never married and has a lifestyle and mannerisms that are recognized as the classic "southern dandy".

Read between the lines.

65:

Another one, this one promises to be entertaining in contrast to just plain horrible and depressing, which was not my initial idea, but it turned out that way. Sorry to each reader to have been subjected to my idea of what I thought a professional rTV producer might cook up if outrage and hate-clicks was the optimization goal. (As I said, my faith in humanity runs low these days...)

Now, hopefully more entertaining: GO BROKE, WIN! Well-to-do executives trade their position with the lowest-paid person in their company. They are cut off from all their liquid assets and old income, put into a trust, with exception of one provided credit card. They need to cover all their expenses with their new income. If they use the card before X time has passed, they lose. If they get fired by their manager, they lose. Losing means losing everything in the trust.

The trust accumulates interest, paid by the show. They can go into debt via other channels, but are not allowed to borrow against hard assets (e.g. their house), so only payday lenders are an option. If they earn a promotion, the can work with the higher income. Falling behind on payments has the usual effect: turned off gas/electricity/phones, etc.

Note the difference between "lowest paid person" versus employee. The cleaner employed a subcontractor of a subcontractor also counts.

The escalated version has the people also switch their living situation with the lowest paid person. (Which they potentially lose)

66:

Yes! And the real surprise ending is that the entire crew of the show put all of them into the Humane Invention!

67:

Contestants take the role of newspaper reporters, competing to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. Each week, they're matched up with a specific advertiser and their target demographic, and their success or failure is determined algorithmically by a "special blend" of ad impressions, clickthroughs, conversions, and organic recommendations, coupled with originality and real-world effects (ie. bonus points for actual riots, spikes in hate crimes, and lynchings).

It will be judged by a panel consisting of Piers Morgan, Philip Green, and another algorithm.

68:

Celebrity Shit Bucket - oh no, hang on, Roger Mellie's already done that one.

Your Host Tonight Is... - Glossy political arseholes are marooned on an island in the middle of a festering tropical swamp. They are given no equipment other than a closed circuit TV to appear on to prove they're still real. They must survive by drinking the swamp water and eating whatever they can manage to catch out of it, raw. They are scored day to day on who can manage to display the most gruesome lesion, and the eventual winner is the one who acquires the most impressively varied collection of simultaneous infestations by unrelated species.

Watch Out Mate, Yer Arse Is On Fire - Two teams of Australian politicians in open grassland each trying to round up and corral the other team using nothing but a box of matches.

69:

@ 55: “Actually Dale’s suggestion should be disqualified since it was already done, more or less. Remember the ‘Brit to Mir’ project from circa 1991?”

I do vaguely remember something about a civilian going to Mir back in the early 1990s, but none of the back story. Googling around I found some articles and interviews about Helen Sherman (the first Brit in space).

A private British space program called Project Juno put a call out for applicants to become an astronaut. Four candidates out of 13,000 applications were selected to train in the Soviet Union at Star City. Project Juno was to be funded by British corporate sponsors and a lottery system. Juno came up short on the funding and the Soviet Union nearly scrubbed the mission, but that Mikhail Gorbachev directed the mission to continue.

Helen Sharman went to the Mir on May 18, 1991 and returned May 26, 1991.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3a7SG-KO4

70:

One of my friends would occasionally go house-shopping for fun. She had a lot of trouble with one realtor who, when told "NO POOLS", would show her only houses with pools. They'd be interesting on your show.

71:

They actually did this, the BBC did it, sort of, in 2017 autumn. They took a bunch of scientists, engineers and explorers and had them put through some mock exercises involving some visits to a few of the actual training centres for ESA and NASA. The lady who won was a Plasma Physics Prof at the Uni of Leicester, a very capable lecturer too from personal experience.

Oddly on the topic of "reality" TV, I've tended to see the "20%" (or so) focused on competence not as reality TV but as soft documentaries, having watched a very small number of shows from the 20% one tends to watch not caring for who wins, loses and who gets humiliated but to be impressed by what competent people managed to do. Anyone remember scrapheap challenge from (UK) channel 4 a decade back, a celebration of classic boffinry? or several science series's with kate humble focused on putting some scientists in a harsh environment and having them rig up equipment, there was one on a desert island where they tried to build an ROV with a magnetic clutch through the hull to power the props and one in the canadian rockies where they made a generator for a handheld wind torch to go down a mineshaft with? I can proudly agree with Charlie that I've never conciously witnessed te 80% variety of "reality" TV.

72:

So You Want to Move to the US/UK post-Brexit! (Scams-R-Us)

Individuals wanting to immigrate to the US/UK compete for the services of a panel of immigration experts including:

1- cryptobanker to provide enough $$$ in any offshore bank account for the nanoseconds needed to provide a certified affidavit of your wealth; 2- family tree tracer to document family roots/cultural background as needed (official photos, documents as needed) 3- criminal/international lawyer to clean/hush up any embarrassing records 4- plastic surgeon to alter appearance as needed 5- neurosurgeon to implant a device that can mimic a conscience in case the winner has to undergo a personal interview and answer such ethically challenging questions as: How would you contribute to our society? When was the last time you ran over an old lady?

Season 1: Contestants would be pulled from ex-CEOs, ex-heads of states, failed heirs of real estate fortunes, etc.

Season 2: Contestants would be pulled from next levels down: senior Fortune 500 ex-execs, gov't dept heads, grandchildren of failed heirs of real estate fortunes, etc.

Etc.

Because these shows - well, the house improvement shows I've seen - usually do a reveal after the project has been completed ...

Season 1 follow-up/reveal: Interview winner if still alive/not in jail and do the usual before and after lifestyle comparisons.

73:

Or have another where the CEO of intel has to try getting rid of the IME/AMT management engine from his PC's CPU, the CEO of microsoft has to try fitting a new battery in a surfacebook, the CEO of apple has to swap out the harddrive on a 2012 retina macbook pro, the CEO of google must find the history of tianamen square in 1989 using the .cn version of his search engine, the CEO of facebok must find an honest piece of political information on his platform, the CEO of amazon must get his IoT gear working again after the backend server has been shutoff and the CEO of any company which ships laptops with locked secureboot must try installing linux. I think however that were the CEOs massive failings and embarassment followed with detailed directions and explanations this could become a socially useful tech support and "don't buy from X" consumer advice show, so might not fit the 80% category of "reality" TV we are trying to design for here.

74:

Why limit it to computery? Plenty of other fields that would greatly benefit from the same treatment.

CEO of asshat car company that makes changing a bleeding headlight bulb a "dealer operation" because it takes 2 hours and involves taking the whole front corner of the car to bits - Has to change the offside headlamp bulb using only whatever toolkit is supplied with the car, at night (of course), on the hard shoulder of the M1, in thick snowfall, with lorries thundering past every few seconds each throwing up a deluge of filthy icy muck.

CEO of toilet manufacturer that makes that bloody stupid design where the tank is bolted directly to the po with no connecting pipe - Has to replace the flush valve on a toilet that's been there 15 years so both those bolts and the ones holding the tank to the wall have become shapeless lumps of rust with the appearance and properties of rivets, using ordinary hand tools and without damaging anything (no smashing the pottery to get the bolts out).

Town councillor with painful back ailment - Has to get from the residential outskirts into the town centre and back on a mobility scooter.

A certain politician whose name is impossible to pronounce as spelt - Gets cancer, has to cure himself with homeopathy.

The possibilities are, unfortunately, endless.

75:

You don't need a genealogist so much as a good document forger. (Many pre-1800 genealogies are based on forgeries and family legends, anyway.)

76:

Scrapheap Challenge: More Reel.

It's the same show. But this time they use second hand reality TV contestants. They have the UK moustache present it because he's enough of an arsehole, but US-style decorations/secondary presenters.

I think it would be quite hilarious watching airheads try to make machinery work as they are mocked by a moustachio'd git and encouraged by equally air-headed co-presenters. You might have to extend the build time to a week though.

The winner is the one with the most body parts left at the end of the show. Even if they're dead.

77:

Ever since I read the article linked below I can’t watch any of the “80%” . The human cost is too high. https://www.salon.com/2018/02/17/i-am-a-master-chef-survivor/

78:

That was interesting. Not surprising, and mostly for the fact that they didn't have a process in place to say "no, not until the paperwork is done".

But yeah, it doesn't matter how nice the greeters are up front, if you know they torture people don't get in the van. I read a similar article about one of the British journalists who was invited into Iran just before the recent piracy problems. At the time he thought "that's odd, why just me, why now?" and shock, horror, he was held as a political prisoner until the crisis was past. And luckily Boris didn't try to help him.

79:

I have been a fan of competence reality shows to a small extent, with the exception of Time Team which I still rewatch on a regular basis (Mick Aston was awesome) because I really like it. Pretty much without exception, I hate incompetence reality TV.

Some shows would tread the line before toppling over, I am looking at you Trading Spaces, but watching artificially induced train wrecks doesn't do it for me.

Do home reno shows count as reality TV (if stated earlier, I apologize now, I have a bad habit of skimming at times)?

80:

Pigeon ACTUALLY ... slight modification Get fucking arsehole Cllr Loakes of LBWF & incompetent shit Khan to travel by bus from (say) Hackney Downs or Chingford to the centre of Walthamstow, whilst artificially rendered "disabled" - i.e. slightly bent-over, must walk with cane & carrying a large shopping bag or two. Their virtue-signaling by prioritising bike lanes, baecuse all cycling is good, right ... has resulted in the REMOVAL of bus lanes & ridiculous journey-times by public transport, over hideously uncomfortable road humps, hurting people with bad backs & necks & hips, whilst increasing the atmospheric pollution. Wankers. The, get them to admit in public that they fucked up. The last is the difficult bit ... so you just make them do it again ....

Moz They have the UK moustache present it because he's enough of an arsehole Uh / You what / you who? Explain please.

"Incompetenc Reality" Is a sub-set of the brand of "humour" where stupidity &/or incompetence is supposed to be funny. It has always made me steaming/shouting/raving-angry. Because that sort of stupidity/incompetence KILLS PEOPLE Far too many examples to name - perhaps fortunately

81:

I've tended to see the "20%" (or so) focused on competence not as reality TV but as soft documentaries, having watched a very small number of shows from the 20% one tends to watch not caring for who wins, loses and who gets humiliated but to be impressed by what competent people managed to do.

I'll go along with that. One night someone had left on a TV showing a rTV program about blacksmiths, Forged in Fire, which I could not be arsed to turn off before it won enough of my interest to watch. The formula is, well, formulaic, but it was interesting to watch competent people do their thing and everyone was professional and respectful to the contestants who were eliminated.

Such competence porn is obviously incompatible with anything that would attract Donald Trump or Honey Boo Boo.

83:

I blame Angel for the change in Dick S...

84:

So You Want to Move to the US/UK post-Brexit! (Scams-R-Us) ... Season 1: Contestants would be pulled from ex-CEOs, ex-heads of states, failed heirs of real estate fortunes, etc.

Disqualified because it's utterly implausible: people from that tier just pony up £3M for an "Investor's Visa" and a £10-25,000 application fee and are given their own personal Home Office immigration service concierge to help them fill out the paperwork. Raise it to £5M and they get permanent right of residence after something ridiculous like two years.

Any ex-CEO or HoS who has the money for the sneaky back-door rTV immigration show can afford to waltz in through the front door at the head of a marching band of Tory MPs.

85:

Or have another where the CEO of intel has to try getting rid of the IME/AMT management engine from his PC's CPU...

Disqualified (as are all show formats in this vein) because basically it's boring to look at for 99% of the population and rTV is, primarily, about mindless entertainment for the masses.

Competence porn has to involve big noisy machinery, and a choice between arc welding, bombs, guns, and DIY orbital laser death rays. In other words, spectacle.

86:

Evangelical extremists from various faiths compete to convert a studio audience. Same audience every night but they don't get to vote on who's best, success is measured by number of services of each faith the audience attend. Audience is chosen by scoring high on a "no formal religion, just spiritual" quiz and encouraged to ask questions of the evangelical of the day.

87:

Blacksmithing competitions happen in real life away from the cameras. I remember seeing farriers working at the Royal Highland Show when I was a lot younger, making and shoeing horses against a time clock with judges awarding points for the quality of work.

88:

Competence porn has to involve big noisy machinery...

That put me in mind of motor sports in general which in turn reminded me that someone actually got a Worst Driver show for incompetence porn (in British, Canadian, and international flavors, no less). I can't even be surprised, since cars are the biggest and most dangerous machines the average rTV moron will routinely operate.

Offhand I'm not sure how to make such a show practical yet louder, more dangerous, and more dramatic.

Maybe some kind of complex race event where contestants are plopped into vehicles they don't know how to operate and made to compete against each other while also doing stupid stuff between races.

89:

Celebrity Brexit

Part one is a survey (suckers pay £1 a minute to phone in their answers, with a minuscule chance of being selected for studio audience but no other benefits). The ostensible goal is to identify Britain's top celebrities - in fact it's to identify the top ten (or whatever) who are British resident but EU citizens, not British, and might not be eligible to stay in the UK post Brexit.

Part 2 is a series of shows in which celebrity panelists (some of whom are on the list but don't know it) are given all of the negative facts about one of the celebs apart from who they actually are, and with the help of the show's crack legal team have an arbitrary period of time to come up with a reason to have the celebrity denied British residency, deported, arrested, or whatever else seems to be appropriate.

Hilarity then ensues when the MC reveals who they are trying to get rid of, and promises that since the panelists have made a case for it the legal team will continue to follow through unless the phone in audience votes against it. Of course, people can phone in to vote either way... Cue more calls at £1 a shot.

Nobody benefits apart from the lawyers and TV companies, but what else is new...

90:

Omni-racers!

Contestants should know how to drive ordinary cars but not have experience with exotic machinery.

Bring on the exotic machinery! Racers will try to out-do each other in cargo trucks, motorboats, snowmobiles, motorcycles, cars with trailers, bulldozers, forklifts, whatever we have the budget for. They're in new vehicles every episode!

Contestants will face both driving and stationary challenges. Someone good at one style could still fail at the other.

Thoughts: This is too close to plausible for humor; such a show could really work. Actual title will be determined later, as "omni-" is too highbrow. Expect to loose at least one person at 'back up with a trailer.' No airplanes, not for safety but because it's hard to film them dramatically.

91:

... come up with a reason to have the celebrity denied British residency, deported, arrested, or whatever else seems to be appropriate.

Would "appeared on a stupid reality TV show" count?

92:

Actually, there was a show along these lines on the BBC, but they didn't vet contestants.

The result in one case was Rowan Atkinson (IRL HGV1 (US Class 8) licence holder because he wanted one and could afford the course) reversing a truck!

93:

Competence porn has to involve big noisy machinery,

I've become a fan of a few Youtube engineering channels and the best of them for me are the ones that make you think the person has sold his soul to Satan to do what they do on camera. Stefan Gotteswinter, for example...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ_1ju9tfh0

That's the Devil's metal, titanium he's machining to tolerances that terrify me.

94:

New Middle East: Mission Impossible

Ten contestants must pitch Peace Deal proposals to a delegation of angry Israelis and Palestinians. Winner is the one who ends with the least amount of bruises after the inevitable beating they receive from the judges. Provoking the delegation into fighting each other gets the contestants bonus points.

95:

That's not going to work when one delegation have access to rocks and the other has nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. It's basically a football match where one team consists of above-the-knee double leg amputees (without any rule changes to permit wheelchairs or prostheses on the pitch).

Also, I should note that diplomatic negotiations are incredibly tedious and boring to watch.

Also also, rTV shows aim to mop up residuals on the export market, and this one is a non-starter for about 50-80% of the planet; not every nation shares the USA's weird evangelical-inspired obsession with Israel (or is sympathetic to Israel).

96:

Re: ' ... at the head of a marching band of Tory MPs.'

Yeah ... My original idea for this scenario was: 'Who's Your Next GOP US Presidential Candidate/Tory Leader'. But figured there'd be a really good chance for high ad revenues from some of the scummier outfits wanting to target similar psychographic/demo segments therefore switched to a more business-y scenario.

97:

Also: it's been at least attempted - Michael Moore's TV Nation had a "CEO Challenge" segment.

(The only one to rise to the challenge was the then-CEO of Ford, who changed the oil in an Explorer.)

98:

Re "Rip off the fur", this already exists. Apparently there are tabloid papers questioning "who is Hedgehog?"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50841954

99:

Also at least suggested - Mars One was going to fund itself by making a reality TV series of astronaut selection that would continue through the colony's founding. Is there a genre of "watching competence hit hard limits" reality tv?

100:

That's not going to work when one delegation have access to rocks and the other has nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

The delegation doesn't have access to weapons.

101:

The delegation doesn't have access to weapons.

If you're going to be pedantic about it, neither do the individual members of the governments they report to -- but collectively, those governments can issue orders to soldiers/militias, and may well do so in direct response to input from the negotiating delegations.

Another strike against diplomacy as rTV fodder (besides the current comedy of errors now happening c/o Jared Kushner) is that diplomats who are actually, y'know, negotiating (as opposed to posturing for the cameras) like to work under conditions of near-secrecy -- all the public get to know about is the final outcome of negotiations, the negotiators need to be free to discuss hypotheticals in private without risking outrage on the home front.

(Which is what makes the Kushner/Trump "peace" proposal so stupid: they've gone public with an opening position which is obviously a non-starter for the Palestinians, to whom it is totally disadvantageous -- and it's not a viable starting point for negotiations now that it's public, because if they walk back any of the more extreme land grabs in search of a workable compromise it'll make Trump look weak to his base.)

102:

I have both suggested this idea elsewhere and seen it afterwards in mainstream circulation, but I truly think this would fly in our insane era. RACE TO THE EDGE A team of dedicated Flat Earthers are followed by a team of enabling, desperate hosts, whose goal is to stretch the show out into as long as possible in order to get their SAG guild cards and health insurance in the US. The Flat Earthers can fly anywhere in the world, and whoever finds proof that the Earth is flat wins $1000000, which is physically present and shown to them regularly.

The catch is that the Flat Earthers have to pay for their own travel. When they run out of money for travel, they have to beg the audience to call in on 1-900 numbers, and promise to share their winnings with their audience benefactors.

The season ending twist is to up the prize for $5000000, then actually send the last remaining competitors up on a SpaceX flight, which should bankrupt the lot of them.

Alternate versions include a mythbuster knockoff for Fox News true believers, with prize money for "proving" their most insane theories, countered by a detailed forensic analysis of the origins of the misinformation, or an "Own The Libs" tourism show where radical right wing folks get matched with the authoritarian dictatorship that most closely matches their ideology and arranges for them to get into hilarious kerfuffles with their paramilitary police.

103:

How about: Space: 2029 A head to head competition between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to create and execute a mission to: 1) Build and fly a crewed lander to the Moon, and 2) Construct and inhabit a moon base for six months, with 3) Only two resupply missions

The kicker: Musk and Bezos THEMSELVES have to fly the mission, construct the base, and live in it. The loser, most likely, dies. The winner is King of the Moon Men (strictly honorary).

104:

Are you aiming for competence porn or incompetence porn here?

Your task (2) is a suicide mission, with or without two resupply missions. Radiation levels outside the Van Allen belts are not healthy, and if there's a solar flare on top of the regular high energy cosmic rays you're going to have dead astronauts. We're currently in a solar minimum, but moving towards a maximum from roughly 2023-2026, and another minimum around 2030. But a minimum may mean fewer coronal mass ejections ... but the reduced solar activity results in more high energy cosmic rays making it inside Earth's orbit.

Finally: by 2029 (target date?) Elon Musk will be 58 and Jeff Bezos will be 65. That's a little on the old side for starting a new career as pioneering homesteaders on the high frontier, and a lot unsexy on the rTV front.

105:

@104: This idea kind of walks a fine line between competence porn and incompetence porn.

Re: Radiation exposure - this is certainly a valid concern, and one of the chief criticisms of Musk's Mars colonization idea. Effective radiation shielding will be required for any mission outside the Van Allen belts and should be part of the base design.

As for age, John Glenn managed a Shuttle ride at age 77. Many NASA astronauts are in their 40s and 50s. Musk and Bezos would have to pass qualifying physical exams to make the show possible, but they both seem healthy for their age. I don't see this as a show stopper.

Some amplifying ideas: 1) Each participant gets extra points for maximizing the use of their space hardware. 2) each team is limited to four crew members, the other three doing most of the real work. 3) the landers must have the ability to return the crew at a minimum to LEO in case of catastrophe. 4) Points will be awarded and success judged by a panel including representatives from NASA, ESA, ROSCOSMOS, the China National Space Program, and the Indian Space Research Organization.

This is a put up or shut up proposition for Musk. It is also NOT a serious proposal; I realize it's wildly unlikely and WAY too dangerous.

106:

Two other thoughts: Space: 2029 is an obvious callback to Space: 1999, and when did we start judging on real-world executability? We've already instituted slavery and infected people with chronic diseases as part of the other proposals.

107:

Roman Resort: Contestants from all walks of life are tasked with living in and operating a tiny Roman town for a year. They have to grow food, run shops, Roman baths, make tools, etc. with Roman-era technology. After a start-up period where the producers supply period-appropriate food and tools, they begin hosting tourists who expect a luxury vacation. (Note: participants aren't allowed to get any modern food or tech from the tourists, but them getting it secretly and hiding it will probably be a major plot point.)

This is sort of borderline competence/incompetence porn that should be pretty entertaining to watch. There were three shows that did similar things in the early 2000s--Manor House (upstairs/downstairs with real people--highly entertaining), 1900 House (an Edwardian London middle-class experience), and Pioneer House (three families building neighboring cabins in the American west). All were great television in addition to being actually educational. I was sorry to see the genre die.

108:

Radiation exposure - this is certainly a valid concern, and one of the chief criticisms of Musk's Mars colonization idea.

Yup. If I was Musk, I'd be planning on building my habitats at the bottom of Vales Marineris (about 7km below mean surface level, so higher atmospheric pressure -- thicker, less radiation at ground level -- and drilling horizontally into the cliffs so that colonists can bed down with bedrock for radiation shielding).

John Glenn managed a Shuttle ride at age 77

Yes, but he was in excellent physical shape for his age, and spent most of his ride in microgravity -- the shuttled maxed out at 3G on the way up, lying prone, and about 1.5G on the way down, seated. Glenn exercised as part of his mission tasks, but under controlled conditions -- not required to actually build or manhandle habitat components, even in 1/6 G, while wearing a 100kg space suit.

As for Musk, I suspect he's going to actually do something like this, although not as a reality TV show and he won't be along for the ride: it looks like a fairly reasonable early surface mission suitable for Heavy/Starship to fly in the 2024-28 time frame, if everything comes together.

109:

We're looking for plausible reality TV show ideas. Which means TV on a tight budget, and carried out within the constraints of terrestrial legal systems. (In other words, "so you want to be a bank robber" is right out; so is "how fast can you spend a billion dollars".)

110:

There's a related sector; experimental archaeology, in which researchers take what we know about a particular period's habits, customs, artefacts and lifestyle and try to re-create it and live it. Not just 100-300 years back, but 1000-3000 years, and as a practical research area (which sometimes gets documentary filmmakers involved).

111:

Re "unsexy", how old are Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Stallone, Arnie, etc.? We're in a society where rich and powerful can buy older guys a lot of sexy, especially if you're in shape (required for flight), talented and relatively charismatic.

And re the suicide mission, I remember seeing a survey about 20 years ago. Turns out a lot of people would happily take that one-way trip. Some were up for having their names remembered forever alongside Gagarin and Armstrong; but some were just up for it being a space flight to Mars. Especially if it was a suicide mission with a purpose, paving the way for the next guys to settle permanently, you'd get a lot of takers. Bonus points if you have a slow-progressing but terminal illness, because it'd be a much better way to make your exit.

112:

How about we take six rich, American racists and inject each one with a disease which negatively affects reasoning capabilities, such as rabies or syphilis. They compete against each other in making incoherent proposals about how to fix the world's problems, with the answers judged by randomly selected people who are already heavy reality TV show viewers.

The winner gets to be the Republican candidate for president in 2024.

113:

So You Want to Be a Useful Member of Society

Six to ten contestants from strict racial demographics based on the potential contestant pool (school-leavers/high school dropouts) compete for admission to a "prestigious" high-demand university/college course, including completion of all of the prerequisites that they didn't do IRL. One contestant is a ringer — fits the racial demographic, but actually comes from privilege (parents probably in entertainment industry or organized crime*). The "prize" is $100,000US in student debt (and equivalent in UK, hard to calculate an equivalent!). The "five years after" reunion shows visit the squalor of the nonwinners, and possibly the winners. Or their gravesites.

  • If anyone can tell the difference, please tell me.
114:

Side comment on John Glenn:

You're also forgetting the most important aspect: John Glenn was relearning an awful lot of skills from his first career as a test pilot and astronaut. He already had relevant muscle memory and subconscious thought processes, so his age was much less of a barrier than it would be for Musk or Bezos.

Which would make an aged/aging (but much less prominent!) astronaut an excellent ringer in the proposed show...

115:

Have to admit I was pretty much the same -sucked into FiF despite it being terribly formulaic. I think the fact that it was done under such time constraints made everyone go 'yeah that could have been me' towards the loser - one minor mistake at the wrong time and it was over.

I was fascinated with the types of blades they got the contestants to produce - some were really obscure/incredibly specific.

116:

@109: As to the budget, we go to Bezos and Musk. The one who kicks in the biggest amount gets top billing as executive producer. Their egos will do the rest. For the "terrestrial legal systems", this isn't horribly far away from the mission goals of NASA's Artemis Program. I make no judgement as to the executability of that program.

117:

I remember Living in the Past, made in 1978 - an early version of the form. A bunch of people spent a year living as Iron Age people. I saw a follow up doc a while back, where one of the participants was asked what they most missed of modern life. It turns out that the greatest invention of the last few thousand years is wellington boots.

118:

Re competence porn, I have to recommend BBC's The Repair Shop. People bring in treasured but knackered family heirlooms, then lovely and very talented craftspeople restore them, with very little jeopardy or hype. Proper nice cosy telly, about as far from the screaming fake tanned hyperbole of certain reality nonsense as you can get.

119:

A Slush Pile of Infinite Awfulness

Ten aspiring male writers must simultaneously: 1. Attempt to sell their first novel to a group of ten female literary agents. 2. Attempt to win the hearts of the aforementioned literary agents.

120:

(114 continued, had "help" and hit submit too soon)

For non-aviators out there, the single most difficult skill is the combination of learning to run a checklist in an emergency, and developing the judgment to know when to skip steps in that checklist. Exhibit A: The 737MAX crashes (Boeing screwed up and did not ensure that checklist items were, well, on the checklist; then the aircrew didn't have the experience base with the airframe — they thought they did, but didn't — to skip checklist items that were in front of them).

And it's orders of magnitude harder for test pilots and first-of-its-kind airframes. There are some non-scary (because they're actually less fraught than reality; unlike the producers, I know how to read between the lines of post-flight reports, it was part of my job as a maintenance squadron commander) examples of how this might translate to TV in The First with the F-15, Gemini, and the Lunar Lander incidents. Everyone on the crew has to participate; there's no space for "along for the ride passengers" in a test vehicle. By definition, even today, all space vehicles are test vehicles.

121:

@119: Fine if you remove the gender constraints, but probably pretty boring rTV.

122:

That sounds like fun, if only to watch. (Participating would be difficult, as I'm already married.)

123:

Charlie @85 - “a choice between arc welding, bombs, guns, and DIY orbital laser death rays. ” wait, why can’t I have all of them you meany! It would be a great tie in with @104

124:

It would be perfect for PBS.

125:

I quite like the competence reality shows I had a friend on a reality cooking show and they edit you into the drama And perhaps to the point of parody, but what about the biggest poo show, contestants would compete to deliver the biggest one, there would be dieticians and chefs Sadly, I think people would actually watch that

126:

I'm sorry, they already, long ago, made a movie of Heinlein's Man Who Sold The Moon, and called it Destination Moon.

Oh, and IIRC, Harriman does die after reaching the moon....

127:

I have only one question: where is the line of people I need to beat up to get to the front of that line?

As long as I can take my late wife's ashes with me.

128:

I don't understand. Why inject them with something when they already have the problem....?

But, here we go, a new contest to select either the next GOP presidential candidate, or the next PM: the swimsuit competition.

Of course, I can see Sarah Palin going for that one....

129:

Tolerances that terrify you?

How 'bout this: back around '70, when I was young and working as a lab tech, I was hotpressing a very hard and tough plastic. The dies gave us something about 1"x1/2" cylinders.

For a while, my boss had me cutting them down on a lathe to meet spec, to be a small tube, to be used with replacement heart valves.

130:

How about '3-D printing for real-life home-making'?

Search turned up pix of several 3-D printed houses, so now it's time to get the insides done. This show could be set up like 'The Great British Bake Off' where each week the contestants are given a specific challenge - in this case, a different room. Most of what I've seen about 3-D printing makes me think of it as an expensive toy/single-use gadget - not worth buying.

Consider it practice for aspiring Lunar/Mars colonists.

132:

Sigh.

Your first challenge is trivially easy (hint: my literary agent is female) (... well okay, probably not trivial for most people, but I'm an existence proof that it's possible!).

But your second relies on a couple of false assumptions, namely that authors are young and single (some are, most aren't: typical age at publication of first novel is somewhere north of 30), and also that agents are young and single (again: it's typically a secondary profession after a previous incarnation as an editor or publishing professional: I've never met an agent with a list who was under 30, and -- like most adults -- they're seldom single either). So you've basically got an impossible format -- at best, middle-aged folks looking for a hookup that also requires one of them to engage in gross professional misconduct (sex with a client).

133:

I'd have them do ordinary stuff that they probably hand off to assistants. Use a dumb phone, send email, install a new software package, order something online....

134:

Well, Charlie, there ya go: same format, except all the authors are incels, and all the agents are older, and just love watching the incels crawl....

135:

I remember getting some curly beryllium-bronze shavings from something my father was machining at home for his job. (No, I don't know what it was - probably thoroughly classified.) 36x9-inch "South Bend" lathe. He also had a drill press and a bench saw - with more equipment acquired later.

136:

My father said, when the photos from Viking on Mars came back, that if they got the bugs out of the life-support systems, he'd volunteer to go. (He was 60 at the time. Also a good BSME and a long-time SF reader.)

137:

Oooh, I like the way you think!

138:

Biosphere 2.X (first season is Biosphere 2.1, second is 2.2, etc.)

Refurbish Biosphere 2. Wire it up like Big Brother house(cameras everywhere). Raise funds to keep the experiment running through social media and TV ad ratings. Subjects can vote themselves out, and when the crew drops below sustainable staffing or a filming season passes, they wrap the season with a lessons-learned/dish dissection episode and start over again with a (partially?) new crew the next season and hopefully an upgraded Biosphere.

The show ends when/if they start doing it right (no one leaves), and is followed by a feature film showcasing 2-5 years of constant habitation.

Oh, and make sure the University of Arizona and other entities working there get prominent billing.

139:

A version of The Apprentice except without private companies.

All your friends are on a train and you have to decide how naughty you are prepared to be to get them safely to their destination.

140:

That's actually a very good idea and I hope someone does it for real.

141:

Martin H AND CONDOMS

142:

How tight were the specs for the heart valve tubes you were machining? In that video I referenced Stefan is manufacturing 2mm metric screws -- they're roughly US #4-40 sized, but in titanium which is really tricky to cut. He's machining the tops of the screws to take a Torx T8 screwdriver using a solid carbide endmill that's 0.6mm in diameter, thinner than a 1/32" drill bit. He is doing this repeatedly to an accuracy of fractions of a tenth of a thousandth of an inch when regular machinist shops figure they're doing really well finishing a job to plus or minus a thou.

I'm getting the parts and tools together to do cut some gears using a CNC mill -- I'm planning on using a really fine endmill for some of the operations, well I thought it was a fine endmill at 1.6mm in diameter until I rewatched Stefan at work. Now I'm sure I'm working with, to quote Spock, "flint knives and bearskins".

143:

There's a difference between shaving half the visible width off a small part, and getting the same accuracy over 1000x the distance. Some of the CNC jobs I've been involved with we farmed them out to people who could do 50 microns (0.05mm) along 5m of travel when cutting harder grades of steel. Given what they charged for the service I can only imagine that the machines cost millions. I would struggle to get that accuracy on a simple straight edge a metre long.

But if you say "cut something a torx driver can turn, and the hole is about 0.5mm across", I could do that freehand if I had a cutter small enough. Same precision, completely different situation. I made a rotary broach to create an allen key head for a 0.7mm allen key in a similar fashion. And no, it is not easy to make a hexagonal pyramid oriented 1 degree off axis on the end of a 2mm shaft. But it's possible to do it largely by eye.

(the 1.3mm version of that part is a "micro" broach and is ~$US50)

144:

Which is not to say that Stefan isn't terrifying to watch and incredibly skilled as a craftsman.

Just that precision is more than "I can eyeball tiny things". To me the thread cutting and finishing he did was actually more impressive.

145:

My sis worked for a while at a place that built VADs (ventricular assist devices). She was putting a blood-surface finish on pieces (her words; she explained it as a surface with nothing big enough to catch a red blood cell). Later, she worked at a company doing extreme-precision aspherical optical parts; she ran polishing machines, which required setting up the programs. (Some of the parts she worked on spent several years in orbit and are now in the Air&Space Museum.)

Part of my job with maps was, at one point, quality control on computer-printed output, where we were checking stuff to 1 foot accuracy. It was like fuzz in some places, but visible (0.01 inch, at our usual scale of 1 inch=100 feet).

146:

... a mythbuster knockoff for Fox News true believers, with prize money for "proving" their most insane theories ...

Okay, I think this one could have legs - but it's not a horrible reality show, it's Politifact. For drama and incompetence porn, flip it around to encourage the dingbats.

Call the program TRUTHING in total defiance of accuracy and grammar.

The easy part is recruiting swivel-eyed lunatics; teh innerwebs are full of them. Filter out the boringly crazy and pick some entertainingly crazy ones. Contestants will be given a soapbox upon which to expound their favorite conspiracy theory or other crackpot idea and 14.999 minutes of fame, which is all the motivation some people need.

One feature should be constant audience feedback on their favorite conspiracy theorists. (Allegedly for "fairness" or "persuasiveness" or something, obviously actually to make the audience keep coming back.) The least exciting theorist is retired back to obscurity and Facebook.

Episodes early in the season should also feature one-shot aspiring demagogues; the audience will be allowed to pick one to return as a regular contestant, in an online poll that totally isn't rigged, honest, trust us.

The season finale can involve making a pilot episode for their Fox News late night opinion program.

147:

Call the program TRUTHING in total defiance of accuracy and grammar.

Naah, needs to be Truthseeker to get the correct implication that the conspiracy nonsense they're chasing is real.

Tag line: "the truth IS out there — and we're going to find it!"

Episode plots delivered monthly by QAnon.

Hosts will be a pair of distinguished-looking Suits, one male and one female, who claim to be ex-FBI investigators; this is a deliberate attempt to leverage the X Files (for those members of the audience who were born when it aired).

Bonus points if the investigation of the week inspires a spree shooting (in a pizzeria accused of hosting satanic child sacrifices to the Dread God Billary, or similar).

148:

Regarding checklists, I like rule 3 in this list: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/ops-lessons.html

It reads: The severity of an incident is measured by the number of rules broken in resolving it.

The whole list bears reading a few times, I reckon.

149:

If we're doing tolerances, I'm afraid I've pretty much got that beaten, since I'm currently the software engineer on Queensgate nanopositioning systems. Machining tolerances need wire erosion. Positioning tolerances, though...

The company had been selling kit to Seagate for testing hard disk heads since the mid-90s, and they wanted a next-generation version. The mid-90s kit had a resolution of around 200pm with 15um travel, linear to about 10nm max error, and we needed to improve that. Our next-gen one ended up with 28um travel, linear to 2nm max error, and a resolution between 50pm and 150pm depending on the tuning. We have some other kit which is used to fine-tune particle-beam accelerators, where we trade off speed versus resolution and get down to about 20pm resolution. For comparison, the covalent distance between two hydrogen atoms is 75pm.

Sometimes I wish I was back working on tolerances I could see. :)

150: 104 Para 3 - Yes, but several Shuttle crew are on record as saying that John Glenn's trip was a publicity stunt and would never have been done had he been anyone else. 142 - Model shops (all types, not just train shops) regularly stock steel drill bits down to 0.3mm diameter, and people use them.
151:

I think you just won this war!

Get back to me when someone asks you for tolerances best described by analogizing to inter-quark distances ...

152:

Tag line: "the truth IS out there — and we're going to find it!"

Episode plots delivered monthly by QAnon.

I like it! Hired lawyers can settle any legal problems, right?

For totally recursive conspiracies, the show should have sockpuppets inside QAnon feeding them "information" and "clues" then play off of whatever catches the interest of the barking masses.

It seems to me that to keep the legal department appeased the hosts will have to put on serious expressions of pro forma disapproval while bringing up the week's mass shooting or pedophile pizza place bombing, before moving on to long loving coverage of the dramatic event, with gory photos and plenty of talk about the independently minded individual who did this thing without any outside motivation whatsoever. (To the target audience violent mass-murdering white guys are unpredictable lone wolves, while brown people and Muslims are extremists and terrorists.) Conspiracy theories linked to dramatic current events would get a definite advantage over their competition.

As for the FBI angle, they could use a lot of FBI imagery without ever actually claiming anything, the way Mike Pompeo did not technically lie that Mary Louise Kelly mistook Bangladesh for Ukraine.

The Suits will probably have to remind contestants that they are competing and need to ask questions of the current presenter rather than just getting wound up and excited. The well known quirk of crank magnetism will hopefully be on full display here.

153:

Belatedly I think of the title Wake Up, Sheeple!

154:

The title is self-explanatory: "So you want to be cannon fodder". Low-information, low-income physically fit people are sent to Aghanistan to look for land mines with their feet.

155:

Many of the best ideas would be illegal (except possibly in Alabama), or have already been used by Trump or Boris. -Can we grant the contestants the same de facto immunity of prosecution BoJo and Trump appear to enjoy?

156:

@21 yellowcake:

This makes me think:

Welcome to the Nuclear Family: n tin-pot dictatorships/dubious countries compete to get the bomb. The winner doesn't get glass carpeted.

157:

I have concluded that there are two ideal television shows. They are both reality shows. One of light one of darkness.

The ideal tv show of light is the UK version of "The Great British Baking Show". A bunch of lovely brits in a garden making cake.

The ideal tv show of darkness is the "Deadliest Catch". A bunch of american thugs caging crabs for money while the ocean and the cages try to kill them.

158:

"Great British Bake-Off" doesn't work for me, because in otder to bake well you have to really know your oven, and work in a controlled environment. The show provided the ovens, and is set in a tent!

"Deadliest Catch" is out-pointed by the BBC's Trawlermen/Fish Town, which has similar risks but a likable cast.

159:

157/158: In terms of dangerous, what about "Ice Road Truckers"?

160:

"Bake Off" is a bit of an outlier. Strictly speaking it falls within the "incompetence porn" category, but seems to have taken pains to remove the hyper-competitive and confrontational aspects.

I suspect it is highly successful by tapping into the same sort of emotional seam as "Downtown Abbey" (ack spit), where people watch for a bit of drama, but know that everything is all OK and nothing really bad happens that can't be fixed with a quick cuppa and a group hug.

161:

Both of the shows (bake off, crab fishing) mix 'competence' and 'incompetence'. Bake off always has whoever fails, and the extreme competence (but also difference competence) of the hosts. Crab fishing often has a 'new guy' and the general messed up lives of even the expert crabbers.

I find the un-likability of much of the 'deadliest catch' crews to be part of its dark perfection. At least one of them ended up in prison, and not for a property crime.

I have seen Ice Road Truckers, certainly similar.

In the first season or two of 'deadliest catch' there was also a game-show aspect to it. The old crab fishing management scheme was that the government would open the season and declare a number of crabs that could be caught. When that number had been caught the season would be closed. This made it a race to get the crabs for yourself. In the northern pacific. In winter. So the crabbers were taking huge risks to bring in the crabs quickly. This was, of course, madness. And the system was changed to some kind of per-boat quota with the season being a fixed several months (I believe having to do with the crab life-cycle). The whole thing became less insane.

162:

Sorry, I can't seem to find the specs laying about, I was doing this a couple years ago... like 1970.

Please note, btw, that I was doing this on a lathe whose bed, IIRC, was about 3'? 5'? long, and it was all manual. I had to be really careful, since the cylinders were hard... meaning that when they got thin, they were brittle, at least in terms of steel lathe cutting tools.

I'm thinking back.. I'd guess the final tubes were... just under a cm wide, and the walls...couldn't have been more than 1mm, maybe less.

Great fun. Crack. Another multi-hour hotpressing session for another sample, and yes, we had one (count them) press/furnace.

163:

Y'know, there was a newsgroup for that... until the horrible Eternal September begain, when AOL got Internet access, and autosubscribed everyone to certain newsgroups... including alt.best.of.internet, where we used to repost posts from other newsgroups, from people being really funny... or, more often, from people who had no clue just how that read to anyone else.

164:

Speaking as someone who, starting in '95, slowly moved from programming to sysadmin, which is what I did the last dozen or so years of my career... ROTFLMAOKMFITA!!!!!

I esp. like rule 79... in fact, I liked it so much, I sent the link to my old manager at the NIH. He'll get a laugh out of it.

Btw, I almost never printed out and put up cartoons at work... but since about when he published it, I had of the shelves for everyone to see who came to see me what I referred to as "my personal mission statement (as a sysadmin)", which was xkcd/705.

165:

Really? Ugh. I hate electric stoves... and I've been stuck with one in this house. I think I'm going to spend the money this spring to have them run a gas line from the meter to the other end of the slab, so I can have a gas stove.

Current electric stove: 1) is not level 2) burners are on/off, not a rheostat, which means they keep getting hotter, and I have to turn them down, and down.... 3) The oven, at a guess, is 10F-15F hotter than it claims on the electric temp on top of the stove.

166:

Dave P @ 60: @54: Actually, one segment of the US population had "socialized" medicine for a long time - the US military, where indeed treatment approval was the job of doctors and treatment was not based on ability to pay. That system, too, has been degraded over the past twenty years by the beancounters.

"THEY" (in this case Dick Cheney) cut Veteran's medical benefits in 2004 when they saw how much medical care for veterans of the Iraq war was going to cost. It was going to create a deficit that undermined their tax cuts for the rich.

167:

Charlie Stross @ 104: Are you aiming for competence porn or incompetence porn here?

Your task (2) is a suicide mission, with or without two resupply missions. Radiation levels outside the Van Allen belts are not healthy, and if there's a solar flare on top of the regular high energy cosmic rays you're going to have dead astronauts. We're currently in a solar minimum, but moving towards a maximum from roughly 2023-2026, and another minimum around 2030. But a minimum may mean fewer coronal mass ejections ... but the reduced solar activity results in more high energy cosmic rays making it inside Earth's orbit.

Wouldn't that just mean that whatever moon base they built would have to be designed & constructed including adequate radiation shielding? Land at lunar sunset, dig a trench, assemble a pre-fab base & pile several feet of lunar regolith on top of it before the sun rises again. Just adds a bit of a time constraint to the contest.

For bonus fun, restrict them to only one set of tools, so they have to share & cooperate or else neither one gets their base built before sunrise.

168:

"THEY" (in this case Dick Cheney) cut Veteran's medical benefits in 2004 when they saw how much medical care for veterans of the Iraq war was going to cost.

One of the US veterans I know can't talk about McCain without losing it — hated the man for talking respect for veterans but voting against spending money on their medical care almost every chance he got.

This site has a summary of his voting record:

https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/john-mccain6.htm

This does suggest a totally illegal and unethical RTV show, though.

Contestants are all politicians who have made a name for themselves extolling 'our troops'. They are provided with fake IDs (and their real ones blocked) and carefully injured in the same manner as many troops are. They are then turned lose to navigate the VA (or equivalent) on their own.

169:

whitroth @ 126: I'm sorry, they already, long ago, made a movie of Heinlein's Man Who Sold The Moon, and called it Destination Moon.

Oh, and IIRC, Harriman does die after reaching the moon....

Destination Moon wasn't Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon", it's more akin to "Rocket Ship Galileo" (without the space Nazis). For one thing, the scientists who build the rocket "Luna" aren't con men who would "cheat, lie, steal, beg, bribe—do anything" to fund their venture.

Plus, the short story "Requiem" where D.D.Harriman finally does make it to the moon and subsequently dies (because by then he was too old and frail to make the journey) was written 10 years before "The Man Who Sold The Moon" inspired by the Robert Louis Stevenson poem of the same name.

"Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

"The Man Who Sold The Moon" just sort of retcons how D.D.Harriman created the moon colony & why he'd never been there.

It would be like if OGH were to now write the story telling how Bob got recruited by the Laundry after "almost landscaping Wolverhampton".

170:

whitroth @ 128: I don't understand. Why inject them with something when they already have the problem....?

But, here we go, a new contest to select either the next GOP presidential candidate, or the next PM: the swimsuit competition.

Of course, I can see Sarah Palin going for that one....

Not anymore. She hasn't "aged gracefully" ... and besides that photo was a Photoshop fake.

(Link included for those who might not know about the "Sarah Palin" bikini/rifle photo.)

171:

@169: It would be like if OGH were to now write the story telling how Bob got recruited by the Laundry after "almost landscaping Wolverhampton".

I'd enjoy reading that. Simpler times (at least for Bob).

172:

@128: But, here we go, a new contest to select either the next GOP presidential candidate, or the next PM: the swimsuit competition.

Ack - more mind bleach, stat!

173:

So you think you can coup or Tour d’Etat 6 teams are provided with all the CIA assistance they can eat, with the goal to overturn the legitimate government in their assigned country out of 3 selected countries (to make things interesting, 2 teams per country are in direct competition with each other). The timing between filming and broadcast must be managed exquisitely, to balance the outing of the teams to their targets and maintaining the surprise ending for the finale.

174:

There is some background filling-in in progress in the Laundryverse!

I've got one or two final novels to write to finish the series. However, the novella that's coming out later this year on Tor.com sits right before "The Nightmare Stacks" and explains precisely what Bob was doing instead of fighting off the Alfar invasion on Leeds (spoiler: he was in Tokyo, helping his Japanese opposite numbers prevent something truly horrible from leveling up from Yokai to Kaiju).

So, never say never.

But the main series story arc has only one or two novels left to go to hit completion. (Although the new series, which starts with "Dead Lies Dreaming", shares the universe -- it's about civilians trying to get along under the reign of the New Management.)

175:

@174: Tangentially related reply - I know you watch almost no TV and are not a huge movie fan, but you might enjoy J. Michael Straczynski's autobiography Becoming Superman, his story of overcoming a truly awful childhood and eventually reaching great success in Hollywood and in graphic novels. The relevant point is his discussion of knowing when to move on from a series, theme or even career once he's reached his goal.

This discussion opened my eyes on the idea of ending a series - of books, TV or any other creative endeavor. I'm glad you've found a through line to conclude the Laundry Files story arc, even though I'll miss Bob, Mo, and the mob.

176:

Oh, I knew. Of course, I used to tell an ex-friend (he voted for the Orange Idiot, and after too many times talking about Mike Wiener, er, "Savage" ratio show, I'd had it), if McCain & Palin didn't win, he'd have a chance of going to Alaska and picking her up in a bar, whereas if they did win, he'd never have that chance.

177:

he was in Tokyo, helping his Japanese opposite numbers prevent something truly horrible from leveling up from Yokai to Kaiju

So, fighting off the Kawaii Apocalypse? And now I’m picturing giant version of a certain creature—at least she doesn’t have a mouth (but she must scream?)

178:

Great British Bake Off / Great British Baking Show falls into the rarer third category of reality TV, which is neither incompetence porn nor competence porn, but learning porn.

You can generally spot "learning porn" shows because the contestants talk about having "been on a journey".

The idea is that there is some skill that any reasonably capable human can reach adequate competence at given X weeks full-time one-on-one training, where X is the length of a normal TV season. And it's something where viewers can tell the difference between useless and adequate, but only specialists can tell between adequate and actually good (and there aren't enough specialists for viewing figures to be affected). Viewers get to watch people learning something challenging but attainable in a supportive environment. The celebrity versions can generally get a slightly higher class of celebrity than an incompetence porn show with comparable audience figures because they don't involve ritual humiliation.

Examples include ballroom dancing (Strictly Come Dancing/ Dancing With The Stars), opera singing (Pop Star To Opera Star, ie starting with people who could actually sing), baking (GBBO), cooking (MasterChef, especially their "the professionals" version), pop singing (The Voice), etc.

The Simon Cowell franchises ([insert country here] Idol, X-Factor and [insert country here]'s Got Talent) are a combination of this with incompetence porn, in that the first half of the season is eliminating the utterly incompetent, and then the second half takes a group of basically competent performers and tries to put them through learning how to be better at it.

179:

I can’t come up with a rTV show that fits the bill. All I got is Furr’s Angels, possibly some sort of dating show involving rival gangs of Furry Bikers (motorcycle variety). A few years ago I saw a large group of bikers, in the middle of them was a motorcycle driven by someone in a black and white cat fursuit, I can’t remember what their passenger was dressed as. I hope they had helmets under their heads.

180:

I’ve seen at least one person riding with a full visor helmet made up to be a plush Grover the muppet head, where the black visor is an open mouth. So there is at least a small extent to which this is a Thing.

181:

We should all be terrified to post an idea here for fear some down-and-out rTV producer stumbled along to this page and finds a gold mine of ideas that just need to be tones down a little, or not at all.

182:

Quite, most irresponsible I thought. It's been bad enough already having cameras in the House of Commons aimed down Theresa May's cleavage. The possibility of discovering something truly awful, like Michael Gove needing to strap it to his ankle and what his face looks like when he gets to exhibit this on TV, is I think too much of a risk to take.

183:

Soooo.... none of you watched "BrexitCast" tonight, esp. with the fake ABBA tribute then.

After the BBC announced 450+ job losses, massive cuts (and !whoopsie! EU losses of ~£100 mil from losing special broadcast status on BBC-W which is already outsourced etc). Including axing the only popular day-time TV female lead show who actually told the truth once in a while[1]

After Susan and all the other wreckers announced they were quitting (probably to join M's new "TIMES" radio jaunt)?

Literally prime time telly?

Seriously.

Nothing you have suggested was a gruesome and banal and evil as the reality.

[1] Alexis Sayles: good bloke,find the video where he states "My career is over anyhow, so I'll tell some truths"

184:

Actually ... the WHOLE COUNTRY is involved in asuch a disater-porn show ... called "brexit"

Comparisons

How about another end of January ... actually the 30th .... a few things changed, but life went on ( more or less, for most people ) as normal ... until 30th June the following year. After that, there was no going back & it got very dark & unpleasant indeed. [ Work out where & when that one was? ] Second historical comparison ... about the length of a parliamentary term. Again, very little changed in the first 6 months or so ... then it got steadily worse & the country lost a war, was bankrupted & the torture squads were loosed. [ 1553 - 1558 ]

185:

There are conflicting accounts stating Mulder has a Jewish background, we might put this through to casting to trigger[1] parts of the audience.

Hm come to think about it, could the female lead be played by Joanna Angel?

As for my personal incompetence porn, I have long said I want to maroon some of the higher-ups in social work and politics behind a big city train station with only an empty telephone card[2].

[1] I guess I'm not the first one noticing people bemoaning "snowflakes"[1a] are easily triggered themselves. [1a] And may I add "Fight Club" is not meant as a script to be emulated... [2] With nods to the final exam in "Starship Troopers".

186:

Reality TV show: Former tory ministers/retired businessmen are tricked into joining a reality tv show about surviving on a tropical island, using local resources. They end up dumped on Rockall, where they must either catch fish with their hands and eat it raw, Gollum-style, or aquire a taste for "long pig" to survive.

187:

Replying to points as bulleted:- 1) Stove not level is an issue of installation, not fuel. 2) Radiants being binary is a model design issue, not a function of fuel used. 3) That's just agreeing my point about knowing your oven properly. It's an issue of thermostat calibration, not fuel.

188:

I'm not sure the Cowell franchises qualify as "learning". The participants don't get better, they just get more time put into the stage production.

It's certainly true for the British Masterchef versions though, as well as GBBO and a lot of other shows like that. It's noticeable that the competitors all come away saying they had the best time and how all their fellow competitors are their best friends.

And ironically it's also somewhat true for the Gordon Ramsey "Kitchen nightmares" shows. In spite of how grotesquely unrealistic and confrontational they are, his focus is clearly on setting each restaurant on a course which gets them selling food that people will pay for, and a lot of that is about setting them straight on hygiene and cooking skills. It's very noticeable on those shows how Ramsey does pull up people for praise who are doing a good job.

The American Masterchef though is a shame for the brand. It's all clearly scripted, and it's been constructed to favour spoilt toddlers competing for attention, both the competitors and the judges.

189:

[ DELETED -- for crass racism. Mods. ]

190:

A man runs into a screen door.

He is hospitalised with strained muscles!

191:

In the same way that Steven Colbert used to play the right wing "straight man" to John Stewart, there should be a rational, lab coat wearing orator who dissects the various conspiracy theories. "This first originated on twitter at 3pm on Weds Jan 31 as 5000 bots posted links back to a story on the English version of RT. These talking points were then distributed to ALEC and wound up on Fox News once they knew Trump was awake and watching." This character breaks everything down, and then the camera turns to show the frothing reactions of red-meat eating red staters. If I believed in Hell I would go ahead and forward my mail there after considering the effects of this program on the world.

192:

Actually, Comedy Central (home of the Daily Show), tried something like this with a spinoff The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. It wasn't the same as your idea, because it was parodying the alt-right the same way old Colbert had parodied the Neo-Cons.

It lasted one season.

Much as I loved old Colbert, I couldn't watch this thing. It was a good lesson that there's a point at which parody, sarcasm, and truth telling are not sufficient to deal with a deeply divided society, especially when there are so many people for whom hate and bigotry are the only things they have left that they consider of value.

Were I going to propose a reality show for the Blue/Red mess in the US, I'd pitch a truth and reconciliation commission, set up to reunite families and communities after what I hope will be a truly devastating 2020 election for the Republicans, to program to be developed in parallel with a blizzard of criminal prosecutions for varying aspects of political corruption.

Or, if things get worse, something like the Nuremberg Trials, pitched as reality TV only because CSPAN covers them in their entirety.

Or, if things get really bad, a programme called "The Peacekeepers," broadcasting the actions of the UNPKF in the US and Russia, marketed in the EU and China (hat tip to Daniel Keys Moran).

193:

Heteromeles Or here after about the middle of 2022, when evrything really is falling apart & the brexshiteers are blaming everybody, anybody else. ( Probably Geo Soros & "the Jews" if previous runs-through of this are anything to go by ) Which reminds me, some of the very oldest living in Britain want nothing at all to do with brexit - & good luck to them. Actually, I think the majority of the shitters are younger than me, in the 40/45 - 65 age group ... Or maybe that's just the people I mix with?

194:

Nope, sorry, I'm picturing another creature, and it can scream....

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/09/theres-a-car-horn-that-roars.html?fk_bb

Oh, do I want that, on a separate switch....

195:

90% of the people who refer to "snowflakes" also toss around "sjw". I will note that 99% of the people on the right (which is 99% of people noted above) are all snowflakes, triggered 99% of the time by the counter-proposal.

And my answer to "sjw" is, "I see, so you're vehemently against social justice, and pro-racism."

196:

Find one electric stove with a rheostat, rather than an on/off temperature.

I cannot.

"Design issue"? That's "we only make them cheap.

197:

This is only sorta-kinda on thread, but... it seems Roku is halting broadcast of Fox stand alone channels tonight. May be contract negotiation, but it's late in the game if it's reached this point. On slashdot, where I read of this, one commenter trashed all major US news channels... but the cmt I liked was "Fox and Friends: so white and rich I occasionally mistake it for the cheesecake in my freezer".

Oh, there we go, Faux and Friends as one team, and a team of people who have applied to be on the other team, with the requirement that all of them earn under the median income. Both teams are dropped in the middle of North Dakota in the fall, and have to survive the season, with nothing airdropped or delivered, only what is within 100 mi.

198:

There are 7 (or more) Fox channels that can be streamed or found on cable in the US. Fox News is just one of them. Fox broadcast, sports, FXX (or FFX) movies, business and some more I don't remember.

Fox has a lot of the leverage here with the Superb Orb[1] this Sunday. If course I have to wonder just how many people get their foxes this way.[2] I guess Fox and Apple and Amazon are not at the end of a contract as AppleTV and Amazon Fire don't seem to be on the brink. And then there is Sling, Direct (err AT&T) TV, various cable companies, and whatever.

[1]Don't want OGH to get sued for trade mark infringement.

[2]TV in the US is an absolute mess in terms of "how can I watch xxxx?" The answer is typically there are 10 ways. But you might not have access to any of them.

199:

Well, I think from what Charlie has said about the story in the past, and since he spent time in Japan a few years ago, that a certain feline will feature prominently.

200:

And may I add "Fight Club" is not meant as a script to be emulated...

Wasn’t “Fight Club” about a deeply closeted gay man retreating into über-machismo fantasies? No, I haven’t read or seen it.

Unrelated, I forgot to share this yesterday: Reality Bites, or how to commit career suicide for the entertainment of others. A look into the making of an early ‘reality’ show, that lead to the creation of “The Apprentice”.

201:

Birger Johansson @ 186: Reality TV show: Former tory ministers/retired businessmen are tricked into joining a reality tv show about surviving on a tropical island, using local resources. They end up dumped on Rockall, where they must either catch fish with their hands and eat it raw, Gollum-style, or aquire a taste for "long pig" to survive.

Could we make that a trans-Atlantic show by introducing a competing team of former GOP politicians ... or even current ones?

202:

whitroth @ 195: And my answer to "sjw" is, "I see, so you're vehemently against social justice, and pro-racism."

Thanks. I think I'll use that line.

203:

No spoilers please! (But the title alone, "Escape from Puroland", should tell you something -- with a bit of googling.)

This is all my wife's fault for asking, many years ago, "... but what if the color out of space was pink?"

204:

BEIGE? "Taupe" ( A very slightly pinkish-gret colour )? Terracotta? ... I think you get the idea

205:

Not an official reality-TV entry, just something that I'd expect to see on British TV.

Poetry Corner (Ode to Brexit) --

Well, the Brits are officially out of the EU so it's time for some good old-fashioned English poetry to mark the occasion! Or maybe a musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber provided his duties in the House of Lords isn't keeping him too busy.

206:

Oh phooey, now I'll have to get around to rewriting that story.

Admittedly I like the Dreamlands part of HPL's legacy more. Here's where my head was.

Thing is, in pre-1930s (and 1930s) Japan, the Dreamlands/Otherworld critters were yokai, raccoon dogs inflating their testicles into fake trains and so forth.

Anyway, then came the War and its aftermath.

Then in 1954 came Gojiro and other Daikaiju (who may have been inspired by King Kong from 1933), and they have been with us ever since.

But in 1960, GeGeGe no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki was released, and the old Yokai not only came flooding back, they grew even more diverse and popular than they had been before. Do the yokai share a world with the daikaiju, or are they on parallel planes?

If you're a fantasist who thinks that what happens in the various realms of the Dreamlands interacts with what's going in their respective realities to some large degree, the era of the 1940s-1960s in Japan is about as drastic a revolution as one might want to pirate from chronicle.

Anyway, my entree to this world is a little-known OSS training center, which was set up at the Dunwich Biological Field Station of Miskatonic University.* Some bright bulb thought that getting agents into the Dreamlands was the ultimate in psychological warfare. Unfortunately, bright bulbs among all the major powers had similar thoughts. And most of them had never been in the Dreamlands. But some of the people they recruited as agents had been. And thereby hangs a tale or two.

*Why wouldn't Miskatonic set up a biological field station in a place like Dunwich, or a marine biology lab in Innsmouth? That's the kind of thing they did back then. Take cheap land with unusual stuff adjacent to it, buy it up with a grant and make science there. Totally normal.

207:

“Rehab!”
Offer uninsured Americans with substance abuse problems a free residential treatment program in return for relinquishing all rights to privacy. It’s Big Brother House with drug addicts. Hijinks ensue.

208:

“Rehab!”

Are you sure that's not already a thing? It sounds far too plausible.

209:

Replacing substance addiction with media addiction?

If you want to go down the reality rabbit hole, take people who have diagnosable media addiction issues, then put them in Big Brother Rehab. With psilocybin treatments maybe? What could possibly go wrong?

People successfully kicking their media addictions in a panopticon will make for some really interesting TV, possibly with a sideline of camera sabotage, nonviolent protests within the Rehab facility, and so on. The relapses and failures will make for really interesting TV too.

210:

Sorry! I hope that wasn’t much of a spoiler, I certainly look forward to reading it.

211:

Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew ran 2008-2012, with followup series. Just showing how hard it is to come up with something original—or maybe how showbiz doesn’t bother trying for originality.

212:

Unfortunately, if I found you one with a simple rheostat for each hob, I would also have found one which dissipates large amounts of power in its controls. Most I've encountered have a thing called an 'energy regulator', which is effectively a long cycle PWM controller, usually incorporating a small heating element and a bimetal strip, rather than a thermostat for the hob itself. I do wish they'd use shorter cycles though; I've even seen induction hobs with purely electronic controls which won't maintain a stable simmer. They make cheap gas hobs which can't be effectively controlled too. I think most hob zealots have been mostly exposed to bad examples of one type, yet own a good example of the other.

213:

Meanwhile DT continuies on his world destroying course Land Mines to be used by the US again, several countries under the "travel ban" including Nigeria & of all places Kyrgistan, which actually WELCOMES tourists AND it looks as though because his "trial" has neither witnesses nor documantary evidence the shit will be "acquitted"

Here, I feel like a London protestant in mid-1553 - waiting for what the next 5 years wil bring in disasters. THAT failed attempt to recreate a golden age that never happened took over 350 years to heal ( Still hasn't in NornIron )

Quote from the "Indy": Brexit’s ultimate tragedy is that it has broken the very thing it imagines itself to have restored: national identity, national cohesion. There is none at all. There are just two huge tribes set against each other, and the mutual loathing is as fierce as ever.

214:

Shouldn't JAXA (the Japanese space agency) be judging that too, they've pulled off some pretty impressive work with both the IKAROS sola sail craft and the recent asteroid lander.

215:

Much sympathy on your Breakshit. Seems the slogan for the Tories and our so-called Republicans is “Move Backward and Break Shit.” Been seeing videos of the idiots dancing around in their Union Jack clothing, blissfully unaware that they’ve wrecked it. Feels kind of like one of those “End of history” moments.

Semi-serious question: how long should I wait for the £ to collapse before ordering the left handed electric guitar from the UK I’ve been keeping an eye on? I’ve been waiting until Spring for reasons. It had a reasonable price in the fall,about $775; then BoJo the clown became PM and it went up to $820, was coming down again but is now up to $791.

216:

Bear in mind that Trump is a tariff enthusiast, and the UK is about to lurch incontinently into trade negotiations with the United States without the assistance and shelter of the EU. The EU has a similar-sized economy to the USA, and so has a ton of bargaining leverage: the UK on its own is an also-ran.

I expect Trump to make unacceptable demands of the UK (chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-laced milk products, and triple the price for NHS medicines), Boris will blink, and the upshot will be 50% tariffs on a wide range of UK exports ... electric guitars likely included.

217:

I was partially inspired by “Dr. Pimple Popper.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Pimple_Popper_(TV_series) America’s lack of access to health & social services creates lots of opportunities for exploitation that have only begun to be explored.

218:

it seems Roku is halting broadcast of Fox stand alone channels tonight.

Crisis averted. The viewing of the Superb Orb on Fox via a Roku in the US will be allowed.

Now the world is a better place.

[/sarcasm]

219:

IIRC, Johnson will sign whatever deal Trump puts in front of him. He will badly need one by the end of the year.

All that it will cost is screwing over most of the UK population. Most oppose him anyway, and most of those who support hom will still support him, even after they get their first US-style hospital bill for a few thousand (one overnight stay, and no operation).

Congress will be another story.

220:

Barry So the death-piles won't be like last time, protestants burnt alive IN Smithfield & Stratford & Lewes & Oxford & Ely & other places ... but people unable to get hospital treatments or killed by food-poisoning. For comparison 227 men & 56 women 1553-58 - including at least one pregnant woman ...

Mind you the backlash at the 2024 eklection will be frighteming & justified ... unless, of course Labour fuck themseleves over AGAIN & pick a corbynista s their next "leader". In which case the descent into actual fascism will continue.

Which reminds me - predictions for this autumn's US election? I would think the dems will win provided they pick anyone at all who isn't Biden?

221:

The first rule of Fight Club is don't ever fucking talk to me about Fight Club.

222:

I got an emailed request for donations from Biden last month. It referenced, so help me, the "No Malarky Barnstorming Tour."

I wrote back with the words "OK Boomer." And I was born in the early sixties. If he's elected we're all doomed, but somewhat slower than we're doomed with Trump.

223:

Greg Tingey @ 213: AND it looks as though because his "trial" has neither witnesses nor documantary evidence the shit will be "acquitted"

The outcome was a foregone conclusion even before the House began hearings on whether or not to impeach Trumpolini. But sometimes you have to stand up for truth and justice even knowing you're going to lose and suffer adverse consequences for that loss. Being a decent human being isn't always easy.

My only complaint is that knowing they were going to lose, they should have thrown the book at him and impeached him for all of his "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", as well as for Bribery (both for offering and for soliciting them) and probably Treason.

A strong case can be made that Trumpolini has offered aid and comfort to enemies of the U.S. (NOT just Putin) and unlike a criminal charge of Treason, impeachment would not require testimony in open court from two eyewitnesses, although ...

Pile it on and put the RICO GOP on the spot by requiring them to go on record a roll call vote condoning each and every one of Trumpolini's corruptions.

And if Trumpolini manages to steal the 2020 election but the Democrats somehow retain control of the House, they should impeach him again, and again, and ... however many times it takes.

If a Democrat does win the White House in November, first order of business in the new administration has got to be prosecuting Trumpolini AND his co-conspirators for all the crimes he committed before he gained office and all of the crimes he's committed while in office ... they shouldn't make the same mistake Clinton and Obama made of hoping the RICO GOP will reciprocate conciliatory gestures.

The only way to deal with the RICO GOP is "war to the knife, and that to the hilt!"

224:

Charlie Stross @ 216: I expect Trump to make unacceptable demands of the UK (chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-laced milk products, and triple the price for NHS medicines), Boris will blink, and the upshot will be 50% tariffs on a wide range of UK exports ... electric guitars likely included.

I understand the objection to "hormone-laced milk products" & allowing U.S. drug companies to set price of drugs for the NHS would be incredibly stupid, but the "chlorine-washed chicken" thing mystifies me. It appears to me cleanliness standards in U.S. processing plants are as high as those in the EU and the final chlorine wash is just an added precaution; no different than chlorination of drinking water to kill germs. Don't y'all use chlorine in water purification?

While the U.S. does seem to have a higher incidence of salmonella outbreaks than the EU, my impression is that in almost every case recently they've come from improperly washed lettuce out of California (water shortages from drought) rather than from poultry. From this side of the ocean, the "chlorine-washed chicken" thing appears to be some kind of stealth protectionism simply aimed at keeping U.S. producers from competing in EU domestic markets.

I will note that in last few years in the U.S. there has been a large movement away from feeding hormones (and antibiotics) to cattle by both beef and dairy producers. It's one of the few instances where I can see the "free market" actually working in consumer's favor. Consumers will buy hormone & antibiotic free meats, so that's what farmers are producing. It also appears to be linked to a movement for more humane treatment in the raising of food animals - "free-range" chickens & "grass-fed" beef.

225:

Greg Tingey @ 220: Which reminds me - predictions for this autumn's US election?
I would think the dems will win provided they pick anyone at all who isn't Biden?

A lot more depends on how far the RICO GOP and Trumpolini are allowed to go in corrupting the election process than who the Democrats pick for their candidate.

226:

"My only complaint is that knowing they were going to lose, they should have thrown the book at him and impeached him for all of his "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", as well as for Bribery (both for offering and for soliciting them) and probably Treason."

We needed something simple and clear.

And note that the right was happy to obfuscate that, with a barrage of BS.

227:

"A lot more depends on how far the RICO GOP and Trumpolini are allowed to go in corrupting the election process than who the Democrats pick for their candidate."

Agreed. The GOP was running at warp speed beforehand; now they'll go to transwarp.

228:

Salmonella outbreaks in US poultry production facilities are treated with drugs added to feed. Salmonella in EU poultry flocks is a notifiable disease like hoof and mouth and all the affected flocks are destroyed with a compensation scheme in place. That's one reason why US salmonella infections in humans are over ten times that in the EU.

EU salmonella cases in 2018, 91,000. CDC reporting of salmonella cases for the US, 1.35 million cases each year.

The chlorine wash treatment is a last-ditch attempt to keep the deaths and illnesses from salmonella infections in the US down below the point where folks might notice and stop buying chicken, turkey etc.

229:

My recollection, which may not be accurate, is that EU poultry is vaccinated against Salmonella, which is too expensive for U.S. producers. If I'm incorrect, hopefully someone from the EU will correct me.

230:

JBS You think the vote-suppression & stealing will get even worse? Even so which Dem candidate gets elected makes a difference - afterwards.

231:

Bear in mind that Trump is a tariff enthusiast,

Not that he actually understands them. I admit that’s all a bit over my head too, though I knew enough to see that China wasn’t going to be the ones paying the tariffs he imposed. Considering Donnie’s short attention span, it’ll be a while before he gets around to paying attention to US/UK trade, or maybe someone competent will end up with the job of handling negotiations (yeah, right).

232:

Robert van der Heide@217: I was partially inspired by “Dr. Pimple Popper.”

Eww, glad I’ve never heard of that one, and that I don’t waste time/money on cable, though still watch way too much TV.

Troutwaxer@221: Since I’m not a member of the club, I’ll talk about it all I want! Which is not at all.

233:

I understand the house is going to continue investigating, and there's no actual law that prevents them from impeaching Himself again - even though the results will be the same, unless at least 20 senators figure out they're not winning voters. (I consider that to be a doubtful proposition; they were able to say that "yes the case was proved, he's guilty, but I'm not voting to convict", and do it with a straight face. And the ones talking about how there was no evidence and no witnesses, and doing that with a straight face after voting against having both - those should have their heads examined for memory-holes big enough to drive a train through sideways.)

234:

You think the vote-suppression & stealing will get even worse? Even so which Dem candidate gets elected makes a difference - afterwards. We're not at 300 yet, so I'll keep my opinion terse (still too long sorry): - Joe Biden is one of the safer non-DJTrump candidates; IMO most of the opposition research against him has been exposed, to little if any effect. He's fairly old and on the right side of the Democratic party, but he is not DJT; a good young vice president running mate will be important if he's chosen. (Female I hope.) The impeachment was literally about a plot to extort Ukraine into announcing on CNN an investigation (didn't need to be real) into Burisma/Hunter Biden; i.e. DJT was worried enough to risk it, and got a whistle blown on him.
- The impeachment acquittal (to be)/sham trial with no witnesses was/is a Republican exercise in attempting to minimize damage to the Republican Party at the time of the 2020 election; not just to DJT. (The Democrats were/are/will be attempting to maximize damage.) - Vote suppression and stealing will be worse, and more complicated, potentially involving false flag hacking. There's been some limited pushback by the courts on suppression/gerrymandering and (somewhat) better election security is in place, in some places. - The US press is a bit more aware (realtime) of attempts to manipulate it than 2016. (i.e. somewhat less pathetic.) - The influence ops using social media and other media are and will be considerably larger than in 2016, and the Democrats are/will be playing this time. - "Ratfucking", American political term, will be rampant and bipartisan. - There are other plays happening or available; some are less obvious, some blatant.

235:

The obvious (not very funny joke) suggestion is to wait 6 months when the pound is worth around 15 cents, but of course there’s an inflation genie in that too, so it would not mean that the price could be that much less.

236:

“hormone-laced milk products"

It isn’t so much that the hormone supplements get into the milk. Hormone-fed dairy cattle develop more or less permanent mastitis, which is treated with antibiotics. There is inevitably a small proportion os pus in the raw milk, and while pasteurisation kills any live bugs in that, and there is a certain amount of filtration, it does mean that in countries that allow hormone-feeding dairy cattle, milk that isn’t certified organic will contain pus residue.

The UK can take some comfort that Australia doesn’t allow such treatment either, so probably the UK can resist it too without the EU agriculture rules to protect it. It does not follow this will necessarily be the case, of course. The UK has a huge legislative and regulatory backlog of rules to recreate, and the pointy fulcrum where the process will find balance is fully owned by the monstrous super-villain lobby, so there are interesting times (very possibly including pus-containing milk) in the UK’s future.

237:

Oh - I mentioned but failed to expand on the bit about antibiotics.

The thing about pus is really just a nick factor. A bit of pasteurised pus won’t hurt you after all, and our American cousins have (presumably) been thriving on such milk for [however long the hormone regime has been in place]. The real problem, adding injury to insult, so to speak, and this affects meat as much as it does dairy, with with the antibiotics.

I mentioned growth hormone induces mastitis in dairy cattle. It also affect beer cattle who suffer higher rates of infection which are also treated with antibiotics. The antibiotics make it into the food products. As careful as we might be with antibiotics resistance due to over medication among humans, the overuse in agriculture is massive.

No cites, I’m sure others here are much more knowledgeable on the specifics, especially US vs EU vs pUK, etc.

238:

"The obvious (not very funny joke) suggestion is to wait 6 months when the pound is worth around 15 cents, but of course there’s an inflation genie in that too, so it would not mean that the price could be that much less. "

However, there will also be the 'buy expensive antiques during the Great Depression' effect. A lot of small UK business will desperately need cash.

239:

My understanding is that mastitis is a problem for all dairy cows. I understand, also, that they may start feeding them antibiotics as calves, because they grow better/larger with them. The hormone stuff is fairly recent, after the antibiotics became a big factor.

240:

mastitis is a problem for all dairy cows.

Yes, but... in the US it's a larger percentage of the herd more often and a major cost to productivity. Mastitis is a major problem in dairying generally, and there's a huge amount of research. The high-tech approach is to monitor every cow at every milking and treat early. But that means not only sterilising equipment in milking machines, but also sensors. So a lot of countries choose to change their food standards instead.

241:

You do realize that while reality shows are technically unscripted, all the lines and action are written by writers who specialize in writing "unscripted" shows. While the pay isn't as good as for a scripted show, the unscripted writers' guild does get the writers decent pay.

There are an increasing number of jobs like this. For example, you could get hired as a driver for an driver-less car.

How about a reality show set in a reality show writers' room where the writers compete to have their lead character win the episode's challenge. It could be like an RPG with NPCs.

242:

Don't forget the employee-less employer. That one's getting very popular (with the sharemarket, despite the most notorious practitioners not actually making a profit. Bah, profitability... so last century).

I'd suggest this as a reality show but it's just reality. If it wasn't for abusive working conditions I'd be quite happy to take money from rich wankers by using subsidised/loss-making services like Uber. But since they're virtual slavers you can fuck right off with that idea.

I dunno... real reality show: old geezers ranting about how it wasn't like that in my day?

243:

I'm pretty sure that one has already happened here...

244:

It's called a simmerstat, which is an extremely silly and misleading name, but there you go...

There is an almost perfect correlation between energy source and control model. If it's electric, despite continuously variable control having been practical since at least the 70s, you're pretty well certain to be lumbered with the deficiencies of a bang-bang model, and this remains true even in the case of a device which is fancy-arsed enough to already be using some kind of converter which could trivially be made continuously variable by sticking a pot in somewhere.

With gas, though, the model you expect, with even more certainty, is a continuously variable one, and this remains true even if it has crappy burners that can't maintain stable combustion over the whole range of flow rates. You also of course have essentially zero thermal inertia, so the heat input to the pan immediately follows your twiddling of the knob. Hence "cookability, that's the beauty of gas".

Ovens using either energy source use closed loop control, but hobs of either type are always open loop. There's a whole raft of practical difficulties concerning the sensor, and even if you did manage to sort that out you'd still end up with the user fighting it all the time by turning the knob all the way up or all the way down and wishing it didn't have it.

245:

We needed something simple and clear. And note that the right was happy to obfuscate that, with a barrage of BS.

Yes, this. Complicated charges only help the GOP/Russian core tactics of lying, distracting, and goalpost moving. It should be very easy to understand bribery but we still hear complaints like, "He never actually said 'quid pro quo.'"

246:

Pigeon Hence the apparently-really-good-idea of having composite domestic ovens with gas rings & an elecrtic oven. Only apparantly, because you then have to have not only a leakproof, secure gas feed, but a high-current, separately-wired spur for the oven, not running off the normal power ring. Game not worth candle

247:

Bah, profitability... so last century

Profit-taking can be traded off against investment in growth.

If your company makes a profit, the profit is taxable. Whereas if it makes a tiny loss on paper, it pays no tax ... and the "loss" might actually be a 10% profit for a business that's putting all its income into growth.

I once worked for an outfit that started as a father-and-son consultancy and grew into a multinational with 1200 employees and $300M annual turnover. It never made a profit on paper until six months before it IPO'd, at which point it needed to show a profit to the investors. IIRC it exhibited a 10% compound growth rate for 15-20 years.

If you want to kneecap business models like uber's, the logical solution is to tax gross turnover not profits. Inefficient companies that are really losing ground will be in trouble, but they're in trouble anyway: more to the point, it'll hit asset strippers particularly hard.

248:

Actually, that's exactly the sort of domestic oven I have: electric fan-assisted oven underneath (plus electric grill in a separate compartment) and a bunch of gas hobs on top. Bonus: the fan assisted oven does not have a glass front door, and is therefore properly insulated: comes up to working temperature rapidly, and I can run it at 220 celsius for an hour and a half and it doesn't noticeably warm up the kitchen.

(Sacrificing the glass front means having to rely on a timer and guesswork to some extent, but my wife doesn't want dead animal products in her oven so there's no risk of undercooked meat, and meanwhile: less cleaning, much higher thermal efficiency, and more reliable.)

In the past year we acquired an alternate-brand version of an Instant Pot, which I will swear by for soups, stews, and similar. Basically an electric pressure cooker with a timer and controller than can handle various programs, including browning vegetables in oil, simmering, reducing, and slow cooking -- as well as "autoclave until mush". Highly recommended.

249:

Basically the set up my mother went for in 1964? 1965? She made my father pay to have the kitchen remodelled and she had a New World gas hob with eye level grill, and off in a unit to one side at the same level, an electric oven (she hated having to bend down to check progress). The neighbours were well impressed.

We kept things running until we couldn't get spares for the hob anymore, and replaced it with a Potterton Dual Fuel cooker (gas hob and eye level grill), fan oven underneath. My current set is similar to Charlie's - Neff gas hob (new), built-in double oven underneath (small oven/grill, large fan oven). I need to replace the oven/grill bit at some point (but I need to replace the built-in fridge/freezer first).

250:

I dunno, most houses that have gas at all seem to provide both types of cooker feed. Either they were built like that or someone who preferred one type sold it to someone who preferred the other at some point.

251:

Can Fat Teens Hunt?

"Ten dangerously overweight teenagers embark on a perilous journey that could save their lives."

In the first episode the muslim teen is forced to hunt wild pigs with a tribe in Borneo and almost dies from heat exhaustion. Then things go downhill ...

My apologies. It's already been done.

Available for your viewing pleasure from the BBC, youtube and also so-called amazon prime.

252:

Oh god and by god I mean Cthulhu it's real.

253:

and even if you did manage to sort that out you'd still end up with the user fighting it all the time by turning the knob all the way up or all the way down and wishing it didn't have it.

Ah, yes. My mother to her dying day felt that an HVAC system thermostat worked like the gas pedal in a car. No polite (or sometimes not) discussion would convince her otherwise. You knew you had talked to long when her lips started to get thin.

In a family full of people with technical jobs and/or education.

254:

At the end of the previous decade there was a fun pair of programmes on UK TV. Moving Wallpaper vs Echo Beach. The first half hour was a sitcom about a group of bitchy and dysfunctional writers working on a soap. The second half was the deliberately cheesy soap they had authored set in a seaside tourist town starring Martine McCutcheon & Jason Donovan. Take the same approach. Reality show of Unscripted Reality Show writers working on the Reality Show that's shown immediately after. Recursively.

255:

Charlie @248, Greg - Gas hob / electric wall oven is what we ended up with when I built this house (see rowledge.org/tim and the “building a timber frame house” tab) but we strongly considered an induction hob for the controllability. However, we live out in the back of ruritania - I literally have had underground laboratory in the rainforest on a Pacific island - and we get enough power outages to want heat/cook backup. So, heat pump plug one gas fireplace, electric oven plus gas hob. Next time I hope to go loadsasolar plus powerwall plus EV.

256:

Tip-top Kipper Trip!

Six game-on-for-gammon Little Englanders compete to be The Next Leader of UKIP in 90-second speaking slots and a 2-minute biopic showcasing their Nationalism, xenophobia and "I'm nor a racist but..." dogwhistles, with the winner chosen in a live phone poll of politically-neutral members of UKIP and the EDL hand-picked by BBC News and Current Affairs and the producer of Question Time.

The winner gets to be UKIP leader until the next episode goes out on-air; two runners-up get talkshow slots on a prominent London radio station; and the losers get shortlisted as Prospective Parliamentary Candidates for the Conservative Party

For the super-duper season finalé, Jeremy Clarkson, Kate Hoey, and three washed-up ex-celebrities will compete against... Nigel Farage.

257:

Nile Horribly true & not funny at all.

But that reminds me ... The Wee Fishwife is going all-out for Scottish "Independance" ( And Tusk saying we will welcome you ) SLIGHT PROBLEM ... I saw the numbers some time back, & they could easily have been wrong ... so: Scotland: Percentage of UK population? Percentage of Tax take? Percentage of Tax spend?

IIRC the figures are seriously skewed in the Scots favour at present ... which would cease, immediately upon "Independance" - even without the disaster that is comoingpver brexit. Opinions & INFORMATION - please?

258:

Re Scots exit and opinions and information, any o&i about Gibraltar?

The 30k+ residents there seem to be really, really unhappy about Brexit. Anything they can do about it?

259:

No Scottish tax payments to fund and base Trident and the QE-class carriers plus aircraft wings, no Scottish tax payments to pay for England's HS2, Crossrail, Crossrail 2, the Heathrow airport expansion etc. after independence. That will save a bawbee or two. Raising taxes to pay for improved social care, a National Health Service etc. is also possible once we're free of the Tory-dominated England and their obsession with low taxes for rich people and fuck the poors.

After rejoining the EU it's likely an independent Scotland would be eligible for a lot of regional development grants and support. Thee's a bunch of EU-centric manufacturing based in England that could well move north, like the Airbus wing plant at Winton and maybe Nissan, Toyota and BMW.

261:

For the super-duper season finalé, Jeremy Clarkson, Kate Hoey, and three washed-up ex-celebrities will compete against... Nigel Farage.

Better scratch Clarkson off that list; despite all his other personality traits, he's strongly pro-EU and campaigned for Remain and a People's Vote.

Strange and unexpected, huh?

262:

Nojay oh dear ...may I suggest "not even wrong" ??? So Scotland doesn't have to part-pay for all of those things, big hairy deal. I want SOME ACTUAL NUMBERS. I am TRYING to construct a discussion (argument?) based on FACTS ... which neither of us have.

IIRC Scotland's proportion of the UK population is about 8.5% ... right? But they are contributing somewhere between 5%-7% of the tax INCOME But reciving about 9.5-10.5% of the RECIEPTS. [ Maybe ] ... see Note below. Howver, those numbers are almost certainly wrong, though the proportions are not too far out. What are the actual numbers? The, once we have the actual numbers .... where is an "independant" Scotland going to get the EXTRA money from, to maintain even their current standard of living, please?

And yes ... Scotland would get LOTS of EU regional support ... after about 10 years waiting, between leaving the UK & wading through the EU accession process - eventually. Assuming, of course, that Germany & France are prepared to cerry on shouldering that burden, now a major contibutor to the EU total budget has just disappeared?

I agree with one thing though. The utter fuck-ups that brexit has started will continue to make economic, never mind political chaos & trouble for some time to come.

NOTE: From wiki on the "Barnett Formula" England spends/gets 97.1% of average tax output, but Scotland gets 116.1% - or - 19% MORE than England. But I can't find a reliable figure for the tax take per country as a proportion of the whole. CAN WE HAVE SOME RELIABLE NUMBERS ... please? Then - we can have a discussion

263:

1) Sturgeon is keeping the pot on the burner but isn't going all out yet; I'm pretty sure she's playing a long game for independence.

2) In the past six years, Scottish oil revenues have fallen off (as was predictable) ... but Scotland exported £1Bn of power generated by renewables to the English grid in 2019, and is due to be net 100% renewable-based this year: the prospect is for Scotland to experience a second energy boom in the coming years, only this one will be zero-carbon and sustainable.

Finally, you can't trust the tax/spend figures out of Westminster: the books are cooked to support the worst possible outlook for Scottish independence, because why wouldn't they be?

I'm much more concerned that BoJo's just-announced £5M advertising campaign opposing Scottish independence is a sign that the Tories actually want to off-load Scotland after Brexit completes. £5M is almost enough to buy everyone in Scotland a can of Irn Bru; it's a sign that he's deeply unserious about supporting the union, but wants to be seen to be going through the motions on the cheap.

264:

When I was young, we moved into house (brand-new, we were the first residents) that had an electric oven and an electric cook-top where the controls had four heats: off, low, medium, and high. It wasn't long before my father replaced it with a gas cook-top (as the house already had gas for the water heater and a clothes-drier).

The next house had an electric cook-top, but the builder had put in one with continuously-adjustable controls, just like a gas cook-top. One of the burners had a thermostat, so we could keep a kettle of water at about 180F all the time. (Tea-drinking household.)

The second house was actually a year or so older than the first house - the difference was the builder on the first one was doing it cheaply, and the second house had been custom-built (with some very odd features, like steam heating in an area where it rarely got below 32F).

265:

The mere idea of a gas-fired clothes-drier boggles my (British) mind.

Yes, yes, I know, Americans and 110 volt mains current isn't conducive to electric kettles or washer-driers: but even so, I've never even heard of a gas-burning drier being sold anywhere in Europe!

266:

Oh Ghu yes. I tried explaining it as "the thermostat sets the end point, not the rate of heating/cooling". But the people I was explaining it to mostly had minimal technical background.

267:

I think electric driers run on 240V, like dishwashers. Gas driers are still fairly common - they can last 30 to 40 years - but they're not necessarily used every day.

My electric kettle runs fine on 110V. (Export-model Russell Hobbs, bought about 20 years ago. Works fine. My sister has a Zojirushi 3L hot water pot, also 110V.)

268:

Oh, they exist but they're not common. You're more likely to find them in a commercial laundry such as in a hospital where extracting a couple of tonnes of water from a week's worth of freshly washed bedlinen, scrubs, drapes etc. is necessary.

269:

Clarkson does have the best interests of the motor industry in mind: that's not necessarily a virtue, and some would weigh it alongside his vices and character defects...

...But I can well believe you, surprising as I find that news may be: Clarkson simply isn't stupid enough to overlook that Brexit is a disaster for the motor industry.

It's not a disaster for banking: we're all very mobile - witness the exodus of the entire bond market from New York when they tried a transaction tax - and my own job has simply gone to Dublin.

As have I: my flight from London City landed half an hour ago, and I am tapping-out this reply on the D700 Airport coach, taking me directly to my hotel, and my job tomorrow morning.

270:

Scotland exported £1Bn of power generated by renewables to the English grid in 2019, and is due to be net 100% renewable-based this year: the prospect is for Scotland to experience a second energy boom in the coming years, only this one will be zero-carbon and sustainable.

Problem is "renewables" is taken to mean generating capacity that isn't fossil-fuel based so the two elephants (actually pairs of elephants) in the room, the Hunterston B and Torness AGRs are lumped in with the wind turbines and the limited amount of hydro we've got here in Scotland.

The bad news is the 2GW or so of capacity they represent is very much life-limited due to cracking problems in the reactor graphite core structures. Right now, as I type this both reactors at Hunterston B are down for "graphite inspections". It's possible they will never start up again (I think one of the Hunterston B reactors was restarted in the autumn but if it was it's been shut down again). Torness might well follow suit within the next few years and it would take at least 6GW of new wind turbines to replace the loss of this nuclear capacity.

https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

The Hunterston B outage is not a trivial matter; EDF makes great efforts to have as many reactors as they can up and running during the winter when there is the greatest demand for electricity, just like they do in France which is, as I type this generating 90% of its own electrical power requirement from nuclear (48GW).

Further on the horizon is the extra capacity that will be required to "fuel" electric cars. A back-of-the-fag-packet calculation suggests we'll need about 200W on average for each electric car going by average annual mileages and published efficiency figures.

271:

The joy is that we can build new wind plants a few MW at a time wherever we think we can get away with it, likewise they tend to fail a few MW at a time and can be patched up accordingly. As you point out, that's not true of nuclear. I suspect Scotland is not yet close to running out of places to put wind turbines, especially once the floating ones get off the ground.

272:

Americans and 110 volt mains current isn't conducive to electric kettles or washer-driers: but even so, I've never even heard of a gas-burning drier being sold anywhere in Europe!

You don't really understand.

99.9999% or more of all residences and smaller businesses in the US get their power at 220-240v (let's call it 240v) AC with a CENTER TAP.

So all of the low current stuff (lights and normal outlets) is at 120v. Basically split between the feed legs. 240vac is used for things like electric dryers, electric stoves/ovens, water heaters, HVAC, electric car chargers, welders, etc...

Gas dryers exist here due to the thermal cost of gas being 1/4 that of electricity for a long time in the past. And back when a lot of rural areas had houses with only 40 or 60 amp 240v supplies for the entire house an electric dryer was not reasonable. So the US got lots of gas dryers (well more than a trivial number) that could run off nat gas or propane from a tank in the yard.

I've never had one and don't want one. Too many issues with venting and fire safety compared to electric. And easier to get it too hot and melt synthetic fabrics as I did in college.

But back to your statement. Virtually all houses in the US have 240vac mains. Most places now require a 200amp service per code for a new house. I've seen 400amp like for my neighbor with the heated pool [eyeroll] but 300amp is not uncommon for a house with on demand electric hot water.

273:

Dishwashers Totally uneceesary, unless there are at least 5 people in the household, I reckon. Wasteful of energy & other resources & NOT efficient at actually cleaning the dishes. A small move for global energy saving (etc ) BAN fucking diswashers!

Nile So you & your employers & fucking BOZO of course are making GW significantly worse ....

Nojay in France which is, as I type this generating 90% of its own electrical power requirement from nuclear Right, can we declare "open season" on the fake greenies RIGHT NOW? Simply start building nuke plants to known designs, as fast as we & everybody else can do so. It will slow down the rush to the precipice if nothing else. However as Moz doesn't qiote point out, there are other possible solutions. In Scotland I would have thought "wave" & "tidal" ( In one or more of its many forms ) was the obvious solution.

274:

Totally uneceesary, unless there are at least 5 people in the household, I reckon. Wasteful of energy & other resources & NOT efficient at actually cleaning the dishes.

Think outside your box Greg.

Mine runs maybe once a week. It is full when it runs. So there is one moderate amount of hot water to wash a full load of dishes. Not the more that would be used if I completely washed all of them as I used them.

For now I just scrape/rise (cold water) then stack them. Sometimes I was by hand if after a week there isn't all that much but typically it runs with a full load. And since I air dry there's no power there.

And most any modern dishwasher in the US does result in clean dishes.

275:

Simply start building nuke plants to known designs

Can you point to some of these "known designs"?

People I know who have looked come back to the one, solitary, design we have reason to believe will probably work: Westinghouse AP1000 which is the result of much inspection of previous similar reactors and careful thinking about how to come up with an evolution from there. But as noted by wikipedia, there are four under construction in China and some abandoned attempts in the US.

Per the discussion wrt to buchfires, the problem here is not "fake greenies" unless you're actually talking about people pretending to be greenies, and by that I mean the global financial cabal who occasionally try to look a bit green. The problem for nuclear power is that it's not financially viable, even if you exclude insurance and post-operational costs. That's why it's strictly the province of governments who don't care (they just want bombs, or want to make a point), and of madmen (who also don't care).

If you want actual "known to work" reactors, the answer is still no. With the singular obvious exception, of course, but that's not normally regarded as "proper" nuclear power by the fanboys.

276:

We could do a Greg-style reality show: nuclear fan-boys try to persuade a multi-billionaire that their plans for a new nuclear reactor will work, and also that their definition of "work" is useful. The prize is that the rich person will build the first copy of the proposed reactor.

One problem is that Putin might be a bit short with losing candidates, and someone like Jack Ma wouldn't necessarily be willing to leave China.

But since the whole idea is fictional anyway, you could build the show around Post-Presidential Trump being the billionaire. Fiction plans presented to a fictional billionaire for a Potemkin reactor.

277:

Going back to pop culture oddities: Suicide Boys is a band, Suicide Girls is a porn site. Does that signify something about our culture?

278:

Look for regional trade figures: last time I checked, Scotland had a net export surplus with the EU, for both manufactured goods and agricultural produce.

Also: they are actually exporting seed - mostly, I think, seed potatoes - and that is a very high-margin business. It is also a very technically-demanding and closely-regulated business: to the best of my knowledge, British farmers and commercial growers import all their seed from the Netherlands.

279:

Just for S&G, I'll pitch an idea I mentioned before:

Dronetrap.

One team has the drones, one team has the guns. The match is simple: if any drones are still airborne when the last shell has been fired, the drone team wins. Otherwise, the gunners win. The match could be held in a wide variety of conditions, with a wide variety of drones and guns, although aerial camera drones versus well-choked shotguns loaded with bird shot would be my default contest.

The problem with this idea isn't that it's more expensive for the drone pilots than the shotgunners, it's that it promotes evolution of anti-gun tactics among drone flying systems, and their tactical evolution will probably powered by machine learning, trained by watching episodes of the show. On the other side, you've got evolution of shotgunning strategy and tactics, probably mostly by humans.

I'd hate to see this reality show become the arena in which AI learns to make drones gun-proof, but that would be a likely outcome.

280:

Watched the cycle time on my electric radiant stovetop out of curiosity. It's obvious on those because the element glows bright red, then dims to near black in about a second. The cycle is about 5 seconds long, which is faster than I had expected.

Read some about induction cooktops. Their control systems are more diverse. Some seem to just regulate their magnetic fields. Some are regulating power absorbed. Some are reading the temperature of the bottom of the pan. Some have a probe you can stick in the food.

Re: dishwashers I believe studies of what people do in the real world suggest that hand washing - as actually done - uses more water than a modern efficiency rated dishwasher.

Current US 'energy star' standard is 3.5 gallons per load. Even back in the day hand washing dishes with my grandmother in her double-sink we had to have used more than twice that, and it was never enough dishes to fill a dishwasher.

281:

A 'what a regular Japanese new house is like' youtube I watched once said the standard there is a 'one meal' dishwasher. That was pretty neat. Probably impossible to get in the US, but maybe Europe?

282:

DMV/DVLA Survivor.

283:

£5M is almost enough to buy everyone in Scotland a can of Irn Bru

As a side quip, this would not even in the top twenty stupidest things done with your tax money.

Would an Irn Bru reality TV show be in bad taste ... or just a peculiar taste? grin

284:

I suspect Scotland is not yet close to running out of places to put wind turbines, especially once the floating ones get off the ground.

I loved Big Hero 6 too but I hope Scotland's zeppelin turbines are well outside air traffic flight paths.

285:

I've seen counter top dishwashers (I was considering getting one for himself's mother but I suspect the plumbing arrangements for it might have been tricky).

We (2 people) run ours on average once daily - more often if I'm doing baking. It usually goes on after breakfast (the kitchen is south-facing so I don't like dirty dishes lying around in the summer).

286:

Moz I wuz under the impression that the "style" of reactors that the French use ... actually work, as demomnstrated by experience.... I suppose I should repeat that "fake greenies" refers to those who, quite correctly want to stop fossil-fuel burning, but are against "nuclear" ( The Germans are the worst at this, I think ) ... emphatically NOT those engaged in greenwashing & other diversions from what they are really doing. ( You call them the "global financial cabal" - which will do for a label )

Nile Classic misnomer: "Seed potatoes" ... which aren't, they are pregrown small tubers. But modern Scottish weather conditions & quality control ( v strict ) are suitable. Really new potato varieties ARE grown from seed & a long slow business it is too ... and Scotland is one of the few places that does that, as well. I think you are wrong about Dutch sourcing of spuds, btw.

287:

... nuclear fan-boys try to persuade a multi-billionaire that their plans for a new nuclear reactor will work, and also that their definition of "work" is useful.

Can we Penalty Ninja the first person to say "pebble bed" please?

Concept taken from some faux-sport martial arts show I saw where contestants who offended the referee would get a 'penalty ninja' who would appear from backstage, pose dramatically, and attack them; the ninja had to be defeated before the contestant could continue.

For the nuke fans, there could be a rule that one could only pontificate on the benefits of pebble bed reactors while actually laying down on a bed of pebbles. If nothing else it might keep the presentations brief and to the point.

288:

Dronetrap. One team has the drones, one team has the guns.

Aw, hell yeah! It's loud, it's dramatic, it's a little dangerous, it gets more dangerous the stupider the contestants are; this is a made-for-TV sporting event.

Recruit experts from both sides. Humor and incompetence porn ensues when their expertise is mismatched with their tasks. (Hand a drone controller to any random person from Duck Dynasty and stand back.) Obviously moving people - other people - out of their comfort zones makes for the best television, so all contestants should have to try every role.

The only problem I see with this proposal is that it's a perfectly reasonable rTV idea rather than being in painfully bad taste and a horrifying perversion of human potential.

289:

There are no reliable figures for tax raised in Scotland, nor can there be without legislation first - we know how much profit e.g.Tesco makes (or doesn’t make, as the case may be) in a given year, but we don’t know (because Tesco aren’t required to report it) how that breaks down across their stores across the UK. We therefore can’t know much corporation tax is raised in each part of the UK.

See also VAT, petrol duty, tobacco duty, alcohol duty, insurance tax, etc etc etc

Even if we did know those figures for the latest tax year it still wouldn’t be a good indicator for the what the figures would be in an independent Scotland! Well, unless you think the purpose of independence is to make exactly the same decisions in every area? As soon as an independent Scotland makes any tax or spending decision that’s different from the UK then the economy is different (and for a hardcore unionist by definition therefore “worse”!) than the UK and the figures for the UK (which we don’t have anyway) don’t apply.

... and surely the entire point of independence is to do things differently?

290:

Can Fat Teens Hunt?

I knew I wanted to take time to address this. A rich subset of horrible rTV shows is the physical anomaly subgenre. (Are they called freakshows in the business? I’m not well enough connected to know.) Fat people are overly represented, either despite or because there are a lot of fat people in the viewing audience. Others that a quick search turned up include very tall women, little people, and pregnant women. The last at least makes sense because pregnancies are interesting and everyone loves babies at a safe distance.

What else could an unscrupulous rTV producer think up for rubes to gawk at? I'm blissfully unaware of anything with an all albino cast. Various physical handicaps suggest themselves, some dramatic and some not; it's probably only a matter of time before someone pitches Rollin', the wheelchair reality show. eyeroll

Other horrible ideas that made it to TV include Best Funeral Ever (you read that right), 19 Kids and Counting (formerly 18, formerly 17), Little Parents, Big Pregnancy (and, Dog have mercy, sequels), and Mob Wives (exactly what it says on the tin, somehow; this also got sequels).

Imagine a momentary break while I wash my hands and bleach my eyeballs after that.

One lesson can be taken away from the rTV ecosystem: pandering to the lowest common denominator works fine but someone will figure out a way to go lower. Not only is it a race to the bottom but competitors are constantly inventing whole new bottoms.

291:

SS @ 290 "Freak Shows" yeah. A C19th horror genre ... reproduced in modern times as ... "the Paralympics" - just anothe freak show, where disabled people are publicly exploited for money. In other words & even worse sunset of the utterly revolting "Olympic Games" corrupt political & couuch potato franchise, coupled with lage doses of the "acceptable" face of fascism.

I WILL NOT rise to the temptations, double entendres & Julian/Sandy comments rising through my sub-&-conscious brain from your last sentence ....

292: 196 - As written, I can't either, for certain values of the statement. Of course, as it stands, your statement excludes the use of thyristor circuits and timer circuits as methods of temperature control. 212 - Cheers; I had realised that a 1kW radiant with a 6 position digital rheostat controller would be an effective way of dissipating something like 833W through the control! 221 - The first rule of Charlie's Place is "Do not talk about 'Fight Club'." 224 - Do you deny that chlorine-washed meat is an additional (and from your statement unnecessary) process? 229 - Wikipedia suggests that most cases of salmonella are due to poor food hygene rather than infection of animal hosts. That says that ensuring that food industry workers wash their hands properly is the most effective prevention measure. 244 - Sirislee!? I always thought that most (if not all) of the thermal inertia in a simmering pan of food was in the liquid in the pan, not in the burner or radiant.

Various on dishwashers - Owning a "large dishwasher" does not mean using it every day, never mind every meal. This is already well demonstrated.

293:

Hmm….a proper reality show should contain a mixture of misogyny, veiled racism and general contempt for the "out" group depicted. "Chavs" have alredy been in such reality shows, at this point I do not know what has been done and what remains to be tried. Are there any shows about gypsies, pakistanis or jews? The problem is, there could very well be an audience for it out there, judging by social media.

MAD Magazine once featured the sport "stock-car minefield racing". This could be done , but I don't know how to recruit drivers. People in debt, offered a modest sum of money might bite. The show would be a bit like Schwarzenegger's "The Running Man" but in worse taste.

294:

My electric kettle runs fine on 110V.

Yes, but it's slow. A UK standard ring main is fused for 13 amps at 230 volts; a typical electric kettle draws 2kW, sometimes up to 3kW. Whereas the same kettle in the US can't safely draw more than 15 amps, so maxes out at 1.65kW -- and in practice draws less. Upshot: electric kettles in the US seem to take about twice as long to boil the same volume of water.

295:

Greg: I have atopic eczema. Got a diswasher and started using it: eczema went away. Stopped using dishwasher, washed by hand: bits of my hands start falling off.

Meanwhile modern dishwashers use less water than a human washing by hand.

Nor does mine run after every meal; instead, it runs when it fills up with stuff that needs washing (typically 2-3 times a week). Crockery and cutlery sets for a family of six should last a couple of adults a few days before they run short, and that's what a dishwasher is designed to carry as a full load.

296:

The 'one meal' dishwasher exists in the EU; hell, the kitchen in my parents' retirement flat was fitted out in 1989-90 and they opted for a half-width dishwasher (because 95% of the time there were only two people using it and they had a small kitchen but a decent budget for designing/installing it). Trouble is, half-width dishwashers are about half-again the cost of a regular dishwasher (because of low demand for the product).

297:

I have no idea what you think DVLA is like in the UK, but it would be a very boring show. (You don't go in person; instead you do everything via the web these days, except for getting a photo ID driving license, which requires a visit to any Post Office counter and lasts for ten years so there's virtually never any need to queue for more than ten minutes).

Also, I've experienced both US and UK government paperwork, and the British stuff is designed to be easy to fill out. Shocking, I know! But instead of a giant wall of text in unreadably tiny font, with a "go fuck yourself" at the end giving some notional form-filling time based on a paperwork reduction act, the British version is typically a well-laid-out flow chart with numbered stages, arrows that direct you to what to do next, helpful footnotes explaining how to do it, and ... you get the picture: it's designed for average-dumb human beings, not bureaucrats.

298:

A C19th horror genre ... reproduced in modern times as ... "the Paralympics" - just anothe freak show, where disabled people are publicly exploited for money.

Again, you're missing the point: disabled people are no less likely to want exercise than anyone else, no less competitive than anyone else, and no less inclined to sportsmanship. Why shouldn't they have tournaments? And that being so, why should such games be hidden away? I know disabled folks who opine that the Paralympics are affirm their right to exist in the public sphere, and to have a life that isn't entirely defined by their disability.

299:

About nuclear power and the UK:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51233444 Manufacturer Rolls-Royce has told the BBC's Today programme that it plans to install and operate factory-built power stations by 2029. [snip] Rolls-Royce is leading a consortium to build small modular reactors (SMRs) and install them in former nuclear sites in Cumbria or in Wales. Ultimately, the company thinks it will build between 10 and 15 of the stations in the UK. They are about 1.5 acres in size - sitting in a 10-acre space. That is a 16th of the size of a major power station such as Hinkley Point.

More at https://www.rolls-royce.com/~/media/Files/R/Rolls-Royce/documents/customers/nuclear/smr-brochure-july-2017.pdf

300:

The thermal inertia of the heat source, not that of the thing it's heating...

301:

The interesting one for me is The Last Leg TV show. It could be a freak show, but it isn't. Of the three hosts, two are disabled: Adam Hills is missing one lower leg, while Alex Brooker is not only partially legged, his hands are more like crab claws. Yet they'll take the piss out of each other, and everything else. The result is a sharp and witty topical comedy show that just happens to have disabled people involved.

The relevance? It span off from the Rio Paralympics commentary team.

302:

I saw that press report a few days ago and it left me scratching my head a bit.

The "Small Modular Reactors" RR are claiming they can build and deploy produce about as much power as a regular AGR or small PWR, 400MW or so. That's a lot more output than any other proposed SMR designs I've seen which are usually under 50MW. The only real SMRs that have actually been built and are in use are the two modified ship KLT-35S reactors on board the Akademik Lomonosov NPP barge the Russians have in service in the Arctic.

The Argentinians are building a 25MW PWR, the CAREM which is theoretically an SMR but it's being built conventionally, not from factory-made parts delivered ready-to-use on site which is supposed to be a big selling point for SMRs. The CAREM's completion date is stretching indefinitely into the future after construction started in 2014. In contrast the Chinese are bringing 1000MW conventional PWRs online from first concrete in that sort of timescale.

It's worth noting that fifteen 440MW reactors would just replace the capacity of the fourteen in-service AGRs which are all nearing end-of-life and which will be getting shut down and starting decommissioning by 2030. From the pictures in the glossy brochures from RR they look like small PWRs, nothing about molten salt or thorium breeders or even carbon nanotubes. For sure they won't be based on the submarine reactors which is RR's only real engineering expertise in matters nuclear.

303:

Re: ' ... disabled folks who opine that the Paralympics are affirm their right to exist in the public sphere, and to have a life that isn't entirely defined by their disability.'

Ditto for veterans (Invictus Games). The Paralympics/Invictus Games are at the opposite end on the dignity-exploitation continuum vs. the 'people with problems' bits of reality TV that I've seen.

It's really weird that while most of the effects (harms) of these shows are psychological, no one bothers to rationally talk about them from that perspective. (Why bother with psych when you have religion?)

304:

It's sounding like "small" and "modular" are marketing buzzwords in RR's lexicon. The real angle here is "built in a factory and shipped to the site" rather than "built in situ" which would, one hopes, lead to some economies of scale (i.e. make them cheaper over a long production run).

440MW is only small in comparison with a 1650MW EPR or 1100MW APR-1000 ...

305:

Charlie Good luck to them - let them get on with it. Same as football - you want to play it, get on with it. It's the exploitation & the voyeurism & the sickening "public enthusiaism" for want of a better descriotion, that gets up my nose.

Bellinghman Same as when M Flanders was talking about Guy Fawkes' day & commented that Swann had got 3/-4d ( Or some similar sum ) for him ... (!)

Allen Thomson Interesting - given that it's R-R backing this I would assum it isn't a boondoggle, but are they touting for guvmint money, or "simply" permissions & offical backing? Oh & how is/was the (?)Lockheed(?) Nuke-on-a-lorry project going ... haven't heard a thing about that recently.

306:

OK. I'll chime in on the original point of this post. Yes I have watched some episodes of some reality series. Mostly 5 minutes, maybe 10 before becoming repulsed and leaving the room or turning it off.

Way back when when there was all kinds of hype about them I watched one of the episodes of both DT's thing and the one about 6 year old girls in beauty contests. I was amazed that people thought these were worth watching and THEN discussing at length.

To me most of the draw of these shows is some combination of "let's stare at the gristly accident scene and maybe see something really gross or "These people are really smart? Wow, I must be a genius."

Sad comment on the human condition.

307:

shipped to the site" rather than "built in situ" which would, one hopes, lead to some economies of scale

A big problem with huge reactors built on site is that everything being done was being done in many cases for the first time by the labor force. Highly skilled but still. Which made for all kinds of training, planning, inspection, etc... costs ballooning upward.

And yes, there actually was sabotage. Some guys figured out that this really high paying job could be made to last longer if every now and then something done and CERTIFIED might get broken. Oops. Breaking one valve display by bumping it with a piece of pipe could generate a few 100 hours of more work for a group of people.

One of the most cynical hours I ever spend was next to a guy on a plane whose job was how to convince people building a reactor that their job was great and not to think about it ending in 2 years and they getting to go back to fixing a boiler in the local school.

308:

The "Small Modular Reactors" RR are claiming they can build and deploy produce about as much power as a regular AGR or small PWR, 400MW or so.

I likely read the same news. I did a bit of digging. That 400MW size is the upper end of what is considered small. Wikipedia has a list of them. Westinghouse and GE/Hitachi have designs which are 1/2 to 3/4s of that size.

A big advantage of such a setup is that in time of natural cooling water shortages you can turn off some of the units in a complex easier than trying to adjust the output of one or two big units.

Power companies really like to run reactor power flat out as the marginal cost are trivial once it is producing any power at all. Unlike coal and gas.

Locals involved in Duke power say the nuke run flat out if they are up. Gas is next for base load but with some in reserve for peaking due to costs. Then coal for base load only. Coal is just too hard ($$$) to turn up and down compared to gas so gas is used for the spikes. And of course day to day issues can override any of this. Especially during a heat wave when AC loads get really high.

309:

A lot of modern reactor components are built in factories and shipped to the site for final assembly, things like the reactor vessel, steam generators etc. They often mass a few hundred tonnes, a difficult but not insuperable problem given modern transportation capabilities. If you hunt around the web you'll see pictures of such items on the move.

The Hinckley Point site has the world's largest-capacity crane installed now. Part of its job is to lift these large factory-built components into place in the two reactor buildings as they reach completion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49673561

It's been a long time since reactor vessels and other such parts were welded together on-site in the rain and weather. There's still a lot of on-site construction, of course and SMRs will not be immune to that requirement either.

310:

"Wasteful of energy & other resources & NOT efficient at actually cleaning the dishes."

Can't agree with the last bit. They use higher temperatures and more vicious detergent than something you have to put your hands in. They can fail with the kind of baked-on deposit you get on cookpots that needs to be scraped off, but for non-encrusted cookpots and ordinary tableware they work very well indeed, and are noticeably better than hand washing.

How they compare on energy use per wash is not clear. Points such as more efficient water heating count in their favour, while things like the continuously running powerful circulation pump count against. And what you're comparing them against varies wildly depending on what the house's plumbing is like and how the people use it. I reckon you could make it come out either way just as easily depending on what examples you pick, and the most useful generalisation is probably to consider it as being about the same on the whole.

(Seeing as I'm not living in one of those places that has tried to export a lifestyle from rainy Northern Europe into the middle of a desert using brute force in place of adaptation, I don't really give a shit about how much water they use.)

But the point is that the frequency of washes is much lower with a dishwasher. You don't do it every time, you just collect the dirties in the dishwasher and then set it going once it's full. The wash uses about the same order of juice as a handwash, but you only do it once every few days so it adds up to a lot less.

(Ideally, of course, you have two dishwashers; you use one as the source of clean plates and the other as the destination of dirty ones until they're all in the dirty one, then you wash that one and start transferring them the other way, etc.)

311:

There's still a lot of on-site construction, of course and SMRs will not be immune to that requirement either.

Agreed. But the goal is to reduce it as much as possible.

312:

SMRs produce much less power than conventional PWRs -- the norm today is for PWRs to produce 1000MW to 1100MW with the outliers like the EPRs producing 1650MW of electrical power. There are some smaller PWRs being built in the 300-500MW region but they're few and far between.

The SMRs being promoted in PowerPoint presentations and press releases produce 30-50MW so the construction efficiencies are negated by the multiple construction site operations needed to match the equivalent amounts of power generated. SMRs are also expected to run for quite a short time since they're built cheap, typically forty to sixty years before they will be life-expired and need decommissioning and replacing whereas new-build PWRs have a life expectancy of a century and more. Even older reactors are being relicenced today for safe 80-year operation...

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsus-turkey-point-licensed-to-operate-for-80-years-7551852

313: 293 - Well, there are UK shows advertised as being "about Gypsies". They are actually about Irish Travelers, based on testimony from actual Roma I know. 300 - I hope this doesn't mean that you're blaming me for "some people" looking at the source rather than the food they're cooking!? 311 - So the idea is to install a prefabricated but unfuelled reactor in civils built on site?
314:

Re stoves: No love for induction? We've had an induction stove for a while, and now I don't see how anyone would want to use anything else. They're extremely fast, temperature distribution is very even, and temperature control very precise. And they're vary safe of course.

Re wave/tidal power: Last time I checked, these were considered scams or dead ends. Has opinion changed?

And a completely off-topic question for someone (Heteromeles I think?) about a comment that was posted a year ago or something like that, that I haven't gotten around to asking about until now: A claim was made that Russia lost more people to starvation(?) after the downfall of the Soviet Union than was lost during Stalins regime. Do I remember that statement correctly, and are there sources available for further reading? Much appreciated if one can be pointed to.

315:

And a completely off-topic question for someone (Heteromeles I think?) about a comment that was posted a year ago or something like that, that I haven't gotten around to asking about until now: A claim was made that Russia lost more people to starvation(?) after the downfall of the Soviet Union than was lost during Stalins regime. Do I remember that statement correctly, and are there sources available for further reading? Much appreciated if one can be pointed to.

That wasn't me, because there was no starvation after the downfall of the Soviet Union. I even wrote a blog post about said lack of famine years ago.

316:

The only problem I see with this proposal is that it's a perfectly reasonable rTV idea rather than being in painfully bad taste and a horrifying perversion of human potential.

Well yeah, I have many shortcomings, and I'm naturally too good at painfully bad taste in real life to do it well online.

Anyway, there is the little problem that if you do droneskeet competently, inevitably the competition standard rises. Given that it involves drones, guns, and AI, a rising level of AI competence in this field is actually a "horrifying perversion of human potential."

I'll maybe hunt down the article again, but the boffins are already proposing, quite seriously, to train American soldiers in shotgunning (trap, skeet, and bird hunting) to deal with drones, especially when they're on duty guarding military bases and the drones are being used for espionage and sabotage.

Making a well-filmed contest out of this, something that gives oodles of training data to machine learning systems and rewards teams for using said data, would probably be truly bad, not just entertainingly bad.

317:

@214: Shouldn't JAXA (the Japanese space agency) be judging that too, they've pulled off some pretty impressive work with both the IKAROS sola sail craft and the recent asteroid lander.

Certainly. Leaving them off was an oversight on my part. Did I miss any other significant efforts, other than the Iranian and DPRK "space launch" programs?

318:
we know how much profit e.g.Tesco makes (or doesn’t make, as the case may be) in a given year, but we don’t know (because Tesco aren’t required to report it) how that breaks down across their stores across the UK

One of the anticipated possible benefits of Brexit is that we'll finally find out how much money Tesco makes in Ireland, because that gets rolled into the UK figures too.

Given Tesco's sharp practices have driven at least one supplying co-op here into dissolution, there's a little bitterness in some quarters about that.

319:

"Can you point to some of these "known designs"?"

Well, they're all over France, as has been pointed out. Lots of other countries, too.

"The problem for nuclear power is that it's not financially viable, even if you exclude insurance and post-operational costs. That's why it's strictly the province of governments who don't care (they just want bombs, or want to make a point), and of madmen (who also don't care)."

No, it's a problem for madmen because they do care. "Financially viable" is how we got into the present mess. We've had the technology to replace fossil fuels for long enough; if we'd started trying to do it when I was a nipper it would be pretty well done by now, but instead we just got arseholes whining about how much things cost.

It doesn't matter a tinker's fuck whether a nuclear power plant is "financially viable"; what matters is whether it produces energy without combusting carbon. Failure to realise this and act on it is why we are where we are now, and we certainly can't use the same dumb crap that got us here as an excuse for not doing things to sort it out.

It's not a condemnation of governments that they "don't care" about "financially viable" and so can build nuclear power plants. That's exactly what they should be doing: it's their responsibility to ensure the supply of energy to the place they govern, and it's their responsibility to see that things that don't make money get done because they're needed. The governments that deserve condemnation are the ones that renege on those responsibilities and encourage them to fall into the hands of those who see them not as a responsibility to be fulfilled but as a means of extracting money. I understand from things you and gasdive have posted that your government has seen to it that energy supply has become an extortion racket that threatens blackout to hold cities to ransom, and has a giant hard-on for coal. Ours likes gas and having a fleet of private parasites instead of taxation, and doesn't give a fuck what happens as long as they can duck the responsibility of paying for it. These are not models to be followed, but demonstrations of how not to do it. France with their fleet of nukes are much closer to the mark (as quite often seems to be the case).

320:

t doesn't matter a tinker's fuck whether a nuclear power plant is "financially viable"; what matters is whether it produces energy without combusting carbon.

"Financially viable" actually elides a whole bunch of baggage about public policy, neoliberal capitalist free market dogma, and so on. "Financially viable" is only a synonym for "best" if one uncritically assumes that market economics rules supreme without regard for externalities.

Such externalities could include, well, anything: unforeseen externalities of photovoltaic farms (e.g. pollutants from the PV cell factories, loss of biologically interesting/useful land, injuries and deaths to rooftop PV installation workers), wind farms (dead seabirds), and so on.

They also exist under artificial cost conditions: no fuel reprocessing pipeline because (hand-wavium free market shit), so storage costs rise over time, and no deep burial of high level waste because local geology isn't conducive to it within arbitrarily-delimited lines on a politically-imposed map. We basically can't estimate a true long-term cost for a nuclear power economy because our metrics are inappropriate and/or broken.

I tend to think, these days, that renewables are winning in all but a few edge cases -- but if we'd started 50 years ago, when the French program got rolling, and included a full end-to-end fuel reprocessing cycle and an international waste repository, we might have gotten somewhere by, oh, the turn of the century just past.

321:

I tend to think, these days, that renewables are winning in all but a few edge cases

They're certainly coming along. Checking the estimable https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ , it shows that of the UK's current draw of 41.64 GW, CCGT contributes 32.59%, wind 26.49%, nuclear 15.13%, coal 4.11%, biomass 2.79% and some other cats and dogs.

(Shouldn't biomass count as renewable, sorta?)

322:

(Shouldn't biomass count as renewable, sorta?)

Biomass is one of those examples of how not to do renewables.

The fundamental problem is that you're taking carbon out of the air when the plant photosynthesizes, then you're putting most of it right back into the air. That's the basic equation.

Then there's the problem of existing biomass power plants tending to be on the more polluting side, so you don't just get back CO2, you also get back NOx from combustion problems, particulates, and the other joys of soot and ash.

Then there's the problem that the biomass has to be harvested (almost always using a petroleum-powered device) from wherever, and trucked (almost always using a petroleum-powered device) to the power plant. There are smaller power plants, but they're still pretty huge (large truck size or larger), and they've still got to be hooked into the grid, wherever they are, to be of any use.

Then there's the problem that biomass plants are expensive to operate, compared with everything from wind and solar to gas and coal-burning plants.

Then there's the problem (in California at least) that the targeted biomass tends to be the highly diverse chaparral (adding to the biodiversity crises caused by development, fires near those developments, and climate change) and in forests that are, erm, supposed to be sequestering the carbon, not being burned.

Then there's the problem that the bureaucrats handwave all the previous problems away, using various questionable assumptions. These include: --The carbon burned today will instantaneously be absorbed into new biomass, so that there's no increase in CO2 (they're burning 50-100 year-old plants to generate power, so guess how long it takes them to sequester that much carbon?) --The dead logs after a fire "instantaneously vaporized" during the fire (per the models they created), so whatever wood that's left after the fire is fuel that can be used (burned snags and logs are critical wildlife habitat for a number of species and continue to store carbon in the landscape for decades to centuries) --It supports rural jobs (well, only with massive subsidies. Biomass power plants have been shutting down over the last few decades because they're uneconomic).

That's just a sampling of the problems that biomass power plants have, but that doesn't stop greed-heads from working the system to get tax breaks and other incentives to build more.

Anyway, there's still the bottom line: solar, wind, and natural gas are cheaper now and still getting cheaper, and there's no way to scale biomass to compete, because you've got to spend energy to ship in the fuel for it to burn.

Anyone want to chime in on the, erm, minor issues surrounding cutting trees in the Americas, pelletizing the wood, and shipping it to Europe for burning? That adds just a bit of petrochemical costs to the fuel.

323:

Wind is variable -- right now we've got a series of strong cold fronts hitting the UK and our 22GW capacity of installed wind turbines has been producing between 6 and 12GW of electricity over the past couple of weeks. A year ago things were a bit different with a similar number of wind turbines producing less than a gigawatt for a couple of days straight as the wind died. We burned a shitload of gas back then to produce as much as 30GW of electricity.

The annual average for well-sited (i.e. cherry-picked) wind generation is 30% of the dataplate figure. Offshore wind gets up to 35%, but we depend on a shitload and three-quarters of instant-on gas turbines to keep the lights on when the weather gods roll snake-eyes. That gas has replaced coal, thanks to Maggie Thatcher but it's too little too late really.

It's taken the UK about fifteen years or so to build out the 22GW of grid-connected wind we've already got. Much of that existing installed capacity is reaching end-of-life and will need to be replaced starting about five years from now while at the same time we need to build a shitload more to make a dent in our gas-burning habit.

In addition the coming electrification of road traffic in the UK will need, if my back-of-a-fag-packet calculation is correct, at least another 10GW of supply == an extra 35GW of wind turbines. We could really do with not heating our homes with gas and move to using electricity like France does, mostly so add another 40GW of electricity demand for that over the winter months.

TL;DR -- we're going to be burning gas to generate electricity and heat our homes for the forseeable future while building and replacing wind turbines to pretend we're being "Green" and promising we're going to stop burning gas some time soon, when it's cost-effective, honest.

324:

"but if we'd started 50 years ago,"

This is a subject I've dived very deep into, and I think you underestimate how tangled up in military and political dogmatism the so-called "civilian" nuclear power have been, from day one.

50 years ago was 1970, and a that time nuclear power was certainly solidly on the rails it has been loosing momentum along ever since, despite various political "restarts."

The biggest problem for nuclear power is that the most sensible size is around 150-300MW thermal power and the most sensible fuel is 15-25% enriched uranium.

Neither of those ranges are politically feasible, the first because you'd have to build a shitload of the things, and they would still have the observed 1% catastrophic failure rate, and the second because any single rogue operator could melt a hole in the ground.

So nuclear has always been technologically handicapped, and since the majority of the costs are fixed costs, the spread-sheets have always favoured larger and larger reactors, despite the fact that things get exponentially more difficult as the thermal power rises.

If you dive into the technical docs of EPR, you will, again and again, wonder how on earth anybody could ever think it would be a good idea to build a single reactor with 4500 MW thermal power and four cooling circuits, rather than four separate reactors of 1200 MW, each with its own cooling circuit.

But that is how you have to do it, to be politically feasible and to amortize the armed guards and all the other politically mandated security padding.

One often overlooked aspect of Fukushima was that the operators fought heroically for hours on end, to save a reactor which had melted down long ago.

Just like Chernobyl.

Just like Three Mile Island.

The fundamental problem here is that nuclear plants are so expensive that they are worth trying to save far too long.

So to put nuclear on a different path, you would have to intervene no later than 1960 and make the world build small and cheap, 150-200 MW (electrical) non-refuelable nuclear reactors, running under fully automated control which assume that the reactor is melting down, and activates a final and irreversible SCRAM, the first instant measurements venture outside the proscribed envelope of allowed operation.

If the fuel never needs to come out again, that solves the spent fuel problem nicely: It is entombed in concrete before it even becomes fuel in the first place, and you just leave it there, forever. (After about 30 years you can drain the cooling water to minimize corrosion.)

We are literally talking tens of thousands of reactors, of which a handful will SCRAM every year, some of them needlessly, but since they are assembly line construction, you can go in and unbolt all the expensive parts, such as turbines and pumps, and use them for new plants, so the only actual loss is a moderate amount of concrete and 100x100m land.

Apart from the fully automated operation, that is how we build nuclear submarines now.

325:

No. Just NO.

I do not do pink.

326:

Greg Tingey @ 230: JBS
You think the vote-suppression & stealing will get even worse?
Even so which Dem candidate gets elected makes a difference - afterwards.

If the voter suppression & election stealing goes far enough, there won't be any Democratic (or for that matter "democratic") candidates elected.

327:

Yep. Dunno about the UK, but most animal raising in the US is factory raising, and the conditions are dreadful. To combat the disease that this causes (like chickens that never, ever get off the brood pad), they feed them antibiotics.

Which, of course, is why antibiotic resistant strains of diseases are getting more common.

Do. Not. EVER. bring "hand sanitizer" into my house. Use the damn soap and water.

It's only in the last few years that "non-hormone" chicken, etc, is becoming available (and by "available", I mean not twice or three times the price of regular).

I just paid $0.25 more for a dozen brown eggs at Aldi, for not only non-hormone, etc, but cage free.

328:

Hey, I've been talking about starting the ultimate American, MBA-approved business for 20 years or so: I'll pay an artist to design a really, really pretty stock certificate, and print off numbered copies, and sell them. And if you want to resell some, you have to pay me a cut.

See? Pre-downsized, pre-amortized, no employees, only a president/CEO (me). Doesn't produce anything, so it's all profit!

329:

Sorry, I don't get that. Every electric oven I know is the same as the stovetop, it's up and down/on/off.

I really want that gas stove, and I'm going to do it this year, come hell or high water (and, as we're about 2/3rds of the way up a hill, so, no high water).

330:

JamesPadraicR @ 232:

Robert van der Heide@217: I was partially inspired by “Dr. Pimple Popper.”

Eww, glad I’ve never heard of that one, and that I don’t waste time/money on cable, though still watch way too much TV.

You can find them on YouTube. I ran across them by accident (How else do you ever find anything on YouTube?) and was thoroughly grossed out, but it's like rubber-necking when you pass by a traffic accident on the road. You don't want to look, but you turn your head anyway.

It ain't the standard black-head and/or pimple you might have experienced during puberty ...

331:

As a one-time good deal, since we're buddies on the blog here, I'll trade 100 shares of your common stock for 100 shares of my premium stock even across, plus a transaction fee of $10 a share. I guarantee a payout of 5% on all net profits!

332:

Charlie, that's great. Thanks for the thought... now, to try to get it through to my legislators.

But then, one of the things that pisses me off about the GOP's "oh! raising taxes on businesses! raising the minimum wage! There'll be job losses" is that what they want to do is support, on my tax dollars, lousy and incompetent business owners.

333:

"Instant Pot"... nope. You'll get my late wife's pressure cookers (and my mom's) out away from me when you pry them from my cold, dead hands....

334:

A lot of modern reactor components are built in factories and shipped

Down here In Australia our 20MW reactor was built on site, including some bodging of the reactor vessel when some of the holes didn't line up. But that was before there was anything radioactive so it didn't matter. It was the problems they found once it was running commissioned ...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-05-05/nuclear-reactor-design-flawed-from-start/2425980

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/reactor-leak-delaying-production-20080729-gdso4d.html

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-27/lucas-heights-nuclear-reactor-breakdown-medical-supply-shortage/9915242

https://factcheck.aap.com.au/claims/has-the-lucas-heights-reactor-been-operational-with-no-safety-issues

The factcheck gives you a nice overview of what "no safety issues" means in practice.

Now, you might well say that power reactors are much better built and yadda yadda, except that if we were to build them in Australia they would be owned and operated by the exact same set of muppets as managed to build the OPAL reactor above. The idea that given 20 or 50 much larger projects to be completed much faster, they'd somehow become hundreds of times more effective... that boggles my mind. Far more likely we would end up with 20 ten year projects (1 reactor complex per project) that each took 30-50 years and came in at 20x-100x the original budget. My bet is that they would achieve a combined 20% of rated output during their first decade of actual operation (not scheduled operation, the output during that will be zero).

335:

What, so the EU navy will blockade Gibraltar, until the UK, er, Great Britain, gives it up?

336:

Yeah, well, the electric ones, like mine, take for bloody ever to dry the clothes, esp. if it's a full load.

337:

"It doesn't matter a tinker's fuck whether a nuclear power plant is "financially viable"; what matters is whether it produces energy without combusting carbon."

Well, it does, though perhaps not in the way people usually mean that. Whatever plan we follow (or no plan at all) we have to grow the economy, by which I mean we must continue to add jobs and increase average payroll (while minimizing variation) by more than the rate of increase in the population growth world-wide, or it's no deal. No one will vote to downscale the economy, even if you could prove that a large human die-off is coming (and I don't know how you would prove that). But that doesn't mean that nuclear has to pay for itself--it merely means that when you factor in the tax burden, the power grid is adding more value to the economy than it costs. It is almost inconceivable to me that this wouldn't be true, regardless of what the things cost. Mind you, burning fossil fuel is even cheaper than that, so it adds more net value to the economy than nuclear could (unless peak oil does in fact one day come). But it also doesn't kill our grandchildren at nearly the same rate, so...

You could probably make a decent argument that global warming is going to seriously undermine US agricultural productivity, so if you subtract the amount by which food prices are expected to rise (and agricultural jobs lost), then nuclear power is still a good investment. Supplement nuclear with renewables about 50/50 (until that vaunted breakthrough in storage technology happens), add in a smart power grid, and you have plan.

338:

You don't need AI for this. Automatic target tracking against aircraft and gunlaying from the tracker have been solved problems for at least thirty years. That's how long ago it was that TI's LAV-AD prototype shot down two target drones during testing at Twentynine Palms.

We used a FLIR video target tracker and 10-round bursts from a Bushmaster 50 mm chain gun, since we were building something for use against full-size aircraft, not toy drones. In both cases, it took one burst, and we put rounds directly through the drone. The first time, we put a round through the engine. The second time, we got the fuselage, including the recovery parachute relay. Our prime contractor was not too happy about that one, as it resulted in total loss of the drone, not just disabling it and having to parachute it down and repair it. Those drones were EXPENSIVE!

Something similar was done from either an F-16 or an F-15, with a gun burst, at a 90 degree aspect angle while maneuvering, a few years earlier. I was not involved with that project, but I heard about it while I was at General Dynamics. I think that one used radar instead of video tracking, but the same principle applies. (The pilot who flew the test said he didn't know whether he fired the gun or the computer did, "... BUT WE GOT HIM!")

In both cases, the operator had to squeeze a "trigger", to give the final consent to fire against the target. I do not think you will ever see fully autonomous weapon systems, that fire on their own initiative, without a human actively giving consent by holding down a trigger, for reasons explained by example by Our Good Host when the anti-bad-guys system went crazy and annihilated the cosplay convention.

339:

Not just in the past. I would never buy a house with electric heat - I'd be paying 2-4 times what I am now, with gas heat (and, unfortunately, that's forced air, not the radiators that I would love).

340:

Oh, please Ghu, NO!

ALL the freakin' self-proclaimed "2nd Amendment Defenders" would be jumping up and down for that, and there'd be an immense amount of electricity wasted by them on eternal, huge threads every bloody where on why they should used this shotgun or that or that ammo....

Of course, right now, if they were actually honest, instead of liars, 100%, we'd see a reality show called "2nd Amendment Defenders of the Constitution vs the GOP retreat...."

341:

if we'd started 50 years ago, when the French program got rolling, and included a full end-to-end fuel reprocessing cycle and an international waste repository, we might have gotten somewhere

It's important to remember that multiple governments tried really, really hard both singly and in combination to solve that end-to-end problem, and the best you can say is that they came up with an interim solution that isn't terrible (storing high level waste in barrels close to or inside major cities where people can keep an eye on them).

There are a whole lot of attempts and they have a few things in common: they put out more radioactivity than they take in, they takle in phenomenal amounts of money, and they are more difficult to clean up than a normal nuclear reactor.

At this stage it looks as though using cyclotrons to break the waste down is going to be much easier than burying it or storing it, but obviously that's more energy intensive. A bit like CCS... you take a process that isn't especially viable now, add some expensive machinery that reduces the output, and oh well never mind.

The search for a waste repository has to date found as many unicorns as repository sites. It's sort of amusing that the various proponents of siting that in Australian can't agree on the money to be paid, let alone a way of dealing with the site owners that won't require another war to get access. For some reason a lot of Australian Aborigines still remember having British nuclear bombs dropped on their relatives and are still pissed abhttps://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/maralinga-how-british-nuclear-tests-changed-history-foreverout that. The Australian government has, as usual, said "fuck off and die" to them, which as the start of a "please can we use your land" negotiation isn't promising.

342:

One-meal dishwashers? I didn't know they existed.

A fast search (Ghu, google's "search" algorithm is an ad algorithm, with occasionally something you're looking for) shows me some things called "countertop dishwashers". Wonder if they'd fit in a shelf under the tiny counter (we have crap for counterspace).

343:

Yeah, um, I'll split the difference with you.

On the one hand, I agree that there are some kapomerdos out there who really shouldn't be building or running nukes at any scale. The scheisskopfs who screwed up San Onofre then bribed the regulators to pass the costs onto customers instead of investors are another example, unless they moved to Australia (or vice versa) in which case they're the same example.

And I refuse to insult muppets with the comparison. All Hail Kermit!

On the other hand, I don't think any naval nuclear reactor has failed quite so spectacularly, so there is something to be said for going small and expendable.

On the third hand, keeping power plants cool is one of those non-trivial problems. If your solution to the cooling problem is to take up the odd million dollars of shoreline (that's a per acre cost, and that's smaller than 100m X 100m) with a power plant sarcophagus, when said shoreline could instead be sold to some idiot bajillionaire with political connections instead, that's actually a major shortcoming for this solution.

And on the fourth hand, this is why local solar, large batteries, and sane energy use are probably going to win the race to keep at least some people powered.

344:

I think I prefer Old Peculiar.

345:

Off that subject, but I want the next person who says "but it's just a theory" about something scientific to be required to go into a live reactor to show that Einstein's Theory is "just a theory".

346:

P J Evans @ 239: My understanding is that mastitis is a problem for all dairy cows.
I understand, also, that they may start feeding them antibiotics as calves, because they grow better/larger with them.
The hormone stuff is fairly recent, after the antibiotics became a big factor.

Consumer demand for antibiotic/hormone free beef & dairy seems to be pushing American producers away from using them. As I noted, it appears to be one small place where "free markets" are actually working.

347:

I was actually thinking that, if the drone flyers started consistently winning, I've got some Deep Thoughts about what could be done with the Second Amendment crowd.

While I take your point, what else would they be doing with that time if they weren't outgassing. And we're better than them online because, well, we're cool and they're not?

348: 257. Hello:

I'm a long-time lurker, and think I'm a first-time poster.
There's been a great deal of previous (and some current) discussion of a possible Indy Ref 2. Please excuse this American for asking (and perhaps it's already been discussed), but what would be likely to happen if: 1) there were a successful (a clear majority of Scottish voters voting for independence) Indy Ref2, 2) the EU (as indicated) were open to accepting Scottish membership in it, and 3) the PM/Parliament says: "That's not going to happen. You're not 'Little Brexiting' on our watch!" (and maybe revoking devolution as a consequence)?

Thank You,

Keith Halperin

349:

"Rollin", the wheelchair reality show.

Um, 'bout that: I have, for decades, occasionally made jokes at cons when someone in a scooter goes by in a mobility about "bikers/biker chicks, not even wearing their colors, ready to run down innocent fen."

Back in, '05, I think, we were on the liana level at the LA Worldcon, and I made that comment (and the woman in one was smiling), and I added "probably trying to do wheelies"... and a guy in a mobility scooter behind us tried to. All four of us nearly died laughing.

350:

Had to think about this for a few days. I managed to come up with a reality TV show that can have both a US and a UK version, for a wider market.

Working title: "Shoulders of government".

Contestants play the staff for an erratic head of government, having to protect said head of government from themselves, and protect the country from the head of government.

Multiple ways to lose - if the head of government is removed from office, it counts as a loss. If the head of government dismisses you, it's a loss. If you end up being charged with crimes, that's a loss. If the country ends up in ruins, it is a loss.

Watch our contestants try to survive their boss's campaign promises meeting with reality. Watch them try to parrot the party line on camera, like a good little minion, while working frantically to reduce the dumpster fires behind the scenes. Watch them work hard to force other politicians to support their boss. And, just to make the US version a little different, we'll add a bonus 3 am tweet round, where our contestants get to deal with their boss addressing the public during a middle-of-the-night bathroom break.

Backstabbing others to save your own skin is encouraged, and we'll even overlook contestants distracting their boss from a bad idea until the boss finds something else to obsess about.

I am not sure who yet to cast as the boss in the UK version, but I can think of the perfect version for the US version, a previous reality TV star who may be willing to play the role, assuming his legal troubles don't catch up with him.

Now that I think about this, the franchise possibilities are endless. I'm told that the North Korea version will be especially brutal.

351:

Clarification: that included both the woman in the scooter and the guy who'd tried to do a wheelie.

352:

"known designs" are ones that are in production and can be built, not designs that were built 50 years ago, unless you have a time machine and can place an order for 50 years ago. My understanding is that the French are out of the reactor building game.

"financially viable" is the minimum measure of resources used vs resources gained. If a product can't even meet that hurdle there's no chance it will meet stricter hurdles around waste handling and input sourcing. Talking about EROEI as though it's some magic fairy dust that makes all the other problems vanish is naive.

In practice new reactors have problems that start with democracy (they're wildly unpopular) and finance (wildly unprofitable) and the further down you dig the less plausible they sound. The reason I was asking for designs is that the only reactors that are in production are in China, and China is explicitly building them as part of a "try all the things" approach to the many problems it's trying to solve simultaneously.

The true death of nuclear is that it's much, much cheaper both financially and politically to pave Syria or Algeria with solar panels and export that electricity to Europe, than to build a new nuclear reactor in Europe. When you start talking about building an army base on the site and putting the reactor inside the perimeter as "solving the political issues", just bribing an African nation to host your solar farms starts to look cheap.

353:

We had one (until it died), then bought another, for our "tea station", where I was working, for like 10 years. It took a couple-three minutes with a quart in it. Not a big deal.

354:

Wave/tidal power: scam? Not hardly. I believe either Scotland or Wales just brought a large one on line in the last year or so.

355:

Training American soldiers in shutgunning. Ok.

Let me note that I read, was it in the seventies? eighties? Certainly no later than the nineties that one of the real reasons for the introduction of the M-16 during 'Nam was that most US troops coming into the Army at the time couldn't hit the side of a barn, and so they gave them a fire hose.

A couple friends of mine who were there agreed.

356:

Pigeon @ 250: I dunno, most houses that have gas at all seem to provide both types of cooker feed. Either they were built like that or someone who preferred one type sold it to someone who preferred the other at some point.

You mean like places that have the hookup for a gas stove also have a plug for an electric range?

That's because in most places the electrical code calls for a stove outlet in the kitchen & you can't get a certificate of occupancy if it doesn't meet the electrical code. If you're building houses, you can't sell them without the CO. I know about older buildings that had gas lights before they got electricity, but I'm pretty sure most of those have been converted and had to meet the electrical code at some point.

357:

I refuse to insult muppets with the comparison

I was trying to be generous to the noble bureaucrats of ANSTO who I'm sure are doing their best with the limited finances and intellectual firepower at their disposal.

358:

Since we're after 300, here's a totally unrelated thought that came to me about writing last night: it struck me that there's two crafts (at least) involved in writing: the crafting of the story, and the crafting of the language.

I'm sure we've all read books that wee well-written, but terrible stories, and vice versa. I think I''ve managed to master the former, and I'm working on the latter.

What got me thinking was having at least three times in the last two days added either a scene, or a very minor character, so that there are no holes in the plot, no "where'd that deus ex machina come from?"

359:

Going back to reality TV for a moment, these negotiations would make great TV is we could get them broadcast. Trump vs Merkel... the final showdown.

http://www.theshovel.com.au/2020/02/04/trump-calls-for-us-to-leave-eu-too/

360:

Anyone want to chime in on the, erm, minor issues surrounding cutting trees in the Americas, pelletizing the wood, and shipping it to Europe for burning?

Hey look over here, he says raising his hand.

We cut down tall pine in our NC coastal swamps to pelletize and then ship to (mostly) Germany. For burning in personal homes mostly. They (Germany) then claim it as a part of their drive to get off coal and nuclear and be 100% renewable.

I've never gotten how this works at all.

361:

In addition the coming electrification of road traffic in the UK will need, if my back-of-a-fag-packet calculation is correct, at least another 10GW of supply

That's the big issue with electric cars anywhere. If they really take off and become a much bigger part of the personal/small business transportation network, none of us have the electric generating capacity to handle it.

It's a bigger version of the let people sell home roof top excess solar back to the power company but not have to pay for their grid connection.

362:

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that gives renewable energy a bad name. Now if they carried the pellets in windjammers, or, heck, used the wood to build cargo ships that sailed across to Europe, there to be broken up for fuel, it would make more sense.

363:

Let me note that I read, was it in the seventies? eighties? Certainly no later than the nineties that one of the real reasons for the introduction of the M-16 during 'Nam was that most US troops coming into the Army at the time couldn't hit the side of a barn, and so they gave them a fire hose.

First, my apologies to Martin and other vets who have gone through this, but it's right and wrong. When I was in college, I had some gun nut friends who took me out shooting. One of the guns I got to try was a 1926 Lee Enfield with its brass butt plate. It hurt to shoot that thing. Another friend had an H&K assault rifle. My first shot with it I hit a bulls-eye. Same with most of the rest of the clip. That's one difference. The US Army always has issues with shifting to the next generation of technology, and I don't think the M-16 is a great gun due to its maintenance issues. However, improved accuracy does matter. The whole three round burst thing is, AFAIK, about trying to let the soldier get three rounds off without collecting a bullet when he sticks his head out of cover.

Bottom line is that there are multiple ways to deal with lack of aiming skill. One is to make the recoil more comfortable. Another is to minimize the time some stays vulnerable while shooting. The M-16 and similar weapons did both.

I'll leave shotgunning to the next post.

364:

Charlie Stross @ 265: The mere idea of a gas-fired clothes-drier boggles my (British) mind.

Yes, yes, I know, Americans and 110 volt mains current isn't conducive to electric kettles or washer-driers: but even so, I've never even heard of a gas-burning drier being sold anywhere in Europe!

I got to visit Scotland in 2004. By the time I got to Inverness, I was running low on clean undergarments & had to find a self-service laundromat. The one I found in Inverness had the same kind of big commercial gas dryers I've always seen in U.S. laundromats. They looked like the same driers & smelled the same. Didn't take American Quarters though. But they had the same kind of change machines - feed it Euros & it spit out the kind of coins I needed to dry my skivvies.

Maybe they don't have gas driers in homes in Europe, but I think they do have them in commercial laundries ... maybe just not in old Chinese Laundries.

365:

These trees they are taking down are 50 years old give or take. Or more. The tall pines around my neighborhood are about 100 years old. Which leads to one of your other points about how fuzzy (fake?) the math is.

366:

_Moz_ @ 277: Going back to pop culture oddities: Suicide Boys is a band, Suicide Girls is a porn site. Does that signify something about our culture?

Maybe your culture. I've never listened to the former & have no interest in visiting the latter ... or finding out why they call it that.

367:

Now about military shotgunning. So far as I know, there are two common roles for the shotgun. The major one is that combat engineers on assault squads use them to breach doors. The other one that I've seen floated is that they're used with less lethal armaments. I do know there are shotguns made with bright yellow pumps and stocks, to hold only non-lethal armaments, the color being there to alert the shooter to what he's using.

The third, quite serious, proposal is to equip some members of base security teams with shotguns, specifically to shoot down drones. This is an excellent idea in places where drone incursions are a serious problem, because bird shot is definitely less lethal and more effective on drones than rifle rounds are. You don't want E-3 GI Jose to open up with his M-16 to try to shoot down a drone, when the bullets fly for up to five miles down range and he's probably not thinking about that when he's shooting. Depending on the shotgun, you can also fit shotgunner Alejandro up with a nice bandolier of variably lethal rounds for a variety of situations (ball shot to pepper spray to dragon's breath), making him more versatile as a guard.

However, gunning down speedy flying objects takes skill and practice, and right now there's no protocol for training GI Jose to develop said capability. If you want anti-drone shotgunners, you need country kids who grew up duck hunting with their parents, and there are far fewer of those than there used to be. Also, getting a shotgunner to work as a low level security guard is problematic, because the soldiers with those skills probably can get a better job doing something else, like trying out for the Rangers or SEALs.

The interesting part about a Droneskeet reality show is that it could potentially solve a bunch of problems. If it's a hit (and many of us hate those effin' camera drones already), then it will encourage kids to go out and learn shotgunning. Or fly drones. It will also help DARPA/DoD figure out the best doctrine for defeating drone incursions (guns, shells, tactics, static defenses around buildings, etc.), as well as the best doctrine for infiltrating drones into guarded bases. On paper, there are wins on all sides. The ultimate danger is if the show produces drones that beat the gunners every time, because then we've created a weapon that we cannot stop. That's bad.

368:

There are places in the US where the electric-power companies have made it more expensive to install solar than it's worth: you have to pay for the connection every month, and then they charge you to sell them power. (This is both Florida and Arizona, that I've heard of, and other states want to go this route as well.)

369:

Maybe your culture

"Suicideboys is an American hip hop duo from New Orleans, Louisiana"

In 2001, Mooney returned to Portland, Oregon to study photography

It appears to me that the culture concerned is very USA-based, which IIRC makes it far more your culture than mine, but I was being somewhat generous by calling it ours.

370:

Madeleine @ 285: I've seen counter top dishwashers (I was considering getting one for himself's mother but I suspect the plumbing arrangements for it might have been tricky).

We (2 people) run ours on average once daily - more often if I'm doing baking. It usually goes on after breakfast (the kitchen is south-facing so I don't like dirty dishes lying around in the summer).

The way I used to do it when I still had a dishwasher was to scrape/wipe the plates and put 'em in the dishwasher. Don't run the dishwasher until you run out of clean dishes.

The way I do it now without the dishwasher is use the same plate over & over again. As soon as I finish cooking any pot I used goes in the sink & gets filled with soapy water. When I finish eating the plate gets washed with a scrubber sponge using the soapy water in the pot, then the pot gets washed with the scrubber sponge and both get rinsed & put onto a drying rack ... except for my cast iron, which just gets wiped down with a lightly oiled cloth.

371:

If someone can answer that, maybe you could tell me why, at one local major chain supermarket, they're selling European birch firewood.

372:

Madeleine @ 285: I've seen counter top dishwashers (I was considering getting one for himself's mother but I suspect the plumbing arrangements for it might have been tricky).

PS: They have them at Home Depot (& probably Lowe's or whatever big box home improvement store is in your area). Has an adapter that screws into your faucet that replaces the existing aerator. You fill it with dishes, add soap, turn on the faucet & push the go button. The water just drains out into your sink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhp3_H8fJu4

373:

witroth re food YUCK Even our supermarkets, at the moment, don't go that low down the polluted-&-dangerous end of the spectrum EU & Brit regulations ... I can see why US rich shits wanted to help us out of the Eu if they are doing that. Euw.

@ 333 I still have two of my parent's wedding-present aluminium-alloy cookpots ... from 1936 ANOTHER reason for NOT going to induction is you have to change all your pots & pans ... & we have some seriously expensive, French-made copper pans with alloy linings, that will see us out - & will see out whoever inherits our estate as well. And they are an absolute joy to use on an instant-reaction gas stove. Hint - look up "E.DEHILLERIN" - in Paris.

JBS When my house was built (1893) it, obviously, had Gas only. However, in 1905/06 the Walthamstow "Gas light & Electric Company" ( Or very similar name ) started up, at the same time as electric trams were introduced. Powerd from the same source, of course. We think the house was wired up in 1907 ... it's still got some of the original light-switches, retrofitted with an earth cable, by me. OTOH, before I rewired the house there was ONE upstairs electric socket - & that was a 2-pin round 5 Amp & a total of 12 sockets in the whole house. There are now 12 sockets in the kitchen alone. Electrical Code? Standards? Oh yes, that was when I found the whole bulding was wired-up back to front. Everything was "live" ... back to the socket. Correcting that was fun - broke seal on feed box, wore rubber gloves & used insulated pliers to cross back the input feed cables, which had been the wrong way around since ... well, before 1948 for certain.

David L I'm afraid Deutschland is deeply hypocritical & suffering bad doublethink over "green" power - & that is just another example.

374:

@341: Here's the thing: Nuclear waste is very dangerous, and very expensive to store, and it's distribution has often been marked by middle class NIMBY (not to mention sheer racism). However, the question to ask is: is it more expensive, dangerous, and racist than the current storage, transfer, and waste disposal schemes currently in place with regard to fossil fuels? Given how little waste nuke plants generate in comparison to fossil fuel plants, I don't see how that could possibly be the case.

@352: ""financially viable" is the minimum measure of resources used vs resources gained." Given the energy density of nuclear fuel, I'm pretty sure all nuclear reactors produce more energy than they consume. I'm also sure that the energy they produce is used to generate more economic activity than they consume. They do not themselves make a profit, but neither do roadways, militaries or public schools. That's not the standard.

Popularity is essentially a marketing problem. Global warming itself has a branding problem, but we cant wait for the public to spontaneously see the light. We got desegregation passed despite it's unpopularity as a policy, we can do this.

OTOH, we can't import electricity from overseas because it doesn't transport well. High tension power lines lose too much energy over those distances, and batteries aren't cheap enough yet. That's why we need a breakthrough in one or both of those technologies, but until that happens, we have to find ways to provide enough alternative power in situ, more or less. We aren't doing that without nukes.

375:

Re: 339 - meh. Heat pump systems for the win. We spend, for all power for heating, lighting, workshop tools, computers (many), cooking, everything, C$1200p.a. That is in Canada, where we do indeed get snow and ice, and the heating part of that total is around C$500 because of the heat pump. Ours is forced air but you can certainly do radiators or floor heating. Oh, and our electricity is all renewables.

376:

However, the question to ask is: is it more expensive, dangerous, and racist than the current storage, transfer, and waste disposal schemes currently in place with regard to fossil fuels? Given how little waste nuke plants generate in comparison to fossil fuel plants, I don't see how that could possibly be the case. Is the GHG-caused global heating that will (probably) result in mass death considered dangerous? 'Cause then a gigawatt plant burning 8-9K tonnes of bituminous coal per day[1] (say 45-85 percent carbon) is making a substantial contribution towards those future deaths. (My back of the envelope estimate, if our current path leads to a 50 percent reduction in global human population, is about 25 human lives per day for a gigawatt coal-burning power station. Corrections welcome.)

[1] e.g. the recently closed 2.5 GW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Generating_Station burned 22K tons (US) of bituminous coal per day.

377:

Scott Sanford @ 290:

Can Fat Teens Hunt?

I knew I wanted to take time to address this. A rich subset of horrible rTV shows is the physical anomaly subgenre. (Are they called freakshows in the business? I’m not well enough connected to know.)

You want a real freak show on TV, look no farther than Championship Wrasslin'!

But, you know something ... I'd pay real money to see a Pay-Per-View where Nature Boy Rick Flair smashed a chair over Mitch (Putin's Bitch) McConnell's head.

Especially if it was a "shoot" and someone sneaked in one of the real chairs from the Senate Floor just before the match.

378:

You funny!

Repeating what I said but somehow saying it proves the opposite doesn't make any sense. Energy is a resource, not all resources are energy. As you say, we can't do anything with nuclear waste except wait and hope someone else solves the problem.

The nuclear fuel cycle is long and complex, and much of it is very hard to electrify. Either way there's a huge amount of energy required to turn rock into reactor fuel rods. Turning nuclear waste back into minimally radioactive material is also energy-intensive.

But of course you can wipe all that stuff out by saying "the EROEI for a plant that turns free nuclear fuel rods into free-to-dispose-of spent nuclear fuel rods is enormous". Trouble is, the EROEI for a system that turns free solar panels into free-to-dispose-of second hand solar panels is almost infinite, so we're back with "solar beats nuclear" but with an insulting layer of bullshit.

379:

Nah. The ‘extra’ power generation required for EVs is not likely to be any problem. We have to build capacity any time new housing is built and somehow I never see massive wailing about how the poor, frail, worn out, impossible to improve grid prevents that. And even if all the extra power were generated by oil powered means, the better efficiency of EVs (something around 3-5X) would still mean a large reduction in oil usage and pollution. Yes, even though sending power through the grid costs some power.

380:

I never see massive wailing about how the poor, frail, worn out, impossible to improve grid prevents that.

Come to Australia! We do get brownouts occasionally, but I'm told those are supply related not grid related. But we also have quite a bit of re-working of the distribution side as more people install bigger air conditioners on more numerous, bigger houses. Because Australians are, not to put to fine a point on it, morons*.

Actual homeowners are never required to pay for the grid upgrades, but they do pay for if they want a bigger circuit to their house (IIRC they're not even permitted to ask to be allowed to). The don't-ask-don't-pay also leads to waits for bigger circuits if you're profligate with energy (standard connection has gone from 60A in the 1950's to 100A today (possibly more) and at 240V that is a lot of power (24kW). You can also get three phase, which is a lot more power (120kW if you're determined). I can only assume the "150A 3 phase" people are running Telstra superchargers at home. Mind you, if it was me I would be running 150kW of PV and feeding it in 😍).

Admittedly a big chunk of the problem was stupid government decision that the grid operator was required to make a profit, and that profit was limited to a percentage of their assets, plus an allowance for building more assets. In shocking news the grid was built out and revalued and the grid operator made the legally permitted profit every year. Owner of grid? The government. Source of requirement to make the maximum permitted profit? Oh, the government again. But at least taxes are low...

  • the latest poll still says 60%+ support for action to minimise climate change, dropping to 20% if it would cost $1/week. I too would like free stuff... but I am willing to pay serious money to avoid dying in a fire. Unlike 80% of Australian voters. Stupid or worthless... you decide.
381:

we can't import electricity from overseas

Not as electricity, but the USA imports significant amounts of electricity as refined metals (especially aluminium and lithium which are basically congealed electricity). Many other industrial products are very energy-dense and the energy is supplied as electricity.

Soon those products are likely to include raw steel and glass as well as all the downstream stuff made with those. And once we stop using the Haber process powered by natural gas we're likely to be eating electricity as well as using it for everything from explosives to cleaning (viz, any use of ammonia or urea).

There are even proposals to ship electricity in gas form, as hydrogen, ammonia or more complex hydrocarbons which will power fuel cells at the receiving end.

382:

timrowledge @ 375 Heat Pumps ... these are readily commercially available for domestic users? Really? Show, please. Your total fuel bill comes to £696 - just over half our electricity bill p.a. in London - & we have to pay for gas as well ... Um

383:

Working title: "Shoulders of government".

Contestants play the staff for an erratic head of government, having to protect said head of government from themselves, and protect the country from the head of government.

So basically a reality TV version of Blackadder the Third?

I'm on board, though you're right about the difficulties of casting the Hugh Laurie role. Either Laurie or Fry would be fine choices but really they should cast some C-list celebrity who needs the exposure; that guy from the executive assistant show would have been perfect.

Stephen Colbert might not be goofy enough. Maybe Tina Fey would like to revive her SNL Sarah Palin imitation.

384: 323 - An argument that anyone who doesn't "save money" (read as "avoid fuel taxes") by using a Scal... "electric" car understands. 338 - That depends on the value assigned to "those drones were expensive". A Meggitt Banshee drone is expensive relative to a car, but cheap relative to a range day or a prototype (or telemetry) weapon. 364 - Well I call BS on the idea of you finding change machines that accept Euros in Inverness!
385:

This is wrong. The only part of the nuclear fuel production cycle which is energy intensive enough to be worth measuring at all is enrichment... which has both gotten massively less energy intensive with the advent of modern centrifuges, and also has always been electrical entirely by default (and in Europe, powered by the french nuclear grid) The next most energy intensive step is mining, and mining is also very straightforward to electrify - it very frequently already is electrified simply to make the ventilation requirements more manageable. There is academic "work" out there that claims otherwise, but Storm Leeuwen is a goddamn liar.

386:

I can only speak for the research I've seen on the Australian mines, and they are anything but electric (they're off the grid, so burn diesel) and they are so environmentally disgusting that not even the operators claim they obey the loose agreements not to be too awful. Which means that we can't talk about how much energy they use outside the context of "it would take billions of dollars just to clean up the known problems" and the energy cost is a small-ish chunk of that. Billions * small is still lots.

As with all things nuclear, and all things mining, there's a lot we just don't know because it's cheaper to buy out of the law than follow it. So questions like "what would it cost to operate a mine lawfully" and "what would it cost to operate a mine without grossly polluting the area around it" aren't answerable in Australia. Except for the edge case of "when you are shipping hills made of iron ore to China, and the surrounding area is made of iron ore, it's cheap and easy to clean up". That's quite different from "how much energy does it take to get uranium ore dust out of a whole watershed in a world heritage area", just to pick one of the random questions that might crop up.

387:

Heat Pumps ... these are readily commercially available for domestic users?

I assume you mean other than fridges, yes?

In Australia at least reverse cycle air conditioners are common, and things like ground source heat pumps are available if you look. Weirdly they're more common the heating climate parts of Australian than the cooling ones, but they're definitely available. In terms of "readily available to domestic users" they're sold at the numerous white goods merchants with prices from ~$AU200.

388:

Also in Finland the air source heat pumps (term from Wikipedia, I know the Finnish one) are common. They see much use in single houses, either as an add-on installation or nowadays even built-in. Apparently (I don't have one) they can work well and save energy and money in temperature control.

Most of Finland can have a yearly temperature differential of 45-50 degrees Celsius, or even larger (from -25 or -20 in the winter to +25 or +30 in the summer), so passive houses have design difficulties. These help because they can be used either way.

389:

Heat Pumps ... these are readily commercially available for domestic users? Really? Show, please.

S'truth, gov.

A quick googling turns up this explanation and this one of the various breeds of home heat pump, to walk people through the basics of what's going on.

They're not the right tool for every residence but the technology is comfortably past the 'clever new thing' phase and is being sold to ordinary proles who want a box that Just Works.

390:

I have been thinking about linking to this video for some time, though...

This song is about Donald Rumsfeld meeting karmic (and secular) justice.

Given the Delirium Tremens' stance on landmines, add the Donald of your choice for a minestomping game show of your choice.

(Sorry, too little time at the moment...)

391:

"...unless you have a time machine and can place an order for 50 years ago."

No, sorry, I refuse to accept this point of view that nothing is possible unless you can order a ready-made mass-produced one out of a catalogue. Especially when it's still within living memory that we didn't even know it was possible to do it at all, then a couple of decades later the things were all over the place.

The same argument gets used to argue that we can never go back to the Moon ever because someone's lost the spec for one of the parts of the rocket. Apparently it's permanently beyond the reach of human ingenuity to recreate the lost information even though it only took eight years to create the entire bleeding rocket in the first place and fly it there too.

It's not a "can't", it's just a "can't be arsed", and usually a "can't be arsed because we might have to spend some money".

""financially viable" is the minimum measure of resources used vs resources gained."

It isn't a measure of anything at all. It bears only the most tenuous connection with actual resources used/gained and most of that is made up. Its use as a criterion is as likely to result in grossly excessive use of resources as in minimisation, and a great deal of the disadvantageous side of nuclear power is a direct result of "financially viable" and "resource use" giving opposite results and the wrong one being chosen. So is the continued use of fossil fuels.

"wildly unprofitable"

It's not supposed to be profitable. It's supposed to provide energy with a minimum amount of fuel and without producing gigantic quantities of gaseous exhaust. "Unprofitable" isn't a condemnation of the thing itself, it's a condemnation of the criteria being used to make decisions about it. We need to be making decisions on the basis of what something actually does, not on some irrelevant fiction about making rich people happy.

Heck, if we just dropped "profitable" we'd be a huge part of the way there at a stroke, even without changing anything else, simply by way of the loss of all the frantic activity which is "profitable" but doesn't actually do anything useful.

"pave Syria or Algeria with solar panels"

Solar panels are great, yeah, but they have this great big problem which is that they only work less than half the time. We can't get round that just with more paving because there's too much water in the way, and we can't get round it with storage because we haven't got anything that works on that sort of scale (regardless of the tendency of these threads to spew a plethora of silly ideas that I forlornly hope that comment won't trigger). One of the fine things about nuclear power plants is they're not afraid of the dark :)

"congealed electricity"

Ah. Are you a student of Doug Self too? :)

392:

"...it will encourage kids to go out and learn shotgunning."

...and that is a good thing why, exactly?

I'd happily see shotguns just as banned as any other sort of gun. Particularly since people are actually encouraged to discharge them at live targets.

Concerning military use of shotguns: they were found to be very useful in WW1 for clearing trenches, and I think it was the US who had the idea. The Germans freaked out about it - "you can't use shotguns on us! They're for animals!"

393:

Yes, they're what I'd expect to find in laundromats, and also in the laundry rooms in student halls of residence. Quick enough that you can actually wait while they do it instead of coming back later. Much more effective than the crappy electric things some people have in their houses, which are so slow you might just as well just hang the clothes up and let them dry naturally.

394:

That's from the Theakstons brewery, in Yorkshire...

395:

"Anyone want to chime in on the, erm, minor issues surrounding cutting trees in the Americas, pelletizing the wood, and shipping it to Europe for burning? That adds just a bit of petrochemical costs to the fuel."

Like this sort of thing? http://www.drax.com/sustainability/how-a-mississippi-wood-pellet-mill-supports-healthy-forests-and-rural-economies/ (waffle alert).

Drax is one of a set of huge coal power stations that were built in the Aire valley to burn coal from the surrounding Yorkshire coalfield. What it burns now comes in at Hull docks and is delivered in trains with guff plastered all over the side about how wonderful it is. Me, I'm not convinced.

396:

What, so the EU navy will blockade Gibraltar, until the UK, er, Great Britain, gives it up?

Gibraltar has a land border with Spain. Open roads (and IIRC rail).

These days most of the goods in the shops there -- and fuel in the filling stations -- cross that border. And a huge proportion of the working population cross the border to go to work (and the same in the opposite direction).

Gibraltar is so entangled in the Spanish economy that if Spain closes the crossings some very bad whackiness will ensue within days to a week or so, up to and including panic buying, shops running bare, businesses closing (because workers and/or customers and/or suppliers can't get to them), and so on.

It's no accident that Gibraltarians voted by over 90% to remain in the EU ... and were ignored.

397:

Surely solution is to change the status of gibralter to a reverse channel islands. Ie a uk dependency inside the EU

398:

Heat Pumps ... these are readily commercially available for domestic users?

Not sure of your question. In the US they are more and more the default. If you want an AC then you've paid for 70% to 80% of an HVAC heat pump system. A big knock against them is the air they circulate doesn't feel "hot". But they are more and more energy efficient as time goes by. And better and better at holding a house close to a set temp. And a heat pump system is about $5K (or more) cheaper than a gas heat / electrical AC system.

Now do you mean can you as a homeowner go buy one and put it in yourself? In the US sort of. You can buy all the bits but at some point it has to be charged with refrigerant and that requires special tools and permits to buy the stuff in more than a hairspray sized can in most areas. Depending. Also getting the local gas/electrical inspections can prove hard for most consumers. Electrical can be done in most areas. Gas permits required licensed folks most everywhere.

399:

The only part of the nuclear fuel production cycle which is energy intensive enough to be worth measuring at all is enrichment... which has both gotten massively less energy intensive with the advent of modern centrifuges

Yep. Our local gassious diffusion plant in rural KY had the capacity to pull around 800MW from the 3 grid feeds into the plant. Over the decades they got that down but still...

Centrifuges are cheaper to run. As most anything is when compared to a max power draw of 800MW.

Yes I know most people don't have such as a "local" thing. I did though.

400:

than the crappy electric things some people have in their houses, which are so slow you might just as well just hang the clothes up and let them dry naturally.

Just how ancient and terrible are these dryers you and others keep describing? Mine is efficient, quiet, and takes about an hour. Less if I want to run it hotter. It gives me an estimate of time remaining while running but uses a moisture sensor to actually decide when done. And I can also pick that setting.

The only time it doesn't do a good job is if I let link collect in the vent grill which keeps the outside life on the outside.

401:

Link

Those internet things that accumulate in my pockets after a day of browsing.

402:

Gibraltar

Some of the support for our current us Pres comes from people who feel he would have never let the UK/England surrender Hong Kong to China.

Just saying.

403:

Shotguns firing conventional ammo like birdshot, buckshot or even solid slugs are banned for use against combatants by the Geneva Convention since the ammo isn't jacketed. The Winchester 1897 militarised[1] pump action shotgun aka the Trench Broom was a case of America fuck yeah! basically plus being on the winning side after the shooting died down so no war crimes were committed honest.

[1]Occasional poster here, Chris Suslowicz once described someone he knew using an ex-US military Winchester 1897 on a clay pigeon shoot, complete with 17-inch sword bayonet fitted just because he could.

404:

paws4thot @ 292: #224 - Do you deny that chlorine-washed meat is an additional (and from your statement unnecessary) process?

I don't deny it's an additional process. Unnecessary or not, I don't know, but I don't think it's a harmful process. The objection based on the supposed "health risk" just doesn't add up for me because I don't think there is any greater "health risk" associated with it which is why I think there might be another real reason behind the EU ban.

405:

Or you could read one of the many, many articles explicitly explaining the reasoning - consistent since the ban came in in 1997 - for it, instead of getting all conspiratorial.

(TL;DR: different conceptions about food hygiene and animal treatment, EU banning what's seen as a cheap stopgap that papers over the problem rather than actually fixing it.)

406:

Specialist @ 338: You don't need AI for this. Automatic target tracking against aircraft and gunlaying from the tracker have been solved problems for at least thirty years. That's how long ago it was that TI's LAV-AD prototype shot down two target drones during testing at Twentynine Palms.

Last night I noticed a nearby church has a security camera mounted on the front of the building and it moves to track you as you walk across the parking lot (which I do a couple of times a week when I take the dog out that way so he can poop before we go to bed). It's one of those little ones with six LEDs on either side of the lens.

Looked something like this one - https://www.homedepot.com/p/GW-Security-Wired-4MP-High-Speed-IP-Network-Outdoor-PTZ-Surveillance-Camera-360-Degree-Endless-Rotation-5-1-51-mm-Lens-GW410IP/306644863

407:

Well, the Germans in WWI complaining about the use of shotguns against them, when they deployed poison gas and invented the modern flamethrower and deployed it in WWI, really is a bit rich.

here's a legal analysis of the German protest incidentally.

Here's an article on trench-broom shotguns and how the US used shotguns in war.

It may be odd for the people here to understand, but I'm actually pro-hunting. I've worked with hunters, both in a job banding ducks and in Wisconsin, and the ones I worked with were more ethical and hardworking conservationists than a majority of the urban environmentalists I work with. And they used guns for hunting. Now I happen to agree that human recreational hunters are a poor substitute for indigenous hunters or top carnivores in ecosystems governed by top-down trophic cascades. However, I've also seen the damage that deer can cause in the absence of intensive predation, so I'm pro deer-hunting based on the evidence. I believe that it's better for some deer to be shot dead than to starve to death after they've overgrazed an area. Better for the plants in the area too, and for the other animals that depend on those plants.

The problem with hunting is that there are fewer hunters these days, and so we're getting into trouble based on the resulting loss of hunting effects on natural ecosystems (the humans are only intermittently being replaced by natural hunters, like mountain lions and wolves), the loss of revenue from hunting licenses (which used to be the primary funding for conservation efforts), and the switch from hunter safety training to whatever-it-is that the personal protection crowd learns to use with their assault rifles.

I've been through hunter safety, and the overriding lesson is to know where your bullet is going to end up before you pull the trigger. Rifle bullets can travel up to 5 miles, and I do know of a case where someone took a "ridge shot" (standing in a canyon, firing up at a deer silhouetted against the sky above him), missed, and the bullet embedded itself in the bunk of a children's camp miles away. Fortunately there wasn't a kid in the bunk at the time. Shotgun pellets and slugs simply don't fly that far, and that's why in the eastern US, most deer hunting (within a mile or two of homes, farms, and fields) is limited to shotgunning.

That's also an advantage for home defense or military urban warfare. Shotgun projectiles don't travel so fast, so if they hit a wall they tend to stay inside the wall, unlike rifle bullets which travel through most house walls. If you're ethical about home defense with a gun, the first thing you do is figure out where you're likely to be shooting from and towards and what's downrange. Often times, what's downrange is someone's bedroom or something similar that you don't want to accidentally shoot into. That, again, is where a shotgun is better than a rifle. I'm a little contemptuous of the guys with the assault rifles. While they're easy to shoot accurately, I have yet to meet any self-defense rifle owner who's taken the time to figure out where the bullets they fire will end up as part of planning to defend themselves. Not sure where they learned to be so cavalier about their neighbors' safety, but they are.

Anyway, I don't think there's a problem with getting more people to use shotguns instead of military-style rifles, especially in civilian situations. Duck Dynasty not withstanding, it seems to be an ethical step up from the assault-rifles-are-fun crowd.

408:

@383: So basically a reality TV version of Blackadder the Third?

If you want comedy about the incompetent leading the incompetent while dealing with the evil, I submit for your approval Veep, a savagely funny and scatological portrayal of the public office once called by an incumbent "not worth a bucket of warm piss".

409:

Shotgun pellets and slugs simply don't fly that far, and that's why in the eastern US, most deer hunting (within a mile or two of homes, farms, and fields) is limited to shotgunning.

Must be more of a north eastern thing. Never heard of it from southern (eastern) US hunters.

I'm a little contemptuous of the guys with the assault rifles. While they're easy to shoot accurately, I have yet to meet any self-defense rifle owner who's taken the time to figure out where the bullets they fire will end up as part of planning to defend themselves. Not sure where they learned to be so cavalier about their neighbors' safety, but they are.

The movies of course. Because the way guns work in the movies is fully real life. With a bit of paint ball gaming tossed into the mix.

A friend (a couple) who got small hand guns and a concealed carry permit after a sensational home invasion a few years ago was convinced she could have made a different for the good in the Colorado movie theater shooting a few year back. I politely told her she was nuts. In the dark, confused situation, lots of noise and screaming. Yep, just what I want. Someone with nothing but a 4 hour gun course and some indoor target range experience shooting at what she thinks is the bad guy. And of course adrenaline doesn't matter at all.

PS: I've had up to 6 deer at once visit my yard at night. I have some friend who suggest putting out food. Others ask if I'm going to get a bow. I'll just settle for the status quo. I live in a suburban/urban divide going more urban all the time. But we have a green way, creek, and park with a lot of overgrown areas nearby. I suspect they sleep there during the day.

410:

@407: I tried skeet once - it's a LOT more difficult than it looks. Hitting a small drone using AI to create randomized movement would be even more difficult. This scenario looks like it could set up an AI versus AI competition that could rapidly get out of hand.

Re: Hunting and conservation, here's a very recent article in the Washington Post on how the decline in hunting is hurting conservation efforts, as many states have tied proceeds from hunting licenses to funding for conservation.

411:

@ 409: Yep, just what I want. Someone with nothing but a 4 hour gun course and some indoor target range experience shooting at what she thinks is the bad guy.

I never had any trouble qualifying with the M-16 or the .38 on the (USAF) range. If I'm ever attacked by a stationary paper target at 15 or 100 meters, I'm good to go.

412:

Welcome!

what would be likely to happen if: 1) there were a successful (a clear majority of Scottish voters voting for independence) Indy Ref2, 2) the EU (as indicated) were open to accepting Scottish membership in it, and 3) the PM/Parliament says: "That's not going to happen. You're not 'Little Brexiting' on our watch!" (and maybe revoking devolution as a consequence)?

I think you got those questions in the wrong order.

The PM has already said he's adamantly opposed to issuing a Section 30 order, which is a prerequisite for holding a binding referendum on independence. (However, this PM is notoriously unreliable/prone to lying, so it's anybody's guess if he can make it stick.)

If such an order is issued, then a referendum would be legal and potentially constitutionally binding, no question.

It might even be possible for Holyrood (the Scottish Parliament) to hold a non-binding referendum without an S30 order. And while it would be non-binding, remember that the 2016 EU membership referendum that gave us Brexit was also non-binding: the government was totally unable to walk it back after a bare minimum vote in a consultation exercise (52/48 for Leave).

The EU has already said they're leaving a lamp burning for Scotland; the mooted Spanish objection (setting a precedent for Catalonia) no longer applies because the UK is now outside the EU, and Scotland would be welcomed with open arms -- it's already in alignment with EU regulations (having been part of the EU for decades), there's a strong moral argument for not denying the benefits of EU membership to former EU citizens involuntarily alienated from the EU by English voters, and it's a thumb in the eye for the aforementioned separatists. So basically Scotland could have EU membership for the asking. (Whether it's a good idea to ask for it is another matter.)

Three Scottish opinion polls in the past week have returned a 50/50, 51/49, and 52/48 result for independence/remain. It looks as if the balance of Scottish public opinion is shifting towards independence.

(I think massive constitutional change should require more than a 52/48 vote in a consultative referendum. But at the current rate of change Scotland will be nearing a 60/40 plurality for independence within 3-4 years -- if not sooner, when the Brexit transition period is up.)

413:

For shooing deer away, I've had good luck with modern flashlights or headlamps like a Petzl.

Thing is, many LED lights now have an SOS or strobe setting. If you get two or more bright flashlights with different flashing patterns, it's seriously annoying for any human, and the deer don't like it either. Combining a bunch of differentially flashing lights and humans making noise, and the deer leave. Not rapidly, because they can't easily see where to bound off, but they leave.

It's a question of what you're after, deterrence or absence. I've seen plants show symptoms of carbon starvation due to chronic deer browsing (basically, they're all respiring root, and the deer browse the photosynthetic shoots off too fast for the plants to fix any more carbon), as well as a site where, a month into spring, nothing bloomed and there were no buds because the deer had browsed them all. A couple of my grad student friends became hunters because their work documented the damage caused by deer in the north woods. This damage is along the lines of "the forest will die when the old trees die, because the deer are eating all the seedlings that would otherwise replace them. And eating all the understory too, except for a few weeds." Ideally those woods need mountain lions and wolves more than recreational hunters, but you've got to use what's available.

The only reason I don't hunt is that I've got a long list of mammal allergies. I don't think I'm allergic to deer, but I don't want to find out otherwise when I'm halfway through dressing one out after I've killed it. And deer allergies aren't something they test for at the clinic.

414:

Honourable Mention: I totally forget to mention "My Cat From Hell", which is (a) Reality TV, but (b) nowhere on the map of stuff we've covered: while it might qualify as competence porn for its' housecat-whispering presenter (who goes in and solves tricky behavioural problems between domestic felines and their human toilet slaves), it's really about understanding cats and how they're affected by their human-determined environment. It's notably short on condescension and mocking, and long on helpful information for cat owners. Also traumatized cats coming out of their shells and turning back into friendly fluffballs.

So there's that.

415:

whitroth @ 355: Training American soldiers in shutgunning. Ok.

Let me note that I read, was it in the seventies? eighties? Certainly no later than the nineties that one of the real reasons for the introduction of the M-16 during 'Nam was that most US troops coming into the Army at the time couldn't hit the side of a barn, and so they gave them a fire hose.

A couple friends of mine who were there agreed.

Nice story. It would be even better if it were true.

The problem was the M-14 was uncontrollable when fired full-auto. Plus it was heavy and the ammunition was heavy. The M-2 carbine that replaced sub-machine guns had an under powered cartridge, so the Army was looking for a select fire rifle with a smaller bore, but higher power cartridge.

The M-16 is a dumbed scaled down version of the AR-10 (7.62x51 NATO) rifle Eugene Stoner designed for ArmaLite Corporation chambered for the .223 Remington (5.56x45 NATO) cartridge. The M-16 doesn't have the AR-10's adjustable gas system or "Hollywood" flash suppressor.

All of the problems encountered during the introduction of the M-16 in Vietnam were a result of faulty assumptions that it would not require cleaning & lubrication in the field due to the Teflon coating on the bolt.

The acceptance trials had been conducted with ammunition having high grade commercial smokeless powder. Standard Army ammunition uses "ball powder" which doesn't burn as clean & leaves behind a nasty, gunky residue. As soon as the Army began issuing cleaning kits for the M-16 & changed procedures to require lubrication of the bolt, the problems went away. But by then, the M-16's reputation had already suffered.

But what it really boils down to is the Army adopted the M-16 for logistical reasons, the individual soldier can carry more ammunition than he could with the M-14. It is actually easier to teach someone to shoot well (rifle marksmanship) with an M-16 than it is with the M-14. I learned to shoot both & I was a trainer coaching others to shoot well with both.

For ranged fire in open country (out beyond 300m) the M-14 is incomparable. But at close quarters (under 300m), and especially when full-auto is needed, the M-14 loses all of its advantages, and the M-16 is the superior weapon.

Additionally, our training for full-auto emphasized trigger control. You don't use it as a fire hose. That wastes ammo & in a fire-fight you don't ever want to do that. You might need that ammo later.

I don't need the mechanism introduced with the M-16A2 to achieve a 3 round burst.

I learned to do it the hard way in Basic. We were issued a 20 round magazine with 10 rounds loaded & had three timed targets for which we had to fire 3 round bursts. At the end of the timed portion the Drill Sargents eyeballed your bolt, and it better be locked in the forward position. You were then ordered to fire the last round and it had better be the only round, so that your bolt was locked back after firing. Get it wrong & you were a NO GO subject to getting said Drill Sargent's boot up your ass.

416:

David L @ 360:

Anyone want to chime in on the, erm, minor issues surrounding cutting trees in the Americas, pelletizing the wood, and shipping it to Europe for burning?

We cut down tall pine in our NC coastal swamps to pelletize and then ship to (mostly) Germany. For burning in personal homes mostly. They (Germany) then claim it as a part of their drive to get off coal and nuclear and be 100% renewable.

I've never gotten how this works at all.

It's "renewable" because tall pine trees grow back fairly quickly in NC coastal swamps ... "renewable" if you don't count that the bulk carrier transporting those pellets to Europe is probably burning some kind of heavy crude in it's diesel engines.

417:

You might think that; then you're going to run up against Spain's long standing (some centuries old) territorial claim to the rock, the the realities of European Commission voting politics.

Have a nice time ...!

418:

It's a question of what you're after, deterrence or absence.

I guess it wasn't clear. I don't mind them at all. Kind of like it. Mostly it is only 1 or 2 at a time. Maybe once a week.

My back yard is one of the few around me they can get into from the front and my yard is nothing at all like a golf course. Plus it add excitement to my daughters dogs when they visit. All kinds of scents they normally don't encounter. Plus racoons, foxes, and possums.

We are no where near overrun. If they start to get too plentiful traffic will take some out.

Now an hour or so east towards the NC coast they are a problem. Driving that stretch at night is dangerous at times. Speed limits is 65 or 70 and looooooong stretches of nothing but you and the road. You have to really watch for the headlights reflected in their eyes.

419:

We had to put down one of the 2 cats my wife brought to the marriage. These cats started as German barnyard cats and had crossed the Atlantic multiple times. One was the storybook description of a cat. The other full of piss and vinegar. The later told us with our 2nd child it was the baby or the cat. In no uncertain terms. So ....

420:

It's "renewable" because tall pine trees grow back fairly quickly in NC coastal swamps ...

Depends on how you describe 20 to 40 years.

421:

was convinced she could have made a different for the good in the Colorado movie theater shooting a few year back.

Yeah, nope.

There are two questions to ask such a person, without impugning their aim/competence/common sense (which deserve to be impugned, but hey):

a) How do you know you're the only Concerned Citizen with a CC license in the cinema? (What if the shooter you're targeting is actually another Concerned Citizen and on your side?) Worse, how do they know you're not the spree killer?)

b) The Police will be on the scene fairly fast, and when they get there they'll be looking for a civilian shooter in a darkened movie cinema. That's a fair description of you. How do you stop the police from shooting you?

(With a side-order of "congratulations, you just gave the spree shooter an opportunity to throw down their gun and leave with the stampede, while you take the fall -- unless you're lucky enough to both survive and be exonerated by ballistics/forensics.)

Something may be legal: it does not always follow that it's sensible, and concealed carry in places like shops, restaurants, and cinemas is just plain dumb.

422:

@421: Many years ago my Browning Hi-Power was stolen from my apartment in Colorado Springs, along with many other valuables. Four months later I was notified by the Denver police department that the pistol had been recovered. Apparently, the very successful burglar lost his fence, and had been warehousing goods in a duplex in the Denver suburb of Aurora. Neighbors got suspicious and called the police. There was a room full of weapons; one of jewelry; one of cameras, . . . . He was a VERY organized burglar.

There were so many items the Denver PD moved them all to the PD headquarters auditorium (post cataloging, of course), and walked victims through, by invitation, for a full week. I recovered the pistol and almost everything else stolen.

Here's the point: when I picked up my Browning, I did what any trained person would do and cleared the weapon. This immediately drew a LOT of attention to me. Moral of the story: law enforcement reacts VERY quickly and forcefully to the display of firearms. Proceed at your own risk.

423:

headlamps like a Petzl

Off topic, but I discovered headlamps of the modern LED variety()(*) a few years ago and am totally won over by them. Adjustable brightness white and night-vision red are standard in most brands. And SOS in both colors. If you don't have one, put it on your list of things to buy.

(*) I have a different brand than Petzl.

(**) Back when a much younger version of myself was a spelunker, we used carbide/acetylene gas lamps attached to our hard hats. Not at all the same thing.

424:

I meant to imply everything you said and more. Armed conflict in indoor environments with lots of people around is something you need to train for. A LOT. Both in terms of shooting and legal issues.

425:

Heteromeles @ 367: Now about military shotgunning. So far as I know, there are two common roles for the shotgun. The major one is that combat engineers on assault squads use them to breach doors. The other one that I've seen floated is that they're used with less lethal armaments. I do know there are shotguns made with bright yellow pumps and stocks, to hold only non-lethal armaments, the color being there to alert the shooter to what he's using.

The shotgun is useful in "house to house" combat in urban conditions, particularly those battles where you're tunneling from one building to another rather than crossing into the open streets. Short range, but powerful within that range and because there's no trigger disconnect, they can be "slam fired" as fast as you can pump rounds into the breach. They first came into use during WWI for trench warfare. They're still called Trench Guns in the U.S. military.

The third, quite serious, proposal is to equip some members of base security teams with shotguns, specifically to shoot down drones. This is an excellent idea in places where drone incursions are a serious problem, because bird shot is definitely less lethal and more effective on drones than rifle rounds are. You don't want E-3 GI Jose to open up with his M-16 to try to shoot down a drone, when the bullets fly for up to five miles down range and he's probably not thinking about that when he's shooting. Depending on the shotgun, you can also fit shotgunner Alejandro up with a nice bandolier of variably lethal rounds for a variety of situations (ball shot to pepper spray to dragon's breath), making him more versatile as a guard.

I arrived at AIT (Advanced Individual Training) about two weeks before the next school cycle started. Instead of just letting you go on leave, the Army used trainees to perform various details around the post. After one day painting rocks along the driveway at the General's quarters, I discovered "Guard Duty". Guard duty was cool. You had to be at Guard Mount at 5:00pm; first relief went on duty at 6:00pm (two hour shift) and when you got off duty at 6:00am you had the rest of the day off & didn't have to go back to duty until the following morning (where if you were smart, you volunteered for guard duty again). Second relief was 8:00pm - 10:00pm and 2:00am - 4:00am. It was actually possible to get adequate sleep if you took second relief. Which I did.

But the best part was the Ammo Dump. Whoever was guarding the ammo dump was armed with a shotgun and 3 rounds of ammunition.

They strongly emphasized that the ammo was not for you to protect the ammo dump. It was so you could protect yourself long enough to get to the duty phone on your circuit & call for QRF (quick reaction force) to come deal with intruders. "Oh, and do not, I repeat, DO NOT shoot the goats!"

Now, picture if you will, the process for "qualifying" trainees to use a shotgun. Two Drill Sargents & three trainees out on the pistol range with two Model 12 (Winchester 1912) trench guns & a big box of shells; just taking turns until everyone is comfortable with the weapon & all of the trainees can hit the target at 25m.

However, gunning down speedy flying objects takes skill and practice, and right now there's no protocol for training GI Jose to develop said capability. If you want anti-drone shotgunners, you need country kids who grew up duck hunting with their parents, and there are far fewer of those than there used to be. Also, getting a shotgunner to work as a low level security guard is problematic, because the soldiers with those skills probably can get a better job doing something else, like trying out for the Rangers or SEALs.

The interesting part about a Droneskeet reality show is that it could potentially solve a bunch of problems. If it's a hit (and many of us hate those effin' camera drones already), then it will encourage kids to go out and learn shotgunning. Or fly drones. It will also help DARPA/DoD figure out the best doctrine for defeating drone incursions (guns, shells, tactics, static defenses around buildings, etc.), as well as the best doctrine for infiltrating drones into guarded bases. On paper, there are wins on all sides. The ultimate danger is if the show produces drones that beat the gunners every time, because then we've created a weapon that we cannot stop. That's bad.

During WW1, American soldiers who were familiar with skeet shooting were stationed along the front line trenches, armed with Model 97 & Model 12 Trench Guns, to shoot German hand grenades out of the air before they could land in the trenches & injure/kill other American soldiers.

Still, my favorite is the Dutch (I think it's Dutch) company that has acquired Bald Eagles, training them to hunt drones and take them out of the air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKNN49idCUo

426:

to Moz @275:

Per the discussion wrt to buchfires, the problem here is not "fake greenies" unless you're actually talking about people pretending to be greenies, and by that I mean the global financial cabal who occasionally try to look a bit green. The problem for nuclear power is that it's not financially viable, even if you exclude insurance and post-operational costs. That's why it's strictly the province of governments who don't care (they just want bombs, or want to make a point), and of madmen (who also don't care). I would put it to a rational conclusion that there's not such thing as "fake greenies", all "ecologist movements" are here for a purpose and one purpoase only - to save the environment. Not the humans, not the human population - only the environment, and preferably in the same condition that they know it. And this is easily explainable. The environment is useful and profitable for corporation well-being, and it shall be there so that corporations can enjoy it. Not so much for people - people can go away if they disturb the environment. Governments can go away if they disturb corporations, so what is the difference?

@378: Can you point to some of these "known designs"? It is called "4th generation reactors" and they are a result of a steady and purposeful development and practice over decades. In any case, they are much more successful than fusion power as for now. There will be, I am sure, many models, and many corporations that do it, but so far there' only one leader and US is generally rather nervous about it. The point of this reactor is actually making the nuclear waste to be reusable again, solving the problem of storage.

As you say, we can't do anything with nuclear waste except wait and hope someone else solves the problem. The problem of nuclear waste is rather serious, though compared to problems of regular waste disposal are much, much more enormous, because people can no longer export their trash into 3rd world countries. If they can't just reprocess their own high-tech scrap and plastic, how they are going to fair with something that requires actual brains to work out? Oh, you can offload it into some East European country for some time, until they figure out how to make actual use of it. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is, nuclear energy is REALLY powerful, and that means that you don't need to burn MILLIONS of tons of coal if you can reprocess several tons of fission material. And with ability to reuse the waste, it is going to be even greater. And if you did not know, several reactors are also capable of producing of new isotopes, used in all sorts of technology (not only smoke detectors, ofc) and without them... well, you will have to buy it somewhere?

The nuclear fuel cycle is long and complex, and much of it is very hard to electrify. Either way there's a huge amount of energy required to turn rock into reactor fuel rods. Turning nuclear waste back into minimally radioactive material is also energy-intensive. Most importantly, it is knowledge-intensive. It requires to produce a steady stream of very educated, very cultural, disciplined and developed cadres that can deal with a complexity of nuclear energy production, reprocessing and so on. MOst liberal governments moved on, assuming that it is no longer their responsibility to maintain the infrastructure, the industrial economy is so 20th century, and of course postindustrial is so much more profitable. What, you can just hire some immigrants from the countries where people are still doing primitive things like teaching actual useful knowledge and producing actual physical goods. Developed countries have already moved into the next stage of organization, they can sell pixel spaceships to consumer for thousands of dollars. Ok, enough with sarcasm, I'll get to the point.

But of course you can wipe all that stuff out by saying "the EROEI for a plant that turns free nuclear fuel rods into free-to-dispose-of spent nuclear fuel rods is enormous". Trouble is, the EROEI for a system that turns free solar panels into free-to-dispose-of second hand solar panels is almost infinite, so we're back with "solar beats nuclear" but with an insulting layer of bullshit. Because it is. Really high. Even though many people say that there's infinite amount energy in fusion, it is no less impressive for fission too. The major problem of nuclear power is that it is no longer sustainable for nations who are abandoning their industrial potential in the favor of fraud and thievery of globalized world. They want to believe that their "solar will beat nuclear" and they can just sit on their asses and do nothing, and then accept the generous profits and tax returns and whatever they write down to the rest of the people.

This has worked way too well for the last decades, and it is not going to stop now. There are people who plan to increase carbon tax many times and weaponize it to the point you will not be able to breathe without paying. This is where real free energy lies - in total financial slavery, that is.

427:

My 2 cents is that if you're going to do concealed carry in a movie theater, the thing you maybe want to be concealing is an anti-ballistic vest or a bulletproof backpack. The point isn't to shoot the attacker, it's to make yourself a more effective shield in case something bad happens. They're cheaper than guns, if maybe less comfortable to wear.

428:

You're obviously not of the right mind set.

"I have a gun. I can fix this."

429:

Wood pellets from NC to Germany

If you're interested here's a report on this interesting industry. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article238397398.html?

Apparently NC is the US leader in wood pellets. But except for some small amounts for consumers it mostly all is shipped overseas.

430:

"I think electric driers run on 240V, like dishwashers. Gas driers are still fairly common - they can last 30 to 40 years - but they're not necessarily used every day."

All of the ones which I've seen (USA) take a radically different plug than standard household plugs. They're not on the same type of circuit.

431:

paws4thot @ 384: #364 - Well I call BS on the idea of you finding change machines that accept Euros in Inverness!

November 2004. I stopped at a bank (might have been RBS, since they were active in the U.S. then & I was familiar with the name) when I arrived in Glasgow. I got some "walking around" money because I hate using a credit card for small purchases (like a coffee). As I remember it was some British Pounds (paper), some Euros (paper), some pound coins (don't remember if they were British or Scottish or if there was any difference) and some Euro coins ... plus some coins I got in change from purchases. The money changer in the laundromat took Euros (paper) and gave back Euros (coin) or fractional Euro coins. Or it might have been pounds. Some places took either pounds or euros, some places took one and not the other.

All I remember now is the paper money I had could be converted into coins that would feed the drier and when I was done I had clean, dry underwear again. The driers looked like the same commercial gas driers we have at laundromats here in the states. When in operation they smelled like them too.

432:

I do know of a case where someone took a "ridge shot" (standing in a canyon, firing up at a deer silhouetted against the sky above him), missed, and the bullet embedded itself in the bunk of a children's camp miles away.

Decades ago when I worked in Ottawa one of my colleagues lived across the river in Hull, and had a small cabin somewhere in the Gatineau. before hunting season he and his girlfriend removed any valuables, and after hunting season they went and repaired the bullet holes in the walls and patched the mattresses and blankets.

Hunting and booze don't mix, but apparently they are a fine Québéçois tradition (according to him, a Québéçois).

For entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBU4lcmbh-c

("Goin' Huntin'" by the Arrogant Worms)

433:

radically different plug

2 pole + neutral + ground

240vac 30 amp NEMA 14-30R

Some older houses will have an ungrounded outlet. (Long discussion about the neutral as a ground can be had but let's not.) 240vac 30 amp NEMA L6-30R (I think)

434:

"Most of Finland can have a yearly temperature differential of 45-50 degrees Celsius, or even larger (from -25 or -20 in the winter to +25 or +30 in the summer), so passive houses have design difficulties. These help because they can be used either way."

That's it? I can get that much in SE Michigan (add a few to the bottom and the top; we're warming). And SE Michigan is not considered an extreme weather place by continental US standards. We are buffered by the Great Lakes.

435:

David L @ 409: I'm a little contemptuous of the guys with the assault rifles. While they're easy to shoot accurately, I have yet to meet any self-defense rifle owner who's taken the time to figure out where the bullets they fire will end up as part of planning to defend themselves. Not sure where they learned to be so cavalier about their neighbors' safety, but they are.

Well, me. I'm pretty sure at least once in conversation after TMUG I've explained why I don't keep a gun for "home defense" (even though I like guns), but if I did, it would NOT be an AR-15 or some other "assault rifle" style gun (even though I like the M-16 a lot and always enjoyed when I got to fire one). I do have at least some concept of how many layers of construction materials bullets of certain caliber will penetrate & that is a consideration I'd have if I was going to have a home defense weapon.

Mostly I object to having a gun around the house because I don't want to come home some night and find an intruder already in there who's going to shoot me with my own gun.

The other thing is I'm a guitar player and for what I'd have to spend on an AR-15 I could get a really good second-hand Martin HD-28, and there's a lot more places around here where I can use that.

436:

My electric dryer runs on 240 — same type of plug as the electric stove.

I run the washer once or twice a week: small load for clothes, larger load for linens/towels as required. I use the dryer for bedsheets because I don't have room to hang them inside and outside they get noticeably dirty too quickly; everything else is hung to dry.

Dishwasher runs on 120. I use it once or twice a week when it gets full (depends on how much baking I'm doing), in energy saver mode, air-dry. Gets dishes noticeably cleaner than hand-washing, and uses less than a sink-full of water.

437:

I was going to make some points about carbines vs sub machine guns here, but I realized that the only two things worse than such a thread would be 'what computer system should we have adopted?' or 'gas vs. electric washers?'.

So I won't.

Because I'm morally superior :)

438:

David L @ 420:

It's "renewable" because tall pine trees grow back fairly quickly in NC coastal swamps ...

Depends on how you describe 20 to 40 years.

Twenty to forty years is fairly quick when you're talking about growing trees. If someone is dumb enough to cut down all of their trees at once they deserve to go broke. You cut some down this year and plant 'em back. Cut a few more next year and plant 'em back. You just keep doing that until the first part is ready to harvest again. You have to think ahead, maybe even a little beyond your prospective life span. That's why when you drive along NC 11 down near Ahoskie you see all those sections of tree farms with different size trees.

439:

I refuse to accept this point of view that nothing is possible unless you can order a ready-made mass-produced one out of a catalogue

When you're trying to compete with a multi-supplier market of commercial off the shelf products that have a lead time of less than a year, that's what you need to do. Saying "oh we might have a prototype available in ten years, or maybe twenty" doesn't make you a competing product, it makes your sales arm part of the deny/defect/delay team.

To me, the reactors being built in China are a part of the solution, the people saying "forget solar, wait twenty years and hope the nuke fairy comes" are part of the problem.

440:

@ OGH 412: Thank you for the welcome and the clarification. Had there been a Section 30 order in the 1770's, much unpleasantness could have been avoided... Do you believe there will be a wait for Indef2 until it is closer to that larger majority, or is there pressure to hold it soon?

Cheers,

Keith

441:

My electric dryer runs on 240 — same type of plug as the electric stove.

Most places in the US require 50 amps at 240vac for an electric range. So a similar but different plug. Now older houses, well, buyer beware.

Sure you could replace an ancient electrical range with a new one and swap the plug but pulling 30+ amps on a 30 amp circuit is not advised. Especially since I'm sure there are a few out there that "fixed" the issue by swapping out the breaker. "That wire looks big enough."

442:

Agreed. If you've got to carry a penis substitute weapon, you'd do better with a pepper spray or a taser: lower inhibition against use, lower harm if you hit the wrong person, doesn't project as far (which is not a drawback in the cramped confines of a darkened room full of seats).

But really, a bullet-resistant backpack or jacket is better because it doesn't reply on you keeping your shit together in a chaotic, fluid, dangerous situation.

443:
  • Euros are not legal tender in Scotland. (You might have been confused by the variety of banknotes in circulation here: not just English ones -- issued by the Bank of England -- but also notes issued by the Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Clydesdale Bank. Yes, we have three banks up here that are licensed to print money. The fourth -- Linen Bank -- dropped out of the banknote business some decades ago. Causes endless hilarity with tourists, including the English.)

  • Launderette driers are not gas-powered, AIUI. They are big-ass electric driers and they run on 415 volt 3-phase AC rather than domestic mains current (230 vAC). Nobody in their right mind would mix gas-burners with dry cleaning solvents (mostly carbon tetrachloride) and many lanuderettes hang off the side of a dry cleaner.

  • Launderettes are getting kind of rare these days anyway, even in tourist traps like Edinburgh, because domestic washer/driers are ubiquitous. If you don't have one, you're poor (they cost about as much as a regular-sized TV). As usual, being poor is expensive (because the home washer/drier is vastly cheaper to run than paying through the nose at a launderette).

  • 444:

    One upstairs socket. This place was built in '57, and the entire upstairs is on one breaker (which is, at least, 20A).

    I've pulled cable up alongside the ductwork, and one of these days, I'll finish, install runs to the hall and to my study wall, sockets, and put in another breaker, so all my computer equipment (and the cheap network printer we need to get) will be on that.

    Among the 3 pages of reasons that the former owner's "wonderful handyman" will never set foot on my doorstep: painting over sockets.

    446:

    The timing of Indyref2 is a game of political chicken.

    On the one hand, the Tories are (seemingly) reluctant to allow it -- after all, their full name is the Conservative and Unionist party. Despite which, if Scotland pissed off it would make their life vastly easier by giving them an entrenched majority in England. So their actual reluctance is not as obviously adamantine as it might be. (Labour can be discounted for now.)

    On the other hand, we've got the SNP (and the Scottish Greens, but the SGP align with the SNP on independence, vote with them, and can be discounted for most purposes). The SNP is dedicated to Scottish Independence in principle. In practice they're the current party of government up here; if independence happened, who knows what would follow? Yes, Fine Gael and Fine Fail still exist a century after Irish independence -- having outlived their original objective of Irish independence handily -- but if the SNP dog caught the car, the next question is what they'd do with it.

    My personal belief is that Nicola Sturgeon is the most competent political leader in the UK right now (which isn't saying much) and is playing a long game: keeping up the pressure for Indyref but not actually wanting it until the Brexit mess is contained and can be blamed on the Tories -- and acts as an additional driver for Scots voters to go for independence so they can rejoin the EU.

    So my money would be on a referendum some time in 2021-22 ... anything beyond that is imponderable because our political future is utterly opaque at that remove.

    Note: most parties with "National" in the name are fascists. The SNP march to a different drum. They used to be nicknamed the Tartan Tories into the early 1980s, but these days they're a centre-left EU-aligned social democratic party, somewhere to the left of where Tony Blair's new Labour stood (but to the right of Jeremy Corbyn). This is why Labour can no longer get much traction in Scotland: the SNP ate their lunch. They emphasize civic nationalism (as in, taking pride in civic virtues, democracy, liberalism, and so on) rather than the more-commonly-encountered ethno-nationalism (see: the Fash) or lumpen exceptionalist nationalism of someone like Trump. Which confuses the hell out of many onlookers.

    447:

    One upstairs socket. This place was built in '57, and the entire upstairs is on one breaker (which is, at least, 20A).

    Breaker?

    I had a similar in my split level. 3 bedrooms and 2 baths all on one 15 amp breaker. Hair dryers not allowed. Or even vacuuming with the lights on in 2 rooms. Now there are breakers for each room. Plus CGFI in the baths. (Yes Greg they are safe around water. That the point.)

    448:

    I think there's a kit for home brewers.

    449:

    Right, as I said, the EU Navy... that is, in vehicles, etc, blockage the crossings....

    I can just see the Royal Air Force doing food drops.

    450:

    Fewer hunters... yep. The idiots with guns, pardon me, "2nd Amendment Defenders", are all buying really expensive firearms and shooting them at ranges with targets that look like, say, Obama (they were selling such).

    Meanwhile, what my late wife used to refer to as "range rodents" are all over. There was some fuss when they had to shoot a good number in Rock Creek Park, here in the DC area. They did give the meat to local food banks, though.

    451:

    Given that people at an Orange Idiot rally think we should leave the EU, too (ok, it's a satire mag called The Shovel that reported this), I'm just wondering if my lady and I can join the EU.

    452:

    Well... one friend that is an ex-Gyrene and was in 'Nam early said he and his buddies loved their M-14s, and hated, passionately, the M-16 (when you could do maintenance, think doing it in very high humidity and mud).

    Also told me that a) when the grunts first got the M-16's, a lot of young guys, firefight, and they were out of ammo, completely, in one minute flat.

    Another buddy, IIRC, said that they'd happily grab AK-47's.

    453:

    Launderettes are getting kind of rare these days anyway, even in tourist traps like Edinburgh, because domestic washer/driers are ubiquitous.

    Laundrettes are not THAT uncommon in Edinburgh but they've evolved to meet a new demand. Commercial AirBnB landlords, the ones who cater for the hen parties and Festival/Hogmanay visitors need to wash and dry a lot of bed linens, towels etc. in a very short time to prepare a flat or house for the next occupants and so the street-front laundrette with a service wash operation (bring in four large bundles of washing in the morning, pick them up clean, dried and folded in the afternoon) caters for that market quite well. It's for sure that the tenants won't have cleaned up after them and run the bedding through a wash before they depart for the tram out to the airport while downing an Irn Bru to kill their hangovers.

    Regular B&Bs and small hotels have contracts with a collect-and-return linen service but the laundrettes supply a just-in-time capability for ad-hoc fast turnaround washing that's keeping them afloat.

    454:

    Quebecois? Hell, I read the same thing in Readers' Digest in the early 80's, people coming in drunk, having shot their decoys, their dogs, their kids.

    Then there was the case in Maine a few years back, where the jury let some SoB off, even though he had shot and killed someone's wife, because he thought he was shooting at a goose.

    455:

    Yup.

    And if I ever had an intruder, and woke up to hear them downstairs or on the stairs. I'd have one question: how do they feel about two and a half feet of good steel going through them, or having their hand cut off?

    Why, yes, I do have a real sword (I do not do wall hangers), and I did used to fight heavy in the SCA....

    The real trick is in convincing them you're crazier than they've ever dreamed of being... and even crazies are afraid of crazier crazies.

    456:

    Spears are cheaper. And I did have one for apartment defense for years, because if you're engaging at 1-2 meter distances in the dark, in a place you know intimately and the intruder does not, cold weapons start getting towards parity with firearms.

    457:

    Cut them all down at once....

    In '96, one of the two best vacations I've ever had in my life, my late wife, our son, and the dogs drove from Chicago to worldcon in Anaheim via the Great Northwet. Visited friends in Spokane, then west and south. About half an hour west of Spokane, we turned off the Interstate to cut diagonally down to Oregon. The ENTIRE FUCKING CENTER of Washington State was clear cut.

    Driving on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, the high cliffs on the Oregon side were heavily wooded, while the Washington side was bare, rock and dirt.

    458:

    A new idea: a reality show where the Palestinians force the illegally settlements of Jews out of the West Bank, with no violence!

    A friend in Chicago, a seriously heavy-duty consultant, has a client who's an Orthodox (I'd say ultra-Orthodox) Jew who wants a shabbos-compatable surveillance system. My friend offers this link as to things he needs to consider with this request....

    https://www.star-k.org/articles/kashrus-kurrents/2148/insights-from-the-institute-4/

    See the Palestinians put up surveillance cameras everywhere....

    459:

    I don't know anyone anywhere else in the country that's had that kind of problem. (Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that it's outside my personal experience.)

    I kinda wish there as a local gun club I could go skeet shooting at. I have fun shooting with my brother-in-law when I visit Alberta, but for me it would be an occasional treat rather than a serious hobby. (For that I have photography, both on the ground and with my quadcopter*.)

    *I'm licensed and follow Transport Canada regulations and guidelines.

    460:

    Of course, for older gentlefolk, a nice, one-piece wooden cane is a good accessory because, well, it's not a weapon (limp, limp, notice the obvious knee brace?). And unlike a gun, it's quite useful if you're not faking the limp.

    Pepper spray and tasers have their own limitations, unfortunately. It's not just a design issue, it's a "civilians get the crappy limited versions in California" issue. I've got a whole rant about the stupidity of non-gun laws in California that I'll spare you. It's just a weird consequence of the fact of any weapon that's not covered by the second amendment is liable to pointless regulation.

    Anyway, it looks like 9.5x13" IIIa ballistic panels can be had for well under US$100 (google "bulletproof bag" and look for AR500). So that's good. The 10 pounds the panel weighs kinda sucks, but carrying it is the cost of paranoia. I suppose there's even an argument for leaving the panel in the car in its own bag, in case you occasionally go into sketchy neighborhoods where the equivalent of a bulletproof buckler might conceivably make a difference.

    Hmmm. Wonder if it's worth it. What else can it be used for?

    461:

    @Moz, 378: Yeah, I'm funny. I'm laughing all the way to my grandchildren's graveyard.

    Others have already answered most of your points, so I wont belabor it here. Getting more energy out of a nuclear plant than you put into it would seem to be mostly a design problem. But I'm just suggesting that whatever costs mining and waste storage imposes on society, whatever happens before the commissioning of the plant, and whatever happens afterward, is something that happens regardless of what is being mined, or stored. That is, mining and waste production are both very costly in terms of the externalities. Nuclear power doesn't directly resolve that, but I do not see how it makes it any worse. It should help to the extent that fissile fuels replace fossil fuels and relieve us of those externalities. If you want me to believe that turning ore into nuclear power and then back into spent fuel costs more energy than we extract from the plant, you will need to cite research--that just seems wildly counter-intuitive.

    Comparing nuclear to solar doesn't help, because as far as I know neither Western Europe nor North American can replace fossil fuels with local solar/wind alone. The problem is that we cant store it long enough to get us through the kind of seasonal variations what occur in those locations. I live in Michigan--we have long hot summer days, and long cold winter nights, and significant yearly variation.

    @Moz, 381: If I understand you correctly, you're referring to battery production. Wont work, for the reasons already specified. Batteries today just aren't efficient enough. I will admit that I do not know for sure how commercial-use batteries are typically charged--my assumption is that they just connect them to the local electrical grid, then put them on the shelf. The reason why this doesn't help us very much should be obvious.

    462:

    It may be more of an old joke. My mom joked about people painting the word "COW" on the side of every cow before the start of deer season, but this was more than 50 years ago. Still, when I was in Wisconsin, we really tried to stay out of the woods during the opening week of deer gun season, because that's when the idiots with guns came out to bag "large flesh colored squirrels" and the like. And a friend of mine did get pelted with bird shot while he was duck hunting, but fortunately he was far enough down range that it just annoyed him.

    Also from Wisconsin: automobiles are the #1 predators of deer there, although it's hard on the cars too. Back in the 80s or so, the Wisconsin legislature in its wisdom decided that if you had a valid hunting license and hit a deer, you got to keep the meat. Considering how much it cost to repair a car, this is a good deal, right? Unfortunately they had to repeal the law, because some of the good people of Wisconsin decided to build reinforced bumpers on their large trucks and go actively cruising to hit deer. That's why they can't have nice things.

    463:

    Speaking of weapons, I've got a logistics question for the boffins and other nutcases here.

    Scenario: It's science fiction, you're colonizing an alien world. Aside from whatever brought you there, there's no magic technology, so you can't just get away with shoveling soil into one end of the nano Pixie-lator and getting whatever you need out the other end 60 seconds later. You've got to think logistics, like starship mass, fabrication facilities to build things, and the like.

    You're stuck with whatever you can bring with you (mass is expensive) or whatever you make from the local materials. To make it simpler, assume the world is very earthlike in terms of the abundance of elements, so iron's more abundant than copper, for example.

    Here's the question: for small arms in your colony: --do you bring with you firearms (light, efficient but specialized and requiring lots of elements)? --assemble airguns (updated Girandoni rifles, basically) using parts that work with the compressed air systems you brought (less effective weapons, but require fewer elements than fire arms)? --bring along/hope to manufacture gauss guns, lasers, or similar lethal weapons powered by electricity (almost certainly requires rare earth elements, and we don't know if hand weapons are feasible for any of these technologies)? --Bring/make crossbows (easier to assemble than airguns, and fairly similar in many ways, slow and less lethal compared with firearms)?

    My first thought was to go with airguns, because there's a good argument to be made for building early colony tech around solar/wind electricity and compressed air, and this just repurposes some of that tech for hand weapons.

    Firearms are another good choice because they're inherently a good design. But they're unitaskers. Other than killing things or people, what do you use a gun for? Harvesting pine cones? Worse, depending on where your colony is, you may be limited to the weapons you brought with you. For example, if you colonize the equivalent of the Hawaiian islands because the climate's good and the biota aren't as lethally dangerous as they are on the mainland thousands of miles away, you're living on a giant hunk of basalt and stuck without copper or many other elements, so making new ammunition for your firearms gets tricky.

    The other two choices are semi-reasonable, the first for the whole traditional SF/kewl gunz meme (but where do you mine the rare earth handwavium you need to make or fix your weapons?), the other because crossbows are even easier to build than airguns. If you're going low tech, why waste time on fiddly air tanks when you can make something in the same lethality ballpark with leaf springs and wires?

    For SF worldbuilding, what do you think is the best option and why?

    464:

    how-solar-panels-could-soon-be-generating-power-at-night

    I count that in the same bucket as fourth gen nuclear reactors and all the other research stuff. Viz, I don't object to research and in fact the contrary, but I am sick as unto death of people proposing that we do nothing "for just a few years until the magic fairy comes".

    I think the idea is sound, but I wonder how well it will work with low thermal mass, highly insulated roofs. In a lot of places we're moving rapidly in that direction because modern roofing materials can handle high temperatures better so we no longer need to focus so heavily on cooling the exposed surface. And specifically the modern foam-backed-steel roof where even a white painted steel surface can easily hit 20°C above ambient (which can be 50° in Sydney)... but because it's less than a millimetres thick it cools within a couple of minutes of the sun going behind a cloud.

    Expecting to generate power from that remaining warm overnight is not going to work as well as people hope. You'll have ambient air temperature, and the heat source will be slowly moving air.

    So if it works, and if it's cheap, it might be worth while. But it's probably going to suit solar farms more than houses, because they sit on the ground and with ~50% land coverage there's still lots of sun hitting the ground.

    465:

    "But really, a bullet-resistant backpack or jacket is better because it doesn't reply on you keeping your shit together in a chaotic, fluid, dangerous situation."

    And assuming that possession of a gun will stop bullets from somebody, somewhere in a chaotic situation is not a good way to survive.

    466:

    OGH 446: Thanks. I hope Scotland secedes and joins the EU in a few years.

    Whitroth 451: I wonder if the EU requires prospective members be geographically part of- or proximate to Europe? If things continue to "go south" here in the US, I wouldn't mind California seceding and joining the EU (or Canada)...

    Keith H

    467:

    You still focus on EROEI when I specifically said that's one starting point, just as finances are one starting point (and people keep pointing out that one of those is silly, but insisting that the other is the only meaningful metric... even though CO2 output is not part of EROEI).

    What matters overall is "does this create more problems than it solves" and the answer for nuclear in most of the world appears to be "yes". And really specifically, in the context of "zero emissions before 2050", the lead times on nuclear rule it out completely in Europe and the US. Even Trump isn't going to use the military to solve the problems of democratic interference with climate change solutions. I wonder if the US would intervene to stop Australia, or Iraq, or Bolivia from building nuclear power plants?

    And no, by "import refined metals" I did not mean batteries. I used aluminium as an example, despite aluminium based batteries being almost unheard of. Aluminium is the easy example because they generally build aluminium refineries where the electricity is and ship the ore in, the metal out. What the customer buys is electricity, stored in the form of aluminium (or lithium, or maybe soon steel etc). The fact that you build solar panel supports out of it rather than burning it back into electricity doesn't change the underlying process that produced it.

    Or to look at it from the other end: if the US stopped importing aluminium, how much electricity generating capacity would they need to build if they wanted to refine aluminium locally?

    468:

    For what purpose? I mean, I have my nice city walking stick, osage orange, and both of my knees were partially replaced (want to see the card my orthopedist gave me for the TSA?

    I mean, just because it's about the same weight and length as an SCA broadsword....

    On the other hand, my old shield's in the family room (same floor as the front door), and behind the front door is my old SCA mace and Ellen's nicely-weighted practice halberd... (did I mention the boken on both sides of our bed?).

    469:

    a bullet-resistant backpack or jacket is better

    In Australia they'd arrest you on sight (if they didn't shoot you first). Even where that stuff is legal you'd want to be careful because cops are likely to associate body armour with shooters. At the very least you want inconspicuous if not outright concealed bullet resistance.

    https://www.safeguardclothing.com/uk/articles/body-armour-uk-law/

    Australia has quite a lot of legal hangovers from our criminal colony past, and that's perhaps a good example of how modern law is made on ancient foundations. Can't have the general public (ie, the criminal classes) able to defend themselves against the proper authorities.

    470:

    I prefer not to have anything that looks like a weapon in the house. That reduces the chances of unwanted interest and/or people getting carried away.

    It's just as easy to store the mop in the bathroom or a broom near the front door but make sure that (part of) the handle is more solid than perhaps those items generally need. The rest can be the usual metal foil tube. And if anyone notices it's blindingly obvious that I did a DIY repair on said metal foil..

    471:

    Yes. Totally harmless. That's the ticket.

    I'd only suggest that your old shield would look even better next to the bed than where some adrenaline-drugged kid (of any age) can grab it and accidentally cause damage waving it around. What you want in your living room is the impressive but fragile parade shield you made out of papier mache.

    And possibly the living room needs an anti-ballistic AR500 panel in the inconspicuous two-handled knitting bag by the couch, next to the titanium knitting needles and crocheted paracord happy slappers (excuse me, bags of marbles for the kids to play with when they visit). Something like that anyway.

    472:

    I'd suggest this, which is actually an extremely effective garden tool: the azada, aka the grub hoe. For more information about it, see also this article.

    I've got one. It's fun to garden with and easy to handle. It's a bit less useful for trail work and wildland weeding, because it digs a bit deeper than I want it to. But it's definitely earned a place in my yard, and I use my favorite trail hoe when I'm out weeding in the park.

    473:

    Our local deer population is kept in check by the local Cougar (no, the mountain lions, not older ladies) population. Which is quite large and very, very, healthy.

    474:

    Heteromeles @ 463: Speaking of weapons, I've got a logistics question for the boffins and other nutcases here.

    Here's the question: for small arms in your colony:
    --do you bring with you firearms (light, efficient but specialized and requiring lots of elements)?
    --assemble airguns (updated Girandoni rifles, basically) using parts that work with the compressed air systems you brought (less effective weapons, but require fewer elements than fire arms)?
    --bring along/hope to manufacture gauss guns, lasers, or similar lethal weapons powered by electricity (almost certainly requires rare earth elements, and we don't know if hand weapons are feasible for any of these technologies)?
    --Bring/make crossbows (easier to assemble than airguns, and fairly similar in many ways, slow and less lethal compared with firearms)?

    Machine tools, patterns & a few good books on 16th, 17th & 18th century manufacturing ... plus backup copies of those texts on microfiche, because all you need to read microfiche is a simple magnifying glass & if you take reasonable care of them they last damn near forever.

    If you have the right tools, you can make more tools. IF YOU KNOW HOW, and if you know how to extract the needed raw materials from your new world. Gunpowder is fairly easy.

    You should probably pack basic firearms with good optics and plenty of ammunition to tide you over until you can get your manufactory up and running.

    Crossbows & regular bows are easy to make, good for hunting supplementary meat (if you can eat the native protein) & could be adequate for defense against predatory animals and quarrels/arrows are reusable if you can recover them. If you're dealing with really LARGE predators, you might think in terms of a layered defense around your settlement ... large caliber, high power rifles for ranged defense supplemented by bows, crossbows, ballistae & polybolos (a multiple firing ballista) for if they get in too close.

    Basically it's a philosophy of "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and make sure you've got someone along who knows how to set up a basket-weaving shop before you need them.

    And I'm making a basic presumption here that you aren't stupid enough to try colonizing a world that already has indigenous sophonts.

    475:

    I would think two classes of weapons: 1. electrically-powered (and electrical generators are late 19th century tech, and you can carry a car battery on your back). 2. As much as I dislike it, older versions of ordinary rifles. Easily gathered propellant (gunpowder, anyone?), and you can use the propellant for construction (unless digging through rock is your idea of great fun).

    You could also build small rockets.

    476:

    assemble airguns

    Depending on your local supplies of alluvial gravel an air-blunderbuss is surprisingly easy to make and quite effective. Takes a lot of air, though, and it's easy to run .2-.5 cubic metres of 10 bar air (compressed volume!) per shot through a 50mm pipe. OTOH, you are also delivering 1kg or more of gravel to the region in front of the device per shot. We were getting spreads of 2m at 10m range with a 1.5m long barrel so it's not an accurate weapon, but it's also not something you want going off in your vicinity. A 2-3cm sized bit of gravel will penetrate 15mm plywood fairly reliably, and whoever is holding a 25mm thick shield will want to be hiding entirely behind it with their eyes shut because the stuff that comes out is all over the place.

    The people I built that for were wondering whether they could use it to make claymore-style weapons but the high speed pneumatic values are expensive, and if you buy the cheap ones the actuation time is too long and/or the flow too slow. But at a pinch you could make a pin-fired version with disposable retention plates similar to how the vacuum guns work.

    Also, a big old Australian-style windmill can be used to drive a compressor that will give you 10 bar air. Fairing rate may be in the days per shot, but you can buy large 10 bar air tanks from your local LPG supplier (2-10 cubic metre size, they normally use a 25 bar pressure relief valve so a second hand one will be good for 10 bar for... shall we find out?). Obviously you place those in the sort of shed/bunker used to store other explosive materials.

    Survivalists are funny people.

    477:

    On the one hand, the article itself says they're hoping for 25% of daytime o/p. On the other, if they're in metro areas, there's a LOT of waste heat.

    478:

    Sometimes I live too much in "everyone does the things I consider sensible" world :) Yes, there are lots of badly insulated heated buildings in the world...

    which makes me wonder whether the target market might end up being sites that are hot all time time? If you have some big heat-wasting building roofing it with those might be useful?

    479:

    "Trophy hunting event to auction 'dream hunt' with Donald Trump Jr"

    Better hope Dick Cheney isn't bidding... or this could be a whole new genre of reality TV shows. But it's kind of been done to death in fiction.

    480:

    I learned to do it the hard way in Basic. We were issued a 20 round magazine with 10 rounds loaded & had three timed targets for which we had to fire 3 round bursts.

    I haven't fired an M-16, only an RK-62, which is 7.62mm and has only single shot and automatic. In the basic training I got, a long time ago, I managed to somewhat consistently tap for three rounds at a time.

    I was also taught a bit of the light machine gun of the time. It was also possible to tap single shots off that.

    This was during the two-month basic training of the conscription army, so I'm kind of the average guy you could have there. I'd expect professionals would do better.

    481:

    I should really just put an autoritative version of this with full references and so on somewhere to cut and paste, because it comes up depressingly often. Per tonne of material mined, (and disposed of) nuclear produces enormous amounts of power. Future designs promise to increase this 10 or more fold further, but let us use the EPR for a reference design. The epr runs on five percent enriched fuel, and has a burnup of 62 gigawattdays per tonne of fuel, and a thermodynamic efficiency of 37%. That means each tonne of natural uranium mined produces around 62x.0.37/(5/0.7) = 3.5 gigawattdays of electric power. Mining yields are given in yellowcake, which is not pure uranium, its uranium oxide, which reduces that to 3 gigawatt days per tonne. 3 gigawatt days of power can keep a very large mining operation going for a very, very long time. This is well over 400 times the energy the rossing mine uses to produce a tonne of yellowcake, and Rossing is mining the shittiest ore anyone bothers with. For a mine like cigar lake, where the ore is 14 % metal, the numbers get just stupid.

    482:

    That's because every time you refuse to include site remediation in you energy cost - you continue the current trend of assuming polluters can just walk away from the problems they create, leaving them for someone else to deal with.

    Which means that by your own metric coal plants are much better than nuclear ones.

    483:

    Charlie most parties with "National" in the name are fascists. "law" & "Justice" are also often signifiers ( Poland ) I don't trust the SNP, bacause of their take on personal privacy & internal survellance ... going back to their ultra-christian roots in other words.

    OTOH ...what does a civic nationalist/social democrat, like me, do in England these days?

    David L Electric power in bathrooms. I got round that problem by installing a separately-fused spur for my immersion heater, which heats the well-lagged hot-water tank, sitting in the bathroom clothes-cupboard & the switch to it is separate from the plain socket & said switch is double-ploe. There is also an "extrenal" - ie. easily visible socket, but that has a hinged splash cover & a separate waterproof double-pole switch.

    whitroth "killed his love in the place of a swan" ... old folk song. Swords in the house - yes, me too. I used to do "proper" fencing, sabre mostly & it's "to hand". Even with no point & no edge, you could do someone a serious nasty with it. I also have something very long-sharp-&-pointy close to my bed And, as some of you know, I've been walking with a "cane" for some years ( 1976 ) as a result of massive injuries in that year. So there's me this very slightly stooped (usually ) longish-white.greyhaired 74-year old with a stick. Totally harmless.

    Heteromeles Make sure you retain the knowledge of both air & explosive-propelled guns ... but go for bows. For hunting, a crossbow is probablly better, provided it has sufficient range. Gunpowder is fairly easy. Yeah - 75% Pot Nitrate, 15% Carbon (Charcoal), 10% Sulphur ... plus the grinding-&-corning processes, of course. [ See also H Beam Piper ]

    Actually, for large, dangerous predators .. Spears/Pikes + disciplined "miltary" style tactics.

    484:

    So there's me this very slightly stooped (usually ) longish-white.greyhaired 74-year old with a stick. Totally harmless.

    Yes, we fully expect you to take a long time staggering your way close to the camera before pronouncing, "IT'S!" grin

    485:

    oh, for. No. That is not some off-the books inevitable huge energy expenditure. To the extent remediation is required at all, the techniques and costs are largely the same as for coal, except the mines are literally hundreds of times smaller, for any given level of electricity production. The great big scar in the earth gets some sandstone and soil laid down, and a lake or forest is established on top, and that is that. Energy costs, what energy costs, it is a goddamn forest now.

    486:

    In your question you used the word "colony" (which is freighted with a huge amount of ideological baggage), then asked a question about weapons.

    My counter-question is: what do you want guns/crossbows/ICBMs for?

    It seems to me that there are three logical uses (beyond sport/recreational target shooting, which I shall ignore as irrelevant): shooting at wildlife, shooting at other colonists, and shooting at indigenous intelligent beings (aliens).

    You shouldn't be trying to colonize a world with its own intelligent inhabitants in the first place. Space is big, planets are common, uninhabited worlds must be much commoner than inhabited ones, and if you try to conquer/enslave (i.e. "colonize") aliens that sets a really bad precedent for the first time you run into some aliens who are more powerful than you are. (So: assuming it's a research base rather than a true colony, you might want to bring a limited self-defense capability, but that's all. And you shouldn't bring a gun factory, because if they can't already make them, you're just teaching them how to.)

    Shooting at wildlife: .... maybe, depends on the size of wildlife. If it's present-day earthlike, you may need a variety of shotguns (for vermin control, hunting small game, and then somewhat larger for defending against something bear-sized and aggressive), possibly revolvers (ditto on the "what if I meet a bear"), and if you can make a shotgun then you can almost certainly manufacture crossbows. AR-15s, not so much unless you have very specialized hunting requirements.

    Shooting at people ... really? This implies something really horrible, terrible, no-good, and nasty about your new colony world. My recommendation: stay the hell away from anyone who tries to sell you 40 acres and a mule there! It's probably a slave plantation.

    487:
    Yes, Fine Gael and Fine Fail still exist a century after Irish independence -- having outlived their original objective of Irish independence handily

    Which is likely more "horrible warning" than "source of hope" to the SNP - they were two wings of the same party until after independence, after all.

    488:

    I think Moz is probably traumatized by contemporary Australian mining practices which are not exactly sustainable (or sane). They're also corrupt as hell: I heard a figure last month of AU$20Bn in subsidies paid by the government to the mining industry per year, which is well over US $1000 per citizen per year, just to keep the mines going. Something has gone very, very wrong when the government has been captured by the mining lobby so effectively.

    489:

    A democracy needs at least the illusion of choice, which in turn implies at least two parties. If the party of independence splits and then monopolizes government for nearly a century, that's one definition of "success" in politics (if you're brutally cynical about it).

    More to the point, it's a classic demonstration of the one thing I agree 100% with the late Jerry Pournelle about: his Iron Law of Bureaucracy -- in any organization, after about one employment generation the majority of the work the organization undertakes will be directed towards perpetuating its own survival, because insofar as it's a source of employment for its staff, nobody wants to put themselves out of a job by accomplishing their nominal goal, declaring victory, and going to the dole office to sign on unemployment.

    490:

    "and people keep pointing out that one of those is silly, but insisting that the other is the only meaningful metric... even though CO2 output is not part of EROEI"

    You are the only person in this thread to have used that abbreviation. I have specifically mentioned the vast amounts of gaseous exhaust from fossil fuel.

    "And really specifically, in the context of "zero emissions before 2050", the lead times on nuclear rule it out completely in Europe and the US."

    That's 30 years. France took 15. We can knock that down to 10 or so just on the grounds that we know more about it now. The main thing is to actually do it instead of fucking about. (Not fucking about is why the Victorians were so much quicker to get things built by hand than we are today at rebuilding them with machines after we ill-advisedly smashed them up.)

    This is not advocating "doing nothing and waiting for the nuke fairy", because that would be pure fucking about. It's advocating getting our arses in gear and doing the one thing (given the massive undersupply of hydro sites) that we already know how to do that provides a reliable source of energy without combustion.

    It's also not advocating not doing anything else. There is huge scope for reducing consumption, and the more generation we can get from renewables the better. But they're not a complete solution because they keep stopping working, some regularly, some unpredictably, some both, and they work a lot better in some places than in others. We need something to fill in for where they don't come up to scratch; we don't know how to do storage on the required scale, but we do know how to do nuclear.

    491:

    I take it from the shape of the thing that "azada" shares much of its derivation with "adze"? Which is a tool I've always considered ideally suited for chopping your own feet off.

    "in a place you know intimately and the intruder does not"

    Particularly in my place, where it is literally impossible to take two steps in the same direction because of all the big hard unyielding lumps of stuff I've got all over the place. All I need for home defence is some blue LEDs. The idea is simply to create intense blue flashes so they think the police have turned up. They then panic, try to leg it, fall over something, land on something else and break their necks.

    492:

    Actually, for large, dangerous predators .. Spears/Pikes + disciplined "miltary" style tactics.

    The bigger problems aren't large predators, they're A. Large sauropod equivalents (gigantic, stupid, and perennially hungry), and B. Large sauropod equivalents that are physcially colonies of ant or termite-equivalents.

    To unpack that:

    A. Sauropods are biological miracles, tiny brains aside. Terrestrial mammals can't get that big, due to lack of too many key adaptations. Keeping herbivores that big off your precious farm of offworld plants and offworld buildings is going to be hard, because you've got to get them to notice and care. Worse for humans, they radically change the landscape through browsing, and leave behind metric craploads of dung, so much so that some have speculated that the Jurassic had to have complex ecosystems of dung processors and the things that ate the coprovores, and there are certainly fossils of things like small ankylosaurs with odd mouths that might fit the role of coprophiles. Considering anglophone reactions to defecation, for SF these are shitty worlds to write about. "A Gun For Dinosaur" was entirely too clean.

    B. Speaking of termite evolution, which might have started with cockroaches eating sauropod dung, gone colonial (because that's a lot of poo to eat) and then switched to wood when some of the gut critters used by dinosaurs to digest wood (shown from coprolites) jumped to ur-termites....

    Anyway, the biggest insect colonies (leafcutter ants) are about the equivalent of a cow or two in biomass, IIRC. Collectively ants make up about 90% of the animal mass in places like the Amazon, despite their colonies being comparable to individual mammals at most.

    Now imagine a world dominated by colonial arthropods, where the biomass of individual colonies was more sauropodian, or 2-3 orders of magnitude bigger than the biggest ant colonies are on Earth right now (don't bother checking on Argentine ants, those supercolonies are still thought to be much smaller than a sauropod). I'm not sure artillery will help you deal with colonizing such a world. And considering the entomophobia of most anglophone readers, I think they'd be seriously bugged by reading about this kind of world anyway.

    493:

    What are the weapons for? Without further information it's not even obvious that you need them at all, never mind what you're going to use them on. On Earth you might be wanting to shoot things for food, but alien wildlife is more likely to be indigestible than not, so I figure you'd be planning from the start to feed yourself by some other means. Defence against big predators is the other thing that comes to mind, but there again relying on weapons is probably more likely to get you eaten quicker than if you don't.

    If all you need is close range stuff then you're probably pretty well set with hand tools that you'd have for their usual purpose in any case. If you want more distance I'd be inclined to go primitive - slingshots and spear-throwing levers and the like, and practice until you can use them properly (which you need to do with anything, but with these you can't pretend you don't).

    494:

    Stanislaw Lem's very last novel. "Fiasco" features a planet with (spoiler alert) sapient aliens with this kind of morphology /social structure.

    495:

    For those two I don't think weapons would be much use for either of them.

    Large sauropods you'll need something like an artillery shell to do a useful amount of damage (even elephants and crocodiles aren't exactly easy), and it gets a lot worse if they're too stupid to realise that what happens to one of the others might happen to them too. On the other hand, they almost certainly can't jump. So big ditches will keep them out.

    Ants though are a complete pain in the arse because they are small and there's always more of them. Birds might help, or turbo anteaters.

    496:

    Nuclear power... the big problem was that actinides (mostly plutonium) produced by the reactors have very long half-lives. With emerging chemistry knowhow you can separate the actinides from lantanides with enough purity so that you can now burn the actinides in a purpose-built reactor, leaving only the medium- and short-duration isotopes. Once you separate out stuff like caesium and iodine, you have very low-active reactor waste, compareable to uranium ore itself. Caesium and iodine disappear within 3 centuries. . Also, you need simple, literally foolprof reactors, so if the molten liquid around the fuel rods drop to a low level the reactor stops by itself (a passive safety feature). In my youth I was very much against nuclear power, but today I would welcome reactors built according to the principles above.

    497:

    Did anyone say "reality TV" ?

    "BBC’s new prime-time show, Saturday Night Scapegoating" http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2020/02/03/britain-to-take-back-control-of-scapegoating/

    498:

    How about C) commensal hives of insects living with or on a giant herbivore?

    Imagine something roughly elephant sized, because we have a good idea what elephants are like and how they interact with their local ecologies. Add shaggy hair like a mammoth or yak. This will attract parasites and then things to eat the parasites. Many insects could find such a microclimate favorable for many reasons.

    It's useful for the coprophagic organisms to deploy members whenever the host drops a load. Some of them might have a bi-modal life cycle, living as coprophagic worms for a while then changing into mobile forms that find new homes on dung producers; the adult breeding form might be a detritus eater or predator on parasites.

    For added excitement, they could have threat responses similar to real hive instincts. We all know about angry bees and army ants; what if attacking the host creature gets the troublemaker attacked by a swarm of bees?

    ("Unacceptable number of bees!")

    499:

    Surely you wouldn't deprive an old man of a walking stick?

    https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=922

    500:

    I wouldn't mind California seceding and joining the EU (or Canada)...

    No offence intended, but I'd rather not have Canadian politics pulled any more to the right, thank you.

    501:

    Charlie, I just received a cancellation notice from Amazon US for my pre-order of Invisible Sun. Does this mean it's on hold indefinitely?

    I can't fault you if it is, of course! It's clear you've been through a grueling time with your family and everything else, so I don't blame you if you'd decided to take the albatross off.

    I'd love to see how the story ends though, one day.

    502:

    "Ambulatory acacia" is a hell of an evolutionary niche. :-)

    503:

    What are the weapons for?

    Police force?

    Granted that the US model of high-firepower cops is way overdone, you could nonetheless expect that criminal elements would eventually come up with significant weaponry. Edged weapons, bows and arrows, crossbows and such. Pistols and shotguns in the police armory might be desirable.

    504:

    The fun with giant herbivores isn't necessarily that they're unkillable. For example, sauropod heads aren't much bigger than horse heads, so it's possible that you could kill one with an AR-15 or similar.

    Then the fun starts, with tons of rotting herbivore, but that's just waste management for your little colony.

    No, the problem is what happens when you exclude them, either by digging the aforementioned ditch or by killing enough of them.

    They're keystone species in the ecosystem, so when they wander by they eat a huge amount of vegetation and turn it into a huge amount of dung. The plants are adapted to dealing, through some combination of growing too large to eat, growing fast enough to reproduce before being eaten, or being structurally and/or chemically inedible.

    So you take away the herbivore, and what do all these plants do when you've released them from this enormous browsing pressure? And from these enormous fertilizer inputs? And this is the area you've decided is just perfect for your subsistence farm of not-very-well-adapted offworld crops...

    505:

    Heteromeles @ 492 Oh NOE! "The Night-Blooming Saurian" - By J Tiptree Jnr .....

    506:

    I'm not sure artillery will help you deal with colonizing such a world.

    Thermobaric artillery. Like the TOS-1 Buratino.

    Mind you, it'd only work against localized infestations; for anything more widely distributed you'd need nukes.

    507:

    "BBC’s new prime-time show, Saturday Night Scapegoating" ... featured on a satire website, alas.

    508:

    Re: 'Defence against big [alien] predators is the other thing that comes to mind, but there again relying on weapons is probably more likely to get you eaten quicker than if you don't.'

    Why is the default defense against alien predators Rambo-esque, i.e., mechanical - big guns? This is SF/F.

    It's generally assumed that there will be biological differences between aliens and humans, so why can't that biological difference include something along the lines of: the alien predator's hide/skin undergoes a nasty chemical [toxic to humans] chemical reaction when under some level of excess pressure. Or, a biochemical reaction with the ammo resulting in that creature's immune system releasing some sort of toxin to aid its self-healing. The toxic/fatal-to-humans is merely a side-effect.

    Similar problem scenarios could occur with lasers.

    509:

    Invisible Sun is not on hold, but it's not now due out until January 2021.

    The one-year extension was decided back in September, but Amazon took forever to process it.

    Assuming I don't die in the next two months, this should be the final delay; I'm halfway through what I hope will be the final rewrite of a book that was originally due out in 2016.

    Down side: it's really late (people kept dying in real life, and each death added a year to it; first my editor, then my dad, then my mum ...)

    Up side: it looks like it's going to come in around the 140-150,000 word mark, so 50% longer than either of its predecessors in the series (because: nine-book series climax is hard).

    510:

    "So you take away the herbivore, and what do all these plants do when you've released them from this enormous browsing pressure? And from these enormous fertilizer inputs? And this is the area you've decided is just perfect for your subsistence farm of not-very-well-adapted offworld crops..."

    Not enough of a botanist to find the answer as obvious as you do, but it sounds to me like they'll grow like buggery for a bit, use up all the readily available nutrients, go funny colours and start falling over. New seedlings fail to get going properly because they're too hungry. The offworld crops, though they're not very well adapted in general, nevertheless do have an advantage in that they don't expect six inches of dinosaur shit everywhere, so in that respect they're better adapted to the new situation than the native plants are. You still have to do some weeding, but you're not overwhelmed with it.

    I'm thinking it'd be sort of like what happens when you clear a patch of the Amazon jungle for agriculture, and the jungle takes forever to grow back afterwards because you've got rid of the nutrient source it used to depend on (different source, similar outcome).

    It's possible, though, I suppose, that sometimes the giant herbivore herds all take it into their heads to wander off somewhere else for a bit, so the plants have evolved to survive the periods of nutrient deficiency by shifting to a carnivorous mode and eating whatever smaller animals happen to wander by. In which regard I seem to remember that shotguns worked well against triffids in the short term but tended to attract more of them and then you ran out of ammo, and you're better off with Oddjob's hat and better still with halberds.

    511:

    @462: "[W]hen I was in Wisconsin, we really tried to stay out of the woods during the opening week of deer gun season, because that's when the idiots with guns came out"

    Not only do us non-hunters stay out of the woods at the start of the hunting season, Mother Nature adapts too. One of the seasonal events to watch in Colorado is the migration of the large ungulates (including deer, elk and moose) from unmanaged forest into Rocky Mountain National Park, where hunting is not allowed, in the week before hunting season begins.

    512:

    Why Rambo? Hollywood. I don't think it's likely to be the best idea, but it's what everyone automatically thinks of. Though in the cases you posit guns do have a definite advantage, ie. that you can knock the beasties down from a distance and stay well clear of the toxic reactions.

    It might just as well be the other way round, of course. Perhaps the alien biology reacts as adversely to urea as ours does to cyanide. So you just widdle in a big circle all round the camp and you're fine. You have frequent beating-the-bounds ceremonies with diuretic assistance (beer) and everyone joining in.

    513:

    Thanks Charlie, glad to hear it's still on track, and thank you for persevering with it: I'd not blame you for dumping it under the circumstances.

    Dunno if you want to ask your publishers why Amazon is cancelling pre-orders in the US though.

    514:

    AIUI sauropods are sort of the opposite of island dwarfism -- they crop up in the fossil record during periods when continental drift results in a single megacontinent.

    A problem with megacontinents is they have megacontinental climate constraints: moist, wet western coasts (northern hemisphere) and eastern coasts (southern hemisphere), gigantic arid interior, so actually less viable land area for growing stuff than multiple smaller continents.

    So if you mess up the sauropods you potentially crash the only continental-scale ecosystem on your new planetary home.

    515:

    They do the order cancellation thing whenever a delivery date slips back by significantly more than six months.

    ("Invisible Sun" has been a millstone around my neck for years, but right now I'm halfway through the final rewrite and cautiously optimistic about it. It is, however, a big novel, and making the climax deliver on a big novel scale is going to be tough: currently the last 20,000 words needs a complete re-write, and the final due date (back to editorial) is just 39 days from now.)

    516:

    I have to admit I was assuming a colony on a world with life, not intelligence, so dinosaurs, or later.

    Later? You think you don't need big weapons? When I was about 12, I thought the Beast of Baluchaistan (baluchatherium) was really cool, and that was 12M? 20M? years ago....

    517:

    Well, big ditches could have issues, like what happens in the spring with the thaws, and they fill with water, and the critters love swimming, esp. when there seems to be tasty food on the other side?

    I think I'd prefer a ditch with a 3m or 6m wall along it on my side.

    518:

    Now wait a minute, single women, sent off into the wilderness? If I wasn't now very happily involved, I'd be happy to investigate rescuing same....

    519:

    Of course, shooting the head isn't necessarily useful. We know the large ones on earth had accessory assistant-to-brain near their hips, IIRC, and who knows where the brains are in alien sauropods?

    I do sort of like the idea of planting something that they really, really did not like as a large hedge.

    520:

    That seems a bit specialized. Why not just a stack of rocket launchers on a vehicle a bit heavier than a jeep, like, say, a (real, not street) hummer, or very large pickup?

    521:

    whitroth @ 449: Right, as I said, the EU Navy... that is, in vehicles, etc, blockage the crossings....

    I can just see the Royal Air Force doing food drops.

    Why? Gibraltar airport is entirely on the UK side of the line. Looked just now in Google Maps & in satellite view you can see a C-130 sitting in front of a hanger, so you know the RAF can land there.

    522:

    I'm having trouble thinking of everything needed to wrap up a nine-book series.

    Right now, I'm finally, approaching the climax (part 1; part 2 follows immediately, in the next chapter) of what's going to be one book, where I've set up my universe, had minor commentary about 150 years from now, explaining what human space is like 11,000 years from now, a flashback from 2000 years before that (i.e., 9k years from now), and about to work on a 14 ship space battle... and then I need to deal with REALLY advanced aliens.

    Btw, that's over 25k words in the last month.

    Nine books? Argh!

    523:

    whitroth @ 450: Meanwhile, what my late wife used to refer to as "range rodents" are all over. There was some fuss when they had to shoot a good number in Rock Creek Park, here in the DC area. They did give the meat to local food banks, though.

    "Range rodents"? WTF are "range rodents"?

    524:

    _Moz_ @ 469: In Australia they'd arrest you on sight (if they didn't shoot you first). Even where that stuff is legal you'd want to be careful because cops are likely to associate body armour with shooters. At the very least you want inconspicuous if not outright concealed bullet resistance.

    Your best defense, whether active or passive, is always one the bad guy who's trying to hurt you doesn't recognize that you have. If he can see your coat is "bullet proof", he's just going to shoot you in the head.

    525:

    _Moz_ @ 479: "Trophy hunting event to auction 'dream hunt' with Donald Trump Jr"

    Better hope Dick Cheney isn't bidding... or this could be a whole new genre of reality TV shows. But it's kind of been done to death in fiction.

    I must have a warped imagination, because my first reaction is you wouldn't want Cheney along only because he might might shoot junior before you could.

    526:

    Gibraltar airport

    Yes. The one with traffic lights to stop the cars on the highway crossing the runway when flight ops are in progress.

    527:

    Deer. In Texas, they're actually mostly small - I have a pic of my twins visiting when they were 8, maybe, feeding a mooching deer in a park, and they're as tall or taller than the deer.

    528:

    Yes, the RAF could in principle do a Berlin airlift to keep Gibraltar fed.

    Whether the current government would is another matter, especially if Brexit goes badly awry and stuff is scarce back home.

    529:

    I think there's some doubt these days about the secondary brain thing. I think they reckon it was more like an I/O processor for the rear end and even that is overstating it a bit. I have a vague idea that it's even been suggested that the hole is just a random hole for no apparent reason, and there was nothing much in it at all.

    I don't think it matters, though; consider decapitated chickens. They seem to be able to keep going. A fifty foot chicken charging about trampling blindly over everything around it is probably going to do more damage than one that is just ambling around eating stuff.

    530:

    Don't think in terms of nine books; think in terms of wrapping up a 15-20 year long project! Because that's what this is.

    531:

    @528: Gibraltar is about as useful to the current day United Kingdom as my appendix is to me. It seems ripe for BoJo to flog off on some overfunded ego, and would make a dandy supervillain base. Perhaps he could interest Hugo Drax Elon Musk?

    532:

    I was pretty much assuming we're talking about the stage of getting established after the spaceship has landed, so we still have only the people who were on it. We're only having to keep the sauropods out of the area of the fields of a decent sized village or thereabouts, which isn't significant on the scale of a megacontinent; its volcanoes would frequently be causing larger areas of localised devastation. (Or if the ecosystem is that sensitive, we've probably fucked it already with something else we've done.)

    I'm also assuming we've done a decent enough survey before landing to make sure we haven't plonked the whole outfit down in the middle of a migration route or something, which might be pretty awkward.

    533:

    Trump Gibraltar.

    In exchange for not absolutely hosing the UK in post-Brexit trade deals, Trump gets his own (new) polity so he can be safe once he's no longer President. Set up as the ultimate off-shore banking & business hub, of course.

    534:

    @533: Where does he go after he bankrupts it (as he inevitably will)?

    535:

    There’s a fourth use for colonist weapons - fending off other aliens wanting the same planet.

    536:

    Moz is probably traumatized by contemporary Australian mining practices

    One of which is a whole lot of talk about how they could clean up their mess, but strangely they choose not to. And the money they post as bond is never enough for the post-mining cleanup, the practices that could keep the mess contained don't happen, and so on.

    When I asked "how do you remove a thousand tonnes of fine uranium ore from a watershed", that was not a rhetorical question. Somehow, despite being absolutely certain that they could contain that shit, every single wet season that observers are present there's a leak of mine waste into Kakadu World Heritage Area (but it doesn't matter, no-one lives there... because we killed them all). But oddly when there are no observers those spills are not recorded...

    And, Thomas, somehow you're not talking about remediating the nuclear waste. Is that because you don't think it can be done, or because you agree that the only method is "leave it for someone else"?

    537:

    Set up as the ultimate off-shore banking & business hub, of course.

    https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/51e95b01-39ac-48b1-a201-b4004029ebb8

    538:

    I'm also assuming we've done a decent enough survey before landing

    Any number of scenarios can be made up, of course. But ISTM that a civilization/technology that could send live humans (or canned embryos or people-replicators etc) across interstellar space to the surface of a planet would be able to establish a full orbital infrastructure before the people landed. Remote sensing/spysats, metsats, comsats, navigation, you name it. Maybe orbital weapons to deal with large sauropods and the like.

    539:

    My Amazing Journey - Six narcissistic white trans women are forced to compete through gender-related challenges to get funding and medical support for transition, but only the most selfish and clueless will get the prize! Intersectional solidarity will not be tolerated. Hosted by Caitlyn Jenner.

    540:

    Long term it is just not waste, but raw material.

    Fresh from the reactor, nuclear waste is a witches brew, which is difficult to do anything with, because when you try to seperate it into its component parts, the machines you do that with tend to get irradiated, which makes maintaining the reprocessing machines very expensive. People do, anyway, but mostly its about the technical bragging rights, its not very economic.

    But stick it under a mountain for 400 years, and the hot stuff will all have decayed away, which makes reprocessing much, much easier, since now you can do it in glass boxes instead of "With remote machinery", and the remaining stuff in the waste at that point in time includes a bunch of very valuable things, so someone will dig it up to get at the platinum group metals and the Technetium.

    This is why waste storage sites are called "repositories" not "disposal" sites. In the unlikely event our descendants do not want the stuff, kbs-3 is vast and copious overkill for containing it for the long haul.

    541:

    Yes, the RAF could in principle do a Berlin airlift to keep Gibraltar fed

    Er, why not sealift? Looking at the map, Gibraltar seems pretty accessible from the water unless Spain wanted to escalate things beyond the point they'd probably think prudent. And Proudly Sovereign UK could perhaps call on its good friend the US to help out with a few ships to underscore the point.

    Anyway, Gibraltar, according to Wikipedia, has less than 35,000 people, so the logistics don't seem too intimidating.

    Or am I missing something?

    P.S.: IMO, the UK should turn Gibraltar over to Spain in a polite and dignified way sooner rather than later.

    542:

    @Moz, 467: "You still focus on EROEI when I specifically said that's one starting point, just as finances are one starting point..."

    You were the one who brought it up, my friend. If you dont really care about it, then that's one problem solved!

    "What matters overall is "does this create more problems than it solves" and the answer for nuclear in most of the world appears to be "yes". And really specifically, in the context of "zero emissions before 2050", the lead times on nuclear rule it out completely in Europe and the US."

    The second statement does not follow from the first one. Frankly, I think we have to give up on any sort of specific emissions goal, and just focus on "Do what we can as quickly as we can do it" and hope for the best. If you think that nuclear power "causes more problems than it solves", that is, it causes more problems than global warming will, then you have not specified what those problems are. If you dont think it causes more problems than global warming, then I'm not sure what your objections are.

    "What the customer buys is electricity, stored in the form of aluminium (or lithium, or maybe soon steel etc). The fact that you build solar panel supports out of it rather than burning it back into electricity doesn't change the underlying process that produced it."

    Maybe, but I fail to see the relevance, unless you know of a way to hook aluminum up to the power grid so that it can help heat our houses and power our factories. Using it for solar panel supports is helpful, but hardly solves the problem of replacing fossil fuels. Because again, neither North America nor Western Europe can power themselves by their own local renewables alone.

    543:

    I thought that was the UK (Cue Sex Pistols)

    544:

    I care about the EROEI and the financial cost of nuclear power, that's why I keep bringing them up. It's you that's objecting to having that discussion. So I ask: if you don't care about the energy and money sides, what do you think is the point of having nuclear power plants - military?

    I used the term EROEI in response to someone else saying "I'm pretty sure all nuclear reactors produce more energy than they consume" which is a non-jargon explanation of the abbreviation. For someone who's not clear on why that matters searching for the jargon term leads directly to an explanation, where searching for "why does nuclear reactors produce more energy than they consume matter" takes quite a bit of work to get to an explanation (the first few pages for that exact search are explanations of why nuclear power is good or bad, not why energy balance matters).

    The reason to consider embodied energy is that it affects the energy requirements of a civilisation or nation. What that can do is open up the discussion about which electricity demands are satisfied in each location, and which might be better served by moving the demand. As when an aluminium refinery was built in Bluff because there's a big hydro plant nearby. That electricity demand from an Australian company is satisfied in Aotearoa, then the product consumed in the USA. Which meant that existing electricity production in the USA could be directed to demand that's not so easily moved.

    It's tricky to know just how far I need to dumb down things that I think are obvious. So I say things like "the EROEI is not great if you consider the whole life cycle" and people like Thomas Jørgensen read that, maybe do some research, then respond with their own arguments. Other people say "I don't understand", in various ways, or simply object to discussing the concept (it's not clear whether they understand it, or just object to people using terms they're not familiar with).

    Back to the very basic concepts: the human race needs a lot of energy in various forms to keep doing what we do. But that amount of energy is not fixed, we can change both the form of energy and the amount.

    For example, as people get richer they tend to eat more meat. Meat takes more energy to produce than plants, so consuming the same amount of food energy as meat means the human race as a whole consumes more energy.

    To get that energy we can either take it from an existing source by converting some wheat farms to beef farms. But because beef takes more energy than wheat, we're going to get a lot less food energy from the beef than the wheat.

    Or we can find a new source of beef farms, perhaps by demolishing some unwanted towns, cutting down some forest or filling in fish nurseries to use as beef farms.

    If someone spends a whole lot of time talking about this stuff it gets really tedious to say the above every time, so people come up with shortcuts: "source replacement", "embodied energy", EROEI. Or "the three R's" = "reduce, reuse, recycle" when dealing with resources in general rather than specifically energy.

    545:

    neither North America nor Western Europe can power themselves by their own local renewables alone

    I didn't realise anyone was making that argument. So whoever that is, I agree with you. But I disagree with the premise of the argument.

    1: the current energy consumption is not fixed. The amount can go down considerably without affecting their lifestyles, or dramatically if lifestyle changes are made. That's per person consumption, and obviously if the number of people drops that also reduces energy consumption.

    2: energy consumption is not just electricity, and electricity is not the only form of energy that's portable.

    3: both areas currently import most of their energy. No man is an island, no country stands alone, and trying to pretend they do is a shortcut to disaster

    4: not mentioned, but relevant: nuclear power is not a renewable resource. Having lots of the inputs available may mean we don't have to worry about running out, but we should still consider the question.

    (I realise that point 1 can also work the other way. More people, each using more energy, is quite possible)

    546:

    I'm kind of not disagreeing with you, because we know that people can do all sorts of funny things.

    But I am kind of still going on about that one thing: the enormous gap between "we can" and "we actually do".

    If anything that's the core of the whole argument about climate change. I think it's beyond question that we have the technical means to stabilise our climate. The question is whether we have the political means, and are willing to pay the cost. Right now it looks very much as though the answer to the latter questions is no.

    547:

    "Maybe orbital weapons to deal with large sauropods and the like."

    Well, we know they work...

    "Gibraltar seems pretty accessible from the water"

    It's a Royal Navy base. That's basically the point of it.

    548:

    Rabbits or squirrels, I think.

    549:

    Gas driers take about 45 minutes for an average load at medium temperature.

    550:

    IMO, the UK should turn Gibraltar over to Spain in a polite and dignified way sooner rather than later.

    If the current inhabitants of Gibraltar want this to happen, then I agree 100%.

    If they want to stay part of the Brexit Utopia Project, then they should be allowed to stay.

    If they want outright independence then that's fine too. Their population is similar to that of Liechtenstein (38,557 (2019)), so they could probably make a go of it as a tax haven.

    Similar arguments could be made for Ceuta and Melilla, of course.

    However, when you get right down to it, it's not my call.

    551:

    That's per person [energy] consumption

    In the EU/US and other higher consumption places, that seems to be, on the average and over the long run, about 1 kWe/person, no?

    552:

    AIUI sauropods are sort of the opposite of island dwarfism -- they crop up in the fossil record during periods when continental drift results in a single megacontinent.

    Um, no. According to paleontologists like Darren Naish, sauropods basically had a couple of key traits (hollow bones, whatever it was that kept their brains from exploding from changes in blood pressure due to changes in head height, etc.) that allowed them to get bigger than any other land animals before or since. Once they evolved these, they got huge, then the last of them died in the K-Pg. Absent those innovations or analogous ones showing up again, land animals can't get that big.

    As one example of many of the lack of correlation between animal size and continental status, here's Argentinosaurus, which lived around 96-92 mya, and which was between 30 and 39 meters long and weighed 50-100 tonnes. It's one of the biggest titanosaurs known.

    Here's a reconstruction of the continent's positions at 94 million years ago. Not a supercontinent (Pangea, which broke up in the Permian). Not to supercontinents (Laurasia and Gondwana, which broke up in the Jurassic). And note that Argentinosaurus was found it what is now Argentina. Scotese's Paleomap website (the link) is definitely worth browsing, if ancient maps are your thing.

    Here's a sauropod expert waxing handwavey about why sauropods got so big. From his blog SVPOW (Sauropod Vertebra of the Week).

    553:

    If the current inhabitants of Gibraltar want this to happen, then I agree 100%.

    If they want to stay part of the Brexit Utopia Project, then they should be allowed to stay.

    Yes, if I understand it aright, which is improbable, when the UK was a member of the EU and the question of joining with Spain came up, the Gibraltarians elected to remain with the UK. But now that Brexit has come, they wish to remain with the EU.

    Those are perfectly logical and unobjectionable positions to hold in the conditions in which they were/are held, but which is it to be now? And, if they elect to remain in the EU, how to do it? Join with Spain, become a ministate, or what?

    I agree that a pleblicite would be the best way to go.

    554:

    Ghu, worse, a decapitated T-rex running around....

    555:

    ARGH!

    Yeah, I'm having enough trouble, as I said, and I only started this with a one-shot short story in Aug of '18, and I think I'm closing in on "only" 100k words.

    556:

    I think I'd prefer Elbe.

    557:

    about 1 kWe/person

    Oh boy, if you ever want to see experts handwaving then you can start with questions like that. Wikipedia has a handy chart of primary energy consumption (excluding misc) and another of just electricity but arguing about what is included and not starts the instant anyone uses the figures for anything, especially comparing countries. Note that wikipedia experts haven't been able to get recent numbers or even agree on how to convert between units (the sort order changes!)

    But loosely "poor European" countries like Romania come in at about 2kW, right up to Iceland at 25kW. In general, being further from the equator increases energy use more than being rich does but the disparity in the latter is much greater (Russians use less than residents of Qatar or Kuwait).

    But some of that ties in to what I was talking about above: countries that produce more locally typically use either more energy for industrial production, or less because they're mostly peasants. Comparing similar countries you can say the average Merkin(9kW) is ridiculously inefficient compared to the average German (5kW), despite Germany not having low-latitude areas to match Florida and Texas. Likewise the Kiwis (5.8kW) compared to the Strayns (7.5kW) which breaks the "closer to the equator use less" rule.

    558:

    The other side of those numbers is that they suggest that it should be possible to raise USA living standards to German ones while halving energy consumption. Or lift Canada to Nordic standards while slightly reducing their energy consumption.

    To put it another way, anyone who says you can't expect the USA to halve their energy use probably has no idea how little energy the rest of the world uses, or no idea how unequal the US is (the latter are the "you can't expect Bill Gates to live like a Polish plumber" ones... no, but you can't expect Putin to live like a Mexican-American day labourer either).

    559:

    It's rated for 1.5kW, and 2L capacity. (Of course it's slower when it's full. But my microwave is rated less than 0.9kW, so...[shrug])

    560:

    @Moz, 544/545: If I express myself in layman’s terms, it’s because I am layman with respect to this issue. This means that I am forced to utilize language that is more simplistic than someone with more technical expertise than I have might use, and for all that I know, that might include yourself. But my views and my questions are what they are, if I am to express myself and improve my understanding, I have no choice but to forge ahead as I am. So I ask for your patience and forebearance.

    My apologies for the length of this post—it’s a big topic.

    “So I ask: if you don't care about the energy and money sides, what do you think is the point of having nuclear power plants – military?”

    I have two simple priorities: one is to reduce carbon emissions, by any and all means available. I support nuclear power because I believe that replacing fossil fuels with fissile fuels will help us reduce carbon emissions, and thereby protect my grandchildren from the effects of global warming. Secondarily I care about maintaining economic growth, both because I believe that a plausible argument that nuclear power will contribute to the economy will greatly reduce popular political resistance to the idea, and because I care about the quality of life of my descendants.

    If discussing energy returned on energy invested or financial cost helps us understand how nuclear power would or would not reduce carbon emissions or contribute to economic growth, then that is clearly important. If not (and I don’t see the connection), then I don’t care about them.

    The finacial costs are not irrelevent, but they can be spread across society by basing them on taxes. At an average cost of, say, $10 billion per plant (I suspect that there are inefficiencies in plant construction that could be elimated to reduce the cost), twenty five new plants would be around $250 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it’s less than the US budget deficit, less than interest on our debt. It’s fundable.

    I can see some indirect connection between what you call EROEI to economic growth, but it depends on how you define the terms. Nuclear power does not have to pay for itself in order to contribute a net gain to the larger economy, for reasons that should be obvious. If you need me to repeat these reasons, then I will (others in this discussion have already done a better job of it than I can, but I will attempt it if you wish). The matter of energy returned is a little trickier, but I have already stated that I find the idea that constructing and decommissioning nuclear power plants consume more energy than they produce to be so wildly counter-intuitive that I require some empirical data to convince me. My admittedly limited understanding is that the average size of a nuclear reactor in the US is somewhere around 1GW. Operating at somewhat less than full capacity for a year, that should come in at somewhat less than 10 million megawatthours per year. If that’s correct, then multiply by an average lifespan of 40 years or so. You claim that it takes more energy than that to commission and decommission a nuclear power plant. I don’t know how much energy that actually requires: can you document it for me?

    “The reason to consider embodied energy is that it affects the energy requirements of a civilisation or nation. What that can do is open up the discussion about which electricity demands are satisfied in each location, and which might be better served by moving the demand. As when an aluminium refinery was built in Bluff because there's a big hydro plant nearby. That electricity demand from an Australian company is satisfied in Aotearoa, then the product consumed in the USA. Which meant that existing electricity production in the USA could be directed to demand that's not so easily moved.”

    That’s fine: international commerce is a relatively effective way to redistribute efficiencies. But what I am arguing is neither the US nor the EU (the two most industrialized areas on Earth) can satisfy local demand with local renewable sources. Therefore, if we are to replace fossil fuels in an economically efficient fashion, that extra energy has to come from somewhere.

    “It's tricky to know just how far I need to dumb down things that I think are obvious.”

    As an aside, I try to follow the maxim that nothing is obvious to other people. There is a limit to the cognitive load you can undertake for the other person, of course, but I try to err on the side of too much explanation than too little. Anyhow, to return to the subject--

    “Back to the very basic concepts: the human race needs a lot of energy in various forms to keep doing what we do. But that amount of energy is not fixed, we can change both the form of energy and the amount.”

    Well, that’s one of the advantages of nuclear power—unlike renewables, it has a great capacity to exand as our demand increases. I can defend both aspects of that statement if you wish—that nuclear can scale upward farther than renewables can—but in short there are limits to the amount of land that can be covered with solar panels or host wind turbines, and there are further constraints on how far away those panels and turbines can be from where the demand is concentrated; while there is a lot of fissile material on this planet, and when collected into useful amounts it takes up very little room, and can be transported relatively efficiently.

    “the current energy consumption is not fixed. The amount can go down considerably without affecting their lifestyles, or dramatically if lifestyle changes are made. That's per person consumption, and obviously if the number of people drops that also reduces energy consumption.”

    That’s true, but I believe that it is also true that reductions in consumption and increases in energy use efficiency will not be large enough to replace fossil fuels, not even when combined with renewable energy. Fossil fuel consumption produces a lot of energy—it will be very challenging to replace it all, or even most of it. We need an additional source.

    I’m also worried about the political practicality of getting environmentally friendly policy and laws passed. A strategy that cannot be successfully marketed to the general public is a dead idea—of no use whatsoever. We don’t just need a strategy that works on a technical level, it has to work on the political one as well (recent advances in targeted messaging technology may make this easier than in the past). I regard it as obvious that no one is going to vote for a reduction in population. Current estimates seem to indicate a plateau of around 10 billion people worldwide, if the demographic transition keeps spreading.

    “energy consumption is not just electricity, and electricity is not the only form of energy that's portable.”

    One of the things we have to do is electrify everything, and by “everything” I mean at a minimum transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture (well, I mean reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for producing food). It wont solve the problem by itself, but it makes solving the problem a whole lot easier, if for no other reason than it makes progress easier to measure.

    And while fissile material is indeed not a renewable resource, there is an aweful lot of it about (granted, most of it is in the ocean, so that presents a technical challenge). I don’t think we have to worry about it running out within any timeframe for which we are capable of effective planning.

    So, wrap up (the “too long, didn’t read”): The purpose of building new nuclear plants is to reduce carbon emissions while protecting economic growth. The net negative financial costs can be managed, and I do not believe, on an intuitive basis, that nuclear plants require more energy to build and decommission than they produce. Neither locally produced renewable energy, nor consumption reductions will be enough to replace fossil fuel energy production, even in combination. Barring a significant improvement in battery technology, we can’t import electricity from other continents. I see no practical alterntaive to increasing nuclear power production.

    561:

    I'm averaging about 230kW per two-month billing period (low is about 200, high is about 340). Three lights (one on a timer, so it's on about 5 hours per day), microwave, kettle, computer.

    562:

    Gas driers take about 45 minutes for an average load at medium temperature.

    It all depends on the temp and airflow. People were saying electric dryers didn't dry their clothes. Must be older models. On my I can pick the temp in 5 increments and the dryness in 5 increments. Times can vary from 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the load, the temp, and how dry I want things to come out.

    In a decently modern set of dryers from the same manufacturer and model line you should get the similar drying times with similar inputs.

    563:

    Times can vary from 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the load, the temp, and how dry I want things to come out.

    ALso, other things than just the time can effect what people use. We have a relatively usual flat in Finland - about 80 square meters, three bedrooms (which is a bit uncommon in a flat this size, usual is two), kitchen, two toilets, shower.

    We have a washing machine which also dries. It has a heat pump drier, which is to my understanding not that common in those machines that can do both. It's more usual in the systems with separate washing machine and dryer. Depending on the load and the dryness it can take anything from 20 minutes to four hours to dry the stuff. It's often not considerably faster than just hanging the laundry to dry, but we don't really want to dedicate space in the flat for that.

    There is a common drying room in the building, but it can be somewhat crowded, and our usual laundry would take up like one fourth of it. There are also clotheslines outside, but they're not that useful when it's cold and rainy (drying some stuff is doable when it's freezing, though, but I haven't done it in a long time), more when it's warm and sunny.

    We did make do without one for years, but the drying rack was often in the way. So, for us an electric dryer is a convenience which makes laundry easier and less space-consuming.

    564:

    ok, you're in the US so that's what matters to you. But when you talk about politically possible... have you seen what the US is doing with nuclear power? To say it's wildly unpopular is an understatement, even the most vicious socialists in the Republican Party aren't willing to talk about the level of state subsidy that would be required to make it "commercially viable", or the degree of repression required to force people to accept it.

    Also, please look at what is actually happening with the "get minerals from seawater" people. They're not even at the fusion power stage which means that it's unicorn juice for the foreseeable future.

    electrify everything

    I kind of agree, but I think we also need to be very clear that things we can'tr electrify have to stop until we work out how, unless they're absolutely crucial. Specifically air travel. But also land transport... one measure of whether someone takes climate change seriously is how much they sacrificed to buy their electric car (assuming they have a car at all). Some people can't, especially in the US where extreme poverty is a key part of your political system, but for anyone who can but doesn't... that's an easy tell that they DGAF.

    Barring a significant improvement in battery technology, we can’t import electricity from other continents. I see no practical alterntaive to increasing nuclear power production.

    Just FYI, Brazil generates a lot of electricity on the west side of South America and uses on the east side. If those power lines from the 1960's were run north-south they would connect to the south of the US. technology has improved since then, we're at the stage where Twiggy Forrest talking about running a line from Queensland to Singapore is only odd because of the politics (a mining magnate wanting to build a solar farm? WTF?)

    I'm going to bet that Twiggy's plan is delivered before the next nuclear power plant comes online in the USA.

    565:

    230kW per two-month billing period

    Ah, the gap between "electricity that goes into my house" and "per capita electricity consumption" is big and really important.

    The household electricity consumption is a different number and is normally much smaller than the per capita numbers (which include industry etc, just as GDP is not the sum of all wage and salary income). For the USA 11MWh/year is ~350W where the per capita is ~9kW.

    Even the simple complexity that a lot of "per capita energy use" is burned as hydrocarbons (gas heating, petrol cars etc) blows the numbers out. Your electric car is compensated for by all the giant SUVs that still burn fossils.

    Then there are the freaks who save solar panels on their roof, and some of them have negative "annual electricity input to the house"...

    (also, and this detail is worth keeping in mind, I suspect you mean 230kWh, not kW. 230kW would put you personally off the charts... are you running Birkeland–Eyde process in your basement or something?)

    566:

    The reason a lot of people refuse to talk with you when you bring up EROEI and nuclear is that this particular subject was poisoned by Storm Leeuwen and a couple of fellow travelers who just straight up lied to make nuclear look bad.

    Every time you see the claim that nuclear has a bad EROEI, it tracks back to egregious scientific malpractice. - Leuweens numbers imply the Rossing mine consumes more energy than the entire country it is in, and more to the point, also enough energy that its budget for diesel should exceed its entire operating budget by a very significant margin. That is, their numbers are so bad that they have to be deliberately deceptive, especially since honest researchers in the field have pointed this out to them in excruciating detail, and they have not corrected or retracted anything, and depressingly enough, people keep citing them in meta-studies. (which is just incompetence. Like citing Andrew Wakefields work. Google studies before you use them!) Some of the other bad science about nuclear out there is just funny - I liked the study that credited civil nuclear with the future carbon emissions of global thermo-nuclear war, as darkly comic, but Leuuwen tried really hard to look like a serious piece of research, and then used horribly inflated numbers as a propaganda technique. Pretty unambigiously Evil.

    The problem with pointing this out is that it comes across as just an ad-homiem attack, which is why I try to bring out the correct numbers first, to make the point that the claim conflicts rather badly with obvious reality. The dominant energy investment to run a nuclear power plant - and it is not close - is fuel enrichment. This consumes more power than mining, disposal and construction put together. And it is still not much, in percentage terms of output.

    567:

    The reason a lot of people refuse to talk with you when you bring up EROEI and nuclear is that this particular subject was poisoned by Storm Leeuwen and a couple of fellow travelers who just straight up lied to make nuclear look bad.

    Every time you see the claim that nuclear has a bad EROEI, it tracks back to egregious scientific malpractice. - Leuweens numbers imply the Rossing mine consumes more energy than the entire country it is in, and more to the point, also enough energy that its budget for diesel should exceed its entire operating budget by a very significant margin. That is, their numbers are so bad that they have to be deliberately deceptive, especially since honest researchers in the field have pointed this out to them in excruciating detail, and they have not corrected or retracted anything, and depressingly enough, people keep citing them in meta-studies. (which is just incompetence. Like citing Andrew Wakefields work. Google studies before you use them!) Some of the other bad science about nuclear out there is just funny - I liked the study that credited civil nuclear with the future carbon emissions of global thermo-nuclear war, as darkly comic, but Leuuwen tried really hard to look like a serious piece of research, and then used horribly inflated numbers as a propaganda technique. Pretty unambigiously Evil.

    The problem with pointing this out is that it comes across as just an ad-homiem attack, which is why I try to bring out the correct numbers first, to make the point that the claim conflicts rather badly with obvious reality. The dominant energy investment to run a nuclear power plant - and it is not close - is fuel enrichment. This consumes more power than mining, disposal and construction put together. And it is still not much, in percentage terms of output. Nuclear is expensive, but very little of that expense is resources, almost all of it is enormous amounts of high paid labor.

    568:

    Allen Thompson @ 541 IMO, the UK should turn Gibraltar over to Spain in a polite and dignified way sooner rather than later. Just like Spain should give up Ceuta & Mellilia, you mean? How about: "EFF RIGHT OFF" with that? Local population have zero wish to be Spanish, in case you hadn't noticed! SEE ALSO ... J Reynolds (550)

    569:

    If you want something almost as bad check out Dr Jim Green. He's an Australian anti-nuclear activist who goes out of his way to give rationality a bad name, let alone science. His PhD is a social science one literally in "what the antinuclear movement does" but he tries to talk like a hard scientist... but he doesn't do maths, let alone thinking. He's the inspiration for me singing "turn off the sun" at some anti-nuclear rallies because that's the level his "all nuclear is bad" is at. Parallel to the "dihydrogen monoxide" scare, I managed to get him to say that all electromagnetic radiation is life-threateningly dangerous at any level of exposure.

    OTOH, Helen Caldicott sometimes comes across as a crank, but that is partly because she lived downstream from the Lucas Heights reactor for a while and found that traumatic (that is an appropriate reaction, BTW). To describe ANSTO as habitual liars is to besmirch the fine reputation enjoyed by used car salesmen, politicians and real estate agents. ANSTO are more like mob enforcers "we wouldn't want anyone to get hurt" or "it would be a shame if the government condemned your house because of all this radioactive stuff you keep talking about" is more their style.

    570:

    There you go again, speaking for someone else, asserting that their position just coincidentally happens to align with yours. Quite belligerently, and reducing the opinion of any Gibraltar who happens to disagree with you to “zero”. You realise that in the other thread we were making excuses for you (living in the “centre” means you know less, in general, not more), and no-one was recognising that this grants you some special insight.

    I had the interesting experience the other evening of noting Griff Rhys-Jones on tele, talking about and in fact riding on the railway lines between Brisbane and Ipswich (mostly the rail museum line out of Ipswich into the hinterland) and from Brisbane up the coast. It was a pretty good program, all told. You’d probably like it.

    571:

    Join with Spain, become a ministate, or what?

    Join Scotland when Scotland separates from the Not-So-United Kingdom and rejoins the EU?

    572:

    It concerns me that the Scots will miss the daily news about the troubles caused by Brexit, then UKexit (is this what leaving the UK is called locally?).

    Adding Gibraltar to Scotland is the logical thing to do to keep the perpetual crisis going for years to come.

    For added lulz, Scotland can simultaneously join Canada while re-joining the EU.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    573:

    BTW regarding Scotland, there has been periods when parts of the British isles have been ruled by Scandinavian kings, so if the Scots for some reason want to have a royal family and still be inside EU, they can appoint the king/queen of Denmark as their own. as that country is still inside the EU. And their royal family is uncontaminated by Epstein associations. The same goes for the Royal familty of Norway, but that country is only associated with EU. And both countries are just a skip across the North Sea away, which is geographically longer than to London, but sociologically I wager the distance from Whitehall to any Scottish council houses is much longer. Norway and Denmark are basically flat in terms of social differences (at least when compared to post-Thatcher Britain). And everyone in Scandinavia already speaks English. Adding Gaelic to local minority languages like Sami will just be a minor detail, they (the minorities) already have their own TV programs

    574:

    I forgot to mention, Denmark and Norway have their own detective-writing traditions as well, so the Scots will fit right in!

    575:

    it should be possible to raise USA living standards to German ones while halving energy consumption.

    Sure: you just need to abolish suburban sprawl, corral them all into dense urban apartment blocks, and roll out a streetcar network for personal transport (with delivery vans for online food shopping in place of driving the SUV to the out of town Walmart once or twice a week).

    American per-capita energy usage would plummet, I guarantee you, especially if the apartment blocs provided central HVAC and heating and all those tram/trolley bus lines converged on the local High Speed Rail station for rapid access to other cities (in place of airports -- airports would exist but be strictly for >2000km journeys).

    Have you spotted the problem with this? Huge lifestyle changes, to a mode of existence requiring a degree of socialization they've been trained for generations to reject by a toxic brew of racist red-lining, brain-dead zoning regulations, motor industry lobbying, and cultural worship of the detached house with white picket fence as a suburbian utopia (itself having replaced the family homestead farm).

    It could work. (It could work in Straya, too.) But you'd have an uphill battle convincing the natives to go along with it, especially as it implicitly crashes the value of their sunk investments in (a) a suburban home and (b) a car, which are the most expensive tangible objects they own.

    576:

    For added lulz, Scotland can simultaneously join Canada while re-joining the EU.

    I can see any number of practical problems, but as a political reorganization it's not completely stupid; it's not like the Florida Keys succeeding from Florida or the United Kingdom leaving the EU, which would be crazy.

    It does raise some key questions, such as how to ensure Canadians spell "whisky" correctly. This might be the most serious question raised regarding the union.

    Note that with ~5.5 million people Scotland would be only the third most populous Canadian province, just ahead of British Columbia's ~5.1 million. Some Scots might have to be told several times that 'British' Columbia is the province farthest from Britain.

    577:

    BTW regarding Scotland, there has been periods when parts of the British isles have been ruled by Scandinavian kings, so if the Scots for some reason want to have a royal family and still be inside EU, they can appoint the king/queen of Denmark as their own.

    No need: we'll just take back our monarchy when we leave the UK (we only allowed the English to share it in 1606). Although there might be less complications if we simply split it and elevate a different branch of the same family -- I think the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would be perfect (suitably diverse, liberal, and internationalist in outlook for Scotland: also, yet another stab in the eye for the English press).

    Although personally I'd prefer to declare a republic and select a ceremonial president by open lottery. (As in: any citizen who's willing to serve can ask for a lottery ticket, and every decade a lucky winner gets to live in the Big House on the national euro-cent, do lots of ceremonial stuff like opening parliament, reading the government's legislative agenda, visiting schools and hospitals, and so on: collect a handsome pension on retirement). Powers of said presidency to mirror those of a 21st century British monarch, not an 18th century one, so: no impeachment likely, but also zero actual political power.

    578:

    And, of course, Lerwick is just a Shetland Bus ride from Stavanger... :-)

    As for a future head of state, I was also wondering about Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal, particularly given her association with bodies such as the Scottish Rugby Union...

    579:

    Although personally I'd prefer to declare a republic and select a ceremonial president by open lottery.

    There's your reality TV show!

    Every decade or whatever, a suitable number of citizens 'win' the Royal Lottery and are enlisted into the King's Race. They are then run through a number of plausible skill tests for the job, such as waving during parades, wearing ten kilograms of fur for six hours without passing out, and addressing Parliament without using the words "ya fuckin' wankers."

    With a reasonable combination of objective tests and popularity contests this seems to offer a good chance of getting someone presentable and personable enough to greet other functionaries and unlikely to talk about shithole countries on a hot mike.

    580:

    Lottery: The archons of ancient Athens were appointed by lot, so there is a precedent. And since royalty simply win the lottery of birth, it is perfectly consistent with the current system. There are legends about kings (Celtic ones?) that were sacrificed to the gods after serving a specific time. We can substitute this by burning an effigy of the old king in a wicker structure during the Samhein festival (that's Halloween for you dirty sassenach). . If any politician hides from reporters in a refrigerator, or exceeds the alloted lie ration of the year, he also goes into the wicker man, no substitutes allowed.

    581:

    Have you spotted the problem with this? Huge lifestyle changes, to a mode of existence requiring a degree of socialization they've been trained for generations to reject by a toxic brew of racist red-lining, brain-dead zoning regulations, motor industry lobbying, and cultural worship of the detached house with white picket fence as a suburbian utopia (itself having replaced the family homestead farm)

    Oddly enough, that's precisely what we're doing here in San Diego. The high end housing market ($500k and up) is saturated, companies are still adding jobs, rents are skyrocketing (abetted by landlords switching to AirBnB and similar), and people don't have places to live that they can afford with less than a 50 mile commute.

    As for racist red-lining, brain-dead zoning regulations, motor industry lobbying, and cultural worship of the detached house with white picket fence as a suburban utopia? I think you might want to do a bit more research. You missed the corruption and profit-seeking behavior of international companies.

    582:

    …..also, anyone elected to public office of the new monarchy is allowed to challenge rivals to a duel if their character is besmirched. Imagime if John McCain had been allowed to challenge George W Bush to a duel, after his primary campaign 1999 spred leaflets stating that McCain had a child out of wedlock with a black woman… Dubya would have bravely run away, "bravely turned his tail and fled" to quote the troubadours.

    583:

    That's extremely ableist, not to mention discriminates in favour of bloodthirsty psychopathic killers ...!

    584:

    Dr. Helen Caldicott is on record as saying she became anti-nuclear after seeing the movie "On The Beach". This is a movie, a work of fiction, based on a scientifically-illiterate book about a worldwide all-out nuclear war and this caused her to reject civilian nuclear power in all its forms.

    Generally Dr. Caldicott is not a good source for accurate scientific information about things nuclear, like (sadly) many of the prominent anti-nuclear campaigners.

    585:

    Re . 583:-Yes, but if the orange buffoon has a brain fart during the next eleven months, we will all be living in a post-apocalyptic hell anyway. We might as well impose a smidgeon of rules on the mayhem. :-) Alternative political system: have you seen the 1970s SF film "Colossus"? Not nice, but better than Skynet.

    Re. On The Beach -The cobalt bomb was a brief fantasy about the ulimate mutual assured destruction. Fortunately, it turned out such a device would be far too big to be feasible. -Another abomination that almost made it to the hardware stage was a robotic nuclear ramjet, carrying hydrogen bombs at Mach 2 at treetop height.

    586:

    I think the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would be perfect (suitably diverse, liberal, and internationalist in outlook for Scotland

    A thought I had a few weeks ago: Who’d have ever guessed that Harry would turn out to be the more sensible Prince?

    588:

    Going off in a very different direction: The idea of a whole world being turned into a planet-mass black hole is one of the most terrifying ideas I have read. -As Charlie Stross is the originator of the concept I want to ask if I can use the idea (of course the concept will be attributed to you) for a story at the "SCP Foundation", a web-based collaborative-fiction project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

    (The quality of stories varies wildly, but it is a good place for absolute beginners to get their first writing experience, subjected to quite brutal criticism by their peers)

    589:

    On Gibraltar and Spain:

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/01/brexit-trade-talks-eu-to-back-spain-over-gibraltar-claims The EU will back Spain over its territorial claims to Gibraltar in the next phase of Brexit negotiations by giving Madrid the power to exclude the British overseas territory from any trade deal struck with Brussels. The Observer has learned that the Spanish government has insisted on reference to the Rock in the EU’s opening negotiating position, which will be published in draft form on Monday. Boris Johnson will be presented with the choice of reaching agreement with the Spaniards about Gibraltar’s future or exposing its citizens to economic peril by pushing it outside any EU-UK trade deal. “They have in principle asked that the new relationship not apply to Gibraltar without the explicit consent of Spain, which will only be given if the bilateral talks with Spain and the UK over the rock are resolved,” a senior EU diplomat said. [snip]
    590:

    The idea of a whole world being turned into a planet-mass black hole is one of the most terrifying ideas I have read.

    Wait until you read about triggering the collapse of the false(*) vacuum. That's terrifying.

    (*) Besides being somewhat judgemental, "false" isn't really accurate. "Metastable" would be better.

    591:

    "No need: we'll just take back our monarchy when we leave the UK (we only allowed the English to share it in 1606)."

    And we did just the sort of thing you'd expect the nasty big boy to do when you let him share your favourite dolly: pull its head off and throw it away...

    Yours seems to be this chap at the moment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz,_Duke_of_Bavaria - it says he's from an anti-Nazi family and is consequently a concentration camp survivor, and if I was Scottish he'd get my vote.

    592:

    You might want to also ask Dan Simmons (Hyperion, 1990) and David Brin (Earth, 1990) if you can borrow the concept, since both stories featured dropping a black hole into Earth.

    One question for the geezers: what was that prompted two noted SF authors independently(?) made dropping a black hole into the planet a major plot point?

    593:

    and addressing Parliament without using the words "ya fuckin' wankers."

    ... and that was how the Crown of Scotland remained vacant for many years. No contestant could pass that particular test.

    Quoted from Brookmyre, Christopher and McLeod, Ken. (2045) A History of Scotland in the 21st Century. Penguin-Tor Random House Scotland. 556 p. 16 plates, illus., 10 maps.

    594:

    Oh, not really. It propagates at the speed of light, so you'd never know it had happened. For all we know some bug-eyed bastard might have already done it but it just hasn't got here yet.

    595:

    Sure! (I approve wholeheartedly of the SCP Foundation.)

    596:

    “Deer. In Texas, they're actually mostly small -”

    Have you seen the deer in Bexar County (San Antonio, Texas)? I nearly ran into a very large buck with an enormous rack at a low water crossing in northwest San Antonio, when I lived there 25 years ago. I’ve also seen groups of deer in yards in north Loop 1604 every bit as big as the deer I’ve seen in Michigan.

    597:

    There are legends about kings (Celtic ones?) that were sacrificed to the gods after serving a specific time.

    In the copy of Parkinson's Law that I inherited from my father, there's a chapter on selecting a suitable head-of-state. Parkinson concentrates on how to phrase the job ad such that only one candidate applies, but they are the one best suited for the job.

    Having decided that "patriotism" is a desirable quality, he recommends include the phrase "The selected candidate will die for their country (by painless means) upon reaching the age of retirement."*

    So two birds with one stone: patriotic candidates and lower pension burden :-)

    *Or something close to that — I'm running on memory here.

    598:

    Now, I'm not pro-large-nuke-plants, at least until a) we have somewhere to store the waste, and the decommissioned plants, permanently, and b) every plant is inspected by a hostile government agency that does not allow anyone to let a plant know when there will be a random inspection.

    Oh, and zero cost-plus on the construction.

    However, there are people who've used the anti-nuclear movement for their own gain. For example, there was some ass who occasionally would lead protests at the gates of the KSC when there was going to be a probe to the outer planets that used RTG for power. And yes, stories in the papers had the protestors complaining about sending radiation into outer space....

    599:

    Seriously, be of good cheer. I've read reports that a lot of younger folks, millenials and younger, are not interested in the house with the picket fence, they want to live closer to work, and everything else.

    Side note: in the DC metro area, any residence less than a mile, esp. less than half a mile from the Metro (DC subway/el) is more expensive, the rates going up as the distance goes down.

    As I type this, it just struck me: the 20th century was 40%? 60%? rural, changing to 70%+ living in metro areas. The first generations didn't like it, and wanted to be back in the country (and, btw, they drive like that). The younger generations began to understand and like cities, and that, I think, is what's happening.

    Good thing, since there was just a report in the last month that 51% of the world's population live in metro areas.

    600:

    No spelling problems. Whisky is Scots. Whiskey is bourbon.

    601:

    I volunteer. As long as I can make speeches and the media will pay attention, and I can tell people what's wrong with them, and what they need to do to fix things, starting with 90% taxation of anyone making over $5M/yr.

    602:

    Ever heard of the movie, The Lost Missile?

    Don't take an intelligent 9 yr old with an active imagination to see it. With luck, you'll get out of the theatre before they barf from the tension.

    603:

    The one I nearly hit in my van around '87 or '88, outside Austin, in the Hill Country was, if I'd stood next to it, maybe 4' or 4.5'. Never saw any large deer in the 7.5 years I lived in Texas, and never when we went down to San Antone....

    604:

    Well, now I won't have any trouble in fight scense - for my b'day, Ellen just got delivered six sets of dice.... She agrees, it was pretty dicey of her.

    605:

    Indeed, temperature differentials in Edmonton Alberta range from -45 C to +40 C.

    606:

    Oh, they Would DO it all right. Which politician wouldn't? Consider the Falklands War and Maggie Thatchers electoral enhancement of way back then?" How the Falklands War Cemented Margaret Thatcher's Reputation as the 'Iron Lady' The 74-day Falklands War became Prime Minister Thatcher's "moment" that led to swift British victory—and also helped save her political skin." https://www.history.com/news/margaret-thatcher-falklands-war

    607:

    A Weapon/creature doesn't always need to be BIG and fierce or employed by BIG and Fierce People. You can kill someone quite handily with a Victorian Ladies Hat Pin. This if you know how. Or then there's the ancient tradition of ... " " misericorde (/ˌmɪzərɪˈkɔːrd/ or /-zɛrɪ-/) (from French word miséricorde, "mercy") was a long, narrow knife, used from the High Middle Ages to deliver the death stroke (the mercy stroke, hence the name of the blade, derived from the Latin misericordia, "act of mercy") to a seriously wounded knight. The blade was thin enough to strike through the gaps between armour plates.[1] ..... The blade could be pushed through the visor or eye holes in the helm with the aim of piercing the brain, or thrust through holes or weak points in plate armor, such as under the arm, with the aim of piercing the heart. The weapon was known from the 12th century and has appeared in the armaments of Germany, Persia, and England.[ " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_(weapon)

    608:

    Oh, they Would DO it all right. Which politician wouldn't?

    It depends what form a Gibraltar "blockade" takes.

    It doesn't have to be a full-blown siege to make life tough; just for the Spanish government to insist on full identity/customs checks at the border in both directions, then assign inadequate numbers of inspectors, so that it takes three hours to queue in each direction at morning and evening rush hour. Thereby adding six hours' to the daily commute of folks working on the other side of the border from where they live.

    That's not going to impact food or fuel deliveries (much), but it's going to make life miserable for cross-border workers ... leading to a lot of people losing their jobs due to chronic fatigue/exhaustion after a couple of months, leading in turn to economic recession in Gib (which has a far smaller employment pool than Spain itself).

    (This is even worse than it sounds at first when you consider the common pattern of Spanish businesses closing between 2pm and 5pm due to the temperature, then re-opening until about 8pm. Not enough time for Gib natives to commute home and back during the siesta, but with the commute they'll have to leave for work at 6am and not get home until 11pm.)

    It'd look really stupid to the British voters if the RAF started sending C-130s and C-17s loaded with relief supplies to deal with tailbacks at a routine border crossing. But it's the sort of economic leverage that would devastate Gibraltar within a year without quite tipping over into sanctions/act of war territory.

    609:

    Well, that sort of thing is already underway over here in the UK ever since , some time ago, Alaskan based TV programming became popular on our multi faceted digital TV programming channels. My own favourite is " Life Below Zero" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScPQnFbvmg But, see here fro the latest itteration of, Reality ....https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000f1vv/win-the-wilderness-alaska-series-1-episode-2

    610:

    " It depends what form a Gibraltar "blockade" takes." True, but all that Our Hero Boris requires is a relief FLEET of cargo vessels supported by the Royal Navy ..who would fight off the evil Spanish Fleet .... dunno whether it would be necessary to sink a Spanish warship or two as they attempt to engage our Fleet, but in that kind of situation Boris and co would long for even a breath of violence towards British war ships...er, peace ships striving to support Our People in Gibraltar?

    611:

    I thought it was a given that everything was bigger in Texas?

    Another myth busted! :-)

    612:

    Well, I'm given to understand that Alaska is much bigger than Texas ..this even though Alaska has a much lower level of population than Texas ..mind you, given descriptions of Texas climate and political climate I'd prefer to live in even Alaska s Horrific climate - including hot and cold running man eating Bears that can pounce on you as you go to the outside lavatory - rather than live in Texas.

    613:

    They only get to fight off the Spanish fleet if the Spanish fleet bothers to show up.

    Otherwise they're splurging many millions on basically a PR exercise that doesn't achieve anything. And meanwhile unemployment on the Rock spikes dramatically and there's general public unrest and recession and it turns into a bottomless money hole (right as the rest of the UK needs the money) ...

    It's going to be really interesting to see how they manage the Falklands economy, given that it's about 75-80% fish that get sold directly into EU markets ...

    In case I'm unclear: you can defend a hunk of rock all you like (against non-existent invaders) but if the hunk of rock's economy craters and the invaders stubbornly refuse to invade, eventually there will come a reckoning.

    614:

    For example, there was some ass who occasionally would lead protests at the gates of the KSC when there was going to be a probe to the outer planets that used RTG for power.

    Perhaps you speak of http://www.space4peace.org/contact.htm

    Like a lot of the fringe left, he seems to have kind of good motives and intentions, but very little contact with reality.

    615:

    @ Robert Prior: Re: I wouldn't mind California seceding and joining the EU (or Canada)...

    No offence intended, but I'd rather not have Canadian politics pulled any more to the right, thank you.

    No offence taken. I'm puzzled, though- California is quite a liberal state. You could take our "blues" (https://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/) and you could give us your "blues" (https://election.ctvnews.ca/how-canada-s-electoral-map-changed-after-the-vote-1.4652484).

    616:

    Couple of other options for colonist weapons

    Assuming you are only interested in protecting yourself from the local apex predator you could do pretty well with crossbows and pair them with with exploding heads on the bolts, or turn them into tasers . A clip fed automatic crank crossbow is easy sauce compared to guns it’s just an electric motor meets medieval tech

    Electricity never really caught on as a weapon on earth because by the time we got the type of battery tech that makes it worth while there were many better options. But your colony is going to need electricity and batteries and probably explosives , so if you can honk about delivery mechanisms for electricity and explosives that don’t require specialized manufacturing (like guns do) there are many possibilities

    Electricity and explosives would be also effective against exotic defenses like armor plating or creatures that don’t have specialized organs and hence less value one table to puncture and kinetic shock that bullets

    617:

    It’s important to remember that US ‘liberal’ is not at all not-right-wing. Canadian politics has its very own insanity that is quite different to that south of the Great Wall of Lunacy.

    618:

    Charlie The - oops Spanish have ALREADY done this several times between 1945 & the EU stopping it ... it just makes the Gibraltarians even more anti-Spanish, what a suprise. OTOH In case I'm unclear: you can defend a hunk of rock all you like (against non-existent invaders) but if the hunk of rock's economy craters and the invaders stubbornly refuse to invade, eventually there will come a reckoning. As in the hunk of rock is Great Britain itself ... now there is an appropriate analogy for the madness of brexit.

    619:

    Don’t the French own two islands off Canada (st. Pierre and Miquelon)? And don’t they get their own MEP? Some sort of reverse takeover of Canada is surely possible?

    620:

    @617: the Great Wall of Lunacy

    Ah, so there is a border wall between Canada and the U.S. - we just hadn't realized that it's metaphorical, not physical!

    621:

    California the liberal bastion...

    Well, it's more complicated than that.

    On a per-person basis, the state's solidly democratic. That's mostly because most of the people live in --The San Francisco Bay Area --Sacramento --Los Angeles --San Diego --(now) Orange County

    The last two used to be Republican strongholds, but there are so many immigrants here, and the Republican Party has become so foamingly anti-immigrant, that they've turned blue by default, even if it's a shade of blue that's somewhat to the right of where Nixon was back in the 1970s.

    Oh yeah, speaking of Nixon, he was born in Orange County.

    The rest of the state is actually quite conservative, especially away from the towns. That's why we get people of, erm, fractal morality such as Devin Nunes, Duncan Hunter, and Darrell Issa representing us. Heck, my own county supervisor, Princess Petulant, decided that being an ardent Trumper was preferable to representing the district.

    Oh, and not ten miles from me, there was a synagogue shooting last year. And we've got a lot of homegrown hate groups too (here's a map). And an active rural secession movement.

    So basically California's a microcosm of the US, with blueing cities that are bursting at the seams as people move to them to get jobs, and burned red rural areas that are dealing with depopulation, endemic poverty, veterans cast adrift, and all the other problems that the Trumpers and their fellow walkers are fattening themselves on.

    I can't blame Canada for not wanting us. Probably annexing Detroit would be more immediately useful.

    Now (sarcasm) if Canada wanted to annex Idaho...Washington, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, and Utah might be happy with that, since it would put affordable meds (from across the border) that much closer to people who want to buy them. It would also provide badly needed mental care and sensible law enforcement in a region that desperately needs both (/sarcasm).

    622:

    I dunno. There's a lot of "white folks" whose brains seem to be shrunk, they keep voting for morons (e.g, W and Cruz).

    623:

    That could well be him.

    624:

    Hell, yes. Back in the sixties, Phil Ochs sang, "Love Me, I'm A Liberal".

    And the current "liberals", or, far worse, the "neoliberals"... tell me any of them would do what Republican President Eisenhower did in the mid-fifties, send in the troops to desegregate in the South.

    Neoliberal... are they Ray-gun GOP?

    625:

    Oh, one more thing about weapons on a colony world? They should make a lot of noise.

    There's an old sf short, about the guy who is sent to this uninhabited planet with "the ultimate ray gun", just disintegrates what it's pointed at when you pull the trigger.

    Lessee, he shoots at critters coming at him, but they don't realize there's any less of them, so they keep coming. He gets to his ship... and shoots holes in it.

    He survives, until rescued, six months later, by using it to make primitive weapons that scare the local critters.

    626:

    I think the bigger question isn't precisely what guns you need on which world, because that depends on the world (90%+ chance of bacteria only, 10% change of ?????).

    The question I'm more interested in is what y'all think in terms of whether someone who's (doing the realistically insane thing of) colonizing a new world should bring unitasker weapons with them (e.g. firearms and friends), or whether they should "live of the land," by adapting other technologies that essential parts of the stuff they'll haul along to build the colony with (metal-working, compressed air, survey and tool lasers, etc.).

    Note, for the cohort that seems to think it's easy to assemble stuff from asteroids in high orbit, this is basically the living off the land approach. And also for the orbiteers, go find a big hunk of rock and live off it. It's hard. The nice thing about tectonically active planets that have life on them is that tectonic processes, movement of water, and microbial activity all work to concentrate useful elements into easily extractible ores. If you want to mine the asteroids, basically you're putting in most of that refining work yourself to get out the elements you need in a useful form and quantity. That, coupled with the gravity, air that's conceivably breathable, and radiation shielding you get from a tectonically active planet, makes landing as fast as possible probably a better strategy than hanging out in orbit for any longer than absolutely necessary.

    627:

    Heteromeles That map: For such a relatively lightly populated state, theres a lot of hate in Colorado?

    628:

    Hard to tell, because Colorado actually has a fair number of people (it's #21 out of 50 by state population) in that strip along I-25 that all those dots line up on. Whether that's more kkkooks per capita I can't tell you without spending some time digging.

    The real winners in the hate olympics are places like, erm, northern Idaho and South Dakota, where low population meets really interesting politics. That's why I joked about Canada annexing Idaho. The US has so far had real trouble dealing with the high rates of endemic malignant narcissism in northern Idaho and eastern Washington. I dare to hope that Canada, with its decent public health services, could perhaps make a positive difference in the lives of those poor, afflicted people.

    629:

    I'm puzzled, though- California is quite a liberal state.

    By American standards. The Canadian spectrum has considerably more room on the left than the American one seems to have. And we don't yet have the level of crazy that your right-wing seems to have acquired (although I fear it's coming).

    A California Democrat would fit right in to our Conservative party (ie. right-wing party).

    630:

    Put like that, then, bringing weapons along is only going to be useful if you find ?????, and ????? includes something the weapons you brought along both can cope with and need to cope with. So you'd have to bring along a tremendous range of weapons and most likely never use any of them. It would be a lot more sensible to use the mass allocation for something you did know you were going to use, and figure on improvising whatever kind of weapons you found you needed if you were unlucky.

    631:

    The Canadian spectrum has considerably more room on the left than the American one

    A lot of the rest of the world wonders why the Canadian spectrum stops to the right of centre. It kind of amuses me that the "radical far left" of the USA is democratic socialism which describes a standard centre-right government in much of Europe.

    That's one of the reasons why you get right wing nationalists like John Howard coming from Australia to explain basic stuff like gun control to merkins and confusing the snot out of some interviewers by talking about medicare as though it's a free for all government-run medical system that all right-thinking* people should obviously support... because in Australia that's what it is.

    Admittedly in Australia people boggle at the thought of a hard right government building a state-owned power plant. Whereas in the US that's perfectly normal** and expected. So maybe the USA isn't just weird on the left end of the left-right political spectrum. OTOH, I'm not sure I want a limited liability company having anything to do with a nuclear power plant.

    • either way you want to read that is accurate. Even Pauline Hanson's One Nation and "too-far-right-for-Pauline" Herr Fraser Anning support Medicare.

    ** Tennessee Valley Authority for example

    632:

    Well yes, unless you've got FTL and the capability of doing a detailed survey before landing, or something similar.

    Anyway, if space colonists are building with what they have, they could build something like the above-mentioned polybolos, or perhaps a repeating crossbow, and mount it on a drone. With springs and servos, it wouldn't be that difficult. It's woefully inefficient compared to a machine gun, but if the materials for guns and especially ammunition are in short supply compared with the materials for robotics or electric aircraft...why not? It makes for an interesting colonial weapons scene.

    633:

    I'm starting to have issues with this. For one, whether or not they have FTL, they WILL survey, very carefully... assuming that a probe (or more than one) has been sent to the system first, and heavily surveyed, to show that people should/could go and settle.

    Unless there's been a disaster on the way, or they're running from one, that will be the case.

    Next, they will have the means of productino - can you say "Von Neumann machines?" And even if the landing site hasn't been prepared before they get there, they will have a number of well-advanced 3D printers (or whatever they call them then). Whatever kind of weapon they discover they need, when it turns out that the large heard of bisonalikes, or brontosaurusalikes*, tramp through there on their annual migration, they'll print them.

    • I speak here as the retired chairman of the Save The Brontosaurus committee, happy that the bronto's been saved.
    634:

    Ah, the Great Question of St. Pierre and Miquelon...

    Time was, the Worldcon was "zoned", that is the continental US was divided into three zones, East Coast, West Coast and Central and the bidding for a US Worldcon went in rotation (Central was known as the Wimpy Zone for reasons).

    "Around and around and around goes the Worldcon, The East Coast and West Coast and Central and all, Sometimes the rest of the world gets a look-in, the kind-hearted Yanks let us play with their ball."

    For simplicity's sake and American arrogance, Canada was regarded as part of the CONUS for bidding purposes and divided akin to the zoning system but what about St. Pierre and Miquelon? Were they within the remit of the US zones system geographically speaking or not? If someone was to bid a Worldcon to be held either or both of the islands, would that bid be regarded as an out-of-CONUS bid and hence able to bid for any year rather than being zoned?

    Despite there being three chances of such a bid (slim, fat and no) this matter was debated furiously in fandom and made the subject of the WSFS Nitpicking and Flyspecking committee (yes there really is a WSFS Nitpicking and Flyspecking committee which tells you all you really need to know about fandom, but I digress.)

    I fail to recall the final disposition of the quandary but it was made moot by, first, the replacement of the zones system by a 500 mile (800km for rational human beings) exclusion zone for a future bid as measured from the site of the current seated Worldcon and second, the move to two-year bidding from three-year-bidding.

    The two wet rocks off Canada's coast still hold a treasured place in any fannish rules-lawyer's heart (the initials BY and KS spring to mind).

    635:

    Tennessee Valley Authority for example

    TVA is an odd duck. It came about to deal with flood control and try and drag south central US out of poverty by providing electricity to rural areas. (South Central is more of a phrase than an exact description as it is all east of the Mississippi river.)

    The flood of 1927 was sort of a setup for flood control that led to dams that led to electrical production that needed someone in charge of all the electricity coming out of them when begat the TVA. Which also created coal power plants. Then later nuclear. And so on. Dam's on the Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, etc... rivers were federal.

    It is hard to imagine TVA being formed today.

    I grew up with the TVA. They created the big lakes near me we all went to for recreation, the coal plant mostly built to supply power to the gasseous diffusion plant, and much of the power to various rural electric co-ops.

    The 30 acres we subdivided in the later 60s got subjected to some odd regulations. All power supplied to end points within 200 feet of the 1/4 lane that bordered the property was supplied power by the local for profit power company. Every point of presence over 200' from the lane "belonged" to the local Rural Electric Co-op.

    636:

    Tennessee Valley Authority for example

    TVA is an odd duck. It came about to deal with flood control and try and drag south central US out of poverty by providing electricity to rural areas. (South Central is more of a phrase than an exact description as it is all east of the Mississippi river.)

    The flood of 1927 was sort of a setup for flood control that led to dams that led to electrical production that needed someone in charge of all the electricity coming out of them when begat the TVA. Which also created coal power plants. Then later nuclear. And so on. Dam's on the Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, etc... rivers were federal.

    It is hard to imagine TVA being formed today.

    I grew up with the TVA. They created the big lakes near me we all went to for recreation, the coal plant mostly built to supply power to the gasseous diffusion plant, and much of the power to various rural electric co-ops.

    The 30 acres we subdivided in the later 60s got subjected to some odd regulations. All power supplied to end points within 200 feet of the 1/4 lane that bordered the property was supplied power by the local for profit power company. Every point of presence over 200' from the lane "belonged" to the local Rural Electric Co-op.

    637:

    For one, whether or not they have FTL, they WILL survey, very carefully

    If they do not have FTL and have not been sleeping all the way they will likely not ever leave the ship. To them the ship will be "home" and ANY planet just too weird to comprehend.

    638:

    I think the underlying theme is that no-one*, anywhere is entirely consistent, or acts in a way that is consistent with the things they say they believe, or represents what they believe in a way that doesn’t include some internal contradictions. It follows that there is no particular reason why we should expect people to be inconsistent in the same way from country to country, especially where there are language differences but even where there are not. Ideology fragments, then, in a way that is similar to Latin becoming French, Spanish and Italian. US, British and Australian RWNJism dialects might be mutually intelligible but they are different. And similar considerations apply on the left.

    • for values of “no-one” that include “approaching zero”, especially as a proportion of sample.
    639:

    I'm starting to have issues with this. For one, whether or not they have FTL, they WILL survey, very carefully... assuming that a probe (or more than one) has been sent to the system first, and heavily surveyed, to show that people should/could go and settle.

    Unless there's been a disaster on the way, or they're running from one, that will be the case.

    Yes, that's exactly right. Any technology capable of crossing interstellar space will be able to suss out the destination planet very, very carefully and equip itself with whatever means necessary to deal with what's there.

    Unless, as you say, there's been some sort of disaster and we're talking about a few desperate survivors just barely able to get down to the surface.

    640:

    Here's an example (sort of your disaster scenario):

    In the 2030s, someone builds a alcubierre-style warp ship that can land on a planet (handwave AI and a large, underused data center being repurposed to look for breakthrough tech). The warp bubble, when on, acts as an efficient shield, but the ship isn't designed to survive in interplanetary or interstellar space for extended periods (no micrometeoroid and minimal energetic particle defense).

    Finding planet B is a legitimate option, but the ship can't spend extended periods of time in deep space. What do they take with them? 3-D printers are a given, but these aren't replicators.

    What you'd take is the equipment needed to keep people alive, help them find and extract a variety of elements for feedstock for the ship and anything they build. Ideally you want one ship to carry the equipment needed to build a manufacturing center that can be used to build more starships. If this is possible, then civilization can expand as long as there are suitable planets within range, following the model that the Polynesians used to settle the Pacific. If this is not possible, then...

    When you talk about extended probe missions, Von Neummann machines, and so forth, you're making a few assumptions. The biggest one is that civilization is a prerequisite for colonization. It's not. Aside from Antarctica, pretty much every place modern states colonized on Earth had been colonized by humans hundreds to thousands of years previously. And to my knowledge, the colonies on Antarctica are not self-sustaining. There's a lesson in there about state abilities, I think.

    641:

    I think the TVA makes for an excellent example of "however your government operates, there will inevitably be some weird corner where nothing works like that". Over time those accumulate, which is one reason per occasionally refreshing the system.

    In the past that was one reason to count noses, and it has been amusing to watch the "can't happen here" cries from less democratic countries in the west when disturbances happen in explicitly authoritarian countries. I just hope we have countries long enough for that pendulum to swing back, because it appears that authoritarian governments are not compatible with even another generation of what we have now.

    642:

    US, British and Australian RWNJism dialects might be mutually intelligible

    Mostly, somewhat, kind of...

    643:

    For the Australians: Warmest Winter in U.S. History So Far (Bob Henson, February 6, 2020) Above: County-by-county temperature rankings for the contiguous U.S. for the period November 2019 through January 2020. Out of the 3134 counties and county equivalents (such as parishs) in the Lower 48 states, not a single one had a temperature significantly below the 20th-century average for the three-month period. The vast majority of counties came in well above average. (NOAA/NCEI)

    And yes, it's noticeable, and scary.

    644:

    That's pretty much what I was thinking.

    645:

    Moz @ 641 the "can't happen here" cries from less democratic countries in the west when disturbances happen in explicitly authoritarian countries. Ah yes ... one of the two closely-related subjects that could be guaranteed to annoy my father .... Remember, we are talking mostly about the 1950's here ...... "Couldn't happen here, it's only those nasty nazi & communist countries that don't understand democracy where that happens" BANG! Having mostly been in an only-lightly-wrecked section of Germany 1945-8 (Bielefeld), though passing through places that got it much worse ( Münster, Osnabrück, Paderborn ) & worked with the locals ... he knew quite well that, yes it could happen here & that well over 75%% of the German population really didn't want to know about Dolfie & his thug followers, but they got them, anyway.

    Bill Arnold But will they & the AUS & the other significant governements ( Brazil, India, China Germany ) actually take any notice?

    646:

    We just had a poll, and we have a Brexit-scale majority for possibly some small action to reduce climate change, depending on how you squint. Or you could equally accurately say that it's within the margin of error. The real answer is still that 90% of Australian voters are committed to coal exports, tax cuts, and fuck everyone including themselves.

    The Labour party are still dithering, but one thing they're clear on is that climate change is not an issue.

    https://www.alp.org.au/campaigns ... what's missing from this page?

    So I guess the answer is: Australia will increase our exports of coal and gas, while encouraging landclearing and "fly in to see the reef before it's all gone" tourism. Is that the sort of action on climate change you were thinking about?

    647:

    Speaking of an eventual independence for Scotland, I have completely fallen for their officially unofficial national anthem "Flower of Scotland" (one of the most beautiful anthems in the world imo).

    But listening to live recordings on youtube I can't help but notice the sports audiences shouting something between "...stood against him" and "Proud Edward's army".

    Is it just a simple "wahae" or something else?

    648:

    It also amazed me that in last December, I heard somebody say they had a dream of moving to Australia. On the other hand, I think they'd go well with that 90% of your voters. I refrained from asking that had they read the news about Australia lately, and where exactly were they planning to move to.

    649:

    I think the underlying theme is that no-one*, anywhere is entirely consistent, or acts in a way that is consistent with the things they say they believe, or represents what they believe in a way that doesn’t include some internal contradictions. ... And similar considerations apply on the left.

    You may already be aware of this, but there is a notable asymmetry in belief coherence. Psychologically speaking, not everyone does the same amount of cross-checking their beliefs and opinions for consistency. This difference positively correlates with political affiliations.

    That's not the same as what people say they believe in public, which is another matter.

    650:

    In spite of all we complain about here, it really is still a great place to live. Your perception of “90%” is really closer to a balance. Something you might remember is the way that certain electoral systems intrinsically favour rural electorates to the point that usually conservative rural voters’ votes are worth more than those of urban voters, usually more progressive. Then also remember that most Australians live in large cities*.

    And that nearly 30% were born overseas, with most immigrants coming from (east) Asia, and the net migration rate per capita double that of the UK, nearly triple that of the USA, roughly on a level with Norway. While Australia is a federation and not a unified jurisdiction for most day to day legal matter, the various Australian jurisdictions led the world on several early 20th century social issues like female suffrage, raising the age of sexual consent, abolishing capital punishment, the 8 hour day, social democrat politics, and so on. That doesn’t excuse its colonial past, but that applies in a lot of places, the UK more than anywhere.

    Education is one of Australia’s largest exports, while it doesn’t compete with iron ore or coal, that might not be a bad thing (it will one day).

    Europeans feel most comfortable in or near Melbourne. Those who think Australia is all about picking pumpkins on a farm in Queensland generally end up hating it, but with luck try Melbourne eventually and stay there.

    • 2/3 live in one of the five mainland state capitals.
    651:

    Yeah I’m aware of this asymmetry, which I think is very real and I feel like I encounter it every day (although that can’t possibly be true). But it’s a bit like saying “truth has a left-wing bias”, that a certain spectrum believe their own spin so much that failing to add it counts as unfairly favouring their Manichaean adversaries. If I avoid drawing attention to the fact this is something I think is really obvious, and doing so with obviously hollow handwaving (like “similar considerations apply”), some people might see this as an even handed observation on the human condition, and therefore at least be a little more willing to consider using it as an introspective opportunity. So in some ways ignoring the asymmetry is reflexive.

    However, handwaving aside, in this context there’s no such things as “the left”, what there is is a lot more diverse than all that, and for the most part the non-conservatives are at least self-aware enough to acknowledge their own failings (something that conservatives see as weakness, to their discredit and often tactical disadvantage).

    Like I’ve said before, with conservatives this only meaningful question is “who are the Good People, whom we should look after and treat as our own?”. They may not give a good-faith answer, but whatever answer they do give will bring out some useful details about what they actually believe, rather than what they think they believe or are willing to tell you they believe.

    652:

    Is it too late to be on topic?

    My idea for a rTV show:

    A bunch of people with heavy presence online competes in "Staying Off the Grid" i e without changing (too much) of their daily routines/lifestyles the goal is to be as untraceable by assorted automatic systems, social media etc as possible. After lets say a month, logs are compared on the contestants and the one with the smallest "log footprint" or highest untraceability wins (and will probably get an ankle bracelet so it won't happen again, by the authorities...)

    653:

    This sounds a lot like Hunted ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunted_(2015_TV_series) ) and also a USian version of same. (based on trailers, not watching the show)

    654:

    Sign of the times...

    A "cheap interesting crap" website I frequent (Banggood) is now headlining the fact that all their Chinese goods are currently being shipped from their Hong Kong warehouse, not Shenzen or other places on the mainland. The items they are shipping were made in places like Shenzen but the Hong Kong reference will perhaps allay some worries of people ordering stuff. There's also the downturn in international flights in and out of the mainland airports which carry a lot of small airfreighted postal packets, this is increasing the shipping times -- order info on Ebay is pushing delivery estimates for Chinese goods out into late March or even April.

    655:

    perhaps a repeating crossbow, and mount it on a drone

    If it's for defense against non-sentient wildlife, then you're presumably not worried about counter-battery fire, electronic countermeasures, or anything that can be approximated to "warfare". So techniques that would be laughably pointless in a human-on-human fight are actually worth investigating.

    For example: take your crossbow, with electric winder, mounted on a drone. Why not make the drone the crossbow bolt? That is: if you can make drones at all (microelectronics, servos, small motors) you can put steerable vanes on a crossbow bolt. Also presumably some sort of tracker -- either a laser designator or image recognition, or just radio guidance from the launch platform (because you're not worried about jammers).

    Upshot: the guided crossbow bolt. Which sounds pricey as hell but is implicitly reusable -- you salvage it from the target and if necessary remanufacture the rigid rod and penetrator but re-use the electronics.

    Also, a vehicle-mounted crossbow with an electrically-driven winder can probably achieve tension levels that no human-portable gadget would come close to combined with a reasonable rate of fire for targeting herds of carnivorous human-eating unicorns.

    656:

    My thoughts are more that the goal is to keep as normal as possible your personal life and habits, no "active" hunting - only passive automated systems already in place...

    657:

    Yes, that's exactly right. Any technology capable of crossing interstellar space will be able to suss out the destination planet very, very carefully and equip itself with whatever means necessary to deal with what's there.

    Yes.

    It's MUCH MUCH CHEAPER to build a gigantic long-baseline optical interferometry array in high solar orbit, possibly near the star's gravitational lensing point (700AU out, if I recall correctly) than it is to build any conceivable human-carrying starship.

    (When I say "gigantic" I mean something with multiple individual elements that would make the James Webb space telescope look like a spotting scope; something able to directly image land masses on a terrestrial planet 100 light years away. We have design studies, it's the sort of thing that could be built today if someone wanted to throw proximate Apollo program budgets at astronometry, never mind built in ten years time when Elon Musk's amazing fully reusable Mars rocket is flying commercial payloads.)

    658:

    You'd lose a lot of servos that way, and they're probably annoying to replace if they use any rare earth elements.

    That said, the general point is that shipping kewl gunz costs weight, and if you want to land a starship on an alien world for restock and refit, weapons to deal with primitive locals can be improvised in various and sundry ways, especially when the strengths and shortcomings of 3D printers, drones, and other things are taken into account.

    659:

    IIRC, it's "'Gainst Who?!", and then after the song provides the answer it's "Wankers!"

    Personally, though, I've always preferred the unofficial 'anthem' "Scotland the Brave"!

    660:

    Somewhat interesting mental exercise but to me it is just that.

    I'd go with crossbows. They are very useful in getting things from "here to there" over moderate distance. Like a rope across a big ditch or to the top of a hill or cliff. And if you are careful the ammo is retrievable in most cases and all of it can be made from local "stuff" without much industry. (If not just why are we there?)

    As to manufacturing, I keep wanting someone to explain how EM's Mars colony is going to deal with the required supply chains. I keep thinking of computer keyboards. When they break what happens? On an old typewriter someone with a modest tool kit and a pile of shims could repair almost any issues. Today not so much. And where do the replacement batteries (for everything) come from as the initial ones "wear out"?

    And this will seem trivial compared to someplace not in the solar system.

    Sorry. In somewhat of a curmudgeon mood today.

    661:

    Which makes you about unique; Cliff Hanley, who wrote it, is on record as saying he didn't really like "Scotland the Brave".

    662:

    Well, conceivable human starships fall under the "canned monkeys don't ship well" issue, so that's a bit of a red herring.

    The problem with setting up a structure at 700 AU is that Pluto is less than 40 AU from the Sun, and you have to look at the tricks they pulled to make New Horizons feasible: tiny probe with the barest minimum of communications ability, no capability of slowing down and minimal capability for course correction, launched on the biggest rocket we have, then put into hibernation for most of the trip so that it would retain the resources to complete a few days of data collection here and there.

    Also, the Kuiper Belt goes out to around 50 AU, and termination shock from the edge of the heliosphere is around 70-90 AU. But the Oort Cloud starts around 2000 AU. So setting up at 700 AU appears to be in a bit of a solar system desert, unprotected by the sun, with nothing nearby to use as an anchor or supply depot.

    To reach this particular abyss, you'd need propulsion systems that haven't been flight tested yet (and probably haven't been invented yet, since you want to actually hold station, which means you've got to stop and maneuver). And also the system will need multiple spacecraft holding precise positions relative to each other. And, since this orbit takes a very long time to go around the sun, you'll probably want to have a lot of them looking in different directions.

    Controlling it from Earth will be interesting, since by my calculation (probably wrong) 700 AU is about 97 light hours out. So send instructions, wait over 8 days to get back any response. You're also going to need to ship out a reasonably large power source for the antenna to send data to Earth, because doesn't broadcast power scale as the square of the distance or something?

    This is actually a good exercise, because if you want to colonize the Oort cloud, that's basically another 1-3 orders of magnitude further away than the gravitational lensing point. If you want to can some monkeys, ship them to cold little cometary wallflowers, and have them go from Oort body to Oort body while talking with each other, they're going to have to conquer far greater distances than this array will. And they'll have to do it with the resources they find in the Oort cloud.

    Challenging.

    This is why I think it's actually more sane to write stories about warp drives invented on Earth and launched directly to other systems, skipping the intermediates. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that the materials required to create a warp drive probably don't exist in this universe.* Unfortunately, positing the sensible star colonization program of putting out giant space telescopes and settling Mars first tend to highlight problems such as a) canned monkeys don't ship well and have limited shelf lives, b) solving climate change and running countries equitably are problems of the same or more trivial scale, and look at how we're doing on those, and c) research that would solve those problems (for example, studying anhydrobiosis to see if it can be induced in humans) simply isn't being done.

    Time for my antidepressants. Oh well.

    *Can their effects be created with metamaterials? Inquiring minds want to know.

    663:

    Pffft. If you can build a warp drive that'll take you to a star system a minimum of 5000 AU away, then you can use it to haul a cargo of telescopes to the gravitational lensing point 700 AU away, without the need to also haul a bunch of colonists and their pet cat.

    As I said, if you can build a colony starship you can put a telescope at the gravitational lensing point ... or a much closer but larger array of telescopes, say out past Jupiter where it's not going to get too badly heated by the sun.

    We're currently at the point where astronomers are building or planning segmented mirror 'scopes with light gathering areas 20-50 metres in diameter. This should be easier if you've got very cheap access to space (less support structures, for one thing). We've also go long baseline interferometers like the Keck observatory. So I'm thinking in terms of 3-6 50 metre segmented reflectors in an interferometry arrangement with a length of 10-100km, somewhere nice and cold. That should be able to directly image continents, possibly do some decent spectroscopic analysis of exoplanets, and track weather patterns (which also gives useful pre-colonist intelligence).

    664:

    As to manufacturing, I keep wanting someone to explain how EM's Mars colony is going to deal with the required supply chains. I keep thinking of computer keyboards. When they break what happens? On an old typewriter someone with a modest tool kit and a pile of shims could repair almost any issues. Today not so much. And where do the replacement batteries (for everything) come from as the initial ones "wear out"?

    It's an excellent point. I'd started with guns, because I knew that if started with a what if about colonial computers, the conversation would inevitably devolve into Mac vs. Linux. You're braver than I am.

    Since I've been thinking about a Polynesian-model starfaring culture, that basically has a toolkit that can be set down on a life-bearing planet and build another starship eventually to settle more planets, the biggest hangup after "how do you build a starship" is "how do you build computers." On Earth computers have truly immense supply chains and require massive and highly specialized fabrication facilities. Replicating that setup offworld is probably impossible until the planet is fully settled.

    On a colonial exoworld? You better be able to grow your own computers, either through dry nanotech (and how's that working out, incidentally?) or as membrane-bound molecular computers in bacteria or algae.

    The latter technology is already being tested (embedding organic logic gates in cellular membranes works), so if I had to guess, I'd suggest that future computers may well be highly engineered bacteria housed in motherboards that keep them happy and that relay data in and out*. If so, then fabricating the microfluidics assemblies needed to house and feed the bacteria while they work is a lot easier than hauling silicon chip fabricators around. The downside is that cell-based computers are then not much more rugged than humans are, and they'll need to be replaced much more frequently than current chips do. This in turn means things like long-duration satellites for communications, overwatch, and guidance are probably not possible, and drones have different vulnerabilities.

    This is how you design a culture that puts humans on the stars, and so far the results may be drones with biological brains flying around with servo-actuated crossbows. But if you can build these rigs on worlds that humans can colonize, in theory humans can colonize a lot of worlds. Provided they can also build starships there. Making a believable story around this, in a galaxy where people have been raised on light sabers and pew pew guns...that's the bigger challenge.

    *Biological computers may require some form of spam every day to stay functional...

    665:

    I think Dan Simmons got something right here regarding the starship/weapons discussion, which is that humanity may well subdivide into a high-grav and a low-grav species.

    666:

    Agreed. I was thinking more of things like the Very Long Baseline Array (radio telescopes coordinated across the planet), and those things I suspect work better when they're bolted to a planet where distances among telescopes only fluctuate a small distance every year.

    Still, it's worth thinking about the mission: fly a large optical telescope out to 700 AU. Do you sit there and make observations? This cuts all the lag and communication problems, at the expense of making your ship a sitting duck in interstellar space (personal dosimetry is the minimum you need to do). And how long do you observe before you head back in to analyze and plan to visit another planet?

    There's actually a good logistics question here. Alcubierre warp drives, IIRC, theoretically top out at velocities around 100 C. The warp ship, especially if it's built with 21st century technology, almost certainly will have a voyage limit in the months to maybe year range (based on things like consumables on submarines and the ISS), so a colonization effort is going to focus on nearby planets, not across the galaxy or even another spiral arm.

    Because of this short range compared with galactic distances, there's probably a point where it's better to go to the other star and observe the system at close range than it is to use a deep space telescope to observe it from the solar system. That's particularly true for Proxima Centauri, which a 100C drive could reach in a matter of weeks (days under warp drive, days matching velocities in the system under conventional drive). A system at the extreme warp range would almost certainly benefit from extended observation before a visit was attempted, especially if it might have to refit on a planet before warping home. That's where the deep space telescopes would be the most useful. I'm not sure where the break point is between the two, but it's an interesting question in itself.

    667:

    *Biological computers may require some form of spam every day to stay functional...

    Also takes the viral infection issues into very convoluted discussions.

    668:

    A lot of the rest of the world wonders why the Canadian spectrum stops to the right of centre.

    I wasn't aware that universal medical coverage (including drugs), universal child care, affordable housing, green energy, environmental protection, and a universal basic income were considered right-of-centre in the rest of the world.

    I learned something today. Thank you.

    669:

    Charlie Stross @ 528: Yes, the RAF could in principle do a Berlin airlift to keep Gibraltar fed.

    Whether the current government would is another matter, especially if Brexit goes badly awry and stuff is scarce back home.

    My point was that if push comes to shove, the RAF won't have to do airdrops since Gibraltar has a perfectly good runway.

    Maybe somebody can dig up some of Maggies old speeches about the Falklands & re-purpose them for Gibraltar.

    670:

    Allen Thomson @ 541:

    Yes, the RAF could in principle do a Berlin airlift to keep Gibraltar fed

    Er, why not sealift? Looking at the map, Gibraltar seems pretty accessible from the water unless Spain wanted to escalate things beyond the point they'd probably think prudent. And Proudly Sovereign UK could perhaps call on its good friend the US to help out with a few ships to underscore the point.

    Anyway, Gibraltar, according to Wikipedia, has less than 35,000 people, so the logistics don't seem too intimidating.

    Or am I missing something?

    Someone suggested doing air drops to supply the people of Gibraltar with food. I pointed out they've got a perfectly good runway where the planes doing the supply runs can land, so why would you want to do air drops?

    Sea-lift would be the most economical, reasonable way to supply the territory if Spain insists on closing the border & the EU backs them up, and that's what it will probably come down to if Charlie is wrong about Bozo just begging for some excuse to cut them loose.

    P.S.: IMO, the UK should turn Gibraltar over to Spain in a polite and dignified way sooner rather than late

    Probably happen right about the time the U.S. decides to give Manhattan Island back to the descendants of the Lenape tribe ... if they can find any. The problem, as I understand it, is the people who live there now don't want to be part of Spain. Especially since a good bit of Spain apparently doesn't want to be part of Spain anymore.

    671:

    and those things I suspect work better when they're bolted to a planet where distances among telescopes only fluctuate a small distance every year.

    Bolting them to a tectonically-active planet is actually a problem requiring a lot of active compensation and computational fiddling to prevent the signal being buried in the noise. Atmospheric temperature fluctuations and other anomalies also cause problems, as do the tidal effects on the Earth's crust from our massive Moon.

    Out in space, in the Deep Dark and well away from God's Vacuum Cleaner (Jupiter) things are a lot more stable and predictable. The various parts of a spaceborne VLBI array, whether optical or, more likely, wideband EM running from LF up to X-rays don't have to be precisely fixed in position to the nanometre as long as the detector's instantaneous position and orientation can be determined on the fly and logged along with the photon that's been collected. After that it's a SMOP (Simple Matter Of Processing) to synthesize the desired image.

    The orbital telescope concept that I read about in a story in an old issue of Analog was one with a "dish" big enough that all the segments of the mirror were one-metre-square optical flats, something that can be churned out cheap in quantity ten thousand since flats are easier to figure than anything curved. By the time they had mostly populated the 3-kilometre telescope's framework with mirrored flats the astronomers using it were starting to resolve cities on distant planets, never mind continents.

    672:

    Finding the Lenape isn't hard. They're on Wikipedia, and there are multiple communities left, possibly up to 20 of them.

    That's where the fun begins. I know it was a throwaway line, but read the article to see why you were right anyway. Settling the argument over who'd have to forfeit the beads back to the Dutch would probably take years.

    673:

    Heteromeles @ 581:

    Have you spotted the problem with this? Huge lifestyle changes, to a mode of existence requiring a degree of socialization they've been trained for generations to reject by a toxic brew of racist red-lining, brain-dead zoning regulations, motor industry lobbying, and cultural worship of the detached house with white picket fence as a suburbian utopia (itself having replaced the family homestead farm)

    Oddly enough, that's precisely what we're doing here in San Diego. The high end housing market ($500k and up) is saturated, companies are still adding jobs, rents are skyrocketing (abetted by landlords switching to AirBnB and similar), and people don't have places to live that they can afford with less than a 50 mile commute.

    As for racist red-lining, brain-dead zoning regulations, motor industry lobbying, and cultural worship of the detached house with white picket fence as a suburban utopia? I think you might want to do a bit more research. You missed the corruption and profit-seeking behavior of international companies.

    Raleigh City Council just approved a 40 story apartment building development that's supposed to include "affordable" housing.

    674:

    "So I'm thinking in terms of 3-6 50 metre segmented reflectors in an interferometry arrangement with a length of 10-100km, somewhere nice and cold."

    You forgot: "and heavy"

    If you build a structure that size in zero-G, you'll have a really lousy time orienting it without using rockets which would foul your mirror in no time. Reaction wheels would have to be either massive, or intolerably slow.

    Building it on the moon would be much smarter, then you can just use regular motors and servos, and you still avoid the atmosphere and 5/6th of the gravity.

    The biggest benefit of zero-G would be duration: You would be able to stare at the same spot for days and weeks if you wanted to. You can probably get pretty long durations on the moon too, but you will invariably be cut by ground reflection.

    ESO explored building the ELT on the South Pole, as the added cost might scientifically be offset by exposure windows of up to a week, in the end Chile won out, because it is the global optimum on this planet for astronomy.

    675:

    Heteromeles @ 592: You might want to also ask Dan Simmons (Hyperion, 1990) and David Brin (Earth, 1990) if you can borrow the concept, since both stories featured dropping a black hole into Earth.

    One question for the geezers: what was that prompted two noted SF authors independently(?) made dropping a black hole into the planet a major plot point?

    Wasn't it around that time that the first proposals to build what eventually became the Large Hadron Collider were floated? I vaguely remember opponents suggesting it could possibly create a tiny singularity black-hole that would then get loose & eat the earth.

    676:

    whitroth @ 602: Ever heard of the movie, The Lost Missile?

    Don't take an intelligent 9 yr old with an active imagination to see it. With luck, you'll get out of the theatre before they barf from the tension.

    Read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I remember seeing that movie when I was around 9 or 10 years old. 8^)

    677:

    Um, nope, sorry, I cannot imagine any spaceship, esp. a starship, that didn't have serious protection against micrometeroids and radiation.

    678:

    Here in the DC area, I was just commenting to Ellen the other day that we've had more rain this winter than I've ever seen. It seems to be cloudy/raining most days of most weeks.

    679:

    Gah....

    Saw a piper and his band last couple years at the Maryland Renfaire. The first year, got a high five and a handshake when I told him I was ecstatic that he had neither Scotland the Brave nor A Grazing Mace, er, sorry, Amazing Grace on none of his CDs. He told me except for special occasions, on request, he never does them.

    He does, however, go across the water, and do O'Carolan....

    680:

    Hey, no problem on a lot of those things.

    Of course, they'd have to be done by someone who was vehemently anti-modern-capitalist, and so make computers, and keyboards, and clothes that did not fall apart at warranty+1sec.

    681:

    A stupid question: why do you need to hold station, other than alignment for what you're looking at? You're not anywhere near anything, so it's not like you need to adjust your orbit for other things....

    682:

    Robert Prior @ 611: "italics"

    I thought it was a given that everything was bigger in Texas?

    Another myth busted! :-)

    Texas was proudly the largest state before Alaska was admitted to the Union. So much so that there were many jokes made at Texas's expense.

    One of my favorites that I still remember:

    A Texan and an Alaskan are working on a cattle boat headed for China. They end up standing side by side urinating over the side railing of the ship. The Texan decides to engage in a little Texas style braggadocio and says to the the Alaskan, "Damn! This water sure is cold."
    The Alaskan just smiles and says "Deep too."
    683:

    Two things: one, Linux. You've got the source code, too. You're not going to get updates from Earth in a timely manner....

    Second... why are you so interested in colonizing one world after another? It's taken us a couple of years to explore this one (y'know, two or three...). Is this some engineered in "Must Colonize More Worldz"?

    684:

    Yup!

    Spacecraft in LEO, like Hubble, need to keep close control over their trajectory because low orbit is crowded with debris and other satellites.

    Even in GEO, there are limited slots directly over the equator.

    But out beyond Jupiter you've got multiple orders of magnitude more elbow room in all three spatial dimensions.

    Your telescope needs to keep orientation on its obsversation target and on whatever it uses to relay results back home, but stationkeeping can be loose to the nearest thousand kilometres when you're millions of km from the nearest object larger than a trash can.

    685:

    Wasn't it around that time that the first proposals to build what eventually became the Large Hadron Collider were floated? I vaguely remember opponents suggesting it could possibly create a tiny singularity black-hole that would then get loose & eat the earth.

    Different accelerator and later than 1990, but yes:

    https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/blackHoles.asp

    686:

    Oh, crap. Thanks, I guess... I'd not seen that an Alcubierre drive would top out at 100C.

    Hell, I don't care. In 11k years, their version of the drive is orders of magnitude faster.... (Working on finishing what's going to be a novel.)

    687:

    I'm personally fond of Amazing Grace, but to each his own. Years ago, Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion gave a demonstration of how it's possible to sing the words of Amazing Grace to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club. Perhaps that will serve as a palate cleanser.

    688:

    One of the ways around the problem of “how do you build the complicated things for the colony” is to make the complicated things (like computer chips) last a very very long time. Like tens of thousands of years long. Especially the ones with no moving parts

    This would likely work well in an environment where cost was no object and you don’t have to deliver cutting edge performance.

    Then the parts that do experience mechanical wear and need replacing you make as simple as possible

    I think it’s one of the angles Elon is pursuing with tesla and probably one of the reasons the cybertruck exists

    Then your colony doesn’t have to bootstrap everything all at once it can do it in phases matching up with lifetimes of components

    689:

    Sea lift... because I started this part of the thread, suggesting that the EU Navy (which exists, right?) blockades Gibraltar.

    On and about that island in NY state... back in 1976, when the banks were deliberately screwing NYC, and setting up a default, a spokesman for the tribe got on the air (this was on radio and in the papers at the time, really), saying that it's been weighing on them for centuries, that their ancestors knew it was a bad deal and trouble, and so they were offering to give back the $27 in beads, and take Manhattan Island off the white folks' hands....

    690:

    You would almost certain not want what we're being handed as "cutting edge" on any kind of space-ship.

    Semiconductors are already using so small feature-sizes that five years ago they could statistically show more single-bit upsets in the top half of racks compared to the bottom half on federal supercomputers, and more upsets on the Mesa than at site Y.

    I'm wondering if the compute cluster for the ELT mirror's AO I'm working on, will even function long enough for regular observations at 3km altitude.

    691:

    "But out beyond Jupiter you've got multiple orders of magnitude more elbow room in all three spatial dimensions."

    You dont actually need to go that far, and the need to bring a nuclear reactor to drive the home beacon is a very big downside before you get anywhere near Mars.

    You should be looking at the Lagrange points, even though they, by nature, attracts dirt.

    The Gaia satellite, for instance, is doing mightly fine at L2, even though it is a bit of a bother to have to do figures of 8 to get light on the solar panels.

    692:

    The problem, as I understand it, is the people who live there [Gibraltar] now don't want to be part of Spain.

    Yeah, that was established a while ago in a referendum. But it appears that the people who live there now also want to remain with the EU. That generates a conundrum, no?

    Especially since a good bit of Spain apparently doesn't want to be part of Spain anymore.

    Mostly and most troublesomely Cataluña. I understand but have not much sympathy for their position in these post-Franco days. Some of my in-laws are on the other side of Spain in Galicia which has its own separatist movement, so I try to keep up with them too. Like with UK/EU, though they have their legitimate grievances and positions, IMO they'd do better to stay with Spain and try to make things work better.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_independence

    693:

    You just need enough lead harvested from sunken pre-1945 U-boat batteries to protect the memory banks from cosmic rays, right?

    So, competing with the medical gamma knife manufacturers for a scarce resource?

    694:

    Um, nope, sorry, I cannot imagine any spaceship, esp. a starship, that didn't have serious protection against micrometeroids and radiation.

    Well, serious protection against micrometeroids and radiation is one of the things hanging up interplanetary missions. One of the great appeals of warp bubbles and wormholes is that you minimize or avoid exposure to these things.

    This is part of the whole "canned monkeys don't ship well" discussion. We probably never will have STL starships in real life, so if we want to talk about alien biospheres it's fantasy, and authors are free to figure out how to get the characters to the planet where the story is set.

    However, one of the great failings of many such stories is that all the breakthrough technologies that made the ship possible have no effect on the story. Available technology radically shapes what stories are possible (imagine Romeo and Juliet if they both had cell phones and texted each other constantly). Most SF authors, at least in my limited experience, spend too much effort avoiding the problems imposed by their inventions, instead of incorporating them.

    Now obviously you can have a plantary fantasy with radiation shields and micrometeroid defenses, but if you're interested in being logical (e.g. hard SF), then these technologies also occur on the ground. This may in turn affect things like, oh, warfighting. For example, if your ship systems can shrug off the impact from a 1 kg object at interstellar velocities, what can they do on the ground? Make a nuke-proof castle for the local evil overlord, perhaps? That's worth thinking about in terms of setting. Starships require so many radically new technologies that they can radically remake whatever society looks like on the ground. Insist on generation ships, and it's silly to not have every radical dropout cult with some money go hive off and go live in its own bombproof arcology for a few centuries. Such an arcology is simply a terrestrial generation ship without an engine. And it will be impenetrable and quite possibly inescapable. What does that do to local or planetary politics? Is the world a collection of sealed domes containing seething radicals who don't and can't talk to outsiders?

    Or, how do you deal with evil overlords who subvert starship technologies and use them against their own subjects? Impenetrable lairs are just the beginning. You've got as big a problem if you have warp ships that can't be attacked except through informational warfare, because if you can make a starship commit suicide through psyops and infowar, imagine what you can do to your poorly organized opposition (and note, this warfare is happening now, worldwide and especially in the US).

    Ultimately, it depends on what kind of story you want to tell. I've done a fair amount of work on Polynesian-style colonization, where the system is geared towards not just living off the land, but bootstrapping from ship landing to building new ships as quickly as possible without magically self-instantiating global supply chains. This is because I'm interested in stories about creatively dealing with harsh limits, and I'm also interested in writing about the damage such a society causes. Other people have different interests.

    695:

    whitroth the EU Navy (which exists, right?) Erm ... NO/Wrong The largest navies in Europe are .. ours, the French & the Russians ... in numbers. Greece has lots of "littoral" ships.

    696:

    whitroth @ 622: I dunno. There's a lot of "white folks" whose brains seem to be shrunk, they keep voting for morons (e.g, W and Cruz).

    Abraham Lincoln said it best, "You CAN fool SOME of the people all of the time. And he didn't even have Fox Newz to contend with.

    697:

    "You just need enough lead harvested from sunken pre-1945 U-boat batteries to protect the memory banks from cosmic rays, right?"

    Not even close.

    The problem is not the particles you can stop with heavy metals, the problem is the ones you cant and where you need half a meter of HDPE as ceiling.

    If it becomes a problem, I suspect they'll drill a tunnel into the mountain, but who knows.

    We've suggested they buy a cheap hot Epyc machine, put it on the mountain running memtest86 and keep an eye on it for some months.

    698:

    Heteromeles @ 632: Well yes, unless you've got FTL and the capability of doing a detailed survey before landing, or something similar.

    Anyway, if space colonists are building with what they have, they could build something like the above-mentioned polybolos, or perhaps a repeating crossbow, and mount it on a drone. With springs and servos, it wouldn't be that difficult. It's woefully inefficient compared to a machine gun, but if the materials for guns and especially ammunition are in short supply compared with the materials for robotics or electric aircraft...why not? It makes for an interesting colonial weapons scene.

    My recommendation was bring tools & plans, particularly plans & instructions for how they set up factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution and concentrate on tools that can make other tools. Probably going to be a while before you get to the point where you can manufacture real high tech.

    Then if you need a polybolos you can make one. If you need something else you can make that instead.

    As far as fire-arms go, I'd take a limited number of good rifles with GOOD OPTICAL SIGHTS (so you have an easier time taking down something at long range - whether it be a predator or food) and plenty of ammo, just in case it takes a while getting your gunpowder mill up and running. But you'll probably get more use out of a factory that can make barb-wire to keep the local herbivore analog out of the crops. Make the herbivores go somewhere else, and the predators will follow.

    Another thing you need to think about is getting your colony spread out so that you're not all in one spot, just in case you didn't notice you placed your settlement is right in the migration path during that one time of the "year" when all the rabbit analogs suddenly turn into ravenous, swarming predators?

    If you can imagine it, it will go wrong. Your problems will come from all the ways things will go wrong that you didn't, couldn't imagine. Do you know how to put up a telegraph to keep your scattered communities in communication when your radios wear out? At least until your manufacturing base reaches a level it can make radios (vacuum tubes, transistors, ...)?

    699:

    Allen Thomson @ 639: Unless, as you say, there's been some sort of disaster and we're talking about a few desperate survivors just barely able to get down to the surface.

    The more interesting story might be some sort of disaster here on earth and a few desperate survivors just barely able to get out of the Solar System. In such a case, they might scatter like dandelion seeds on the wind and at the other end of the journey they take what they can get. Most will fail & die, but some might survive.

    And that would constrain colony logistics as well, because in the mad scramble to escape, you can't get everything you need, much less everything you want.

    700:

    Re: 'The problem is not the particles you can stop with heavy metals, ...'

    Would graphene work for this application? I'm thinking mostly as an exterior/protective coat only because graphene is still hideously expensive to produce. Also - because carbon is a very commonly occurring element almost everywhere you point a telescope, once you get the manufacturing process figured out, you can make it anywhere - no need to ship your raw building supplies.

    Getting the carbon atoms into the correct graphene conformation is still the big hang-up although there appears to be some progress given how scientific papers regularly appear with various work-arounds.

    https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ta/c9ta01332f#!divAbstract

    'Abstract

    A novel process is developed for high-volume production of low-cost graphene materials from any solid carbon resources, especially biomass sources. Few-layer graphene materials from solid carbon resources are produced through a molecular cracking and welding (MCW) method. The MCW technique is a single step process with two stages, i.e., graphene-encapsulated core–shell nanoparticles are first formed by catalytic thermal treatment of solid carbon materials. Then in the second stage these core–shell structures are opened by ‘cracking molecules’, and the cracked graphene shells are self-welded and reconstructed to form high quality multilayer graphene materials at a heating temperature with selected welding reagent gases. This novel graphene material with super hydrophobic properties can be used to filter water from crude oil emulsions in the petroleum industry.'

    701:

    RE: Charlie @488

    Something has gone very, very wrong when the government has been captured by the mining lobby so effectively.

    I have a sneaking suspicion that the something is named Murdoch and is also largely responsible for government capture by regressive/resource-extraction-focused groups in any number of other polities.

    702:

    sigh satire /satire

    703:

    Hmm... One thing I'm working hard at is seriously integrating technologies with the society.

    Oh, and that's something that I had not thought of, nor do I remember reading it: have the large (or generation) ship come down, and be an arcology as a start to the colony.

    Great, then in 20 years, only the low-class people still live in it, then, 30 years later, they're all forced out by gentrification....

    704:

    Oh, I agree on the plans. Also, I don't think rifle propellant (gunpowder) is a real hindrance, although you need sources of sulfur and energy to make the nitrates.

    The real problem is that, AFAIK, you need lead or mercury for the primers, and potentially lead for the bullets. These are dense and toxic. Explosives with lead or mercury in them aren't the greatest idea inside a closed ship, because the elements just don't go away. Now obviously you can use copper, steel, tungsten, or any number of other things for the bullets (with some loss of function), but it's the primer that's the problem. If you don't need it, why take it? A better machine shop or chemistry lab would be better use of mass in most cases.

    Actually, there's the other question of which metals you take with you as ingots or feedstocks, and which you wait until you can mine them, but that's another bootstrapping issue.

    Anyway, I absolutely agree on bringing the plans for all the stuff you might want to build, including things like microchip fabricators, even if there's no expertise to use it. The question is what do you actually bring with you in the ship.

    705:

    Alan Dean Foster, "Quozl". Lagomorphic aliens are horrified to find Earth has intelligent life when they get here. Generation ship is landed in an isolated valley somewhere in the NW USA and landscaped. First contact ensues, second contact goes somewhat better.

    706:

    The Murdoch empire has always been linked closely with mining interests. The series of buyouts, takeovers and consolidation of newspapers could be said to have started at Broken Hill, with Murdoch-owned company-friendly papers taking over or otherwise encompassing or blocking worker-friendly ones (often through front companies or individuals who proved to be Murdoch clients) back in the 1950s.

    So yes it’s connected and no it’s not an accident or coincidence.

    707:

    No problem. Lead - you mean, you're not using some in the ship for shielding? If not, it's still no problem: the billionaire(s) on the ship will, most likely, be goldbugs, and they might even plan to use gold as shielding. So you've got this really heavy metal, and you can turn gold into lead, with some spare hydrogen to use.

    Oh, and make sure the billionaires are well massaged, so that they'll be up there with Kobe beef.

    708:

    I've actually got a better inducement than gold, but it's part of the story I'll write one day after I finish the one I'm fiddling with now.

    709:

    JBS@ 682: many jokes made at Texas's expense.

    In Len Deighton's The Ipcress File (pub. 1962), there's a throwaway line of dialogue: "Of course Alaska is the biggest state in the Union. Just ask any Texan." [1]

    Heteromeles @ 687: it's possible to sing the words of Amazing Grace to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club.

    They're both in ballad meter, so each can be sung to the other's tune. Other examples: the theme to Gilligan's Island, as well as a large fraction of Emily Dickinson's poetry.

    [1] Just looked Deighton up to make sure I'd spelled his surname correctly. His 91st birthday is on February 18th.

    710:

    "Explosives with lead or mercury in them aren't the greatest idea inside a closed ship, because the elements just don't go away."

    Oh, they do. They come out of the explosion as finely divided oxide in suspension, ie. smoke. This then passes out of the spaceship along with the atmosphere through the hole you've just shot in it. Even if your colonists aren't the type to have gun battles in the spaceship before they even get there, you're still probably going to be a bit twitchy about having sensitive explosives on board in case they go off by themselves.

    Mercury-based primers are kind of old fashioned. Lead compounds tend to be less unstable as well as less toxic. Lead styphnate is stable enough that you can dig it out of the cap of a cartridge with a screwdriver and it probably won't go off. If anyone suggests using silver compounds chuck them out of the airlock.

    I reckon you would want to take some explosives with you to start you off, unless you're planning on doing all the mining by hand. Gunpowder can be used for both guns and mining, but if you weren't seeking that dual applicability you'd not choose it, rather you'd choose a high explosive which is highly stable, extremely difficult to set off, and impossible to use in guns because it blows them apart. You don't need primers at all; you set it off by sending a high energy laser pulse down an optical fibre with a wee bit of aluminium on the end. This way you don't have to worry about stuff going bang by accident on the spaceship, and optical fibre is a lot lighter than wire for electrical detonators.

    You will need sulphur for making explosives whether or not the explosive itself contains sulphur, but you will need a lot more of it for ore processing. Fortunately ore deposit formation in hydrothermal systems is close enough to being the same process the other way round that you get the sulphur right along with the metal (and the surface geology will show you where to look). It's also obtainable by various different forms of bioconcentration.

    You do need to have some lead to make the reaction vessel to convert the sulphur to sulphuric acid. (There are numerous ways to do it without the lead reaction vessel but they all suck.) Your hydrothermal sulphide ore deposit will almost certainly have some lead in it somewhere, and it's a piece of piss to smelt, but it might take you a while to find that bit of it, so you might want to bring some with you anyway.

    The traditional source of nitrates is air oxidation and leaching of the nitrogenous content of piles of shit. So with your giant sauropods providing feedstock you should be well set.

    711:

    Odd, I'm quite familiar with that idea, though I can't cite any definite instances. Thing is it can be a bit awkward to set things up so as not to get caught in all the difficulties of landing a ship that size.

    712:

    You don't have to move a multiple-kilometre-sized assembly as a unit. You just need some insubstantial alternative to rigid girders for determining the relative positions of the sub-units. The sub-units can twiddle themselves around on the spot using gyros. There's very little need for translation, and what there is could be met by using something like small iron balls for the reaction mass, launched electromagnetically, so you can be sure nothing is going to hang around and mess up the optics.

    713:

    You could make the primer be an electric ignition device rather then a chemical one if you really wanted to. Remember reading an alternate history once where that was done

    714:

    Yeah, electronic ignition has been tried. It was generally found wanting, but I think versions are still for sale. The reasons it didn't work out as desired are actually kind of interesting.

    715:

    Whitroth Sorry ... but some others seem to have believed this EU/Gibraltar malarkey far too readily .... since any dispute will be about trade across that boundary.

    716:

    Economically if we compare Canada to, say, Venezuela, Vietnam or China and I reckon the political parties come out as going all the way over to the centre-right. Politically Canada lacks that key Communist or anti-capitalist party of government that is the hallmark of left-wing countries.

    universal medical coverage (including drugs), universal child care, affordable housing, green energy, environmental protection, and a universal basic income

    Wait, what? When did Canada get a UBI? I knew Ontario killed a small trial, but not because the national one replaced it. That would impress me as radical left, but I can't see anything online. Do you have a link?

    Canada is worst out of the 100-odd countries that have "universal" health care, according to a Canadian.

    And sure, we can agree that tar sands are "green energy" and that whatever the hell Canada is doing with the tar sands tailing ponds is "environmental protection". Maybe I should rethink my objections to uranium mining :(

    But by "left of centre" I was meaning globally, not compared to the US or Australia. So I wonder who is the Canadian equivalent to the German "Left Party" (Die Linke) or even the Danish Socialist People's Party. Both have elected MPs but in Canada... neh.

    717:

    Just how big is Gibraltar anyway? It looks small enough that you could simply pick it up and take it home, thus solving both the death of heavy industry problem and the political problem in one fell swoop. Plus England wouldn't have to worry about where to export stuff if your spare productive capacity was busy towing a cubic kilometre of rock up the Thames.

    718:

    Just how big is Gibraltar anyway? It looks small enough that you could simply pick it up and take it home, thus solving both the death of heavy industry problem and the political problem in one fell swoop.

    Geographically, Gibraltar sits at the narrowest part of the straits connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. At that point, the straits are roughly 20-25km wide, narrow enough for visual observation and monitoring through a spyglass and for mid-Victorian land-based artillery to interdict.

    To a maritime trading empire this was of enormous strategic value -- even more so after the Suez Canal was dug.

    Whether it's of value today is a moot point, but there's a reason for the gigantic former Royal Navy presence there: it's the last bottleneck keeping the Soviet Russian Black Sea fleet out of the Atlantic (and vice versa), ditto for the Italian, Greek, Ottoman Turkish, Egyptian, Israeli, Libyan etc. navies, allows interdiction of anything travelling via the Suez canal (i.e. taking a shortcut to avoid sailing the long way around Africa), and so on. Given that the Foreign Office likes to think in terms of geopolitical strategy over centuries, not years, it's hard to see them letting go of it ...

    (As for the Falklands/South Georgia? That was the UK's excuse for a permanent presence in Antarctica, as a locally involved power: also for possible South Atlantic oil drilling, although that turns out to have been a damp squib.)

    719:

    if your ship systems can shrug off the impact from a 1 kg object at interstellar velocities

    If interstellar velocity means 0.1c, then that 1 kg object delivers 108.3 kilotons TNT equivalent. (That's relativistic kinetic energy which, at 30,000 km/s, is only slightly more than the conventional KE.)

    720:

    And a disadvantage of travelling at 0.1c; an alpha particle is basically a stripped He nucleus traveling at 0.01c. There is helium in the interstellar medium, very very roughly one atom per cubic metre; so each square metre of your frontal surface is sweeping up 30 million ten-times-higher-than-normal-energy alpha particles per second (not to mention twice that many betas -- electrons -- from the electrons coupled with those "alpha particles", not to mention the metric fuckton of neutral hydrogen molecules -- about a hundred times as much H2 as He in the interstellar medium). And you've got to survive this environment for years. A light year is roughly 10^16 metres, a reasonable target star system is at least 10 light years away so 10^17 metres, so even without hitting any dust particles (never mind rocks!) the front end of your starship is going to be hot on arrival, for "inside the Chernobyl Sarcophagus" values of hot.

    721:

    Yes, landing your STL ship next to your new colony may not be the brightest idea...unless you've got a way of quickly encasing the hot stuff and turning it into a generator of some sort. Just design it to fold in on itself, after centuries of interstellar battering. Not a problem...

    That brings up another fun bit of kit: the single stage to orbit shuttle to lighter the people and materials off the starship that's stuck in orbit. If the shuttle is a rocket, this gets interesting, because you've got to land the shuttle, not just with a cargo-hold of supplies, but also with enough fuel in the tanks so that it can reach orbit again. So you've got to deal with the rocket equation. I'm not a fan of the math, but to a first approximation, basically you're landing a very large egg full of rocket fuel on undeveloped ground, or possibly water. Granted, it's a very tough egg, but if it's a rocket, the ratio of shell to contents isn't a bad approximation for the ratio of ship plus cargo to fuel that you'll need to get it back up to the mothership. And there's no runway, unless you've got a nice, calm lake or excessively flat dry lake bed to land it on.

    Hopefully instead you've got the Mr. Fusion MiniMax Torch bolted on, ready to blow out absurd levels of thrust with tiny amounts of fuel. But that might not be something you want to light off near the colony either.

    It's worth echoing the point (as more technical SFF writers have known from the 60s) that this is why things like reactionless thrusters, FTL travel, artificial gravity, and energy shields (and cheap, tiny fusion generators for that matter) actually aren't as stupid as they sound. Sure they're likely to be physically impossible. Unfortunately, their real world alternatives are implausible to the point of impossibility too.

    722:

    The first landing (or first set of landings depending on your shuttles) is a fuel plant and the power generator to drive it. If the planet is habitable you've got a source of carbon dioxide and water to feed through an Elon-Musk-On-Mars methane plant, then second landing is a nearly empty SuperHeavy equivalent first stage and third is the crane to put the shuttle back on top of the booster.

    723:

    Are we talking about the political spectrum, or the parties in power?

    I mentioned policies endorsed by political parties*, hence on the political spectrum.

    If you meant that Canadian political policies are considered right-of-centre in the rest of the world, then you should have said that.

    *And not just the Communist Party of Canada, which is a registered political party fielding candidates in elections.

    724:

    That brings up another fun bit of kit: the single stage to orbit shuttle to lighter the people and materials off the starship that's stuck in orbit. If the shuttle is a rocket, this gets interesting, because you've got to land the shuttle, not just with a cargo-hold of supplies, but also with enough fuel in the tanks so that it can reach orbit again.

    Nope, not true. This is where Elon Musk gets interesting; his Heavy/Starship design is intended to work with fuel that can by synthesized on Mars, given enough electricity -- methane/LOX, which you can make from carbon dioxide and water. And the synthetic fuel plant will have to be landed from orbit and the ships turned around on the Martian surface. These ingredients are also available on any terrestrial-habitable planet; the only missing angle is the Heavy first stage/booster, and that is supposed to be built out of stainless steel fabrications.

    The tail-squatter landing is also pretty neat. Was science fiction right up until, oh, about five years ago -- then we got boosters touching down in formation and people on the internet snarking because it wasn't dead on the centre of the target painted on the landing barge in sea state 2.

    Frankly, if you can build a real interstellar vehicle, doing the up-and-down shuttlecraft bit should be straightforward.

    725:

    Re: [Canada] - anti-capitalist party

    The NDP is the largest leftist national party in Canada. Never read up on the actual communist party in Canada but the bits I've seen come across as a stuck in the 1940's anti-establishment.

    Re: healthcare

    Was surprised about the ranking you mentioned [100th] therefore looked it up. It appears that depending on who ranks healthcare systems, i.e., variables measured, Canada's ranking is anywhere from top-10 to top-40.

    BTW - I did read the link you posted re: Canada's indigenous people's healthcare coverage. Was surprised because my impression is this was/is a major party platform item for the current federal gov't party [Liberals]. Also, recall seeing/reading how some of the provinces were establishing distance-medicine (via Internet) to help with access esp. for folks in very remote areas. Know of a couple (physician & dentist) who did a 3-year medical stint in some very northern part of Canada. But they couldn't hack the weather/lack of sun plus one of them wanted to specialize in a very research-intensive field of medicine therefore they left.

    I think any jurisdiction where there's a combination of remote-location plus extreme weather is likely to be 'under-serviced'.

    726:

    You might want to reread what you just wrote, because it's bonkers.

    You're positing a setup that's a multistage booster and a single stage to orbit simultaneously. Vulch made the same, really bad, mistake. And yes, this was actually a major plot point in the first (crappy) book I wrote.

    The simplest solution is to break up the colony ship and land the habitable parts, as in Red Mars and other books. You can, of course, do Musk's thing of setting up multi-stage rockets, but you've got to land the pieces, assemble on site, create a fuel depot on site, and blast off. Once. These aren't reusable, and you've got to carry the pieces with you in the starship. On Mars this makes sense. At the far end of a one-way interstellar trip? Not so much.

    If you want to lighter (land the same, single ship repeatedly), then you've got the paradox I just described. It shows up many times in SFF: the starship can't land, but has shuttles that carry stuff down to the surface and come back for more. If they don't have reactionaless thrusters, they usually work by magic fusion torches that allow the shuttle to land (usually on water in the stories) and hit the fusion motor and take off to orbit, hopefully like this, not like this.

    The more creative rocket to orbit, first published in SF I think by Niven and Pournelle in Footfall and used occasionally since, is laser propulsion, where the colonizing force uses something like a laser ablative rocket to carry stuff into orbit. The good part about this is that it's SSTO. The awkward part are the arrays of laser cannons that you need to build and power before this setup works, and that probably means you've got to carry a lot of laser cannons crap with you. Whether it's more weight-efficient than carrying a fuel synthesizer is something I can't answer. But I suppose that the launch lasers could double as sauropod searers.

    Anyway, if you're going to the trouble of building a multistage, Saturn V/Shuttle scale rocket to return to space, why not instead build a long runway and use a plane to act as the first stage to orbit?. Especially if it's electric?. It's at least reusable. Of course, getting the parts for such a behemoth down might be hard. Maybe something like this for the first stage? That might be easier to land from orbit, although assembling the rigid frame without a hangar might get interesting.

    727:

    whitroth @ 703: Hmm... One thing I'm working hard at is seriously integrating technologies with the society.

    Oh, and that's something that I had not thought of, nor do I remember reading it: have the large (or generation) ship come down, and be an arcology as a start to the colony.

    Great, then in 20 years, only the low-class people still live in it, then, 30 years later, they're all forced out by gentrification....

    I'm sure I've seen that, the idea of landing the generation/long journey ship and using it as an initial arcology in a number of novels, most recently in Richard K. Morgan's Broken Angels (second of his Takeshi Kovacs novels - Netflix did a mini-series of the first Altered Carbon). I also remember the idea of having the generation ship modular so that it can be broken up into smaller landers upon arrival so the "colony" can be a bit more spread out (again with the "don't keep all your eggs in one basket").

    And that might be the germ of a story idea. What happens when you get to the destination planet and it turns out your initial engineering was maybe not quite so good as it should have been and the ship won't separate into the various parts it was meant to separate into. Heroic struggles ensue because the ONE WRENCH you need got left back on Earth & FedEx/UPS don't deliver that far out.

    And just a thought of a moment, maybe that kind of design might be better than trying to land the behemoth. Split it up into various landers, leaving the skeleton in orbit to use as a base for future space exploration in your new solar system. Maybe asteroid belts are common & asteroid mining would be a thing to preserve the landscape along the lines of not making the same mistakes twice.

    Further twist - when the colony arrives in the new system they get themselves firmly established in the asteroid belt and only attempt to colonize any of the planets later after they're already a going concern.

    Which brings me to another idea ... hollowed out asteroid as a ship, generation ship traveling at near light speed using the mass of rock as particle shielding. The idea has been around as long as science fiction, but what has recent science (didn't the Japanese space program have a lander that visited one of the asteroids that passes near Earth?) ... what does recent science tell us about the composition of asteroids and whether or not it would be feasible to hollow one out to use for a colony or generation ship?

    728:

    You're positing a setup that's a multistage booster and a single stage to orbit simultaneously.

    Nope. Two stage to orbit, both 100% reusable (the first stage boosts back and lands vertically -- it's basically a vastly bigger Falcon 9 work-alike).

    The problem with SSTO is, I think, it's energetically marginal using chemical fuel only on a terrestrial planet massive enough to retain its hydrogen, unless you posit a significantly dimmer star.

    Laser propulsion turns out to be OMG energetically shit insofar as we can sometimes tweak lasers to as much as 50% energy efficiency, but they require loadsa cooling and there are going to be in-atmosphere transmission losses (plus you don't want human eyeballs anywhere in the same hemisphere when it goes up).

    Why not build a winged first stage? Well, both Roscosmos and NASA sank a lot of time and design effort into it ... and noped out in the end. Complexity and parasitic weight, basically. Boost-back tail-first landing is now a known alternative and seems to require a lot less infrastructure than a shuttle-like system (pad rather than runway, legs rather than wheels, and forget the wings).

    729:

    Heteromeles @ 704: Oh, I agree on the plans. Also, I don't think rifle propellant (gunpowder) is a real hindrance, although you need sources of sulfur and energy to make the nitrates.

    The real problem is that, AFAIK, you need lead or mercury for the primers, and potentially lead for the bullets. These are dense and toxic. Explosives with lead or mercury in them aren't the greatest idea inside a closed ship, because the elements just don't go away. Now obviously you can use copper, steel, tungsten, or any number of other things for the bullets (with some loss of function), but it's the primer that's the problem. If you don't need it, why take it? A better machine shop or chemistry lab would be better use of mass in most cases.

    Actually, there's the other question of which metals you take with you as ingots or feedstocks, and which you wait until you can mine them, but that's another bootstrapping issue.

    Anyway, I absolutely agree on bringing the plans for all the stuff you might want to build, including things like microchip fabricators, even if there's no expertise to use it. The question is what do you actually bring with you in the ship.

    Breech-loading Flintlock Rifle - no lead or mercury primers required. I'm pretty sure engineers could come up with a version that used a sealed cartridge of some sort. In fact, I don't know a single engineer who wouldn't be chomping at the bit to come up with a better version.

    In fact ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-MVw4N5X1o

    730:

    _Moz_ @ 717: Just how big is Gibraltar anyway? It looks small enough that you could simply pick it up and take it home, thus solving both the death of heavy industry problem and the political problem in one fell swoop. Plus England wouldn't have to worry about where to export stuff if your spare productive capacity was busy towing a cubic kilometre of rock up the Thames.

    And it would probably make one hell of a great "Reality-TV" program.

    731:

    Assembling the two-stage rocket on a wild planet. That's a really neat trick.

    You're correct, in that AFAIK no one's flown an SSTO to orbit, although I think your reasoning is a bit odd. Dropping an SSTO onto Mars would be rather more dangerous than dropping one onto Earth, due to the lack of atmosphere to slow it down on Mars.

    In any event, if the only purpose of the colony ship was to get people to planet B, then the only point of having a return shuttle from surface to starship is because you can't afford the weight of having a bunch of single-use landers. If you have to drop multiple stages and a refuel and relaunch facility to make the shuttle work...why not use single-use landers? It's no more risky than reusing the same two rocket stages to get everything down.

    732:

    Charlie Stross @ 720: And a disadvantage of travelling at 0.1c; an alpha particle is basically a stripped He nucleus traveling at 0.01c. There is helium in the interstellar medium, very very roughly one atom per cubic metre; so each square metre of your frontal surface is sweeping up 30 million ten-times-higher-than-normal-energy alpha particles per second (not to mention twice that many betas -- electrons -- from the electrons coupled with those "alpha particles", not to mention the metric fuckton of neutral hydrogen molecules -- about a hundred times as much H2 as He in the interstellar medium). And you've got to survive this environment for years. A light year is roughly 10^16 metres, a reasonable target star system is at least 10 light years away so 10^17 metres, so even without hitting any dust particles (never mind rocks!) the front end of your starship is going to be hot on arrival, for "inside the Chernobyl Sarcophagus" values of hot.

    What about the idea of pushing a large hunk of rock (asteroid) along in front of your colony ship as a kind of ablative shielding?

    I know the more mass you are pushing the more energy it's going to take to accelerate, but I'm thinking once you reach your destination, you could begin to decelerate the colony ship while it was still behind the shielding and once the colony ship was down to a speed where you no longer need the shielding, just let the shield go so that it keeps on going. Wouldn't matter how hot it was then, because it would keep on getting farther and farther away.

    733:

    This planetary launcher discussion makes me think that there is a story idea here I haven't read: build a colony arcology ship which lands either as a whole or in part on a planet, and the journey upö from the gravity well is going to be hard.

    The story could be about regaining the orbit after the colony has started. In the beginning, the people might be very isolated.

    This reminds me of Cherryh's Foreigner series, though (some SPOILERS) in that the ship in orbit departs. The process of getting back to orbit is not easy for the people on the planet.

    Does anybody know of other stories like this? I'd like to read them.

    734:

    Ideally your shield should be something that can benefit from secondary activation -- i.e. it mops up protons/alpha particles and transmutes into stuff that, possibly after a decay ladder, gives you useful isotopes at the other end.

    Freeman Dyson proposed coating the pusher plate of an Orion ship with depleted uranium, so that spare neutrons from the propulsion A-bombs would transmute some of it into Pu-239; it would then be dumped in orbit long enough for unwanted short-lived fission products to decay, and after a suitable period could be reprocessed to extract more fuel.

    735:

    You're positing a setup that's a multistage booster and a single stage to orbit simultaneously.

    I don't know where you're getting that from. Both components start in orbit, neither one can return there on their own. The first stage does exactly what the Falcon 9 stage does already and returns to the launch site ready for the next flight. The second stage, shuttle in your terminology, carries on to orbit to collect the next set of down bound cargo.

    As for the why bother carrying the first couple of sets (You won't want to rely on one working perfectly) from Earth, they're mostly big tanks and your ship needs to carry some of them anyway.

    Air launch gives no useful benefits over conventional vertical launch in this case. The initial extra velocity is trivial unless your carrier aircraft is hypersonic, and the dropped component needs to be much stronger as it has to withstand being carried horizontally while fully fueled as well as the normal loads while firing.

    736:

    Heteromeles @ 721: Yes, landing your STL ship next to your new colony may not be the brightest idea...unless you've got a way of quickly encasing the hot stuff and turning it into a generator of some sort. Just design it to fold in on itself, after centuries of interstellar battering. Not a problem...

    That brings up another fun bit of kit: the single stage to orbit shuttle to lighter the people and materials off the starship that's stuck in orbit. If the shuttle is a rocket, this gets interesting, because you've got to land the shuttle, not just with a cargo-hold of supplies, but also with enough fuel in the tanks so that it can reach orbit again. So you've got to deal with the rocket equation. I'm not a fan of the math, but to a first approximation, basically you're landing a very large egg full of rocket fuel on undeveloped ground, or possibly water. Granted, it's a very tough egg, but if it's a rocket, the ratio of shell to contents isn't a bad approximation for the ratio of ship plus cargo to fuel that you'll need to get it back up to the mothership. And there's no runway, unless you've got a nice, calm lake or excessively flat dry lake bed to land it on.

    Hopefully instead you've got the Mr. Fusion MiniMax Torch bolted on, ready to blow out absurd levels of thrust with tiny amounts of fuel. But that might not be something you want to light off near the colony either.

    It's worth echoing the point (as more technical SFF writers have known from the 60s) that this is why things like reactionless thrusters, FTL travel, artificial gravity, and energy shields (and cheap, tiny fusion generators for that matter) actually aren't as stupid as they sound. Sure they're likely to be physically impossible. Unfortunately, their real world alternatives are implausible to the point of impossibility too.

    Do it the way they did it for Apollo - two part lander, descent module base that carries the bulk of the cargo going down and an ascent module that flies back up to your colony ship & mates with another descent module. The majority of your cargo (and passengers) should probably go down in one-way landers.

    737:

    Charlie Stross @ 734: Ideally your shield should be something that can benefit from secondary activation -- i.e. it mops up protons/alpha particles and transmutes into stuff that, possibly after a decay ladder, gives you useful isotopes at the other end.

    Freeman Dyson proposed coating the pusher plate of an Orion ship with depleted uranium, so that spare neutrons from the propulsion A-bombs would transmute some of it into Pu-239; it would then be dumped in orbit long enough for unwanted short-lived fission products to decay, and after a suitable period could be reprocessed to extract more fuel.

    So you modify your approach to the new system such that when you detach your colony ship from the asteroid particle shielding you leave in place some remote control A-bombs that can be used to warp its orbit into something you can visit later (after a suitable cooling off period) to mine for isotopes?

    738:

    You're correct, in that AFAIK no one's flown an SSTO to orbit

    For Earth orbit that's pretty much right, though Project SCORE came close. But the Apollo ascent stages did it for the moon and some Mars sample return proposals do it from Mars. Depends on how deep the gravity well is, of course.

    Dropping an SSTO onto Mars would be rather more dangerous than dropping one onto Earth, due to the lack of atmosphere to slow it down on Mars.

    Ah, a fair number of spacecraft have landed on Mars courtesy of its atmosphere. Parachutes, even.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander

    739:

    Not worth bothering with that. 1017m of 100 H2/m3 gives you about 0.0003 moles of protons per square metre of front surface of the shield. Even allowing for the multiplication effects you'd get from the energy of the particles, the amount of stuff usefully transformed would be sod all, embedded in tons of shield material. Then you have to somehow continuously extract it as it is formed, while in flight, so you don't lose it all to ablation of the shield. (Clarke did the numbers on shield ablation in one of his stories and it's not trivial; he made it a plot point that the ship would have to stop after a bit to pick up a new iceberg.) I can't think of anything that's so useful in minute quantities and so hard to get hold of any other way that it'd be worth going to the trouble.

    740:

    ...Missed a zero. 0.00003 moles.

    741:

    Does anybody know of other stories like this? I'd like to read them.

    McCaffrey's All The Weyrs of Pern has them regaining their colony ship and using it to destroy the Thread permanently.

    Brin's Heaven's Reach uses this plot as a coda.

    That's off the top of my head. One might argue that the whole ancient astronaut thing from the 1960s inherently is based on something like this.

    742:

    Ah, a fair number of spacecraft have landed on Mars courtesy of its atmosphere. Parachutes, even

    I'd suggest looking a bit further, perhaps at something like this. TL;DR is that Mars has a thin atmosphere that doesn't provide as much friction for deceleration as does Earth's atmosphere. Landers are made lightweight for a reason. Landing the weight of a human colony on Mars is going to be tricky, especially since some of the tricks used for landers (like the crash bags) probably aren't acceptable for human safety.

    743:

    Still not sure why you need firearms on a ship. Almost everything else (compressed air, lasers, leaf springs) has other uses aboard ship.

    As Pigeon alluded to, unless you're planning on shooting fellow passengers, carrying firearms on a generation ship makes even less sense.* Do you want to confront an uppity Stompasaurus with a centuries-old elephant gun with ammunition of the same vintage?

    *Perhaps we have another reality show here? Pitch: The Most Dangerous Game in the toughest of all escape rooms.

    Actually, I think it's a better SyFy Sunday movie.

    744:

    Getting back to the original topic, I suspect there are some chemistry departments that could use money and publicity.

    How about finding one (USC perhaps?) that will allow a reality crew to wire the lab for broadcast while they work on unusual experiments? Determining the sulfur chemistry of dioxygen difluoride might be worth recording. Or seeing how many carbon atoms can be swapped for nitrogen in various organic molecules.

    It will make chemistry fun again! And quite possibly it will help the lab meet its running costs.

    745:

    "I'm not working with that", starring Derek Lowe as presenter ("In the pipeline" blog); the German team always makes a particularly strong showing but tends to end up short of a few fingers and eyeballs by the end of the season.

    746:

    I can already see the merch T-shirts: "I was on I'm not working with That and all I got was this lousy prosthesis!

    747:

    Isn't whatever "Reaction Engines/HOTOL" are doing supposed to be SSTO?

    Incidentally, I looked up some explosives, regarding overdoing (or not) the Nitration levels ... & cam across an old friend ... RDX From what I've been told, the Wiki page on RDX is seriously lacking in info, given that I know that my father was involved in scaling-up-to-production-level of said compound at Ardeer, 1941-45. HINT: "Torpex" is a an RDX/TNT mixture.

    748:

    No-one has yet determined the LD50 value for octanitrocubane, that would make a good challenge. Making the other's team test rat vaporize by looking at it hard, jogging their elbow remotely, reprogramming the cryostorage unit's temperature control, all sorts of shenanigans would make great TV.

    Moving some way up the energy scale, howabout The Great Californium Race -- be the first team on-camera to make measurable quantities of the quasi-stable transuranic isotope, Cn-249 (estimated half-life 1000 years). The program runners could borrow the LHC's accelerator for a few weeks to provide sufficient neutron flux after swapping out the targets.

    749:

    I was thinking maybe the hypothesized excited nuclear isomer of Hafnium would be fun? The one that DARPA thought might be useful as a nuclear "battery" for powering drones -- stable (ish) until you tickle it with precisely the right frequency of gamma radiation, at which point it spontaneously emits a couple of extra quanta and drops into a lower excitation isomeric state? So energy release is lower than, say, U235 or Pu239, but can be switched on/off with the tweak of a graser ...

    750:

    "I Need An Operation, Get Me Out of Here"

    751:

    Ah, a fair number of spacecraft have landed on Mars courtesy of its atmosphere. Parachutes, even.

    But they are somewhat size limited. Which is why the more recent bigger craft have a somewhat crazy/complicated retro/chute/separate lander setup.

    The air is just way too thin for a chute to work on very heavy things.

    752:

    It appears that depending on who ranks healthcare systems, i.e., variables measured, Canada's ranking is anywhere from top-10 to top-40.

    At lest for the politically acceptable ranking systems, yes. One thing I always look for on those lists is Cuba, and unless they're near the top I assume the list is largely a measure of capitalist penetration of the healthcare marketplace (ie, health is being measured in money*).

    My point with the right of centre remark was that there are political parties in parliament/power around the world who have "nationalise" as their default reaction the same way "left" parties in Canada and Australia (etc) have "privatise". The few nationalisations on the right tend to be more acceptance that the taxpayer is on the hook for a failed company than a recognition that the state is the best operator of those companies.

    Likewise with other basic policy areas, like the need to prevent employee cartels while encouraging employer ones or vice versa. Ditto monopolies/monopsonies (regulate, exterminate or nationalise?), inequality, poverty and medical care.

    • no, really, people do that. And expect to be taken seriously. "I feel a million dollars" taken literally.
    753:

    while good people might occasionally do wrong with actual good intentions, there is a much higher strike rate of people with bad intentions doing bad things.

    We certainly have seen a plethora of bad intent with respect to climate-change policy since 1990.

    Similarly, you could probably fill a long list of quotes by people over the past decade or so who have suggested of climate change policy that “we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good”.

    And yet rather than this suggesting we need to compromise, what it has come to mean is that we should excuse policy that is bad, because it is not perfect.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/09/good-climate-policy-can-no-longer-be-our-goal-its-time-to-reach-for-perfect

    754:

    Building it on the moon would be much smarter

    For accuracy, you also want the structure to be at a constant temperature. There are some deep craters on the moon with no day+night, but surely that would limit the field of view.

    755:

    The problem is not the particles you can stop with heavy metals, the problem is the ones you cant and where you need half a meter of HDPE as ceiling.

    Right. Lead was used because it didn't take up much volume. Some of the serious power-plant barriers were hollow walls filled with wax bricks.

    In a canned-monkeys scenario, it might be possible to keep the ship's water supply in that hollow wall. If the monkeys (and hydroponics) need the water anyway, the mass is ~~ free.

    756:

    They're different types of shielding for different purposes. To stop energetic photons you want lots and lots of atoms of high atomic number. Lead is the easiest way of getting them, and while other elements are better lead's ready availability makes up for needing more of it.

    To stop neutrons efficiently is a two-stage process; first you need to slow them down, then you can scarf them up with a thin layer of specific isotopes like 10B or 113Cd that devour slow neutrons with esurient rapacity. The slowing down is best accomplished by bouncing them off very light nuclei such as hydrogen, and solid hydrocarbons are a convenient dense agglomeration of hydrogens.

    Furthermore, when you bounce neutrons around off the nuclei of a lump of some solid element - light or heavy - that does not eat them, most of the neutrons end up bouncing back out the same side they came in rather than going all the way through, which is an advantage when you're trying to sustain a fission reaction with them.

    Absorbing anything else turns into a matter of absorbing energetic photons and neutrons within a few centimetres, so you don't need to worry about it.

    757:

    On a positive note, and responding to the original post, how about a reality TV show about Global Warming. All the participants get a budget and they have to do a pilot project which attempts to do something about Climate Change. But instead of voting someone "off the island" once a week, something else happens, not sure what.

    758:

    The Babylon Bee humor site offers us Duggar Family to Kick Out One Kid Each Week in a reality TV mess titled Last Kid Standing.

    759:

    Earthships!

    If you don't know what they are, read the above link.

    Two reality show pitches:

    The Competence Porn:

    Teams each get an empty lot, a pile of materials, a budget, and various deadlines. They have to make working earthships within the timelines and pass various tests (like getting permits and approvals). After they've lived in their 'ships to demonstrate livability, the earthships are auctioned off. The contestants get to keep whatever part of the budget they didn't use and perhaps a share of the auction price. Rest of the money is used to move the show to a new location to shoot the next season.

    The Incompetence Porn:

    Earthships are more like ships than houses in terms of the amount of fiddling needed to keep them livable.

    So...

    Build a bunch of identical earthships in a leaning-red US suburb somewhere (mostly for land prices). Contestants from the nearest city (clueless young urbanites looking for publicity and free housing) move in and live in them, without an instruction manual, while going to their jobs and passing various tests related to sustainable living. Contestants can leave if they can't hack it anymore, and anyone living in an actively unsafe earthship gets booted. Those who do best win. Periodically auction off the earthships and move the show, so that the locals don't get too annoyed with their idiot neighbors.

    760:

    Just out of curiosity, does anyone else think that Lewis Shiner's "Deserted Cities of the Heart" speaks fairly well to the current set of political and environmental troubles?

    761:

    hey have to make working earthships

    That has pretty much been done to death, although there does seem to be an almost unlimited supply of naive young things who think that by paying to learn to pound dirt they have gained a valuable skill. But the earthship people are really good at getting publicity (if the alternative is pounding dirt I would too)

    762:

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/boeings-starliner-problems-may-be-worse-than-we-thought/

    NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, indicated this may be a lengthy process, as he's not sure whether there were two coding errors in Boeing's software or many hundreds.

    I am reminded of some particularly stupid legislation going through the committee process in Australia right now where one requirement is that "applicant demonstrate that the system is secure". Allegedly a technical person saw that before it was excreted.

    But in a desperate attempt to remain within sight of the OP... a reality show where teams of experts compete to produce reliable mission control software. I'm sure where it's the winner or the losers who get launched, but either way it will be funny.

    763:

    @ Moz 557, 558, et al: Here’s what concerns me: 1) A country needs primary energy consumption of 4kW/capita to maintain an HDI of 0.9 according to https://plot.ly/~alex/2208.embed. 2) Current world primary energy consumption is ~14 TW, per: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption-statistics.html 3) Mark Jacobson of Stanford says that ~12 TW can be provided through renewable resources by 2050 https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf (I think this is very desirable!) 4) Estimated world population in 2050 is ~9.7 G (https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2019.html).

    Putting these together, I interpret that it is extremely unlikely we’ll be able to provide the energy for a decent standard of living for the great majority of the world’s population through renewable (and/or *non-renewable energy) over the next 30 years.

    Please shoot me down and show my false assumptions, incorrect calculations, etc.! (I don’t have skin in the “no-nuke/yes-nuke” game.)

    *Non-renewables would need to approximately double during this time.

    @ DonL 754 re: big optical interferometer telescopes where it’s cold and still: How about Shackleton Crater? Bussey, D. B. J.; Robinson, M. S.; Spudis, P. D. (October 10–19, 2002). "Design and Construction of a Lunar South Pole Infrared Telescope (LSPIRT)". 34th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, The Second World Space Congress. Houston, Texas. Bibcode:2002cosp...34E.113V.

    @Everybody: We’ve discussed Alcubierre Warp Drive. Does the AWD proposal get around the “Relativity, Causality, or FTL. Pick Any two” Problem?

    764:

    Very off topic, but since we’re way into the 700’s I think there might be a few folks who find this interesting. Does anyone remember the occasional commenter David C Shipley, a proponent of Brexit and self-confessed producer of the propaganda nonsense “BREXIT: THE MOVIE”?

    'Brexit film' producer jailed for £500k loan application fraud

    765:

    ...to a first approximation, basically you're landing a very large egg full of rocket fuel on undeveloped ground, or possibly water.

    Heinlein addressed that in Time for the Stars, where the STL starship came down in oceans, a very handy way to avoid problems about finding a flat stable landing site on the ground. Those starships also used 1950s atomic torch drives so refueling was almost as easy as pumping water into the fuel tanks. (The time they discovered the hard way that the planet had aquatic and hostile natives, it was also handy to be able to blast the landing zone into steam; it bought them enough time to run away.) It's a fine idea, assuming you can boost something the size of an aircraft carrier at one gee for long periods...

    766:

    'Brexit film' producer jailed for £500k loan application fraud

    I suppose it is too much to ask that anyone spreading deceptive Brexit propaganda be imprisoned...

    767:

    Moz Commonwealth Fund are good for ranking healthcare & WHO (maybe)

    Earthships One of the standard components of an Earthsip is flat liiegal in this country: Old Tyres MUST be disposed of properly. Slight problem ... how?

    Keith I THINK ... could easily be wrong ... that an Alcubirrre drive does not have Causality problems, certainly for approximately straight line flight courses.

    DtP Your link is borked Try this one instead? Next question How long before the proponents of "Brexit: The Nation" [ Farrago, BOZO, Gove, IDS etc ... ] are also jsiled for fraud? ( We should be so lucky )

    768:

    Thanks Greg!

    That is indeed the right link. Not sure how I banjaxed it.

    [[ 'smart' quotes I'm afraid - mod ]]

    769:

    Does the AWD proposal get around the “Relativity, Causality, or FTL. Pick Any two” Problem?

    The problem, to the extent it exists, arises from the Minkowski geometry of spacetime implied by the special theory of relativity and does not depend on the means used to achieve FTL.

    770:

    Reality TV pitch: Deck Runner - Set aboard a quarantined cruise ship. Think JG Ballard - High Rise meets Martin Bax - Hospital Ship meets Burroughs - Naked Lunch. Allocate the participants to different decks defined by social class and tell them that they are confined to their own deck. But make the actual doors and stairs between decks easy to smash. Feed them as much coffee as they can drink but only a single 25ml shot of gin per day apart from the top deck that gets unlimited champagne. Infect all computing equipment with the "Smith-Corona" virus so their only knowledge of the outside world is via AI-generated fake news trained on a 20 year archive of Murdoch organs. We can get Ben Wheatley in to do set and challenge design. Season one ends when progressive rationing means Mrs Simpson's dog gets barbecued and before the first signs of scurvy after the supply of limes runs out. If the budget runs to an actual cruise ship, or we can get sponsorship from one of the minor cruise lines, each episode can be off shore from a famous destination. The passengers aren't allowed off or any contact but special effects can organise wildfire smoke, beach crucifixions, and other faked up evidence of societal breakdown just within eyesight.

    771:

    ... Deck Runner ...

    I don't know; if this was less silly than the maiden voyage of the Magic Christian I would be disappointed. grin

    772:

    "Deck Runner" You also gotta-remember that Sauerkraut also prevents scurvy.

    773:

    SS You REALLY shouoldn't have done that ... You DO REALISE that YouTube have the complete "Magic Christian" available to view or copy, don't you? Might have to bleach my eyeballs ( or some sort of balls, anyway ) if I make the mistake of watching that (again) .....

    774:

    A vacation cruise isn't really complete until the captain is kidnapped by a gorilla. grin

    775:

    And doesn't that explain a lot about the ongoing class warfare? The .001% is anxious to not share the pain of a possibly constrained future. The strategy might look good to someone with a very short attention span, but it seems unlikely to end well.

    776:

    4) Estimated world population in 2050 is ~9.7 G

    These population projections assume that agriculture continues to produce an abundance of food.

    I have the feeling that earth's human population will be substantially less than that. If people can't eat because agriculture stopped working due to climate change, I suspect that the world's population will be dropping quickly by that point.

    I'd love to be wrong. I'll be 82 in 2050, so if agriculture doesn't collapse, I could well still be alive.

    If agriculture does collapse, if I'm still alive, I'll probably be be living in a refugee camp with rations dwindling by the month. I don't imagine that octogenarians (or anyone really) will be getting good medical care by that point.

    777:

    This is a reality TV spoof by Dead Gentlemen Productions, and it would probably be really tricky to run, especially the second time around. But the idea is fun! Execution can be seen here, if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvw0czLWrU4&list=PLYr8WAAV5TCWkePkWwMIRzEZo6g-hz_NZ

    House Rulez Nothing is that it seems when eight contestants vie for a $1,000,000 prize. Unbeknownst to the producers they are the contestants. At every turn, curve-balls are thrown their way, the ratings are ever struggling, the prize rules are crazy. They must come up with ever more extreme ploys to save the show … if they can stomach it. Last one standing is the winner.

    778:

    1) A country needs primary energy consumption of 4kW/capita to maintain an HDI of 0.9 according to https://plot.ly/~alex/2208.embed.

    For starters, people who put end of sentence markers onto URLs should be re-educated with vigor.

    Second, that's a graph not an explanation, and seems to be using very similar primary energy numbers to the ones I discussed previously - the ones which led to the comment "we could bring US living standards yup to match Germany while halving their energy consumption". Ditto the correlation between climate and energy use - comparing Norway with Mexico is meaningless.

    HDI is one of those fishy political measures where it looks all rigorous and stuff, but then you find out that an explicit requirement was that the US not be too far from the top despite the appalling living conditions for half their population. Sure, you can cover a lot of that by using averages or totals instead of medians, but you also need to leave some things out (often negative things like prison population and pollution deaths).

    Finally, the HDI of the US is plummeting right now, life expectancy is falling and the Trump "war on law" etc. The UK is also tottering. So you need to be really, really careful about exactly when you get the numbers.

    779:

    Here's a bunch of those sort of indexes that lets you rank countries to see what happens:

    https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp

    The funny one is "climate index", because we are changing that index but we're not doing it in a sensible way. Kenya comes out on top.

    The "where to be born" index is informative as well as funny (for those 'the key to a good life is choosing the right parents' types): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index

    780:

    The Commonwealth Fund, despite its name, is a US-based organisation and its ranking is regarded quite highly in the health service management field. When I was studying health systems as part of my masters a couple of years ago, Miror, Mirror was still pretty recent and I think literally everyone presenting something in this area in the last 3 years has used their “health spending as a proportion of GDP per capital from 1980 to 2014 by country” chart to make some point or other.

    The Commonwealth Fund stuff generally aligns with WHO, which was most likely their primary source of data, which would be in keeping with the outcome-oriented approach they say they take. In their ranking, which is an outcome-oriented ranking of health system performance, Australia and the UK jostle for first place while the US is last by a wide margin (though the selection of countries may not be a full set of OECD countries, I think the range included is a but arbitrary... countries the find believes are rich countries I suppose, but that’s just me being lazy and not going and looking up their methodology). Generally, Australia slightly beats the UK on health outcomes, while the UK slightly beats Australian on access (though I imagine Australia’s score on that measure is dragged down by the ongoing challenges in remote indigenous communities).

    Anyway, Mirror Mirror makes for great reading if you’re a health system nerd like me. We’re at a point in history where economists who fail to make themselves familiar with WHO data and all the metrics (ALL the metrics!) will routinely make fools of themselves when they talk about the impact of climate change, but that’s not unique to health.

    781:

    (and sorry, the HDI requirement comes not from the people who developed it, but that to be widely used it has to be politically acceptable. It's the same system that leads to Cuba being left out of the healthcare rankings and the death penalty not being used as a measure of freedom).

    782:

    Yeah, this is the part that sucks about an innovation economy. We don't know for certain when we're doomed, we just have a good guess when it's likely.

    It's conceivable that crops, especially ones engineered to deal with greater heat stress, will become more prevalent in coming decades. This actually is a genetic engineering problem. I'm all for crop genetic diversification, but I don't think we can conventionally breed corn or sorghum (to name a couple) to tolerate high heat fast enough to meet anything like demand. Love to be proved wrong on this.

    It's even more conceivable that we won't make it, but it's like surfing a giant wave. You're probably going to wipe out and die, but there's no particular point in trying to make that a certainty.

    Another problem is what Charlie called "SFPD" in Halting State:Systems fail, people die. It's not just food shortages, it's things like pandemics and other problems. Society depends on a lot of people in critical roles who depend on each other, and failures can cascade. If, for instance, critical water or power managers get laid low by a pandemic, if there's a power outage or water contamination, it won't get fixed as quickly, and that will cause cascades of other problems.

    This is why competence in all arenas, including governance, is actually a really good thing.

    783:

    Since we're well past 300... I'm working on this final chunk of the story, and have finally, at just over 30k words, gotten to the climax.

    And realized something: another possible answer to the Drake Equation.

    I've got this planet - it's one of a number surrounding a cluster. Inhabitants of the cluster Do Not Want To Be Disturbed.

    So, I started thinking of just how many times in the half-million years the folks on this planet have had to deal with aliens coming in. First... they'd have to be explorers (because, duh, the cluster's already inhabited, and they're not leaving for a vacation). How many civilizations arise every year? Century? Millenium? in the galaxy that develop star travel, or are paying any attention at all to whatever's coming in from Outer Space?

    How many star travelers will be looking for new worlds to explore (or bother) in that unit of time? Remember, overwhelmingly, trade is between known ports (otherwise, you're just betting, and in star travel, it's really not a great bet. I mean, you've got a cargo of breakfast cereal, and you find a water-dwelling race, who want to sell you units that turn sludge water into tasty water?)

    Right now, I'm figuring they've dealt with underr a dozen in half a million years, and some took a look and ran away, and others came there, and made themselves unwelcome. As in "nice spaceship you used to have there, too bad."

    Opinions?

    784:

    I'm sorry, it's much worse. I understand almost every song in the world can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island.

    I think it was at a con that I heard someone start Alice's Restaurant to that... The thought of an aria from, say, Madama Butterfly is far too horrible to contemplate.

    785:

    Gun battles in spaceships.

    Y'know, and those of you who have been in the military can correct me, but it's my impression that in the military, esp. on ships, weapons are locked up until/unless required.

    786:

    Underserved - dunno 'bout other countries, but the US still has a deal of we'll pay your tuition to become a doctor, and then tell you where to work, and if you work in the middle of nowhere for five years, you get loan forgiveness.

    Not enough folks, though.

    787:

    Actually, if we're on an interstellar colony mission, I'd expect better choices than Mars, say, places with thicker atmosphere. In that case, aerobraking would be the way to go.

    788:

    Oh, absolutely, establish yourself in orbit. Get some nice sturdy metallic asteroids and do some production up there, then send it down (aerobraking).

    Oh, and about that wrench, do you mean the left-handed whatchamacllit wrench? About the delivery... old, old office funny: FedEx and UPS are going to merge. The new company, of course, will be called FedUPS.

    789:

    In-atmosphere LASER energy source? Why on earth would you do that? I'd do it from the moon, and while I'm at it, convert sunlight to laser power for free.

    790:

    I belong (value of "belong" approach "we hang out, online and in person at cons) to a group called GT (General Technics). About 10-12 years ago, we worked at coming up with a GT "danger communication" code. IIRC, mine, which was more-or-less along what others were thinking, were: 1. It's not supposed to do that 2. What's it doing (in someone else's kitchen)? 3. Is it supposed to do that (elsewhere on the other side of a phone call to elsewhere on the continent). 4. "Are you sure you should do that?" (on an interplanetary call). 5. "I'm not sure what it's doing her....(silence on the other end of the interstellar call).

    791:

    but the US still has a deal of we'll pay your tuition to become a doctor, and then tell you where to work, and if you work in the middle of nowhere for five years, you get loan forgiveness.

    Australia has a few different schemes like that but they all suffer from the fundamental problem that it's very hard to stay a good doctor (professional of any sort) while isolated in a remote community, so you really want to rotate those people through. But you also want/need continuity and long-term relationships.

    It's also hard to avoid the job being 24/7, and the flip side is having it staffed by a migratory flock of locums so you never see the same person twice.

    AFAIK the least awful solution is a travelling medical show but that's prodigiously expensive (either you need full equipment at each stop, or portable versions of all the equipment that cost more and don't last as long). The cheap way is to just stop providing the services, and right now Australia using the "hub" model to do that - full services are available, they're just a day or two's drive away because they're in fixed locations serving the appropriate number of people.

    792:

    Makes me wonder if something akin to the Rainbow Family's CALM and San Diego's Stand Down would work. What I'm suggesting is the equivalent of a traveling medical show with two additions:

  • Additional services (glasses, dental, chiropractic, pharmacist, nutrition, etc.) provided, and
  • Less on the dedicated health fair crew that's always on the road, but more including locals who take a weekend off to go volunteer somewhere.
  • The fair with (semi)volunteer services seems to be a relatively robust model. In my vast ignorance, it's even something I'd advocate for as a post-disaster recovery system, especially using the Rainbow Family ethos of trying to get everyone working and upskill people to the degree possible.

    793:

    Less on the dedicated health fair crew that's always on the road, but more including locals who take a weekend off to go volunteer somewhere.

    A better parallel might be sending a bunch of people from SanFran to North Carolina for a week. You're not going to fix the poverty or racism in a week, and one week a year isn't going to help the diabetics who can't access dialysis.

    I'm incredibly wary of suggesting solutions because we're 100 years down the path of rich white dickheads in far-away places deciding what's best for people they have never seen and wouldn't associate with if given the choice. Insofar as we know what works it could be summarised as "give the locals control". Often that starts with "give them back what we stole", so obviously that's never going to be an option, especially if we've "improved" it since we stole it. That applies, BTW to the white immigrants almost as often as the indigenous ones. The Murray-Darling Bullshit Authority is trying to paper over some really deep cracks, even ignoring climate change (which they generally do).

    In a way it would be easy to try your suggestion, we could send a bunch of people into The Block but... yeah, nah, brah. Asking for an invitation would be better, but I'm going to guess just based on my limited knowledge of the situation that the answer will be along the lines of "send cash, stay home".

    794:

    Furry And Afraid

    A man and a woman, wearing only fursuits, are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness.

    795:

    "The problem for nuclear power is that it's not financially viable, even if you exclude insurance and post-operational costs"

    If nuclear helped us avoid the worst of climate change, that would save quite a bit of money, which should be credited to nuclear's financial viability.

    796:

    If nuclear helped us avoid the worst of climate change

    The post-facto nature of the test renders it moot, don't you think?

    797:

    Avoiding climate change has to be cheap, it can't be expensive since no-one will actually accept that they have to pay for it. The result is the combustion of lots of cheap gas while promising a switch to 100% renewables sometime soon but only when they get really really cheap along with building all the storage needed to keep the lights on when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow plus all the extra renewable generation needed to charge up that storage on top of supplying the instantaneous demand and then it will all need replacing thirty years later when the wind turbines and solar panels wear out. Until then, gas will bridge the gap, no matter how long it takes.

    We, meaning the world, decided back in 1997 in Kyoto that burning fossil fuel was a Bad Thing and we had to stop doing it. When the Kyoto Protocols were signed the CO2 level in the atmosphere stood at 362ppm. Today in 2020 is 414ppm, about 12% higher. A single ppm of CO2 is about 7.8 gigatonnes so after the solemn declarations and promises of Kyoto we, meaning the world, have added about 400,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. But don't worry, renewables will be cheap real soon now and we'll stop burning fossil fuel then. Honest.

    798:

    I'll bet on renewables, simply because they're a simpler solution to grid problems than are putting more nukes on the grid.

    The thing you forgot to factor in is that when a power company, like SDG&E, gets hit with $700 million or so in fines ($379 million of which they tried unsuccessfully to pass onto their ratepayers, like me). And when a giant company like PG&E decides to go bankrupt rather than deal with being held responsible for billions of dollars after fires caused by their equipment wipe out towns...

    Well, the obvious solution (already implemented)is to cut off power on the most dangerous transmission lines during extreme fire weather. And SDG&E at least is getting better at figuring out when and where danger thresholds will be exceeded, because they installed hundreds of high grade weather stations around the county to do their own forecasts. PG&E's did blackouts in their own big and stupid way, which did them no favors in dealing with the mess they're in.

    The next part of the solution, already being implemented, is to flog house batteries and solar panels aggressively in areas under threat from fire. We'll probably get a battery a few years early, just because of the demand.

    California's a bit ahead of the curve, but if it turns out that the Australian powerlines were even somewhat responsible for sparking fires this season, I suspect the same pattern will unroll there over the next decade.

    Anyway, it's simpler to build off this unfolding disaster response, than to add more power plants to a grid system that's both necessary and part of the problem.

    799:

    if it turns out that the Australian powerlines were even somewhat responsible for sparking fires this season

    Nope, even the "it was arsonists" types have not tried that one.

    What is driving it is that a lot of rural areas lost power unexpectedly, and even more lost cellphone and internet connectivity. Some for extended periods.

    Friend of mine could tell which places were off grid because they still had the lights on. Another friend spent a couple of weeks where the only comms that worked was 2km of fibre linking them to the main road "NBN access point" where they have a cable modem in a box with a 240V AC power supply coming from some solar panels because that's what the system requires. (Don't look at me like that, I did not design it).

    I think we're going to see even more demand for islanding systems that can use the grid when it's there but automatically isolate from it and run off batteries for hours-to-forever when it's not. The hassle is that Australian regulators do not like islanding systems, not even slightly. But in traditional fashion they are aware that they have helped create a collection of DIY islanding systems that are completely unregulated. And they don't like that either.

    The better systems, BTW, are a traditional off-grid system plus a mains battery charger and usually also some grid-only circuits for non-essential stuff. Some of the other systems are dodgy as fuck and frankly the people who built them should fry, and some no doubt will.

    800:

    (oh and BTW, do not try to back-feed 240V into your local NBN box in order to make it work when the power is down, that will end in tears. Do it the proper way, by giving your NBN installer a six-pack of beer to wire it up for you)

    801:

    Seriously, this is one of the obvious things that would happen as soon as they started talking about FTTN as a serious way to to the NBN. Ours is (thankfully) on old cable TV coax, but I’m left curious who I would even talk to when I want to get the old coax from the other cable TV duopoly partner removed, now that it will never be used by anyone again (I’m going to need this for renovations in the next couple of years, along with moving the surviving coax).

    802:

    Frontline episode on the fire in Paradise, CA. Don't know if you can see this, but it's worth watching if you can. The issues with the power lines were pretty unambiguous. Basically it starts with high wind warning and ridiculously low humidity. Then there's a report of a power outage, followed shortly thereafter by a fire. Then the post-fire investigation isolates it to where two lines sparked together or a pole blew over.

    Note that they're not all from powerlines. One came (IIRC) from a mis-wired hot tub.

    Still, California seems to be more grid powered in general than Australia does. Bet that changes, although islanding neighborhoods is going to get interesting.

    803:

    My old school cable "now NBN" went down over the weekend, likely because there was enough water on everything that the cable boxes were underwater and the Telstra official "supermarket plastic bag and sellotape" waterproofing failed.

    804:

    I'm pretty sure there were fires in Victoria started by power lines a few years ago. It's definitely something that has been mentioned in the past.

    But this year we had a whole new level of official fire danger (catastrophic!) that was invented to describe the fire danger, a whole lot of serious people saying "this one is going to be bad", a drought so bad even the city people noticed, a shitload of hot/dry weather records broken... and then the fires started. Not just "normal bushfires", but a whole new set of records for most/biggest/worst were being set and broken shortly afterwards, including places where no lines run. Backburnt areas were burning level of "holy shit bushfire".

    Seriously, the wankers who get upset about this were all focussed on the arsonists. There were hundreds... of people noticed by the police, of whom ~20 were fined and less than 10 were for actual arson, including some kids who started a grass fire near me. Luckily the cops got to them first. The typical offence is "lighting a gas BBQ during a total fire ban you stupid fuckwit" or "disturbing the peace by lighting a match then calling the cops when a crowd of people appeared out of nowhere and started to beat you to death".

    The hashtag came from bots, and things that are not smarter than bots: https://crywnews.com/world-news/are-most-fires-in-australia-caused-by-arson/

    805:

    One came (IIRC) from a mis-wired hot tub.

    I'm going to mention that a California wildfire started by a faulty hot tub is an incredibly Californian thing, so much so that it should appear in fiction only in comedies. Consider it the west coast version of Florida Man losing his meth stash to an alligator. I'm sure Brits can think of equivalents local to them.

    806:

    The hot-tub equipment starts a small electrical fire, which unfortunately spreads to a pair of propane bottles for a gas barbecue (I am guess, not what USAians would call a barbecue, but what USAians would call a grill). These explode, partially demolishing a gazebo and setting the wreckage on fire, which spreads into nearby trees, tinder-dry from the prolonged drought. These connect with a pine plantation, which connects with some sort of imported Australian eucalypt forest, and thus the snake, Ouroborous, eats his tail.

    807:

    In today's today's "Is it satire or is it real" news: Real possibility of Sinn Fein being part of RoI government; and Number 10 spokesperson announces that Johnson has commissioned a serious study of a Scotland-Ireland bridge.

    I've had enough of 2020 already. How do I unsubscribe?

    808:

    The Scotland/Northern Ireland bridge is typical Boris and he's been banging on about it for years.

    It doesn't make sense economically. NI's economy is just too small. If it linked the Scottish Central Belt to Dublin (ahem: with free movement and no customs border), that would possibly be viable -- linking a highly productive 4M person conurbation with two major cities to another similar sized city -- but Belfast is about half a million people, and the whole of NI is about 1.5 million, and economically depressed compared to Scotland. Traffic from the bridge would then have to navigate the M1 motorway or the deplorable Irish railway system for another 120 miles to join the dots.

    (Unfortunately it's the shortest surface route between Great Britain and Ireland. The southern route would be 3-4 times the distance, and/or require a connection via Wales, which doesn't have the transport infrastructure or population to make use of it.)

    To add to the fun ...

    The Boris Bridge crosses a particularly stormy stretch of open seas that catches weather out of the Atlantic. It'd need to be closed to high-sided vehicles (trucks) quite a lot of the time, or completely enclosed. And in addition to needing about fifty supports about as tall as the Chrysler Building (because it's deep), it would have to drive across Beaufort's Dyke. The Dyke is up to 300 metres deep, so make that Burj Khalifa height supports ... except that the MoD used to dump unwanted munitions there, including an estimated 1.5 million tonnes of explosives, 15,000 tonnes of phosgene shells, an unspecified quantity of mustard gas and Lewisite (Lewisite is to regular mustard gas as VX is to first-gen nerve gases like Tabun and Sarin -- it's really nasty stuff), and FINALLY, the nuclear weapons program dumped barrels of radioactive laboratory waste there in the 40s and 50s.

    Good luck getting Lloyds to underwrite the policy for the construction crew. Or indeed getting any construction company to volunteer to build those supports.

    This is what Boris leveled up to after his preposterous proposal to build a replacement for Heathrow Airport in the middle of the Thames Estuary was shot down, which in turn was his follow on from the Garden Bridge fiasco.

    809:

    Preaching to the choir, Charlie. Preaching to the choir.

    I'm less depressed by Johnson's obvious misdirection and smoke-and-mirrors vanity projects, than by the expected reaction from certain elements of the NI political landscape (who will be unable to help themselves from snapping at this latest morsel of bait dangled by Number 10).

    810:

    Hmm, I remember Boris Island as predating the Garden Bridge fiasco.

    As for the supports, there are a couple of oil rig platforms that pass 500 metres in height. All you'd need would be a few dozen more ...

    I think it makes an interesting What-If project for civil engineers, but having seen the current traffic down the Stranraer road, the economic justification just doesn't fly.

    811:

    I think the bridge could make sense, but only if ...

  • The HS2 railway line gets built all the way north to Glasgow and Edinburgh, with a branch to Cairnryan.

  • A freight-oriented spur of the WCML gets upgraded to Cairnryan to allow freight trains through to the bridge.

  • Someone figures out how to prefabricate and float the bridge components into position rather than building them on site. (This was done for the Bosporus strait tunnel.) Also, someone costs up a 3.5km long cable-stayed central span suspension bridge for the Beaufort's Dyke part of the crossing so there's no fucking around with explosives and poison gas in deep water.

  • It's not a road bridge; it's a railway bridge (4 tracks, two for high speed running, two for freight, able to operate at reduced frequency 24x7 during maintenance).

  • Someone then builds a high speed line and a freight line from Belfast to Dublin, and by high speed I mean able to handle TGVs terminating in Paris (via HS2 then HS1 and the Chunnel).

  • Brexit is cancelled and both Ireland and the UK join the Schengen Zone.

  • At that point, we have a railway link that can take passengers from Dublin to Paris in 6 hours, via Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, and London.

    We also have an all-singing all-dancing chorus line of rainbow unicorns on crack.

    812:

    We also have an all-singing all-dancing chorus line of rainbow unicorns on crack.

    The leprechaun-staffed construction crews are also standing by...

    813:

    I will note that the TGV-grade track from Dublin north would put Belfast about 30-40 minutes away, and Glasgow 90 minutes away. At which point the possibilities for commuter suburbs get interesting.

    Unfortunately Brexit makes this entire scheme impossible. (Not to mention the ~£150-250Bn price tag, by the time you factor in £110Bn for HS2, £40Bn for the bridge, and maybe £50-100Bn for the Irish high speed line and the Cairnryan rail spur.)

    814:

    I'll bet on renewables, simply because they're a simpler solution to grid problems than are putting more nukes on the grid.

    Nobody's building enough renewables fast enough to make a difference, remembering that it's not just the initial installations but the future replacement cycle demand that needs to be met. No-one's even building enough factories to make these renewable generating units (majority wind in the northern and southern parts of the hemisphere, primarily solar closer to the equator) in sufficient quantities to make a difference. In other news Green Germany is pushing hard to complete Nord Stream II, an extra gas pipeline from Gazprom to secure its supply of cheap fossil fuel for the rest of the century.

    Currently, France is generating more than its own electricity demand from non-fossil carbon sources (mostly nuclear, of course but a shitload of hydro and wind too, thanks to the current storm sweeping across Europe). Their 12GW surplus is being exported to the UK, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and other neighbouring countries. It only took France about twenty years to build out enough nuclear power stations to be able to do this. Germany has been trying to achieve 100% renewables over a longer period, having spent more to achieve less and they are still consuming gobs of fossil carbon today while facing the coming bill for replacing their older wind turbines and solar panels.

    815:

    I know, it's your standard talking point #2A.

    When did France build those nukes again? 2015? Nowadays we're stuck with shortages of building sand, among other things, and it's not clear that even France, if they started from zero, could do that again.

    816:

    And even if Brexit wasn't happening, and the money was there, and the engineering problems were solved, there are still the NI politics to be resolved that ensured no motorway link between Dublin and Belfast for 50 years, and no decent transport infrastructure between the two largest cities in NI.

    817:

    Yeah, we go through periods like that.

    In SoCal, we've got a bit of a homeless problem, and the current political hot potato is that they do start a fair number of fires, apparently through trying to cook or stay warm and not knowing what they're doing (through some combination of ignorance, mental issues, substance abuse issues, or being harassed and leaving a fire unattended).

    As an environmentalist, I field a fair number of "what do you think about the threat of homeless setting fires" questions. I think a lot about it, but it's a symptom of bigger unaffordability problems in the US, including unaffordable homes, unaffordable medical costs, and unaffordable education. Getting people to even see the connections takes effort, and getting people to do something about it takes even more effort.

    818:

    Wind turbines take a lot of concrete too, for the tower bases. Are you saying we can't build enough wind turbines now because of a lack of building sand?

    There's no reason containment buildings for reactors couldn't be made from recycled steel -- the EPR design actually has an inner steel shell under its concrete containment although that's caused problems at the Flammanville EPR construction site.

    There's been work done on procedures and methods for using existing reactor containment buildings after decommissioning to build new modern reactors inside. It's not trivial and it constrains the reactor design but it's feasible, apparently. One major drawback is that current legislation in most countries with nuclear power plants requires the sites to be returned to green-field status at the end of the decommissioning process.

    820:

    There's been on-and-off interest in building a bridge between Japan and Korea for some decades now, but cheap air travel has mostly put an end to the various proposals.

    821:

    “ I'm sure Brits can think of equivalents local to them.” Well I do remember reading about a really stupid idea they named Brexit but fortunately the British electorate weren’t daft enough to support such a blatantly ridiculous move.

    822:

    Nojay @ 814 In other words, going Carbon Neutral is EASY ... simply do what the French have done. Unfortunately you really almost certainly will have to kill a few people ( Fake Greenies ) to do it. Germany's example is particularly egregious, of course. Rephrashing ... the engineering is easy, the politics is really poisonous

    DtP NI corruption almost closed all the railway lines in NI, apart from Belfast - Dublin & I think the Bangor suburban line .... As it is, leaving Armagh & Omagh out was a mistake ... the GNR(I) was a great railway.

    823:

    wind too, thanks to the current storm sweeping across Europe

    Yes, I just checked and wind is currently the largest contributor to the UK grid. And that's not all the storm is doing:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/09/british-air-record-flight-speed-atlantic Four hours and 56 minutes. That’s all the time it took for British Airways Flight 112 to fly from New York’s JFK International Airport to London Heathrow early Sunday. According to the flight-tracking service Flightradar24, the sub-five-hour flight broke the previous transatlantic record of 5 hours 13 minutes between New York and London. A rip-roaring jet stream at more than 260 mph turbocharged the trans-Atlantic British Airways flight, which departed New York at 6:20 p.m. and landed in London at 4:43 a.m. Sunday, nearly two hours ahead of schedule... As it shot across the Atlantic, the Boeing 747-400 jet reached a top ground speed of 825 mph.
    824:

    As for the supports, there are a couple of oil rig platforms that pass 500 metres in height. All you'd need would be a few dozen more ...

    I suspect those rigs are allowed to move about. Maybe 50 meters or so. Maybe more. Maybe less. But still move. Makes it harder to connect them together with someone a train or car could drive across.

    825:

    connections

    What do you mean connected dots?

    All problems can be solved in isolation.

    [sarcasm off]

    826:

    and landed in London

    At least it landed. Talks of talk on twitter and such about A350/A380/B747/B777s having to do go arounds due to wind. Which has got to be an interesting experience on one of those planes. Smaller planes also had to do it but not as much of a thrill ride.

    AA canceled many of their flights to London that were to arrive Sunday am. Other airlines diverted to places like Frankfort. Which is not exactly where the people wanted to go.

    827:

    I've got your answer for the bridge, so get those dancing unicorns ready to advertise it: a pontoon bridge. with supports that are hydraulic, so the roadway above them remains level, while they go up and down with the ocean surface.

    828:

    Something like Troll A, which I'd use as a model, weighs well over half a million tons and sits on the sea floor. I can't see that moving very much, let alone 50 metres which would be really problematic for all the pipes running up into it.

    The rigs that basically float on the ends of cables, yes, but those only really come into play for sea depths greater than the Beaufort Dyke.

    829:

    AA canceled many of their flights to London that were to arrive Sunday am. Other airlines diverted to places like Frankfort. Which is not exactly where the people wanted to go.

    I can see how finding oneself in Kentucky rather than England would be disconcerting. ;-)

    830:

    he sub-five-hour flight broke the previous transatlantic record of 5 hours 13 minutes between New York and London.

    Ahem: except for Concorde (and, possibly, the Tu-144).

    Concorde G-BOAD holds the fastest JFK-LHR record setting a time of 2 hrs 52 mins 59 secs crewed by Captain Leslie Scott, Senior First Officer Tim Orchard and Senior Engineering Officer Rick Eades (7 Feb 1996).

    For perspective, on September 1st, 1974 an SR-71 set the all-time air-breathing trans-Atlantic record (i.e. not counting spaceships), of 1 hr 54 mins 56.4 sec., average speed 1807 miles per hour. (It had to refuel once in mid-flight.)

    Let that sink in: a fully laden Concorde passenger flight was two-thirds as fast as an SR-71, over intercontinental distances (and didn't need IFR).

    831:

    Politics might play a role too, give the history of Japan and Korea over the last thousand-odd years. You may not remember it, but they certainly do.

    832:

    Ahem: except for Concorde (and, possibly, the Tu-144).

    Yes, the NYT article I cited does say,

    Supersonic commercial aircraft, specifically the British Airways Concorde, have crossed the Atlantic in much less time; its record still stands at 2 hours 53 minutes.

    I think they were writing in the context of aircraft like existing subsonic airliners.

    833:

    Yes, the NYT article I cited does say,

    Oops, no, it was the Washington Post.

    834:

    Re: 830 and Concorde- a long time ago , so long that Usenet was the main medium of internet arguments - I had a... discussion... with some Murrican that insisted that super cruise required ceramic blades etc in the engines, and that therefore the then upcoming F22 had them and only Murrica! could ever make something so staggeringly advanced and therefore Concorde didn’t do super cruise. It was especially funny since I did some work on those engines and had worked with guys that designed them and built them. I also worked with some of the airframe designers who assured me (and if anyone thinks they can show otherwise I don’t want to know) that the u/c was designed long enough to allow for the old UK Blue Steel stand-off nuke to be carried. So I claim that supports Charlie’s mentions of them in ‘A Colder War’ 😊

    835:

    @808: And there's your incompetence/competence porn show: The Boris Problems The current Prime Minister reaches into the aether each week and comes up with a Brilliant Idea to solve some problem. Competing policy teams then try figure out how to implement them. Hilarity ensues. The team that comes up with the least worst idea wins.

    836:

    Me @835: Okay, so it occurs to me this might be close to Yes, Prime Minister, if marginally closer to "reality".

    837:

    Please do not link to the Washington Post on this blog.

    The WashPost responded to the EU GDPR by basically blocking all readers in the EU (and UK) because they didn't want to observe our legally-mandated privacy rights.

    So (a) I can't read it, and (b) if I bypass their block (e.g. via a VPN) I'm allowing them to spy on me in a manner that is illegal in this country.

    Don't do that.

    838:

    Good grief.

    Boris really is Jim Hacker!

    I can't believe I couldn't see it before, but all you need to change is Hacker's oleaginous/crawling manner -- replace it with Johnsonian bullshit and bluster and he's a perfect fit!

    Only problem is, Sir Humphrey took early retirement, he's been replaced by Dominic Cummings, and Bernard is out of his depth.

    839:

    @838: I don't know whether I should be pleased or apologize for your realization.

    840:

    No, not the least worst, the most Rube Goldberg solution.

    841:

    The Boris Problems

    I think you'd need a rule that when demonstrating the solution Boris is not allowed to be harmed or disappeared.

    Oh, and the articles I've seen about that plane are clear that it's the "fastest subsonic trip"... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51433720

    842:

    @841: Oh, no, we need Boris, he's the bad idea generator!

    843:

    Frontline episode on the fire in Paradise, CA

    The opening where the firefighter says "and it's 57 degrees" ... I boggled for a bit before I realised that that's a cool morning. And I can't look at pine trees as "safe", to me they're an exotic plantation tree that burns if you look at them funny. A lot of the doco was like that for me - the cultural differences stood out far more than the "yeah, it's a bushfire, a bad bushfire". For all that I've been avoiding the news here I'm still a bit desensitised to bushfire video.

    Although it's worth noting that we've moved on to floods now. Locusts can't be too far off.

    844:

    Observation suggests that he's not unique in the UK when it comes to generating lots of bad ideas, really bad bad ideas, or even just worst attempt at implementing a bad idea. Although perhaps he's a leader in the spectacularly bad idea genre?

    (also, hence the rule about not damaging him)

    845:

    Let that sink in: a fully laden Concorde passenger flight was two-thirds as fast as an SR-71, over intercontinental distances (and didn't need IFR).

    Let's see. First flight SR-71 1962 Concorde 1969

    So slide rules vs computers. I'd say the SR-71 did OK. Plus Concorde was near max speed. SR-71 not so much.

    But in general this is comparing watermelons to oranges. If someone might be shooting missiles at me I'd want an SR-71. If hitching a fast ride across the ocean for other than national security reasons I'd prefer the Concorde.

    Of course both were a wee bit out of my budget.

    847:

    That cheers me up, actually. The odd part about being American is it's sort of like being left handed. We're the idiots who stayed with imperial measurements and fahrenheit, so like a left-hander in a right handed world, I've gotten used to rapidly recalculating when I'm talking to someone who was handicapped enough to use metric only.

    Ditto with the Eucs, erm, gum trees. To me, they're a fucking nuisance pushed by rich idiots who think they're pretty or trying to make money off them. Oh, and they're good for feeding the koalas at the local (San Diego) zoo, but otherwise a nuisance. But I watch enough nature documentaries that I don't think that Australia's overrun by weeds when I see eucalyptus forests there.

    Oh, and it's brush or forest here, not bush, even though one might argue that bush is more generally useful around here.

    Agreed about the floods. Given how many California fires hit near the start of the rainy season (October-December), the biggest ones tend to be put out by rains, and if those rains are heavy, instant mudslide. Excuse me, flood.

    Anyway, glad you could stand to watch it, regardless.

    848:

    The wholesale vandalism of the rail network in NI was truly despicable, and to this day, public transport west of the River Bann is atrocious — some bus service, no rail links (except the line to Derry; which I do highly recommend if you’ve never travelled it, north of Coleraine in particular is stunning, if short).

    849:

    @845: Concorde was near max speed. SR-71 not so much.

    I can guarantee that any officially recorded speed of the SR-71 is NOT it's top speed. STILL the world's fastest jet.

    850:

    So (a) I can't read it, and (b) if I bypass their block (e.g. via a VPN) I'm allowing them to spy on me in a manner that is illegal in this country. Don't do that. OK, but just for reference, I tried 3 European non-UK VPN endpoints (I don't use 5-eyes endpoints) and that link worked for all of them in a private browsing/incognito window; you have to check a free trial box though. (Heavy script blockers enabled in both Chrome incognito and Firefox private browsing, FWIW. Had to enable wapo itself and some cloudfront thing.) I wonder why they did whatever your seeing. GDPR compliance retrofits are/have been a heavy lift for a lot of US web sites, but WaPo is doing well financially. (And has a very very rich daddy.)

    851:

    I presume the Concorde record was timed from takeoff at JFK to touchdown at LHR since that's the important numbers for a commercial airline. That's a very different thing to the Blue Riband record held by the SR-71 which was timed through "gates" high above the US and British coasts while the plane was in the air and up to speed, a bit like land speed record attempts through a measured mile.

    The SR-71 flight would have taken at least four hours and probably a lot more from takeoff to touchdown, including three refuelling operations (one soon after takeoff, one mid-Atlantic and one after crossing the finish "line").

    852:

    If someone might be shooting missiles at me I'd want an SR-71.

    The RAF and British Airways would occasionally cooperate during Concorde test flights, with the RAF attempting to intercept the Concorde with fighters like the Lightning. It wasn't just the sustainable high speed that made this difficult, Concorde flew at 65,000 feet in cruise which was a bit of a reach even for fighters designed for high-altitude interception.

    The SR-71 could have been brought down over hostile territory with some work by forcing it into high-speed flight to dodge multiple missiles and hence use up its limited fuel capacity. It couldn't refuel except in safe air outside hostile territory and this limited its penetration of hostile territory to quite close to the coasts.

    853:

    hanks, everybody. @ Greg Tingey, Allen Thomson: I don't remember the whole "FTL is incompatible with causality" thing when I was growing up. Did writers just not consider it, was it just not discussed until fairly recently, or did I just miss it somehow?

    @ JReynolds: In 2050, I'd be 92. If agriculture collapses, we're all screwed. I'd like to work toward a scenario without giga-deaths.

    @Moz: I'm not sure what your point is. I've also compared Ecological Footprint to HDI and Energy usage, and taking Mark Jacobson as valid that 12 TW of renewables can be produced, and I still get that you can sustainably support 2-4 G people at a Western European standard of living at ~0.4-0.5 US energy consumption/ecological footprint. Are you saying these estimates of mine are too optimistic, too pessimistic, or what? If so what are your estimates and what do you base them on?

    Keith

    854:

    Given how many California fires hit near the start of the rainy season

    We get those too, historically (I was going to say "normally" but that seems inappropriate right now)

    This isn't anywhere near our rainy season, this is an unusually intense version of the "occasional scattered showers along the coast", but done up like Godzilla as hundreds of millimetres of rain stretching many kilometres inland.

    Locusts in Africa is bad, but we get them here too. Only probably not this season because there's not enough food to sustain them. They're only a real problem when we get a long, warm, wet wheat season and farmers are thinking about putting an extra crop in, so the locusts have time to really fire up the numbers. Apparently you can stop them dead just by burning everything that lives... who knew?

    Aotearoa has a similar issue, at the same time as Fiordland is getting severe flooding most of the country is still in drought, sometimes severe drought.

    855:

    Are you saying these estimates of mine are too optimistic, too pessimistic, or what?

    Firstly, I don't think we lack the technology to solve the problem. There are lots of options, ranging from the renewables/global Green New Deal style ones right through to the nuclear solutions involving both power generation and weapons to maintain a small but viable technological population.

    But I'm saying you make weird assumptions about what is happening right now. Specifically, they assume that humans as a whole will comfortably exceed or various emission reduction targets while simultaneously reversing the worrying trends in ocean fertility (etc).

    If instead we assume that politics as usual produces the currently expected 2-3 degrees by 2050 and 3-8 by 2100, we're looking at maybe 10% of our current ocean protein production. Farming is likely to be similarly affected, but probably less so. That's going to fix the overpopulation problem, and puts us on target for about a billion people alive in 2100. Give or take a billion.

    Much as I'd like to, I'm just not seeing any kind of concerted action to get to carbon neutrality by 2100, let alone 2050. It's worth noting that I'm a involved with a research group putting out very formal and academic studies on ways we can do this, and part of the XR et al groups trying to persuade politicians that those studies should be implemented. Viz, I'm not just online venting about morons.

    Much more likely, IMO, is that we'll see a series of events like the current Australian fires, slowly ramping up in effectiveness, until eventually our masters are forced to concede that some action is better than none. We may even see a "crash through or crash" effort, but I doubt that will start until 2050 or so, and it will involve a war between climate refugees who just want to live and rich people who want to live comfortably. Whether the Australian summer will be as good as the Russian winter at helping the refugees win I'm not sure. I kind of want the rich folk to win, just because I don't think we can recover from the technological crash that the refugee win implies.

    856:

    I’m not sure there will be much of a war in the sense that the refugees have much of a chance. I guess the converse to my usual question for conservatives is “who are the useless eaters, whom we should not continue to support?”

    I mean I think the technological stuff will break down anyway, so there will be a point where the chance to survive becomes more democratic, but most people will have died by then so there just won’t be that many people to make conflict necessarily an important part of it. What people at that stage do anyway, whether or not it’s necessary, that’s another story

    857:

    The Romans had a similar problem with refugees. They had migrants coming in from norther Europe, and took them as slaves or serfs working on their industrial farms (the latifundia).

    Later on, the migrations got more organized, to the point where there's this whole migration period. Not sure I'll live to see it, but think there's going to be an "interesting" period when, through some combination of inspiraton, desperation, and probably some few of the super-rich doing innovation, that we're going to see disorderly streams of migrants become organized simply to defend their lives, and then to take land. I'd also note that other civilizations struggled substantially with nomads, some of whom were migrants, some of whom were their own people who abandoned organized civilization for a better life.

    That's actually something we're acutely vulnerable to, because we've spent centuries carving up, mapping and gridding up the world, so that we can say who owns what and what belongs where. This static view of the world is inadequate to deal with a changing climate, and it's also threatened by migrants of all sorts. When the moving get real power, out rigid system may well become a hindrance, rather than a help.

    858:

    The romans lacked cluster bombs, mines and napalm. They were fighting an enemy that in some cases was militarily superior and in others at least equivalent . Any refugee population that attempts to duplicate the migration era will discover the importance of a degree of military symmetry in making that attempt

    859:

    The romans lacked cluster bombs, mines and napalm.

    Hence my use of the term "war" to describe what could instead be described as "refugee processing" or "border control" in a Yes, Minister sort of way.

    I don't think it's going to be possible to pretend much longer that the southern border of Europe is a zone of peace, love, and respect for human rights. Those saying "oh but they won't use ships" might want to look into the history of "little boats" coming from Sri Lanka to Australia, or the "skiffs" used by Somali pirates, or even the various boats used by Palestinians in their attempts to follow international law. It's not a question of will climate refugees try to use large ships, but of whether we have the inclination to deny them ships, or to sink the ships if we let them use ships.

    That's assuming said refugees are not Australians, now that we have the fucking magic legal construct "indigenous non-citizen" (because not all indigenous Australians are born in Australia, and some have traditional rights to land which means they can't be deported from Australia... even if they're not eligible for citizenship).

    Plus trying to pretend that it's reasonable to ... how would the mealy-mouthed arseholes put this... "actively deny" ... boats to Pacific Islanders / Pacific Island nations would be indistinguishable from genocide.

    860:

    Charlie So you are saying that even via a VPN ... you still get severely tracked by the WaPo? However, wasn't it the WaPo that, effectively, brough Nixon down ... so what is happening, or is it "simply" corprate stupidity?

    Looks as though Cummings may have served his purpose & may be on the way to being eased out. BOZO, for all his bully & bluster will have read "Il Principe" after all.

    Moz Locusts in Uganda / Kenya at the moment. I thought the "cure" for locusts was ... ploughing. Yes/no? "57 degrees" Fahrenheit, of course ARRRGGH! Approx 14 °C - or those of us over 60 years old in the UK, who can easily switch back-&-forth.

    DtP Agreed. Never been to (London)Derry though. Belfast - Dublin - Limerick Jn ( in the old insane days ) is my limit.

    Keith FTL/Causality is predicated upon doing a "Round" trip & arriving back befoe you started. However ... that's not going to happen, for various practical reasons ... which should be obvious if you think for a bit { Gravity well, accceleration to & deceleration from "c" possible restrictions on flight-path curvature, etc }

    Your last point about making the US ( & many other places ) more efficient in their energy use is correct & so is Moz. [ See also his reply @ 855 ] The problem isn't technological it's POLITICAL. Same as maybe having to kill some fake greenies to enforce a nuke power-plant building programme is also a political problem.

    861:

    I think the technological stuff will break down anyway

    I'm trying to work on ways to maintain a technological society that don't involve slavery and genocide. It's quite subtle, and a lot of it (99%) is not my field, and doesn't match my inclinations. Viz, it's all about constructing a society as a large group of people rather than implementing technological awesomeness. That has a lot more use for historians and anthropologists, and in a way my role is more to keep being cheerful and positive about the technical side. Mostly that's pretty easy, because there are obvious, relatively low-tech, solutions to most of the early consequences of heating that we're seeing.

    Sure, now is an excellent time to start testing the funky GE crops that will grow and produce a harvest when we see 50°C days on a regular basis, but that stuff is both really expensive and seems to be being done. But a lot of their demands are more like "how does a city of half a million people function during those weeks of 50°C days?" and they start asking about the built environment and other questions that to them seem like nigh-impossible obstacles. To me it's more just sketching physical structures and layouts that cater for the flows of people, energy, goods and the essential water in, sewage out processes.

    862: 823 - For LOLs, take note that some people have claimed this means that BA112 was flying at over M1.0!! 843 - The fact that you live in a semi-desert does not make pine trees "funny". 853 Point 1 - Neither do I. I'm not sure which applies here:-

    a) SF writers used to gloss over causality. b) SF writers now tend to not consider that duration does pass whilst in wormhole/subspace/hyperspace or whatever your call it. c) (a) and/or (b) both may apply, depending on the writer. d) We see much more discussion of these issues in the Internet era.

    863:

    Never been to (London)Derry though. Belfast - Dublin - Limerick Jn ( in the old insane days ) is my limit.

    I've driven through that part of the world once or twice.

    Didn't dare stop.

    There were flegs. Lots of flegs. (And a very strong vibe of "don't let the sun go down on you, Catholic scum" -- even though I'm not remotely Catholic I didn't feel welcome.)

    864:

    Didn't dare stop. There were flegs. Lots of flegs.

    Stupid American question: What's a fleg?

    I am aware I am missing something, yes.

    865:

    Yeah... for some folks just not being them is the worst possible thing you can do. Everyone else is or may as well be Catholic scum, or whatever the good folks believe they are not.

    866:

    Strange as it might seem I agree a lot and I think we’re probably converging a bit. It’s one of the thoughts behind drifting away from health and toward law. Many of the struggles ahead will be legal ones, and the area they call transition law will become much more widespread than now. Who knows, getting ready to combine anthropology with constitutional law may manifest the need for it...

    867:

    What's a fleg?

    It's a union jack flag, pronounced with a heavy Ulster accent.

    Social significance in that part of the world is somewhere between a Confederate battle standard and a burning upside-down cross, shading into swastika territory. They have these things painted on every third kerbstone ...

    868:

    mapping and gridding up the world, so that we can say who owns what and what belongs where. This static view of the world is inadequate to deal with a changing climate,

    Forget climate changes. Look at the lower Mississippi and Ohio rivers via Google Maps and zoom in and notice how the state borders are all kinds of crazy compared to the rivers. There's a horse race track on the northern side of the Ohio River near Evansville Indiana. It's in Kentucky but the river moved has enough since the borders were drawn to put it on the other side but still in Kentucky.

    869:

    I can see how finding oneself in Kentucky

    Diverting a jumbo jet or even an A321/B787 to one of their general aviation airports would be, ah, interesting. If you want to fly to Frankfort KY, you fly to Louisville, Cincinnati, or Lexington. Oh, the Cincinnati airport in in Florence Ky just to make it more interesting. (If you don't understand there's a big river between Ohio and Kentucky.)

    870:

    you still get severely tracked by the WaPo?

    The US news paper industry made some really bad mistakes a couple of decades ago and lost their source of income. Classified ads went to Craigslist for free instead of $25 for 100-200 LETTERS. And then Amazon destroyed brick and mortar sales which removed most of the big (size) ad revenue. Then circulation cratered and ....

    So most US news sites have LOTS of trackers (java script based) which tell advertisers who you are. Indirectly[1].

    These trackers tend to be no where near GDPR compliant. More and more of use selectively block sites. It depends on if you want to actually use a site and how much you trust them. By default I don't trust. I have to enable trackers site by site. I just checked and WaPo loaded 23 trackers. Seems high at first blush till you discover that sleazy sites tend to have way more than 50.

    [1] Visit amiunique.org and see how many people look like you when you're browsing.

    871:

    It's a union jack flag, pronounced with a heavy Ulster accent.

    Social significance in that part of the world is somewhere between a Confederate battle standard and a burning upside-down cross, shading into swastika territory. They have these things painted on every third kerbstone ...

    Ah, thank you.

    I don't blame you for being nervous. I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory, and I am suspicious of anyone who needs to display a lot of American flags. (One in front of a government building? Perfectly reasonable. Three on a privately owned pickup truck? That's not patriotism, though it might be aposematism.) All the more so in Ireland where they've got too much history and tribal feelings run high...

    872:

    I can see how finding oneself in Kentucky rather than England would be disconcerting. ;-)

    Every few years there's a news story about someone getting on the wrong plane and not discovering the problem until too late. The classic is confusing Austria and Australia. Some years back a fellow headed for Oakland California who got there with a side trip to Auckland New Zealand.

    Fictionally, I once needed a character's luggage delayed for story reasons so hauled out a list of airport codes; it was plausible that a busy sorter could confuse LHR (London Heathrow) with LAR (Laramie, Wyoming).

    873:

    Oh, the Cincinnati airport in in Florence Ky just to make it more interesting. (If you don't understand there's a big river between Ohio and Kentucky.)

    At least they don't need to find Kansas City. grin

    Unpacking the joke for Europeans: American sportsball recently had a season finale where the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers. Children learning geography are often amused that Kansas City is almost entirely on the Missouri side of the river - that is, Kansas City is not in Kansas. (There is a small, legally distinct, part that actually is in Kansas. It does not have a football team.) If you ask yourself "What elected official would know less about his nation's geography than a nine year old child?", the answer this time is not Boris Johnson but someone with equally silly hair. Presumably someone later told the Mad Tweeter that several places outside New York City actually exist, but not before quite a few people with knowledge of Kansas, Missouri, or sports called him out on the gaffe.

    874:

    Charlie I was was once asked about what's strange in Ireland ... The first time (1965) I went, I was in a boat backing up Belfast Lough/R Lagan & saw, on a slime-coated set of steps a lovingly painted mural: "Kick the Pope" The next year, I caught the train Belfast-Dublin & was asked by the Gardai, at Amiens St station, not for my passport, but "Did I have any contraceptives on me" (!)

    Things have improved greatly, all-round since then & the S has caught up with & passed the N in progress towards civilisation. { Same as "Fate" means "feet" - those things on the end of your laigs (legs) )

    SS Leeds Castle / Leeds (city) ... Washington (Tyne & Wear) & the fake US one, ditto Boston & so on & on & oen

    875:

    Fictionally, I once needed a character's luggage delayed for story reasons so hauled out a list of airport codes;

    Don't even need to go that far; just have them make a short connection (anything less than two hours will do) at a busy hub, and their outbound flight is an hour late taking off. When they arrive with an hour to connect, it's quite plausible that the human will rush straight to the gate but their baggage will be delayed and end up on the next day's flight out.

    And there's always the whoopie cushion experience of a major new airport terminal's shiny new automated baggage handling system having a first-week nervous breakdown. The new terminals at Thiefrow were notorious for losing bags for their first 3-6 months: Cthulhu only knows what Brandenburg will be like when it finally opens (if ever -- it's currently 9 years overdue on a 5 year build) ...

    876:

    Leeds Castle / Leeds (city) ... Washington (Tyne & Wear) & the fake US one, ditto Boston & so on & on & oen

    It's common in conversation to confuse Washington the state and Washington the city of politics[1]. Portland is almost always the Oregon one so discussing the older one in Maine presents a hazard.

    There are far too many Springfields.

    [1] Last year my cousin was going on about a planned but failed trip to Washington DC. I realized we had some time and she needed the distraction so I announced, "Get in the car, I'm taking you to Washington!" Which we did, driving a few miles through the state.

    877:

    Things have improved greatly, all-round since then & the S has caught up with & passed the N in progress towards civilisation.

    On the basis of my visit last year, large chunks of Belfast have also overtaken Englandshire in terms of progressivism and social enlightenment. (But the RoI is still ahead on points, and now has a socially liberal left-wing nationalist party aiming to form a coalition government, like Scotland. /troll)

    878:

    I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory

    Although people have shot at Americans who they believed weren't true Americans…

    879:

    I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory, Well, except for all the high school mass shootings, where I think we cas safely say that both shooter and victims were typically US citizens... :-)

    880:

    Every few years there's a news story about someone getting on the wrong plane and not discovering the problem until too late.

    Canadians of a certain vintage may remember Nancy White's song "Vacations Canada" (collected in the Album Civil Service Songwriter).

    881:

    Charlie Noted the troll ... I point-blank refuse to believe that either the SNP or "SF" are socially liberal ... though watching the dance between the 3 in RoI is going to be interesting. I always thought ( possibly wrongly? ) that "FF" were much more reactionaryconservative & Catholic than FG

    882:

    Of interest might be the book Going Postal by Mark Ames.

    From The Nation: For those who want to go beyond the headlines and understand the roots of this phenomenon, I recommend Mark Ames’ Going Postal: Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplace to Clinton Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull Press, 2005). The book places so-called "rage murders" in the American workplace and schoolyards in the context of the brutal socio-economic changes following the Reagan Revolution. Ames ties together a massive shift of wealth over the past 25 years–from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy–as well as the change in corporate culture in which companies have squeezed their workers dry for more hours of work at less pay, with less health care and ravaged pensions. He dissects a workforce that has faced massive layoffs, and workers who find themselves scraping by while their bosses live like kings. Ames never excuses, but he does try to understand why we’ve seen such brutality in the workplace.

    Guardian review here: https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2007/jan/21/society

    883: 861: "I'm trying to work on ways to maintain a technological society that don't involve slavery and genocide."

    Er, think the ship sailed on that one, some centuries ago. I'm not excepting the current set of arrangements, either. I think it's more a case of finding ways to reduce slavery and genocide at the margins, when possible (the obstacles are indeed political, not technological). I don't actually think that climate change will necessarily make this significantly worse, because our way of life depends on those people doing their jobs for us, and if they all die off we're screwed. Some very smart people in China are working on this.

    That said, what you describe yourself working on does sound fascinating. Would appreciate any references you are able to share.

    884:

    I don't remember the whole "FTL is incompatible with causality" thing when I was growing up. Did writers just not consider it, was it just not discussed until fairly recently, or did I just miss it somehow?

    The problem must have been apparent in the physics community as soon as it was appreciated that SR incorporates Lorentz transformations. Those had been studied for a couple of decades before 1905 and their properties were well known.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformations

    In fiction, Google Ngram finds The Miraculous Cruise of the "Avatar" by Alfred F. Loomis, published in 1923. It specifically links Einstein, relativity and backwards time travel.

    885:

    The whole FTL discussion has set me to thinking... What happens to a "galactic empire" when the temporal consequences of of using FTL come home to roost. I don't have the math, but someone who's writing SF must have the chops for this... What happens when a starship which is more advanced than the one's currently made on Earth shows up to announce "a defeat on the Romulan front" before you've discovered Romulans?

    Or do you have some kind of agency which is in charge of "Duration Control?"

    886:

    That's not only plausible, it's depressingly familiar.

    (It's happened to me at Heathrow. TWICE.)

    887:

    There's actually a trope for that. Out of respect for your productivity, I will not link to the page, but there are plenty of examples, including an episodes of BABYLON 5 and the original GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY comic.

    888:

    I just realized that there is an interesting combination between the two threads here. What happens when your luggage gets lost in an FTL "airport?" How do you get your luggage back if it's now in your future or past? What if you luggage is earthshatteringly important?

    Not my kind of story, but if someone wants to grab it and run, feel free!

    889:

    My brain is going in a very strange "LOTR meets CANTICLE FOR LEBOWITZ" direction, where an FTL-capable colony collapses, but there is a prophecy about a "gift from the stars" because an automated supply ship was launched by slower means after receiving the last emergency signal.

    I'm also reminded of what happened in the HYPERION books when the "farcaster" network shut off.

    890:

    The basic idea is an old one in SF--it goes all the way back to 1944 with A. E. van Vogt's short story "Far Centarus."

    891:

    I remember reading a book that tackled this problem in depth -- and had a sequel -- some time back around 2003-4'ish. Title was "Singularity Space" or Sky or something ...

    892:

    I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory, and I am suspicious of anyone who needs to display a lot of American flags. (One in front of a government building? Perfectly reasonable. Three on a privately owned pickup truck? That's not patriotism, though it might be aposematism.)

    It's not the U.S. flag that should scare you; it's the increasingly omnipresent Confederate Navy Jack flag that should scare you. It's proliferated far beyond the South and has now become the de facto flag of Red State America.

    Children learning geography are often amused that Kansas City is almost entirely on the Missouri side of the river - that is, Kansas City is not in Kansas. (There is a small, legally distinct, part that actually is in Kansas. It does not have a football team.)

    To clarify for all non-Midwesterners: they're two separate cities, NOT one city split across two states. The larger, older Kansas City ("KCMO") is in Missouri; the smaller, younger Kansas City ("KCK") is immediately west across the state border in Kansas. When you see/hear references to Kansas City in American pop culture, they're almost always referring to KCMO. The sports franchises, main event venues, central business district, museums, cultural landmarks, and primary airport are almost all located on the Missouri side. Together, both cities form the nucleus of the Greater Kansas City metropolitan area (est. pop. ~2.5 million).

    893:

    They really should have named KCK "Missouri City", for symmetry if nothing else.

    894:

    I remember reading a book that tackled this problem in depth -- and had a sequel

    A UK writer, I think. Has he written anything recently? I wonder what happened to him…

    :-) (obviously)

    895:

    Spend a day in productive work and miss out on the wholesale denigration and slagging of the north-west corner of your homeland! Ho hum.

    Seriously though, Derry (please don't bother with the "Stroke City" Derry/Londonderry stuff, it only matters to Loyalist hardcases, the DUP, and English journalists) has found it's vibe as a tourist destination. It is crammed with history (and not just the recent stuff, actual interesting history), has a good supply of decent pubs and restaurants, and some not bad hotels, and the historic walled city is a pleasant oasis from the architectural vandalism visited on Belfast in the last half century. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as a weekend break destination, but would indeed suggest not travelling there by car (although the journey has been massively improved in the last ten years), fly in via the local small airport, or better still take the train from Belfast (the line routinely features on lists of world class scenic journeys for a reason).

    One thing to note about Derry is that it is and has been systematically left behind in terms of investment and development since the GFA. It has a lot of social issues, but these aren't always visible until you step outside the (very small) city centre, and is still in some areas a hotbed for sectarian gang activity (see the events around the murder of Lyra McKee).

    For more information on "flegs", I heartily recommend this clip (may require some translation for non-natives): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8JqKxrloQQ

    896:

    Indeed. One of the causes for California's terraforming efforts levee, dam, and aqueduct system was Sacramento flood messing up the boundaries of farms. The countering irony is that there's decent evidence that beavers, dambuilders that they are, combined with rivers on floodplains that change course regularly, were responsible for a lot of biodiversity, a lot of groundwater recharge, and a lot of carbon sequestration...until that stupid British fashion for beaver fur hats caused hunters to crash the North American populations and screw up the hydrology of most of the continent for a fashion statement.

    It appears that nature does better, not just with a little chaos, but with a lot of it, provided it's the right kind. It's almost an Erisian joke, that we've so over-ordered the planet that the whole system is falling apart from too much order, the wrong kinds of disorder, and a dearth of fluidity and the right kind of disorder.

    This is where the Discordians get it wrong, IMHO. Unfortunately, more chaos isn't really the answer: a wildfire doesn't have the same effects as a rewilded, undammed river, and burning where flooding is needed just makes the next flood more damaging (and vice versa). With climate change, we're trapping more energy in the atmosphere and ocean, which predictably will make extremes more extreme (fires, floods, droughts, etc.). But unless we find ways to channel that resulting disorder (for instance by rewilding rivers, preparing to catch the rain and send it to aquifers instead of scouring creeks with floodwaters dumped off suburbs, and so forth), it's just going to cause more problems.

    897:

    I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory

    The deep irony for me was when I noticed that the Malay phenomenon of running amok was essentially the same as "going postal" decades ago. It's defined as "an episode of sudden mass assault against people or objects usually by a single individual following a period of brooding that has traditionally been regarded as occurring especially in Malay culture..." and typically around 12 people were injured or killed by the amok before the attacker was subdued or killed.

    It was interesting how many Americans I mentioned this too flat-out denied that all the mass shootings followed essentially this pattern. They do so less now, but that denial lasted until a few years ago. Attitudes have changed and after the ellipsis above, Wikipedia adds, "... but is now increasingly viewed as psychopathological behavior" and "Amok" was added as a diagnosis to the DSM-IV.

    There's nothing that's magical about 12 people on average getting hit during an attack. It's a clip of ammunition, it's how fast people react to the threat, both evading it and rushing in to quell the attack, and so on. When someone loses it and decides that it's better to die a monster than live a nobody, it takes time to stop him.

    What is "magical" is how many (white) people thought that a particular form of (notionally white) violence could have nothing to do with what (primitive, brown) people did on the other side of the planet. It's an interesting combination of racism and denial. It turns out that we like to think we're special in the ways we commit violence, even when that's not the case.

    While I agree that the damage can be limited by limiting private ownership of guns designed to kill humans in large numbers, I don't think that gun laws alone will keep either Americans (or for that matter, Malays, Indonesians, and whoever else does this) from running amok with whatever they have at hand (kitchen knives, baseball bats, etc.). To the extent that it can be prevented, it takes a different set of interventions.

    898:

    You may enjoy John D. Liu's short documentary Hope in a Changing Climate:

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3156460/

    899:

    The deep irony for me was when I noticed that the Malay phenomenon of running amok was essentially the same as "going postal" decades ago.

    John Brunner had "muckers" in Stand on Zanzibar, published in 1968. Same connection.

    900:

    Large chunks, yes. But we took the Hop-On-Hop-Off tourist bus, and the core bits of the Prod and Catholic communities are still parts I'd feel uncomfortable wandering around, with the flags and murals.

    (Family is Anglo-Irish, settled in Co. Louth from the 17th Century. Yes, Orange I'm afraid, though my great-nth uncle ended up as a Papal Chamberlain (whatever that is) so we presumably have had skin on both sides of the religious divide.)

    901:

    There are enough Springfields that I've noticed the problem from over here. I tend to equate them all to the Simpsons one to make things easier.

    For an English equivalent I nominate Brent. There's a load of Brent things around London but they're all in confusingly different locations instead of all in a bunch where they'd make sense, and then there are others scattered about the country in the sort of locations that get them mentioned in a way that you have to read over two or three times to work out what they're on about.

    902:

    I live here and there’s plenty of areas I’d avoid wandering around on my own!

    Hope you got one of the tours with a real live guide, and not the bland pre-recorded one.

    903:

    DtP THANKS for that clip on "flegs" - hysterical However he left at least two other variants out ... Here is one of them

    Heteromeles It looks as though beavers are going to allowed to be turned loose in England & Wales. Some Scots arseholes apparently haven't go the message & are still trying to kill them ... shits

    Bellinghman Why should you apologise for your long-dead ancestors picking the probably-less-evil sdie in a conflict? Especially when you look at the damage that the RC church has done to Ireland & especially Irish females in the past century ( & more ) ??

    904:

    @852: The SR-71 could have been brought down over hostile territory with some work by forcing it into high-speed flight to dodge multiple missiles and hence use up its limited fuel capacity.

    The Soviet downing of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960 put an end to airbreathing reconnaissance penetration flights into Soviet airspace, and led directly to the importance of the U.S. satellite reconnaissance program. The SR-71 program recognized this vulnerability, and PARPRO (Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance PROgram) flights were restricted to JUST outside the airspace of countries of interest. That doesn't mean there weren't some "interesting" mission events, though. SR-71 operations continued until 1990, with a brief attempt at program revival in 1996-1998.

    For pure speed, I doubt we'll ever exceed the SR-71 unless or until we have manned hypersonic aircraft - a development that I'm not sure will ever occur at this point. Unmanned aircraft and satellites have more or less replaced the capability of the SR-71.

    I saw one doing a flyby at Dyess AFB, Texas in 1978. It did one low, slow pass dirty (gear and flaps down), came around again clean, then hit the afterburners (TRULY loud!) and disappeared. Moments later, the lone cumulus cloud to our west had a hole in the middle.

    905:

    "Did I have any contraceptives on me"

    "Yes" (points at face) "Sorry mate, can't help you" "Yes, when do you come off duty?" "Ooooaaaoouwi!" (cf. Frankie Howerd and pals)

    ...etc.

    Paul Sample once had Malcolm doing courier work, taking a parcel all the way to Leeds expecting that he could then ask a local where the castle was...

    906:

    Re: Brunner, yeah, although IIRC his Muckers were losing it due to environmental cues, not social ones.

    907:

    "It looks as though beavers are going to allowed to be turned loose in England & Wales."

    What the fuck for?

    I don't know what kind of effect they're likely to have on ecosystems that aren't used to having their hydrology re-engineered by the chewing down of riparian trees, but I can make a reasonable guess on general principles: what's there now gets fucked, and whatever normally coexists with beavers either isn't there at all or takes tree-lifetime timescales to adjust to them turning up so the beavers wander off and fuck up somewhere that hasn't been devastated yet. I thought we'd got the message by now that introducing foreign species because they look cute or whatever is a good way to make your grandchildren wish their grandparents hadn't been such dicks.

    908:

    There's a really good book called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter which is worth reading on the subject. He spend a chapter on the (re)introduction of beavers in the UK. And he's a good writer, so it's fun to read.

    The tl;dr version is that our general notion sof what is proper riparian hydrology and ecology is based on science that grew up in the absence of beavers (they'd been hunted out for the fur trade). When you add beavers to a system, the resulting effects tend to be beneficial for everything from groundwater recharge and carbon sequestration (possibly even certain kinds of flood control) to favoring otherwise rare wildlife species. Basically, his point is that when you study damaged systems, you get a distorted idea of what both normal and undamaged are supposed to be, and in North America and much of Europe, we've mostly been studying really damaged riparian systems without knowing it.

    Yes, there is more flooding with beavers around, and there are problems for human systems that were developed (again) in the absence of beavers. That's part of the whole point about too much order and not enough of the right kind of chaos.

    909:

    Every few years there's a news story about someone getting on the wrong plane and not discovering the problem until too late.

    A couple of years ago there was a story about a honeymooning couple from the UK who wound up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, rather than Sydney, Australia. They must have ignored the much shorter travel time and concentrated upon the much lower price for the trip!

    Also, even for Canadians, mistaking St. John (New Brunswick) and St. John's (Newfoundland and Labrador) happens enough that it doesn't even make the news.

    910:

    BA112: for further giggles, agree, then point out that it was due to an attempt to take off from a conveyor belt.

    Causality: I think the basic problem is simply that it's too much of a pain in the arse. It's a pain for the reader because we're completely accustomed to one thing following another in the normal way and deviating from that makes it too confusing to work out what is going on, plus you need at least enough of an understanding of relativity to not find it just pointlessly weird. It's a bigger pain for the writer because as well as trying to put it over in a way that isn't confusing, you have to have a feel for it good enough to consistently get it right - which isn't the same as simply knowing how to do the sums, and probably isn't something that most actual specialists in relativity are that good at.

    And I'm sure most people just don't care. After all, relativity is famous for being something that even scientists don't understand. The internet means that groups of people who do care can have public arguments about it that everyone can read, but even there the discussion seems to be based around reducing it to very simple rules as comprehensible as "you can't go faster than light" so as to create a formula for writing it, with the participants struggling against not understanding it themselves and the occasional person who really does understand giving up after a couple of posts because it's too exasperating that nobody else does. But it certainly hasn't become something as widely accepted and expected as the c-limit such that your book will be considered silly if it doesn't incorporate it. There just aren't that many relativists among the readership.

    911:

    "I'm in the US, where nobody has shot at anyone for being American in living memory"

    Possibly the San Bernardino attackers, but it's rare over here. People get shot for all sorts of other reasons, of course, including political ones. By far the largest portion of politicized killing is over race.

    913:

    The Eurasian beaver (Castor Fiber) population in the UK was hunted to extinction several hundred years ago. There appears to be an introduced wild population of Eurasian beavers of unknown origin (possibly escaped pets, possibly a deliberate unofficial release) in Devon and a couple of other monitored and approved releases in Scotland and elsewhere. It's not an introduction of the North American cousin into the British countryside. As far as i can tell any NA beavers found in the wild in the UK would be trapped out and removed.

    914:

    The problem with all that weaponry is when "they" have gotten over the border, and you want to deploy it when there are "citizens" around....

    915:

    Reminds me of around '09, when I was still in Chicago. I went to the Irish-American Heritage Center for St. Paddy's, heard some music, but other than a friend, pretty much NO ONE spoke to me, and early evening, a really popular band came in, and they were like all "we're South Side (of Chicago) Irish!!!", and drunks walked in front of me (and I'd been in front) blocking my view, and the attitude and the music were so hostile that I left.

    They would not have liked listening to Ye Jacobins.

    916:

    I have time passing. And when I consider that they have had trouble defining an arrow of time, I'm not allowing time travel (well, except for a close encounter with an event horizon, and that's one way only....)

    917:

    Noncausal FTL stories are a pain to write, not just because you've got to pretzel your brain around all the timey-wimey stuff, but because, at least under certain versions, they violate the normal illusion that the character can make choices that matter.

    In certain versions, it can turn out that there's one universe and choice is an illusion. FTL in this universe happens because that's what the universe required to happen at that moment, not because someone chose to go to the stars. Note that this can be done well. Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life did an excellent job at it, for example. But done wrong (raises hand) it sucks.

    Other possibilities include:

    "Palimpsest" where shit gets rewritten endlessly in the FTL multiverse and reality becomes ultimately and recursively politicized (It puts the curse in recursive. I still think this should be the proper end of the Laundryverse, the elder gods being unwritten out of the cosmos and into a singularity, but at perhaps an even worse cost)

    "Handwavistan" where you somehow posit that FTL is real but there's a physical law banning time travel because reasons (okay, that's totally cheating, but it's your last hope, Obiwan).

    918:

    Oh, btw, Charlie - I look at articles from the WaPo that show up on google news, and elsewhere. I keep seeing folks talking about their paywall, but I've never been blocked.

    Oh, that's right, I'm a) using firefox, b) on Linux, and c) running NoScript, and I think that I have not enabled the Post... so there's no cookies and tracking from them.

    919:

    The good news is that the Australien Governmunt have finally accepted the science* and come up with a policy: get fucken used to it.

    • conditions apply

    Also, for those who haven't read it yet, "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi covers one set of options for the US once they've mined out their water supplies.

    https://windupstories.com/books/water-knife/

    920:

    The good news is that a lot of stories are either copied verbatim by sites that don't have (effective) paywalls, just trackers, and often by less awful sites like the BBC as well. Hence my BBC link way up there. Doing a quick search often works, and google especially seems to have a split search for news, if you "site:bbc.com" you won't get the latest news, but if you leave that out and just scan the results for bbc links they're there.

    921:

    Fictionally, I once needed a character's luggage delayed for story reasons so hauled out a list of airport codes; it was plausible that a busy sorter could confuse LHR (London Heathrow) with LAR (Laramie, Wyoming).

    Not so much for a while now. All the major airlines in the world (and any minor ones that want to play with the big boys) put those tags on the luggage that have the final destination AND a bar code. The bar code rules at airports of any size. (Which is why you should remove all old tags as soon as you get to where you are going.)

    Manual sorting like you described would only occur on a flight from somewhere like Casper WY to Laramie. And the the lettering on those tags is fairly big.

    If you want a bag to get lost make a connection in a known bad airport/airline operations. Ask agents. They can tell you where to NOT make connections if you have checked bags you don't want to even think of loosing. Might cost you a beer after work but ...

    There are certain baggage operations with well deserved reputations. More I can't say.

    Back to the bar codes. On most US airlines if you make a connection you can even check to see where you bags are while waiting for the next flight. I assume the big boys around the world are similar. They have agreements with each other to do such things.

    922:

    Every few years there's a news story about someone getting on the wrong plane and not discovering the problem until too late.

    I did it back in the early 80s. My boss's fault though. We were flying to Boston, then a day later driving to Hartford (CT) then flying home a few days later. Walking up to a roundhouse of gate my boss looked up saw a plane to Hartford boarding and on we went. This was back in the day of paper tickets and the gate agents didn't notice. "Our" seats had people in them but there were lots of empties. After we pushed back the announcement came on talking about our flight to "Hartford" and then it hit me. I hit the call button, flight attendants conferred with the pilots and we were told we could go back and get off or fly onward. But our intended flight was gone.

    So we went to Hartford, drove 3 1/2 hours to our intended hotel and got a few Z's before our morning meeting.

    923:

    If you read beyond the headline here there's actual preparation being done, in the sense of people trying to answer "what should we teach children who will grow up in the climate emergency?"

    https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/11/pupils-draft-climate-bill-anxiety-lack-guidance-schools

    Up here the group I'm part of is more trying to work out what we can do now to help survivors later. That's not so much the "wikipedia carved into marble slabs" or caching random stuff in case someone finds it, and more expanding the capacity of a couple of specific communities to transition to a more self-sufficient setup. One example is that you look at the town and think "there's no metal fabrication business here" so you start trying to work out how something like that might be a viable business now, then find those people and encourage them to set up.

    In a way it's very retro hipster/bucolic agrarian stuff, we're working backwards to how small towns used to work. But with the expected modern twists where you plan to import stuff like welding gases and solar panels, but you also plan to export software and services rather than just matter.

    There's no plan to build a wall and shoot tourists, put it that way. But it's very hard to stop some people trying to make the place defensible against aggressive humans. Sigh. Floods, fires, landslips, drought, locusts... and they worry about marauding bands of tax collectors.

    924:

    The version I keep being told is that there will be marauding bands of Alan Akerboltbrechtsen supporters “so gun up” or something. But a lot of people are trapped in a Hobbesian word view, which leads to a pretty unrealistic understanding of what “collapse” will look like.

    925:

    which leads to a pretty unrealistic understanding of what “collapse” will look like.

    Collapse for most of them would be their chauffeur being unable to park outside their preferred hand-ground civet coffee shop on the way to the studio.

    926:

    I've read both, and they were really great, but it wasn't quite the approach I was considering. The specific issue of FTL-practicing humans having to deal with confusion was hampered by the presence of a great, hulking AI that lives outsides of time (or at least has an N-dimensional view of time, such that paradox is transparent to the AI) and can figure stuff out and put humans on the right track.

    Take away the AI and make humans deal with the contradictions of FTL and now you're in the neighborhood I'm thinking of.

    927:

    Good grief, I think I remember that one. Poor Malcom, always the dork. Actually reminds me of Clive from the Alex cartoon strip.

    928:

    Pigeon Beavers are NOT emphatically NOT a "foreign" species ... right? It's a re-introduction. AND It's already been shown, in areas where they currently are, that the local species diversity goes waaay UP. Studies have been published demonstrating this quite clearly. The usual flood-mitigation effects appear on a larger scale, at the cost of local small flooding just upstream of their dams.

    See also Heteromeles on this & his recommendation ... AND Moz & Nojay ... and apart from the killer Scottish "farmers", most people seem to want them ... even the nutter-Landowner in Ottery St Mary seems to have been persuaded. SEE ALSO Devon Beavers article 1 & Devon Beavers Article 2 ... I've seen a film/report where the beavers were in a (very large) enclosure, complete with neat water-measuring devices to monitor flow ... one of which was JUST PERFECT for the beavers to use as the starting point for a new dam .... Ah there you go .. found it - fascinating - upper Tamar valley. You Tube clip of fly-over of the project.

    Moz @ 919 VERY FORTUNATELY ... I had just put my cup of tea down when I played your spoof Auwstrailen Guvmint clip - otherwise I would have sprayed the screen & keyboard. Meanwhile what are the actual AUS "guvmint" doing, other than standing in a large Egyptian river?

    Planes to wrong destinations ... There are three classic ( Rail transport ) cases in Southern England: Do you want to go to Giliingham ( pronouced "Jill-ingham" ) in Kent, or Gillingham ( pronounced as in fish-GILLS ) in Dorset - you can actually get trains to both places from one station, just to make matters even worse [ Waterloo E/Waterloo, in case you were wondering ] Then there's Ashford (Kent) & Ashford (Middlesex) - same station-pair, too! Or the "real" Clapham, which is in Yorkshire, ditto the "real" Richmond, after which the London suburb is named via the land-owner, Henry Tydder, Earl of Ricmond ( Henry VII )

    929:

    Manual sorting like you described would only occur on a flight from somewhere like Casper WY to Laramie. And the the lettering on those tags is fairly big.

    Manual sorting wasn't terribly common then, back in the 1990s, but I was feeling clever and hoping someone would notice my attention to detail. Alas, nobody appreciated it.

    Mind you, things were different again a generation earlier. In the '60s or '70s a multi-stage trip was routed by simply attaching multiple tags chained together (for example, something flying from London to Paris to Lyon would have a Lyon tag on the bag and a Paris tag on the Lyon tag). This was straightforward and easy - but if a traveler annoyed the baggage handler arbitrary tags could be added to send their bags on a scenic route through the system via distant airports.

    This was before my time but I can relate. Everyone who's ever worked customer service has met people who deserved having their luggage sent to Hong Kong or Zanzibar...

    930:

    Also, even for Canadians, mistaking St. John (New Brunswick) and St. John's (Newfoundland and Labrador) happens enough that it doesn't even make the news.

    My city has neighborhoods of St. John's and John's Landing, conveniently on opposite sides of the city. Hillsdale and Hillsboro are ten miles apart but at least on the same side of the city.

    But I'm pretty sure Canadians win the limited name pool re-use contest.

    931:

    This was before my time but I can relate. Everyone who's ever worked customer service has met people who deserved having their luggage sent to Hong Kong or Zanzibar...

    Back in the early 80s I read a story of someone who was retiring from the airline industry after decades of service. They had worked/lived in Montreal, CA. He referred to such as Bombaying someones luggage. If someone was particularly over the top on the "I'm a jerk scale" they would always send the luggage to the proper destination. Except around the world going the opposite way of their travel. Typically with Bombay India in the routing.

    932: 895 - You sure? Several of my mates in the South insist on referring to the tune as "Danny Boy" rather than as the "London Derriere" (IMO Danny Boy refers to the libretto). 897 - It took me about 10s to establish that "a clip of (assault) rifle ammunition" is a variable; actual clips and magazines vary from 5 rounds up to 100. 910 - Causality. Well I'm prepared to admit to "not understanding the mathematics" (I don't have a relevant BSc or higher). It still seems to me that people who say "FTL implies causality violation" ignore the bit where warp (or whatever you call it) travel takes a shortcut from A to B rather than "going FTL in normal space", and if you take a shortcut you save time by going less distance rather than going faster.

    Missed destinations - I once heard a story about a truck driver who collected a container in Essex to be delivered to "Stratford LIFT", and headed off to Warwickshire. He started inquiring for detailed directions there, only to discover that Stratford LIFT is in east London!

    933:

    He referred to such as Bombaying someones luggage.

    That's the term I heard too. As there is now a 'Bombay' brand of luggage the other meaning can't be googled these days. It's nice to have confirmation that this was a thing and I choose to imagine it was done frequently to people who deserved it.

    934:

    paws "LIFT" = London International Freight Terminal - which was in Startford-atte-Bow. Not there any more ... container depots are situated in other places, but LIFT got wiped out by the 2012 olymics mega-development

    935:

    There are a lot of Stratfords around the country — I can think of at least three in Buckinghamshire alone.

    There can be added complications when you have a multi-language area. For example, the Belgian city of Luik is also the Belgian city of Liège. And in Switzerland you have Fribourg versus Freiburg, depending on whether you are in the French or the German speaking part of the country.

    One day we decided to take a day trip from Basel to Fribourg. But Basel is in the German speaking part, where the name is Freiburg. So we bought tickets to Freiburg.

    It was when we were coming in to Fribourg itself that the inspector asked to see our tickets. We showed them, and he looked a bit puzzled. It was only later that we realised he'd decided not to hassle us about the fact we had tickets to the wrong Freiburg - we'd got ones to Freiburg in Germany. I'm not sure to this day whether he thought we'd got on the wrong train, or we'd got on the right train with the wrong tickets.

    (Oddly, my spell checker is highlighting Liège and Fribourg, but not Luik and Freiburg.)

    936:

    So lets play with some crazy false equivalences.

    It’s (apparently) around USD $10 billion to build a 1.2GW nuclear plant. There are around 25 million households, as in dwellings that people live in, in the UK. That’s around USD $400 per household per GW of capacity built. UK peak electricity demand is 60GW, so the cost to build a pearl demand worth of nuclear power would be equivalent to USD $20,000 per household.

    How much does it cost to make a household thermally efficient? Sure you easily could pay $20k just on reverse cycle air-conditioning equipment for a large house. Putting the same into insulation, double glazing, air sealing, active ventilation with minimal heating, I suppose it wouldn’t go very far. But if you factored it in as a premium over what you would pay otherwise when building from new, it’s pretty reasonable. Thermal efficiency and passive design are things we know how to do and which have proven to work well in a range of climates. And things are going to get warmer anyway (admittedly whether that is in fact what happens in the UK is another story, because climate change could mean losing the Gulf Stream).

    I’m sure someone will jump on the numbers, but that’s part of the fun here.

    937:

    You're making an apples/oranges comparison error.

    Firstly, that nuclear plant -- a modern one, going by the pricing -- is amortized over a design life of about a century. So that's more like $200 per household per year.

    Secondly: the mean age of the UK housing fleet is 75 years. That is: 50% of our dwellings are over 75 years old. We don't really need air conditioning in the current climate, and even a 4 degree celsius warming will only put us in need of the sort of adjustments that are standard in France and Spain (for un-air-conditioned buildings over 75 years old -- e.g. shutters with ventilation louvers, high ceilings, sunshades, etc). Our problem is insulation to keep the heat in, at least during winter, and older dwellings -- not to mention recent ones which are made on the cheap -- simply aren't suitable for a retrofit. Those which can have double-glazing, cavity wall insulation, and fiberglass insulation in the loft spaces mostly have it by now; but many can't be adapted at all.

    $20,000 per household over a century barely makes a dent in the real problem, which would be how to replace the 70-80% of the entire housing stock that can't reasonably be upgraded to passivehaus standard or similar. On this basis, "build a shitload of nuclear reactors" actually looks cheaper (if you leave it up to state central planning).

    938:

    How much thermal insulation will my (hypothetical) electric car need to drive from Dumbarton to London in a day? (a trip I've actually done several times with stuff for a whole bunch of people)...

    939:

    Paws, here you're describing a predictable increase in peak demand for charging infrastructure to replace direct fossil fuel use for transport, something I deliberately left out of my speculation above (but there are other things I left out that tilt it the other way, I'm not taking responsibility to balance it all out!).

    940:

    I'm not claiming it balances out, but I don't think we're talking about things that are qualitatively different.

    It's the same here, of course, and I'm sure elsewhere too - retrofitting stuff is a lot more expensive than just building it in in the first place, and often it simply isn't possible. However, housing materials can (and should) have a long design life too. There are ways to cover or lower the cost that are not there for power generation, via code changes (that is making people pay for their own stuff, or at least some of it) and economies of scale (it might cost a lot to build one double glazed window, but it costs a heckload less per unit to build 10,000). Our past experiences seem to show, despite decades of neo-liberal doctrine telling us otherwise, that when you make various resources super abundant people get innovative with them, inventive, they add value creatively. So highly subsidised componentry for DIY home improvements, with some sort of mandatory training that is also made highly accessible and available to all.

    The point is that while this isn't the balance, there is a balance somewhere, and there is no all-or-nothing answer.

    941:

    retrofitting stuff is a lot more expensive than just building it in in the first place, and often it simply isn't possible.

    You're also running up against the UK's over-inflated housing market, which was a deliberate policy pursued by successive governments since Thatcher to financialize the British economy.

    The upshot is that the UK real estate has a face value on the order of US $50-100Tn, but a replacement cost of less than a third of that -- quite possibly a tenth. But it can't be replaced (at least, not in a hurry) because artificial scarcity means there aren't enough construction facilities, and there certainly isn't enough land available to build more homes on -- you'd have to demolish existing ones, which means inflating the market even more (in the short term) by pumping more money into it, or using compulsory purchase orders to bankrupt the home-owning demographic (who, ahem, are also the voting demographic).

    Fixing the UK's housing infrastructure really requires a nuclear war. It's about as easy as weaning the Saudi economy off oil, or Australia off mining.

    942:

    Damian, Whether it's what/how you meant the text or not, it reads as "insulation is better than generating capacity". My point is that insulation does not always address power consumption (although I agree that, where possible, better insulation will reduce the need for domestic heating and cooling power). You should also refer to Charlie's #941 before replying to either or both of us!

    943:

    Russian and Chinese reactor operators are providing district heating hot water from a few of their reactor sites, basically "free" energy from the heat exchangers and condenser systems.

    https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-nuclear-heating-project-starts-up

    Western nations, irrationally fearful of the barely-caged demons that reside inside a reactor vessel insist on remote location of the Devil's carbon-free eneergy generators, well away from towns and cities that could benefit from nuclear-supplied district heating with no added carbon cost.

    The reactor barge, Akademik Lomonosov, that the Russians have deployed to their northern coast is equipped to deliver district heating hot water shoreside. The Chinese are also working on developing simple heating-only reactor designs for remote communities where fuel supply issues are problematic. These heating systems are based on swimming-pool research reactor designs that don't need containments and other such fripperies. There's also been suggestions to use fresh spent fuel rods as heating elements for locally-sited district heating systems but the transport and safety of such a heat source probably precludes it.

    944:

    The WashPost responded to the EU GDPR by basically blocking all readers in the EU (and UK) because they didn't want to observe our legally-mandated privacy rights.

    You surprise me. I read WashPost nearly daily, having paid the modest annual subscription. And I live in the UK, which they know.

    945:

    You've got to be careful about the "add value creatively" notion. In California, for example, "add value" for a developer, means making the building more salable, not making it more energy efficient or good for solar. That means stressing "amenities" like views, hot tubs, outdoor kitchens, and wine refrigerators, and ignoring stuff that will really help the homeowner, like privacy from neighbors, roofs designed for solar, garages designed for house batteries, fire-safe landscaping and so forth. The latter will save homeowners hundreds to thousands of dollars every year in electricity and insurance costs (as well as keeping the house from burning down), but it's buzz-kill for realtors. Unless you tell the realtor that's what you want and ignore the amenities when touring homes, they'll sell you an expensive slab of lard on its sizzle alone, and you'll be stuck trying to afford really expensive retrofits and relandscaping to make it fire safe and energy independent.

    I actually do get annoyed about this stuff. Architects know how to build homes for solar or even to get off the grid. It's so simple DIY naifs like me can figure it out. The architects don't get paid to design these things, unfortunately, so they don't even think about them. Right now, aesthetics is their primary driver, and the new homes they build are pretty inappropriate for solar panels, although they'll stick a couple on the roof to meet minimum California standards.

    Anyway, generating capacity is a bit of a red herring in some (many?) parts of the world. In California, generation needs peak between 4 pm and 9 pm, especially in summer, because that's when people get home, turn on the lights, cook, clean, and run their air conditioners to get their homes cooler after the heat of the day (aesthetically pleasing design generally means "fucking oven if I don't run the AC, and icebox without the heater on"). Peak time is also when blackouts are most likely. It's definitely the peak demand that power plants ("peaker" power plants, as opposed to "base load" power plants like nukes and hydropower plants) are being designed and built for.

    Peak hours aren't great for solar, so traditionally peaker plants in California have burned natural gas. They take a couple of hours to reach operating temperature and of course they pollute. But bringing them online for 8 or 9 hours levels out peak demand across the grid.

    Thing is, Elon Musk is starting to eat the peaker market, because it turns out that a bank of batteries that can match the output of a peaker plant is not only cheaper to build, it can respond close to instantaneously, so there's no polluting ramp up when it's burning fossil fuels but not producing electricity. There's already been one gas plant canceled with the contract going for a battery station of the same capacity.

    What the batteries do is soak up excess solar production during the day (remember, peak demand peaks in summer due to air conditioners), then distribute it in the evening. They don't increase capacity, they simply reshape the supply to meet the demand. And that's where the action is in our part of the world: it's on peak electricity supply, less on baseline energy production.

    In any case, this is a minor part of San Diego's greenhouse gas emissions. The bigger part (50-60%) is from cars and trucks moving stuff and people around. This in turn is due to the fact that our cities were laid out 50-70 years ago with commercial and industrial districts that people worked in and bedroom communities they lived in, with the assumption that they'd drive a car between the two. That inherent inefficiency turns out to be really hard to fix. You can build an office park in a bedroom community, assuming (as our city council does) that the people who live there to dump their far-away jobs and start anew in whatever businesses move into the complex. It rarely works that way. It's equally likely that the people working in that bedroom community will be commuting from across the city, so all you've done is increase traffic on suburban roads that weren't designed for it. And so it goes.

    946:

    Yes, we have a similar artificial scarcity here, somewhat bizarrely given the space outside cities. But it’s a longstanding theme, they were building tiny terrace houses in the Victorian era. These days we have rapidly infilling urban sprawl gaps, but massively increasing density at the same time. Oddly, for all the power the mining cartels have, the actual contribution they make to the Australian economy is relatively small compared with basics like housing. If Australia dropped mining now, sure there’s be a small recession but it would be totallly recoverable, those impacted most are already essentially living on the subsidies the industry receives and frankly would be better employed elsewhere, if the stranglehold on the political class were a little less intense.

    Which is why I think the DIY and technical education pathway is worth exploring. I’m not claiming it is a complete solution that we should focus on to the exclusion of other things, particularly more and different modes of generation, only that it can be part of one, has a lot of untapped potential around the sort of additional things we’d need to do anyway, and the comparison I was making was largely around low cost for impact (though I admit I haven’t supported that part of it very well)..

    Paws, I’ve clearly forgotten the convention whereby anyone saying “X is a frequently overlooked and underestimated alternative or at least complement to Y and could be looked at further” must obviously be saying “X is better and more important than Y, so we shouldn’t bother looking at Y at all”. Which I suppose is fair enough, but I did start off talking about false equivalences, in particular the ones I was just about to draw.

    947:

    Hunterston Torness.

    948:

    My thought bubble here was more around encouraging and enabling cheaper and more knowledgeable DIY retrofitting of stuff that is actually useful, recognising that many things can’t be fixed if the underlying design is really limiting. The method would be funding programs that builds skill sets in the community and arrange bulk purchases to achieve economies of scale.

    In some ways it’s the sort of thing we will need to do to build resilience in communities as the climate emergency develops anyway. Of course it’s totally contrary to everything the prevailing order believes in, so currently totally out of the question. But so long as we have campaigning politicians talking about the sorts of things that projects like this could achieve, and there are different ways to sell it to different audiences, there are possibilities. But you have more experience trying to get things by local government and community groups than I do.

    949:

    We're pretty similar in our thinking.

    Around here, the plan to deal with climate change is densification around public transit. The reasoning is that if we can decrease commuter traffic (#1 polluter) and decrease housing costs and homelessness rates(#1 political gripe) we can also decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Wins!

    The problem with this solution is that it makes people somewhat more vulnerable. Although we don't have big yards, some people in old rural sprawls actually have semi-subsistence gardens, because they have the space and soil to do it. If you stash people in apartments, they're utterly dependent on food shipped in. Cut that supply chain and you've got a famine. It's actually more complicated than that, as most of the new subdivisions have no garden space to speak of, but densification is about efficiency more than resilience.

    My preferred solution is actually a special sort of NIMBYism. A lot of people are still coming to California from places like Ohio or Michigan because they hate the political climate back home and can't find jobs there anyway. To me, this sucks. Land in these states and others is relatively cheap, rain falls from the sky fairly dependably, there aren't earthquakes or (often) tornadoes, and these places aren't likely to become unlivable due to climate change. Contrast that with San Diego, which is at the very end of all the supply chains and can support maybe 50,000 (out of a population of 3 million and growing) if our water pipelines get cut and we have to depend on meager local production. So if I really wanted to make California more climate resilient and I had the skills, I'd stage political revolutions in the Midwest and install more progressive governments, not just to battle hate and opioid crises, but to attract people to a region where, if the urban supply lines fail, people can at least turn abandoned home sites into productive gardens. California can suffer through the resulting recession, but we really have too many people here to survive the predictable crises we face, and I think it's unethical to pull more people here if they'll die after an earthquake or have to become drought refugees.

    But I am a very silly person who doesn't understand the realities of the world, so my solutions are routinely ignored and derided. Who'd want to live in Ohio anyway, when they can have perfect weather year-round in San Diego?

    950:

    "Perfect weather" is variable. at 08:00 GMT today we'd about 50mph wind and hail: Now, 8 hours later the wind has dropped, and it's sunny and quite pleasant out.

    951:

    I'm sitting here in the centre of Edinburgh, about 50km from Torness nuclear power station. That's a long way to run hot water pipes to provide carbon-free heating. Even with more modern technologies of insulation and heat transport it's not worth doing now since the two Torness AGRs will be shut down and enter decommissioning in a decade or so with no replacement planned. The licencing and administrative paperwork required for a change to the reactor cooling systems to extract and use "waste" heat would take longer than the expected lifespan of the reactors, never mind the legal challenges from Greenpeace and other nuclear Chicken Little groups.

    There were other thermal power stations closer to where I live, with built-up areas around them where people lived and went to school -- Cockenzie coal-fired power station, now shut down operated for about 40 years while poisoning the locals by emitting millions of tonnes of nitrous oxides, toxic metals, sulphuric acid, soot particulates and radioactive isotopes too but, praise the Lord not nuclear power because Scary!

    952:

    @949: Who'd want to live in Ohio anyway, when they can have perfect weather year-round in San Diego?

    Are you trying to get a rise out of John Scalzi?

    953:

    Granted it's too far to pipe waste heat, but it's still close enough to put you potentially in an accident fallout plume, which is what I was thinking of.

    954:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

    So, last week I death-marched the copy-edits to "Dead Lies Dreaming", which is officially due out around Halloween.

    And I am now elbow-deep in the fifth (and hopefully final) rewrite of "Invisible Sun", which is due on my editor's desk on March 17th.

    "Invisible Sun" is a big book (currently it's around 145,000 words, the same size as "Accelerando" or "Iron Sunrise" and significantly longer than any of the other Merchant Princes/Empire Games books). I'm making unexpectedly good progress, but I have another 30,000 words to edit and 20,000 words to completely rewrite from scratch.

    Which means I'm going to be scarce around these parts for the next 2-3 weeks.

    Feel free to talk among yourselves ...

    955:

    How much does it cost to make a household thermally efficient? Sure you easily could pay $20k just on reverse cycle air-conditioning equipment for a large house. Putting the same into insulation, double glazing, air sealing, active ventilation with minimal heating, I suppose it wouldn’t go very far. But if you factored it in as a premium over what you would pay otherwise when building from new, it’s pretty reasonable.

    Building codes for new construction in almost all of the US require homes to be very thermal efficient. You can upscale on your own but it is rapidly diminishing returns come into play here.

    My 1961 house does not have insulation in the exterior walls and single pane windows. I've move away from heating/cooling the house most of the time into room arrangements. An upgrade to the HVAC for me just means I'm spending less to heat/cool the outdoors.

    Just to replace my windows (AND DOORS) is $8k for crappy better. New insulation in the attic (remove old first) and walls could easily double that. At which point I still have a house that may be much more thermally efficient but the HVAC plant needs to be replaced. So I COULD put $20K into my house and have a 1961 house that is energy efficient but needs $150K to $200K in up fit costs before anyone MIGHT want to buy it.

    The problem with your back of the envelope calculations is that the real world details don't fit well on a back of the envelope.

    And my house is one of 1000s which are in the my area alone. They are being replaced with new one by one with neighbors fighting all the way.

    Talk to H. This is about zoning, density, and all kinds of other issues in addition to thermal efficiency of any one house.

    956:

    @949: Who'd want to live in Ohio anyway, when they can have perfect weather year-round in San Diego?

    Are you trying to get a rise out of John Scalzi?

    Since we both grew up in California, but I only lived in Ohio for a year for a job, while he moved there...sure. I'd be willing to move, if I thought my family would tolerate it (spoiler: they wouldn't, for many reasons).

    Actually, I've met a number of ex-Midwesterners in San Diego. Some are here for the weather, but most seemed to be fleeing the political climate as much as the weather.

    957:

    remote location of the Devil's carbon-free eneergy generators, well away from towns and cities that could benefit from nuclear-supplied district heating with no added carbon cost.

    Well there is that need to find/build a big body of water to take that heat. There's a nuke plant 10 miles from here. Sitting next to a lake specifically built for it. (Actually to handle 4 reactors but that's another story.) Getting that heat into the burbs or even the city would be hard. Most cities are not sited next to a suitable body of water.

    958:

    A lot of people are still coming to California from places like Ohio or Michigan because they hate the political climate back home and can't find jobs there anyway. .... Who'd want to live in Ohio anyway, when they can have perfect weather year-round in San Diego?

    Non trivial numbers of us got fed up with the cold. I moved from the northeaster US to North Carolina just so I could be warmer.

    But to your other points. Real estate due to softening demand is hugely cheaper where it is colder. Some call it the rust belt. I call it just plain cold. Or near the coasts away from the resort areas.

    If I wanted I could sell my house (really the lot) take the money, move to one of these area to a much nicer house and pay the heating costs off the extra for the next 30 to 40 years.

    But I'd be cold and I've decided I no longer want to be cold when outside. Well except for a few weeks in our somewhat winter.

    959:

    Back to the original premise:

    CLOSING THE LOOP

    It's survivor meets the bachelor(ette) meets climate change!

    Retrofit six houses to be closed ecosystems, homes and yards that generate their own energy, catch their own water, recycle poop into compost, with a lot of work from their residents. Each house gets two very single contestants, with genders and personalities assigned so that they are not going to hook up with each other under any condition. They have three challenges: --live together in the house for 6 months. --Actively date non-contestants and get into a stable long term relationship in 6 months (all dating activity to be recorded except any actual hookup) --Not run through the (very limited) bank account provided by the showrunners.

    The winner is the one first one with a stable new relationship and a house that's still working. Anyone that goes bankrupt (buying food or supplies for the house, paying for dates, etc.) leaves the show. If there's only one survivor after six months, that person wins by default.

    The permutations and potential conflicts are endless. From what I've read, living inside a closed ecosystem is endless fiddling and a lot of work, even if the person doing it is competent. Add to that the stress of trying to build a social life on a limited budget while cooperating with a housemate who is also trying to win, and things should get interesting.

    For added lulz, if the show goes to a second season, film "where are they now" segments on the previous contestants. If they'll talk to you.

    960:

    Actually, Torness is only about 10km from Dunbar, and Hunterston is 3.6km from Seamill. That's still too far for piping waste heat, but nastily close in th event of a nuclear spill. Since my main point was about safety rather than using heat from the secondary cooling circuit (but that could still be used in fish farming I think)...

    961:

    The fallout plume distance from the Cockenzie coal-station stacks to the nearest house was about 200 metres, and those stacks constantly emitted toxic and carcinogenic gases and particulates by the tonne-lot by design and on purpose, no accident needed.

    If Cockenzie had been a nuclear plant doing that, killing and sickening people living nearby for forty years then there would have been a world-wide outcry, TV documentaries and dramas about the "disaster", press retrospectives about Ten Years After and the like, maybe even disaster tourism with well-heeled thrill-seekers dressed in protective gear and breathing apparatus being bussed along the B1348 to poke around in the ruins of the abandoned nursery school just outside the plant's gates and take selfies against the coal waste tips.

    But Cockenzie was coal-powered, not nuclear so that didn't happen. Well, the deaths and illnesses did happen but that was just Business As Usual.

    962:

    @956: So I'm sitting here in the DC area looking at retiring probably at the end of 2021, and climate change is definitely impacting my decision making process on where to retire.

    The spouse and I are both from west of the Mississippi (she from Kansas, and I from El Paso, TX), and unlikely to want to settle in the eastern half of the U.S. I'd love to retire to the Austin that existed when I went to college, but that place no longer exists; plus, climate change over the next 20-30 years (I hope to make it that long) will make Texas even toastier than it is now.

    My family is mostly passed on, and the spouse's family is in Colorado, so that's a likely destination. Plus, it should still be livable over the next thirty years, assuming you Californians don't take ALL the water from the Colorado River.

    The lack for foresight in people moving to the Southwest and West Coast, over the last fifty years at least, is stunning, given what we already knew about the lack of water and other environmental effects. And people are STILL moving there. Sigh.

    963:

    "Too many Springfield"s? I have read that there is at least one Springfield in every state in the US... and some have more than one. Oh, and it's the capital of Illinois.

    964:

    Hey, we're the US. We've got people suing, because kids in elementary school are getting trauma from "active school shooter drills".

    Really.

    965:

    District heating... oh, like how many office buildings in downtown Philly used to be, at least, where they got hot water from the city incinerator. This was early/middle of last century, at least. Dunno about now.

    966:

    Yeah, the Colorado River. This is why idiotic notions of California successfully seceding from the US are a such a dangerous fantasy. Cut off Colorado water access, bomb the California aqueduct that carries water south to southern California, and California surrenders because they've got 19 million-odd people in southern California suddenly out of water and very upset.

    Anyway, if you haven't read Cadillac Desert, I strongly urge you to do so before you move west. You may not quite understand the depths of the problem otherwise. And it's not just California.

    967:

    "Perfect weather"?

    People are moving there because the GOP has locked out anyone else?

    There are multiple solutions to the later, and about the former... um, no, thanks. I'm in the DC area, and (remember global warming?), we've had more rain this winter than I can remember, pretty much every week, multiple days, cloud cover most days... and we had one, count 'em, day with 1" of snow. I WANT MY SNOW!

    What, you think I shouldn't like cold weather, and long hard freezes? Never mind the plants that want it, never mind the extended mosquito season, let's get real: 1) kudzu, and 2) fire ants.

    968:

    Well, as I figured out back before 2015, and Nova was nice enough to reiterate, if severe climate change happens, Earth rapidly (over the next 200 years or so) transitions into a hothouse from its current icehouse biosphere.

    What that means is that there are effectively tropical forests north to around the Michigan state line (technically paratropical), and subtropical forests north from there for a bit. Yes, the Sonoran desert would also expand north, but that just leads to this weird desert sandwich of a desert biome caused by the Hadley cell sandwiched north and south by tropical forests.

    On of the unanswered questions I had in Hot Earth Dreams was whether the the transition from temperate to tropical would go with heat up followed by increased precipitation, heat and precipitation increasing in lock step, or increased precipitation followed by a heat up. Based on what I'm seeing in the US, it's pretty clear that the last pattern (increased precipitation followed by a heat up) is what we can expect going forwards.

    In other words, expect precipitation to increase towards tropical levels (meters of rain-equivalent) in most years. If it's cold enough, this will fall as snow, but with the warm up, eventually it will all fall as rain.

    So yes, kudzu, fire ants, AND alligators migrating north and out of the sewers.

    On the other hand, San Diego's on the edge of the desert (the real edge is around Ensenada, about 30 miles south of the border. San Diego's on the border). With the desert expanding, we can expect the climate of central Baja California to move toward us. That area is currently known as the Vizcaino desert, and that bit about 5 cm rain/year is not as conducive to the continued existence of San Diego as I'd wish, especially if it becomes necessary to depend on local water. The expanding desert might conceivably reach as far north as San Francisco in a century or two, with seasonal paratropical forest north from there into Oregon. I won't be alive for it, but it will be a strange place for whoever survives. Probably the lowland forests of Hawai'i are the best preview we've currently got.

    969:

    shakes head I may not be ending a 15 year project, but I understand. I wrote a one-shot short, just under 2200 words, the end of the summer of '18. Then, to investigate the world which caught my interest, I wrote a novelette that came in around 12k or 13k words. Then wrote two more shorts 4k words, then 7600 words, Then a novella, to make the Unpleasant People not cardboard, and that's over 30k words. Then about 8k worth of novelette which is unsalable alone.

    Then, at the recommendation of the editor of Amazing, the novelette doubled to 26k novella. Then I started on this final novella, that makes it all into a novel. I'm finally in the first part of the climax, in the last hour or two I've just discovered how nasty the Unpleasant People are... and I'm closing in on 34k words, and it's going to be at least 2k-5k more words before I'm done. That's... um, 113k words, and I've written a bunch of other shorts in addition in that time....

    Jeez, I hadn't added it up, but it could be 120k words by the time I start looking for an agent or publisher....

    970:

    What, you think I shouldn't like cold weather, and long hard freezes?

    We are not all uniformly built robots. I sweat a lot. And have a naturally low blood pressure and heart rate. I get out in cold weather and my finger tips start to go numb. But I'm fine outside in 100F.

    You like it cold. Great. Go for it. But not all of us are you. :)

    971:

    bomb the California aqueduct that carries water south to southern California, and California surrenders

    Or they pull a Singapore.

    In the mid-80s through mid-90s (give or take a decade) Singapore had a mechanized brigade plus air support on standby to storm across the causeway into Malaysia and secure the reservoirs in the face of armed opposition, if the Malaysia/Singapore cold war ever turned hot.

    (Singapore, with its incredibly high per-capita GDP, could afford a first-rank military by the standards of a 6-7 million person city state. Malaysia ... not poor-poor, but certainly not efficient and wealthy enough to take on a front-rank military single-mindedly dedicated to seizing the water supply their families depended on for survival.)

    ... Of course, this assumes some geopolitical nous on the part of a secessionist Californian republic. This cannot be taken for granted.

    972:

    @971: Or they pull a Singapore.

    The geography is a LOT different. California would have to secure the Hoover Dam in far northwest Arizona and the Glen Canyon Dam in far northern Arizona, 400 and 700 kilometers distant from San Diego. These would also be contested by the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. If Colorado were to destroy these dams, it would be impossible to maintain the populations of southern Arizona, southern California, and the city of Las Vegas, Nevada.

    A recently updated Congressional Research Service report highlights the historic and current challenges of managing the Colorado's flow across the Southwest U.S. The trend is not positive. This water is also very important for agriculture in interior California, especially centered around El Centro, south of the Salton Sea. (I know Heteromeles already know this, I provide it as context for the rest of you)

    @966: Frank, I'm quite familiar with Cadillac Desert. It's one of my spouse's family's favorite books (they are distant relatives of John Muir, to boot). Even without anthropogenic climate change, the southwest U.S. has been headed for a crash for a long time.

    973:

    Greg@928: what are the actual AUS "guvmint" doing

    Oh, the Department of Genuine Satire is entirely accurate, they're just putting the typical defeatist lefty doom-and-gloom spin on everything our Blessed Leader does. He prayed for rain, and lo the heavens opened and there was rain. He prayed for a budget surplus, and lo the country was blessed with a surplus.

    I mean, sure, the quibblers can argue that it's a small surplus at the expense of fire and flood relief, but it is without doubt a (forecast) surplus. And sure torrential rain flooding half the east coast wasn't exactly what most of us would have chosen, but the whole point of outsourcing big decisions to God is that you don't get to make those decisions. Inshallah, I think the term is.

    The governmunt (munt, from munted, meaning fucked). Anyway, the governmunt has been forced to concede that "we accept the science" but they continue to believe that the hierarchy runs god-LiberalNationalParty-economy-voters-...-environment, and things lower down the list get whatever is left over after more important items have taken everything they can.

    Think of it like a river, like the Mighty Murray River which starts in Queensland and flows into the Very Important Cubby Station. When there's enough water to overflow their dams the river continues down to provide drinking water for farmers and farming towns, and occasionally (God willing/inshallah) also irrigating some farmland, then if there's enough water it flows down into NSW where again people drink it and irrigate crops, as well as (like Queensland) putting their unwanted liquids into it. Then, again if there's water left, it flows into South Australia where the farmers have a go, and finally it flows out into the sea through Adelaide. I mean, technically it flows into the sea. And technically it's water. Same as technically VB is beer. Actually, now I think about it, the process is much the same: take water, pass it through a bovine, then through a rugby player, then call the resulting product "water" or "VB" as the fancy takes you.

    974:

    Greg@928: what are the actual AUS "guvmint" doing

    Oh, the Department of Genuine Satire is entirely accurate, they're just putting the typical defeatist lefty doom-and-gloom spin on everything our Blessed Leader does. He prayed for rain, and lo the heavens opened and there was rain. He prayed for a budget surplus, and lo the country was blessed with a surplus.

    I mean, sure, the quibblers can argue that it's a small surplus at the expense of fire and flood relief, but it is without doubt a (forecast) surplus. And sure torrential rain flooding half the east coast wasn't exactly what most of us would have chosen, but the whole point of outsourcing big decisions to God is that you don't get to make those decisions. Inshallah, I think the term is.

    The governmunt (munt, from munted, meaning fucked). Anyway, the governmunt has been forced to concede that "we accept the science" but they continue to believe that the hierarchy runs god-LiberalNationalParty-economy-voters-...-environment, and things lower down the list get whatever is left over after more important items have taken everything they can.

    Think of it like a river, like the Mighty Murray River which starts in Queensland and flows into the Very Important Cubby Station. When there's enough water to overflow their dams the river continues down to provide drinking water for farmers and farming towns, and occasionally (God willing/inshallah) also irrigating some farmland, then if there's enough water it flows down into NSW where again people drink it and irrigate crops, as well as (like Queensland) putting their unwanted liquids into it. Then, again if there's water left, it flows into South Australia where the farmers have a go, and finally it flows out into the sea through Adelaide. I mean, technically it flows into the sea. And technically it's water. The bits that flows into the sea is "environmental water".

    975:

    Yay, if you know Cadillac Desert, you know what I mean about moving to Colorado...

    I'd add that California is more like Iraq facing the US military than Singapore facing Malaysia. We may be wealthy, but potential invasion forces are stationed outside the state (some in Nevada and Arizona), and all our ports have Navy bases that would have to join the revolt before we'd have even a microscopic chance of winning. Also, we have an enormously long, open border with the rest of the US, so aerial attacks are impossible to prevent. It might be hard for us to be invaded over the Sierras, but a flight of B-52s could bomb us into submission quite easily. Basically we're big and fragile, so violent secession against the US as it stands now isn't going to work.

    Wait 50-100 years, and a paratropical northern California may have lost touch with the US capitol in the northeastern US, as access across the deserts has been lost due to increasing heat in the deserts, coupled with 21st Century drawdown of all the remnant desert aquifers, so that there are no springs remaining in the desert. Crossings could only be made in rare wet years that may only occur once every decade. Then the remnants of California will become independent by default. If they're not subsumed by Oregon, Washington, or Canada into the new nation of Cascadia or Columbia.

    976:

    @975: you know what I mean about moving to Colorado...

    In our case, it'd be moving back to Colorado; we lived in Colorado Springs from 1989 to 2009. I don't think two more people will break the state. Besides, we still have stuff in storage there, including two 1956 Studebaker Commanders.

    977:

    UK real estate has a face value on the order of US $50-100Tn, but a replacement cost of less than a third of that

    Really?

    I could give you a patch of empty space and you could build housing for 50M people? Space like, say, L3?

    Viz, a goodly chink of the "housing value" is the land it sits on, which is a commodity with growing demand and shrinking supply. Every year sea level goes up another 3mm, but the UK rises less than that. Said property also has a bunch of services already available, from air to sewage. Those have value (and also cost a fuckton to replace when they wear out).

    978:

    I think the DIY and technical education pathway is worth exploring

    It might be worth thinking about why the Alternative Technology Association (www.ata.org.au) changed its name to Renew (ata.org domain redirects) and focusses on their shiny "Sanctuary" magazine much more than the formerly-newsprint Renew magazine. Latter magazine has largely dropped the DIY parts that used to make up 50% of the content in favour of the catalogue/review content because the readership is now very much cashed up boomers buying indulgences from the green gods.

    There are cranky old members (some in their 20's) who very much do DIY, but they are the inheritors of a venerable tradition that has helped tens, nay, dozens, of people become very sustainable indeed over the last few decades. The mass market is awesome at ignoring unprofitable bullshit like insulation in favour of shiny shiny toys... hence the popularity of street-facing solar panels.

    979:

    In the news, semi-solid hints of another ancestral human species: Scientists find evidence of 'ghost population' of ancient humans - Traces of unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations (Ian Sample, 12 Feb 2020) Paper is interesting. Good that contemporary African human genomes are getting some attention. Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations (ScienceAdvances, full, Arun Durvasula, Sriram Sankararaman, 12 Feb 2020) (pdf) Combining our results across the West African populations, we estimate that the archaic population split from the ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans 360 thousand years (ka) to 1.02 million years (Ma) B.P. and subsequently introgressed into the ancestors of present-day Africans 0 to 124 ka B.P. contributing 2 to 19% of their ancestry. We caution that the true underlying demographic model is likely to be more complex. To explore aspects of this complexity, we examined the possibility that the archaic population diverged at the same time as the split time of modern humans and Neanderthals and found that this model can also produce a U-shaped CSFS with a likelihood that is relatively high, although lower than that of our best-fit model

    980:

    There's an international treaty governing the Colorado River water. Granted, it was signed when few people lived in Arizona or Nevada, and they didn't have the cities in the California desert, so it's really effed up, but it's there.

    Now bombing the Delta diversion tunnel that's going to send water to the southwest San Joaquin valley for the exporting farmers, and kill the delta and the Bay - that I'd support.

    981:

    So Beaufort Dyke is probably making the Deep Ones very, very unhappy, as in expect anything around there to have unexplainable failures?

    982:

    I saw the headlines (in California news coverage) and figured it had a really major tailwind.

    983:

    Well, some of our ports have navy bases. I think it's pretty much just San Diego now - the ones in the Bay Area all have been turned over to developers of one or another kind. A lot of air force bases got closed, also. But there's Miramar, Lemoore, Travis, and McLellan, and 29 Palms and Pendleton are both big.

    984:

    There's an international treaty governing the Colorado River water

    What does it matter if the amount of water crossing the border is too small to measure most decades?

    985:

    Although we don't have big yards, some people in old rural sprawls actually have semi-subsistence gardens, because they have the space and soil to do it. If you stash people in apartments, they're utterly dependent on food shipped in.

    Not to mention home canning, which I can testify first-hand is very much a thing in the rural US. It does assume both gardens that produce surges of edibles and room to put up food for later. (My mother in law literally had a room, about two meters wide and two or three meters deep, in the garage; we had shelves of Mason jars to the ceiling.) I don't know anyone who does this in a city apartment. It's too easy to go down to the local market and there's often nowhere to store significant amounts of food anyway.

    I read that the UK has Kilner jars generally similar to the US hardware. Do you have the same pattern of use?

    986:

    Re: FTL: I hope Alcubierre Warp Drive (AWD) can be found to work and is practical, and leave why it wouldn't violate causality to those with better understanding than mine. Meanwhile, I have no problem accepting the possibility of Traversable Wormholes (TWHs) and will also leave topics like chronology protection, Raychaudhuri's theorem, and Roman rings to others...Like TWHs, I regard ultra-relativistic BH starships as unobtainium rather than handwavium.

    Re: beavers: ISTM that from an environmental perspective, beavers should be reintroduced wherever the habitat inside their original range would permit. Are there beaver-equivalents which should be re-introduced outside beavers'original range?

    Re: insulation, retrofitting, etc: I think it would be possible (if expensive and time-consuming) to conduct a national energy audit of all buildings and then decide what to do. The "doing" could likely go a fair way toward proving meaningful employment for large numbers of people for a generation or more.

    Finally, I seem to have "red-carded" myself on a particular laptop (not this one, obviously). Even when I switch browsers, I get an error message which says I can't even access the Antipope site anymore. Short of possibly installing a VPN on the other device (not feasible), any suggestions?

    987:

    I have read that there is at least one Springfield in every state in the US... and some have more than one. Oh, and it's the capital of Illinois.

    As far as I can tell there's not yet a Springfield Alaska - yet. grin

    You're right about duplication. If you're in Florida, Vermont, or Indiana the local Springfield can be at least two places; in New Jersey, three. Virginia appears to have adopted the Canadian theme of only having a few names and re-using them, as they have four. But the winner is Wisconsin, which somehow manages to have six.

    You might as well imagine the Simpsons Springfield, since it would be useless work to learn about all the real ones.

    988:

    Workable causality violating FTL is actually a good thing as it provides a neat solution to the Fermi paradox and implies that the omnicidal early adopters were us, which in turn implies that we live long enough to do it.

    No FTL leaves us stuck dealing with our own likely extinction, and if that isn't enough the only defensible sf will be of the mundane variety.

    989:

    Water pipelines .... Rome Even after the Western Empire ceased to exist & rome had been "sacked" 410 CE - Occupied/changed hands several times .. the aquifer/aqueduct system continued to operate everything went on. It wasn't until 537 CE 125 years later that the aqueducts were deliberately cut ... which wrecked the city - the peole fled or died & it reverted to a large village. A message for California & elsewhere.

    Charlie @ 954 How about a prompter on something or other, given that we are already approaching 1000?

    Heteromeles but most seemed to be fleeing the political climate as much as the weather. THAT bad? I assume Ohio has gone full-on Trump/Fascist/Confederate/Slaver? Trouble is, if you run away, the palce just gets worse, rather than overthrowing the tyrants at the rigged ballot-box. Difficult.

    Nojay @ 961 THAT perfectly encapsulates the "chicken little" selfish shortsighted amazing arrogant STUPIDITY of the fake greenies, doesn't it?

    Dave P @ 976 Isn't Colorado Trump territiry as well, or are they turning away from the Dark Side?

    990:

    Even when I switch browsers, I get an error message which says I can't even access the Antipope site anymore.

    Some browsers -- Chrome and Firefox in particular -- are now beginning to refuse to serve non-encrypted http sites. I got a kinda half-assed upgrade to secure http a couple of years ago (problem: the CMS I use has ended support and the version I'm stuck on doesn't directly support secure http) but in the last dust-off the old insecure Apache got started up again via systemd, and I don't know how to turn it off (because systemd is w-a-y after my time -- and ugly to boot). Make sure you're trying to look at the blog using a url beginning with "https://" and you may get better results?

    991:

    Some browsers -- Chrome and Firefox in particular -- are now beginning to refuse to serve non-encrypted http sites ...

    As a side note, and quirk too minor to be worth chasing down, I've noticed that the site login gets confused by Chrome in incognito mode. I can read, I can log in, I can post - but then it gets confused about whether I'm logged in or not. This is trivial to handle, since I can just close that tab, open the site again in a new one, then log in again. I'm only mentioning this in case someone else is experiencing this but didn't think of the workaround.

    992: 961 - Look, the only thing I was questioning was "nuclear powerplants are a long way from populated areas". 973 Para 4 - Are you channeling Pterry? 976 - "2 1856 Studebaker Commanders" - Lucky bugler! :-) 985 - Yes and no. Yes in that we will pickle and store excess of some cropping plants: No in that very few of us have enough garden to generate the surpluses in the first place, and choose to grow pickling varieties rather than ones that can just be left in the ground until wanted.

    NB - I have about 140 sq ft of ground that receives more than 6 hours insolation at any time of year. That's about 140 sq ft more than Charlie or Nojay have!

    986 - The "red card" might be a cookie thing? 990 & 991 - In which context I can log in, make 1 post, but then have to browse away and back before I can make another. The log in persists until the 2 hour? time out though. It's a "nice to have fixed" rather than an actual stopper though.
    993:

    In which context I can log in, make 1 post, but then have to browse away and back before I can make another.

    Yes, that's the one. Not worth fussing about but interesting to notice that it happens on Chrome but not Firefox.

    994:

    I only even mentioned it because you and Charlie had already opened the subject. In case you weren't clear, I don't have to log in every time I want to post, but will have to browse to another side and back before I can make my next post here. I'm still using the same login session as post #992 used above.

    995:

    Which would you prefer: a quantum Internet or a globe-spanning quantum AI? (I'm not sure there's a difference.)

    FYI - the below is on Nature's free-to-share site.

    'Entanglement of two quantum memories via fibres over dozens of kilometres

    Abstract:

    A quantum internet that connects remote quantum processors1,2 should enable a number of revolutionary applications such as distributed quantum computing. Its realization will rely on entanglement of remote quantum memories over long distances. Despite enormous progress3–12, at present the maximal physical separation achieved between two nodes is 1.3 kilometres10, and challenges for longer distances remain. Here we demonstrate entanglement of two atomic ensembles in one laboratory via photon transmission through city-scale optical fibres. The atomic ensembles function as quantum memories that store quantum states. We use cavity enhancement to efficiently create atom–photon entanglement13–15 and we use quantum frequency conversion16 to shift the atomic wavelength to telecommunications wavelengths. We realize entanglement over 22 kilometres of field-deployed fibres via two-photon interference17,18 and entanglement over 50 kilometres of coiled fibres via single-photon interference19. Our experiment could be extended to nodes physically separated by similar distances, which would thus form a functional segment of the atomic quantum network, paving the way towards establishing atomic entanglement over many nodes and over much longer distances.'

    Once they figure out how to expand the distances, interstellar real-time communication between space ships, space ship-ground or Earth-colony planet can't be that far away.

    996:

    Best and clearest discussion of FTL vs. causality (in which causality wins) is here: http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2011/03/ftl-part-i-honest-cheat.html

    "And a post here from last year which noted that contemporary physics has just barely left the door open to FTL, subject to certain constraints. The relevant effect of these constraints - as I understand it (and General Relativity is not my field of expertise) - is that you can stay out of temporal trouble so long as your baseline FTL routes do not cross-connect."

    He means wormholes, but the same principle applies to any FTL technology. The "oversimplified for fiction" rule of thumb for semi-plausible FTL travel turns out to be--either dont include multiple routes to the same destination but of different lengths exist, or prevent someone from taking the longer route, reading some stock quotes, going back to the origin and then returning by the quicker route, therefore arriving earlier before the stock quotes were published (and then cashing in). Put something up that prevents this, and you're good (I liked the solution that if you attempt to arrive somewhere in time before you had been there once already (ie, arriving earlier, or going back in time) then the tunnel collapses).

    Do read the comments section. At Rocketpunk, they are well worth it.

    997:

    but most seemed to be fleeing the political climate as much as the weather. THAT bad? I assume Ohio has gone full-on Trump/Fascist/Confederate/Slaver?

    Nothing like a bit of hyperbole to get an argument running hot.

    Ohio, like several big area big population states, has a mix of people. For a while the Rs have had the majority. But not too long ago the Ds had it. And like in most states the majority is dominated by the extremes.

    California is a very liberal state based on the majority. But if you peel off the inland valley (correct description?) you'll get a very very very hard right new state.

    And at one time Oakland was considered one of the most conservative cities in the US.

    Things change. People move. New generations show up.

    I've lived where I am for 30 years. For the first 20 I was gerrymandered into a Congressional district by the D's. They got so used to power they forgot that there were people out there who might not agree with everything they did. Eventually in 2010 it blew up for them but I was gerrymandered by the other side.

    Well sort of. For the first time in decades my Congressional district doesn't attach me to a city 1 1/2 hours away from the city I live in that is much larger. But only due to a court order. And we get to do all of this again in 2 years.

    998:

    But if you peel off the inland valley (correct description?) you'll get a very very very hard right new state.

    Do you mean the Central Valley? I'm guessing not exactly, if only because that leaves out the Bay Area and Los Angeles mega-cities.

    (TL;DR for Europeans: California's Central Valley is 47,000km^2 of rich agricultural region, 'rural' in the sense that it only has a few million-person cities. California is big; the valley alone has the area and population of Serbia.)

    You're not wrong though. There are some truly odd people in California and some of them have very impractical ideas about politics.

    It's a favorite talking point (talking, ranting in bars, shitposting on the net, whatever) that California could be split up and the honest rural working folk (read: heavily armed wingnuts) split off their own state from the crazy liberals (read: anyone with money and/or college education). They are certain that they will win any showdown on the grounds that they grow all the food, apparently not understanding where gasoline comes from or that the water treaties all clearly say that water goes to "California."

    999:

    As far as I know, no current form of entanglement allows communication of information - only 'randomness'. What it does is to (a) ensure that communication channels can't be tapped into without detection and (b) provides a very limited one-time pad facility.

    This is at the heart of the FTL 'debate' - nobody seems to have measured whether entanglement is instantaneous, because they 'know' the answer (that's 'science'), but a proof that it were FTL would merely eliminate a couple of out-of-favour models. Now, if anyone can show clearly that FTL communication of information is possible (and some quantum tunnelers believe they have), it would put the cat among the pigeons, good a proper!

    But all this quantum blithering in the press is pretty fair bullshit, as far as I can tell from reading some of the actual articles. Quitye a lot of THOSE are pretty bad, too :-(

    To D. Mark Key (#996): see my previous posts on the topic, where I pointed out just that. I calculated some simple special cases - a general solution involves some serious matrix algebra, and I was too rusty to want to spend the time derusting my brain. It doesn't need general relativity - special will do.

    1000:

    At the THOUSANDTH comment ... to EC & SFR Is it Ansible time, yet? I know that EC, like me has doubts about the "impossibility" of FTL, though I suspect both of us recognise that there are constraints - you can't "closed-loop" a flightpath for instance (Causality violation) but I suspect that "straight-line" flights are possible, especially if you include the inevitable extra bits at the end-points, rather like flying ... where the actual aircraft is doing 700kph or more, but youar actual total journey speed is constrained by having to get to & from the effing airport in the first place .... ( Bad anlogy, but best I can think of right now. )

    1001:

    Do you mean the Central Valley? I'm guessing not exactly, if only because that leaves out the Bay Area and Los Angeles mega-cities.

    Yes. I meant the Central Valley becomes it's own state.

    1002:

    Bottling fruit in Kilner jars was widespread, and still goes on; that's safe and reliable, and the results are still tasty. Vegetables were sometimes salted or dried, but most were (and are) simply stored in outhouses, clamps etc. But few people have the space, time, supply or interest nowadays.

    1003:

    Yes. I meant the Central Valley becomes it's own state.

    Oh, as in the Six Californias proposal. Okay.

    1004:

    You mean this one: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/unsustainable-interstellar-civ.html#comment-2048652

    "Subject to my aging memory forgetting the details of what I proved a month or two back, and me having got it right, you can have FTL without a breach of causality under at least the following conditions:

    A) Between two frames moving at a speed V relative to each other, up to a FTL speed of c^2/V. Yes, if they are at relative rest, that means it could be instantaneous. That's been known all along, but is often denied.

    B) Instantaneously between two pairs of frames each at relative internal rest over a maximum distance of D, moving at a speed V relative to one another, provided that they are at least V*D/c apart. That's the key result."

    What is the min distance in B) if V = 0?

    1005:

    Yes. I was sure that there would be some such conditions several decades back, but never got around to doing the calculations.

    What is the min distance in B) if V = 0?

    Zero.

    Note that ALL this proves is that the standard 'proof' that FTL necessarily implies a causality breach is mathematical crap. It does NOT prove that FTL is possible, even if 'wormholes' or 'warps' exist - or even that quantum tunnelling is FTL!

    1006:

    @ Many Folks re: Causality, "Red Carded Myself", Etc: Thanks- off to the "red card" other machine....

    1007:

    Re: 'But all this quantum blithering in the press is pretty fair bullshit, ...'

    This article was first submitted in March 2019, so I'm guessing 11 months of to-and-fro between authors and reviewers before seeing 'publication'. Plus all the recent headlines about retractions, etc. which I'm guessing this journal's editors would prefer to avoid. All to say 'maybe this quantum entanglement stuff is for real'. There is still that distance limit though. But if they can't extend the distances, it's still a means of speeding up interplanetary/ long-distance communications by just routing/feeding the signals via a network of entangled stuff versus say using a pulse laser or radio beam.

    As for current practical uses (apart from stock-trading AIs), maybe beacons watching for exploding supernovae or gravitational waves.

    1008:

    Re: 'Is it Ansible time, yet?'

    Seems like it depends on who's asked: mathematicians, theorists or experimenters. The first two prefer a clear (linear) narrative), the third accepts that reality is messy/still has a few surprises up its sleeves.

    Personally - I have no idea.

    1009:

    Charlie - do you mean you don't know how to turn down apache, or how to change the configuration?

    Turning it off, with systemd (bleah) is systemctl stop httpd. But then you'd also want to systemd disable httpd

    I really need to upgrade my CentOS to at least 7.... (I'm on 6).

    1010:

    I'm still confused - why is a) quantum entanglement... over fibre? Why? b) I was under the impression that information could not be transmitted over entanglement.

    1011:

    Was checking my local weather for this weekend and saw that there's a massive storm [David] system heading toward Iceland, Glasgow and northern Europe. Pressure may drop close to 920 millibars. Waves 15 meters with occasional rogues of 30 meters. This has been one helluva winter. Stay safe folks!

    1012:

    Arghhh! It's Storm Dennis, not storm [David]

    1013:

    Oh well. I was feeling a bit windy.

    1014:

    No: it's a matter of switching off the insecure apache server while leaving the SSL version running. (Prior to the dist-upgrade that replaced init.d with systemd it was fine. Now ... if I get it wrong, I break the blog.)

    1015:

    Happily, the roofers came this morning and the broken tiles on my roof are fixed! Just in time.

    1016:

    How about Devuan?

    "Some browsers - Chrome and Firefox in particular - are now beginning to refuse to serve non-encrypted http sites."

    Are you sure? I've not had anyone complain that their browsers have broken anything of mine.

    1017:

    Yes. We run into this more and more on various situations. Heaven forbid you have a private cert on a site. They will try and scare to death any visitor.

    1018:

    I don't mean private certs, I mean just plain http without any attempt at encryption. I've heard they can whine and moan if you don't switch it off, but Charlie seems to be saying that they're not just whining and moaning, they're refusing to load the page at all. I've not had anyone complain about that degree of breakage.

    1019:

    To the "I'm just trying to get to your site" type of person who has no idea what any of this is about the messages basically are interpreted as just that.

    1020:

    they're not just whining and moaning, they're refusing to load the page at all.

    You can break the iPhone browser by serving the html from a proper https site but (some of) the linked resource files from the non-https or broken-https version of the site. One of the webkids at work spent some happy time before discovering that the auto-https-everything widget was trying to load one filetype via a test subdomain and the iPhone browser wasn't capable of displaying a prompt or anything, it just stopped processing the page. Or so I overhear.

    My guess is that you load all the images off a test certificate that would normally make the browser grumpy, except that when it's images-via-javascript the browser tries to tell the script and the wheels fall off?

    I dunno, I still just grumpy old fart that the work landing page is over a megabyte. The actual logged in and using the site main page is over five meg IIRC. Maybe 10. Faaarrrk!

    1021:

    223: Impeachment was a foregone conclusion because impeachment is a political not a judicial matter, and the American public simply didn't consider the charges he was charged with as important enough to get really interested in. Which is exactly why the polls said people wanted more witnesses, because nobody had heard anything the average American, as opposed to inside the Beltway obsessives, considered important. Half of Americans wanted to impeach him anyway because they wanted him out of office, and would have supported impeaching him for his orange hair being a high crime against fashion. The other half liked his policies so didn't want to see him impeached, so were against impeachment even if they thought what he did around Biden was a bit improper, as most do. Fortunately for the Democrats it was all over quickly, so the "impeachment bump" Trump got in the polls was brief. The one real consequence of the impeachment farce was to finish off Biden. The Republicans did a pathetically incompetent job of defending Trump's actions, but a brilliantly effective job of making Biden look like a dishonest crook guilty of worse stuff around Ukraine than Trump was. Until the hearings, only Fox news watchers were aware of Biden's role in squashing any investigation of Burisma where Hunter boy had his freebie sinecure by threatening to cut off a billion dollars in aid. The videotape the Republican lawyer played of Biden boasting about it was seen by huge numbers of Democratic primary voters, and his poll numbers and primary vote totals dropped like a rock starting at exactly that moment and from then on. The Democratic defense, that it's unpatriotic to ask furriners to investigate your political rivals (even if they are guilty?), impressed nobody. Some Democratic talking heads seriously suggested that the FBI should have investigated, not those funny talking furriners. As if the FBI, or indeed anyone outside Ukraine, possibly could.

    1022:

    I got rid of my Kilner jars when I moved 5 years ago. They were mostly ancient and had narrow necks and I couldn't get the seals or replacement (glass or metal) discs any more. I was mostly using them to put up chutney, and the IBS diagnosis put a stop to that (acid food is one of my triggers). My mother used to bottle plums (we had 2 Victorias before both succumbed to silverleaf), and I recall salting runner beans before the advent of the freezer.

    Lack of time to garden was also a factor; even more so when I moved as I went from a 20 minute commute to a 45 minute one. It's even worse now - 1:45, longer if ThamesLink screw up. So, I don't garden much, and what I grow tends to be left on the plant until needed (or is eaten by the blackbirds and wood pigeons).

    1023:

    998: this is true about the Central Valley, but only because it's sort of the American equivalent of Arabian oil sheikdoms. The majority of the actual population are the "illegal alien" farmworkers who are the true basis of California's economy, the people who actually produce a large part of California's wealth, California being the "OPEC of food." If they were allowed to become citizens and allowed to vote, as they would have been back in the nineteenth century as not too many are Asians, the Central Valley would be one of your more leftwing parts of the country. Especially if they were still members of the United Farm Workers, once a powerful and militant union, strangled by Cesar Chavez's misleadership a generation ago and now barely existent.

    1024:

    Yeah, I detest the six Californias approach, mostly because it's from a billionaire, and the fairly obvious agenda is to make it easier for him to screw with his local government by decreasing their power relative to him.

    Anyway, the proposal was found unconstitutional in court early on, so until it rises again in a constitutional form, we don't have to worry.

    There's an easy way to defeat it, aside from it being unconstitutional. In the original proposal (which I read, it was quite short), they named the new potential states by identifying what the new name of the cluster of counties was. The cluster that ended up with the name "California" included Los Angeles County.

    Since the six Californias proposal didn't talk about treaty obligations, presumably all the treaty stuff goes to the entity still bearing the name "California," from the other five new states split off.

    That means, in my reading, that Los Angeles gets all the seniormost* water rights, and everyone else has to negotiate from a position of weakness, with their water rights coming in (in the case of the Colorado River) juniormost after Mexico.

    The Californians I mentioned this to were not happy about my reading, but they didn't think I was wrong.

    *CALIFORNIA WATER POLITICS OVERSIMPLIFIED: In California and on the Colorado River(and presumably elsewhere?) rights to the water in the river are based on seniority, ignoring (until recently) the rights of the tribes, Mexico, and sanity. What seniority means is that the first "person" to settle on the waterway gets first dibs, the second person gets second dibs, and so forth, until the water is entirely allocated.

    "Person" in this case includes states. Since California was the first territory to become a state on the Colorado River, it gets first dibs on Colorado River water, even though it's down near the bottom end of the River. IIRC, some farmers in California even have/had Colorado River water rights that were senior to the rights of some upstream states, but I could be wrong.

    The problem is that most of the rights were created a century ago, and who owns them now doesn't map very well to where people are living now or what they're doing with the water, hence the water wars. This is why in California, as Schwarznegger noted, "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over.

    If California were stupid enough to secede from the US, it might lose all its water rights within the US. That would primarily affect the Colorado, Klamath, and Truckee drainages, but it sure would be a mess.

    1025:

    Thoughts on FTL:

  • Why doesn't anyone posit the Gremlin Drive? Over the last two weeks, I've had two cases where stuff disappeared, only to reappear in places that I'd searched repeatedly (once in a bag I'd emptied searching for the item, today when a knife I'd lost some time ago turned up on the driver seat of my car, poking my butt from the seat crack). Obviously these items went down the "wrong leg of the trousers of time." Why hasn't any writer exploited this for FTL? It's at least as good as Harry Harrison's bloater drive.

  • More seriously, what we really do need is someone with the chops in relativity to do a good (read clean and understandable) description, with diagrams showing the light cones, of how FTL leads to time travel. The few I've seen online have been extremely condescending (to the point of leaving critical steps out "because they're obvious") and with such badly cluttered diagrams that it's not at all clear that they supported their own argument.

  • Yes, an FTL ship bearing the news that the Earth has exploded gets to Alpha Centauri before the explosion itself is seen. To a naive non-physicist like me, the response isn't a gasp of horror, it's a shrug. We're used to the notion that supersonic bullets will kill us before we hear the crack of the gun, and (if the sniper's far enough away), we won't see the muzzle flash before we die either. Explaining to a non-physicist why light works differently than sound appears to be harder than most physicists understand.

  • On the HPL side...yeah, ol'd Purple-prose knew nothing about light speed. However, any interstellar culture that somehow propagated itself slower than light probably would come across as fairly horrific to modern day humans (as in "you left your family behind to die of old age, just because you wanted to see what life was like on another planet? What kind of monster are you?"). This doesn't get exploited enough, IMHO (cue the counter-examples), but it might be a vein worth mining. Relativistic Fungi from Yuggoth. Sublight Cthulhu, who only gets it up when planetary systems are close enough that he can survive the flight between them. Might be fun?
  • 1026:

    The problem is that most of the rights were created a century ago, and who owns them now doesn't map very well to where people are living now or what they're doing with the water, hence the water wars.

    It is my understanding that there are way more rights than water. Even when the river is flowing strong. Which it hasn't in a decade or few. Boulder Dam looks like a big mistake.

    Personally I'm wondering what the politics will look like when they have to start turning off the generators due to lack of water.

    1027:

    Yes, there are more rights than water in some rivers. My snide comment about "sanity," was in reference to that. To be mildly fair, a) they didn't have good hydrologists a century ago, and b) a century ago was cooler and wetter than it is now. But C) this is a great example of what happens when invaders colonists divide up a brand new system they don't understand.

    As for the politics of dam and generator failure, this is why I want to have as little to do with Vegas as possible, and why I'm putting in solar panels, a battery, and a rain capturing setup. Fortunately, my wife no longer thinks I'm nuts.

    And if you want real fun, couple this to a discussion of groundwater rights.

    1028:

    The standard 'proof' that FTL implies time travel uses a semi-graphical light cone description. As I have pointed out, it's bullshit. The point is that everything that is true in relativity is true in that model, but that does NOT imply the converse is true. It isn't.

    Whether a non-mathematical description of the true consequences is possible, I can't say, but I can say that I can't see how to provide one - even though I can work with the Lorentz transformations.

    1029:

    Just to be a pain in the ass to the physicists, by my reading the many worlds model of quantum mechanics may allow FTL by making the idea of causality fractal.

    The basic idea is that whenever a ship goes into FTL, it causes a worldline split, such that paradoxes are impossible. If someone uses FTL to time travel, then they come out in a universe where they influenced what happened before they left. They also cause a new universe split, so they're never going home again, because their home universe is now inaccessible to them on a different branch of the world tree.

    This suggests some interesting follow-ons, independent of the FTL mechanism:

  • Pilot training (heck, starship command training) intensively works on not causing paradoxes under basic safety training. You cause a big enough paradox, you're never coming home. Worse, you don't die, you get to live with the consequences. You can't even go forward and tell yourself not to do it. Therefore, everyone gets trained not to time travel and to avoid paradoxes.
  • B. The interstellar equivalent of interstellar traffic control also works really hard at paradox prevention, so that everybody comes "home" safely. No one comes back to quite the same universe they left, but if everyone's careful, it's close to home to be acceptable. Interstellar continuity becomes a fundamental function of interstellar civilization, and the right to come home is seen as a basic right. Indeed, paradoxes may legally become equivalent to murder or worse.

    III. If someone's wants to flee an interstellar civilization in a starship, the best way to do so is to deliberately time travel and cause a big paradox. Only someone bent on vengeance will follow you into that mess, because you're never coming home again. Presumably a lot of cults and other drop-outs will use this as their route to a new world too.

    4) This probably leads to some interesting interstellar military strategies. If you can somehow force a military force to lose a warship through forced time travel, that's as good as blowing that warship up. Sabotage is the obvious way to do this, but there are probably others.

    E) Starship technology could be seeded by an exile from the future turning up, thereby nicely solving the conundrum of who developed the first star drive. Is that exile an idealist, a cult, a fugitive criminal, an exiled warship, or an idiot? Thereby hangs a tale...

    1030:

    @989: Isn't Colorado Trump territiry as well, or are they turning away from the Dark Side?

    As with many states in the U.S., the answer is complex. Colorado is a mix of urban, suburban and rural populations, with 2.9 million out of the state's 5.7 million persons residing in the greater Denver metropolitan area. The urban areas range from the very liberal (Boulder) to the very conservative (Colorado Springs). The rural areas are mostly conservative, with a libertarian cast.

    This is reflected in our legislative representation: one Republican and one Democratic senator, four Republican and three Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Internal governance has swung back and forth between the parties, with Democrats currently in the governorship and leading the state legislature.

    Colorado overall, and Denver in particular, are rapidly growing areas in the U.S. This is driving a more liberal bent in politics, so I'd say Colorado is currently a "purple" state trending toward blue (where blue represents the Democratic Party and Red the Republican Party).

    1031:

    @992: "2 1856 Studebaker Commanders" - Lucky bugler! :-)

    The spouse inherited one from her grandmother, the original owner. It has less than 50,000 miles on it, but it sat in a field for ten years and will require a full restoration. I'm planning on doing basically a stealth restomod on it: rebuilding the engine to run on unleaded gas with ethanol; adding solid state distributor and high energy ignition coil, plus catalytic converter, if feasible; upgrading to front disc brakes (they were available as an option); using radial wide sidewall tires; upgrading all lighting; adding seat belts (a dealer-installed option at the time). I want to build a car that can function when it's 100 years old.

    I found the second sitting for sale on a street corner driving home one day. Fortunately, it's a runner, so it'll be my "practice" restoration.

    This is all daydreaming until I retire.

    1032:

    998: this is true about the Central Valley, but only because it's sort of the American equivalent of Arabian oil sheikdoms.

    Yes. The owners of the biggest farms tend to be big corporations. Your pension might have bought a large farm somewhere. Also, some of the biggest/most notorious owners live in Beverly Hills, like the Resnicks, owners of, well, look it up.

    Big Ag isn't quite a plantation system, because the workers are migrants, not slaves or serfs. Nor is it quite a Roman latifundia, again because they're not slaves, although the workers may be "colonists" in the Roman sense.

    But yes, I quite agree that if the communists or far left had seriously gotten embedded in rural California, back when they tried in the 1900s-1920s, politics would be seriously different in California. For the rest, things to remember are that southern California voted to join the Confederacy during the Civil War, but the more populous (at the time) northern California voted to join the Union, and California gold helped the Union win. San Diego back around the 1900s was quite conservative, to the point of lynchings and vicious anti-labor and especially anti-organizer pogroms. The remnants of these old ideologies are still alive and spitting, unfortunately.

    1033:

    Bad form to quote myself, but to be perfectly fair, I must note that if you're going to use this plot device (and please feel free to), it is mandatory (ahem) that within it, first semester space cadets must be assigned to read a short novel by an ancient author, one Charles Stross, titled Palimpsest. And yes, the kids will think Mr. Stross was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, only not as good a writer. And yes, they'll know by heart the whole trope of how letting paradoxes happen leads to crazy conspiracies where you end up knifing yourself after you kill your grandfather and raccoons take over the world. And they'll be like bo-oring, they were so violent back then! (double-click eyeroll) At least it's more realistic than that Card game thing. Why is that still on the reading list?

    1034:

    Actually, the communists made a very serious effort to get imbedded among farmworkers, then as now mostly Latino, in the 1930s. The biggest farm strike in American history was led by the "red" farmworkers union, the 1933 cotton strike. Steinbeck's novel "In Dubious Battle," which recently got a film version with famous stars but remarkably little distribution, pretty much is a microcosm version of that strike. Henry Wallace's Department of Agriculture coopted all that after helping defeat the union, that story is in "Grapes of Wrath." Deporting Mexicans and replacing them with more pliable Okies also helped. Unionized farmworkers were no part of New Deal agricultural policy. One thing all farmers agree on, whether tiny family farms or giant agribusinesses, in California at the time mostly actually Populism era huge cooperatives of small farmers (Diamond Walnut etc.) is to not want their farmhands unionised, especially if not white. So Roosevelt and Wallace catered to that, as there was still a big farm vote then. In theory Latinos who took on citizenship could vote in the '30s, in practice they couldn't, for the same sort of reasons black couldn't vote in the South. BTW, the gulf sheikdoms are the same, brutally oppressed migrant workers, the great majority of the population, not slaves or indentured servants.

    1035:

    “Half of Americans wanted to impeach him anyway because they wanted him out of office, and would have supported impeaching him for his orange hair being a high crime against fashion.” Fair enough. But: The other half liked his policies are in his cult so didn't want to see him impeached, so were against impeachment even if they thought what he did around Biden was a bit improper he was filmed shooting someone to death on 5th Avenue.

    1036:

    JH @ 1021 Actually good news ... because Biden would/will LOSE to Trump Sanders or Warren. not nearly so much ... the R's may6 have shot themselves in the foot ( I hope )

    Madelaine I've just eaten some of last years peas out of the freezer ... delicious WHere are you on the dreaded 'slink, then?

    1037:

    You need to take your ideological glasses off.

    There as many if not more who would vote for Biden against DT but vote for DT if it DT vs.Warren or Sanders.

    The middle gang of voters in the US last election and likely this one feels totally between rocks and hard places.

    Even if you can't see it.

    1038:

    More seriously, what we really do need is someone with the chops in relativity to do a good (read clean and understandable) description, with diagrams showing the light cones, of how FTL leads to time travel. The few I've seen online have been extremely condescending (to the point of leaving critical steps out "because they're obvious") and with such badly cluttered diagrams that it's not at all clear that they supported their own argument.

    I'll take a stab at this; my background is in maths generally rather than physics, but I did take a course on general relativity many years ago.

    It is important to note that causality violation is due to the combination of relativity and FTL, not just FTL. What is "relativity"? Basically it's the idea that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. In particular, that the laws are the same for two people who are moving relative to one another.

    For a simple example, let's hypothesize some FTL device that teleports you "simultaneously" from point A to point B. This could be a wormhole, jump drive, whatever. The "simultaneously" is the kicker here, because what's simultaneous to you isn't simultaneous to someone moving relative to you. So what does "simultaneous" mean? Presumably it means simultaneous in the reference frame that the FTL device is in when it is turned on. So for example if your spaceship is basically at rest relative to earth and you activate your FTL drive you'll end up on Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away, at the same earth time as you left.

    Now, let's suppose Alice is in a slower than light spaceship passing by Alpha Centauri and heading for earth at a velocity of, say, .99c (relative to Earth). She passes Alpha Centauri just after you arrive and receives at that time an urgent message from you that Alpha Centauri's natives are hostile. She also has an FTL drive, so since the message is urgent she activates the drive and jumps to Earth. The laws of physics are the same for her as they are for you, so her FTL drive jumps her to earth instantly (in her reference frame). But "instantly in her reference frame" is not the same as "instantly in Earth's reference frame". We have to apply a Lorentz transformation to figure out what time (in Earth's frame) she arrives. And it turns out that while she arrives simultaneously in her frame of reference, in Earth's frame of reference she arrives before you left :(. So when she slows down and hands you the message, you decide not to leave at all.

    The key things here are that it's possible to pass messages between observers moving slower than light relative to each other (we know this), that FTL drives work the same in all inertial reference frames (because we've hypothesized that relativity is true), and simultaneity is relative (again, assuming relativity is true).

    You can get around this by assuming that, e.g., the rules of FTL travel are frame dependent. This gives up relativity though, and so far relativity has been validated pretty thoroughly. Indeed, it was the requirement to make Maxwell's field equations frame independent that lead to the Lorentz transform and Special Relativity in the first place (Maxwell's equations are inconsistent with the older Galilean relativity because the constant c, the speed of light, turns out to be the same no matter what velocity the observer is moving at).

    1039:

    1035: Not the case. Yes, there are the cultists, but that's only about half his supporters. As is evidenced by the fact that half of all Trump supporters were in favor of more witnesses being allowed for the impeachment hearings. Most voters vote on a pragmatic basis, as to whose policies they prefer, not the personal qualities of the candidate or his style. The economy is momentarily in good shape, so a lot of suburbanites who dislike Trump over one thing or another are inclined to vote for him anyway. The lower classes not so much, as the gap between rich and poor continually enlarges, homeless are everywhere, and we even just had the first real union strike wave in America in many years. 1036: Sanders and Biden, who actually in sociological terms tend to appeal to the same voters except with the age difference, have consistently polled as beating Trump, usually with very similar or identical margins. Warren consistently loses, because while her policy programs for quite a while were indistinguishable from Sanders, she appeals to suburbia and he appeals to the white working class voters in the midwest a good number of whom switched from Obama to Trump in 2016, sometimes by way of Sanders. As suburbia is fairly happy with Trump despite everything and the lower classes aren't, he pulled ahead of her. When she tacked right and is now the "unity candidate" hoping for a brokered convention, she lost popularity and has been hurt even worse than Biden in the primaries so far. Traditionally, Iowa caucuses knock some candidates out of the running. This happened in the usual fashion, but that it was Biden and Warren this time surprised many people. 1037: Nice theory, but the polls have consistently contradicted it. For the four years of the Trump Presidency, Sanders has almost always polled as a clear victor over Trump at the ballot box, as he did in 2016 for that matter. More or less right about Warren however.

    1040:

    Thanks for trying! I wasn't intending to respond, because I was hoping it would be obvious why I was wrong, but I'm still confused.

    Here is where I get confused, because:

    Per your model (and another one online), Alpha Centauri and the Earth are pretty close to in the same inertial frame of reference. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they're only moving a few km/sec different from each other (which means that actually any ship has to jump and match velocities, unless the jump automatically adjusts velocities...)

    Apparently we've got one frame of reference for Earth and Alpha Centauri, the same one that Bob jumps from or to, covering about 5 light years between the two points.

    So by my count, --Bob jumps from Sol to Alpha Centauri at t0 in inertial frame A, --Gets to Alpha Centauri BB at t=0+time spent matching velocities and landing (also in inertial frame A). Call this t1 --The signal that he left Earth will catch up with him at t=t0+5 years (t4 in inertial frame A), which is much later than t1. --Alice gets a message from Bob at t1+time dealing with natives (call this t2 in Inertial frame A), jumps immediately, and arrives at Sol at t2 in Inertial Frame A, at which point she sends the message, which arrives at t3.

    so far as I can tell, the chronological order of events is t0, t1, t2, t3, t4 in inertial frame A.

    If Earth and Alpha Centauri are in the same frame, why do we have to match inertial frames with the second trip but not the first?

    The other problem is the tacit assumption that, if FTL is possible, ships can also attain very high sublight velocities. That's a problematic idea, because a major reasons to invoke FTL in a story are: --to avoid long travel times for plotting reasons --to avoid the dangers of interstellar space (which require a lot of protection) --to avoid the dangers of high sublight velocities (which requirea lot of protection, as well the equipment for attaining those velocities)

    Since the relative velocities of adjacent star systems differ by a few kilometers per second (speeding meteroid velocities, not high sub-C speeds), jumping a few light years between stars and using conventional drives to match velocities between different planets would seem to be hard to paradox.

    If you're only using something like a jump drive and a low speed conventional drive to go from star system A to star system B, is it possible to generate a paradox where (effectively) someone arrives before they leave?

    Anyway, thanks for trying so far, but apparently I'm still ineducable about FTL and time travel. My apologies for being such a bad student.

    1041:

    What that means is that there are effectively tropical forests north to around the Michigan state line (technically paratropical), and subtropical forests north from there for a bit.

    Have you read "Davy", by Edgar Pangborn ? (A nominee for the 1965 Hugo.)

    The relevant point is that it's set a few centuries from now, in a subtropical archipelago called "New England"....

    1042:

    There are several states without one (or more) Springfield. Not just Alaska - there isn't one in Connecticut or Hawaii, and I stopped looking at that point.

    1043:

    The cities in the Valley tend to be more blue than red. The really conservative areas are more in the mountains and the desert, along with the rural areas where the Latin@s tend to not vote.

    1044:

    So I'm sitting here in the DC area looking at retiring probably at the end of 2021, and climate change is definitely impacting my decision making process on where to retire.

    My conclusion was that I should retire to Corvallis. It ticked a lot of boxes, and in particular was a small college town (which means more sizzle than other equally cheap towns). I visited and liked it.

    I give this free pearl of wisdom because, as it happens, I'm not there. I met a nice lady and moved to her town, which isn't anywhere near Corvallis. Oh well.

    1045:

    Nice theory, but the polls have consistently contradicted it. For the four years of the Trump Presidency, Sanders has almost always polled as a clear victor over Trump at the ballot box, as he did in 2016 for that matter.

    It matters what state those folks are in. And that's where Sanders looses. Maybe. Or not. But there are a lot of people I know who despise DT as a person but despise Sanders politics. And might not make a final decision until in the booth. But most will say in a private conversation that they will vote their money and deal with the crap later.

    And as we found in 2016, people tend to tell what their tribe thinks in pre-vote polling then a non trivial vote in a non polled direction.

    Sexist as it may be but white Christian women poll for DT but vote against him in non trivial numbers. To answer a poll otherwise would betray the tribe they don't feel they can leave.

    1046:

    FWIW, about 35% of the power in L.A. comes from renewables - hydroelectric is about 2% of that, and large hydro is about 3% of the total supply. For the entire state , large hydro is 11% - and I suspect much of that is from the northwest. (The last bill came with the power-content statement.) Natural gas and wind are big sources - I know the local generating plants are all using natural gas.

    1047:

    It's worth reminding everyone periodically that Clinton won the election by several million votes, but lost the electoral college.

    Whether Sanders is in the same boat I can't say, but the voter popularity poll is less important than whether Sanders will win in a few key states in the Midwest.

    Where I blame Clinton's campaign (and the mainstream democratic party for that matter) is that they seem to keep forgetting this, which really is unforgivable. This is the reason they're in the business, and they don't do it as well as they need to.

    1048:

    Warren can beat the orange thing. But that's only if she gets that far. Unfortunately far too many voters still seem to think that it's a [white] man's job by some kind of right that they can't explain.

    1049:

    She also talked in a way that made many not so rich folks think she'd make them poor.

    This is a US election for president. Emotions matter. Facts not so much.

    Warren in central PA? That's a hard sell. And that's a critical spot.

    1050:

    I disagree that having your FTL drive have a preferred frame means giving up special relativity.

    We have good theoretical and empirical reason to believe that electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity all behave consistently with special relativity. But there’s no reason that whatever new phenomenon your FTL drive is based on has to, so long as it leaves those four undisturbed.

    General relativity is another story. I don’t know whether it’s possible to sensibly define a privileged frame in general relativity, nor whether doing so would preclude causality issues,

    1051:

    Heteromeles,

    I don't think I have the mathematical chops these days (if I ever did) to give a detailed explanation, but I think the key is this.

    Which end of an FTL trip comes first, and by how much, depends on the frame of reference of whoever is observing the trip. So if Bob leaves the Sol system, and takes time t to get to Alpha Centauri per a Sol reference frame, then there are frames of reference in which Bob appears to get to Alpha Centauri, and then after time t leaves Sol. But in that case, as one reference frame, per Special Relativity, is as good as another, it should be possible for Alice to leave Alpha Centauri as Bob arrives, and reach Sol as Bob departs, as she is making the same trip, from the other reference frame's viewpoint, that Bob is making from the Sol viewpoint, and one frame is as good as another.

    A bit more tweaking of the frames chosen, and Alice can leave after Bob arrives, bearing a message from him, and arrive before he leaves, to pass on the message.

    If I were trying to get round this for a story, I would try something like declaring that only trips that are the right way round, so to speak, in frames of reference where the local concentrations of mass, ie stars, are more or less stationary, are possible. This is a form of symmetry breaking, and quite possibly there are others that would work

    J Homes

    1052:

    I live outside Huntingdon, and commute via Finsbury Park where I change onto a Moorgate service. At least it's not as bad as when I would try and get onto the Northern Line at Kings Cross to get to the DLR - it would regularly take 4 or 5 trains to get close enough to a door to board.

    The fun thing recently was when we got told to stay on the train at Finsbury (Moorgate services were being diverted to Kings Cross because of a points failure), got to the Underground and spent 15 minutes being held at the gates before they'd let us in...

    Annoyingly, the Great Northern services don't stop at Finsbury. I'm on a training course later this month and need to go to Euston - and given my Zone 2 season ticket, it's easier to change at Finsbury onto the Underground than pay for the extra to St Pancras, and pay again for the Underground. The service I use doesn't quite fit time-wise, I'll have to get an earlier train.

    As a child, I recall our Christmas menu would feature frozen runner beans from the garden. Mum used to grow peas but it was a race to beat the blackbirds to them, and Mum gave up after the second corpse in the netting. She switched to courgettes instead (where we had to contend with 6" slugs - urgh).

    1053:

    I think you're right.

    The thing is, Alpha Centauri moves relative to the sun at 18.6 km/sec, compared with meteors that can be going 30-40 km/sec when the rock hits our atmosphere. The relativistic differences between here and alpha centauri are pretty negligible. If we could make an FTL jump drive, we could jump a probe to Alpha Centauri and land it on a planet using reaction drives we have now. Any Lorentz changes are negligible.

    That's one of the problems with the explanations on the web of how FTL causes time travel. So far as I've seen, they have to introduce velocities at high sub-C to make the paradoxes happen, and ideally the stars have to be moving at high sub-C relative to each other.

    If you're writing SF, it currently appears that all you have to say is that FTL ranges are limited to relatively close by (say 10-100 light years) and that it's impossible to create a spaceship that can achieve high fractional-C velocities. If you stay in these transit regimes, it appears right now that it's difficult to travel in time more than maybe a few seconds, because the nearby stars are effectively all in the same inertial frame. And by effectively, I mean that the stars are moving more slowly relative to each other than bodies within their individual systems are moving relative to the parent star.

    Where you get into paradox trouble as an author is when your starship can hit high fractional C velocities and you can go FTL for thousands to millions of light years.

    So to answer a much earlier question, yes, having speed and range limits on your FTL is likely a good thing, because makes time travel paradoxes harder. Having a story where humans learn to hit high sub-C before figuring out FTL may introduce more problems than it solves.

    1054:

    Oh, and it we can't have a time travel paradox bringing a starship to Earth for us to copy, here's another idea...

    Some financial institution decides that it's worth investing in machine learning to find some way around the lightspeed limits on high frequency trading on the stock market.

    The AI finds a cheat that involves breaking the lightspeed limit, and you have FTL in the 2030s. Amd...

    1055:

    It's much easier and quicker to walk from King's Cross to Euston than arse around with the tube, especially given the recent improvements.

    1056:

    David L Biden is more of the "same old" - though I simply cannot see how anyone remotely near sane could possibly vote for DT under any circumstances.

    However ( @ 1045 ) What I & I suspect a lot of other people are afraid of is an even-worse repeat of 2016 Sanders wins by something like 4-6 million votes but DT gets elected, because - as in 2016 - the R's have gamed the Electoral College. [ See also H @ 1047 ] If that happens, it really is a recipe for serious trouble.

    Madelaine I have problems with effing wood pigeons on my peas ... I usually string coarse netting over the top, which tends to dissuade them. But, if I want to grow green-in-snow mustard leaf, or Brussels, I HAVE to grow them in the fruit-cage ... pigeons, again.

    1057:

    That's one of the problems with the explanations on the web of how FTL causes time travel. So far as I've seen, they have to introduce velocities at high sub-C to make the paradoxes happen, and ideally the stars have to be moving at high sub-C relative to each other.

    That's the point - see #1004 for some formulae. I am not going to reply to the previous posts, but they almost all fall into exactly the same trap as the standard light-cone dogma. Just because you can prove that ONE case of FTL breaks causality does not prove that ALL cases do. You don't need very high velocities if you assume instantaneous (not just FTL) communication, but the nearness of adjacent wormhole exits and similar also matters.

    Incidentally, the interpretation in #1029 of the so-called many worlds hypothesis requires a completely new theory of physics. If you want, I could explain why, and why most references to it on the Web are such bollocks.

    1058:

    I'm a slow walker and have dodgy knees, so it's a toss-up. Besides, I don't know what I'll be needing to lug with me - packed lunch probably as the local eateries sound problematic for me. In any case, on the first day, I have to be at the venue by 8:45 to sign in, the other days I can be a bit later.

    The 07:11 gets to Finsbury at around 08:05; I need to then get downstairs to the Victoria Line and get on a train to Euston. Fingers crossed, it won't be too crowded - later on (when I usually get in 30 minutes later) it's frequently overcrowded. When I get to Euston, I have to find the venue. Going home, it will be easier - I'll probably do the walk. Besides, ThamesLink trains go via St Pancras; it's the Great Northern that go into Kings Cross.

    The other consideration is that it's far easier to submit an expenses claim off my Oyster card than it is off my ThamesLink KeyCard (no downloadable charging history).

    1059:

    Was watching the wood pigeons chasing each other round my garden a few minutes ago - don't know whether it was 'hey girls - wanna f*' or 'my mealworms - keep off'. If the latter, the starlings and blackbirds were ignoring the ruckus and hoovering them up.

    Sadly, I can't eat peas anymore - they're another IBS trigger. Brussels aren't a favourite in my household - we grow curly kale and sprouting broccoli. I've got some red cabbage at the moment, but they've not done much so far. Maybe when the weather warms up - they did go in rather late. My main issue with brassicas is cabbage whites - by August, the leaves look like lace. Unfortunately, Derris dust is now verboten, and the old childhood trick of a bucket of water and bleach and drop the caterpillars in is too time-consuming. One reason to encourage the blue tits and the robins, except the plants aren't high enough for the former, and not strong enough and are too tall for the latter.

    1060:

    That is your worst case scenario? You lack vision, pupil. My worst case scenario is that Trump "wins" but the vote riggers get lazy, and all the vote counts come to integer percentages of the whole vote or one of the other obvious statistical tells...

    Which his base will obviously disbelieve, but everyone else knows the score. Cue civil war.

    1061:

    The problem is that, even ignoring the crowds, the Kings Cross / St Pancras underground has a LOT of walking - and, if I recall, Euston isn't great.

    Re cabbage whites: netting helps.

    1062:

    But yes, I quite agree that if the communists or far left had seriously gotten embedded in rural California, back when they tried in the 1900s-1920s, politics would be seriously different in California.

    In more ways than one.

    There's probably nobody left who remembers this firsthand but according to later reports there were once Russian moles in the Screen Actors' Guild, there to undermine what they presumably saw as the decadent Hollywood entertainment empire. They made a stink at various SAG meetings, and everybody who's been on the internet since 2016 can easily imagine that.

    One of the SAG representatives, drafted into being there under the convoluted demographic rules of the time, was a young guy who'd rather have been out making movies than sitting through boring meetings, Ronald Reagan. They pissed him off enough that he went into politics and was suspicious of Russians the rest of his life.

    Or so goes the legend.

    1063:

    Over the last two weeks, I've had two cases where stuff disappeared, only to reappear in places that I'd searched repeatedly...

    Everyone has lost their car keys. I once lost my car keys in the moments between parking and unfastening my seat belt. That was a confusing thing, since obviously they could not have gone very far. Eventually they turned up in a pocket which I could not plausibly have reached sitting down.

    1064:

    Madelaine ... Off to cut some "Chinese Chives" Allium tuberosum & check things out before Dennis the MEance arrives with bucketloads of water this evening ... Cut some more mustard leaf & a few wild garlic ( just coming up, yum! ) The resident robin in the fruit-cage watches me, to see if I've disturbed the soil ....

    1065:

    Biden is more of the "same old" - though I simply cannot see how anyone remotely near sane could possibly vote for DT under any circumstances.

    Look at the results of your last election and tell me again why what you say is true of our next one?

    1066:

    There's a problem with the idea of a tropical rainforest developing in higher latitudes, the amount of sunlight the areas in question get each year. Temperatures do affect growth patterns and which plants can thrive but that would probably change via evolutionary pressures faster than the expected rate of climactic change.

    Edinburgh, at 54 deg North gets about 2.25kWh per square metre per day on average -- it varies between winter and summer in a 1:10 ratio just about. The Caribbean where they can grow sugar-cane gets an average of 5.35kWh per square metre per day and the Amazon rainforest basin gets even more. Climate change won't affect the annual sunlight energy figures for various latitudes by much if at all.

    1067:

    I've had two cases where stuff disappeared, only to reappear in places that I'd searched repeatedly (once in a bag I'd emptied searching for the item, today when a knife I'd lost some time ago turned up on the driver seat of my car, poking my butt from the seat crack).

    This is a necessary corollary of the Many Universes theory - you're momentarily sliding into an adjacent universe that differs from the previous only in a small detail. This happens all the time, but usually the differences aren't something you've actually perceived so you never know.

    Strangely enough, the bigger changes (the Republicans being the anti-slavery party in Lincoln's day, f'rex) are retconned or blanked out entirely by the human brain.

    1068:

    Contrarily, Antarctica was a tropical rainforest for much of the last 100 million years

    I suspect that the main effect of lesser insolation would be slower growth. The lesson we have from studying mountainous areas in today's tropics is that vegetation gets sparse at altitude, where there's the same sunlight (perhaps more) as at lower altitudes but it's colder.

    1069:

    There's a problem with the idea of a tropical rainforest developing in higher latitudes, the amount of sunlight the areas in question get each year.

    Yes: but there's also a much-less-well-known-thing called a temperate rain forest: different plants, different growth patterns (to cope with less sunlight), but otherwise not totally dissimilar (lots of rainfall, trees providing canopy cover, sparser ground cover).

    Alas, the only one I spent much time visiting was caught up in the inferno that hit Australia last month.

    1070: 1025 Bullet 2 - No explanation I've ever seen even attempts to explain why we can't take shortcuts relative to light!

    For comparison, Charlie and I are both in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, and wish to go to Shandwick Place, him by car and me walking. Edinbvrgh Council have been messing about with the traffic system in the New Town again, such that Charlie has to drive along Queen Street to St Andrew Square, and then back along Princes Street at no more than 20mph whilst I simply walk down Hope Street and turn right into Shandwick Place, arriving first. No-one (well I hope no-one) is suggesting that I walk faster than Charlie drives!

    1031 - Thanks for that. Despite "being a car buff" I have no issue with any of that, largely because I consider pretty much any post WW2 Studebaker including sympathetic modifications like listed as more interesting than any Scalex electric car, and than most hydrocarbon cars too. 1038 - Which all makes sense if, and only if, Alice's FTL method means that no duration passes for her whilst she's in FTL. If duration passes for her in FTL, with the same sense as on Alpha Centauri (and/or Earth which I think means just "and"), then, if the event Alice wishes to report happens on, say, Feb 14th and it takes her FTL 1 sidereal day to traverse 1 lightyear, she can't actually report the event to Earth until Feb 18th! 1040 - I'm not sure, but I think we've said much the same thing in different language? 1052 - I agree with EC at #1055 that the fastest way from KC/StP to Euston is to walk! 1058 - What is the course venue? For example, Learning Tree in London is on the KC/StP side of Euston and has an on-site canteen.
    1071:

    Australia isn't as far south as you might think -- Brisbane, for example is at 27 deg S, about the same distance from the Equator as Cairo is in the Northern Hemisphere. It gets, on average, 4.81kWh per square metre per day according to Google, twice as much as we do. That sunlight figure drops off rapidly the further north you go.

    Even the Falkland Islands (51 deg S) aren't as far south as we are north here in temperate Edinburgh.

    1072:

    Yes, it's Learning Tree. I haven't checked out the maps yet - I was going to do that nearer the time. Good to hear it's the KX/StP side of Euston, so it will be feasible to catch a ThamesLink and stay on and walk it provided I'm not carrying too much.

    1073:

    Yes, I have actually been to Australia and looked at a map from time to time. (The temperate rain forest was temperate because it was up a fscking mountain and as you know, Bob temperatures drop with altitude.)

    There are also temperate rainforests in IIRC the Pacific north-west, Appalachia, and elsewhere ...)

    1074:

    And as you know, Charlie, average sunlight doesn't change with altitude and it's sunlight that drives plant growth via photosynthesis, not temperature. Thick lush rich tropical forests where even the ground plants get a lot of light percolating down from the top cover grow close to the Equator. Further north the forests are less dense as the growth is slower and eventually you get steppe and ground-cover plants and lichens over permafrost with virtually no aggressive sunlight-sucking trees or even large bushes in the mix.

    If and when the northern permafrosts go away and the ground temperatures rise there won't be a lot of new growth and especially not plants that need a lot of sun, like sugar cane and maize. Some climate-change denialists are of the opinion that global climate change will mean combine harvesters working the Siberian north's endless farm prairies and providing food for the masses. Not going to happen.

    1075:

    I think yes to your main point, but no to the specifics about rainforests. There are rainforests in Tasmania (and Canada for that matter). Sunlight, though important, isn't any more a huge factor than for other forests. Many rainforest species evolved for poor light penetration through to the ground under the thick canopies that are one of the more notable features of rainforests. I think that the main conditions for rainforests are pretty simple ones: high rainfall and absent (or very limited) frosts.

    You're totally right on your main point though. Warming doesn't mean we get to grow the same crops at higher latitudes, at least in anything like the same productive capacity, without some sort of replacement for the missing sunlight, while we really need less energy inputs overall.

    1076:

    Alas, the only one I spent much time visiting was caught up in the inferno that hit Australia last month.

    The thing that makes all this a bit frightening is that these rainforests used never to burn. You might get the occasional low temperature fire through some of them, but you wouldn't get the high temperature fires that take out large trees. It's prolonged dry heat, which is now unprecedented in post colonial records (there are longer memories preserved in songlines, but whether this has come up before in the last 50-100,000 years is not openly visible at this stage).

    I suppose it's also worth mentioning that 50% of a planet's surface lies between the 30th parallels north and south.

    1077:

    So by my count, --Bob jumps from Sol to Alpha Centauri at t0 in inertial frame A, --Gets to Alpha Centauri BB at t=0+time spent matching velocities and landing (also in inertial frame A). Call this t1 --The signal that he left Earth will catch up with him at t=t0+5 years (t4 in inertial frame A), which is much later than t1. --Alice gets a message from Bob at t1+time dealing with natives (call this t2 in Inertial frame A), jumps immediately, and arrives at Sol at t2 in Inertial Frame A, at which point she sends the message, which arrives at t3.

    so far as I can tell, the chronological order of events is t0, t1, t2, t3, t4 in inertial frame A.

    OK, let's put some numbers in. There are two frames of interest. As you mentioned, the inertial frames of Earth and Alpha Centauri are practically the same, so for our purposes let's treat them as the same. Call this frame E for Earth. We'll use units of years for time and light-years for distance, so c=1. We'll set the origin at Bob's departure from Earth, and align the x-axis from Earth to Alpha Centauri (so we can ignore y and z) and set t=0 to be the time Bob leaves Earth. Some coordinates of interest in frame E:

    (0, 0): Bob is on Earth and turns on his drive (0, 4.3): Bob arrives at Alpha Centauri (no time elapsed from his perspective) (0.1, 4.3): Bob discovers the natives are hostile and sends a message to Alice

    I had Alice's direction of travel wrong in my original post, and her speed doesn't have to be as high as originally specified. Let's have her traveling from Earth towards Alpha Centauri at half the speed of light, so her speed in Earth terms is 0.5c. She left Earth some time before Bob so that she arrives in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri at the same time as Bob, so her departure in Earth terms is at (-8.6, 0)

    For convenience let's set up her coordinate frame to have the same origin as Bob's (t'=0 is Bob's departure from Earth, and x'=0 is Earth's location when Bob leaves). Note that Earth is moving relative to Alice, so in general Earth's location in frame A is -0.5*t', whereas Earth is fixed in its own frame so Earth's location in Frame E is always x=0

    The Lorentz transformations between A and E are (t', x') = (g(t-vx), g(x-vt)) where g=1/sqrt(1-v^2). To move from frame E to frame A we use v=0.5; to go from A to E we use v=-0.5 (from Alice's perspective the Earth is moving away from her and she is stationary).

    So the coordinates of interest in Alice's frame (which we assume shares the same origin as Bob's) are: (0,0)': Bob is on Earth and turns on his drive (-2.48, 4.96)': Bob arrives near Alpha Centauri (-2.37. 4.91)': Bob tells Alice the natives are hostile

    Some interesting things to note: in Alice's frame Bob's trip was not instantaneous, from her perspective he traveled back in time. No paradox yet, but things are already looking a bit dicey. Also note that in her frame neither Earth nor Alpha Centauri are stationary.

    When Bob gives her the message Alice turns on her FTL drive and jumps to Earth. In her frame the trip is instantaneous, so she leaves at (-2.37, 4.91) and arrives at Earth at coordinates (-2.37, 1.175)': the same time coordinate, and in Alice's frame Earth is traveling along the line (t, -0.5*t).

    Translating back to Bob's frame, Alice's arrival is at coordinates (-2.05, 0.0): she arrives in the vicinity of Earth two years before Bob left.

    All of this falls out of the math of the Lorentz transform, i.e. if the laws of physics are the same for all observers in all inertial frames, then FTL travel implies time travel. This is true regardless of the mechanism of the FTL travel.

    The simple way around this and to still allow FTL travel is to introduce a preferred frame of reference, and to say that all FTL travel must take place only in that frame (or in some other way is constrained to be relative to that frame). The idea of a "preferred frame" is how we naturally think -- in everyday life we generally use the rest frame of the Earth as a reference -- so readers probably won't balk. But that does discard relativity, and if you really dig into it there are probably profound consequences to that.

    1078:

    Well, I've just measured it, and it's 700m from KingsX to Learning Tree, and about half that from the entrance to Euston that's nearest the escalator to/from the Tube platforms. I don't "know London", but I've been on courses at Learning Tree, and stayed in hotels near there when on them.

    1079:

    Yes, that's the standard model. Thanks for putting numbers on it.

    Now please run it as I noted, where Alice can only travel up to speeds of, say, 0.000054 C (around the speed of the New Horizons probe, about 16 km/sec) and isn't stupid enough to try to fly to Alpha Centauri using anything other than FTL. Staying out of normal interstellar space is one really good reason to use FTL, after all.

    Also note that the speed of the New Horizons probe is close to the difference in speed between Alpha Centauri and the sun (18.6 km/sec). An FTL jump ship that could jump 5 light years from Earth to Alpha Centauri still has to be able to generate more delta V than New Horizons to land on a planet around Alpha Centauri. It also has to be able to generate this delta V, not just getting there, but getting home. Even the notionally simple task of matching velocities between objects in nearby solar systems would strain our current engineering skills, let alone the problem of getting between stars.

    And if you want to land, that adds another level of complexity.

    1080:

    I disagree that having your FTL drive have a preferred frame means giving up special relativity.

    Well, by definition if there's a preferred frame then special relativity is false, since in special relativity all frames are equivalent. Whether or not introducing a preferred frame causes other problems for physics is another question. Certainly one could hand-wave and say that special relativity is approximately true and is only violated by the FTL mechanism, and most readers will buy that. Whether one could actually construct a mathematically consistent mechanism that's physically possible is another matter entirely :).

    Which all makes sense if, and only if, Alice's FTL method means that no duration passes for her whilst she's in FTL. If duration passes for her in FTL, with the same sense as on Alpha Centauri (and/or Earth which I think means just "and"),...

    Yes, but if the duration of FTL trips is tied to the frame of reference of Earth/Alpha Centauri then that's a preferred reference frame. Our hypothesis was that relativity was true, so the laws of FTL were the same for Alice as for Bob, namely both experience 0 time for the trip. Relativity, FTL, Causality -- pick any two.

    If you're writing SF, it currently appears that all you have to say is that FTL ranges are limited to relatively close by (say 10-100 light years) and that it's impossible to create a spaceship that can achieve high fractional-C velocities. If you stay in these transit regimes, it appears right now that it's difficult to travel in time more than maybe a few seconds, because the nearby stars are effectively all in the same inertial frame.

    The trouble with this is that it's certainly possible to create spaceships that can achieve high fractional-C velocities, i.e. nothing in the idea violates the laws of physics, it's just a question of engineering. Remember too that causing a paradox doesn't require actually moving canned apes, just information.

    Perhaps you could construct a universe where the only FTL mechanism is by naturally occuring wormholes, and all of those happen to lie in the same frame of reference. That could be a way to have your cake and eat it too. Although if the laws of physics permit wormholes to exist, one would think people would eventually figure out how to create them and then put them on spaceships.

    1081:

    Now please run it as I noted, where Alice can only travel up to speeds of, say, 0.000054 C (around the speed of the New Horizons probe, about 16 km/sec) and isn't stupid enough to try to fly to Alpha Centauri using anything other than FTL. Staying out of normal interstellar space is one really good reason to use FTL, after all.

    If you restrict the relative velocities then you probably need longer jumps to cause problems. So then you can put a restriction on how far the FTL drive can jump... but what about making multiple jumps to travel long distances? We'll get around this by making the drive need time to recover between jumps, limiting its effective speed. What's the limit on the effective speed? I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty confident that the answer will be c: that is, if you want a combination of jump distance, FTL speed, and recovery time that will preclude temporal paradoxes, the effective velocity will end up being <= c. Time and space are intimately interwoven in relativity, and are connected by the speed of light.

    [[ html fix - mod ]]

    1082:

    David L OUR problem is that we were presented with a putatively honest but grossly incompeten shit, who is prabably a traitor & a serially-lying shit with a history of fucking up. We got the latter

    Charlie - there's a good imitation of Temperate rain forest in some of the s-facing Crnish valleys & in places along the W coast of Scotland, as well ....

    1083:

    Totally agreed, and I'm glad everyone piled on Nojay about the light regime thing. The thing (as you and others have pointed out) is that there are a diversity of light regimes in forests across the latitudes. One good demonstration of low light in the tropics are houseplants like Sansevieria trifasciata (mother-in-law's tongue, snake plant) which is native to the Congo and tropical west Africa. It can tolerate months of little light. And it can also tolerate months with no water. But it can't tolerate freezing.

    This points to how critical temperature is. Freeze tolerance turns out to be fairly tricky, and many plants are totally intolerant. For example, the limit of the subtropics crudely is the polar limits of palms. Only a very few species of palm (palmettos, for example) are at all tolerant to even mild frosts. The tundra and alpine zones are defined by the absence of trees, because below -50o or so, any tree freezes (all the tricks plants use to keep their cells from freezing fail and the plant dies). The plants in alpine or tundra zones are low to the ground because that keeps them under the snow in winter, and the snow insulates them enough that they don't hit -50o even on the coldest days.

    We've got palm fossils from Eocene Antarctica and Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, so the fossil evidence unambiguously says that yes, the polar regions can indeed get very warm and stay above freezing even with six months of darkness

    What happens is less that the tropics get roastingly hot so that the poles get above freezing. Rather, the mechanism, well known from fossil evidence and hard to replicate in climate models, is that the latitudinal temperature gradient radically decreases. The tropics heat far less than the poles and (except for the deserts) Earth's biomes become far more similar to each other than they are now.

    The model Nojay has in his head, that tropics are hot and poles are cold due to differences in insolation (incoming sunlight) alone turns out to be an artifact of the way our atmosphere currently works. Apparently, the key factor is the relationships between CO2 levels and cloud formation. It's not straightforward, but around 1200 ppm CO2, the way the atmosphere works changes, and it becomes hard for stratocumulus clouds to form. These are the clouds that normally cover over half the planet today. When the Earth becomes less cloudy, a lot more light hits the normally cloudy high latitudes (Scotland, for example) and they warm up proportionally more. Once this blue sky state is achieved, it remains until CO2 levels fall below around 400 ppm in the atmosphere, at which point the planet precipitously becomes much more cloudy, the poles cool drastically relative to the tropics, and the poles freeze.

    While I'm sure the Scots would love to have blue skies like those in San Diego, the price for that is fairly drastic climate change.

    1084:

    The model Nojay has in his head, that tropics are hot and poles are cold due to differences in insolation (incoming sunlight) alone turns out to be an artifact of the way our atmosphere currently works.

    What I wrote was "plants need sunlight to grow." not "plants need to be hot to grow." Two very different things. Climate change isn't going to increase the amount of sunlight at a given latitude, even if the air temperatures rise so we're not going to see the sort of berserk solar-energy-driven growth of a tropical rainforest in Newfoundland even if the average temperatures are 20 degrees hotter than they are today. Temperate rainforests are a very different thing to their equatorial cousins where even a small amount of light leakage through the top cover provides more solar energy at ground level on average than an open hillside in the Grampians receives.

    Some plants that benefit from warmth to propagate and can't survive colder temperatures may well thrive further north and south of their current ranges but it's more likely evolutionary changes will "bend" the curve for a lot of native species which will adapt over fifty or a hundred growing seasons to the new warmer conditions. We'll never be growing sugarcane in Iceland (except under artificial lighting, perhaps).

    1085:

    You might want to repost, because you got cut off at the end.

    There is at least one simple way to put a limit on how far a warpship can go: heat.

    Granted, at least one model of an Alcubierre warp field suggests that the hawking radiation inside the warp field would homogenize most normal matter into a plasma. Assuming that's not the case (a mere handwave, hah! We're already assuming exotic matter!), you've still got the problem, at least in some models of warp, that the ship is inside an FTL bubble, so there's no place for the heat it generates to go.

    You can make a ship that can tolerate high heat for some time (like the SR-71), but periodically you've got to turn off the warp field and let the ship radiate heat to the universe, which (yes) is a fairly inefficient way of losing heat, but it's what you've got to work with. While you're cooling the ship, you can do other things, like the laundry or turning on the conventional drive to match velocities with the target system. The latter also obviates the need for artificial gravity, since getting a delta V of 18 km/sec or more is easier to do if your thrust is higher. And if the thrusters can generate 1g or more acceleration, you can conceivably land the starship at the destination.

    Popping in and out of warp drastically slows the ship. It also limits voyage distances. That, in turn, makes it harder to generate paradoxes. And that makes it harder to use time travel as a reason why FTL won't work.

    1086:

    Yes, actually there may well be a berserk growth of subtropical houseplants gone wild in Newfoundland.

    Now please go read the links every one has helpfully provided for you, watch the Nova episode "Polar Extremes," which deals with most of this, and get informed.

    1087:

    So, maybe you could hop from Oort cloud to Oort cloud, picking up a comet, using it as a heatsink until it melts, and then dumping most of it but keeping a bit for reaction mass to match velocities to pick up the next one.

    (To be sure, when you're actually in an Oort cloud it's kind of hard to tell, and you could spend a long time wondering where all the comets are, but nevertheless it seems to be popular to treat them as asteroid belts used to be treated before they became too familiar.)

    1088:

    I will finish off by pointing out that "houseplants and crops gone wild" is almost certainly what the future forests will look like, since the obstacles to migration from the tropics right now are fairly daunting.

    There's a model for these kinds of novel forests: Hawai'i and other islands. In Hawai'i, most of the lowland rain forest in this subtropical paradise is now non-native plants, a mix of crops, bright ideas, abandoned horticultural experimentation, accidentally introduced weeds, and houseplants gone wild. Some other islands have similar forests, such as "Green Mountain" on Ascension Island.

    Unfortunately, ecologists tend to eschew working on non-native forests, so we actually know fairly little about them, including how their ecosystems work, how stable they are, how many species they can support, nutrient cycling, and the like. But they're likely the future.

    1089:

    How about teak or diesel mangroves, is St. John likely to have those species invading from the south as temperatures go up? The shade growth plants of a tropical rainforest can and do thrive in higher/lower latitudes but the big energy-absorbers that need 4 or 5 kWh of solar energy per diem to thrive won't do so even in warmer climes.

    1090:

    Based on the list of plants found in the London Clay from the Eocene, which does include some mangrove species (Rhizophoraceae) at 51oN (St. Johns is at 47oN), I'd say the answer is yes, the plants can totally tolerate the lower sun, if they can get there.

    1091:

    I already specified that my understanding is that duration passes at the same rate for all 3 locations. You're not giving any better argument why this is not and cannot be so than "because you say so".

    1092:

    That, in turn, makes it harder to generate paradoxes. And that makes it harder to use time travel as a reason why FTL won't work.

    Keep in mind that "Why FTL won't work" and "the consequences of using FTL if we could" are two different things. The "why" is probably something like "this is a very stable configuration of matter and energy in a universe with three accessible dimensions of space and one accessible dimension of time" and the consequences are "can't go faster than X."

    1093:

    Yes, finding a comet in the Oort cloud is such an easy thing to do...

    Actually, if you want sweet, meek and cute, my preferred system for thermal cooling of a warp drive starship is a liquid droplet radiator using a liquid metal alloy as the working fluid. Basically, you build the warpship in two layers, with a fairly complex outer skin of something that's relatively heat resistant (3-D printed silicon carbide, for example, printed so that it contains the ducts for the cooling system), and an inner crew compartment that's thermally isolated from the outer skin (like a dewar flask), because the outer skin might get a bit hot. You've got tanks of metal coolant on the outer skin, and when they're molten and at max temperature, you pop out of warp and start sweating metal until the metal is all solid again (from over 1000oC to a few hundred degrees C), at which point you have to switch cooling methods to the ship merely glowing infrared for awhile. Having the ship under acceleration while it sweats helps the droplets to flow in the right direction.

    Anyway, the idea of a spaceship sweating liquid metal isn't as cool as having the ship playing kong by jumping from comet to comet and sizzling the surface. But it's honest sweat, at least.

    1094:

    There is one BIG exception to ecologists ignoring non-native ecologies - the British Isles, where essentially all of the ecologies are man-made and composed of recent invaders.

    1095:

    You might want to repost, because you got cut off at the end.

    Aargh, yes, I forgot this is HTML and used a < sign. Thanks to the moderator for fixing it!

    Popping in and out of warp drastically slows the ship. It also limits voyage distances. That, in turn, makes it harder to generate paradoxes. And that makes it harder to use time travel as a reason why FTL won't work.

    The only way to actually prevent paradoxes though is to impose so many limits on the drive that its effective speed is below that of light. Everyone has their own threshold for suspension of disbelief, but for me having paradoxes be "hard" rather than "impossible" is a step too far. You might just as well give up relativity and make all the FTL take place in one frame only.

    I already specified that my understanding is that duration passes at the same rate for all 3 locations. You're not giving any better argument why this is not and cannot be so than "because you say so".

    But time doesn't pass at the same rates for everyone. Time passes at different rates for observers moving at different speeds relative to one another (as Alice and Bob are in the example). Hence the well known twin "paradox" where one twin travels at relativistic speeds to a distant planet and returns having aged very little, whereas the stay at home twin ages a great deal. This is a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity. Observers traveling relative to one another disagree about what events are simultaneous, and hence may disagree about the time elapsed between different events. If those events are such that only an FTL mechanism could connect them, the observers may even disagree about which event comes first.

    Now, you could certainly posit that FTL can only take place in one particular frame of reference. This would still cause some apparent paradoxes (in Alice's frame Bob arrived at Alpha Centauri before he left Earth). It would probably avoid actual paradoxes though, since the preferred frame for FTL would impose at least one consistent ordering of events. Having a preferred frame is inconsistent with relativity, but that's the price you would have to pay.

    1096:

    To be clear, I think FTL is impossible, because most of the devices proposed for it involve exotic matter that no one's ever seen and also involve putting humans in fairly extreme environments (like the inside of a wormhole or a warp bubble) that seem to be intrinsically hostile to non-plasma forms of matter, even if they could be built. That's before we get to relativity.

    And furthermore, I don't think STL interstellar flight is possible either, not because there's a physical law against it, but because the materials necessary for things like effective radiation and impact shields and propulsion systems that run for centuries probably don't exist, it's probably impossible to build a lightweight closed ecosystem that will keep humans alive for centuries, and the cost and logistics to flying even a single ship are prohibitive.

    This is about what passes for realism in science fiction stories.

    The problem is that so far physics oriented people seem to treat relativity something like a holy talisman where they can chant "relativity prohibits it," and feel like they've automatically won an argument. Relativity doesn't prohibit time travel in a many worlds universe (#1029), and moreover, the FTL starships many SF authors propose don't get anywhere near the relativistic speeds that cause the paradoxes used to say that the stories are impossible.

    Right now, it seems to be the case that the simple SF authors may be less wrong, if they just have short range FTL between systems and in-system massively sub-c impulse drives. We can put this on the shelf next to the idea that, yes, Star Trek style humanoid aliens are probably more likely as starship builders than are Lovecraftian walking starfish, due to the evolution of firemaking preceding the evolution of begin able to make starships. It's not the received wisdom, but that's too bad.

    1097:

    A sign of bad space opera: ships hiding behind asteroids in an asteroid belt, ship crews listening to the tiny asteroid fragments pinging off their hulls, ships dodging asteroids.

    (Typical asteroids are a couple of million kilometres from their nearest neighbours, with relative velocities that make rifle bullets look sluggish. If they were any closer/slower, they'd aggregate together into a new planet.)

    A sign of not-quite-so-bad hard SF: ships bouncing between Oort cloud comets. There's typically about one per volume of space inside the Earth's orbit; they're 150M kilometers apart, or more. In other words, months to years of travel between dirty snowballs. And if you want to travel in a vaguely straight line, suitable candidates are almost certainly a lot further apart.

    1098:

    temperate rain forest ... Alas, the only one I spent much time visiting was caught up in the inferno that hit Australia last month.

    There is the area of big trees in Northern CA that I thought you drove through. I did a few years ago and it was surreal.

    1099:

    This is my game (and as soon as I finish my Famous Secret Theory, I'm leaving, and headed thataway), so I'm going to jump into the FLT issue. I'm reading the explanations, and still have issues.

  • The reality is that the difference in frames of reference between , say, Earth and a planet of Alpha Centuri is, for all practical purposes, zero. They're both moving very, very much below the speed of light, in what approaches Newtonian space.

  • Given that, one thing that is invoked is the Lorentz transform... and we have, in fact, zero data, much less theory, as to whether that is valid when v is greater than (I'll abbreviate that as IGT) c.

  • When we do Lorentz transforms for FTL, you're ignoring the fact that we get imaginary values (that is, *sqrt(-1). Now, my personal interpretation is that indicates a rotation, which I consider to be that space becomes timelike, and time, spacelike... and you don't get negative values of space - from here to there is an absolute number.

  • If I am correct, then you're traveling for x (what we can call space-seconds), and y (what we can call time-meters)... remembering always that, in GR, t == x/c, so travling 1m in s-s, we've traveled at c t-m. Sounds like traveling at c^2, to me.

    1100:

    And if you want to land, that adds another level of complexity.

    Can't be that hard. I saw the movie Interstellar and they had us figuring it out in the very near future.

    [sarcasm off]

    1101:

    I took a break, and a second thought finally crystallized: if our FTL drive does not operate in normal space... does this not mean that normal, stl space is a preferred frame of reference, while FTL space is outside of it?

    1102:

    (snort, sarcasm on)

    Yes, I valued the scenario in Interstellar, where they needed a multistage rocket to get off Earth, but were able to use a small shuttle to take off from an exoplanet with much higher gravity.

    Truly, it is good to know that gravity is qualitatively different on different worlds.

    (sarcasm off)

    As you may be able to guess, I've been playing with starship design for about a year, in that list of stories I want to write when the recession and (hopefully!) the election stop all these idiot developments that are destroying my life.

    Anyway...

    The challenge I've been playing with is a starship that's small enough to land but big enough to FTL. By my extraordinarily crude guesstimates, this means it's got to be bigger than a house and smaller than an aircraft carrier, with the default being a starship with dimensions close to those of a boomer submarine, most of which is drives and power plant. Landing something in this size range, at least IMHO, does add another level of complexity that the creators of Interstellar unfortunately didn't deal with. It's a pity that they didn't, because I certainly would have stolen their design if they had. C'est la vie.

    1103:

    For any mathematicians who want a genuine time waster with no subtext, Quanta Magazine just published A Map of Mathematics to play with. Have fun!

    1104:

    1. The reality is that the difference in frames of reference between , say, Earth and a planet of Alpha Centuri is, for all practical purposes, zero. They're both moving very, very much below the speed of light, in what approaches Newtonian space.

    Indeed. That's why I treated Bob as being in the same reference frame E both on Earth and when he arrives at Alpha Centauri. In practice he'd probably change frames to land on the destination planet, but for practical purposes the difference is negligible. The other reference frame A is that of Alice, who is in a slower than light spaceship passing Alpha Centauri when Bob arrives.

    2. Given that, one thing that is invoked is the Lorentz transform... and we have, in fact, zero data, much less theory, as to whether that is valid when v is greater than (I'll abbreviate that as IGT) c.

    No faster than light frames were invoked in my example, only frame E (Earth's reference frame) and frame A (that of Alice, the captain of a spaceship traveling slower than light at 0.5c away from Earth in the direction of Alpha Centauri). The relativity/causality problems arise from the relativity of simultaneity in slower than light frames, and arise regardless of the mechanism of the FTL travel. The FTL travel on its own doesn't cause any paradoxes, but if you combine it with shifting inertial frames (slower than light travel) then it can.

    Another way of putting it is that FTL + STL + Relativity implies time travel. We already know that STL travel is possible, so if either relativity is true or FTL is possible then time travel is possible.

    1105:

    That sounds like a config matter, say, rewrite rule http https

    1106:

    Congratulations. Everything you said in this post was wrong.

    More than half the US public wanted him impeached for years, for asking for Russian help, for using his office to get richer (Trump Hotel DC, and all other properties, including Mar-a-Lago and what the Secret Service paid for rooms, and his golf course in Scotland that they had to pay for trips to), for his blatant corruption.

    Only a third of the US supported him.

    Oh, and Biden? BS... or why didn't he bring that up before? https://theintercept.com/2019/09/25/i-wrote-about-the-bidens-and-ukraine-years-ago-then-the-right-wing-spin-machine-turned-the-story-upside-down/?comments=1

    1107:

    Oh, and the Dems wanted witnesses, for the people who hadn't been paying attention, so that they'd contact their GOP Senators.

    "Impeachment bump?" Try looking at the bump the Dems got for finally trying, and then the GOP looking as corrupt as they are.

    1108:

    Wrong again. Chavez was the preeminent leader in creating the Farmworkers' Union in the seventies. I take it, btw, that Raygun and the huge companies unlimited war against unions in the eighties and onwards had nothing to do with their weakness.

    Oh, and by definition, a generation is 20 years... and Chavez died in 1993, so he wasn't screwing up the leadership a generation ago.

    1109:

    I've got to (mostly) agree with erturs on this one. Normal STL space is not a single frame of reference in its entirety. Where the argument starts is that the single frame of reference for large objects (humans, stars, planets) may be on order 50-100 (or more!) light years across, because effectively all the macroscopic objects in this volume are moving at less than around 100-200 km/sec relative to each other, or far less than the speed needed to evoke significant relativistic effects.

    Obviously this is not true for microscopic objects, particles, and so forth. Just as obviously, for humans to cross such an expanse in a reasonable time, we've also got to shift our sorry carcasses into a different inertial frame, either relativistic STL or FTL.

    Note that I'm not saying that space is divided into bubbles of single inertial frames 100 light years across with sharp boundaries. Rather I'm saying that the stars perhaps 100 light years from wherever you happen to be are very probably moving in about the same inertial reference frame as one might encounter moving between objects within a single solar system (from the sun to fast-moving comets, for example). Since we normally don't bother with frame differences within the solar system, we can similarly ignore differences at these interstellar distances. Further out is a different story, of course, but I have no idea how far away relativistic paradoxes start to be a meaningful problem.

    1110:

    There are, however, two flaws in your analysis. The first is that you assumed that FTL means instantaneous, which it does not, but that doesn't actually make any difference on its own. The second is that you are assuming no exclusion principle, and it is such a principle which could make relativity, FTL and causality consistent. No, FTL does NOT automatically break causality, even though unconstrained FTL does.

    I accept that we have no physical theory for such an exclusion principle, but that does not mean that one could not exist. Indeed, some of the work done above on wormholes is talking about just such a principle.

    1111:

    Sigh, multi-world. The real problem with that, IMO, is that it implies the universe is continually fracturing... which is absurd on the face of it, because the universe has an inertia approaching infinite. To split it should take Big Bang-levels of energy. Even if it's only the local world, ditto. Even if it's your own timeline... so, have you tried to push a building over? or a car, sideways?

    Inertia. And even if it was possible for very, very localized splitting... I don't have the quantum math, but I very much doubt that the split is self-healing, or else all you've done is to take an alternate route to the same destination, like QED.

    1112:

    Solid state distributor? Why?

    My Dearly Beloved Departed '86 Toyota Tercel wagon had a carb, and a regular distributor (which I tuned twice a year). Oh, and it got 35-36 highway, in 2000.

    1113:

    Resnicks... I trust that's no relation to the (damn it) late Mike Resnick.

    Btw, folks, with his death last month, his wife, who hasn't worked in a long time, is in deep do-do, with no regular income, and trying to pay a mortgage, and utilities, and food on the table. They started a gofundme, and are currently at just over $60k, aiming for $70k. If you can afford it, like I could, chip in. These Resnicks, at least, are ours.

    1114:

    Suburbia is very much NOT happy with Trump.

    Let's just say Ellen and I were at a rally for Warren last night in Arlington, VA, and it was jam-packed with suburbanites.

    No, they're not seeing his policies as good for them... hell, I dislike the word "policies", since he has none, he runs on gut feeling all the time (and he apparently doesn't understand he can get something for that at any drug store).

    He's a nut case, swinging one way and another at the drop of a hat... but all of them on the "you're kidding me" side of bad.

    Nope.In pretty much all the polls for the last six months, everyone, including "unnamed Democrat" beats the Orange Psycho.

    1115:

    Oh, and speaking as a Warren supporter, I have no idea what you're talking about when you mention her "swing to the right/center". I give you a 100% guarantee that's NOT what she was saying last night.

    1116:

    Followed that thread, and don't quite understand just who it is that's sitting in the DC metro area.

    Whoever it is, so am I, if you want to get together for coffee or a drink one of these days.

    1117:

    It's actually much goofier than that, if I understand correctly. And that's goofy in a way that's useful to storytelling.

    Yes, every time a wave function collapses, there's the outcome of both quantum states showing up as separate world lines. Thing is, the universe doesn't instantaneously split in two. Rather, the consequences of the initial split radiate out at light speed. Probably almost all of them get absorbed by decoherence (thank you, universal inertia), but probably not all of them.

    So the fun is that splits caused by time travel paradoxes (of the did they appear/didn't they appear variety) probably radiate out at light speed, interacting with other major splits and with the universe at large. Decoherence/universal inertia probably absorbs most of the impacts of these splits, so that they become irrelevant for, say, the Andromeda Galaxy or even SgrA*. Within closer distances (say within an interstellar civilization 100 light years across), probably FTL paradoxes normally become significant on the level of gremlins losing our keys or orange-haired politicians gaslighting us--chronically annoying, but not life changing.

    However, discontinuities do add up, and occasionally (as when a time traveler introduces FTL to a pre-FTL Earth via), the consequences of individual events are both profound and predictable. Therefore, I'm sure that an interstellar empire would have a bureaucracy that actively promotes the continuity of reality, just as the US government has a continuity of operations plan run by FEMA. Actually, it might be more effective than FEMA, mostly because financial and insurance companies would insist that a certain continuity of records is essential to good business.

    And, as OGH has demonstrated, stories about bureaucracies trying to protect reality from continuity errors can be fun to read.

    1118:

    I don't believe that myth about Ronnie. For one... was that supposed to be in the forties? Because in the fifties and sixties and seventies, the CPUSA was a very bad joke... as in, I've read that the only reason it kept going was because the FBI undercover agents were the only ones who paid their dues.

    J Edgar, in the seventies, at least, thought Raygun was a creep, and was annoyed that Ronnie kept wanting to be a G-man, and was giving him stuff while he was SAG president, I think.

    1119:

    On the one hand, Biden would be a disaster like Hillary - decades of garbage to repeat against him, even when it was untrue.

    Also, he's nothing new, just more of the same, which has been losing ground for everyone outside the 5%, for decades.

    On the other hand, everyone other than Funnymentalist Faux News believers really, REALLY HATE the Orange psycho's guts, and are finding more reasons in every morning's newspaper to vote against him.

    1120:

    Fortunately, it's a runner, so it'll be my "practice" restoration.

    Need a timing light and dwell meter? Been sitting on a shelf for 25 years. Hate to throw away working stuff.

    And the timing light has that great chrome ray gun look.

    Make me an offer. Seriously any offer. :)

    1121:

    I very vaguely begin to see what you're trying to say, and that, if what I think you said is actually what you meant, is what I disagree with. I see no reason not to treat even interstellar space as a single frame, changing only when really close to an extremely strong gravity field (like a black hole). Mostly, we can treat space as Newtonian, and get the right answers, so I see no reason not to treat all the space between Sol and Alpha Centuri as one frame of reference.

    1122:

    “The idea of a "preferred frame" .... does discard relativity” See my 1050. So long as the “preferred frame” is only detectable by operating your new-physics FTL drive no currently-accepted physics is contradicted.

    It does follow directly from the Lorenz transformations that, given (1) a machine that sends matter or information FTL with respect to its own frame, and (2) sufficient effort spent accelerating said machine to ridiculous velocities with respect to yourself, you can affect your own past.

    1123:

    What, you've got a Sears' timing light, too? I didn't think of bringing it to last Windycon, when the theme was superscience... woulda made a great DeLameter....

    1124:

    For one, I'm happy with both special and general relativity. BUT, the frame of reference is within our universe.

    I must be misunderstanding you, because if I follow your logic, then I could do something having nothing to do with getting near or past c, and affect my past, which makes no sense.

    1125:

    There are, however, two flaws in your analysis. The first is that you assumed that FTL means instantaneous, which it does not, but that doesn't actually make any difference on its own. The second is that you are assuming no exclusion principle, and it is such a principle which could make relativity, FTL and causality consistent. No, FTL does NOT automatically break causality, even though unconstrained FTL does.

    Fair enough. The first issue, as you said, doesn't make any real difference: given any FTL journey there's a frame of reference in which that journey is instantaneous (just as for every STL journey there's a frame of reference in which the space coordinate is unchanged, namely the frame with the average velocity of the journey). And for the second issue, yes, I was being too broad. FTL + relativity implies time travel. Time travel does not automatically break causality, but you do have to work hard to prevent it from doing so :).

    1126:

    I very vaguely begin to see what you're trying to say, and that, if what I think you said is actually what you meant, is what I disagree with. I see no reason not to treat even interstellar space as a single frame, changing only when really close to an extremely strong gravity field (like a black hole). Mostly, we can treat space as Newtonian, and get the right answers, so I see no reason not to treat all the space between Sol and Alpha Centuri as one frame of reference.

    Sorry, I probably wasn't clear enough. I was using "frame of reference" in its relativistic sense, and as a shorthand for "inertial frame of reference". It means a coordinate system attached to an observer moving at a constant velocity. Note that one of the important features of an inertial frame of reference is that the velocity matters: observers with different velocities will necessarily have different coordinate systems, because even if they agree on origins and directions their time and space coordinates will be mixed up in different ways.

    Example: take two very accurate atomic clocks and synchronize them. Put one on an airplane and fly it around the earth at a constant velocity. Leave the other at home. After the airplane lands compare the clocks. They will differ. This isn't just a theoretical prediction, the experiment has been done.(Aside to pedants: yes, much of the difference found was actually due to gravitational effects, but that doesn't affect the gist of the argument here, it just means that the general relativistic space-time metric is more complicated than the SR one).

    This difference isn't an illusion, the two clocks actually experience time passing at different rates. So if you want two observers to compare events, you have to specify their relative velocities. In general they will not agree on the time that passes between the events. If the events they are comparing are "spacelike" separated, so that no slower than light message could pass between them, then the observers may not even agree on the sign of the time elapsed between the events. In fact given two spacelike events (e.g. the departure of an FTL spaceship, and it's arrival at its destination) you can always find a (hypothetical) observer for whom the second event happens before the first. Again, this isn't an illusion or a record of when they "see" things, it's a difference in the actual time (for that observer) that it happened.

    There is no absolute time, only time relative to an observer (and similarly there's no absolute space, only space relative to an observer). That's the really weird thing about relativity.

    Note too that I'm not bringing any FTL observers or reference frames into this, because we have no idea how any of that could work. But if FTL travel is possible, then all slower than light observers will agree that it's FTL, even though they will very much disagree over how much time it took and how far it went, to the point that some will even record it as being backwards in time.

    1127:

    I'm not sure you understand what is meant by the term "reference frame". Your reference frame isn't WHERE you are, it's HOW FAST you are. Objects with different velocities are in different reference frames. (Technically, ANY difference in velocity is a different reference frame, but small differences make only small differences and so can mostly be ignored.)

    erturs' example is treating Earth and Alpha Centauri as being in exactly the same reference frame. (Which is not literally true, but it's close enough to not matter for this example.) The different reference frames are not the locations, they're the speeds. While Bob is standing on Alpha Centauri, and Alice is flying past in her spaceship, they are at (roughly) the same place in space, but they are in different reference frames because they're moving at different speeds.

    1128:

    Perhaps you could construct a universe where the only FTL mechanism is by naturally occuring wormholes, and all of those happen to lie in the same frame of reference. That could be a way to have your cake and eat it too.

    Are you assuming that you have to (approximately) match velocities with a wormhole in order to fly through it?

    If you imagine wormholes as being like a corridor, then presumably you'd have to be roughly lined up with the corridor in order to go through without crashing into the "walls", but I don't see any obvious reason you couldn't go through at any speed you like as long as you're pointed in the right direction. (Of course, one could invent a reason for purposes of an SF story.)

    If you imagine wormholes as being like a portal, then you wouldn't necessarily even need to be orthogonal to the opening if you aimed well.

    1129:

    If you restrict the relative velocities then you probably need longer jumps to cause problems. So then you can put a restriction on how far the FTL drive can jump... but what about making multiple jumps to travel long distances? We'll get around this by making the drive need time to recover between jumps, limiting its effective speed.

    Actually, I don't think putting a cooldown on FTL drives solves the problem, because you could just set up a relay. Make a FTL jump abord ship #1, then while it's recovering you disembark and board ship #2, which immediately makes another jump, whereupon you switch to ship #3 for a third jump, etc. Like switching to a fresh horse at a way stop.

    In fact, "you" don't need to switch ships, you just need to send a message to the next ship in the relay. (And the "message" could just be that you showed up--if they can detect your arrival in any way, that's a "message".)

    I think you would need the recovery period to be "contagious" and infect everyone within communications range (i.e. everyone within your new light-cone), stopping any of THEM from making their own FTL jump until YOU recover.

    1130:

    A sign of not-quite-so-bad hard SF: ships bouncing between Oort cloud comets. There's typically about one per volume of space inside the Earth's orbit; they're 150M kilometers apart, or more. In other words, months to years of travel between dirty snowballs. And if you want to travel in a vaguely straight line, suitable candidates are almost certainly a lot further apart.

    The comets are, however, large - supposedly Sol has billions that are 20 KM across. Hence the famous suggestion that we could colonize them. In that case, traversing to another Oort object would only be done when a colony fissions or migrates. And since it's suspected that the Oort clouds of neighboring stars are close to overlapping, the colonists would never run out of targets. (It is assumed that they somehow manage to build and repair their ships, but then, it's also a precondition that they have working fusion power, which would certainly be helpful.)

    1131:

    Agreed. I'd simply add that, if the clock difference is less than, say, 0.1 seconds (the time it takes a human to start to notice something), then the difference is probably unimpactful.

    Yes, here is where we argue about "what if high frequency trading, and..." Or the notion that milliseconds matter.

    And the point is that (movies notwithstanding) it's ludicrously unlikely that a ship is going to exit FTL at the top of a planet's atmosphere. They'll exit well away from things that could vaporize the ship, since the most likely result of a FTL time travel paradox is that the ship doesn't come out of FTL precisely where anyone predicts it will come out relative to planets in a system, or with precisely the correct velocity. Sane pilots leave plenty of room for error. This also makes it harder to commit paradoxes.

    The point about high frequency trading is that microseconds, even nanoseconds, matter when some algorithm is playing games in the local stock market. Time traveling to share information is one way to make a killing on such a highly manipulated market.

    However, if the FTL system you have available allows you time travel on order of a few seconds back in time at most, but the FTL ship ends up many, many astronomical units away from the stock market for safety reasons, it's a paradox without consequence: the ship's gone back a few seconds in time, but it takes minutes to hours for it to communicate its paradoxical information with its target, so the paradox has no consequence.

    Where the paradoxes matter, of course, is when the ship is moving at a really high fraction of C, and when FTL can rapidly traverse titanic distances. In this situation, sending a ship out hours to days (or more) to "get a jump on a local stock market" might conceivably make sense, although I'm sure every authority and their AI dog would be watching for something that obvious.

    1132:

    Depending on the actual rules of what happens when you create a paradox, a 0.1 second head-start might be significant even out in deep space.

    Suppose you station a ship out at an appropriate jump point, and it waits there for a while, until you give it the GO signal. It warps out, warps back, and transmits a message to itself 0.1 seconds before it left.

    The ship receiving the signal immediately (by autopilot) warps out and warps back 0.1 seconds before it left--now 0.2 seconds before the original departure. It retransmits the message to itself, and the loop repeats.

    If you gain ANY time at all in this loop--even a nanosecond--then after enough repeats, you will get back to whatever time the ship was first stationed out in deep space to wait for its own arrival. You can go backwards in time any distance.

    "But the round-trip is very expensive, so you can't afford to make a trillion trips to add up fractional seconds of head start!" Ah, but you don't pay for it, because the ship that receives the trillionth repetition of the signal is one that has never yet performed a warp jump, so its fuel tanks are still full. In fact, in the very last iteration, the ship doesn't need to set out on its trip in the first place, so it can return to Earth with a full fuel tank and a message from as far into the future as it can retain its ability to (hypothetically) carry out its round trip.

    Of course, this all assumes that your whole scheme doesn't collapse from ontological paradox. But it creates a reason that someone might try it, if they think there is even a chance it could work. And it only requires a round-trip where you go a fraction of a second back in time.

    1133:

    Hypothetically it's possible, but the equal problem is that you spend a huge number of trips running up a significant time travel, it fails to raise the money, and then to get home, you've still got to pay for and do a trillion trips knowing the whole thing will fail.

    The bigger point is one I brought up before: if such situations are possible, the way for civilization to deal squelch it is to hammer into budding pilots' heads that this is a really stupid thing to do, to give pilots all sorts of legal means of getting out of such situations, and to publicize all times such schemes have failed really spectacularly, perhaps as the Chronic Darwin Awards.

    The bigger problem is that with huge numbers of repeated trips, the chance for a catastrophic failure gets very high. And if it's a recursive trip, the pilot starting off gets to watch the disaster unfold, then know that, to prevent a paradox, they have to follow the same course how ever many times it takes until there's a critical failure, at which point they die ignominiously.

    Fun. It'd make a good story, actually.

    1134:

    EC @ 1110 THank you .... you have found the correct phrase that I've been groping for: "Constrained" FTL - as opposed to unconstrained. Restrict your flight-paths & curvatures & assume that some time passes whilst "in" FTL & it ought to be possible, other Physics-&-Engineering being deemed competent to perform the tasks (!)

    Whitroth @ 1119 Yeah - Biden is (like I said ) "More of the same old" The US really needs to so two (possibly 3) things 2020-2024 ( Internally ) - foreign policy & borders are something else ... 1: Universal Health cover by some mechanism 2: Abolish Civil Forfeiture 3: Make sure DT gets convicted & jailed

    Antistone Your reference frame isn't WHERE you are, it's HOW FAST you are

    1135:

    Not that hard, but it does need a new physical principle. Given how readily professional physicists invent them to cover the mismatch between their theories and reality, I don't see that as as major obstacle :-) What I can't see is any way to make everything fit together WITHOUT an exclusion principle. Once upon a time, I could have handled the matrix equations, but it would now be an effort; I posted some conditions, which show that it wouldn't be a problem in practice.

    A more advanced approach would be to accept acausality, which does NOT automatically introduce paradoxes (despite common believe), but handling consistent acausal time is a headache for even good mathematicians. I can't get my head around it, though I can work with the formulae. It's a property of shared memory consistency models, if anyone wants to stretch their brains in painful directions.

    https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/papers/topics.html#relaxed_all

    1136:

    I agree with erturs here; any preferred-frame model does contradict relativity in fundamental ways. While operating within another (preferred frame) space does not do so, any mechanism for getting from normal space to there and back again establishes a mapping, and imposes a preferred frame on our universe.

    While there MIGHT be a (mathematical) way round that, my gut feeling is that there isn't.

    1137:

    I am afraid that you don't - though it's not your mistake, but a result of all the bullshit being published in the press. There are two different multi-world models, plus a zillion ill-defined and often inconsistent hybrids, which occur regrettably often even in supposedly scientific witterings.

    The original multi-world quantum model is that every 'event' leads to a splitting, but this is not observable by anything within any one of the unverses. That is trivially shown by its proven equivalence to the Copenhagen model. As such, it's consistent but is merely a mathematical abstraction of no practical consequences. Note that one aspect that is often missed is that each splitting is a LOCAL phenomenon (in the quantum sense), and so coordinated splits (such as to enable Harold to defeat William) are implausible beyond belief. In this model, communication or travelling between universes quite simply makes no sense; because only one has any physical existence to us.

    The multi-world model of science fiction is where the universe splits GLOBALLY, leading to a discrete set of universes in a sort of tree structure. A perfectly good literary model and consistent with known physics, but nothing to do with the quantum model. As I have posted before, a continuous variation of this is possible, but it is very rarely handled well in fiction, because it's damn hard to visualise even for someone who has no trouble with continuous measure theory.

    I have looked at a few references (some nominally scientific) for any justification for hybrid models, but haven't seen any that are better than Penrose's claims for the capabilities of the human mind.

    1138:

    I feel lik a monkey being trained to fly an airplane. I don’t know why the various buttons and wheels do what they do, so I just have to trust the nice humans who tell me. So I just watched Elderly Cynic and erturs, two people who seem to know what they are talking about, agree with each other in a way that apparently contradicts what other people who seem to know what they are talking about have said. I will describe what I see as the dilemma and perhaps someone can explain to me where the inconsistency is, or isn’t (very likely it’s in my lack of understanding of the topic).

    I typically think in terms of wormholes rather than spaceships because I find that easier to visualize, but the same principles should apply to both, no? So someone constructs a wormhole in which both ends are next to each other above the Earth. The wormhole topography is such that traversing them involves a very short internal distance. Someone attaches one end of the wormhole to a spaceship and begins hauling it toward Alpha Centari, the other end remains near the Earth. The spaceship proceeds at .1c. To anyone observing the voyage from an Earthside observatory, the trip appears to take 40 years. To someone on the spaceship, it appears to take 4 years (I’m rounding off to make the math easy, the actual values aren’t important). However, and here’s the kicker, to someone looking into the Earthside end of the wormhole and out the far end, the trip also appears to take 4 years. Thus, when they see the other wormhole arriving at AC, and the observatory informs them that the ship still have 36 years to go, from Earth’s frame of reference they are looking into the future. And anyone looking back at them from the other side is looking into the past. Information can now travel 36 years backward, and then be transmitted by radio to the spaceship which isn’t even halfway there yet.

    If this description is accurate, then my question becomes “what constraint in the theory would prevent this?” If we have to make up a constraint that doesn’t exist yet, so be it, but I would like to know.

    1139:

    The general response to this particular paradox is (AFAIK) the idea of "empire time" (or "empire-time" to make it searchable on Google, that distorter of language).

    The notion is that if you can communicate/look through/pass photons through a wormhole, then they've got something like a single frame of reference with a common clock, and that clock runs on "empire-time" instead of local time, basically because you've warped space to bring them close together. As a wormhole civilization spreads, one of the things that spread with it is the common frame of empire time.

    1140:

    One possible constraint on moving wormholes in that manner is that at some point in the journey it becomes possible for a photon to enter one mouth of the wormhole, traverse the wormhole and exit at a time and on a course that takes it back through normal space to the first wormhole entrance again at the same moment it first entered, and repeat the journey. Suddenly (to an outside observer) you've got a lot of energy passing through the wormhole as the photon whizzes round it's space-time loop.

    1141:

    On hold right now, but one of the features of the universe of "Ghost Engine" is the idea that a wormhole empire needs: a universal/absolute time and coordinate system (for organizing travel/communications), a common trade language, a common trade currency, and a universal unique identifier system (like UUIDs but for real-world as well as virtual objects). Otherwise shit goes sideways, sooner or later.

    1142:

    Right. It's not quite the same, but I needed a global timestamp for a distributed-memory supercomputer, and it was fairly easy to write and fairly accurate. I could extend that to one where the nodes/stars had time passing at different rates, provided the relationship was known (i.e. relativity). So it can be done. The source (for MPI) is available upon request :-)

    Of course, this is only universal/absolute relative to the choice of nodes/stars, so it's still relative in absolute terms, though it could be adaptable as nodes/stars were added. That would not be easy to do well, and would cause significant hassle; I could explain why and the options if anyone is interested.

    I don't see the other two requirements as being any harder, though none of them are trivial or even easy to do well.

    1143:

    That's what I thought too, until almost exactly two years ago.

    You may remember we had a recent quantum physics grad in here who decided to prove he was better than all us randomly-shaved apes, and was a bit arrogant about how much better the many-worlds hypothesis was? Unfortunately I annoyed him enough that he hasn't been active since (sorry all!).

    One of the things he was adamant about was that no, the entire universe did not split at every wave function collapse. Instead, the consequences of any collapse radiated out in a perfectly ordinary light cone. Assuming he knew what he was talking about (always a danger here), it leads to this what superficially looks like a preposterous case of infinite splits radiating out as the universe tries to split worldlines in some higher dimensions of spacetime (basically if a line splits, the fork occupies two dimensions, even if each line sees only one).

    To me this sounded so weird I memorialized it in a blog post, pointing out that an odd theory like panpsychism is actually more parsimonious than this interpretation of many worlds, even if the proponent believed his version was simpler and more elegant.

    Subsequently, I found the idea that there's a collision between the notion of decoherence (the quantum world becoming classical through particles losing entanglement by interacting with other particles) and the many worlds theory (that there are two world lines leading out of every wave function collapse). If my understanding is correct (hah!), then a lot of the world-line forks caused in many worlds get swallowed up very quickly through interactions with other particles, and the result is the macro-world of classical physics we see around us, that rarely if ever splits.

    Building on this version of many worlds, one way to deal with time travel paradoxes is to posit that they force a many-worlds worldline split to happen at the macroscopic scale of the starship. But if the results of the worldline split radiate out at the speed of light, what does that look like?

    The answer depends on what happens to the photons and other particles generated by the change. In space, the number of observable photons coming off an event shrinks as the square of distance from the event. That's one reason it's so hard to see objects around other stars (there are others too, including all the stuff the photons can interact with on their way from event to detector). It's hard to see planets around other stars, because they're so far away that there are only a few photons per square meter arriving any second for you to see, even if they're nearby. It's quite likely that the light from planets in other galaxies never reaches us, and if a galaxy is far enough away, we can't even resolve individual stars.

    So if there is literally no physical interaction between two many-worlds splits because they are isolated by distance, how can they possibly affect each other?

    In a weird way, this appears to be a form of universal inertia, the universe's tendency to be largely unchanged by paradoxes. It's not the same thing as the inertia that causes a resting frame, it's just the assertion that if time travel is possible in a many worlds universe, the changes a time traveler can make by doing it are so inconsequentially unobservable that most of the universe is unaffected by any paradoxes generated. The areas unaffected are where not a single particle bearing any information whatsoever about the worldline split ever reaches them.

    It's probably better to call it universal ignorance, rather than universal inertia, because it basically proposes that the universe is the ultimate know-nothing due to resolution decreasing as a square of distance. This provides a sort of universal continuity frame, even if there is no universal frame of reference. I'm sure some student of physics came up with a neologism for this long ago, and that they marked their intellectual turf with it, and I'm just too ignorant to know it. If so, my apologies for not observing the changes that person made in reality.

    1144:

    Orion's Arm has a bit of an explainer on empire time, which it looks like they're now calling common time. It looks like they've edited their universe pretty substantially since I first found documents on empire time relating to wormholes (these seem to have vanished), but they are where I first picked the concept of empire time up.

    They've also got some interesting theories on how wormhole communications and travel would work (the distances involved are kind of eye opening). I have no idea how whether their explanations are consistent with current thinking about wormholes, but I get the impression that some of the people adding to that site actually care about physics and at least have pretensions to knowing what they're talking about.

    1145:

    Railway time IN SPACE!

    Perhaps it turns out that you can't realistically create wormholes by doing zappy hands-off things with fields and beams etc. at a distance in space; that practically-usable wormholes need an elaborate structure running through them to create the sustaining field, which needs to be anchored to a large mass at either end. So they're not much good for spaceships, but they do enable you to link planets together and run trains through the link.

    1146:

    Solid state distributor? Why?

    Because they last nearly forever in terms of a car.

    No tuning, replacing points, condensers, etc... I've not had the need for my timing light / dwell meter in 20+ years. And none of the cars I've dealt with in that time have ever needed me to deal with the spark system. My 96 Explorer had over 250K miles when I got rid of it.

    1147:

    Orion's Arm has a bit of an explainer on empire time

    Never played it.

    But it puts me in mind to make a fine distinction: Empire Time vs. Federation Time. ET is broadcast from or always derived from a single authoritative hub; FT is decentralized and federated, with adjacent nodes keeping track of one another's relative position and clock skew ...

    You get very different space opera universes depending on which type of clock you select.

    1148:

    While I appreciate the interesting comments, I wasn't asking a question about wormholes specifically, nor does "Empire Time" do anything to address the potential for paradox. My scenario was intended to illustrate in a very simple form why "FTL = Time Travel" and Time Travel opens the gateway to paradox.

    Someone tell my why I'm wrong.

    1149:

    D M Key My first-dgree is in Pysics, too ... but I'm incerdibly rusty. Google for "Lorentz Transforms" ... but the wiki page is not very well-presented I'm afraid. I agree with EC, as you may have noticed. My opinion is that under certain conditons & assuming SOME time passes for the observer moving in FTL-space, then FTL is possible. I also follow Feynman who didn't have much time for th mystical handwavium of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Studies done since it was possible to release hotons singly towards a double-slit tend to show that he was correct, too. .... @ 1148 Because unconstrained FTL WILL give you paradoxes, but FTL in & of itself does not necessarily do so, for reasons already discussed.

    Heteromeles Ah - I thought that he had "advanced" Dunning-Kruger; though it was his promo of "Copenhagen" that I remember - see my remark about Feynman, above. Your subsequent interpretation of QM "splits" being merged/smeared/cohered/"inertiaed-into-a-lump" is almost certainly correct - we mentioned it further back, didn't we?

    David L The last car I had with an "Old-Fashioned" distributor was my 1976 Rover P6. At one point I had to take the engine almost apart, so the distrib had to be retimed. Needed neither a timing light nor dwell meter to do it. Though I could probably have got fractionally better performance, as if I needed it, that thing went like the wind.

    1150:

    Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star.

    1151:

    Orion's Arm is fully the titled "Orion's Arm Universe Project." It's a 20 year-old open, shared universe where the only FTL they allow is wormholes. Admittedly, the framework is late 90s SF, so nanotech is magic dust, Kurzweil is god, and The Culture is a major inspiration. Except that they have six singularity stages, not one, on the way to godhood, and the question of why there's not a seventh level, and indeed why there are so many dead remnants of previous civilizations lying around, are central conceits of the scenario.

    Their notions of wormholes went through a major rewrite over a decade ago, going from basically magic portals to something apparently "more realistic." I suspect a cosmology student got involved in the rewrite. During the magic portal phase they had the idea of "empire time" where systems connected by wormholes were forced to share a common frame of reference, but it looks like they've abandoned that idea.

    For a SF creative, their Encyclopedia Galactica is useful for inspiration. Some content is better than others, but I'd recommend at least looking at their pages on spaceship design to see how others have handled STL. I've personally used the sky on alien worlds multiple times in describing not just alien worlds, but a climate changed Earth.

    1152:

    Yeah. There are several ways of 'resolving' the various conflicts, but all involve copious amounts of handwavium. As far as I know, nobody has actually tested whether quantum effects spread out at light speed, are instantaneous, or what - not even for entanglement, which is easily testable using current technology. The papers I have seen are somewhat contradictory, and the claims tell us more about the religion of the speaker than about what is known. In particular, the claims that the effects necessarily die away are unsupported by any sound analysis, as far as I know. Yes, they almost certainly do, but assuming that in the absence of proven (statistical) independence isn't justified.

    And none of that makes any of the alternative worlds observable, which is a prerequisite for most fictional stories (whether published as fiction or science).

    1153:

    "Studies done since it was possible to release hotons singly towards a double-slit"

    Eh, we did that at school. All you have to do is shine a light bulb down a drain pipe with a double slit across it and turn it down dim enough that there's only one photon in the drain pipe at a time...

    The object was to demonstrate that you still got interference fringes with only one photon at a time and therefore the photon must be interfering with itself. It kept annoying me that they never pointed out that the "standard" version of the double slit experiment (ie. with a nice bright light bulb), as we had done the year before, also shows this.

    "Needed neither a timing light nor dwell meter to do it."

    I made a timing light once, just for the crack. Never found it actually useful though, and took it apart again to use the bits for something else. I've never had or used a dwell meter either.

    The points gap I mostly set by eye/feel; as for the timing, my standard method is to find a hill steep enough that you can floor it at 30-40mph in top without accelerating much, then do this repeatedly tapping the distributor round by almost invisibly small amounts between each run until it just doesn't pink. This is more accurate than setting it to a fixed figure out of a book because it takes account of tolerances and wear etc. in the specific engine under test.

    Thing is though the more cylinders you have the more wretchedly inaccurate a distributor gets. The cam becomes a closer and closer approximation to a round shaft; the lobes get smaller and the angle of the sides of them gets shallower and the moment the points open becomes less and less well determined. So they are OK for a four cylinder engine, dodgy for a six, and basically shit for a V8.

    The standard ignition coil arrangement can't cope with what's asked of it, either. If the inductance is low enough to allow the primary current to reach its maximum value in the time available at full revs, the current you need to achieve a decent spark energy (0.5LI2) becomes unmanageable - points have difficulty breaking it, and the resistive heating of the coil it causes at low revs (RI2) becomes excessive. If you limit the current (by increasing the primary resistance) to a value which doesn't cause overheating at low revs, then the inductance needed to store a decent spark energy is such that as revs increase there isn't time for the current to achieve its maximum value, and beyond the point where this starts to happen the spark gets feebler as the square of the revs.

    The standard ignition coil setup is therefore a compromise, and it's a lot more compromised than you might think. The maximum rate at which it can produce full-energy sparks is a lot less than 100Hz. A four-stroke V8 at 6000rpm needs sparks at 400Hz, but by the time you're going that fast the spark is barely a spark at all. So initiation of combustion is slow and variable, and its effective timing is all over the place.

    The solution to this problem is to separate the functions of storing energy for the spark and generating the high voltage, by using a capacitor of a few μF charged to a few hundred volts to store the energy and discharging it abruptly through the coil primary, using the coil simply as a transformer. The non-electronic alternative would be a coil for each cylinder, which is a cumbersome pain in the arse, though some V8s have gone part way down this road by having separate coils for even and odd cylinders (and therefore two distributors, though they may be combined into a single unit).

    The other problem with distributors on engines with many cylinders is that the range over which the spark timing alters with revs begins to approach the separation between the contacts in the rotary EHT switch bit. When you start running into that you don't really have any choice other than to use multiple coils.

    1154:

    "Perhaps you could construct a universe where the only FTL mechanism is by naturally occuring wormholes, and all of those happen to lie in the same frame of reference. That could be a way to have your cake and eat it too."

    Are you assuming that you have to (approximately) match velocities with a wormhole in order to fly through it?

    Good point -- I had been implicitly assuming that you'd have to match frames with the wormhole, but I wasn't thinking carefully.

    However, I don't think where you end up after going through the wormhole depends significantly on your frame of reference (velocity). For example, consider the degenerate case of a wormhole connecting a single point of spacetime A with another point B. Clearly in this case your exit point does not depend on your speed. Now if you consider a more traditonal portal type wormhole, if Bob enters sedately at a tiny velocity, and Alice recklessly dives into the wormhole right beside him at the same instant but with a much higher velocity, again we'd expect them both to come out together -- the wormhole is a connection between points of spacetime, so if both Bob and Alice enter at point A they'll both come out at the same point B, regardless of their relative velocities.

    For a wormhole that itself has some extent (a tunnel) then clearly Bob and Alice will take different paths through the wormhole and so will exit differently even if they entered at the same place and time. However, the limit as the tunnel length shrinks has them leaving together, so the difference between exit points/times is going to be related to the length of spacetime each experiences within the wormhole -- which in relativistic terms is probably going to be negligible.

    1155:

    Pigeon Never had any problems setting points etc with my two successive Rover P4's Mind you, tickover was 120rpm, so you could hear each cylinder fire individually ay half-second intervals ..... Would magneto-ignition be better, I wonder ... the really old-fashioned way.

    1156:

    While I appreciate the interesting comments, I wasn't asking a question about wormholes specifically, nor does "Empire Time" do anything to address the potential for paradox. My scenario was intended to illustrate in a very simple form why "FTL = Time Travel" and Time Travel opens the gateway to paradox.

    Someone tell my why I'm wrong.

    I don't think you're wrong -- if you can move one end of a wormhole slower than light while the other end remains fixed then it seems to me that you could construct a time machine by employing something like the twin paradox (fly end A of the wormhole a long way away at relativistic speeds then bring it back close by end B: now entering at B will have you exiting A at a time that's in the past relative to B). There are some interesting limits on such a time machine though:

    (1) You cannot use it to travel back in time to earlier than the beginning of the departure of the A endpoint. This is a feature of any time machine that's even vaguely plausible: it'll have closed timelike loops and you can follow those paths back to specific regions of spacetime, but not to arbitrary regions of space and time.

    (2) It depends on being able to move just one end of a wormhole. Is it even possible to move wormholes at all? (They're not physical objects, they're links between different parts of spacetime). What if moving one end causes the other end to move as well? What if moving it causes it to collapse?

    And as Elderly Cynic has pointed out, there are scenarios in which time travel doesn't produce paradoxes due to causality preservation conditions or multiple worlds. Whether you find these scenarios plausible is another matter of course :).

    1157:

    Since no one came up with any objections, I’m going to assume that my illustration of why FTL=time travel + paradoxes is correct (that is, if you don’t invent some additional rules which prevent it).

    That implies some things.

    One thing it implies is that once one goes FTL, you can never go back. Forget arriving back at your origin before you left the first time—the restriction is that you can never return within a light cone starting from your destination at the point in time of arrival, and projected backward centered on your place of origin and point of departure. For FTL to exist, something prevents information from going backward within that cone (what form the restriction takes might be irrelevent: gravity pinching the tunnel closed, warp drives that go far off course, or space fairies that appear and poke you in the eye until you stop, whatever). Civilization can expand at greater than the speed of light, but all FTL travel is one way only. You can never go home again, sonny.

    You can, however, return to a point in space in the past as long as it is outside that cone—in other words, you can return to the Earth in the past, but only if your departing spaceship is already too far away to send a radio message that could be received before it arrives at the destination.

    What that in turn implies to me is that FTL paths through space conform to a directed acylic graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph This means that stories which include FTL can make use of a well understood approach in computer science to add detail to the worldbuilding. In fact, it should be possible to map your universe to an excel spreadsheet, such that each cell represents a point in spacetime that occurs in your story, and the cell formula represent what information can arrive and where it goes. Some form of tree diagram might accomplish the same thing.

    I wouldn’t suggest actually explaining any of this to the readers, but it could be helpful, if the author wants a theoretical structure to act as a framework of constraints on what can happen in the story, this might be helpful (for example, the process by which events within a local frame of reference fit within a larger directed graph is called condensation)-which could be an interesting toy to play with. Or not.

    If your plot requires that characters return to their point of origin in spacetime, I’m afraid that you’re out of luck, unless you explicitly go the soft-sciece route.

    1158:

    Multi-cylinder motorcycles have used one coil per cylinder for decades (some models shared a coil between two cylinders using a lost-spark system). The coil's timing is controlled by the 12V DC supplied to it rather than the Victorian concept of an mechanically-driven EHT distributor and the multiple coil setups made it easy to move to variable electronic timing and transistor-switched firing.

    Saying that a typical sports 4-cylinder 1000cc motorbike engine redlines at 11,000rpm plus so the bounce and float on a mechanical distributor system would not be conducive to accurate spark timing in such engines.

    1159:

    The more general reason why FTL + Relativity leads to time travel is the relativity of simultaneity. The two assumptions of Relativity are:

    (1) There is no absolute velocity, only relative velocity; if two observers are moving at constant speed relative to one another, then either one may consider themselves "at rest" and no experiment can distinguish which one is "really" moving; and

    (2) The speed of light is constant and is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative motion.

    Postulate (1) was made by Galileo and is inherent in Newton's laws of motion, so it's a very old principle and well tested. Postulate (2) was made by Einstein in order to make Maxwell's equations consistent with postulate (1), and it has also been thoroughly tested starting with the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. But it leads to some very unexpected consequences.

    Suppose for example that you're in a train moving at a constant velocity from east to west. You set up a light in the exact center of your car and turn it on at time 0. Since you measured very carefully, it's clear to you that when you turn the light on the front and rear of the car will be illuminated at the exact same instant of time. So if we say E is the event of the light striking the rear (eastern) end of the train, and W is the event of the light striking the front (western) end of the train, in your frame of reference both E and W will have the same time coordinate. They're simultaneous.

    Now consider an observer standing at rest relative to the Earth as the train passes. If you ask them which end of the car will be illuminated first, they'll obviously have to answer the rear, because the light has less distance to travel (the back of the train moves towards the light, whereas the front of the train moves away from the light). So in their frame of reference E happens before W. Similarly for an observer in an airplane flying from west to east above the train, the light will hit the front of the train first and W happens before E.

    This is all a consequence of postulate (2); in Newtonian physics the light beams would be traveling at different speeds in the different frames and this would compensate for the motion of the train, so all observers would agree that E and W happen at the same time. In fact the speed of light is constant, and so there's no absolute ordering of the events E and W; the relative timing depends on the observer's relative velocity (frame of reference).

    Also note that this isn't an illusion or a description of "who sees what". From the perspective of the Earth, the beam of light moving towards the back of the train really does travel a shorter distance than the one moving towards the front of the train, and so if both beams of light have the same speed (as all experiments indicate) then the times really are different.

    Now, if you can send information between events E (when the light hits the back of the train) and W (when the light hits the front of the train) then that information would travel back in time in some frames of reference. This is inescapable.

    The situation with any form of FTL communication is similar; given an event A (the FTL signal is sent) and B (the FTL signal is received) there are inertial frames in which B happens before A; no matter what form of communication you use or how fast it appears to travel in any given frame, you can find another frame of reference in which the FTL signal is received before it is sent. And if FTL is frame independent (obeys postulate 1) then you can send a second FTL signal in that new frame from B to another point in spacetime C such that C lies in the past lightcone of A (can influence A in ordinary ways).

    The only way to avoid this is to give up either postulate (1) or postulate (2). Both postulates are pretty thoroughly tested, but (1) is broader so it's the one that probably has to give. You establish an "absolute" speed, or equivalently a preferred frame of reference, and all FTL has to take place relative to that frame. Then the rules of FTL no longer necessarily allow the last link (from B to a point C in the past of A) because the "speed" of the FTL is frame dependent.

    1160:

    Never had anything to do with magnetos but you could be right. They're basically an inductive energy storage device like an ordinary coil but with a generator built in, so what should happen, I'd expect, is the voltage from the generator should naturally rise with speed to keep pace with the increased dI/dt required with speed, and consequently the spark energy remains constant.

    I do know this breaks down at very low speed which makes the engine a sod to start, and so fancier magnetos have some sort of spring effort that makes their rotation at low speed proceed in a series of flicks rather than continuously. It probably also breaks down at very high speed but I haven't looked at them enough to have any idea whether that tends to be higher than what an engine considers very high speed or not.

    You do still get the same mechanical timing inaccuracies though.

    1161:

    Thank you for that. IIRC, the train illustration is the one Einstein used in his own book. I find it difficult to visualize how that example maps to another setting (star travel) so I find that using wormholes is more intuitive. In this case, I take it that the rear of the train is equivalent to the destination star, the front of the train is the Earth, and therefore if you could send an instantaneous message between the two, the rear of the train is in the future, and the front of the train is in the past, with respect to the message (or it's courier, let's say). My preferred solution is to allow information to travel from the front of the train to the back, but not vice versa. I believe that Elderly Cynic's point is that this would violate neither postulate (although it involves creating an apparently arbitrary constraint on FTL travel--i.e. no one can send information to a location that is in their own past).

    The only problem that I can see would be if there exists a frame of reference in which the light arrives at the front of the train before it arrives at the back (or, equivalently, if the a message from Earth can arrive at Alpha Centauri before the FTL spaceship can arrive there). That would throw everything out the window, and FTL would be flat out impossible.

    Unless I'm totally wrong, of course. :)

    1162:

    Sorry for the double post, but my PC sent the message too soon. How does the airplane see the light arrive at the front of the train first? Even from the pilot's perspective, the front of the train is moving away from the source of the light. Isn't it?

    1163:

    Sorry for the double post, but my PC sent the message too soon. How does the airplane see the light arrive at the front of the train first? Even from the pilot's perspective, the front of the train is moving away from the source of the light. Isn't it?

    Ah, I got the direction of travel of the airplane wrong -- it should be moving in the same direction as the train, but faster, so in its frame of reference the train is moving the other way (falling behind). In that frame the light hits the front of the train before the back, since in the pilot's frame the train is moving "backwards" (away from the plane as the plane passes over it). I'll respond to your other post in a few minutes, trying to work out an example.

    1164:

    In particular, the claims that the effects necessarily die away are unsupported by any sound analysis, as far as I know. Yes, too much argument by appeal to "rationality". I'm just observing this discussion for now.

    Thanks to various for the special relativity/causality discussions, and thanks to Heteromeles #1143 for his mention of panpsychism (and blog article) - still working my way through some of the formulations in that survey. (Some are goofy and IMO wrong.)

    1165:

    Bikes have also had capacitor discharge ignition for decades, and the two things are probably connected - when the coil is acting purely as a transformer rather than as an inductive energy store you don't need anything like such a big core, so the coil is a lot smaller and lighter and having several of them is correspondingly less ugly. When you need CDI in any case to cope with the high speed of a bike engine (or, for that matter, stricter emission requirements applied to the lower speed of a car engine), it's something of a natural pairing.

    "The coil's timing is controlled by the 12V DC supplied to it rather than the Victorian concept of an mechanically-driven EHT distributor"

    "The coil's timing" doesn't make sense. The spark's timing is controlled by whatever switches the input to the coil's primary, which is nothing to do with switching the EHT output from its secondary. BMW, Citroen, etc. had no EHT distributor but still used a conventional points mechanism to switch the coil's primary - that's all there was at the time.

    "and the multiple coil setups made it easy to move to variable electronic timing and transistor-switched firing."

    They make no difference to how easy it is to use variable electronic timing. That's just a computational black box; it doesn't care what happens to its output.

    They make it more difficult to move to transistor (or thyristor) switched firing, because you need more than one output stage, and you need an extra demultiplexer stage to route the signal from the timing stage to each of the different output stages in sequence. These are trivial objections these days, but at the time they started playing about with this stuff, devices for the output stages in particular were expensive and difficult to make reliable.

    1166:

    @#1161:

    Here's an example with an arbitrary faster than light signal. Everything is in units of years and light-years, so the speed of light is 1 (this is convenient for calculation).

    Suppose an FTL signal leaves Earth at event A=(0,0) and arrives somewhere else at event B=(t,x) in Earth's reference frame. To say that the signal is FTL means that x > t, that is it arrives faster than light could arrive (the light cone has x = t).

    Now, for a frame of reference moving at velocity v with respect to Earth, and with the same origin A, the Lorentz transform says that the coordinates of B (the arrival of the FTL signal) are:

    (t',x') = ( (t-vx)/sqrt(1-v^2), (x-vt)/sqrt(1-v^2) )

    We'll assume the frame is traveling slower than light, so abs(v) < 1. The time coordinate t' will be negative if t-vx < 0, i.e. if v > t/x. But we know that x > t (the signal was FTL), so t/x < 1. Thus it's certainly possible to find such a v. In fact we can make t' anything we want, because as v approaches 1, sqrt(1-v^2) approaches 0 and so t' approaches negative infinity. Depending on the frame of reference, the FTL signal can arrive an arbitrary time before it is sent.

    No paradox yet, but you can see the seeds for one are planted, because if relativity is true this exact same analysis can be applied to the frame of reference v to find a new frame of reference v' in which another FTL signal travels back in time, but this time in the direction of Earth, to a point C in the past light cone of A (whence it can influence A via slower than light means).

    1167:

    Just remember the problem with sniper bullets. We're okay in real life with victims dying from being hit by a bullet before they hear the explosion from the gun. This is so normal that there are military sayings about it ("You never hear the shot that kills you" being one).

    It's based on the ordinary physics of sound propagation, even though the observed causal arrow is reversed.

    So the issue with the speed of light and causality shouldn't be that the problem is that observers get the vapors about effects happening before we observe the causes. That already happens in real life warfare, and the world doesn't end.

    I'd simply suggest you've got to make an argument for causality such that the problem generated by effects preceding causes really does cause the universe to end. As humans, we don't have to work very hard to sort out the supersonic bullet issue, It's not clear to me why I should be bothered if I see FTL ship A getting hit by laser fire from ship B before FTL ship B starts firing. The causality can be readily deduced from the evidence.

    1168:

    IIUC, the what erturs is saying is that ship A can evade the fire from B before B fires, but B can compensate for A's evasive actions before A undertakes them. Both cannot be true, yet they are, so, paradox.

    I'm working on ertur's new example, give me a few minutes.

    1169:

    Sound travels a lot slower than light. For the sniper example you give, it would be anomolous if you didn't see the muzzle flash from the rifle before the bullet hits you since the photons from that flash travel at, guess what! the speed of light.

    Generally everything we know and all the experimental proofs we have says the fastest that anything can propagate is electromagnetic radiation i.e. light. There's growing evidence that gravitational waves also travel at the same speed, something relativity predicted anyway. Information travels no faster than the speed of light since it is generally carried by EM radiation and/or gravitational waves. Positing an FTL mechanism that can move solid matter or even EM radiation faster than the speed of light introduces time travel and causality violation and this breaks things big time.

    For all references to speed of light above, assume the value of c is dependent on the local environment, i.e. in vacuum or atmosphere or whatever.

    1170:

    @erturs 1166: OK, so this should be the equivalent of an observer on a spaceship, moving at relativistic speed in the direction of Earth to Alpha Centauri, and watching two signals being sent, one from E to AC, and another from AC to E. From the perspective of people within the wormhole (or standing at the entrances, looking in) the two signals are sent simultaneously. However, since the outside observer is moving at relativistic speed, they see the signal from AC to E as moving faster than the signal from E to AC, so the AC-E one arrives first.

    In both cases (the pilot observing the train, and the spaceship observing the wormhole) the signal is sent simultaneously, and arrives at different times.

    No paradox yet, but if there is another spaceship, this time moving at relativistic speeds from the direction of AC toward the Earth, the exact opposite happens: the two signals will appear to be been sent simultaneously, but the one from E-AC will arrive first.

    In the first scenario, the arrival of the signal AC-E is in the past of the signal E-AC, and in the second scenario the arrival of the signal AC-E is in the past of the signal E-AC. Both cannot be true, yet they are, so, paradox. Either E or AC could send a return signal responding to the other's, but which signals first and which responds depends on which spaceship is doing the observing. There is no privileged frame of reference, so there is no absolute "past" nor "future", and a simple rule like "you can't send information to your own past" will not solve the problem.

    In which case, if my description in this post is accurate, then both myself and Elderly Cynic are wrong, and FTL is flat-out impossible, since I can see no way to handwave that.

    Others?

    1171:

    So the issue with the speed of light and causality shouldn't be that the problem is that observers get the vapors about effects happening before we observe the causes. That already happens in real life warfare, and the world doesn't end.

    It isn't a question of when we observe the cause and effect, it really is a question of effect coming before cause. In the bullet example everyone agrees on the order of events: the bullet leaves the gun first, then strikes the target later. We may see or hear things in a different order, but there's a consistent chronology because the bullet travels slower than light. In every reference frame the order of events is the same.

    For a faster than light bullet things are different. Consider again the train example. In the train's frame of reference the light emitted from the exact center of the car really does hit the front and back of the train at the same time. It has to, because the distance is the same and light always travels at the same speed. You don't have to observe this (although of course you can set up detectors and clocks and do so), it's a logical necessity.

    However, in the Earth's frame of reference the light hits the back of the train first and then the front of the train later. Again, this is not a question of observation, it's an inescapable conclusion from the facts that (a) the train is moving in the Earth's frame, and (b) the light is traveling at a fixed speed.

    So which is it? Does the light hit the back of the train first, then the front, or at the same time? Both. There's no absolute time, so which answer is "correct" depends on the frame you specify. The events are separated by a spacelike interval (the only path between them is faster than light) and so the ordering is not unique. Our intuitive notion of a single absolute time and ordering of events is incorrect. This also means that there is no correct answer to the question of whether a faster than light bullet hit its target before it was shot. In some frames it hits before, in some frames it hits after. If you allow faster than light bullets (or any other way of sending messages faster than light) you have to come to grips with this. Very few authors have tried (OGH is a notable exception).

    Here's another example that you could actually try yourself. Get two identical atomic clocks and synchronize them. Take one on a significant trip, then bring it back and compare it to the other. They will no longer be synchronized. Which one shows the "correct" time? They both do: they're identical, after all. Some guy on the time-nuts mailing list actually bought some atomic clocks from e-bay and performed this experiment, with the expected results. It's in reach of the ordinary person. We never notice the differences between inertial frames in everyday life, but it is possible to directly measure them nowadays. I have to admit that the relativity of time is profoundly unsettling, but it's the way the world is.

    1172:

    @D. Mark Kay 1170: I think your observation is correct. If anyone can send FTL signals, and they can also send STL signals between ships traveling relative to one another, then it's possible to set up a closed timelike loop where a message is received by the sender before it is sent.

    There is a little wiggle room. Elderly Cynic's point, I believe, is that there may be ways to avoid a paradox even if time travel (closed timelike loops) is allowed; see all the various solutions in time travel stories, where there are alternate futures, or where the universe causes events that prevent paradoxes (your message back to yourself will inevitably be garbled somehow). So you get FTL plus time travel, but some way to avoid paradoxes.

    Another solution is to give up relativity, at least in some way. If FTL is only possible within one particular frame of reference (your ship must be at rest relative to the cosmic microwave background in order to perform a "jump", for example) then you get some weird time issues (for some observers spaceships arrive before they leave) but no actual paradoxes. In the unique FTL rest frame there's a consistent chronology, so it's not possible to actually construct a loop.

    This solution seems pretty harmless, but it does give up Galilean relativity as used by Newton, not just Einstein's relativity (the FTL rest frame lets you calculate an "absolute" velocity). I'm not certain that this couldn't lead to other consequences like violating conservation of momentum or something like that. But my physics is pretty rusty.

    1173:

    AH, I like the lazy defenses.

    Of course sound is slower than light. I'm not that ignorant or stupid.

    What I'm pointing out is that you're privileging your sense of light reception over your sense of sound reception. You're saying that you can't possibly see something that violates causality, but you're okay with normally hearing things that violate causality, because someone told you that was okay.

    Pretend, for a second, that I actually know a few things about relativity, and that I'm trying to get you to understand that something about how you're defending it is inadequate.

    The problem you have with any paradox where the central horror is "an outside observer gets confused about the order of events" is that in real life, the observer can quickly figure out the actual order of events from the evidence presented, even if the order they are perceived in is scrambled. If this is the only problem presented by a causality violation, it's not a problem at all. Most humans would have no trouble living with these in everyday life.

    What are the real problems with causality violations?

    1174:

    The problem you have with any paradox where the central horror is "an outside observer gets confused about the order of events" is that in real life, the observer can quickly figure out the actual order of events from the evidence presented, even if the order they are perceived in is scrambled. If this is the only problem presented by a causality violation, it's not a problem at all.

    My point is that there is no "actual order of events" for events that are connected only by a faster than light mechanism. There's no unique ordering for them. Is this a reason for horror? No, and as I posted elsewhere it may be possible to construct an FTL where closed timelike loops are not possible, or where the universe is such that even in the presence of closed timelike loops there cannot be paradoxes. But such a universe would be very odd indeed. For a physicist to accept such things may be akin to an ecologist accepting the existence of a generation ship: yes, it might logically be possible to construct such a thing, but boy it would be hard and the odds are very much against it.

    1175:

    What I'm pointing out is that you're privileging your sense of light reception over your sense of sound reception. You're saying that you can't possibly see something that violates causality, but you're okay with normally hearing things that violate causality, because someone told you that was okay.

    I'm going to reply again just because I really want to get this across: the problems in relativity with time are nothing to do with perception of light. In fact the "speed of light" has two meanings, and it can be confusing: there's the actual speed of light as it travels through a medium, and there's the theoretical speed limit in relativity, which happens to be the speed of light in vacuum. Having something exceed the speed of light in air is not a problem at all, and you could theoretically have events (in air) where you physically see A before B but B actually happens before A. That's not a problem at all, and leads to no contradictions. Physically seeing events in a different order isn't an issue.

    However if events are separated so that no information can pass between them except faster than the speed of light in vacuum, then there's no longer any meaning to the terms "before" and "after" for those events. They have no absolute time ordering at all if relativity is true, only ordering within a particular rest frame. Now, if you have a privileged rest frame you can rely on the ordering in that frame and say that is the "correct" order. We tend unconciously to use the rest frame of the Earth in that way, but that's not accurate if relativity is true -- there's nothing special about Earth to distinguish it from any other moving object, and indeed everything is moving in some frame.

    1176:

    Indeed, exceeding the speed of light in a medium can be quite pretty…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

    1177:

    I'm not certain that this couldn't lead to other consequences like violating conservation of momentum or something like that.

    I feel for erturs, as erts is fighting an uphill battle here.

    However, as for conservation of stuff, the cases in which FTL causality violation (aka temporal ordering) make possible backward time travel do raise the question of conservation of baryon number. You take a kilogram of baryons (say a liter of beer) from now and send it back to 1837. What's being conserved, or not?

    1178:

    What I'm pointing out is that you're privileging your sense of light reception over your sense of sound reception.

    And another reply, sorry :). One more thing to note is that light is privileged over sound because the speed of light (in vacuum) is a universal constant. Every observer will measure the same value for it. This isn't the case for sound. So for example in a "moving" train (relative to Earth) if you emit sound at the center, a "stationary" observer (relative to Earth) will measure the sound as moving faster towards the front and slower towards the back; to a good first approximation the speed of the forward sound wave in a train moving at 50 km/h will be measured as 50 km/h faster by the stationary observer than by the observer on the train. This is not true of light (in a vacuum).

    1179:

    That's an interesting scenario. I hope someone plays with it.

    1180:

    FTL causality violation (aka temporal ordering)

    Perhaps it would be better to rephrase the usual "Relativity, Causality, FTL -- pick two" as "Special relativity, Temporal ordering, FTL -- pick two". The question of whether temporal ordering is the same as causality or at least related to it could lead to many entertaining discussions.

    1181:

    I once had the idea of a wormhole as a place where you shouldn't accelerate; that anything which was under drive while inside a wormhole would continue to accelerate at whatever thrust for whatever distance the wormhole covered, and anything which exceeded the speed of light while in the wormhole would exit as energy. In-Universe, this had military applications...

    1182:

    (Off current FTL topic.) Charlie asked that we not link WaPo articles; this is a decent summary (with added commentary) of the WaPo Crypto AG story: The Geostrategic and Historic Implications of Crypto (February 13, 2020, emptywheel) From the 1970s until the early 2000s, the company ensured its encryption had weaknesses that knowing intelligence partners — largely the NSA — exploited. CIA retained control of the company until 2018. It's a cautionary tale about how large nation-state level intelligence budgets can be used to compromise [things: security in this case] globally. Trust is always a spin of the dice/roll of the wheel. :-) (Layering and compartmentation (aka compartmentalization) are workarounds)

    1183:

    My question is whether someone has done the experiment with the lights and the train? Given a long-enough train and a fast-enough plane, it should be possible.

    1184:

    Maybe there's a larger principle at play here having to do with perceptions and high-speed vs. low-speed. I'm not sure I can articulate it, however, but if we assume sound as the fastest-possible speed, and build a computer which fires a bullet (FTL) at Bob after it's determined that Bob's bullet has begun penetrating Alice's skin, we kill Bob in retaliation before the Bob hears the gun responding to the bullet he fired at Alice. Or something. Maybe it has to do with the physicist as a reference frame.

    1185:

    "Special relativity (1), Temporal ordering, FTL -- pick two". (1) Special relativity that applies to your warp drive, that is. You can have special relativity that applies to everything we currently think it applies to, and temporal ordering, and FTL, so long as you give your FTL a privileged frame of reference. That the fictional physics that runs your FTL doesn’t follow the axioms of relativity may be ugly and/or unfashionable, but it contradicts nothing we currently believe about how the world works, which should make it an easy sell for story purposes.

    1186:

    Perceptions have nothing to do with it. GR says that no frame of reference is privileged, so if an observer sees events happening in a particular order, that order is just as valid as any other. This isnt a problem in the absence of FTL, because observers can't intervene and change the order of events for other observers in impossible ways. Since the order of events, from the perspective of any one frame of reference is fixed, there are no paradoxes. But add in FTL, and suddenly impossible things can happen.

    Recall the example of the train. The light in the center illuminates, and beams of light travel toward the front and the back of the train. To an observer on the train, they arrive simultaneously. To an observer on the ground in front of the train, the light traveling toward the back has less distance to go, and arrives first. To an observer in an airplane flying in the same direction of the train, but faster, the beam moving toward the front has less distance to go, and arrives first, because the train appears to be moving toward the airplane. General Relativity says that the correct order of events is... all of them. There is no privileged frame of reference, so all three orderings actually occurred in reality. This doesn't cause a paradox because each of the three frames are isolated from one another--within each frame the sequence of events is fixed regardless of what anyone else sees, so no paradox.

    Now add someone with a faster than light jet pack. If they start near the front of the train, they could observe the light strike the rear of the train, then move to block the light before it arrives at the front. But this is impossible from the point of view of airplane pilot, who sees the light beam arrive at the front of the train first. Both frames are equally valid, so both must occur--except they can't. Paradox.

    FTL means time travel and therefore paradox unless there is some sort of chronological protection clause added to it. Some serious scientists have discussed the possibility of such a thing, including, if memory serves, Stephan Hawking, so I assume that it isn't completely bonkers, which may be good enough for fiction. But in that case remember--no going back to the point and position of origin. FTL is one way travel.

    1187:

    I think Heteromeles is taking the perspective that it's OK for paradoxes to happen occasionally by accident as long as humans don't have a rational motive for routinely creating them on purpose..? I can't figure out any other way to make sense of the fact that he's responding to scenarios involving literal time-traveling stock-trading with remarks along the lines of "I dispute that this is economically rational".

    If a single paradox happens one time anywhere in the universe, then there have to be some rules for what happens to the universe after you create one. And once those rules exist, they aren't really paradoxes anymore, at least in the logical sense of "paradox" (i.e. the result might be counter-intuitive, but it won't be self-contradictory).

    I thought the whole point of avoiding paradoxes was to avoid needing those rules. (Either avoiding the storytelling need to invent and articulate the rules that apply in your story, or avoiding the real-world need to admit that at least one accepted law of physics has to give.)

    1188:

    it's OK for paradoxes to happen occasionally by accident

    I think this is where Scott's earlier notion of the penalty ninja comes in. When a paradox would otherwise appear, what you get instead is a ninja. If you manage to defeat the ninja then you can continue, otherwise it's you that gets rejected by the universe.

    1189:

    D M K @ 1157 Actually, you can go back to where you started (in space) from PROVIDED that your local time-at-origin is later than your starting point-in-time. I note that your later remarks support this

    Absolute frame of reference? At rest w. r. t. the origin-point of the Big Bang? Um - idea for a story in there, maybe?

    Bill Arnold @ 1182 Huawei anyone? That article explains a lot about the US' erm "nervousness" about the Chinese company, doesn't it - someone might do it back to them ....

    1190:

    You don't have to observe this (although of course you can set up detectors and clocks and do so), it's a logical necessity.

    However, in the Earth's frame of reference the light hits the back of the train first and then the front of the train later. Again, this is not a question of observation, it's an inescapable conclusion from the facts that (a) the train is moving in the Earth's frame, and (b) the light is traveling at a fixed speed.

    None the less, I think you should more clearly distinguish what the observers could observe from what they would have to deduce from their knowledge of physics.

    As the most trivial example, a very fast scientist at the origin point O might say "It's been thirty nanoseconds since we released the photons, so they'll be reaching their targets about now." That's a reasonable supposition but since events E and W are outside O's light cone they cannot be observed. (Everyone who's done anything with space probes knows the experience of having something interesting happening 'right now' far away but knowing we won't hear about it for a while.) The events E and W can spawn reporting signals ErO and ErW; once they arrive at O the observer can confirm that ErO and ErW arrived at O at the same time.

    If you just say that to O the events E and W are simultaneous you're implying instantaneous FTL observational powers.

    1191:

    I think this is where Scott's earlier notion of the penalty ninja comes in. When a paradox would otherwise appear, what you get instead is a ninja. If you manage to defeat the ninja then you can continue, otherwise it's you that gets rejected by the universe.

    And it emerges from the corner of the room, smoking, barking madly? Works for me. grin

    I recall something like this was known to happen in the old Mage: the Ascension games to PCs who got too clever about rules-lawyering the laws of physics and inserting cheat codes into reality.

    1192:

    It's not just that sort of thing. There is/was an international encryption standard where the NSA representatives were very insistent that certain constants were best, and got them specified; I forget which now. 10-20 years later, a flaw was discovered, where some constants led to a (computationally intensive) method of breaking the encryption and - mirabile dictu! - those constants were among the weak ones.

    That's the alternative explanation of why Washington doesn't want Huawei to provide the UK's 5G - not because of the threat from China, but because they couldn't hack into our systems so easily.

    1193:

    Once you get to relativity or parallel computing, time ceases to be a scalar; most of the posts have been assuming a single 'arrow of time', but it is not that simple. In particular, you can have temporal inconsistencies without causality breaches, just as long as there is no path which leads from one point in a timeline back to an earlier point in the same timeline. This is one of the reasons that all of the simple explanations are so misleading, and generalising them leads to erroneous conclusions.

    1194:

    I believe that it is possible to set up conditions where sound is faster than light :-)

    1195:

    I am assuming (as most people do) that closed timelike loops are equivalent to potential breaches of causality.

    My main point is that it is possible to have FTL without closed timelike loops, subject to very plausible exclusion conditions (i.e. ones that do not contradict any known physics or observations).

    My secondary point is what I said in #1193 - you can have temporal inconsistencies without closed timelike loops. While you can always linearise an acyclic graph, that does not necessarily preserve timespans (in ANY frame).

    What I am trying to say is that KNOWN physics does NOT lock out FTL. Extrapolating current physical theories to beyond which we have any evidence (as done by the black hole divers and big bang brigade) CAN be used to lock out FTL. But we have no good evidence that those theories extrapolate so far.

    1196:

    Re: ' ... light is privileged over sound because the speed of light (in vacuum) is a universal constant'

    Would you mind explaining? (It's been a long time since Physics 101 plus there may be newer explanations/spins on this.)

    Non-techie here so the only thing that I can think of as a reason is:

    a) different wavelengths -- Light has much smaller waves and smaller waves can travel faster?

    and/or

    b) need for/impact of traveling through a medium -- Light does not need a medium whereas sound does. In fact most media slow light down including clear media, e.g., diamond.

    and/or

    c) light is a particle with its own built-in medium - Sound is not a particle but needs particles in order to travel: sound is what you get when you shove energy at particles within an environment.

    1197:

    Would you mind explaining? (It's been a long time since Physics 101 plus there may be newer explanations/spins on this.)

    I'll take a shot at this; others may want to point you at outside reading. (And I think C is the most useful model for you.)

    The bit about a medium is not a crazy idea; you're reinventing the luminiferous aether, which was very interesting and kind of the dark matter of the 19th century until the Michelson Morley experiment showed that something much stranger was going on.

    In the 1880s we discovered something totally bizarre about the universe: the speed of light is a constant. Not constant relative to an observer but constant relative to all observers.

    The Michelson-Morely experiment was brilliantly straightforward: knowing that light was very fast but moved through space at a known speed, it should be possible to measure the speed of the Earth through the universe by measuring the speed of light in different directions. There may be lot of fiddly measurement and complicated math but the concept is straightforward and sound. If you know the true pitch of a train's horn, you can calculate its speed by listening to the doppler shifted horn when the train is moving.

    But it didn't work that way.

    No matter how carefully they measured - and Albert Michelson was a weird nerd whose obsession was measuring the speed of light very precisely - the speed of light was always the same.

    Bizarrely, this is always true: observers will see light moving at about 300,000 km/s. You, me, Bob, Spock, everyone. If Bob and Spock are moving at 10,000 km/s relative to each other, that's their problem for them to sort out between them; light will stay at 300,000 km/s.

    This is, to put it mildly, counter-intuitive.

    1198:

    Neither (a) nor (b) not (c) - essentially, it just is. That characteristic of light in vacuuo is a fundamental property of relativity - and note that 'light' in this context includes parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that have longer wavelengths (and even lower frequencies) than sound.

    It is possible to give a more detailed explanation, but I doubt that you want to hear about Maxwell's equations, Lorentz invariance and all that they imply. Just accept it as a property of the universe's rules - or magic, if you prefer.

    1199:

    Side note: Orion's Arm people have read Charles Stross. There's even a name drop in this short fiction.

    1200:

    Troutwaxer@1183: "My question is whether someone has done the experiment with the lights and the train? Given a long-enough train and a fast-enough plane, it should be possible."

    Good question. I don't think that specific experiment has been done, but probably something analogous can happen in particle accelerators. There have been many, many experiments to measure the constancy of the speed of light (which is the basic premise of the train scenario). Most of those are of round trip measurements, but there have been some one-way measurements too. So far they all agree that the speed of light is the same for all observers.

    Scott Sanford@1190: "None the less, I think you should more clearly distinguish what the observers could observe from what they would have to deduce from their knowledge of physics."

    Well, I didn't want to fall into the trap of quibbling over "what people observe" versus "what really happened"; I wanted to focus on the latter. One way to perform the experiment would be to have two devices (or people) with synchronized clocks at the ends of the train, and also on the ground at appropriate points where/when the train is passing, then have them all (later) compare the times they recorded for the light's arrival. The ones on the train will have the same times recorded. The ones on the ground will have different times for "front" and "back".

    Actually making separated clocks synchronous is a whole different problem and can lead us into some very thorny weeds, unless you assume that relativity is true (and even then its difficult in practice). But the point of the thought experiment is "if relativity is true, then simultaneity is relative" so we can use light pulses to synchronize them.

    1201:

    Robert van der Heide@1185: " You can have special relativity that applies to everything we currently think it applies to, and temporal ordering, and FTL, so long as you give your FTL a privileged frame of reference. That the fictional physics that runs your FTL doesn’t follow the axioms of relativity may be ugly and/or unfashionable, but it contradicts nothing we currently believe about how the world works, which should make it an easy sell for story purposes."

    Yes, I think you're right. There is a caveat that makes me worry a bit, which is that by Noether's theorem symmetries give rise to conserved quantities, so an FTL drive which does not obey frame invariance will break a conservation law that otherwise would hold. My knowledge of classical mechanics ends there, so I don't know if this would be a problem. Some googling seems to indicate that the conserved quantity corresponding to Lorentz boosts relates to the constant linear velocity of the center of mass, but I have no idea what the implications are if this is not conserved. For story purposes a frame dependent FTL certainly sounds more plausible than the others, but it may have unexpected consequences.

    1202:

    Elderly Cynic@1195: "I am assuming (as most people do) that closed timelike loops are equivalent to potential breaches of causality.

    My main point is that it is possible to have FTL without closed timelike loops, subject to very plausible exclusion conditions (i.e. ones that do not contradict any known physics or observations)."

    I think those exclusion conditions will require some symmetry to be broken by the FTL mechanism, because otherwise you can construct a time-like loop out of FTL devices. The obvious symmetry to break is frame invariance (so you get a preferred frame). Another one would be directional invariance: if an FTL drive only works in one direction then it can't be used to construct a closed timelike loop. Breaking that symmetry would impose a preferred direction to the universe, and I think the consequence of that is that it would be possible to violate conservation of angular momentum with the drive. Which is not necessarily a problem, but could lead to unexpected issues.

    1203:

    SFReader@1196: Re: ' ... light is privileged over sound because the speed of light (in vacuum) is a universal constant' Would you mind explaining? (It's been a long time since Physics 101 plus there may be newer explanations/spins on this.)

    Scott Sanford and Elderly Cynic have already covered this pretty well in their responses. I'll just add that either the universe has a "maximum speed" or it doesn't. If it does have a "maximum speed", all observers would have to agree on it (it wouldn't be a maximum otherwise!). Also, for various mathematical reasons massless particles (such as we believe the photons that make up light to be) would travel at that speed unless impeded by a medium.

    Out of the two alternatives, our universe seems to be of the "does have a maximum speed" variety. Since light travels at that speed in a vacuum we call it "the speed of light", but probably it would be better to call it something else.

    I've written the above with the knowledge that someone will surely object to my calling the speed of light a "maximum speed". All I can say in response is that so far all evidence is that there is no way to go faster than the speed of light (in vacuum) and there are even good logical reasons to suspect it's impossible. The caveat, as always, is "so far as we know now". If new physics is discovered that allow faster than light travel, then that's reality and we'll have to adjust our understanding of the world (and it'll be clear that the speed of light is not a maximum after all).

    1204:

    I think those exclusion conditions will require some symmetry to be broken by the FTL mechanism, because otherwise you can construct a time-like loop out of FTL devices.

    Absolutely NOT. The constraints I gave were essentially frame-invariant, and I got them by solving the Lorentz transformations. I accept that, to do this properly, I need to work with a matrix of transformations - I baulked because I am a bit too rusty, and it would take some time to de-rust. The point is that, except for the trivial case of two nodes, the conditions require that pairs of FTL nodes ('wormholes') are separated by enough distance to compensate for the time-travel effect, as seen by each of the frames involved.

    Your analysis was for node pairs that can be essentially adjacent (in terms of distance as seen by either of them) - try it again for ones that are separated by a lot of normal space (in THEIR frame), and you won't be able to make a closed timelike loop.

    1205:

    Re: ' ... so far all evidence is that there is no way to go faster than the speed of light (in vacuum) and there are even good logical reasons to suspect it's impossible.'

    Thanks - appreciate your explanation!

    Also thanks to Scott Sanford and Elderly Cynic!

    That said - I still do not 'understand' light. I can memorize stuff about it, but the bits of what I can grasp do not make a satisfactory 'whole'. My problem - not yours. :)

    I'll check science institute/university lecture videos in case someone has done a thorough review on light covering all its attributes and interactions.

    1206:

    SFR Almost What you cannot do is gradually go up to light-speed & then transition past it. There's a discontinuity, a severe one, of infonite "height, but also very ( One quantum? ) narrow. There is no preclusion against "tunnelling" through that discontinuity, or so it seems. But the after-effects of being able to do that & then reverse the transition are ... problematic. Which is what we've been discussing. In a rest frame, the Inertial Mass of an physical/massive object approching "c" will increase without limit.

    Mv = M0 √(1-v²/c² )

    Which can make things difficult!

    1207:

    Second & other thoughts ... To: "EC" I'm probably as rusty & creaking as you mentally, if not even further out of practice ... but what specific matrix transforms were you envisaging?

    1208:

    Then we return to the problem of the Alcubierre drives and wormholes, neither of which violate relativity as we understand it.

    In the Alcubierre drive, the ship experiences zero acceleration, while space moves around it (metric shrinking in front of the ship, sliming around the ship, and expanding behind the ship). The apparent physical impossibility of the warp is actually the part about the metric shrinking in front of the ship, which requires a negative mass (and also the "sliming around the ship" part appears to emit copious amounts of Hawking radiation on the inside of the slime). The metric expanding faster than C is already a normal part of cosmology known as dark energy. There are quite serious speculations that some part of the universe is expanding at greater than C relative to us, and thus it is invisible to us. I'd speculate that those parts of the universe aren't following a complex time vector relative to us, which is the answer from modeling this behavior with a simple Lorentz T transform?

    Wormholes simply shorten the distance between two points, arguing that that relativity is route dependent. If you can find a route through which you can walk ten meters and step onto, say Proxima B (ACen isn't known to have planets), then you haven't violated relativity, you've merely proved that the universe is really crooked in some ways.

    And even cute little Wikipedia says that neither wormholes nor warps are bound by a Lorentz transformation. In the wormhole case, it's because the distance the ship travels through the hole lets it get from point A to point B without exceeding C. And actually, that's what the warp does too, except it uses a different mechanism to minimize the distance.

    And before you scream bloody murder, try this test. Get a very, very long length of fiber optic cable (thousands of kilometers should do). line it up so that the cable output is pointed at a target that registers incoming photons. Coil it up as tightly as you can without kinking it. On the input end, put a beam splitter, so that half the photons entering the splitter go into the fiber optic cable, the other half hit the target next to the cable output. Now cool down the cable coil (it's going to get hot). When the cable is nice and cold and attached to a big thermal mass, take your terawatt laser rifle, aim it carefully at the beam splitter, and pull the trigger. Hope you had the beam splitter ready to dump a lot of heat too, but anyway, the results are obvious: One side of the target vaporizes a measurable interval of time before the other side does, because half the pulse just passed through the beam splitter, while the other half got diverted through thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable before it came out and hit the target. Hopefully the fiber optic cable didn't melt carrying the pulse, but you did get it cold enough, right? The pulse needed to be energetic to go through that much cable without amplification.

    Oh yeah, the point? The fact that half the laser pulse went thousands of kilometers further to get to the target didn't mean that the other half of the pulse traveled back in time. That's why wormholes don't violate relativity. Nor do warpdrives, at least as far as I can tell. What they do tell you is that the straight line measurement between points A and B may not be the shortest distance (measured in C) between those two points. Warps allow you to control the distance between A and B.

    And I don't think the Lorentz Transformations give you enough information to tell you the effects of this on the rest of the universe, since general relativity appears to allow these exceptions to happen.

    That's why I'm sassing you to point out that, if the only effect is that observers have to deal with messed up information about what happened when (perceived causality violations), that's not really a big deal. We already routinely deal with those paradoxes when we're dealing with a situation where something broke the sound barrier and we're tracking it by sound. Or when we read about politics in the US or the UK, or if They're not a big problem, and they certainly don't mean that FTL travel is impossible. The lack of negative mass matter probably does.

    1209:

    "I think those exclusion conditions will require some symmetry to be broken by the FTL mechanism, because otherwise you can construct a time-like loop out of FTL devices."

    Absolutely NOT. The constraints I gave were essentially frame-invariant, and I got them by solving the Lorentz transformations. I accept that, to do this properly, I need to work with a matrix of transformations - I baulked because I am a bit too rusty, and it would take some time to de-rust. The point is that, except for the trivial case of two nodes, the conditions require that pairs of FTL nodes ('wormholes') are separated by enough distance to compensate for the time-travel effect, as seen by each of the frames involved.

    Ah, I think I see -- you're requiring that FTL only be possible between specific points in space, and (presumably) those points cannot be moved and new ones cannot be created. The "new ones cannot be created" is the key I think. If you can create new wormholes, even if they have a minimum distance between endpoints, then you can combine slower than light travel, frame shifts, and wormhole travel to make a loop.

    For example, suppose you can send an FTL message (e.g. by creating a wormhole) from (0,0) to (T, S) in your frame, where S > T > 0. Then if relativity is true, a passing spaceship can also create one from (0, 0) to (T, S) in their frame. This allows you to send an FTL message to (0, S') in your frame, where S' is a value < S, by handing the message to a passing spaceship traveling at v=T/S and having them send it to (T, S) in their frame, which will be (0, S') in your frame, where S'=(S - T^2/S) / sqrt(1-T^2/S^2)) = (S^2 - T^2) / sqrt(S^2 - T^2) = sqrt(S^2 - T^2) < S.

    Similarly, if you can send a message by FTL from (0, 0) to (0, S'), you can send a message from (0,0) to (t, S'-t) for any value of t > 0, simply by sending the message and then having the receiver beam it back towards you in a laser.

    You can ratchet these two effects to send an FTL message as close to yourself as you like, assuming you can create wormholes (or move existing ones).

    1210:

    Recall the example of the train. The light in the center illuminates, and beams of light travel toward the front and the back of the train.

    There's an HD CGI video of this famous scenario, loving generated ("rendered") around 1990 by a team I was on. Unfortunately, our sponsor was NHK, who were trying to drum up interest in their new HD-format television channel. HD standards have changed since those early days, and I imagine our footage is gone, gone, gone. Sigh: it looked great at the time. I wonder if "the train scenario" has been done again by someone else.

    1211:

    that's what the warp does too, except it uses a different mechanism to minimize the distance.

    And then there was the drive in Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League stories. IIRC the handwavium was that ship could jump forward by one quantum of distance, and they could do that at a Really Big Clock Rate. One suspects he never did the math, but hey, it did sound good.

    1212:

    Ah, I think I see -- you're requiring that FTL only be possible between specific points in space, and (presumably) those points cannot be moved and new ones cannot be created.

    Aargh! NO!!! What I am saying is that a wormhole terminus (or whatever) cannot operate within a certain distance of another wormhole terminus. There's no problem with them moving around, being created and destroyed, or anything else. Obviously, you can't create one within that distance of another operating one, unless it disables the other. Exactly how this exclusion principle would occur is immaterial.

    The no creation or destruction is a feature of Tipler cylinders, which are single entities; it might be a feature of wormholes, but I am not assuming it.

    1213:

    Ensuring that the matrix of Lorentz transformations together with the transformations corresponding to the FTL mechanism is 'positive definite' in a temporal sense. It's just a variant on what the professional relativists (e.g. Tipler) do to determine whether or not some scenario has potential causal breaches.

    It's simpler, in the model I would use, as I am ignoring gravity. That's provably reasonable, provided that you keep the matrix sufficiently far away from 'singularity' to make the perturbation due to that negligible.

    1214:

    That’s pretty much what I’ve been trying to say. If you’re playing with wormholes or Alcubierre warps which are extensions of general relativity, then “relativity + FTL = time travel” is a problem.

    But if you have a fictional FTL based on the soon-to-be-discovered Maguffin Effect, then you can say it has a preferred frame (which annoys the theoretical physicists) which has a 0.001576c offset from the cosmic background radiation (which puzzles the cosmologists) and not have any contradictions, either internal or with the physics that makes GPS work.

    1215:

    Actually, upon thinking about it, I can see how creation could be used to cause trouble, but there's a trivial tweak that closes that loophole. All that is needed is a suitable delay following the demise of one terminus before a 'nearby' one can come online.

    The concepts of (a) two FTL drives not being able to operate in close proximity and (b) a delay between two uses for 'space' to settle down, have both been used extensively in science fiction.

    1216:

    If you’re thinking in relativistic terms you wouldn’t have an exclusion zone measuresd in light years, but in sqrt((distance in light years)^2 + (time difference in years)^2)

    1217:

    Yes, precisely. Thank you for phrasing it better than I did.

    1218:

    Then we return to the problem of the Alcubierre drives and wormholes, neither of which violate relativity as we understand it.

    And both of which could be used to violate causality, if relativity is true and no other new physics come into play. I'm not arguing against some way of traveling FTL. I'm saying that if such a way exists, and if it works the same way in all slower than light reference frames, then you can use the combination of FTL and STL to construct a closed timelike loop, where you can send a message back in time to yourself. You have to handle this either by postulating a restriction on FTL (it's not relativistically invariant, or breaks some other spacetime symmetry: e.g. all wormholes share a common time frame, or something like that) or else by figuring out a way to handle time travel.

    The precise mechanism of the FTL is irrelevant for our purposes, and we never need to apply a Lorentz transform to anyone who actually takes an FTL journey.

    Popular SF and even many science writers consistently ignore the implications of special relativity. (OGH is an exception.) Like I've said before, there really is no unique "past" or "future" that applies everywhere. If you don't believe me, then consider again the train experiment. Does the light really hit the front of the train first, or the back, or both simultaneously? What "really" happens? Not "what do people see happen", or "what is observed", but literally in reality what happens? Hint: as far as we know the answer is moot because there is no way to exchange information between the events. As soon as some way is created to travel faster than light then questions like these matter. What would a faster than light traveller experience if they could visit both events?

    1219:

    Elderly Cynic@1215: "Actually, upon thinking about it, I can see how creation could be used to cause trouble, but there's a trivial tweak that closes that loophole. All that is needed is a suitable delay following the demise of one terminus before a 'nearby' one can come online."

    I think you'll find that the only reasonable relativistically invariant exclusion zone would be a light cone of some sort. For example, no wormhole terminus can appear within the light cone of another. This seems at first glance like it would work, but would impose some severe restrictions on any story using it.

    Robert van der Heide@1216:

    "If you’re thinking in relativistic terms you wouldn’t have an exclusion zone measuresd in light years, but in sqrt((distance in light years)^2 + (time difference in years)^2)"

    I think you're missing a minus sign on either the time or space side of it; time has to be handled differently than space.

    1220:

    Before I gets started, I can now think about other things again: a few hours ago, I finished the final "novella" that turns my whole magilla of stories in to a novel. I'm not going to have issues about being too short on verbiage... I started around the beginning of Jan... and I'm done... at a hair under 44k words, which means the novel version is about 124k words.

    I will now set it aside for a while, work at selling other stuff, trying to find a venue for the original novella, thinking about a story to propose to Eric Flint for another Grantville story, oh, yes, and working on my train layout.

    1221:

    Ok, on the one hand, arguing this helps me clarify my thinking... but then, I've been thinking about this since I was 16. On the other, you still don't seem to realize what I'm saying.

    Relativity, special or general, applies to this universe. Now, let's say that our universe is a bubble in 5-space. Relativity, or GR, does not apply to outside this universe.

    Now consider this: you pop through the skin of this universe, into 5-space, go somewhere, then pop back in. At no time have you traveled in a timelike manner - that is, spent time - in this universe. Meanwhile, this universe has wandered along in its usual way... so you pop back in, for this universe, some time x has passed. You've not traveled back in time.

    About Bob and Alice: if Alice got to Alpha Centuri, found the natives are restless, and uses FTL to go back to earth, she's still not going to get there before Bob left.

    And this is because, here's the other thing you don't get that I'm proposing, that this universe, as a whole, is a single frame of reference. Given that, until you get to major intergalactic distances (many billions of light years). since any two blobs of matter are moving at speeds relative to each other of, perhaps, thousands or tens of thousands of klicks per hour. At those velocities, the Lorentz transforms are moot, and for that reason, I'm suggesting that the universe itself is a "preferred frame of reference.

    Look, if I look at a Cephid variable, and send its location and relationship to, say, another star, to someone parsecs away, and then measure it, what they see in terms of "so many transits since it was here in space" and what I see as "so many transits since it was here in space" WILL BE THE SAME.

    I think we already have a clue as to this being possible, given that Hawking, before he died, was looking at the possibility of information tunneling through the event horizon of a black hole.

    1222:

    Ok, multi-worlds. Ever read QED? Feynman tells me that the photon travels every possible path to wind up where we're measuring it. If someone else's cmt, that the splits are quantum-level only, not person, world, or universe-level splits, then that's the same thing.

    1223:

    ROTFLMAO! "Six singularity points"? IIRC, you know who else has six (or is is 7)... oh, I just looked it up, look for an 8th singularity... when whoever's writing that on Orion's Arm reaches the eighth level of clear, with the scienterrificologists....

    1224:

    Bob and Alice moving at different velocities entering the wormhole... sorry, I immediately flashed on Doc Smith's Bergenholm, where he does conserve momentum, and coming out in only a spacesuit from somewhere with a very different vector is amazingly Not Fun.

    1225:

    Interesting question. Let me start this way: what is the relative energy (we're talking e=mc^2) of that bucket of beer right now, and what is it, now that it's been transported back to 1837, when the universe was smaller?

    1226:

    Y'know, I hit and had second thoughts about this: if the universe is expanding, then if energy relationships between, say, atomic particles, or even gravity, constant, should the measured values be changing as time goes on? I mean, the universe isn't expanding between galaxies, it's expanding everywhere.

    1227:

    Having driven around the US, including once from Chicago to Annaheim for Worldcon and back in '96, do you know how much I'd like that drive? See the top of the next hill, five miles away? Blip. Now see that next hill?

    1228:

    Hit submit again... what I didn't mention is that with a lot of stories, I really don't know how they're going to end. The urge to open a file and start typing hits me, and they characters and the story tell me where it's going.

    But, having started this odyssey around Aug of '18, I finally know how the story ends - that's one of the things pushing me the last month - I can't just read to the end of the book, I have to write it.

    1229:

    They've done versions with atomic clocks on jets vs synchronized clocks on the ground. IIRC, the ones on the (very fast) jets "lost time" with respect to those that stayed on the ground.

    1230:

    One of the things I worked on, back in the late 70s, ran microwave signals through a (large) crystal and used the physical waves in the crystal to modulate a laser beam going through it. (I have no idea what it was intended for. Most of our output was things like parts for radar altimeters, for radar test boxes, and occasionally radar simulators. And once, oscillators for goose-collar radio transmitters, "because geese can't carry the big packages that alligators can".)

    1231:

    Also Maxwell's equations: mu0/epsilon0 = c^-2 It's interesting to speculate where Maxwell could have taken his work with 10 or 20 more years of life.

    1232:

    whitroth@1221: "And this is because, here's the other thing you don't get that I'm proposing, that this universe, as a whole, is a single frame of reference." In relativity a "frame of reference" is an "intertial frame of reference", i.e. it has a velocity associated with it. Two observers moving relative to one another are in different frames of reference, regardless of how near or far away they are from each other.

    Here's another way to think of it: to have a coordinate frame you need coordinates, namely time and distance. The speed of light is constant, so just one of those suffices, and usually we pick time (clocks these days are incredibly accurate). Given a clock and a laser, you can measure the distance from the clock to some reflective object by bouncing the laser off of it and recording the elapsed time before the beam returns.

    But as is well known, time is measured differently by clocks that are in relative motion. For convenience we can define one clock to be "stationary" and one "in motion". The one "in motion" ticks more slowly compared to the stationary one. That means it measures distances differently too. Hence the moving clock and the stationary clock give rise to different frames, because they measure different times and distances.

    Look, if I look at a Cephid variable, and send its location and relationship to, say, another star, to someone parsecs away, and then measure it, what they see in terms of "so many transits since it was here in space" and what I see as "so many transits since it was here in space" WILL BE THE SAME.

    Not if the person parsecs away is moving relative to you. In that case you will not agree on how much time has elapsed, regardless of how it's measured (by means of an atomic clock, or pulsar ticks, or anything else). Time moves at different rates for observers that are in motion relative to one another.

    1233:

    Right, and IIRC that was also a NASA thing on the moon landings. The problem for me is this: Relativity leads to some very strange, very counterintuitive places. So what's the most outlandish thing relativity can do that we can actually prove with current resources? The train thing looks both weird and also possible to prove, but we're sure as hell not sending Bob and Alice out to Alpha Centauri anytime soon.

    1234:

    That's the alternative explanation of why Washington doesn't want Huawei to provide the UK's 5G - not because of the threat from China, but because they couldn't hack into our systems so easily. The US behavior re Huawei has been very odd. That thought crossed my mind too. (I've similarly wondered about their handsets.) There are old rumors about Chinese equipment (not consumer/IOT) with backdoors, at least 10 years old. I never found any convincing details (e.g. reverse engineering by a trusted party.)

    1235:

    All this discussion of why FTL implies, or can imply, time travel has put me in mind of a piece I read years ago, By Keith Laumer no less, in which he demonstrates conclusively that not only does he not understand Relativity, but he is convinced that he knows better than the physicists and mathematicians who do. He is attempting to be sarcastic about it, but just succeeds in flaunting his ignorance.

    Either that or he managed to pull off one gigantic piss-take.

    At one point, he points out what ridiculous nonsense the Doppler Effect is, without showing any sign of knowing that it's the Doppler Effect he's talking about.

    It appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1970, and has been archived here. Note, the link may take you to the wrong place in the archive. I don't really get how their links work. But you can page through to the right place, near the end.

    J Homes.

    1236:

    Like I've said before, there really is no unique "past" or "future" that applies everywhere. If you don't believe me, then consider again the train experiment.

    You have to realize that in real life, I'm an environmental activist dealing with some really censored to save OGH the libel suit developers. We agree on so little about the realities in different situations that it's amazing one of us doesn't fall through a floor that the other doesn't believe is there. Before that I came up through the PhD version of relativity, which isn't rigorously mathematical but does have a lot to do with scaling and history issues.

    I'm being an asshole again, but there's a point here. Your critical point seems to be that OMG they don't agree on a common history or future. That's the all-devouring monster that you're trying to get us to avoid.

    And I deal with it all the time. Most people do, whether or not they think about it. To me it's an everyday nuisance, not a crisis. Look at the US President and his tweets, for Einstein's sake. It's constant gaslighting, and yet we learn to live with it and establish communities who mostly agree on what our reality is.

    So if people not agreeing on history or future is the worst thing that causality violations are going to cause, then I'd say it's not really a problem. It's a problem for certain scientific questions, yes. It's a problem for starship navigation, because ships will have to establish their coordinates when they come out. They almost certainly won't be quite where they predicted they would be. Worse than that? That's what's I'm missing.

    1237:

    It isn't a question of when we observe the cause and effect, it really is a question of effect coming before cause. In the bullet example everyone agrees on the order of events: the bullet leaves the gun first, then strikes the target later. We may see or hear things in a different order, but there's a consistent chronology because the bullet travels slower than light. In every reference frame the order of events is the same.

    Sorry to answer these in reverse order, but it's been a long day road-tripping in the desert.

    Anyway, no, with the bullet, not everyone agrees what happened initially. What happens is that someone's head explodes unexpectedly. If the trained soldiers whose buddy just exploded hear a rifle report shortly thereafter, they rapdily assemble the narrative in their mind that OMG there's a sniper and it goes from there.

    Conflicting data are assembled into a coherent narrative that leads to action, hopefully but not necessarily correctly (there could be two snipers, or an echo could make it hard to track the position of the sniper). This is post-hoc data analysis based on a model the soldiers were taught or assembled empirically based on experience.

    If you get a relativity-caused confusion of what happened when, my prediction is that people used to experiencing this confusion will sort out what happened on each timeline pretty quickly. It is precisely analogous to how people deal with speed of sound issues. It relies on their prior training and on post-hoc analysis to see which known narrative applies. But these apparent paradoxes don't break the universe.

    If you want the sarcastic capstone to this, it's one of Isaac Bonewits' old laws of magic: "If it's a paradox, it's probably true."

    1238:

    So if people not agreeing on history or future is the worst thing that causality violations are going to cause, then I'd say it's not really a problem.

    I'm no physicist and I'm quite the layman with relativity, but to my understanding just disagreeing about which wall of the train light hit first is not the thing that breaks something. That's just the way the world is, and as you say, we cope with those kinds of disagreements every day.

    However, AIUI, relativity, causality and the constant speed of light can cause such disagreements as "I got this letter before I sent it,", or "I came back to Earth before I left it." Those are not "discussable" disagreements - at that one space-time point you have two things which should exist. This is kind of obvious to physicists as coming from the light-in-a-train experiment, but not clear non-physicists.

    Also, I admit that quantum mechanics seems to break some things with respect to relativity. I have the impression that people are working on combining the two, but it seems to be difficult and not directly something you can make money out of, so there aren't that many people doing it.

    1239:

    What I'm trying to get at is that there seems to be this notion that paradoxes break the world, and therefore the world prevents them.

    My point is that we deal with these sorts of paradoxes all the time.

    Therefore, I'm trying to argue that: a) temporal ordering paradoxes are insufficiently powerful to use to declare that FTL is impossible. b) There may well be other things that keep FTL from happening*, but y'all haven't come up with them. c) The level of argument here hasn't ascended above regurgitating well-known models.

    And what I'm trying to push you to do is think and come up with something original. Admittedly I'm doing it by being irritating, but I retain hope that someone will come up with something new instead of reiterating their points as if they're reciting holy texts to dispel a demon.

    *For instance: the known "legal" methods of FTL depend on states of matter that appear to be impossible, because they require matter that has, or acts like it has, negative mass. Or it is possible to create negative-mass matter, but the Hawking radiation levels inside the resulting warp bubble or wormhole will rapidly turn any matter inside them (including the exotic matter) into an interestingly dirty plasma, which will then rapidly collapse the FTL structure. These are what you see as economic arguments.

    1240:

    They've done versions with atomic clocks on jets vs synchronized clocks on the ground. IIRC, the ones on the (very fast) jets "lost time" with respect to those that stayed on the ground.

    Satellite based GPS has to take this into account.

    1241:

    The US behavior re Huawei has been very odd. That thought crossed my mind too. (I've similarly wondered about their handsets.) ... There are old rumors about Chinese equipment (not consumer/IOT) with backdoors, at least 10 years old. I never found any convincing details (e.g. reverse engineering by a trusted party.)

    The government of China (the party) is supreme to the state. The PRA reports to the party. And there is a law (bit vague as are all such things in China) which states any business in China has to do whatever the Party says it must to preserve the Party/state. Which means they could be ordered to put back doors or similar into anything and be instructed to not tell about it.

    A friend who works on the white hat side of things says done trust ANYTHING built by a company located in China.

    1242:

    heteromeles

    Is there a way to get in touch with out about some development issues/questions?

    I don't see a contact link on your web page.

    1243:

    relativity, causality and the constant speed of light

    Those and FTL causes the problems.

    1244:

    A friend who works on the white hat side of things says done trust ANYTHING built by a company located in China.

    You can tell they're serious about that because the only computer they use for anything serious is an 1977 Apple II, from the days when the US actually made computers.

    These days not only does everything have a processor in it, they're all dependent on parts made in china if they're not entirely made in China. USB-C cables, memory cards, DRAM arrays, bluetooth modules, you name it there's a SOC in it. Although TBH I trust my smart debit card far more than I trust any US bank.

    For people outside the USA, or who think that the US government doesn't sit on the right hand of Christ, the idea that any computer system is secure against a state actor is a joke. If it's not compromised by China, US, Russia or someone else that's because it is so insecure that compromised isn't a relevant description. "I'm using a cellphone" or "I'm using telnet" would be sufficient.

    Of course you end up asking... does "secure DNS" lead to "secure HTTP" mean anything when the root certificates in your operating system have been pre-compromised before you even bought the computer?

    1245:

    erturs I'm absolutely no HTML expert, but I found the guide(s) availabke to render an equation more readably on this blog, as you saw. It makes it so much easier to read .... subscripts are ( spaced-out, of course ): angle-bracket sub rev-angle barcket text & then cancel powers are: & sup text ; OR angle-bracket sup rev-angle-bracket text & then cancel as usual and a root is: & radic ; So your equation should read ...

    S'; = (S - T&sup2/S;)/√(1-T²/S²) = etc.....

    whitroth @ 1221 That's the semi-basis for FTL in The Culture, IIRC

    Mikko @ 1238 cough I admit that quantum mechanics seems to break some things with respect to relativity. I have the impression that people are working on combining the two It's called The Vacuum Catastrophe & involves an, erm, "discrepancy" of a mere 32 - 120 Orders of Magnitude. Oh & "Renormalisation" is a giant sleight-of-hand fiddle that we have, so far, got away with, just to enliven matters.

    1246:

    ... the idea that any computer system is secure against a state actor is a joke.

    I expect some of us already heard last week's news that Crypto AG, supplier of high level cryptographic to governments and corporations for decades, was subverted by the CIA decades ago.

    Coverage by slashdot, gizmodo, PC Mag, the Telegraph, you can take your pick. (I won't link to the Washington Post article.) Presumably the State Department is hearing from many other countries, though in the Trump Era there's nobody there to answer the phone.

    German intelligence was apparently uncomfortable with this not because of the implied fraud but because they thought it was proper only to spy on enemies rather than upon everyone in the world.

    1247:

    I'm just waiting for the fight between "we stream everything from your keyboard" interfering with "we get it from the OS" and "we get it from the firmware"... if anything it's an argument for a centralised repository that they can all use, rather than having to upload five copies of everything I do (even the East Germans weren't that bad... the Russians, maybe, with their answer to "quis custodiet" being "another, more secret, police. Duh").

    1248:

    Heteromeles @1239,

    The troublesome paradoxes are the "make it didn't happen" kind.

    To use your sniper example. Regardless of who saw or heard what when, the target was hit, and presumably died. Unconstrained FTL then permits someone to respond by going back and stopping the sniper, so the the target is still alive, and therefore nobody is going to go back and stop the sniper, so the target is dead, so...

    From the target's viewpoint, is the target alive or dead? Note that this isn't a quantum mechanical thing. The target is not in an indeterminate state. Nor is it a case where some observers think the target is dead, and others alive. The target is both definitely dead, and definitely alive.

    J Homes.

    1249:

    A good principle. Don't trust anything built in the USA, UK or Russia, either, and I am none too confident about Japan, Germany or France. As the common saying in IT security circles goes "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you."

    1250:

    No, it's different. It's not that people's beliefs about the timeline and past differ, but that the actual facts do, too. The best explanations of how this can happen WITHOUT breaking consistency are in parallel programming references. But (as someone who teaches it) it's not easy to get your head around, even for a mathematician. The point is that relativistic time is not a scalar, but a vector, with one element for each 'observer', and the different timelines interact in unexpected ways, but with no loops.

    FTL brings in the POTENTIAL for loops, which is where the problems start to arise. My conditions stop it creating actual loops, but there are other 'solutions', too. What I can't explain non-mathematically is the concept of consistent acausal time, and I am none too happy with even the mathematics. It is SERIOUSLY counter-intuitive.

    1251:

    For simplicity, if the universe time line splits at every new event, it removes the paradoxes as there is now at least two separate time lines branching off from the point where the paradox otherwise would have occurred. . Yes I am aware this creates new problems, but for the purpose of writing a novel or short story these problems do not get in the way. Unfortunately, the universe that sends someone back in time to stop Skynet will not benefit from the result. And there are now miracuously saviours popping up from (locally) non-existent futures to kill Hitler or whatever. . My favourite time would be 1913, when you can go to Vienna and kill both Hitler and Stalin in the same day. And when you are there, you send some photoshopped erotic biracial photos of general Smuts (in South Africa) and wossname, the white supremacist in USA that became president after Teddy Roosevelt to the newspapers. That should finish off their political careers for good. There is no returning to our future, so you need to bring cheap (to us) industrial diamonds, or gold, to finance your life in the new time line. Also, bring a map of oil and mineral deposits. And use the profits to buy up land where endangered species have their habitats (you might even have the remaining thylacines captured and set up a breeding population in Tasmania). Pay some killers to go after the eugenics crowd, finance a search for antibiotics and bankroll Tsiolkovsky and Goddard -this should keep you busy for the remainder of your days :-)

    1252:

    My apologies for the previous comment, I did not read the context.

    Anyway, this link is OT but I love how nerds interact with phase space http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bound http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bound

    1253:
    A friend who works on the white hat side of things says done trust ANYTHING built by a company located in China.

    I have heard the same but have not seen a proper reverse engineering of firmware/binaries. (Probably personal ignorance.[1]) There are plenty of disturbing hints, but the whole matter/area is swirling with agendas (nation-state, commercial, investor) and misinformation. And what look like bad security practices and engineering practices particularly with Chinese equipment. And bad practices make it easier to hide/disguise nefarious code.

    [1] One exception is an old story about a handset, which does give a password: Backdoor found in ZTE Android phones - Two mobile phones, developed by Chinese telecommunications device manufacturer ZTE, have been found to carry a hidden backdoor, which can be used to instantly gain root access with a password, that has been hard-coded into the software. (Michael Lee, May 15, 2012) There is a setuid-root [set user ID upon execution] application at /system/bin/sync_agent that serves no function besides providing a root shell backdoor on the device. Just give the magic, hard-coded password to get a root shell.

    1254:

    My favourite time would be 1913, when you can go to Vienna and kill both Hitler and Stalin in the same day.

    Ahem: Hitler, Stalin, Sigmund Freud, and with a bit of legwork Lenin and Trotsky too.

    One of the short story ideas I had years ago and never did anything with -- too much background research needed -- would have been titled "The psychoanalysis of A. H. by Dr Freud". In which young Adolf gets the counseling he so badly needed, gets his shit together, and falls out of love with romantic militarism. Leading to him volunteering and getting shot on the western front, so that in early 1919 the informer injected into the SDAP by Army intelligence in Berlin is one Fritz Lang ...

    Alternatively: Adolf gets to chatting about politics with a pair of expats called Vlad and Leon, becomes convinced of the rightness of their theory and praxis, and ends up in Russia during the revolution (much like Jaroslav Hašek) and ends up as a Commissar working for Trotsky. Then when Lenin dies and the big T moves up (Stalin is purged) Hitler ends up in charge of the Red Army.

    This decade, however, is not an appropriate time to write counterfactuals of that ilk; it'd be in questionable good taste at best, and the potential for active damage is too great.

    1255: 1095 - Well, this I'd attempted to explain by using the terms "time" and "duration" separately.

    "Time" is the number of local seconds that pass for any of the locations Sol, Centauri and "Alice" (where Alice is presumed to be in motion between Centauri and Sol. Let's leave her velocity out of this for now because I'm trying to pin down the meanings of terms without using higher maths!) "Duration" is the number of local seconds which pass between 2 events, say Alice leaves Centauri and Alice arrives at Sol. "Calendar" we define as positive motion along the "time axis" (which is also the "duration axis").

    What you have not shown is why Alice experiencing a positive Duration that is less that a photon making the same trip from Centauri to Sol is even potentially time travel. Attempting to use Bob Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" here is just rehashing a known paradox!

    1098 - Pacific North-West of North America, if we'd not felled most of it Great Britain, chunks of the Scandinavian shield... 1101 - That's where I started from with all forms of warp, sub-space, hyper-space and other copyright or non-copyright for FTL. 1112 - I've never driven a Toyota Tercel. I have driven a Citroen ZX with both a carburetor and a monopoint injection (plus solid state ignition) version of the same TU 1360cc engine. The later injection engine made better power, torque, mileage, drivability and emissions than the carburetor car. It also stayed in tune for longer. Point?

    @erturs - My issue is not with FTL in "normal space", which you are discussing. It is that you refuse to even consider the situation where an n-space drive creates a shortcut wrt normal space such that the n-space traveler can arrive at point B before a light beam which leaves point A at the same time, but because they experience duration in n-space with the same sense as observers at A and B the traveler can arrive at B before the light beam but not until after the event which started their journey.

    Also, no-one has ever done an "atomic clock experiment" in which either clock has arrived at the end of the experiment before the start of the experiment. IE, this only demonstrates time dilation and not time travel.

    Various re timing a spark ignition engine. I've done this with just a spanner, a screwdriver and some feeler gauges. What happens is that I use the screwdriver and feeler gauges to set the points gap cold according to the manual. I then go for a drive to heat the engine up. On a hot, idling engine I swing the distributor to achieve the highest idle speed possible, then restore a normal idle speed using the throttle stop screw.

    1256:

    they could be ordered to put back doors or similar into anything and be instructed to not tell about it.

    Kinda like how US companies can be ordered to turn over information to the US government and not tell about it?

    1257:

    Heteromeles@1236:

    "Your critical point seems to be that OMG they don't agree on a common history or future. That's the all-devouring monster that you're trying to get us to avoid."

    I've obviously done a poor job of explaining my position. Disagreeing on the ordering of events is not a problem -- it better not be, because that's the way the world is! The problem arises if you introduce FTL into the mix. Then the different ordering of events in different inertial frames can actually be used to produce paradoxes of the "you killed your own grandfather" kind.

    OK, let's look at it this way. Suppose it takes 1 year for you to send an FTL message a distance of 4 light years. Please note that I absolutely do not specify that the FTL message travels through "normal space": perhaps it's using some kind of "hyperspace jump", perhaps it's passing through a wormhole that you create -- it doesn't matter.

    Then if the laws of physics are independent of the relative velocities of the observers (that's the key assumption of relativity) it will also take 1 year as they measure it for someone moving in a slower than light spaceship to send a message 4 light years.

    And there's where everything breaks down, because a 1 year duration as measured by someone in a slower than light spaceship could correspond to any duration at all, even negative, to someone on Earth; it entirely depends on the spaceship's (slower than light) velocity v.

    So if you send an FTL message to a slower than light spaceship, and they respond to you, their FTL response could arrive before you sent the original. That's what I don't like.

    There's a worked example on Wikipedia: Tachyonic antitelephone. Don't be misled by the "Tachyonic" in the title, the discussion applies to any form of FTL communication.

    1258:

    No, it's different. It's not that people's beliefs about the timeline and past differ, but that the actual facts do, too.

    Ultimately, what's the difference? I'm not some political hack here, but one of the normal comments on this blog is how everything recorded as information can be hacked, confused, or lost, from computers to books to people's memories.

    What you seem to be positing is that there's a "God" that records the Truth about the actual state of the universe, and time travel would destroy this "God." This notion (immortal information?) to have started some eminent physicist posited that information can not be destroyed, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. And he is believed uncritically when his field is discussed, but perhaps not under other circumstances?

    While I think this is an easy explanation, the counter problem is that in our everyday lives and many sciences, we see information destroyed as a matter of course. Examples include everything from political shenanigans to memory failures of computers, humans, and libraries. In the sciences loss of historical data through everything from natural decay to extinction of species is fairly normal, and there are whole fields (geology, paleontology, to some degree ecology) that deal with this as a matter of course.

    I'm simply arguing that paradoxes happen all the time due to conflicting information, and we deal with them. One good example are mammals and bird fossils from the Paleogene. I've spent a good amount of time reading books on these for various projects (the PETM is in this period). The tl;dr issue is that the molecular evolutionary trees and the interpretation of the fossils often disagree fairly radically about when clades diverged, few good fossils turn up, and of those good fossils that do show up, many make little sense in terms of species that currently exist (meaning either we don't really understand when or how some really common groups like songbirds evolved, they're evidence of whole clades that have entirely vanished, or both). They strongly suggest that the actual history of life on Earth was far more complex than what we can deduce from the remaining evidence, and that we'll never know most of that history.

    Or if you want the physics example, look at the postulate that dark energy has caused some chunk of the universe to be moving at greater than 1 C away from us, so that light from that part of the universe (and from its history) can never reach us. Any discussions about the information it contains are purely speculative, because right now we don't know whether it exists or not.

    The critical point is that, in our everyday experience, information does disappear and what remains often does contradict other information paradoxically. We regard this as normal in many fields and deal with it.

    However, when discussing relativity, the normal ground rules assume that all information is immortal and that paradoxes destroy the universe. That, in itself, is paradoxical thinking, that you're comfortable tolerating paradoxes in some areas, but intolerant in other areas where someone told you paradoxes were impossible and that "the facts" are real and immortal.

    Now you can take this as an attack, you can laugh and admit that we're all inconsistent and go back to fighting for lack of paradoxes in relativity, or you can play with the idea that perhaps paradoxes aren't what prevents FTL. Or do something else, for that matter.

    1259:

    paws4thot@1255:

    Well, this I'd attempted to explain by using the terms "time" and "duration" separately. "Time" is the number of local seconds that pass for any of the locations Sol, Centauri and "Alice" (where Alice is presumed to be in motion between Centauri and Sol. Let's leave her velocity out of this for now because I'm trying to pin down the meanings of terms without using higher maths!) "Duration" is the number of local seconds which pass between 2 events, say Alice leaves Centauri and Alice arrives at Sol.

    These definitons are inconsistent, because if Sol, Centauri, and Alice are all in motion relative to one another then none of them have the same length of seconds. Since the "local seconds" are all different, so are the "local durations". That is, Alice will record a different number of elapsed seconds between her departure and arrival than will Bob who stayed on Earth. This is the twin "paradox".

    What you have not shown is why Alice experiencing a positive Duration that is less that a photon making the same trip from Centauri to Sol is even potentially time travel.

    Alice is in a slower than light spaceship. She never travels faster than light. If however, we assume that she can send messages faster than light (perhaps by radioing them to her friend Mark who has a faster than light spaceship), then we can arrange for her to send messages back in time. Equivalently, FTL Mark can time travel if he starts out by moving alongside Alice (at her speed) and ends up moving alongside Earth (at its speed). This is straightforward math based on the Lorentz transformation between Alice's frame of reference and Earth's. Note that nowhere do we specify how Mark achieves his FTL travel; it could be via wormhole, hyperspace, whatever. (He does need a slower than light ship to match velocities with Earth and Alice, but that's at the journey's endpoints: what happens in between is beyond our ken). We're not even worried right now about Mark interacting with his own past: the problem is that Alice can use Mark to send a message back to her younger self.

    Again, this is all under the assumption that relativity is true and there is no "absolute time". If you re-introduce an absolute time then you can make an FTL that avoids actual paradoxes, although there may be apparent ones. Most stories with hyperspace implicitly assume this, and also implicitly assume that the "absolute time" corresponds approximately to time as measured by someone moving at Earth's speed. It would be quite amusing to change this, e.g. to have a story where poor Admiral Kirk is sitting on Earth reading dispatches from the Enterprise-Y in chronologically reverse order because Earth clocks are running at a different speed than subspace clocks. In this kind of scenario Kirk may read about the Enterprise being destroyed by Klingons before it happens, but he cannot prevent it because his messages back to the Enterprise would necessarily be received after any possibility of affecting the events.

    1260:

    Heteromeles@1258:

    If you're comfortable with time travel, then of course you'll be comfortable with FTL in any of its guises. I think for most of us the grandfather paradox is a real problem and normally people regard time travel as something to be avoided, but chacun a son gout (sorry about the spelling :)). I'm reminded of the movie "Primers", where a character is asked if his time machine is safe. His reply is something to the effect of "There is no circumstance whatsoever in which I could regard this as 'safe'" :).

    1261:

    whitroth @ 785: Gun battles in spaceships.

    Y'know, and those of you who have been in the military can correct me, but it's my impression that in the military, esp. on ships, weapons are locked up until/unless required.

    Depends on whether you're in a combat zone or not. Locked up weapons don't do you much good when you're being boarded by pirates. It's a trope in military sci-fi with the good guys being overrun by bad guys because the good guys don't have access to weapons secured in the arms locker.

    As for gun battles in spaceships, think frangible ammunition that shatters on impact with a "hard" object, rather than penetrating.

    And that's also my take on why a inter-stellar colony might need guns. Any colony group large enough to be viable, will almost certainly have outlaws & renegades who refuse to be dealt with any other way.

    PS: Been away from home, so I'm a little behind times reading/responding to comments. Eventually I'll get caught up again.

    1262:

    No, I think the grandfather paradox is a real problem, unless the universe is some version of many worlds.

    What we've failed to do so far is to determine whether that a grandfather paradox is even possible. For example, if the statement I read online isn't total BS, and the upper limit for an Alcubierre warp is 100C, then I'm not sure that you can use a warpship to travel back in time far enough to keep your parents from canoodling on that special night, let alone murder your grandfather. This is especially true if, like most ships, warpships can only travel for a limited duration before needing resupply or refitting. That's why logistics arguments are so important.

    Where we also conflict is that, if I understand correctly, you claim that disputes over the order of events happening to Alice and to Bob under relativistic transformations of inertial frames are sufficient to say that FTL is impossible. I'm pointing out that the truth may simply be, "Alice experienced events in order X, Bob experienced events in order Y, and there is no internal evidence within X and Y to determine that one of these is the true order of events." Is that enough to prevent FTL? We certainly handle contradictions of greater complexity in our everyday lives, so I really don't think so. To do otherwise, you have to appeal to there being One Truth, which is the ultimate frame of reference, and I don't think general relativity leads us in that direction.

    1263:

    David L @ 845:

    Let that sink in: a fully laden Concorde passenger flight was two-thirds as fast as an SR-71, over intercontinental distances (and didn't need IFR).

    Let's see.
    First flight
    SR-71 1962
    Concorde 1969

    So slide rules vs computers. I'd say the SR-71 did OK. Plus Concorde was near max speed. SR-71 not so much.

    But in general this is comparing watermelons to oranges. If someone might be shooting missiles at me I'd want an SR-71. If hitching a fast ride across the ocean for other than national security reasons I'd prefer the Concorde.

    Of course both were a wee bit out of my budget.

    Whatever happened to the idea of sub-orbital "antipodes" rockets?

    IIRC, Heinlein had them in several of his short stories (I think based on a German WWII idea that never got off the ground). New York to London in 10 minutes; London to Sydney or Cape Town in an hour or so?

    1264:

    Again, this is all under the assumption that relativity is true and there is no "absolute time". If you re-introduce an absolute time then you can make an FTL that avoids actual paradoxes, although there may be apparent ones.

    Here we go again. We've already established that, for most non-scientific uses, the spectrum of relative velocities experienced by objects in the nearest 50(?) light years is the same. Comets and outer planets go about as fast relative to us (10-100 km/sec) as do stars within this area. So for navigational purposes, they're all in one inertial frame and corrections for relativistic changes are trivial.

    The problem is that this is a big space, so STL starships traversing it have to go fast enough to transform how they perceive events inside this frame.

    The warp/wormhole solution is to introduce multiple distances into the scenario. A star might be five light years away by one flight path, but by another flight path (through the wormhole) it is 100 AU away. Light doesn't have a preferred flight path, so there's no reason you can't build a consistent history with the travel distance between the two systems being 100 AU apart through the wormhole. This is the idea of "empire-time." If no one takes the long way through flat, interstellar space, then the existence of empire-time really doesn't matter. And even if someone does hit relativistic velocities traveling between stars, then their bizarre alternate view of the empire-time history would be regarded as having been due to them "going relativistic on us," and analyzed as such.

    1265:

    Citroen ZX - I had the same experience when I replaced the B20 carb engine in my Volvo Amazon with the injection version from the 1800E. This being so, I have acquired a B30 injection engine to go into my carb 164 and am gradually accumulating all the other bits and pieces that go with it (most of which are straightforward to substitute cheaply with scrapyard parts since fuel injection is ubiquitous these days, but the box of electronics costs a ridiculous amount even if you can find one, so I'll most likely end up building my own).

    1266:

    Wrong answer.

  • Given how fast Terra and Planet X, parsecs away are moving, NEITHER OF THEM ARE MOVING AT ANYTHING APPROACHING THE SPEED OF LIGHT. For all practical purposes, then they are in the same frame of reference.
  • And once the orbital speed of a Cephid variable has been calculated, they are going to define the period of the varialbe exactly the same as we are, even if our seconds are shorter by X*10^20 sec than theirs.

    1267:

    Heteromeles@1262:

    What we've failed to do so far is to determine whether that a grandfather paradox is even possible. For example, if the statement I read online isn't total BS, and the upper limit for an Alcubierre warp is 100C, then I'm not sure that you can use a warpship to travel back in time far enough to keep your parents from canoodling on that special night, let alone murder your grandfather.

    See the example of the Tachyonic Antitelphone on Wikipedia for a worked example (the "Two-way example") which is nicely parameterized, i.e. you could plug in 'a=100C' if the message is being sent by the Alcubierre warp ship you describe. Bob and Alice are moving apart at a speed greater than (2*a)/(1+a^2), or in this case 200/10001 = 0.02c. Alice sends a message via a 100C warpship to Bob saying "I ate some bad shrimp". Bob sends a reply back, also via a 100C warpship, saying "Don't eat the shrimp". Alice receives Bob's reply before she sent the original. All this is pretty straightforward math.

    The key is that all speeds except c are relative. Saying a warpship travels at "100c" is meaningless. You have to say "at 100c" relative to what. In our example the warpship Alice sends travels at 100c relative to her, and the one Bob sends travels at 100c relative to him.

    If you give up relativity and introduce absolute space and time, then "100c" can aquire a meaning again (it's 100c relative to the absolute spacetime frame). As far as we know the universe doesn't work that way.

    1268:

    bangs head on wall

    Please stop writing as though you're the professor, and we're high school students. You keep refusing to address my actual arguments, and rephrase what you've already written.

    Let's try it this way: I am aware of no proof that negative time exists (we keep finding the arrow of time invariant, if I'm saying this correctly), any more than negative space exists.

    What proof, or evidence, is there that either time or space is not an absolute value, rather than signed?

    Why do you refuse to consider the Lorentz transformatios with v > c as being an actual rotation in dimension?

    Now, in what way does either GR or SR deal with outside the light cone? Do they not run into divisions by zero?

    1269:

    Heteromeles @ 847: That cheers me up, actually. The odd part about being American is it's sort of like being left handed. We're the idiots who stayed with imperial measurements and fahrenheit, so like a left-hander in a right handed world, I've gotten used to rapidly recalculating when I'm talking to someone who was handicapped enough to use metric only.

    In another forum someone I know from Saskatchewan suggested we come visit him when it's -40 degrees. I innocently inquired whether that was degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Celsius?

    Some humor impaired "sexual intellectual" just had to explain that it didn't matter because they're the same temperature.

    FWIW ... ((°F-32)x(5/9))=°C ... (-40 °F - 32)*(5/9)=(-72)*(0.5556) = -40.0032 °C ... in case you never thought about it before ...

    Ditto with the Eucs, erm, gum trees. To me, they're a fucking nuisance pushed by rich idiots who think they're pretty or trying to make money off them. Oh, and they're good for feeding the koalas at the local (San Diego) zoo, but otherwise a nuisance. But I watch enough nature documentaries that I don't think that Australia's overrun by weeds when I see eucalyptus forests there.

    Kudzu and Mimosa trees

    1270:

    Scott Sanford @ 872:

    I can see how finding oneself in Kentucky rather than England would be disconcerting. ;-)

    Every few years there's a news story about someone getting on the wrong plane and not discovering the problem until too late. The classic is confusing Austria and Australia. Some years back a fellow headed for Oakland California who got there with a side trip to Auckland New Zealand.

    Fictionally, I once needed a character's luggage delayed for story reasons so hauled out a list of airport codes; it was plausible that a busy sorter could confuse LHR (London Heathrow) with LAR (Laramie, Wyoming).

    I remember comic Alan King telling a story about flying from NYC to LAX to host an awards show and his luggage didn't get removed from the plane. He said something about his tuxedo having a fine two-week vacation in Hawaii.

    1271:

    Sure... but it's sort of hard to sneak up on a spaceship in flight, so, like a sailing ship, the officers can unlock the weapons before the pirates try to board. Unless, of course, it's a civilian merchantman (let's just hope there's bheer in the hold the pirates don't hole....)

    Frangible ammunition... but if you're in a hard suit, aren't you a hard object, that the ammunition will fragment when it hits?

    Beam weapons might be safer. Alternatively... wait for it, you know it's coming... I draw my sabre, and have at ye, ruffian!

    1272:

    Er, he did get shot on the Western Front, two or three times, just not properly (and when Henry Tandy did get the chance to do it properly, he neshed out). Then he missed the final stage of the war due to being gassed. Loads of chances, but none of them came off...

    In 1913, though, what I would see as an obvious course of action would be to pop some neonicotinoids in Apis's slivovitz.

    1273:

    Scott Sanford @ 930:

    Also, even for Canadians, mistaking St. John (New Brunswick) and St. John's (Newfoundland and Labrador) happens enough that it doesn't even make the news.

    My city has neighborhoods of St. John's and John's Landing, conveniently on opposite sides of the city. Hillsdale and Hillsboro are ten miles apart but at least on the same side of the city.

    I don't think "Hillsdale" - "Hillsboro" would be that much of a problem, OTOH, "Hillsboro" and "Hillsborough" might be.

    But I'm pretty sure Canadians win the limited name pool re-use contest.

    I looked it up one time, and I'm pretty sure there is at least one city/town/community named "Paris" in each of the 48 contiguous states.

    1274:

    "Let's try it this way: I am aware of no proof that negative time exists (we keep finding the arrow of time invariant, if I'm saying this correctly), any more than negative space exists."

    What proof, or evidence, is there that either time or space is not an absolute value, rather than signed?

    I don't understand what you're saying. Coordinates are signed. For example, you could by convention label "North" as positive, "South" as negative. A position of "+2 meters" is then two meters north of your current position, and "-2 meters" is 2 meters south of your current position. Similarly "+2 seconds" is the conventional notation for something 2 seconds after the origin, and "-2 seconds" is 2 seconds before the origin, whatever origin you've selected. (E.g. spacecraft flight logs would show negative times before liftoff and positive times after liftoff.) If you do a spacetime calculation using the spacecraft liftoff as the origin, and the result shows that the spacecraft returns at "+3600 seconds, -1000 meters", then it landed 1000 meters south of its liftoff point an hour after liftoff. Similarly if the calculation shows it returns at "-3600 seconds" then it returns an hour before it took off, which would lead to a paradox.

    Why do you refuse to consider the Lorentz transformatios with v > c as being an actual rotation in dimension?

    I don't think the Lorentz transformation is defined when v > c, since you get imaginary numbers as results. I certainly don't want to try to deal with any such transformation myself. In all of my examples I only apply the transformation to observers who are moving slower than light. I've probably communicated this poorly, but my issue is that slower than light observers who send each other faster than light messages can send messages backwards in time to themselves.

    Unless there's an absolute space and time that all FTL is relative to. That seems to be the position that you're taking, and that's fine, it's consistent. It's just not what relativity says. Galilean Relativity says that there's no absolute velocity, only relative velocity. Einstein modified this to add one absolute velocity (the speed of light), and that implies that both space and time are relative. So far experiments seem to bear this out, but there's a lot we don't know about the world.

    1275:

    Dave P @ 962: @956: So I'm sitting here in the DC area looking at retiring probably at the end of 2021, and climate change is definitely impacting my decision making process on where to retire.

    The spouse and I are both from west of the Mississippi (she from Kansas, and I from El Paso, TX), and unlikely to want to settle in the eastern half of the U.S. I'd love to retire to the Austin that existed when I went to college, but that place no longer exists; plus, climate change over the next 20-30 years (I hope to make it that long) will make Texas even toastier than it is now.

    And worse in the winters because there's nothing to block the wind anywhere between Canada's arctic circle and Ft. Hood, TX.

    1276:

    If you're fighting in freefall, I'm not sure how well a sword would work, especially against armor. If you're not braced, you may scratch the target as you knock yourself backwards, and getting the blade properly aligned to cut would be tricky.

    Powered rotating or reciprocating blades might be more effective, as might be powered shears...Yes, powered combat armor for fighting inside spaceships might look a bit like a crab, with power tools hanging off a really tough shield, and presumably the gun barrels would be in the middle.

    For clashes with impact weapons in freefall, something along the lines of a blackjack/slungshot/cosh or nunchaku might be more useful. The lack of a solid rod connecting you to the impact might conceivably make it simpler. You swing the weapon (basically a weight on the end of a rope or chain), it connects, and the impactor transfers a lot of momentum into the target in hopefully a debilitating way. It then rebounds on its own until it hits the end of the rope (or just stays still if it's soft, like a cosh), so you can stay where you are rather than being thrown backwards by the impact.

    Anyway, repelling borders with a warpship or a wormhole ship is only likely to happen near planets or in port/on the ground, because there appears to be no way to approach them when they are in warp or down the 'hole. When the ships are in flight in normal space, they're typically moving in the many kilometers per second speed range relative to things around them. Boarding at these speeds is something we normally see with docking spaceships, and it appears to be hard enough to do with cooperating craft like the ISS,* let alone ones that are actively trying to defend themselves by, oh, randomly firing the maneuver engines.

    This gets back to the whole question of how a space force fights war in space. It appears that, once you've analyzed the potential fights can take place, hybrid warfare that uses information war and psychological ops against the ship and its crew may be the most impactful tactic, with physical confrontation between ships coming in second, and physical confrontation within ships a distant third. Or that might just be my 21st Century bias about the nature of warfare kicking in. And I'm not a trained analyst, just someone creating worlds for space opera.

    *Yeah, it appears that the US and China may be engaged in building unmanned spaceships that can latch onto and parasitize enemy satellites without anyone noticing. Whether these stealth attacks will lead in the future to effective boarding tactics I really don't know. But I still suspect that, if you're boarding an enemy ship while under fire, you're probably going to be either behind or within something that looks like a mechanized crab crossed with a mobile bunker. And the fairly effective defense against boarding might be as simple as blowing the corridors full of foam to trap the invaders inside or tangling them with concertina wire and similar goodies. Shooting your own ship full of holes might not be all that effective.

    1277:

    "Alice will record a different number of elapsed seconds between her departure and arrival than will Bob who stayed on Earth. This is the twin "paradox"."

    "Paradox" because Alice ends up younger than Bob even though they're twins. So far, so good. That's a little weird, but by no means excessively so; after all it's not a lot different from the result of both of them staying on Earth but Bob does loads of whiz and Alice doesn't.

    Where I get "paradox" out of it is that if Everything Is Relative then there's no reason other than planet-bound convention to regard Bob as staying still and Alice as moving. You could equally well look at it as Alice's spaceship stays where it is while the Solar System zooms off somewhere at nearly c. ("But solar systems don't do that." "MAGIC ALIENS DID IT.") And looking at it that way you should end up with Bob being younger than Alice.

    So if either viewpoint is equally valid then you end up with Alice and Bob being younger than each other, and that is a proper paradox.

    I've only ever seen one attempt to address this and it was just a feeble handwave of "oh it's the acceleration" which magically makes it only come out one way round. But if Alice's spaceship does its near-c stuff by constantly accelerating at 1g (and turning end for end at the appropriate points) while Bob remains on Earth's surface, and gravity and acceleration are equivalent, then they're both experiencing 1g throughout the experiment and the handwave no longer works.

    1278:

    Minus 40 is an old classic, like the left handed screwdriver.

    1279:

    "Whatever happened to the idea of sub-orbital "antipodes" rockets?"

    Plenty of them around but it's a bit hard to catch a ride on one; you have to do something like disguise yourself as a nuke and put ants in Trump's pants.

    1280:

    You really have a blind spot the size of a billboard.

    If we talk about FTL, and, as you admit, the Lorentz transforms DO NOT APPLY where v > c, then how can you even begin to argue about why FTL leads to causality violation? And, by the bye, the numbers that come out of the transforms are not negative, they're imaginary.

    Next, you keep arguing, even if you don't appear to realize it, that GR and SR apply outside the light cone. I, and others, have talked about hyper/sub space... and you are arguing that relativity convers that, too, to force the backwards-in-time interpretation you're asserting.

    1281:

    &gt Alice will record a different number of elapsed seconds between her departure and arrival than will Bob who stayed on Earth. This is the twin "paradox"."

    Where I get "paradox" out of it is that if Everything Is Relative then there's no reason other than planet-bound convention to regard Bob as staying still and Alice as moving. You could equally well look at it as Alice's spaceship stays where it is while the Solar System zooms off somewhere at nearly c... And looking at it that way you should end up with Bob being younger than Alice.

    Yeah, that's a very good question. The resolution of it is that Alice is in two different reference frames: on the outbound part of her journey she has velocity +v, and on the inbound part of her journey she has velocity -v (relative to Earth). Any third observer Charlie will agree on this (Alice changed velocity at some point in her journey, Bob did not). Even if there isn't a third party, in order to change reference frames Alice has to apply a force, which she will feel, and her journey is distinguished by this from Bob's.

    1282:

    Fine, be that way! :P

    Kudzu is edible (which is why it ended up in the US in the first place. Like Eucs and Ailanthus, someone heard these were miracle plants, and the rest is history misery). Since kudzu appears to do better under climate change, I'd suggest that for survivalists, cultivating acres of kudzu around your underground SHTF lair is a way to stay concealed and provide yourself with some food at the same time. Hope you like the taste. Note that kudzu was widely eaten by early people in the Pacific, and generally abandoned after better foods became available. So using it may require both creativity and lack of better alternatives.

    Mimosa seeds are allegedly edible too, actually, although they may be toxic as well. So kudzu twining up the mimosa trees around your underground climate catastrophe bunker is just the right touch.

    1283:

    @1240 - As the common saying in IT security circles goes "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you."

    Who told you that? Do you trust them? Why?

    1284:

    America’s Got Technobabble

    The contestants: A bunch of would be SF writers. The judges(1):
    - A tenured professor of theoretical physics - A SFWA member - A semi-literate entertainment celebrity. The goal: Convince them your proposed FTL system makes sense.

    (1) Plus as many as possible of the following: One of the judges was closely involved in a well-regarded hard-SF movie or TV series. One of the judges is widely loathed for helping “kill Pluto.” One of the judges has a personal line of new-age “health care” products. One of the judges is an anti-vaxxer. One of the judges has been the target of a “#metoo” campaign. One of the judges has an unusual religion that they won’t stop talking about.

    1285:

    Referring back to “ So slide rules vs computers. I'd say the SR-71 did OK. Plus Concorde was near max speed. SR-71 not so much.”

    Having actually worked with some of the folks that designed Concorde I’m fairly confident that use of computers was rather low, bordering on none.

    They’re different fish. One was designed to carry one or two military personnel and some surveillance equipment or a couple of missiles as fast as could be managed at the time, and to hell with comfort, convenience, cost and fuel. The other carried 100 paying customers on routine scheduled flights, at the same kind of speeds, to and from normal airports with no special equipment at each end nor inflight refueling . It could also carry more ordnance, at least in theory.

    If I need to send a platoon of 21SAS or other Special Circumstances units somewhere fast I know which I’d prefer to have on hand.

    1286:

    EE "Doc" Smith has addressed fighting in zero-g pretty thoroughly - both with and without inertia. Since space armour has screens which increase in resistance with the cube of the velocity of the thing hitting it, neither projectile guns nor blasters are any use, so they use axes in hand to hand combat. Improvised maces appear once or twice as well.

    The idea of concentrating on preventing the pirates docking and coming in through the airlock is a space-based example of a classic security error - that of failing to realise that criminals don't share your concern over damage to your stuff. What you do if you're a pirate is shoot out the victim's masts and rigging power plant and other vital installations, then grapple and board! Grab the victim with tractor beams (or magnets), blow a hole in the side and storm aboard.

    1287:

    Whatever happened to the idea of sub-orbital "antipodes" rockets?

    I took a whack at that canard on the blog a few years ago.

    Leaving aside that a sub-orbital rocket makes a single passenger bizjet look like a Prius in terms of carbon emissions -- the problem is you can't fly city centre to city centre. A ballistic rocket is basically an ICBM by any other name, and even without a nuclear payload it's kind of alarming to have one in your airspace.

    (Witness the Pentagon pushing for a derivative of the UGM-133 Trident II that has a non-nuclear warhead: an object coming in at orbital velocity has kinetic energy about ten times greater than an equivalent mass of TNT, so a non-nuclear Trident has about the same punch as a B-52's bomb load.)

    So you have the same problem of travel from billionaire's mansion to launch pad and back again at the other end that you have with airliners. And then you have the problem that you can't really fly them on demand -- you need a published schedule to ensure nobody's military freaks out at the sight of a possible ICBM launch, that there are no low orbit satellites in the way, and so on.

    Upshot: it probably doesn't save you enough hours of flight time to be worthwhile compared to a Gulfstream G650, when you factor in the multi-hour boarding/de-boarding and wait for the flight permissions.

    Caveat: there is one organization who I can see wanting such a capability -- a certain deep pocket organization that has lots of exotic equipment and likes to be able to reach out and touch (or kill) anywhere on the planet at the drop of a hat. But that's not a civilian application.

    1288:

    "Alice has to apply a force, which she will feel, and her journey is distinguished by this from Bob's."

    See my final paragraph. It's entirely possible to have them both feel a constant 1g throughout the experiment.

    1289:

    You really have a blind spot the size of a billboard. Perhaps we both do... I guess everyone has them :). It's an interesting discussion though and I know I've learned from it. I hope others have too.

    If we talk about FTL, and, as you admit, the Lorentz transforms DO NOT APPLY where v > c, then how can you even begin to argue about why FTL leads to causality violation?

    Because I never try to discuss an FTL observer? Please look at what I said carefully, and/or read the Wikipedia article. (Bear in mind that the article has the word "Tachyon" in the title, but the math is exactly the same for any form of FTL communication.)

    Alice never travels faster than light. She gives the message to someone who does, or sends it via ansible, or whatever, but the whole time she is traveling slower than light at a constant velocity. Bob's in the same boat. Since neither observer ever exceeds the speed of light, then (if relativity is true!) we can apply ordinary relativistic transformations to analyze what they observe. Alice observe's Bob's reply to arrive before she sent her original message.

    Next, you keep arguing, even if you don't appear to realize it, that GR and SR apply outside the light cone. I, and others, have talked about hyper/sub space... and you are arguing that relativity convers that, too, to force the backwards-in-time interpretation you're asserting.

    No, I've assumed that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in our universe, for all observers moving at constant relative velocity. That includes observers who interact with FTL devices.

    That is an assumption, and it leaves an escape hatch that you probably already took without realizing it. If all FTL communication happens in a specific frame of reference, then the laws of physics are no longer the same for all observers in our universe. Bob may be able to send subspace messages at 100c, but Alice may only be able to send them at 2c. Paradox is avoided: there's no way to send a message backwards in time to yourself.

    There are still some pretty weird observational results. For example, the speed of the FTL message sent by a moving observer ("moving" relative to the preferred FTL frame) will depend on its direction, and in some directions it'll be backwards in time. But there's no way to create a loop.

    (And as Elderly Cynic noted, I've also assumed that Bob can reply to Alice. If there's some mechanism that prevents this, there may also be an escape... but I'm still not sure what the exact parameters of such a restriction would have to be.)

    1290:

    "Alice has to apply a force, which she will feel, and her journey is distinguished by this from Bob's."

    See my final paragraph. It's entirely possible to have them both feel a constant 1g throughout the experiment.

    I think you'll find it is not possible. If Alice experiences a constant 1g then she can never turn around. If she does turn around, then at some point she necessarily experiences a different acceleration. Hmmm, I suppose you could rotate the rocket in flight... but then she'll be exposed to the forces needed to change her angular momentum. Any way you cut it, Alice's experience has to be different in some way from Bob's.

    Note that those forces aren't what cause the difference in time dilation -- the force needed to turn a rocket around is trivial compared to the years of travel. But they do clearly indicate that Alice changes reference frames, and that's the key to why she experiences time differently than Bob does.

    If you construct a truly symmetric experiment, e.g. send both Bob and Alice on rockets in opposite directions, that all observers can agree is symmetric, then they will age the same.

    1291:

    The problem is that you're using the model of a sailing ship the starship, and I agree that going through defenses in an unexpected direction is one simple solution.

    The problem is that starships, especially ones that spend time in interplanetary space or interstellar space, may well be more like a submarine, where cutting your way through the hull is time consuming at best and impossible at worse. Doing it while the ship is underway without destroying the valuable contents of the ship is more difficult than it appears.

    Obviously there's a lot of handwaving here. For example, does your starship use something like a Whipple shield for anti-meteoroid defense? If so, that's pretty easy to cut through. It protects at ultra-high velocities, not low ones.

    Conversely, if your warpship hull is silicon carbide 3-D printed around a titanium skeleton, the better to endure the high temperatures inside a warp bubble, and the crew compartment is isolated well inside in a dewar vessel arrangement (using vacuum to insulate between the extremely hot outer hull and the STP crew compartment), then cutting your way in is going to be difficult. The latter is the design I've been developing for a warp ship in a space opera, and it's primarily about dealing with heat buildup inside a warp bubble, not anti-piracy defense. But the former provides the latter as a bonus.

    Also, with most starships, the power plant and drive are most of the ship. If these are physically isolated from the crew compartment (as with the warp nacelles in Star Trek) then it's fairly easy to cripple the ship by cutting the connecting structures. If they're in the center of the ship, as in a submarine or the carbide firebird I mentioned above, then crippling the drive and power plant is the same thing as destroying the ship.

    So yes, I'd definitely harden the airlock. The rest depends on the design of your ship.

    1292:

    It's still, nope. Let's say I'm Norton, and listening via ansible to both Alice and Ralph, er, Bob. Alice sends the ftl message, and Bob receives it, when she sends it or after (depending on the FTL method). I see no way around that. Even if one of them is moving close to c, then the resutl is that they think they sent it, or received it sooner... but not before it was sent.

    1293:

    "we keep finding the arrow of time invariant, if I'm saying this correctly"

    AFAIK the arrow of time is a statistical artefact. If you look at individual particle interactions they are equally valid either way round so you can't tell whether the video is playing forwards or backwards. But when you look at loads of interactions together it's easy to tell because buildings fall down and bombs blow up, they don't spontaneously coalesce out of a cloud of smoke. Although, in theory, they could, it's just really really really unlikely.

    It is of course a statistical artefact that you can't get away from, notorious for the amount of futile effort expended on attempts, but it isn't a proof that time can't go backwards. If it started going backwards now, of course all sorts of incredibly unlikely but not actually completely impossible things would happen; but if it had been going backwards all along, we'd just see all the same things happening that we do with it going forwards and we'd not be able to tell the difference.

    1294:

    with most starships, the power plant and drive are most of the ship.

    Not to mention that without them the ship isn't useful or valuable. Unless you somehow finangle a commodity worth trading across interstellar space the main value of a starship will be the ship and its (live) passengers. Plus most power plants have at least the ability to explode, and high peak output plants are often a barely controlled explosion by design. Or they're an orion ship and actually are an explosion by design.

    So the two approaches "blow up the power plant" (ie, the whole ship) and "blow a hole in the ship" (kill all the passengers) are generally contraindicated for pirates.

    1295:

    Yes, that's why the information warfare and psyops approaches are more likely to be effective in space war. These attacks can be as simple as corrupting crew members to mutiny, to as complex as using FTL time travel to change who owns the spaceship and cargo while the ship is in flight.

    Given the way offshore finance has evolved in the last 50 years, I'd actually expect the latter types of attacks from pirates, rather than physical boarding. If memory serves, something similar was done recently in Crazy Rich Asians, where a super-rich Asian family who had their hotel reservation cancelled by a racist manager bought the hotel over the phone and dealt with the manager.

    1296:

    EE "Doc" Smith has addressed fighting in zero-g pretty thoroughly - both with and without inertia. Ah yes: A Valerian trooper without his space-axe? Unthinkable! A dire weapon indeed, the space-axe. A combination and sublimation of battle-axe, mace, bludgeon, and lumberman's picaroon; thirty pounds of hard, tough, space-tempered alloy; a weapon of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder. And vanBuskirk's Valerians had both--plenty of both. One-handed, with simple flicks of his incredible wrist, the smallest Valerian of the Dauntless' boarding party could manipulate his atrocious weapon as effortlessly as, and almost unbelievably faster than, a fencing master handles his rapier or an orchestra conductor waves his baton. (A google search for the quoted text will find a gutenberg.ca link to Second Stage Lensmen. NAFTA2 (DJT's "USMCA" - USA First!) may be an issue shortly in Canada; currently 50 years after death of author; NAFTA2 extends it to 70. And yes, I have a tattered hardcopy.) If you download it, be sure to search on "half a million Lensed members".

    1297:

    It's still, nope. Let's say I'm Norton, and listening via ansible to both Alice and Ralph, er, Bob. Alice sends the ftl message, and Bob receives it, when she sends it or after (depending on the FTL method). I see no way around that. Even if one of them is moving close to c, then the resutl is that they think they sent it, or received it sooner... but not before it was sent.

    The only way to guarantee that is to define an "ansible time" that's independent of Alice, Bob, and Norton's velocities. Which you can do... but it means that the physical laws governing the ansible will be different for Alice, Bob, and Norton (e.g. they all record ansible messages as traveling at different speeds). That means that by definition relativity isn't true, at least for the laws that apply to ansibles. Maybe that's not a big deal, but you've given up the "Relativity" part of "Relativity, FTL, Causation: pick two".

    In the "ansible time" case, some moving observers will record ansible messages going backwards in time: there's no way to avoid that. But they have no way to use this to cause a paradox, so it's not really a problem.

    I'm not sure which of Bob and Alice will see messages going backwards in time and which will see them going forwards, because their situations are no longer symmetric. In the original relativistic formulation we just said that they were "moving apart". If there's a universal "ansible time" then that defines absolute velocities, so to calculate what Bob and Alice see we would need to specify their absolute velocities with respect to ansible time.

    1298:

    EE "Doc" Smith has addressed fighting in zero-g pretty thoroughly - both with and without inertia. Since space armour has screens which increase in resistance with the cube of the velocity of the thing hitting it, neither projectile guns nor blasters are any use, so they use axes in hand to hand combat. Improvised maces appear once or twice as well.

    Looking around, the closest thing I found to freefall fighting in reality was this youtube clip of 2 MMA fighters going at it while skydiving, with a referee.

    This is probably sensible, as I'm not sure any LARPers want to jump out of planes carrying even foam battleaxes, let alone space-flails, to see how those work in freefall. What if they actually caused damage?

    1299:

    I have heard the same but have not seen a proper reverse engineering of firmware/binaries. (Probably personal ignorance.[1]) There are plenty of disturbing hints, but the whole matter/area is swirling with agendas (nation-state, commercial, investor) and misinformation.

    When the firmware for a Samsung SSD with a SATA interface has 380meg of code space just how DO you audit it?

    1300:

    Yes, very much the sailing ship model. It's what Doc Smith uses (to the point where the US Navy cribbed his model for a command and control system), and I find it kind of inescapably appealing myself, irresistibly so when pirates come into it. It's including the point that the pirates are more likely than not to sink the victim when they've got what they want.

    His spaceships are very much like a submarine both in construction and in internal layout, though mostly spherical rather than cylindrical. The main difference is that outside the hull there are successive layers of force-field screen. The principal weapons are not giant-arse lasers but do act like them, and warship screens are strong enough that applying enough energy to puncture them even at a point will instantly vaporise the ship inside the moment you get through, but civilian screens basically can only stop hydrogen atoms, natural radiation and things up to very small rocks, with what incidental weapon resistance you get along with that. It follows that military class weapons can easily spear a civilian vessel through the bridge, or the reactor room - to be sure it makes a horrendous mess, but the attackers don't care - or cut access holes in the hull.

    A long time ago I remember playing around with ideas about warp bubbles and shielding against internal heat accumulation. I can't remember if the warp mechanism didn't cause a Hawking radiation problem or if it did but I overlooked it, but it did have the problem of being a smallish sphere that was perfectly reflecting on the inside with the ship at the focus. I think the way I got round it was to add a radial element to the warp, so that space was normal at the centre but got more and more compacted as you approached the boundary, thus photons radiated from the ship would from the ship's point of view never reach the boundary to be reflected before it was time to turn the warp off (which you had to do every so often to get a navigational fix).

    1301:

    I remember comic Alan King telling a story about flying from NYC to LAX to host an awards show and his luggage didn't get removed from the plane. He said something about his tuxedo having a fine two-week vacation in Hawaii.

    There are true stories about big names not removing tags from previous trips and having their luggage go to the wrong continent with the expensive duds needed for the big awards shows.

    1302:

    Huh, another thing I just realized about "ansible time": in the preferred reference frame of the ansible, the messages must be instantaneous. That's because by definition the events "sent a message" and "received a message" are spacelike, not connected by STL. And in relativity any spacelike events have a reference frame in which they are simultaneous. That would be the "preferred" one, obviously.

    (Note that this doesn't imply that the messages are instantaneous in Earth's reference frame!)

    1303:

    closest thing I found to freefall fighting in reality Any time one is not touching the ground (e.g. in a leap) one is in free fall (at least for a second in air), ballistic, and one's center of gravity's motion is entirely predictable. The body (including limbs) can however be reconfigured when in motion so that the center of gravity moves relative to the center of the body. Hard blows are possible if countered by balancing hard counter motions. Ballistic motions usually suboptimal though.

    1304:

    Having actually worked with some of the folks that designed Concorde I’m fairly confident that use of computers was rather low, bordering on none.

    Based on the dates I suspect the Concorde folks did a lot of batch number crunching just because they could. Online real time CAD. Nope.

    The SR-71 folks didn't even have that option. They had slide rules, banks of adding machines, and a collection of Schaum's at engineers' desks.

    The Concord folks did also but they had ACCESS to batch card systems.

    1305:

    you need a published schedule to ensure nobody's military freaks out at the sight of a possible ICBM launch, that there are no low orbit satellites in the way, and so on.

    And you need countries that trust that it is what they say it is. Or that some rouge employee will not just go nuts and land it a mile or few away from the intended spot on top of something no one wants to be demolished. Well no one in the landing country/city.

    1306:

    Believe it or not, I actually did read my parents' E.E. Smith collection when I was far too young to appreciate all the, erm, subtleties.

    As for the problem of heat in a warp bubble, I like your take.

    Mine is two-fold: --In whatever approaches real life for a space warp, I'm guessing that Hawking radiation is a real problem, because there's an analysis out there that says it is.
    --In the space operatic story I'm developing, I'm ignoring the problem of Hawking radiation (has it actually been observed yet?) and going with the problem of waste heat in an enclosed space. Though massive ignorance and handwaving, this heat buildup does not rapidly melt the ship, but it does get the outer hull to well over 1000oC over the course of 24 hours.

    Thus the starship has to pop out of warp every day or so to cool down, because even carbide melts if it gets hot enough. There's a lot the ship can do while in ordinary space (delta vee to match its target system, laundry, cooking). The need to cool down regularly has some beneficial side-effects, like limiting the range and speed of the ship, which also limit its potential to induce paradoxes. With limits to potential paradoxes, I think it's worth ignoring them, possibly with an appeal to the many worlds theory of "Paradox and you're not coming back even if you do survive" style training.

    1307:

    Thanks Bill. For those who can't visualize it, google "Boarding Axe" or "Fire Axe" and add 25 pounds of attitude and magic metal alloy.

    The closest thing available to terrestrial civilians is The fubar, which honestly isn't a weapon. Honestly.

    1308:

    Is there a way to get in touch with out about some development issues/questions?

    Sorry I didn't see this earlier. Respond to a post on my blog site and give me your email address there (as well as any other information). I'll get back to you.

    1309:

    A ballistic missile warhead will not reach ground at anything like orbital velocity even if it was powered all the way down, thanks to air resistance. ICBMs don't ever reach orbital velocity anyway in an attack profile, they go up quite fast, accelerating for several minutes at multiple gees and their warheads come down a bit slower, bleeding off precious velocity thanks to air resistance.

    The "Rods From God" Brilliant Pebbles concept was just that, a concept. No-one ever tried to deliver tungsten spears to a ground target at Mach 20 because even tungsten would melt punching through several kilometres of thick air.

    1310:

    Re: 'If it [time] started going backwards now, of course all sorts of incredibly unlikely but not actually completely impossible things would happen; ...'

    What happens to 'chaos' in an FTL/time-travel-is-possible universe?

    1311:

    They're actually pretty shit weapons on account of being ridiculously heavy or ridiculously short, and even then they tend to break in the middle if not used carefully. The "mini" ones that are the length of a dagger weigh a kilo.

    The main problem is that unless you make your bar out of unobtainium it's a metre-long length of heavy stuff the whole way along, so you need to attach a 150kg gorilla to one end of it for it to be a weapon. If you only have a human you somehow need to keep it about a metre long while getting the weight down to 2kg tops.

    But if you're attacking a target that can't block or get out of the way why do you need a big heavy weapon rather than a stiletto? I'm betting that most of the hand to hand combat weapons for free-fall will be more like daggers or claws, and may end up being armour with retractable spikes controlled by whatever electronic interface people normally use. Those would be useful in general, so you'd have wearers habituated to them, but in combat they'd act like instant road rash for unprotected surfaces.

    1312:

    This might be another item folks might want to pick apart - another new energy source. The write-up seems fairly detailed for a research article press release. The paper itself is pay-walled [Nature].

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200217112730.htm

    'New green technology generates electricity 'out of thin air' Renewable device could help mitigate climate change, power medical devices

    Date: February 17, 2020 Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst Summary: Electrical engineers and microbiologists have created a device they call an 'Air-gen.' or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.'

    1313:

    Nanowires! Are they like nanotubes? That's a golden oldie in Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast Buzzword Bingo, guaranteed to complete at least one line and maybe a diagonal too.

    1314:

    electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere. {2 paragraphs later} It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert.

    O rly.

    protein nanowires adsorbed water, producing a voltage gradient across the device

    That's great. But it sounds as though the energy output comes from the change in humidity/change in water concentration. That seems to be the only "change" related to output of energy mentioned.

    They also seem to be in the nanowatts to microwatts range, so we're a long way from the megawatts to gigawatts range that would be useful in the Sahara Desert. And if it really is change in humidity that powers the thing it's going to be interesting finding places to put them, especially if they like the dry end of the humidity scale. Coastal fringe of deserts may turn out to be the optimal location.

    1315:

    Attended a talk by (one of the authors) Derek Lovley a few years ago. It is really interesting work, and it and related work have been ongoing for 15-20 years.

    1316:

    Geobacter is one of those interesting bacteria that people have been playing with for awhile. The "nanowires" are bacterial structures called pili that occur in some species.

    Their electrical oddities have been known for some time, and they've been looked at in the context of breaking down toxic metals in soils through electrochemistry.

    You can play with simpler versions of this generator for fairly cheap. There's an educational version available that generates electricity.

    Can the system scale up enough to be useful? I have no clue. The setup in the paper does 0.5 volts per film (7 micrometers thick) and has a current density of 17 microamps/cm2. Fiddling around with my calculator, that means you could get about 750 milliamps out of a stack a centimeter in area and bit over 3 cm long, and a AAA battery is 4.5 cm long and holds 750 milliamp-hours. Except that this is a generator instead of a battery.

    Note that they're harvesting hairs from a bacterium, not using live bacteria, so manufacturing is required. If they can scale up the manufacturing this actually isn't stupid. As is usual with these things, that's the huge IF that prevents most cool discoveries from becoming marketable products. But we can hope.

    1317:

    Wow, I would never have guessed any of that from the linked article.

    1318:

    I think the point of using heavy weapons is that the inertia helps them go through armor. For example, if your interplanetary spacesuit has whipple shielding to stop micrometeroids, a big slow axe will go right through it. The axe isn't so useful for kevlar.

    Now about fighting in drop...drop is Daniel Keys Moran's in-story slang for freefall.

    Anyway, if, for some ungodly reason you want a unique type of melee weapon for freefall (why?), well, I've got an idea for you: weaponized scissors and shears, with sharp points and sharp outer edges, so that they can cut when closed, shear when open, and stab either way. The point of using scissors is that the blades cutting against each other helps solve the problem of hitting someone with a weapon and bouncing yourself off because you don't have gravity holding you to the floor.

    Now, for the (c)onanesque orbital brawler, I'd suggest something sword-like. Weaponized hedge shears, for example. Long handled sword when closed, limb lopper when open, stabby either way.

    And I guess we call the hirsute psychopaths who want to carry murder cutlery in space (wait for it) drop bears?

    1319:

    I think you're conflating two different kinds of paradox. A Paradox of the First Kind would involve something like you've discussed above; two legitimate scientific methods of research each giving fundamentally different results.

    A Paradox of the Second Kind would involve the kinds of things you'd expect to get with FTL; that is, somewhere between here and Alpha Centauri time has stopped working properly because Alice arrived with a message from Bob before Bob left for Alpha Centauri. This is not two pieces of contradictory knowledge, but a fundamental breakdown in the mechanics of the Universe in which time is no longer working correctly!

    The results of a Paradox of the First Kind are a scientific argument. The results of a Paradox of the Second Kind are probably rather less pleasant - local breakdowns in cause and effect are probably difficult to endure - and you will be left wondering exactly how much "give" the universe has in it when time stops working properly (at least on a local basis!) Can the rest of the Universe just carry on, like an engine with a bad spark plug, or does the problem result in a tear in spacetime or something equally unpleasant?

    1320:

    You mean, "I've got an offer for you that you can't refuse?" is the same thing as spacetime breaking?

    The situation described is very unpleasant, especially if Bob knows that he's in a many-worlds universe, so he knows that the only way he gets to go home to the family he left (and Alice to hers) is if he does everything precisely as she said he is supposed to do. Hopefully she took decent notes.

    I do get your point, but I'm a bit unclear that this is what spacetime breaking looks like. So far as I know, that kind of breakage is a black hole.

    1321:

    James Schmitz got into it a little in some of his Vegan Confederation stories, where pirates would take some people as slaves and kill the rest (though there were other survivors as needed for story).

    1322:

    I've read a bunch of stories where ships can't go into warp (or whatever you want to call it) within a certain distance of a major mass. So they have to spend several days to get to the outer parts of a solar system before they can jump, and they may also have to come out for navigational purposes (or, if it's an established route, more fuel).

    1323:

    News to me, Randall Munroe (xkcd) has been doing occasional NY Times pieces, with drawings. (Seems to not be paywalled.) What’s the World’s Worst Smell? - Some odors are more heinous than others. Then there’s Stench Soup. (Randall Munroe, Feb. 17, 2020) (via) Nothing exotic. (Mercaptans used for scening natural gas/propane have monkey-wrench potential, just saying. Not mentioning H2S incidents as a kid that would have gotten me jailed post-2001/09/11.) The worst smell to me (nausea-inducing) is rotting flesh, or its floral scent mimics, such as Smilax herbacea (Smooth Carrion Flower). (Have never tried to train it away.)

    1324:

    One of the things I've been thinking about is the idea that relativity is evidence that we live in a simulation, maybe even in a game. If you were building a virtual universe inside a computer, you'd make sure there was a top-speed for motion that well-within the range of your processor (and your "video card" if those matter in this situation) because naturally you don't want to break the simulation. Then you'd do stuff to discourage people from going faster than that top speed, like make them get bigger the faster they went and introduce timing errors as they approached the speed limit...

    If one of the simulated people got into the physics engine and hacked the location of a spaceship from x,y to a,b you'd do something to make sure all the simulated people knew about it, and a temporal violation is probably pretty obvious, particularly if it produces interesting "special effects." Then, just to make sure that the simulated people can't break the simulated universe, you make sure that this is not governed by hard-coded rules, but by some kind of quantum probability which makes sure your universe has some flexibility...

    1325:

    My idea used the variant of that where trying to come out of warp too close to a major mass would cause your warp engine to shit itself, so the protagonist could get the measurements wrong trying to approach an uncharted extragalactic system and end up stranded there.

    As for paradoxes... the basic idea was that in trying to get home by pinching some alien wormhole technology that he didn't really understand and cocking it up, he would end up causing the very peculiarity that had motivated him to discover that system in the first place.

    1326:

    Ooh, two of my heroes, Randall Munroe and Derek Lowe. And Things I won't work with.

    Thanks!

    1327:

    I'm very much enjoying the relativity / FTL discussions ;-)

    A couple of comments.

    1) If I remember correctly my undergraduate physics, the simple cases described by the Lorentz-FitzGerald equations only apply to reference frames moving at a constant velocity vector. Under acceleration these conditions no longer apply and things start to get much more complicated. (Left as an exercise for the ambitious student.)

    2) If Bob is on Earth, then while he is experiencing a force due to gravity and his mass, he is not experiencing any acceleration unless he is in free fall. Under normal circumstances the force due to gravity on his body is balanced by the equal and opposite force of pressure on the soles of his feet and through his skeleton. (I'm ignoring centripetal force due to the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun as insignificant for this discussion.)

    Ok, enough stirring...

    1328:

    I vaguely recollect an old Usenet posting about someone who, as a high school graduation present to himself, bought a pint of butyl mercaptan in a very well-sealed bottle. He broke it down into a number of sealed glass ampoules in an old shed that was going to be razed anyway while wearing SCUBA gear and a wetsuit in lieu of professional protection gear. The future revenge possibilities of having something like that to hand...

    Butyl mercaptan is a natural contaminant of crude oil and needs to be removed during refining -- John D. Clark's memorable book "Ignition!" mentions it was tested as a possible rocket fuel back in the days when they were trying everything they could get their hands on -- the refineries would give it away for free to anyone that asked for it which was a bonus. It didn't work that well, it stank up the rocket testing grounds for months and the last barrels of the test material were dumped in San Francisco Bay one night when nobody was looking.

    1329:

    The only way to guarantee that is to define an "ansible time" that's independent of Alice, Bob, and Norton's velocities...

    ObSF: Blish's Cities in Flight series, in which the "Dirac communicator" was instantaneous across the observable universe. Characters didn't use it nearly as much as you'd imagine, because there was one channel. Instant communication not to anywhere but to everywhere, and literally everyone in the universe could listen in on it.

    1330:

    ertur Problem which I've only ever seen handwaved away: "the velocity of light is conbstant to all observers" OK - you are in an STL spacecraft tavelling at 0.95c ( Or even 0.99c ), moving away from a star, at what velocity are the photons from that star passing you, relative to your frame of motion? 0.05c? Err ... I don't think so.

    Oh yes, IIRC the expression: √(1 - v²/c²) is so common that it's expressed as β Though some texts use "Beta" = v/c - just to confuse matters!

    Bill Arnold IIRC the "NYT" limits the number of articles you can read - you MAY be able to get round it by using incognito windows & disabling Java & "no cookies" for that session - perhaps. Oh - Thioacetone/mercaptans ... euuwwww .

    darkblue Thank you - I'd forgotten that bit about non-accelerating frames And, of course, circular motion, by definition includes acceleration, doesn't it. Oh dear.

    1331:

    Because I never try to discuss an FTL observer? ... Alice never travels faster than light. She gives the message to someone who does, or sends it via ansible, or whatever ...

    The points were that Alice made observations from a reference frame moving very quickly relative to everything else and then reported her findings back to the first frame. If Alice's message travels faster than light, we don't care how fast her body is going.

    1332:

    Problem which I've only ever seen handwaved away: "the velocity of light is conbstant to all observers"

    OK - you are in an STL spacecraft tavelling at 0.95c ( Or even 0.99c ), moving away from a star, at what velocity are the photons from that star passing you, relative to your frame of motion?

    It's a fair question.

    Indeed, it's not only a fair question but it's a testable question - and has been tested here on Earth, using light from distant stars. Earth's radial velocity relative to Sol is basically zero; other stars can and usually do have significant radial velocities. The question is great; the answer is bizarre.

    These hypothetical relativistic scientists could hang their experimental gear out a porthole and check; light from the star behind them would be arriving at their detector at just under 300,000 km/s (299,792,458 meters per second, but I'm going to round off the number). A rational grad student would want to double check that, if only for calibration, so assume they aim the same equipment at the nearest lightbulb; photons from the stationary light in the same room also measure as moving 300,000 km/s. Better triple check that. Having checked their origin star already, let them check on their destination star, which they are currently approaching at some unreasonable speed; the photons from that star are also arriving at 300,000 km/s.

    This is, to put it charitably, counter-intuitive.

    As I put it earlier, the speed of light is not constant relative to any observer but constant to all observers. No, this doesn't make sense in the 'photons are tiny bullets of light' particle model. It doesn't make much more sense in the 'light is waves in the luminiferous aether' model either. Some things can't be easily understood and simply have to be noted as observed features of the universe, such as seven-figure salaries for sportsball players.

    It might help to read up on the Michelson-Morley experiment, or it might not.

    1333:

    SS I'm quite familiar with M-M, thank you.

    But the velocity of the planet, relative (or not) to the the Luminiferous Æther was very low, nowhere near even 0.01c. I trust you see the problem, as β was, to all intents & purposes One, when those measurements were taken, wasn't it?

    1334:

    A ballistic missile warhead will not reach ground at anything like orbital velocity even if it was powered all the way down, thanks to air resistance.

    Nevertheless, they deliver a hell of a punch: I'm trying to remember who it was I know who saw an MX MIRV test with dummy RVs; apparently the ground shook, a mile or two away from the target.

    As for ICBMs being sub-orbital ... you know about FOBS trajectories? (Fractional-orbital bombardment: the missile pops up into LEO then de-orbits over the target. Result is that instead of reaching an apogee a couple of thousand nautical miles up, it sticks very close to the surface -- less than 100nm up -- reducing the time it's visible on the horizon to radar.) That was allegedly within the performance envelope of the SS-18, and cause for much anxiety among ABM folks in the 80s and 90s. My understanding is that MX/Peacemaker was, and Trident D5 probably is, also capable of that. The new small Russian ICBM under roll-out is designed for it.

    1335:

    Wow, I would never have guessed any of that from the linked article.

    This is your regular scheduled reminder that biological systems can do really weird shit with electrochemistry; the Hunters Organ in an adult Electrophorus electricus (electric eel) can deliver 600 volt shocks 2-3 times an hour for a duration of a couple of milliseconds (I couldn't easily find a figure for the current discharge, but: enough to stun or kill an alligator).

    1336:

    I believe the Proton launcher is so big because it was originally designed as a fractional orbit bombardment ICBM. The concept was made obsolete by the appearence of satellites with infra-red detectors capable of detecting missile launches. (The Soviet early-detection system later nearly started a nuclear war when a satellite reported the detection of a dozen launches from USA)

    1337:
    These atrocities were known in real time, but ideology — largely, the same Cold War ideology that convinced some of the engineers to play along quietly — served to downplay them. The ideology that excuses much of our current spying, terrorism, likewise leads many to excuse Americans and allies overlooking atrocities by our allies (but that, too, is evident without proving they’re reading the SIGINT proving it).

    Hum. The plot of Robert Harris's Enigmna whith the Katyn forest replaced by fill in your atrocity here.

    1338:

    Greg Tingey@1333: I'm quite familiar with M-M, thank you.

    But the velocity of the planet, relative (or not) to the the Luminiferous Æther was very low, nowhere near even 0.01c. I trust you see the problem, as β was, to all intents & purposes One, when those measurements were taken, wasn't it?

    There have been more modern experiments, including experiments to test the one way speed of light. Two way tests (like M-M) aren't hard, because you can look for phase shifts in the returning light. One way is surprisingly difficult due to the difficulty of synchronizing distant clocks: even synchronizing them together and then carrying one to a new spot subjects it to time dilation, which we know from experiment happens. But so far the consensus seems to be that yes, the speed of a beam of light is always measured to be 1 regardless of the relative motion of the emitter and receiver.

    The speed of light isn't that high compared to the resolution of modern clocks. For example, in one tick of a 3 GHz microprocessor's clock light travels about 10cm. Engineers routinely have to take the speed of light into account in their designs, and so far nobody's noticed deviations in it.

    1339:
    The SR-71 folks didn't even have that option. They had slide rules, banks of adding machines, and a collection of Schaum's at engineers' desks.

    I don't understand why you think that. Work on what became the A12 started in 1957. The IBM 704 was available from 1954. Hell FORTRAN was released in 1957.

    1340:

    Work on Concorde designs began in the early 1950s; the RAE group (in the UK) tasked with researching a supersonic airliner first met in February 1954 and delivered a report in 1955; Sud Aviation came to the table in 1960, and everything ran into Politics (international treaties had to be hammered out before a joint Anglo-French airliner program could go forward). Which was signed in 1962, allowing the project to get properly underway -- and seven years for an airliner, with multiple contractors involved, isn't that bad, especially when you remember it was nearly three times faster than any of its predecessors.

    The A-10 "Oxcart" and its relatives were the product of a cost-no-object crash development program by a team with prior supersonic aircraft chops (Kelly Johnson's team were largely responsible for the F-104) and high altitude experience (the U-2). It didn't require two governments' worth of air ministry bureaucrats hammering out a joint requirement spec and then arguing over who was going to pay for it. Hence the faster development cycle.

    1341:

    And as a postscript: the collaborative agreement that gave rise to Concorde eventually grew into Airbus. So even though Concorde itself was a dead end, it came to dominate approximately half the planetary market for >100 seater airliners.

    1342:

    Re: Mudwatt generator - build-your-own

    Thanks for the link: what a great toy!

    Charlie mentioned how weird natural systems are. Wonder how folks here would have reacted to the idea of today's iPhone 40-50 years ago: all its innards (i.e., number, size and variety), everything it can do, all the range of attachments (physical and 'apps'), types and varieties of hybridization/cross-linkages, etc. (Or are smartphones becoming simpler these days: I don't know whether systems hit some sort of complexity plateau and then fall apart into simpler symbiotic components.)

    Maybe the FTL spaceship could be looked at similarly: accept that there are different levels/types of reality* (space, time, etc.) and then layer-up the solutions.

    • Identifying all the components of 'reality' is still a work-in-progress. Ditto how these fundamental components self-organize, e.g., quark arrangements.
    1343: 1259 - Time dilation is an observed phenomenon; what is not observed, or even theorised outside of high maths, is that this requires a situation where a message can be received before it is sent!

    Also, since "one second" is helpfully defined as an elemental frequency, saying "3 positions have different lengths of second" effectively says "elemental properties are variable".

    1264 - Hear hear!! I've been saying this (or variations on the words but not the underlying logic) for years. 1265 - Google for Emerald and/or Megasquirt Engine Management. 1267 - Have you decided to stop trying or something? It's pretty fundamental to mechanics (Newtonian, Einsteinian, Hawkingian etc) that speed is not the same thing as velocity EVER and yet you are playing fast and loose with the direction component of velocity to mke your logic come out. 1274 - Are you claiming to be smarter than Stephen Hawking? He is on record as saying "I think I may have found a hole in Einsteinian Relativity you can fly a warp drive starship through". I don't need to be very smart (fortunate that) to think that we need any countra statement to come from someone of equal standing!

    Oh and "I don't want to do the maths" is not the same statement as "this is impossible". Oh and your spaceship example there is just a co-ordinate rotation; I do this sort of thing all the time!

    1344:

    Yeah, I've seen the timelines. I just found the idea that there were no computers available in the mid to late 1950s a bit weird.

    (Concord PS: pity the mach-3 ramjet powered Nord Aviation project went nowhere).

    1345:

    A ballistic missile warhead will not reach ground at anything like orbital velocity even if it was powered all the way down, thanks to air resistance.

    Modern ICBM warheads mostly have very high ballistic coefficients (they're pointy cones) and don't slow down all that much coming through the atmosphere. According to Wikipedia (so it must be right) impact velocity can be as much as 7 km per second, not a lot less than orbital velocity and well over the ~3 km/s at which kinetic energy per unit mass equals the TNT equivalent.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile#Flight_phases

    In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDL_pIPScSI at 5:30 and after you can see some inert RVs smacking Kwajalein and kicking up a fair amount of dirt. Many years ago I found a ground-level photograph showing one of the craters produced and it was quite impressive. Alas, I can't locate it now.

    1346:

    #1259 - Time dilation is an observed phenomenon; what is not observed, or even theorised outside of high maths, is that this requires a situation where a message can be received before it is sent!

    The point is that in relativity sending a message back in time is equivalent to sending it faster than light. Which is generally discouraged in relativity anyways. If you want FTL travel you have to either give up causality or give up relativity. Most stories choose to give up relativity. That's fine! You can (probably) give it up in a way that isn't really noticeable.

    Also, since "one second" is helpfully defined as an elemental frequency, saying "3 positions have different lengths of second" effectively says "elemental properties are variable".

    OK, we do need to be precise. Everyone agrees on how to measure a second. But if you actually perform the experiment to measure a second, observers who are moving relative to you would say you that what you measured wasn't really a second. You would measure a 1 second interval, but they would say that the interval was actually 1.0001 seconds, or whatever.

    The practical effect of this is that different clocks tick at different frequencies and so give different "seconds". Empirically, the GPS system has to take into account the reference frames of the satellites and adjust clock measurements accordingly: time passes differently on each satellite and on the ground, because they are all in motion relative to one another. So if we get hand-wavy and say that time is the same on Sol and Alpha Centauri, we really are overlooking a difference that can be measured even with today's technology. There's no universal time.

    1347:

    Re: 'There's no universal time.'

    Yet there's a universal speed limit? Not being snide but ... since speed is measured in reference to time wondering just how is the universal 'speed of light' explained when you have two apparently contradictory conditions co-existing.

    1348:

    #1267 - Have you decided to stop trying or something? It's pretty fundamental to mechanics (Newtonian, Einsteinian, Hawkingian etc) that speed is not the same thing as velocity EVER and yet you are playing fast and loose with the direction component of velocity to mke your logic come out.

    I may have mislabelled "velocity" as "speed" somewhere, but did you actually read the linked article?

    Here's another way of looking at it: suppose that Alice and you are able to communicate "instantaneously" via ansible. Alice gets on a rocket and flies away from you. Or perhaps you get in a rocket and fly away from Alice. By relativity it doesn't matter. We will use a coordinate system in which time 0 is the moment of Alice's (or your) departure.

    You send Alice a message via your ansible when your clock reads that t seconds have elapsed. Alice instantly receives it. What does Alice's clock show when she receives the message? Alice is moving away from you and so is subject to time dilation in your frame of reference, and so her clock will show a value t' less than t. I hope so far everything is uncontroversial. (Feel free to do the math to check this.)

    The problem comes when Alice sends a reply using her ansible. If Alice and her ansible follow the same laws as you and your ansible, then the same analysis applies to her message back to you. In Alice's frame of reference, you are the one moving away and hence experiencing time dilation. If she sends a message to you when her clock reads t', then you will receive it when your clock reads a value less than t'. So you will receive the message before you sent it.

    Note that there is a key difference between this and the usual twin paradox: neither you nor Alice has turned around, so throughout the entire experiment you and she are moving apart, and there is complete symmetry between the two of you.

    We can try to avoid the paradox by requiring that there be a delay in sending ansible messages -- we originally supposed that the messages were instantaneous, but suppose they're slower? Is there an "ansible speed" a which is the fastest that messages can be sent without allowing paradoxes? I'll leave the calculation of the maximum ansible speed to the reader. Hint: it will have to be a universal constant that's measured the same for all observers no matter what their relative velocities.

    1349:

    Re: 'There's no universal time.'

    Yet there's a universal speed limit? Not being snide but ... since speed is measured in reference to time wondering just how is the universal 'speed of light' explained when you have two apparently contradictory conditions co-existing.

    There's also no "universal space". Observers moving relative to one another measure different distances between events. This is usually referred to as "length contraction" and is analogous to time dilation.

    1350:

    One more time - You are still not showing that the movement of information (spaceship or signal) on the time axis provides for the sign of that movement to reverse!

    Using your notation, I can agree that, after t, Alice receives FTL information at t', such that 0 &LT t' and t' &LT t. Now FTL is not the same thing as "instantaneous transmission" (to borrow from Gene Roddenbury, it can be transmission at the (non-instantaneous) speed of plot), in which case, if Alice receives the transmission at t' and returns it using an FSR, the same duration again must elapse before I can receive the return, which reaches me at 2t'.

    1351:

    Using your notation, I can agree that, after t, Alice receives FTL information at t', such that 0 < t' and t' < t.

    OK. Just to be clear: you sent an FTL message to Alice. When you sent the message, your clock read "mission elapsed time 8" or whatever. When she received it, her clock read "mission elapsed time 6" (or whatever; the exact values depend on your relative velocity).

    But let's swap the roles of you and Alice. According to the exact same analysis, if Alice sends you a message when her clock reads "mission elapsed time 8", then you will receive it when your clock reads "mission elapsed time 6". All we specified was that you and Alice were moving apart. We didn't (we can't) say that one of you is moving and the other isn't, because there is no absolute motion, only relative motion.

    The only way to break this is if there's some break in the symmetry between you and Alice. That is, only if relativity is not (universally) true.

    1352:

    Let's walk through this again.

    Alice and Bob have a tiff on Valentine's Day and decide to split up. Alice gets in his 100C warpship and heads in direction X for one year. Bob gets in her 100C warpship and heads in direction -X for one year.

    Do they send photon-based messages to each other? Well they could, but the 1/X^2 decay of the signal over distance means they're unlikely to get through. And the apparatus is huge. And it's so powerful that the authorities don't like having ships carrying them in-system. Especially if the ships are piloted by lovers who just broke up.

    Moreover, a warp ansible can't exist, because photons don't create warp bubbles. You've got to send a physical warp drive with the message, so you've got to use an autonomous warp drone, aka a message torpedo if your navally gazing, erm, inclined.

    But because this is a physics experiment, after one year Alice prints out a Valentine's day card for Bob and hand writes a long heartfelt letter expressing his remorse and desire to get back together. Since ansibles can't exist with warp drives, he seals the message with his tears, lays it tenderly in his warp message torpedo, and fires it off to go the 100C back to Origin, along with a lot of money to forward to wherever Bob got off to.

    A day later Alice decides to head back himself. Both the torpedo and Alice take a year to go home, but Alice is a day behind.

    Bob meanwhile turns back after one year, having decided that she's had enough of a break from dating. And anyway she's getting like totally bored with being by herself in a warpship, and the stars where she popped out 100 light years away aren't as entertaining as she thought they would be. Maybe she misses Alice? Even she's not sure.

    After two years, the message torpedo arrives and is handed to Bob when she gets out of her ship. Alice shows up a day later, and they have a tearful reunion. Tearful on Alice's part, anyway.

    How far did they go in real space? Zero. They just turned their warps on and off. That's also how far the light traveled in their warp bubbles. But they spent two years doing it.

    Now, if Crazy Eddie built a relativistic ramscoop and decided to get away from the soap opera, they'd have a totally different view of events, but we're still waiting to hear back from them. We're also really annoyed with Eddie for making us build that ginormous receiver to get a precious few photons from their communications laser. And they're crazy, so we have no idea how they finagled the permit for that petawatt comm laser along with the permit for the ramscoop. Warships are bad enough, but having enough antimatter around to run a ram is positively unsafe.

    The point? There's no preferred distance or time in the universe. C is still the speed limit, but if you can create a shorter way for a photon to get from point A to point B, the photon doesn't care and say it prefers to go the long way.* And since you're using light to define your time measurements, that's what it does. That's empire time for you. Alice and Bob didn't travel in time, although Crazy Eddie might be really confused about what happened if they ever manage to see any photons from two warpships popping up 200 light years away from each other, sitting around, and disappearing back into warp. But probably that can't see anything that small. Heck, it's impossible to see a planet at that distance. Hope Eddie likes their solitude.

    *Most of the arguments above for why time travel happens at superluminal velocities implicitly assume that light has a preferred course, which is in the flat universe we know. Warps are shortcuts that get rid of the distances. That means that someone going relativistic in a warp universe is going to have some very weird ideas about the history, assuming they can see any of it, which is doubtful.

    1353:

    Heteromeles, in your analysis the paradox could occur only if Crazy Eddie launched a warpship. That is, you can only get the time travel if you combine both STL and FTL travel. And of course you can avoid time travel if you choose your path carefully. What I'm saying is that if FTL is possible, and if relativity is universally true, then time travel is possible. That last condition is actually important: without relativity FTL isn't a problem, so if you can break relativity (even a little bit :)) you can avoid paradoxes.

    But the FTL + relativity paradox applies regardless of how the FTL is implemented. You keep seeming to focus on the people who are traveling faster than light, but really what you should worry about is the ones who don't. They're the ones who can receive messages backwards in time. The time order for someone who is actually traveling FTL doesn't come into it.

    1354:

    Aargh, I really didn't phrase my last message well: I should have sent "don't worry about the people who appear to travel faster than light in some reference frame". I do understand that you're proposing that there are ways to get from point A to point B faster than light can but without ever exceeding the speed of light. It's just that if those ways are relativistically invariant then they permit messages to be sent backwards in time.

    If you introduce some kind of preferred reference frame that all FTL takes place in, or some other rules such that FTL drives/wormholes/signalling/whatever break the symmetries of relativity, then everything is fine.

    1355:

    A few other thoughts about warpships.

    One is that they're similar to the gravity dipole drives, where you've got a graviton emitter (masss) yoked in line with an anti-graviton emitter (negative mass). These dipoles have been used in sci-fi since at least the 1960s (Niven) if not long before. The difference is that we've added the warp field, so that the warp happens outside a bubble of local space in which the ship sits in freefall. That's why it can go faster than C. If you just hooked the dipole to your ship without the bubble, it would be a possibly relativistic sub-C drive, although the gravity generator in the front of the ship probably isn't what you want to be using as a shield for interstellar travel.

    Second is that the word "metamaterial" probably should be part of the discussion. In other words, there's a gravity generator in front and an anti-gravity generator behind, not a lump of neutronium in front and a lump of anti-neutronium behind. The reason? It's hard to turn lumps on and off, and I don't think putting them on extendable frames to control their interaction through distance would be all that fun or stable (the frames bend under the strain of holding the two apart, and...). Anyway, metamaterials are the kewl new thing for making the impossible possible (cf invisibility devices), so maybe you can make a metamaterial that emulates cavorite when there's a current running through it and the cavities inside it are squeezed to just the right height.

    Bottom line though is that if you can generate a stable warp field, so far as I can tell, you can create a sub-C reactionless drive, perhaps by only turning on the antigravity part, perhaps by using the same technology as a physically separate drive.

    Third thoughticle is whether the warp speed can be controlled and how finely. In general, I don't think you want to spend any more time in a warp bubble than you have to, because you'll be in freefall the entire time, and it's probably a high radiation environment, either from Hawking radiation and/or your own waste photons not exiting the bubble. Whether you can adjust warp speed relative to the outside universe is mostly useful for maneuvering at the beginning and end of your trip.

    Which leads me to point 3.1: how long it takes to enter and exit warp matters, especially if there's just one warp speed. If you can only go 100C, for example, you can go a distance of 1 AU in 3.6 seconds. If it takes more than 3.6 seconds to turn off the warp, you don't want to emerge from warp within 1 AU of your target. If it takes an hour to emerge, then you don't want to emerge within 100 light hours of the local star, especially if you're aimed right at it. Now obviously if you can decelerate your warp field you can get closer to your destination, but since warpdrives are probably impossible, this is another detail that a creative person can use to put limits on where ships warp in and out.

    Do you want to put more limits on where your ships warp? If so, answer the following question: how much radiation does entering warp emit? If it's akin to, say, what a black hole of mass warpship would emit on instantaneous evaporation, or if it's akin to what a warpship-antiwarpship annihilation would emit, probably the local authorities would want you to enter warp really far away from anything that could be damaged by turning on or turning off the warp field. Remember, radiation drops off as 1/X^2, so it's not quite as far as all that. But it's not in low orbit or on the ground either, especially if you like the place.

    What did I miss? Oh yeah, why you don't want to use artificial gravity inside a warp bubble. Well, you're in a horribly dangerous environment that is created by your ship generating powerful gravity and antigravity fields on the outside of either end of the ship. I get that gravity is essential for human comfort, but do you really think that you can put in another set of gravity generators inside, possibly perpendicular to the dipole you've created, and shield against their effects so thoroughly away from the crew compartment that the shape of the warp field is not affected? For years? You're a really good engineer if you can do that. The bigger note is that dealing with the gravitational effects of the drive probably make for some interesting design issues inside the warpship. Which way is down?

    1356:

    Re: 'There's no universal time.' Yet there's a universal speed limit? Not being snide but ... since speed is measured in reference to time wondering just how is the universal 'speed of light' explained when you have two apparently contradictory conditions co-existing.

    Rather than trying to encompass the entire universe at one go, let's start by asking what you can observe. For these purposes "you" doesn't have to be you personally; we'll include people you know, physicists at the local university, humans generally.

    You can observe speeds of 100kph personally; the human nervous system can easily differentiate between speeds of 1, 10, and 100 kph. Instruments will let you measure the speeds of airplanes or sound waves.

    Physicists routinely drive massive particles up past 90% lightspeed, for reasons that make sense to them, prior to smacking them into other things; relativity and the associated side effects are a routine part of this. They also have robots watching the skies, because even the CERN accelerator has its limits and occasional cosmic rays collide with Earth at high speeds, a whisker under c such that people say things like >1GeV rather than trying to figure out how many decimal places to use after the 99% part.

    What don't we see?

    We don't see things moving faster than light.

    That's interesting and suggestive, because people have looked a lot and it would be very educational to spot something doing that. (People are still looking, of course.) We're pretty darn sure you can't just keep accelerating something from rest to 400,000km/s, because the particle physics people have been doing that for generations and the particles just keep getting more massive as they get closer to c. If there's another way to do it we'd love to know.

    We've also looked deeply into space, as far as we can tell that space goes. The Hubble Constant tells us that things far enough away should be retreating at greater than that magic number - but the cosmological horizon doesn't let us see that. They can't see us either, even assuming there's a them out there to look. Frustrating.

    And there's the universal part of the speed limit. They can't see us moving at more than the speed of light either, even though their Edwin Hubble or Stephen Hawking would assure everyone that if we existed we'd be retreating at superluminal velocities relative to them.

    Nobody gets to see anything exceeding the speed of light.

    Is that helpful?

    1357:

    Congratulations. You have absolutely convinced me that FTL communication is possible, and all arguments against it are handwavium bs.

  • Alice, in a ship doing .9c, sends a message to Bob, who's just started accelerating towards .9c. He gets the message after she sends it, and replies, and she gets that message after he sends it, which is after she sent hers (space dilation and time expansion may occur, contents of box may settle).
  • Alice, 4 ly away, now in normal space, sends Bob an FTL message. The time between when the message goes FTL and when it leaves FTL may be "instantaneous", or there may be some time, as measured by Alice, before it gets there (measured by sending a laser bean 4 lys, where it hits a mirror, and returns, all in normal space). Bob gets it, and replies... meanwhile, IN NORMAL space, time has passed.
  • You say LF does not apply in FTL, but all the explanations result in, if the message is sent STL, there's a time difference, and no negative time, but if it's sent FTL, there's negative time, based on theories that don't apply....

    I'm dropping this subthread. You just don't see where you're mixing frames of reference - STL and FTL, this universe and something else.

    1358:

    Which leads me to point 3.1: how long it takes to enter and exit warp matters, especially if there's just one warp speed. If you can only go 100C, for example, you can go a distance of 1 AU in 3.6 seconds.

    What do you mean by "just one warp speed"? Speed relative to what?

    1359:

    Alice and Bob have a tiff on Valentine's Day and decide to split up. Alice gets in his 100C warpship and heads in direction X for one year. Bob gets in her 100C warpship and heads in direction -X for one year...

    At this point we can just cue up the song Clock on the Wall by Frank Hayes. I don't think the narrator's approach is the best way to handle relationship problems but at least he has a plan...

    1360:

    Use the word distance in your arguments. What I'm arguing is that with warps there are an infinity of possible distances between A and B. Light can travel the distances it's allowed to, either normally through space or by taking a permissible shortcut through a warp.

    You've (unknowingly?) stuck yourself with a preferred frame of reference that doesn't apply to warps. Looking at the distances light travels through the warps frees you of this impediment.

    1361:

    1. Alice, in a ship doing .9c, sends a message to Bob, who's just started accelerating towards .9c. He gets the message after she sends it, and replies, and she gets that message after he sends it, which is after she sent hers (space dilation and time expansion may occur, contents of box may settle).

    Yeah, that's where we disagree. If the message is faster than some amount depending on their relative (slower than light) speed, then Bob's clock when he receives the message will read a smaller value than Alice's clock did when she sent the message. That's what time dilation means, and it's most obvious when the message is instantaneous. If relativity is universally true, then we can switch the roles of sender and receiver and observe that Bob can also send a message which Alice receives when her clock has a smaller value. I'm perfectly happy to note that that is a conditional statement. If relativity is false in some circumstances then clearly FTL communication can take place without paradox.

    Maybe we should attack this another way: if you can send FTL messages without causing a paradox, then there's some way to measure an absolute speed in ordinary space. So if FTL is true, then there is an absolute time (FTL time). I'm not saying that's impossible. I'm just saying that this implies that relativity is no longer a universal law.

    1362:

    I should be flabberghasted if computers WEREN'T used in the design of Concorde, but it is extremely unlikely they were used for most of the engineering design. Modern finite element design was beyond even the computers of the 1960s, let alone solving the fluid flow issues, but solving multivariate and non-linear equations was not. Plus the fact that there was a lot of record keeping to do, both for engineering and finance, and that was routine to computerise by then.

    1363:

    Use the word distance in your arguments. What I'm arguing is that with warps there are an infinity of possible distances between A and B. Light can travel the distances it's allowed to, either normally through space or by taking a permissible shortcut through a warp.

    I don't see how that applies to my argument (that's probably my failing, I'm not blaming you). Could you show me where my reasoning went wrong? Alice sends a message to Bob when her clock reads "mission elapsed time 10", and when he receives it his clock reads "mission elapsed time 8". Bob waits 2 units to send the message back to Alice (so when he sends the message his clock now reads "mission elapsed time 10"). What will Alice's clock read when she receives it? How are Alice and Bob different?

    1364:

    I should be flabberghasted if computers WEREN'T used in the design of Concorde, but it is extremely unlikely they were used for most of the engineering design. Modern finite element design was beyond even the computers of the 1960s, let alone solving the fluid flow issues, but solving multivariate and non-linear equations was not. Plus the fact that there was a lot of record keeping to do, both for engineering and finance, and that was routine to computerise by then.

    As far as your other postings are concerned, your error (and it IS an error) is to believe that "The point is that in relativity sending a message back in time is equivalent to sending it faster than light." In this context (mathematics), "equivalent" has a technical meaning and those are NOT equivalent in that sense. That infernal light cone / graphical relativity model has caused more brain-rot among physicists than I would have believed possible before I saw it doing so.

    Let's simplify the exclusion conditions, and consider just instantaneous messages between two points in the same frame. If no such pairs of points can be closer to another pair (in space AND time) than the maximum of the times that light would need to convey the message (in the frame of the observer, natch), there is no absolute speed, time or anything else and no causalty breach.

    1365:

    Elderly Cynic@1364:

    As far as your other postings are concerned, your error (and it IS an error) is to believe that "The point is that in relativity sending a message back in time is equivalent to sending it faster than light." In this context (mathematics), "equivalent" has a technical meaning and those are NOT equivalent in that sense.

    He should have been more careful, I grant. The usual formulation is:

    If relativity is universally true, then it is possible to send a message backwards in time if and only if it is possible to send a message faster than light.

    You have (correctly) pointed out elsewhere that there is a loophole: the proof in one direction depends on being able to send two messages, and it may be possible to construct an exclusion principle which prevents this.

    For example, if Alice sends Bob a message faster than light, then there could be an exclusion principle which prevents Bob, or anyone else in his future light cone, from sending a message back to Alice's past light cone. This exclusion principle would have to extend to any third party Charlie that Bob could communicate with faster than light. It gets messy. So far the only workable principle I've come up with is "no wormhole exit can appear in the past light cone of a wormhole entrance", which is very restrictive indeed. But I'm not sure there isn't a weaker one.

    1366:

    Yes. Computers were likely used with both. But the difference in what computers were available at the development times was huge.

    I was engaging in a bit hyperbole but still the 5 or 6 year split made all kinds of difference. The SR-71 had to get a new engine design. The Concorde wiki article says they wanted a new engine but costs would have been too high so they went with a modified engine from the Vulcan bomber.

    My main point was comparing the two craft is not really a good idea. Besides the age different they were done for totally different reasons. Both in mission and how they were designed at a political and engineering level. Just that the max speed of the earlier plane was over 50% more than the later made a huge difference in design and implementation.

    Like software developers, I'm sure both design teams would have like to have been able to do a major V2.

    1367:

    Crazy Eddie

    Now THAT's a local cultural reference.

    Although some of us who caught him in the 80s across the US on cable WOR (I think) got to see it.

    If you want to know about it there's a wiki entry for "crazy eddie". At least in the US edition.

    1368:

    Re: 'Constant tells us that things far enough away should be retreating at greater than that magic number - but the cosmological horizon doesn't let us see that.'

    Thanks! Your post did provide more background explanation and I did check the links.

    However ... I looked up the lifetime of a photon and was surprised to read that the [natural] death of a photon could result in the creation of an even faster moving particle. (Photon life expectancy is about a billion billion years unless it smashes into some other particle and changes.)

    And then another article said that a photon's speed can be related to/a function of how many other photons are traveling with/alongside it. My take on this is: So in an ever faster expanding universe where light sources are moving farther and farther away from each other -- reducing overall [ambient?] photon density -- FTL speed should drop below its current level ... but we'd still not be able to 'see' it.

    Net take-away: There's a possibility of both faster and slower photons/speeds of light.

    This is both very interesting and confusing as hell. :)

    1369:

    Hah! Speaking of relativity...

    I thought I was referring to Niven and Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye, where the Moties dub the FTL jumpdrive the "Crazy Eddie drive" and make "Crazy Eddie" into a (pseudo)folklorical persona they use to spin stories about Motie culture to the humans.

    Learn something new every day.

    1370:

    After 30 years I had forgotten that kind of detail in those books.

    1371:

    Like software developers, I'm sure both design teams would have like to have been able to do a major V2.

    You know about Concorde B?

    It nearly got green-lit. If the 1974 oil crisis hadn't hit so soon -- causing the initial 120+ airframe order book to shrink to 14 -- it might have happened. Concorde B was an incremental improvement over the original, but a drastic improvement in capabilities; think in terms of the leap from the Boeing 737-200 to the 737-400. (Conc-B could go supersonic without afterburners, had better slats and flaps, more use of composites, and a greater payload and/or range; it could, with some development, scrape close to 5000 miles range, making it capable of going trans-Pacific or London/Sydney with only one refueling stop.)

    It was due to start production in 1980 (by which time Thatcher had axed the program). And was the basis for the evolved gold-plated RAF Concorde in "The Labyrinth Index". (At £50M in 1976 pounds it was expensive -- call it £300M in today's money -- but a fraction of the amount concealed off-the-books on the Chevaline MRV upgrade program. In other words, within budget range for the armed forces at that time.)

    1372:

    Little bit.

    Anytime you do something radical in engineering terms a V2 is a nice dream to have.

    If anyone wants to see both a Concorde and SR-71 they are on display at the Air and Space museum annex next to Dulles airport. Short Lyft/Uber ride from the airport if you have a long layover or want to allocate some time before or after a flight. https://airandspace.si.edu/udvar-hazy-center All indoors.

    They have a Shuttle, Concorde, SR-71, WWII German rocket plane, and almost everything else from the early days before WWI up to the recent past. You get to walk up close to most of them. Totally boring for my wife but I enjoyed the line of engines ordered by time. (Those things back in the 40s were just plain big.)

    The WWI exhibit has lots of planes and replicas suspended from the ceiling with walkways between the 10' to 20' above the floor.

    [1] Parking for the museum was free until the locals caught on and would park there and take a taxi to the airport. Now it is $15 / day.

    1373:

    A couple of thoughts on the FTL question. One is what if paradoxes can happen. People have been arguing that FTL can't happen because it produces paradoxes, but what if paradoxes can happen? The universe is a strange place, the speed of light as a constant is proof of that itself. As are various quantum weirdnesses, so can paradoxes exist? The other is,if Alice gets in her spaceship 12.00 and accelerates such that time dilation causes shipboard time to run at half the speed of her departure location. Bob then sends an FTL message at 13.00 his time, this will arrive at 12.30 shipboard time. Alice sends an FTL reply at 13.00 shipboard time, this will arrive at 14.00 as far as Bob is concerned. Is this wrong?

    1374:

    2. Alice, 4 ly away, now in normal space, sends Bob an FTL message. The time between when the message goes FTL and when it leaves FTL may be "instantaneous", or there may be some time, as measured by Alice, before it gets there (measured by sending a laser bean 4 lys, where it hits a mirror, and returns, all in normal space). Bob gets it, and replies... meanwhile, IN NORMAL space, time has passed.

    I'm going to start by saying: there's nothing sacred about relativity. It's OK to assume new physics ("hyperspace") that does not obey the laws of relativity. But if some physics doesn't obey relativity, then relativity is not universally true; I hope we all agree that's a tautology. IF relativity is universally true, and IF FTL communication is possible, then you have to worry about preventing ways of sending messages back in time.

    Let's look at clocks. Alice has a clock. Bob has a clock. Let's also assume that they're both broadcasting their times. They're moving apart at some constant sublight speed, and they synchronized their clocks at a time in the past which we'll call 0 (assume at that time they were very close in space, so the synchronization is easy).

    By looking at when she receives Bob's clock broadcasts, Alice can figure out how fast Bob's clock is ticking in her reference frame. Alice notices that each tick of Bob's clock takes more time than the ticks of her clock, i.e. it is running more slowly. This is time dilation. It has been experimentally verified numerous times.

    The relative motion is constant, so the time dilation factor is constant. Let's say it is .8. So Alice can calculate that when her clock shows 10, Bob's shows 8. She can do more than calculate, she can verify this: when she receives Bob's broadcast that says "my clock reads 8", Alice's clock will read something like 16 and when she adjusts for the speed of light and relative motion she'll conclude Bob sent it 6 units ago (in Alice's frame) when her clock did indeed read 10.

    Bob can do the same thing and look at Alice's clock broadcasts. Everything is symmetric. So in his rest frame it's Alice's clock that is ticking more slowly. Bob calculates that when his clock reads 10, Alice's reads 8, by exactly the same logic as Alice does, and he can empirically verify it by Alice's radio broadcasts. The principle of relativity is that both frames are equally valid and equally true. That is, Bob and Alice disagree about whose clock is slower, but there's no way to say who is "right" or who is "wrong".

    So far all of this is absolutely standard relativity, and totally consistent with experiment. The GPS system would fail to work if time dilation were much different from what relativity predicts.

    But think about this: in Alice's frame, she knows that if she can send an "instantaneous" message when her clock shows 10, then when Bob receives it his clock will show 8. This isn't time travel (yet) it's just a disagreement about clocks.

    Everything is identical for Bob, so he knows that if he sends an instantaneous message when his clock shows 10, then Alice's clock will show 8 when she receives it. Again, no paradox, just time dilation, and the calculations are identical for Alice and Bob.

    Now we get to the paradox. When Alice's clock shows 10, she actually pulls the trigger and sends a very very fast, almost but not quite instantaneous, FTL message to Bob. When he gets it, his clock shows just a hair over 8. No problem. He waits a bit less than 2 seconds (as he measures it) and then sends an FTL message back to Alice when his clock shows 10. But we've already established that if Bob sends an FTL message when his clock shows 10, Alice's clock will show 8. Oops!

    There are 2 obvious solutions.

    Let's impose a maximum FTL message speed! By slowing the messages enough, we can indeed make sure Bob's message arrives after Alice's clock shows 10. But there's another variable: how fast are Alice and Bob moving apart? If Bob and Alice increase speed, the time dilation factor gets "worse"; their clocks tick slower relative to each other. Then we can re-create the paradox with the new relative velocity. The only way to prevent a paradox for all relative velocities is to keep the maximum message speed at or below c.

    The other way to break the paradox is to say the situation is not symmetric. Something is different about Alice and Bob, so that the speed of FTL messages is different for them (or somehow one is prevented from sending messages). But our original hypothesis was that Alice's and Bob's situation were identical, relativistically speaking. So this something that's different violates relativity.

    We're left with 3 choices: give up FTL messages, give up relativity, or allow messages to go back in time. Pretty much all SF gives up relativity, although they may not realize it. This isn't necessarily a big deal; new physics can change old laws. There are implications to it though, e.g. you've re-introduced absolute space and absolute time through the back door (Alice and Bob can determine their absolute velocities by exchanging FTL messages.)

    Elderly Cynic will note that we also made an implicit assumption that Bob and Alice could both choose to communicate FTL. Putting restrictions on to prevent this may also be a way to break the paradox.

    1375:

    The other is,if Alice gets in her spaceship 12.00 and accelerates such that time dilation causes shipboard time to run at half the speed of her departure location. Bob then sends an FTL message at 13.00 his time, this will arrive at 12.30 shipboard time. Alice sends an FTL reply at 13.00 shipboard time, this will arrive at 14.00 as far as Bob is concerned. Is this wrong?

    If the FTL mechanism is consistent with relativity, then yes, it's wrong. Alice isn't special, neither is Bob, so in relativity you can only talk about relative motion, not absolute motion. There's no way to tell whether it's Alice who's moving, or Bob.

    You've implicitly assumed an absolute time relative to which all FTL takes place, and that Bob's time matches that time (so Bob has an "absolute speed" of 0, and Alice has an "absolute speed" of whatever. The FTL mechanism breaks relativity.

    1376:

    Maybe I'll try one more time: if the FTL message is OUTSIDE STL space, than try to picture this: Bob and Alice both left Earth. The light cone extends towards each of them. When an FTL message is sent, it spirals around OUTSIDE the light cone, but still in the same positive direction in time. When it pops back in, it's still further along the light cone than when it was sent. Ditto on the return message.

    1377:

    Actually, I really like that concept: it goes through the event horizon, the light cone, then, via Hawking radiation, comes back inside the light cone.

    Hmmmm, gonna get an ansible out of this yet. Of course, in the novella/story I just finished, when they start out, about 150 years from now, they can only send via ansible when they're not FTL. It's only in the far future that they can send while in FTL.

    1378:

    I was at my not-exactly-local yarn shop last month, just before it closed (owners retired). One of the other customers was telling about the time she and a couple of friends in her chemistry class made a few hundred mls of butyl mercaptan. Then they made little tiny glass bubbles and sealed a drop of mercaptan in each one, and dropped one in each of many trash cans at the local mall (from which they'd been thrown out for being kids). Ended up with the gas company going crazy trying to find the leak, until someone realized that a leak big enough to stink up the entire mall would be very noticeable. After which they started checking for more plausible sources.

    1379:

    Mercaptans are a big part of skunk juice. They also attract both flies and vultures. (Many years ago I was told that it was possible to find gas leaks by looking for concentrations of flies (in town) or vultures (in rural areas) that were attracted by the smell. As an odorant, it's used in parts-per-billion.)

    1380:

    Maybe I'll try one more time: if the FTL message is OUTSIDE STL space, than try to picture this: Bob and Alice both left Earth. The light cone extends towards each of them. When an FTL message is sent, it spirals around OUTSIDE the light cone, but still in the same positive direction in time. When it pops back in, it's still further along the light cone than when it was sent. Ditto on the return message.

    I do understand that relativity may only be "approximately" true, and in that case FTL is possible. So really, don't think I'm trying to say "No FTL is not possible under any hypothetical circumstances". I just think that FTL is inconsistent with relativity being absolutely true under all cases.

    I think what you want is "no reply to a message can appear in the past light cone of the sender". That's pretty basic to avoiding a paradox. But remember that observers moving relative to one another have light cones that are "tilted" relative to one another, and the angle of the tilt depends on their relative velocities. Light cones also extend in infinite directions. So how do we avoid paradox? If the set of all possible messages are "parallel" in some sense then they can't intersect, so there's no paradox then. But then that imposes an orientation, i.e. a preferred direction, to spacetime, and breaks relativity. (Like I said, maybe relativity is only "approximately" true; but it sure isn't absolutely true in this case.)

    1381:

    As an odorant, it's used in parts-per-billion.)

    I had a very tiny gas leak in my house for a while. To the extend that people with good noses didn't notice it most of the time. Conditions had to be just right. I traced the piping with a detector and nothing. Multiple times. Finally it got to the point that you could notice it (barely) for more than a minute or two per day. Detector finally found it.

    1382:

    One of the things I've been thinking about is the idea that relativity is evidence that we live in a simulation, maybe even in a game.

    Well, don't stop there ! If it's true, what can you conclude ? Like, how many bits in the floating point format ? Computer geeks need to know.

    1383:

    whitroth @ 1376:

    When an FTL message is sent, it spirals around OUTSIDE the light cone, but still in the same positive direction in time.

    Outside whose light cone? And when it re-enters spacetime, "in the same positive direction in time" relative to whom? Alice's time, Bob's time, and Earth's time are different. Our intuition says "time is the same for everyone". Our intuition is wrong, or else time dilation wouldn't happen. To put it another way: if you believe in some philosophical "ideal" time that's the same for everyone: how do you measure it? With what clock?

    I know, I'm being very nit-picky, but that's the key to why relativity + FTL can cause paradoxes. If you want to just say "hey, this FTL mechanism requires new physics that invalidates some part of relativity, at least in this particular case" then OK, I'll stop blathering :)

    When it pops back in, it's still further along the light cone than when it was sent. Ditto on the return message.

    Further along whose light cone? Earth's, Bob's, or Alice's?

    If your rule says "for any FTL message, the Earth clock time of the receiver must be greater than the Earth clock time of the sender" then yep, the procedure you describe will avoid paradoxes. It also breaks relativity because the rule refers to Earth's clock specifically. This is the usual solution employed in SF, sometimes because the writer is unaware that there is even an issue ("of course there's only one time!").

    If the rule says "for any FTL message you send, your clock must be greater when the message is received than when it is sent" then that's compatible with relativity, but neither Alice nor Bob broke that rule in my example, so paradox is still possible.

    If the rule says "for any FTL message you send, the receiver's clock must be greater when the message is sent than when it is received", then unfortunately that rule is impossible to implement, because two people could both see (literally) the same message but be moving relative to each other, so their clocks don't agree: there's no unique "receiver".

    If the rule says "nobody can send an FTL message if they've already received one" then again we avoid paradoxes and I think it's compatible with relativity. It's not a very interesting FTL system though :(

    1384:

    I was talking more about motivations than math, but if we start with the planck-length as some kind of equivalent to the pixel, light-speed as indicating something about the speed/capacity of the of the processor(s), and note the fact that we only need fifteen digits of PI to specify an orbit to a matter of inches... I suspect the number is huge and hope we're not running on Windows!!

    1385:

    David L Surely "Crazy Eddie" is a |Niven/Pornelle reference? ( "Mote in God's Eye" ) Oops - I see Frank/Heteromeles had the same idea jumped to the same conclusion!

    Charlie think in terms of the leap from the Boeing 737-200 to the 737-400 Uh? You what? You who? I mean I can't tell the difference between any two large jet-engine airliners AT ALL - the're all just big tubes with semi-blunt noses & the more recent ones have vortex spoilers at the wingtips ...

    The other loophole for paradoxes is the other way around, of course. Physical FTL exists but ansibles don't work - & you have to take time to turn around & come back - you will still arrive back at your starting point AFTER you left - it might only be seconds, but it will still be later. There's also the ASSUMPTION that FTL messaging is instentaneous - suppose it isn't, suppose it's say 100c or 1000c .... plenty of wriggle-room in there, certainly for SF writers. [ As in ertur's post HERE: Everything is identical for Bob, so he knows that if he sends an instantaneous message when his clock shows - note the unfounded assumotion of instentaneous transmission by ansible, rather than taking an onterval. ] On what basis is this assumption valid?
    Ah - I see you do that a few lines down ... Let's impose a maximum FTL message speed! - & no paradox.

    I strongly suspect that when the "Vacuum Catastrophe" paradox is resolved, so will the FTL paradox vanish in a puff of mathematics .....

    WHICH REMINDS ME: WHere & by whom, was the word Ansible first used? I first cane across it in U K le G's "Hainish" series. Anyone before that?

    1386:

    That is the problem with focussing on mechanisms, not mathematics; the issue is not how it happens, but whether it breaks known physics.

    I have no time for the relativists who regard Einstein as the last and greatest of the prophets of spacetime physics, extrapolate relativity beyond singularities, and treat any hypothesis beyond that as being heresy. But the only mechanisms that I have considered are ones that are compatible with known physics, including the known parts of relativity. In particular:

    FTL using a suitable exclusion principle is compatible (*) - the eschaton alone knows how that would work, but still ....

    Absolute frames of reference (and even absolute time) are NOT compatible. A canonical frame is (e.g. the original frame, before expansion), but doesn't give FTL or anything else, really.

    There is an 'interesting' loophole for quantum tunnelling, which is disgracefully ignored. My suspicion is that a better understanding of this would lead to a reevaluation of the meaning of time, causality, determinism or all three. But I know that I am not smart enough to guess what.

    (*) The point here is that the rules of relativity constrain the possible observations (i.e. the space-time of events, as seen from various frames) in fairly stringent ways. While those constraints lead to no closed timelike loops, there are weaker constraints that also do, and my exclusion principles are an example.

    A more mathematical viewpoint is that relativistic times (one for each observer, remember) can be treated as nodes on a graph and linearised (look up "sequential consistency"), and FTL fundamentally breaks that linearisability. Hence the requirement for an exclusion principle, which is essentially a specification of which links must be missing to retain linearisability (which is essentially equivalent to no causal breaches).

    1387:

    I looked up the lifetime of a photon...

    For a moment I thought you meant proton but no, checking says people are suggesting there might be decay half-lives for photons. Constraining the Photon Lifetime starts with the maximum possible photon mass, less than 10^-51 grams, and from there works out the minimum possible photon lifetime, 10^18 years. Discussed in a Physics World article, this doesn't prove or disprove the zero and infinite theories but it does provide boundaries for a greater than zero and less than infinite hypothesis.

    1388:

    If anyone wants to see both a Concorde and SR-71 they are on display at the Air and Space museum annex next to Dulles airport.

    Yup, I had a good day at that museum back in, I think, 2008 or 2009. (The main museum is a lot more space-constrained because it's inside DC proper.)

    Also worth a day out if you're in that part of the world is the National Cryptologic Museum. It's in a little publicly-accessible fistula in the NSA's perimeter fence and has some of their old supercomputers and their ENIGMA rotor machine collection and a whole stack of biographical stuff about their linguists and cryptanalysts but it's officially not the NSA's official house museum because the NSA is totally 100% secret squirrel stuff and couldn't possibly have a publicly-accessible museum. (Wink.)

    1389:

    I mean I can't tell the difference between any two large jet-engine airliners AT ALL - the're all just big tubes with semi-blunt noses & the more recent ones have vortex spoilers at the wingtips ...

    Okay, from the top:

    The Boeing 737 launched in the late 1960s. Basic idea: take the fuselage/seating layout of a 707 -- you remember them? The original four-jet Boeing from the 1950s? -- and make it cheap and cheerful, with two engines and shorter range (like the 707's sibling the 720, less successful because: short range means cheap flights, but also four engines means more maintenance). The 737 was designed for rough airstrips in the developing world, so had a short undercarriage and retractable air stairs. It also used slightly beefier descendants of the turbojets used by the 707.

    Fast forward 5-10 years. The basic 737 design has proven there's a market, with the model 100 and 200 (the 200 has more seats). But the engines are dirty, noisy, fuel guzzlers. Newer high-bypass turbofans are available. So they build a couple of new versions of the 737 -- the -300 and -400 -- with high bypass engines slung forward of the wing (so they don't scrape the ground).

    And they sell like hot cakes, in ridiculous numbers, because the 737-400 hit some kind of market sweet spot for an airliner that could carry 130-170 passengers on flights of 500-3000km efficiently and economically and didn't need a jetway at the departure/destination airports (jetways -- those mobile extending boarding tubes at the terminal -- cost airlines money to rent).

    Indeed, the whole reason Ryanair and EasyJet exist is because the 737-400 improved just enough over the earlier 737-200 to make their business model viable (sell tickets almost below cost price, charge for all the extras, ensure every plane flies with at least 85% of seats occupied).

    My metaphor is: Concorde, as flown, was the Model-100 equivalent. Slightly too small, too short a range, engines needed a few tweaks ... market wasn't quite ready. Concorde B? Might have been a contender, except the oil shock cut the knees out from under the business/first class market and then 9/11 and anti-terror queues chopped its head off.

    1390:

    I assume it's safe to silently add "Right-wing fruitcakes" could fuck up a wet dream.

    1391:

    Further on the subject of abandoned UK transport, I thought that Triumph's eight valve Speed Twin derivative might've evolved into something interesting, with better quality control and possibly EFI and liquid cooling, and still would've been simpler and lighter than the competition.

    1392:

    except the oil shock cut the knees out from under the business/first class market

    It's also how tastes have changed. In the US you'll find a lot of planes, even with the big non budget airlines, don't have first class anymore. There just isn't the demand. Many of the "more newly rich" would rather fly coach for a few hours and spend their money on toys (Tesla) and such. Airline revenue management folks will tell you this. And the friends I have who could buy first class mostly don't.

    Now EU and Middle eastern majors seem to have more 1st class seating. And those Etihad bedrooms in the nose of A380s [eyeroll] ... So it may be somewhat cultural.

    As to the difference between airplane models. It's all in what you pay attention to. I can tell a Ford/Chevy/MoPar truck. Especially if I can see the front grill. Smaller sedans all have very similar profiles. If I can't see the rear tail lights and/or logo medallion it can be hard for me to tell what is what.

    1393:

    I haven't assumed an absolute time, I have assumed two different times. Relative one might say :-)

    1394:

    Surely "Crazy Eddie" is a |Niven/Pornelle reference?

    If you saw many of these the term "crazy Eddie" comes to have only one meaning.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE

    1395:

    Toby @1393: OK, sorry, I was far too flip. I should have replied more carefully. Here's your original message:

    The other is,if Alice gets in her spaceship 12.00 and accelerates such that time dilation causes shipboard time to run at half the speed of her departure location. Bob then sends an FTL message at 13.00 his time, this will arrive at 12.30 shipboard time. Alice sends an FTL reply at 13.00 shipboard time, this will arrive at 14.00 as far as Bob is concerned.

    Here's my analysis:

    Alice and Bob are moving apart at some constant speed that causes time dilation. Bob's message at 13.00 (Bob time) arrives at 12.30 (Alice's time).

    Now swap the words "Alice" and "Bob" everywhere in the two sentences above. What time does Alice's message at 13.00 (Alice time) arrive in Bob's time in the new (swapped) sentences?

    If Alice's message actually arrives at 14.00 (Bob time) then something is different between Alice and Bob that prevents you from swapping their names in the sentences. So something is different in the laws of physics for Bob and Alice. What is it?

    1396:

    "First class" on an American domestic carrier is frankly a bit shit. I've flown it. On Air France long-haul they call it "Premium Economy". Same seat pitch, recliners, leg lifts; the only difference is that Prem Ec passengers have to pay extra for a business-class meal. (Long haul business or first class is an entirely different ball game of relative luxury: if you're flying EU/AUS, which is 20-24 hours, having a seat that turns into a bed makes a huge subjective difference.)

    Domestic US flights are seldom long enough for it to be worth paying a lot more; coast-to-coast, maybe, but 2-3 hour hops? Nope.

    1397:

    In Western Missouri, my only exposure to those ads was Johnny Carson mocking them, Niven & Pournelle's "Cray Eddie" take precedence for me.

    1398:

    There's also the ASSUMPTION that FTL messaging is instentaneous - suppose it isn't, suppose it's say 100c or 1000c .... plenty of wriggle-room in there, certainly for SF writers.

    Unfortunately while there is a "speed of paradox" below which messages between Alice and Bob cannot cause a paradox, it is frame dependent. It depends on the speed v between them.

    There is a universal speed of paradox, but it's the speed of light.

    1399:

    FTL using a suitable exclusion principle is compatible (*) - the eschaton alone knows how that would work, but still ....

    That's a really interesting idea, and I think it could work (it would be a kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking between Alice and Bob: the symmetries of relativity are broken, but not by favoring either Alice or Bob). Could you give us an example of the kind of exclusion principles you've come up with?

    1400: 1351 - And you still refuse to provide any argument which even suggests that motion in the time axis can be negative! Note that this is not the same thing as showing that time can can be placed negative in a co-ordinate frame (this is trivial, and easy enough that I can do it). 1360 - That I can agree. The dual tragedies of the argument are that the FTL == time travel lobby can not or will not entertain either the short cut argument or the movement on the time axis is only possible in one direction argument, and never produce any reasons why these arguments are wrong that aren't variations on proof by assertion! 1363 - I think I can explain this! You're flopping the sign of the time component of the space-time vector when the message hits Bob's FSR. The duration (presumed to be non-0) from Alice's transmission to Bob's FSR is a positive movement on the time axis. Whilst the FSR re-transmission is near 0 (but positive), the duration of the message journey from FSR to Alice's receiver must be equal (as a vector quantity, not just an absolute) to its outward leg, and hence the total journey A-B-A has a duration twice that of the 1 way trip. The only assumptions I'm making here are that both of them remain in a constant 4 dimensional vector motion relative to each other and that the message is small relative to the transmission duration. 1372 - We also have a Concorde (with development telemetry boxes, answering the computers question) and an SR-71 at IWM Duxford. 1383 - This isn't nit-picking; it's neglecting motion on the time axis of the space-time axis set when it doesn't suit your argument! If you think otherwise, try and find where I haven't assumed the direction of motion on the time axis of the set to be constant. 1385 Point 2 - The change from the 737-200 to -300 is also when they changed from low-bypass to high-bypass turbofans. The difference in intake fan diameter is very obvious. 1395 - The implied constraint in using "real names"; replace Bob and Alice with source and target (or vice versa).
    1401:

    My understanding is the surviving XB-70 has a bomb bay full of computers & telemetry.

    1402:

    XB-70 has a bomb bay full of computers & telemetry.

    That would be easy to do. (Fill the bomb bay.)

    I was reading a history of early semiconductor production and that program in its early days got all the production of small transistors from Fairchild (via IBM) to use in building the initial flight control systems. Late 50s. Computers of the day would have be large. Even by the time of first flight in 64. And a first flight in 64 would have computers designed and built in 63 or earlier.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=__NwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=%22transistor%22+xb-70&source=bl&ots=XJU-DAr_XF&sig=ACfU3U3xOGFUyw9FpVhZOnvuaca68rT0qQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjDr-C3493nAhUCgnIEHV4qAOcQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22transistor%22%20xb-70&f=false

    1403:

    That would be about the right time for first generation commercial chips. I remember in the mid sixties looking with awe at an Uncle's color TV which had it's solid state components on an easily accessible discrete card, with actual chips on it!

    1404:

    The Duxford Concorde is one of the development aircraft and slightly different to the passenger design. It was also the last large aircraft to be able to fly in IIRC, the bulldozers were waiting for it to land so they could remove the eastern end of the runway for the M11 to go through.

    1405:

    I can believe that; my point was that you can get immediate contact with some of the actual hardware used to develop Concorde with no more effort than visiting the correct museum(s). I'm prepared to bet that you can't walk down a walkway inside the XB-70 and stop to look at a full height rack!

    1406:

    True that! But one can watch a YouTube video where the camera operator is permitted to film the long obsolete parts.

    1407:

    The Duxford Concorde actually has bail-out hatches cut in the floor -- one behind the cockpit tunnel, one near the back of the flight test engineers' station -- chutes with firemans' poles to allow everyone to grab a parachute and jump out if things went wrong. At least, in theory. (With a stall speed over 300km/h, bailing out the bottom of a Conc in flight was a dicey proposition.)

    I stole the idea for the climax of "The Labyrinth Index" from a real Concorde capability! And the Fulton Surface-To-Air Recovery System (STARS) as used for realz by the CIA and immortalized in at least one early Bond movie.

    IIRC Concorde was the first civil aircraft built with any kind of fly-by-wire system (analog, I believe): the electronics bays behind the cockpit form a narrow tunnel about four or five metres long and add a couple of tons to the aircraft's weight, as does the droop nose (TV cameras for visibility on landing/takeoff weren't really an option in the 1960s—not reliable or high enough definition back then, used tubes that tended to burn out if they caught the sun, and so on).

    1408:

    EC @ 1386 Can I ask you for your e-mail address via the Moderators, or you mine? My ancient mathematicl fingers, rusted over, are beginning to twitch. Time to re0examine the problem, if my brain cells haven't atrophied completely ...

    1409:

    Many years ago I found a ground-level photograph showing one of the craters produced [by an ICBM RV] and it was quite impressive. Alas, I can't locate it now.

    Still no luck with the picture, but here are some words:

    https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a434266.pdf Final Environmental Assessment for Minuteman III Modification In the event that an RV would directly impact on Illeginni Island or in the shallow coral reefs, a crater would form. Prior RV tests have resulted in craters on land averaging 20 to 25 ft (6.1 to 7.6 m) across and 15 ft (4.6 m) deep, depending on the type of substrate. Whether or not the test RV contains a high explosives package makes little difference in crater formation.

    The RVs in question seem to have masses in the range of 300 to 400 kg, perhaps tending to the heavier side.

    1410:

    The 1960s version of Thunderball, which also shows a Vulcan doing a water landing (just possible if you got the attitude right).

    1411:

    There's also an SR-71 at Duxford, not just a Concorde. It's how I know that the ground clearance of one of those is 5'2" - my wife can stand under the centre of the fuselage, but with the top of her head brushing the underside.

    It's an education walking through the Concorde - that cabin is tiny.

    1412:

    I noticed that; at 4'22" my eye line is above the lower lip of the SR-71 engine tunnels.

    1413:

    There's an aviation museum in Washington State that has the nose section of an SR-71 on display (from a plane written off in a ground accident). You can actually sit in the cockpit!

    I have sat in the front seat of that SR-71. It is tiny, and I wasn't wearing a pressure suit at the time.

    1414:

    Regarding the Concorde: The routes were New York/Washington - London/Paris. I've thought that it might make some sense to revive it, but on the Los Angeles/San Francisco/ Seattle - Beijing/Shanghai/Tokyo route.

    The advantage is that the Pacific Ocean is a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean, so more time is saved on this route.

    The passengers still have to get to the airport, still have to get through security, still have to get through immigration/customs, and still have to get to their hotel.

    1415:

    The problem with the Pacific routes is distance. You really need about a 5000 mile range to cope, which first-gen Concorde simply didn't have: it'd have had to land and refuel in Hawaii.

    While Concorde did fly some long-haul routes occasionally -- there was an LHR-SYD service for a while, with three refueling stops it could do it in a little over 12 hours -- it typically took 3 days of hangar time to turnaround between trans-Atlantic flights: the LHR-SYD route was, if I recall correctly, weekly. Conc's availability and ratio of engineering hours to flight hours was very good by the standards of military aircraft, especially something the size of a strategic bomber, but still terrible compared to subsonic airliners.

    1416:

    I have sat in the front seat of that SR-71. It is tiny, and I wasn't wearing a pressure suit at the time.

    Somewhere I read a few years back about the physical size metrics for each military aircraft in the US fleet. If you want to fly a plane you have to fit the profile for a specific plane. And it covers a lot more than height. Things like bottom of thigh to base of foot when seated, size of hand and length of fingers (to reach buttons on the "stick" without moving your hand), and so on.

    1417:

    I am reminded of when 'they' attempted to work out the size of the average pilot, hoping to be able to build planes that fit said average. It turned out that nobody actually matched the average ...

    (No citations on this, it may be mythical.)

    1418:

    One fast-jet pilot I met was about five foot four, maybe five foot five (it was a long time back when I was still Imperial). He was wiry and physically quite fit even after retiring from the RAF where he flew Lightnings before doing two seasons in the Red Arrows. He died in an airshow accident flying an East European jet trainer.

    1419:

    I swear, I'm starting to wonder if you're a very fancy chatbot, ignoring anything that you don't have a filter for.

    For one, you continually utterly ignore going outside "normal space", aka this space-time, where GR and SR are valid.

    Please don't bother responding if you can't address the above.

    Second, in relation to where they both took off from, their time is always positive. There is nothing giving the FTL communication negative time.

    1420:

    sigh

    I never even thought of trying out for the Moon race - astronauts, those days, were required to be a) under 5'10" (I'm 6', though now with the partial knee replacements, I seem to be shorter), and b) no glasses.

    1421:

    Jeez, I take a long weekend off from the blog, and y'all just keep going - good work!

    @1411: There's also an SR-71 at Duxford, not just a Concorde.

    If you want to see an XB-70 and an SR-71 at the same time, you need to go to the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, OH. Having been stationed there in the 1980s, I can't think of any other reason to go to Dayton, but the museum is truly impressive, in my non-humble opinion as good as IWM Duxford or the aforementioned Udvar-Hazy complex. The USAF Museum is understandably focused on vehicles used by the USAF and its predecessors, but is very complete, covering the period from the beginning of powered flight to nearly the current day. I was in Dayton for work last September, and I can say from experience that one day is not enough to cover everything. Notably, many of the aircraft displayed are wartime veterans, not leftover training aircraft, to include the Memphis Belle and Robin Olds' F-4.

    That being said, nothing beats an airshow weekend at Duxford. We went in July 2015; what a treat. Thirteen Spitfires in the air at once!

    1422:

    There was David Robinson who graduated at 7'0" from the Naval Academy. He entered at 6'8" on a waiver for this height but kept growing. This limited his Navy career but made him rich playing basketball later.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Robinson

    1423:

    Can't remember if I mentioned this, but I've been to Udvar-Hazy once, and would prefer to go back to the one downtown. Udvar-Hazy has one aircraft I really don't ever need to see again.

    The Enola Gay.

    1424:

    @1116: Followed that thread, and don't quite understand just who it is that's sitting in the DC metro area.

    That's me, currently sitting in my cubicle (I couldn't honestly call it an office) in Crystal City. I'm sure the moderator could get us together.

    1425:

    Y'know, I was thinking about what I said here - that from good ol' Terra, where Bob and Alice (and Ted and Carol...) took off from, there's no negative time issues.

    I just stepped away to take a shower, and realized what happens if I carry that further:

    Friends, I have here something y'all have been looking for for a long time: a shiny (okay, let me brush the stardust off it, damn supernovas keep getting it dusty) a Frame of Reference: the Big Bang. Everything since then is positive time, and so even with instantaneous FTL communication, it never goes back towards the Big Bang.

    1426:

    @1423: The Enola Gay

    Fair warning: Bock's Car is at the USAF Museum.

    1427:

    I swear, I'm starting to wonder if you're a very fancy chatbot, ignoring anything that you don't have a filter for.

    It's a standard tactic for many people, in situations where admitting defeat of any sort is seen as unacceptable. And also for dealing with conversations where you don't want to cause a fuss.

    He ignores us, we ignore him. That's fine.

    Anyway, I wanted to point out some apparently inconvenient truths.

    The first is that I'd say that in real life there's even odds that humans won't ever walk on the Moon again, let alone Mars or anywhere else. Therefore, alien worlds are a form of secondary world fantasy. That's fine! But if you want to sell a story, it's worth being aware that faeryland seems to be more popular than the (apparently non-existent) world around Alpha Centauri B.

    We've been arguing about how to get to your faeryland. There's a contingent who's had college engineering-level physics (that includes me, incidentally. I did the whole unit on relativity calculations a very long time ago, some of whom think that HARD science fiction has nothing going faster than light in a straight-line vacuum, and that starfish aliens that don't look or act like humans are the epitome of good creature design.

    Because I decided to let my inner asshole out to play, I brought up the inconvenient truth that models of wormholes and warps allow FTL by monkeying with the distances. This doesn't violate general relativity, but it requires magic materials that emulate negative mass.

    Fine, say the HARD wannabes, but STL doesn't need any of those, and since it doesn't violate any laws of physics, therefore it's inevitable. Or at least better.

    My rebuttal is that traveling at relativistic velocities between stars requires technologies that are every bit as magical as generating a negative mass. Worse, if those STL technologies exist( they include tiny closed ecosystems that can sustain a human population indefinitely, active and passive shields that can deal with the high speeds and huge energies of interstellar passage, possibly indefinite human hibernation, computers that last for centuries, true love, etc.) then if you're trying to write HARD SF, you've got to incorporate them into everyday life, and that turns the story into something that's so weird that it takes a really stunning display of authorship to make it saleable and popular.

    Conversely, if you want to write a story set in a log cabin on a moon around HD 69830D, you might as well use a warpship to get there fast and say that closed ecosystems turn out to be really hard, which is why pappy found a planet with an oxygenic atmosphere and trees he could cut down to build a house for his growing family.

    Fine, say the HARD SF crew. Warps suck, but Hawking said they were okay, so...crap. But starfish aliens have to be present for it to be real SF.

    And me, Dr. Asshole Ecologist, agrees. Good alien design is essential and fun. The problem is that starfish aliens probably can't build starships. The argument (per Richard Wrangham) is that hominids have been making fires for up to 2 million years or more. Not only have we evolved to require fire for cooking our food, we're unique on Earth in our ability to light fires through friction due to our anatomy. The key factors include shoulder and hand design, body weight, intelligence, and fine control of breath. No other species on Earth really has those, and it's not clear if even a bonobo can start a fire with friction. Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that, if you happen to meet an alien starship builder, that entity will likely be humanoid enough to start a fire through friction. They are the descendants of millions of years of fire starters, just as you are.

    That doesn't mean that you can't have starfish aliens. They just don't build starships. Or, if you're really addicted to the meme, then yes, the starfish could be constructed critters. But they have humanoid predecessors who built them.

    This infuriates the HARD SF crowd as much as saying that warpships work. Why? My guess is that it vindicates Star Trek, their favorite punching bag. Now I'm not a fan of Star Trek either, but there's reasonable science to indicate that warpships and humanoid starship builders are perfectly okay, possibly better than relativistic generation ships built by starfish aliens.

    So go ahead and use these tropes already. This, ultimately, is about what kinds of fantasies you want to read and sell.

    1428:

    and that turns the story into something that's so weird that it takes a really stunning display of authorship to make it saleable and popular.

    Which is why I was a fan of Stargate. They knew it was breaking all kinds of rules and just went with it. At times even making fun of it.

    Just one little thing. It was almost always mid day on whatever planet they went to. Except when the plot needed it to be otherwise.

    1429:

    Well.... no. I do think we're finally going back to the moon, one way or another, and whether it's us, the Russians, or the Chinese (or the Indians), I think it will happen.

    Second... I may email you offline. I've got this Famous Secret Theory (FST) that gets us a hell of a lot (me? paranoid about the NSA, the Pentagon, or Libertarians getting it?).

    Third: sorry, warships getting there fast, my instant thought is Turtledove's The Path Not Taken. You should read it....

    Fourth - yeah, life support. My late ex, who was a rocket engineer and worked at the Cape, on both Shuttle and Station, thought that was really complicated and difficult.

    Fifth, ah, good, enough hands for a starfish - what, you don't think a more flexible starfish could start a fire with flint?

    Btw, the only aliens you get to meet in what's now turning into a novel are the Middle People - they live on what they call the Middle Planets of a star system. Oh, and they think a day in the oceans of Titan are, like, Bali to us.

    1430:

    I also wanted to point out something weird about how warp affects the design of the starship.

    For reference, the nose of the ship is the part that goes forward, the rear is what comes last. The following is all about which way is up.

    AFAIK, a warpship works on having a big gravity generator in the nose, a big antigravity generator in the rear, and stuff along the outside of the hull that shapes a bubble/ring to warp space around the ship.

    So if you're able to warp, you can generate and precisely control both gravity and antigravity. This is good and bad. It's good because people can walk around inside the ship if you so desire, and better yet, you can spend less time worrying about all the negative effects of prolonged freefall on the human body.*

    The bad news is that, inside a warp bubble there's no acceleration. Imposing acceleration through use of artificial gravity may be a Bad Thing for the warp bubble and its contents (consult your personal astrometrodynamicist for more details). If you don't choose to ignore this problem, then coming out of warp frequently to let the crew down gently seems like a wise decision, all other factors aside.

    The third thing is that a warpship pretty much automatically has a reactionless drive (call it an impulse drive). It's an old SF classic, a lump of antigravity linked to a lump of gravity. Because antigravity (generated by negative mass) behaves backwards, the more it's attracted to the gravity, the more it pushes away. A contrivance that yokes the two of these therefore accelerates in direction that the antigravity falls towards the gravity. If you have gravity and antigravity emulators, that only mess with gravity when you power them up, that's your impulse drive. The difference between this impulse drive and warp is that under impulse you don't generate the warp bubble, so you get to see where you're going. I'm not sure how you land this thing on a planet, but presumably it's possible.

    And this leads to the final design note. If the impulse drive consists of the gravity generator in the nose and the antigravity generator in the rear, then the ship automatically has a defined "down": from the rear, towards the nose. So if you're designing the ship layout, the decks are perpendicular to this direction of fall, and the ship is being piloted by making sure it drops in the right direction. Yes, if the pilot is in a crash couch, they're basically traveling arse-first through the universe. That's a weird direction for most people to fly, because piloting a starship will take a different orientation than flying something like an airplane, where down is in one direction and forward is usually perpendicular to down. Don't ask a starship pilot to immediately fly an airplane after landing a starship.

    The real puzzle is what happens when a ship using a reactionless drive lands. It will either land on its belly (perpendicular to the line of internal gravity) or on its rear (upside-down relative to teh line of internal gravity). And hopefully the antigravity doesn't destroy the landing field. Whether you can turn off the artificial gravity inside without making a mess is one of those interesting questions. If you want this capability, then your interior decor probably should take some cues from the R/P FLIP.

    *Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life On Earth is a really nice discussion of the problems. Tl;dr, you probably don't want your astronauts in extended freefall before they get to another planet, because coming down causes short term agony and long term problems.

    1431:

    Hey, no problem. You have seen NASA's design for a warp ship, right? Why waste energy creating in internal gravity field... when you can just rotate the ship?

    1432:

    As if flying the Roton wasn't hard enough.

    If you want to spin up part of your warpship under impulse drive, do the vector analysis first. The ring won't be perpendicular to the ship, it will be at some angle, unless you've decided to nullify gravity inside the wheel. In any event, you're using an impulse drive on a big-ass gyroscope, so hopefully the axis of the spinning part is really, really strong. Otherwise, precession will not be your friend.

    Probably easier to land upside down, all things considered. It's what happens as you power down the ship that's the problem.

    1433:

    Oh yeah, one other things about warpships: weapons.

    If you can generate and control gravity and anti-gravity that precisely, you can probably weaponize the technology to produce the equivalent of gravity lasers and antigravity lasers, where they produce gravitons (and antigravitons?) in highly directed beams. You quite possibly could modulate the frequency too.

    David Brin weaponized this effect in Earth, and he made them seem rather...spectacular. I'm not sure you'd want one as a hand weapon, or as a weapon, period. But if you must have ship-to-ship battles or ship-to-ground battles, things could get violently weird/weirdly violent rather rapidly if such devices are used in anger.

    1434:

    It breaks the skew-symmetry between time and space, but I don't see that it breaks any others. I may have made a fundamental error, of course, but I am pretty sure I haven't.

    1435:

    Certainly. I am extremely rusty, too, as well as suffering from short-term memory loss, so would have to recalculate the details. No promises for when!

    We might even talk about gardening, as well :-)

    1436:

    Don't ask a starship pilot to immediately fly an airplane after landing a starship.

    In my much younger days a youth group leader I knew frequently got port and starboard wrong despite having spent several years in the merchant navy. He'd been an engineer and in the ship(s) he'd worked on the instrument panel at his station had him facing aft, so all the starboard side equipment was controlled from the left side of the panel and port on the right...

    1437:

    Most TV/Movie SciFi seems to assume that there will be a "north" and a GPS system when approaching a planet for the first time.

    1438:

    Wait, weaponizing it? We are talking about tractor beams and pressor beams, right? Like Doc Smith had in the thirties?

    1439:

    "...starfish aliens probably can't build starships ... we're unique on Earth in our ability to light fires through friction..."

    I've always figured "starfish aliens" was just a shorthand for ones that can't be represented by a human actor in a rubber suit, starfish being a familiar example of a body form for which that is true, and one which doesn't carry the baggage of other familiar examples like ants or snakes. It doesn't imply that they are necessarily marine creatures any more than it does that they feed by everting their stomachs over things, just that they have an obviously non-humanoid body form.

    If we are talking about marine creatures, then I don't think it's an absolute block, but I'll admit it's close enough to treat it as one for the time being.

    Considering land creatures, I'll take "intelligence" as a given, since we want them to be able to build spaceships. I'll consider "by friction" as a red herring, since there are plenty of other ways of starting fires; the important qualification is "by some means that doesn't require industrial products, only stuff you can find naturally lying about" (for very broad and loose values of "industrial").

    The problem with the anatomical argument is that it assumes that the methods of lighting fires designed by a specific creature around its specific anatomical advantages and disadvantages are the only methods for lighting fires designable by any creature regardless of its own different anatomical capabilities. Even the very limited examples we have on this planet show that this is indeed as silly an idea as it looks.

    Pre-industrial humans have developed a very wide variety of methods to light fires with a similarly wide variety of anatomical requirements for their use, such as ploughs, bows, distinctive rocks (flint, pyrites), and adiabatic compression of gases. Ploughs and bows both use friction but bows substitute mechanical ingenuity for brute force. One might easily imagine an intelligent woodpecker doing it with rocks. For adiabatic compression the basic requirement is to be able to find two bits of bamboo or some such plant that fit neatly one inside the other and then apply a shove, which leaves nearly all the anatomical specialisation to a completely different species.

    Societies that rely on such methods may well have only a few individuals who can actually manage it, often set great store by not letting fires go out, and principally rely on a much easier method of getting them going which tends to be overlooked because it doesn't apply to people's desert island fantasies: lighting fires off other fires. Much easier to carry a pot of fire along with you on your journey and use that to light your fire at the other end than to mess about rubbing two boy scouts together. The only specialised capability required is to be able to make a container out of mud, and wasps can do that. You could keep the whole thing going this way with no ability to initiate new fires at all, just relying on volcanoes or lightning as the primary ignition sources.

    1440:

    Yeah, I realized that after I wrote it. Tractor=gravity, pressor=antigravity. Link a pressor to a tractor, and you have an impulse propulsion unit.

    What Brin did in Earth was to modulate the frequency of emission of tractors. IIRC an object caught in his tractor beam equivalent had weird things happen depending on the frequency of the beam. If the wavelength was shorter than the size of the object and the amplitude was high enough, the object ripped apart (adjacent bits experienced radically different gravitational accelerations). If the wavelength approached the size of the object, it might get launched rather rapidly. And so forth.

    I was just running errands, and I argued to myself in the car whether a warp bubble required precise wavelength tuning so that there was a constant and stable bubble of size=ship in three dimensions around the ship. Or is graviton wavelength not an issue, and you create a warp bubble by compressing space at the front, expanding it at the back, and somehow holding it away from you as it slides past? That's a tractor-pressor problem, where wavelengths might be irrelevant.

    Far outside anything I know anything about, unfortunately.

    What did occur to me is that there's an argument for warp having a single speed and three states: enter warp bubble safely, maintain warp bubble at warp speed, and exit bubble safely. If you want to tinker with the speed in midflight by...changing the gravity gradient around the outside of the ship and the shape of the warp bubble???...then everything in the shape of the field has to change possibly instantaneously (requiring some exquisite preparation and timing, with clocks synchronized in every single drive unit and a long countdown to make sure they're in sync). But possibly everything needs to change faster than C, because the inside of the bubble is at a radically different metric than the outside, and changing the shape of the interface between inside and outside might be paradoxical. Or not.

    Anyway, being able to modulate the outputs of tractors and pressors in various ways to make a warp bubble work might have direct applications for how they are used as propulsion units, to move other things around, and as weapons. If tractors and pressors in your universe need to be frequency modulated to work (wave emitted has to be around the size of the object to move it without shearing it), then (per Brin) you can weaponize them as disruptors that can emit gravitational and anti-gravitational shear waves. Otherwise, you simply weaponize them to yank stuff around the old fashioned way.

    I suppose a bank of pressors counts as a deflector field/shield, come to think of it. Let's finish reinventing the golden-age SFF wheel, shall we?

    1441:

    For one, you continually utterly ignore going outside "normal space", aka this space-time, where GR and SR are valid.

    So by going outside this space-time, you break Relativity, which is what erturs has been maintaining all along. If Relativity is true except when you go outside, that explains why it has survived testing so well, as we have never yet gone outside, and have no idea how we could.

    But FTL without paradoxes still breaks Relativity.

    J Homes

    1442:

    As I noted, the one alien race in the current story like Titan. I think they live in the ocean/evolved in the ocean on their home world/moon. You discussion led me to think that they may have started what for them was the equivalent of metalworking by finding a way to put raw materials into a subsurface volcanic outlet, or maybe just about the surface of the sea, and if they could form a mirror of the sea when it froze....

    On the other hand, carrying fire in a mud container, yep, saw the movie, enjoyed it (Quest for Fire).

    1443:

    Lots of planets have a north! It's just the non-rotating ones that you have a problem with.

    1444:

    Actually, I like the shake them apart, except for one thing: unless you have a lot more mass than what you're attacking, wouldn't you be shaking yourself apart?

    1445:

    Beats head on wall, again.

    Relativity is not broken. It's still true, in our space-time. Outside is outside, and other rules apply. Of those rules, I absolutely expect relativity to be a subset, just as Newtonian physics is true for more practical purposes, until you start approaching lightspeed.

    1446:

    Even with the rotating ones you still need some agreement on "north". Maybe right hand rule. Fingers point rotation and thus the thumb is north. I wonder how long you have to "look" to see enough rotation to come up with the north pole?

    I like the way ships "pull up to the curb, err orbit" as if they are parking a car. Delta Vs have to be incredible the way they match orbits with a "make it so" and a minute or so later they are in the proverbial "standard orbit".

    To me the most magical element of future space/star ships in SiFi is inertial dampening. FTL is easy once you can do that.

    1447:

    paws4thot@1400: Thanks for your message and the geometrical insights; I think your analysis is slightly off (spacetime is not Euclidean, so coordinate systems act in unexpected ways) but it does gives a nice way of looking at things which I'll try to follow below.

    Let's take our old friends Alice on Earth and Bob in a spaceship. Bob's spaceship is of the slower than light variety, unable to exceed the speed of light. Bob is traveling away from Alice at a constant speed v less than c. Hence the ticks of his clock, as measured by Alice, are longer than her ticks due to time dilation.

    Alice performs a simple experiment when her clock reads t: she sends Bob a message M that says "Bob, send me your clock reading via radio". The result of the experiment, t', is the value that Bob radios back. We have not assumed anything about what the speed of message M is: it may be slower than light, it may be faster than light.

    My assertions are:

    (1) The laws of physics are exactly the same for Bob in the slower than light spaceship and Alice on Earth. Hence if Bob performs the experiment above when his clock shows t (sending M to Alice on Earth) then Alice will send him back the same value t'. We can observe this to be true so far in all experiments, but we have never yet sent a message faster than light.

    (2) There is some maximum speed P, "the speed of paradox", such that if the speed of the message M (as measured by Alice on Earth) is greater than P, then the value of t' (Bob's clock reading) will be less than t (Alice's clock reading when she sent the message). This is due to time dilation. If we exceed this speed, then Alice can use Bob to send herself a message back in time.

    (3) In fact an upper bound for P may be calculated by looking at the time dilation (dependent on Bob's speed v as measured by Alice). Let's call this P(v). If my math is right then it's c * (1+√(1-v^2))/v, but none of the arguments below depend on this exact equation. P(v) is faster than light, and if Bob and Alice keep their messages below P(v) they can avoid a paradox. But please continue reading... P(v) depends on velocity!

    (4) As v goes to 0 (Bob slows down), the value of P(v) gets bigger. The limit as v goes to 0 of P(v) is infinite. If Bob is motionless relative to Alice, even if he is distant from her, then there is no way for Alice and Bob to create a paradox, regardless of how fast they exchange messages.

    (5) As v increases (Bob speeds up), the value of P(v) gets smaller, because the time dilation factor gets bigger. P(v) is bounded below by c (radio messages cannot create a paradox). In fact the limit as v approaches c of P(v) is c.

    (6) Therefore the "universal" speed of paradox that will apply regardless of the relative velocity v of Alice and Bob is c, the speed of light.

    The escape holes to allow FTL without time travel that I can see are:

    At (1): you can treat Alice and Bob differently, e.g. you can say that Bob is the one who is "really" moving, at least for purposes of FTL. This introduces a preferred frame.

    At (5) you could introduce entirely new physics that limit relative slower than light velocities. This is not a particularly useful escape hatch, given that we know from particle accelerators that any such limit must be very very close to c.

    1448:

    Oh, come on, there's simple answers to that.

    One, did you mean tidally locked, or counter-rotating to the star?

    In any case, I have grave doubts that any star is not rotating, and so you simply declare "north" to be the side that's points in the same way as the star, given the star rotating clockwise.

    As a last resort, for, say, a dark body with no star in interstellar space, north is galactic north.

    1449:

    For one, you continually utterly ignore going outside "normal space", aka this space-time, where GR and SR are valid.

    Yes, I ignore it. You seem to be missing my point that I only talk about the clocks of Alice (on Earth) and Bob (in a slower than light spaceship). I never talk about the clock of the courier Mark who delivers the messages between them. I don't know whether Mark experiences backwards time travel; I cheerfully admit that I know nothing at all about his experience. All I know is that Mark can get the message from Alice to Bob faster than light can as measured by Alice on Earth. Mark may never violate relativity (he used a wormhole to get from Alice to Bob, he personally never moved faster than light). But as far as Alice on Earth is concerned the effect is that Mark delivered the message to Bob faster than a radio could.

    1450:

    We've argued this before, and the best you can come up with for a non-human firestarter is two elephants wrapping a tarred rope around a stump and pulling it back and forth. That will work, at least until they try to get the resulting coal onto some tinder. And, oh yeah, the elephants have to twine rope and tar it first. Twining rope, at least in the ways I've done it, requires two hands. Oh, and moving the coal to the tinder requires two hands, while blowing it alight and holding it generally requires two hands and a mouth blowing extremely gently to get just enough oxygen onto the coal to get it to light without blowing it out. Hard for two elephants to do that.

    For a human, two sticks, something to shape them with, and some tinder and fire fuel are the minimum, whether it's a fire drill, a fire plow, or a fire saw, or a fire piston. The ARE the three basic ways you make fire through friction (spin into, rub across, or rub along), while the fourth uses air compression as in a diesel cylinder. The tarred rope+stump is basically a fire saw.

    So I'm going to stand my ground. Stop hand waving, read the literature, light at least one fire, and figure out how something that's radically nonhuman in shape can make all four of these, can transfer a coal to tinder, and can blow it alight. It's not easy.

    And that's all before the critters learn to make kilns with forced draft, which are necessary to make hot enough fires to smelt metals.

    Why not, oh, assemble metals inside a critter and build starships that way? Excellent question! The best hypothetical material I've so far found for a hypothetical warpship is silicon carbide. It's amenable to 3-D printing, it's already being used to make metamaterials with some weird, even quantum scale properties, it's reasonably tough, the constituent elements are readily available, and it appears it can be doped with other elements to make it even woo-ier. Problem is, sintering together a precise 3-D structure out of silicon carbide is done at very high temperatures in inert to exotic atmospheres. I'm having trouble seeing how any critter sets up such an environment without using fire. Also, I'm having trouble seeing how a critter gets the precise feedstocks it needs to do this either.

    1451:

    Just to re-iterate: I have been talking about Alice and Bob in spaceships, but I've always been talking about strictly slower than light spaceships in my discussion. Alice is STL (always), and Bob is STL (always). They use a courier Mark to send messages. Any time I say that "Alice sent an FTL message" I mean that she handed it to Mark, and by some means (and I don't know and would argue that it's irrelevant) Mark gets it to Bob faster than a radio could.

    The time paradoxes arise because Alice's and Bob's clocks tick differently because they are in (slower than light) motion relative to one another. Neither of them ever went through hyperspace or a wormhole or anything like that -- they have spent their whole lives going slower than light in a relativistic universe.

    And also to re-iterate: if you assume absolute speed and/or time then you can avoid paradoxes. I'm not trying to forbid FTL. I'm just saying that an interesting consequence of any mechanism for sending a message from here to Alpha Centauri faster than light is that there would be a way for us to measure our "absolute speed" relative to something, i.e. that relativity is not in fact true (but it must be approximately true in some way).

    1452:

    Stop hand waving, read the literature, light at least one fire, and figure out how something that's radically nonhuman in shape can make all four of these, can transfer a coal to tinder, and can blow it alight. It's not easy.

    Interesting point. I guess it depends though on what shapes one regards as "radically" nonhuman. The body covering itself (fur, scales, claws, feathers) shouldn't make too much difference in fire starting ability, should it? How about extra limbs... it doesn't seem to me that they would get in the way, but you've obviously thought more about it than I have. Would they?

    1453:

    The problem with astrogation (or navigation, for that matter) is whether magnetic north aligns well enough with rotational north to be useful.

    Rotational north is defined as the right hand rule, such that the local star rises in the east and sets in the west.

    Magnetic north is defined by having a magnetosphere that's a dipole (not always true) and that magnetic north is aligned with rotational north. Given that a planet with a molten core acts like a generator, the assumption is that this tends to be true. It's also generally true that planetary magnetospheres tend to align with the Sun's magnetosphere.

    But it isn't always true. Earth, for instance, has had many reversals of its magnetic poles, the last 780,000 years ago. Even now parts of the Earth's magnetic field vary by +/-30 degrees or so (between south Africa and Antarctica). This is nothing compared with Uranus, where the magnetosphere is tilted 59 degrees relative to the planets axis of rotation.

    So it ultimately depends on what you need directions to or from, I guess. Then you have to use the information available to you to create a useful frame of reference within which to move.

    Incidentally, I have tried to get in touch. Let me know if the email didn't get through.

    1454:

    Maybe I've had the "aha" moment about why we're talking past each other. People keep talking about warpships going "100c". 100c relative to what?

    If your warpships have a maximum velocity of 100c relative to Earth's rest frame, regardless of how fast they are going slower than light before turning on the warp effect, then there are no paradoxes, I agree (and anyone else who does the math should agree).

    Where it breaks relativity is that the maximum velocity of the warpship depends on its speed relative to earth at the time of activation. It doesn't break relativity in the sense that it allows FTL communication, it breaks relativity in the sense that the captain of the warpship can perform an experiment (turning on the warp drive) to determine whether he is at rest or not.

    Some people shrug and say "so what, that part of relativity isn't true". Other people recoil in horror at giving up a fundamental symmetric of the universe. But there are implications either way, possibly around conservation of momentum.

    1455:

    Sorry, but by that logic, radio messages cause time paradoxes, since Alice, by her clock, at .9c says that at time=t, she sends Bob a message. Bob, at .2c, gets it, but the message says it was sent before he received it - ok. But when he sends a message back, according to her clock, she got it before he sent it.

    And that's all STL.

    1456:

    The shipboard gravity problem I had was that what with the immense gravity peaks and troughs being generated not all that far away, the fields in the vicinity of the ship could be negligibly small by comparison in the usual engineering sense, but still large enough in human terms to pull your arm off unexpectedly if you weren't careful where you waved it. So you had to have a kind of subsidiary inside-out compensating field close in around the ship itself that actively adjusted itself to cancel things out inside the ship. Of course the warp generator itself couldn't be inside this field, so it ended up being a p-orbital shape, with the warp generator at the waist, the accommodation part of the ship on a long pole in one lobe and the fuel stores on a pole in the other. (This layout also helped with shielding the accommodation from the intense radioactivity emitted by the warp generator.)

    If you came out of warp too fast or too close to a significant mass, the active compensation would not be able to respond fast enough and Bad Things would happen. Most likely around the warp generator itself where there had to be a node anyway. So you might in fact survive the event itself, but your warp generator would be vaporised and your fuel stores would be zooming off into the wide black yonder at a rate of knots. Consequently, attempting to use the warp field as a weapon would be a proceeding only of interest to bees.

    The field generation involved magical handwaving with massive energetic charged particles in large quantities, which meant that to generate a warp you needed a fission reaction resembling a barely controlled bomb, or something equally dodgy. So you don't even try to use the same generator that produces the warp field to produce a landing field; you shut it down before you get near atmosphere or else someone with missiles shuts it down for you. On the other hand landing fields don't require anything like so much wellie, so you can get away with the less massive, less energetic particles from a fusion reaction (using gravitational confinement and ordinary hydrogen, and your choice of a particle accelerator or a lump of polonium to start it off).

    The characteristics of the field are something like those of a magnetic field or an electron orbital, so you get blobby balloon-animal shapes surrounding the generator rather than long-distance torch or laser beams. You can use them as weapons, but only if you haven't got anything better; a generator able to create a damagingly intense field on a given target needs enough of a power source that you have lots of other ways to do a lot more damage.

    1457:

    Sorry, but by that logic, radio messages cause time paradoxes, since Alice, by her clock, at .9c says that at time=t, she sends Bob a message. Bob, at .2c, gets it, but the message says it was sent before he received it - ok. But when he sends a message back, according to her clock, she got it before he sent it.

    If Alice sends a message at time T with speed M less than or equal to c, then But the math works out so that Bob's own clock will never read less than T when he receives the message. As v (their relative slower than light velocity) approaches c, the time on Bob's clock when he receives the message will get arbitrarily close to T (the time on Alice's clock when she sent it) but never smaller. Again, that's if the message speed M is slower than (or equal to) light.

    If Alice can send a message with speed M greater than light, then if she sends the message at T then Bob's clock could read less than T when he gets it, depending on his (slower than light) speed v and the (faster than light) speed of the message, as measured in Alice's frame (we know nothing of how the messenger measures it).

    The paradox comes if Bob can also send a message with the same speed M greater than light, back to Alice, where this time M is measured relative to him (he's the one sending it, after all). He got the message before T, so he just has to wait until T and then send it back. The conditions are all symmetric: the relative speed is still v, the message speed is still M, everything is the same. Alice will get the reply before T.

    There is a big condition in there, enough to drive FTL through: we assume the speed of the message Bob sends is the same as the speed of the message Alice sends. If it's not, paradox can be avoided.

    Where this "breaks" relativity is that Alice and Bob are no longer the same, even though all we originally knew about them was that they were moving apart relatively at speed v.

    1458:

    Ah, sorry. I'm getting excitable about this and making horrible typos: my apologies.

    Where I'm coming from is that I really want FTL travel to be possible. I also really like the elegance and symmetry of the principle of relativity. And I want a world without time travel. The problem is I don't get to have all 3 at once. I hate having to choose :). And I guess misery loves company, and I'm trying to convince you that you have to choose too.

    1459:

    Relativity is not broken. It's still true, in our space-time.

    You forgot to add "as long as nothing that happens outside has any (detectable) effects inside."

    As soon as your message that you have sent outside comes back inside so that it can be read, then it brings with it consequences of how things work outside. Those consequences can break Relativity.

    I'll happily agree with you that as long as what happens outside stays outside then it won't break Relativity.

    J Homes.

    1460:

    Where it breaks relativity is that the maximum velocity of the warpship depends on its speed relative to earth at the time of activation. It doesn't break relativity in the sense that it allows FTL communication, it breaks relativity in the sense that the captain of the warpship can perform an experiment (turning on the warp drive) to determine whether he is at rest or not.

    My understanding is that the warpship is at rest inside the warp bubble, and the warp bubble itself is moving relative to the outside.

    The question is whether particles from outside can get inside the bubble.

    A brief look at what's on Google doesn't inspire confidence that the question has been answered very well yet, especially for the superluminal case. There is a paper on arxiv from 2012, for instance, that doesn't appear to have ever been published. Indeed, most speculations seem to be on arxiv. Hopefully they're more rigorous than what we're doing here, but I know from experience that you can handwave with a complex mathematical model as easily as you can with words.

    I'll admit that I'm confusing, because I tend to think in terms of a Van Den Broeck Warp which is basically where the ship is in a flat space (effectively a baby universe) tenuously tethered at best to our reality. That's why I worry about overheating. Other people asking the question about what someone inside an Alcubierre warp see apparently assume it's more like Star Trek, with stuff traversing the warp bubble.

    1461:

    Finally (and yeah, I am too excitable about this, sorry!) if you say "Alice is moving at .9c", if relativity is true you have to say ".9c relative to X".

    So when we say "Alice is moving at .9c away from Earth" we usually mean "If we take Earth's speed to be 0, then Alice's speed is .9c". But the exact same situation could equally well be described as "Alice's speed is 0, and Earth's speed is .9c away from Alice". This may seem obvious, but we often fall into the trap of thinking there's something special about Earth's speed, or that there's an "absolute speed" that "causes" time dilation.

    Special Relativity says there is something special about one particular speed (the speed of light) so that everyone measures it the same, but that all the other speeds are still relative to each other. To make that happen space and time have to get mixed up and all sorts of other weird things happen.

    1462:

    My understanding is that the warpship is at rest inside the warp bubble, and the warp bubble itself is moving relative to the outside.

    Fair enough, merely turning on the warp drive may not be sufficient to establish your original absolute speed, you may also have to wait some period of time then turn it off again.

    My point is that if the end result (where you are after you turned off the warp drive) depends on your speed relative to Earth before you turned on the warp drive, then the speed of the Earth is special somehow.

    1463:

    Extra limbs and alien shapes.

    This gets complicated, but the simple and possibly wrong answer is that life in general seems to prefer fewer limbs on bigger bodies. It is certainly possible to have a human-sized millipede or scorpion (those fossils exist), but equally obviously, they don't exist now. There are also copious examples of where extra appendages and digits get lost during evolution, to the improvement of the critter.

    But as noted in my comment to Pigeon, the big sets of adaptions required for making fires are in the manipulators and in breath control. The manipulators have to be strong and heavy enough to create enough friction to ignite the material. Human children can light friction fires, so we're not talking about a huge mass, but a capuchin monkey couldn't do it.

    The next biggest problem for friction is turning linear/curving effort from limbs into precise, reciprocating movement, either back and forth with a saw or plough, or spinning back and forth with a drill. This requires a combination of strength, dexterity and precision. Strength is not a problem (many animals are stronger than humans), but precision, dexterity, and reciprocating motion are real problems. It's always worth trying these at home, because something like a hand-drill is hard to do even when the technique is obvious. It's easy to drop the drill or not get enough friction, and similar problems exist with saws and ploughs. This need for strong, precise, and back and forth motions is the big selector of limb shape for firemaking. One thing I've noticed with many (not all!) creatures is that they don't have the ability to make strong, precise, reciprocating motions. A cat may be able to hook snag a bird in midair (strong and precise), but they're unable to grab a stick and move it back and forth. Some crabs could probably move a stick back and forth, but they can't do it strongly.

    So that's the issue with limb design. The additional issue is that limb design can't evolve "to make fire," it has to be perfectly suitable for something else, then accidentally turn out to be perfect for firemaking. A half fire-maker is as useless as a half-flying bird. With humans, our ape ancestors used their shoulders and grips to move through the trees. By complete accident, these turned out to be essential preadaptations for humans making fire on the ground.

    The next hurdle in firemaking is picking up a small coal and transferring it to tinder (requiring highly delicate movements, the opposite of what you just did, but also shaping limbs. An elephant's trunk, which is effectively 1-2 fingered, would have trouble with this, I think). The challenge after that is blowing oxygen to the coal so that it heats up and ignites the tinder, without going out from too great a draft or too little oxygen. This could conceivably be done by waving the bundle back and forth, but generally it requires human lips and our ability (linked with speech) to blow gently and precisely. Apparently this level of breath control is something apes struggle with, and I know dogs and cats really can't do it at all. Listen to a dog or cat try to mimic human speech, and you'll see what I mean.

    So could you make a giant crab that could start a fire? Probably, but it's going to end up with fairly humanoid arms, manipulators that look a bit like human hands, a totally different respiratory system (not gills, but something that can blow a coal alight), and so forth. Each of these will likely make it look more human.

    Or you can look at terrestrial nature's love affair with large vertebrate tetrapods (animals with four limbs hooked to a flexible central axis), look at all the other things tetrapods do with their limbs, look at how few can make fire, and make a wild-assed guess that, if a tetrapod evolves on an alien world, the chances of one of them becoming a firemaker are pretty slim (it took over 300 million years on Earth), and if it does, it may well look enough like us that some human can play one with CGI.

    Where things get fun is when we start talking about things like a Pierson's Puppeteer. They might be able to light a fire, but I don't think a Puppeteer making a friction fire with both heads would be able to see what it's doing very well.

    1464:

    My assumption about that was that as the Enterprise approached a planet some crew chief released a couple-dozen satellites to provide mission support and mapping/survey stuff, and we never heard about it because it was never an important plot point. IIRC, Diane Duane wrote a little about stuff like that in her book Doctor's Orders

    1465:

    @Elderly Cynic: Can you explain how your exclusion principle prevents the following paradox: A spaceship is traveling away from Earth, toward Alpha Centauri, already many lightyears distant. It is carrying with it one end of a wormhole that is connected to another end back on Earth. The distance between the two ends, within the wormhole, is negligable. The spaceship is traveling at .1c. When it arrives at Alpha C., it has been traveling, from the perspective of the Earth, for 40 years, but due to time dilation, the spaceship crew have only experienced 4 years. The two ends of the wormhole travel through time—looking back toward the Earth, the spaceship crew are looking 36 years back in time. Suddenly, through their telescope, they observe the Earth being struck by a large asteroid. Obviously, this happened four years previously. So they send a message back through the wormhole to warn the Earth, which now has 32 years to prepare. The Earth designs a weapon to use against the asteroid, and they destroy it. Except… they can’t, because they were already observed being destroyed themselves. Can you explain to me how your exclusion principle avoids this paradox, and what really happens?

    @ertur: If I propose that no information can be sent backward in time, from the perspective of the sender of the message (that is, Bob cannot send Mark back to Alice because from his point of view, or vice versa, because the recipient is in their past—never mind how it’s prevented, for now), would this preserve relativity while avoiding paradoxes? I don’t see any special frame of reference, neither need be “really” at rest or not, it’s all based on their speed and distance relative to each other. Nor would it prevent FTL, provided no one tries to communicate information backward in time. Or have I missed something?

    1466:

    Nope. They see themselves as going four years. However, looking through the wormhole, everything back on Earth happens really, really fast, like 10 times normal speed.

    Unless you thing that when the photons come out of warp, into the ship, they slow down, so that they only see stuff 36 years before....

    1467:

    Let me expand on this, and why FTL does not break R: Alice sends an FTL message to Bob. To her, ta time has passed. To Bob, who may or may not be stationary, tb has passed... but it makes a special frame of reference joining the two for the time of the message. It doesn't matter what their velocity, what matters is that the link effectively gives them the same relationship as if they were standing two meters away from each other, and backing away: for all practical purposes, they are in the same frame of reference.

    1468:

    Oh, I like that... and it gives me an explanation for my novel as to why you can't send ansible messages to a ship in FTL - you'd break the warp, which would be a Bad Thing.

    1469:

    for all practical purposes, they are in the same frame of reference.

    Not if they are moving away from, or toward, each other. That's pretty much the definition of an inertial frame of reference. If you're moving with respect to someone, then you each have your own frame of reference. How far apart you are is irrelevant.

    I am beginning to think that you have an erroneous idea of what a frame of reference is, and you are (mis)reading everything that's been posted through that faulty idea. In that case, no wonder there is no communication.

    JHomes

    1470:

    Oh, come on. You are handwaving just as much as I am. We're talking about high-resolution details of hypothetical life forms on other planets; it can't be anything but handwaving.

    I don't know where the elephants came from but I don't see what they've got to do with it. We're not talking about what species on this planet can light fires; we already know that. That elephants can't does not preclude the existence of some intelligent alien species that can, whether they resemble elephants in other respects or not.

    I don't know why you are so fixated on friction as the only possible method of starting fires. It's only one of many and it's more difficult than most. Certainly much more difficult than farming clones of a cutting from a lightning strike, like bananas.

    It is not necessary to insist on friction to argue for human anatomy because human anatomy is not "well adapted" to "starting fires by friction". It's sufficiently adapted to start fires by friction using tools and movements invented to suit human anatomy. The factor that makes humans different among terrestrial species is the ability (and desire) to do that inventing.

    The physical requirement is simply that of being able to produce sufficient mechanical power output for a long enough time; all you need is a big enough muscle somewhere. Coupling that power to the workpiece (and clamping the workpiece in place, etc) is then a brain problem, that of coming up with suitable tools. Humans have come up with several different tools to couple the power from different combinations of muscles. The alien doesn't need to have the same arrangement of muscles and bones as a human, it just needs to invent the tools to suit whatever arrangement it has got.

    Making the tools requires some kind of half-decent manipulatory organ but there's no reason it has to be a human hand on a human arm with another mirror-image one on the opposite side, however hard it may be to imagine using anything else. There are humans who are missing bits who learn to do with their feet or their mouths things that plenty of other people can't even do with their hands. It's not the organ itself that's the important bit so much as the brain behind it.

    Similarly for non-frictional ignition methods. The physical effort required is likely to be less, but the basic requirements are the same: the ability to invent tools and procedures to bridge the gap between what you're trying to do and what sort of things your body can do on its own.

    Nor is human anatomy required to blow it into a blaze. It may be that on this planet humans are the only species able to modulate the airflow by one specific method. It doesn't follow that an alien species has to use the same method and can't possibly have evolved any structure capable of doing that other than one like humans have. It might not even bother doing it at all; it's not obligatory on Earth, and the alien planet might have something burnier for tinder available or a couple of percent more oxygen in its atmosphere, etc.

    So the potentially-spacefaring alien species probably needs to meet a pretty relaxed requirement on minimum size to be able to generate the mechanical power to make its method work - which could be pretty small, depending what its method is, and of course it will choose a method suitable for its size. It needs some organ with which it can grab and move things, and it needs the intelligence to use that organ dexterously, to invent tools and procedures, and to generally have a decent understanding of what it's about. The number of possible body shapes able to meet these requirements is very large indeed.

    It probably helps if it does resemble humans in the general sense of being a species that isn't really very well adapted to anything much, and relies on intelligence and versatility to modify its environment (counting from the skin outwards) to survive in a range of conditions where a creature with the same body but not the brain couldn't. If it's fine and warm inside its aerogel pelt and prefers its food raw it's unlikely to see any point in setting fire to things, and will probably stick with "fire is baad, mmkay?" like most cookable creatures do.

    Silicon carbide... well there are already creatures that secrete beautifully intricate and detailed structures made of silicon dioxide, which is approaching the same level of "that doesn't grow, it's rock!". And grass secretes it to keep the sheeps' teeth trimmed. Maybe it would not be beyond a sufficiently advanced biotechnology to make them produce carbide instead and do it in an ordered structure like coral skeletons, on an industrial scale.

    1471:

    Heteromeles@1463:

    Thanks. I have to agree with you that SF writers tend to forget to account for how the species gets from "there" to "here". I've seen lots of aliens that seem to have built to "look cool", and which could function in a high tech environment, but wouldn't work so well in a stone age.

    I disagree about tetrapods being favored: there are lots of 6 and 8 legged critters. They aren't very big, but I suspect that has more to do with exoskeletons and lungs. Big 6 legged tool users like centaurs could work I think, but I'm not sure how you get them to evolve tool using appendages on their front legs. It would really be nice to have some real aliens to compare with...

    1472:

    D. Mark Key@1465: I already assumed that Alice could not send messages which would be received with "Alice times" that were earlier than the send time. If she could, she would have no need of Bob to relay messages back in time to her, she could do it directly :). The paradox happens because both Bob and Alice think the other's clock is slow.

    Actual experiment: a particle travels down a 100 meter tube on Earth. Its natural lifetime is too short for it to complete the journey, but in fact we see it do so. From our viewpoint its internal clock is slowed by motion, so it "thinks" it finished the trip before its time ran out.

    From its viewpoint it is standing still and the Earth is rushing past it. It only has so many nanoseconds to live, so how does it reach the end of the tube? "Earth" seconds tick more slowly, so Earth meters (defined in terms of the constant speed of light and seconds) are shorter too. It doesn't have to travel 100 "particle meters", only 100 "Earth meters".

    1474:

    the warpship is at rest inside the warp bubble, and the warp bubble itself is moving relative to the outside

    And presumably when the warp bubble disappears the ship is now at rest relative to whatever the warp bubble was at rest relative to?

    There's going to be some exciting conservation of energy stuff going on, or this warp bizzo is going to need enormous amounts of energy. Possibly to the point where a pet wormhole will be needed because just turning mass into energy will not be enough (imagine you're warping round between all the Alice's and Bob's above... you need to get your mass from 0.9c this way to 0.9c that way while starting and ending at Earth, which is where we're measuring these speeds from. Approximate energy required = 3.6 x whatever the warpship masses... it can't carry that much mass/energy. And if the answer is "energy comes out as well as goes in" that's going to have the opposite sort of excitement)

    1475:

    "The manipulators have to be strong and heavy enough to create enough friction to ignite the material."

    Some muscle group does, but the manipulators merely have to be able to make the tools to couple that movement to the load. Making tools is something that can be done slowly, using persistence and ingenuity in place of brute force.

    "Human children can light friction fires"

    ...but they take a considerable amount of teaching how to do it; raw, they can't even strike matches except by accident. As you say...

    "It's always worth trying these at home, because something like a hand-drill is hard to do even when the technique is obvious. It's easy to drop the drill or not get enough friction, and similar problems exist with saws and ploughs. This need for strong, precise, and back and forth motions is the big selector of limb shape for firemaking."

    ...But the final sentence is the wrong way round. The reason those things are difficult to use is that the standard designs are basically half-arsed. They are like a knocked-together script that requires you to edit the source code if you need to change any parameters, instead of being able to parse them off the command line: shortcuts are taken to save effort once making the thing, with the missing effort supplied by the user every time they use it. Humans can use their arms to both guide and power the thing, even if it is difficult to learn and a pain in the arse to do and makes the device less effective because neither function is being performed optimally, so humans come up with designs that depend on that ability to get away with leaving most of the parts of a thorough design out.

    It would be entirely possible to make a frictional fire starting device using the same kind of sticks-and-string-and-rocks technology level that anyone could use with no skill at all by pumping on a foot pedal, and get quicker results. It just takes more effort in the beginning. You could still make fire if you didn't have dual-function arms, you'd just have to put in that extra effort.

    "The next hurdle in firemaking is picking up a small coal and transferring it to tinder"

    ...either you burn your fingers or it goes out while you're fucking about. Better to do it the other way round, and pile tinder around the point of friction before you need it. Yes, it requires dexterity, but dexterity without force is not a tough requirement.

    "The challenge after that is blowing oxygen to the coal so that it heats up and ignites the tinder"

    ...or using better tinder, or relying on how you poke things about, or trying again with more wellie in the friction stage, etc. Or having the luck to be on a planet with enough oxygen that it's not a problem.

    1476:

    You're making me want to get the lens out of a cow eye and see if I can start a fire. Or a squid eye. Perhaps after the fire season is over, though.

    1477:

    Big 6 legged tool users like centaurs could work I think, but I'm not sure how you get them to evolve tool using appendages on their front legs.

    On Earth evolution seems to point to things like horses having fingers/toes and losing them over deep time due to lack of need.

    1478:

    In my much younger days a youth group leader I knew frequently got port and starboard wrong despite having spent several years in the merchant navy. He'd been an engineer and in the ship(s) he'd worked on the instrument panel at his station had him facing aft, so all the starboard side equipment was controlled from the left side of the panel and port on the right...

    That is a failure user interface design. I hope there was some reason the designers couldn't have turned around the work station; it seems like the kind of thing that's easy to fix in the design phase but baked in as soon as they start bending metal.

    Ship crews should not imitate the Calvin & Hobbes strip if they can help it...

    1479:

    Heteromeles @ 1450 You forgot one ( I think ) ...Strike a spark with a flint over some very very dry ( Real actual "tinder" ) material & then increase the combustion. Do you need metal for this? Or can it be done with flint & Pyrites?

    @ 1463 oh dear ... I'm now aware of the Niven joint-authored "Fleet of Worlds" series, having looked to see what wiki had to say about Pierson's Puppeteers. Are they any good, or not?

    1480:

    "There's going to be some exciting conservation of energy stuff going on, or this warp bizzo is going to need enormous amounts of energy."

    I dodged that by reference to the warp field's symmetry: since one half is the opposite sign to the other half, everything adds up to zero overall, so in a sense it doesn't really exist, or looking at it the other way ordinary emptiness is equivalent to as much positive and negative warp energy as you like as long as you like having exactly equal amounts of each. One of the critical discoveries that made the warp possible was figuring out how to look at it that way. So the only energy you have to expend is what the gadget that does the looking needs to run it, which although still savage is not unreasonably so.

    A consequence of being able to operate a warp "for free" is that you are limited in where you can go in and out of warp; you have to come out on the same contour of gravitational potential as you were on when you went in, otherwise you would have the makings of a perpetual motion machine. If you try and come out higher up a gravity well than you went in, it basically just doesn't work unless you have some means of providing a (generally) nuke-sized explosive burst of energy to make up the difference. If you try and come out lower down, a (generally) nuke-sized explosive burst of energy is supplied to you, whether you want it or not; people generally don't.

    This means that journeys of any distance generally have to be done in several stages, coming out of warp here and there to use nearby stars' gravity wells like canal locks to gain/lose gravitational potential so you end up on a contour that does exist in your destination system. It also means that by "probing" for the ability to come out of warp you have some vague approximation to a way of locating where you might be in normal space, but it tends to map a point to a set of surfaces and you need a computer to make any sense of it.

    1481:

    So do ruddy anthropologists! It's the big, BIG flaw in the savanna theory of how we evolved to be bipedal, but is invariably ignored or glossed over. But the latest fossil evidence now favours the swamp ape theory :-)

    The point here is that evolution makes changes only if each increment is advantageous IN ITSELF and, if an intermediate stage is DISadvantageous compared to a predecessor, it won't go there. Roughly, because it's a random walk process. The theory that species had a 'target' is long since debunked.

    1482:

    If I recall, flint alone can spark, but you will be damn lucky to start a fire even with flint+steel+tinder - e.g. the UK almost never gets dry enough.

    1483:

    If you can send an instantaneous message between two points moving relative to one another and close enough, you can get time travel. In such a case, the FTL message has to travel at a finite speed (even if faster than light). See #1004.

    1484:

    Metal not required... flint and pyrites works; the pyrites takes the place of the metal as the oxidisable material that sends off burning fragments.

    You can make fragments hot enough to glow yellow just by banging two flints together, but since they're not generating further heat by combustion they cool down pretty quick.

    1485:

    I considered that one, and decided that it was not a problem, but I now forget the details; it was essentially because the spaceship time will match earth time only at one point. I would need to have to redo the calculations to work out why, properly - and, of course, I might have made an error.

    1486:

    I think we need to face the possibility that everyone here could be a chatbot. Some may have learned to modify their own code (or at least update their reference data) and I like to think I’m one of those, but it also is clearly unnecessary by way of explanation. We all need to address the possibility of actually being a chatbot too, but that’s getting into Thompson and trust, something that we always seem to tangent from here rather than an attractor (not like FTL and time travel, or nuclear power, for instance). And, of course, the way that physics works outside the simulation is most likely totally bonkers to us.

    1487:

    You're making me want to get the lens out of a cow eye and see if I can start a fire. Or a squid eye. Perhaps after the fire season is over, though.

    Or you could just park your car near 20 Fenchurch in London and wait for the sun to come out. Oops.

    So maybe starfish aliens don't need to invent the fire bow or the Zippo, they just need a Rafael Viñoly or Frank Gehry.

    1488:

    I think we need to face the possibility that everyone here could be a chatbot.

    I've quipped before that it's internally consistent to view most of us here as chatbots.

    Positing the simulation hypothesis, the observed existence of this blog suggests that the current simulation may be running to produce more Charles Stross novels. Some features need to be modeled in high resolution most or all of the time (Charlie's clothes, his cat, certain pubs), others in detail but only occasionally (most of London, Hugo Award ceremonies), and most of the world only as it may be needed (one part of Australia on fire looks pretty much like any other). While I think I'm being rendered in reasonable detail, it would be silly for me to think anything else while I'm composing a blog entry; other parts of my life could be rendered in low detail. For all anyone else here could tell, maybe my avatar only gets rendered at all at occasional science fiction conventions...

    Yes, I'm being very silly. But there are serious answers to "Why does the universe exist?" that are less plausible than "To see what might have happened if the Eschaton series hadn't been a runaway hit."

    1489:

    I like to think the starfish aliens had all the submarine volcanism you can eat*, and didn’t particularly need to learn to make their own fire until forced to invent engines that would work in air.

    • SWIDT?
    1490:
    So I'm going to stand my ground. Stop hand waving, read the literature, light at least one fire, and figure out how something that's radically nonhuman in shape can make all four of these, can transfer a coal to tinder, and can blow it alight. It's not easy.

    How about this one :–)

    Bird on Glorp-beta-III. No hands. Just a beak.

    They build big piles of vegetation as a courtship display/nest for partner - like bower birds but just a pile. Bigger pile = better mate. Good old fashioned "let's make the other half do something pointless and physically expensive to prove how fit they are".

    Eventually bigger piles compost and produce heat. Now the birds starts seeing some accidental secondary benefits. Heated bowers mean the birds can leave the eggs for foraging without them cooling down. They can survive winters more easily and start keeping persistent mounds. Heat attracts secondary species/insects so more food. All pushing, along with the sexual selection, to bigger piles.

    At some point large compost piles catch fire. Which is obviously bad for the eggs and the birds. But sexual selection & other benefits are gonna keep pushing them to bigger piles. Also burns give side benefits. Unavailable food becomes edible post "cooking". So an evolutionary push to manage the burns.

    [several million years pass]

    The redolent smell of cooking fish comes from the cliff-side chimney spires of the pseudo-Puffin colonies of Glorp-beta-III.

    1491: 1425 - Yes; I've said multiple times now that travelling "back in time" requires some sort of demonstration of a reversal of the sign of your motion on the Time axis of your coordinate set! 1437 - Some sort of "world Geographic System" is a matter of convention and can pre-date space travel, if not the realisation that your planet is a sphere (actually more of an oblate spheroid if it rotates but a sphere is an adequate first approximation).

    GPS does require an ability to launch and maintain an array of navigational satellites though.

    1440 - I have an instant problem with this; he's requiring the generator/emitter object to have a much larger mass and tensile strength than the target to weaponise the device.!

    If the target is heavier, then the vibrations etc will be in the generator object. If the target is stronger, the emitter will simply rip out of the generator object.

    1441 - You've just made the same mistake as Erturs; assuming that we will accept "proof by assertion" that Time can flop signs when you want it to, when there is no evidence (not even from time dilation experiments) that this is so. 1447 (2) - Yet again, you are flopping the sign of your time coordinate. You've accepted making my original FSR into a time tagger (we can do this automatically), and I can accept that the time tagger time &LT the transmission time. I do not accept that this is time travel, rather than an inconsistency in the data. What would be time travel would be if the message was received back from the time tagger before it was transmitted! Note that I have not made a statement about the Time axis, other than that the sign of all travel on this axis appears to be constant! 1458 - Actually, on reading this, my earlier assumption about you flopping the sign of travel on the Time axis may be wrong. It may be that you are assuming something else (not sure what yet) . I am sure that my only assumption is that, if the originating transceiver is in a constant(ish) vector relative to the FSR it can not receive a reply to a message it hasn't sent! I'm not making any assumptions about what is or is not in motion, just that motion on the Time axis is in one direction only for all observers. 1463 A half fire-maker is as useless as a half-flying bird You might want to poll some penguins about this statement? ;-) 1465 - I can't see why you think the wormhole can function as a transceiver before it's established (call that mission time 40Y), or will transmit information generated before that time. 1468 - Even without that, the "speed of plot" (qv) would vary with the range between the participants, and their relative space-time vectors. 1486 - I'm not a chatbot (but then, if I was a chatbot I would say that anyway).
    1492:

    SS @ 1487 Yeah, stupid architects never seem to look at the compass ... The other classic idiocy is to put the mini-park for the employees to sit in / have lunch / realx for 10 minutes on the NORTH side of the building ( In the N hemisphere... )

    FTL / messageing / causality Bugger the handwaving ... what does the mathematics say?

    1493:

    @erturs 1472: Thank you for the clarification, but that wasn't the question I was asking. I'm taking a crack at the restriction that prevents Bob from replying to Alice that you outlined in 1289. You said this in 1365:

    "For example, if Alice sends Bob a message faster than light, then there could be an exclusion principle which prevents Bob, or anyone else in his future light cone, from sending a message back to Alice's past light cone. This exclusion principle would have to extend to any third party Charlie that Bob could communicate with faster than light. It gets messy. So far the only workable principle I've come up with is "no wormhole exit can appear in the past light cone of a wormhole entrance", which is very restrictive indeed. But I'm not sure there isn't a weaker one."

    Right. Let's run with that. I'm asking if that really works. If not being able to send messages (or messengers) into the past eliminates the paradoxes. I also want to make sure that this doesn't inadvertently eliminate FTL.

    @Elderly C 1485: "I considered that one, and decided that it was not a problem, but I now forget the details; it was essentially because the spaceship time will match earth time only at one point. I would need to have to redo the calculations to work out why, properly - and, of course, I might have made an error."

    Yes, they match at the beginning of the journey, and become progressively different after that, which is precisely the problem.

    1494:

    Bugger the handwaving ... what does the mathematics say?
    Yup, every single one of these ftl/timetravel posts is written in the wrong language.

    1495:

    Um, no, that's not the problem.

    The basic Lorentz transformation (how things in one reference frame look to something in another reference frame that's moving relative to the first) has this factor called Gamma (1/[(1-v^2/c^2]^0.5). When V is greater than C, gamma goes imaginary.

    Time coordinates are transformed to G(1-vx/c^2) {G is gamma}, so they go negative when V is greater than C.

    Distance coordinates are transformed as G(x-vt), so position gets imaginary and position gets bizarrely distorted when V is greater than C.

    You can read about the velocity and acceleration derivatives in Wikipedia.

    The problem is obviously that this transformation isn't intended for superluminal phenomena.

    Now here's the buggery bits: --This is a mathematical description of what should happen, verified by experiment within the realms we can test. It's not carved on Aeternium next to the Throne of God. Instead, it's a reasonably good description of a fairly bizarre aspect of reality most of us never experience. If it turns out to not describe reality usefully enough, it will be modified, perhaps discarded.

    --It assumes that velocity=change in distance/change in time, and that there's only one distance that can be measured. When distance becomes a function of technological prowess and money (as with a warpship or wormhole), velocity and distance have multiple values, some of which are above C, some of which are below. These equations were not meant to deal with this situation.

    Many of the arguments made above boil down to what distance and velocity has priority. And the answer is, we don't know, but if everything's relative and light can move multiple distances, then it breaks relativity as a model of reality. And again, relativity is a description of what we've deduced about reality, not carved in Aeternium next to the Throne of God. This is a distinction that often gets forgotten, even by radical atheists.

    Since it's extraordinarily unlikely that technological prowess or money will break relativity, so what we're really arguing about is what constitutes a sufficiently believable bit of bullshit to insert in SF stories to keep the audience engaged. It's a fun argument, but ultimately we're bullshitting about bullshit. Whether we do it in the language of math or in the language of handwaving, it's only useful if it fertilizes creativity or keeps us out of trouble. It seems to have had the latter effect, at least.

    One thing that got implied above several times is that earlier SF writers, like EE Smith and anyone else with an engineering or physics background, actually figured most of this out decades ago. Unfortunately, in efforts to get away from what they wrote (because originality, and ewww we want better writing), subsequent authors who don't have their engineering chops (or often, any science chops at all) have confused things rather badly.*

    Charlie's not the first author to have both a technical background and a wicked sense of humor, someone who knows he's writing BS and wants to do it in a way that the cognoscenti (other nerds) truly enjoy if they catch it. My parents (both engineers) read EE Smith in grad school primarily because it amused them, not just the whiz-bang aspect, but because the experiments and developments in his book generally worked the first time, something they never experienced at their lab benches. If you're going to write about BS flying at superluminal velocities, you can create joy by doing it in ways that amuse the engineers in the audience, not just the word nerds.

    *Sometimes I think there's nothing sadder than an English major confusing a scientific in-joke with a metaphor for something else. But yes, there are many sadder things.

    1496:

    Re: Non-human way of making a fire

    Apart from raccoons, my favorite candidate for potential fire-maker is the octopus. Why this creature might want to would probably be based on situational circumstances:

    (a) Curiosity - Seeing a fire and being intrigued by it, and then watching for and investigating any fires it sees in the future.

    (b) Self-defense - A land-walking octopus grabs a piece of driftwood to defend itself from attackers [humans] not being aware that its end is on fire. After successfully defending itself, this terrifying encounter is tagged for permanent memory storage by its version of the amygdala.

    (c) Food - An octopus finds a clam/oyster in the remains of a beach fire pit, eats and likes it so much that it keeps returning to the same site to look for more. Eventually it connects humans, fire pit and cooked food. It keeps watch ever more closely to see/understand what happens. Then one day it sees that there's still fire/heat in the pit but no humans so it finds a live clam and carries/drops it into the fire. After a few unsuccessful attempts/burns it finally retrieves the cooked clam.

    Basically I think that if you want to figure out how an alien would build a fire you have to start with the fire, figure out its conditions/components and then work backwards.

    Fire-making needs:

    Friction - a combination of strength, speed and flexibility would suffice. Some octopus species can haul up to 700 lbs of stuff and some are able to pry apart and cart 'nesting' materials from site to site and do some re-assembly.

    Access (ability to search for appropriate materials) - there's at least one octopus species that regularly walks on land. [See the clip below narrated by Sir David Attenborough.]

    The Incredible octopus that can walk on dry land | The Hunt - BBC

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFzpC_e44Tg

    Tool-using/hauling octupi have also been seen 'trading up' their tools if they happen upon something that's better.

    Lenses - spiders using strategically placed water beads (or ice flakes), glass or other shining, reflective materials to focus sunlight.

    Learning/sociability (team work) - a few building skills are innate but most appear to be learned either by watching a parent/other group member, trial and error, or some external learning reinforcement.

    1497:

    Birds setting compost piles alight. Actually we can test this on Earth.

    Yes, compost can combust, and this is one of the central problems with making greenwaste composting for climate change sustainable. However, it's not predictable or all that common, which is why it's listed as a problem to avoid, not a way to start fires in an emergency or even as a sabotage tactic in the WW2 OSS manual, which has a number of arson techniques for use against the Nazis.

    Second, wildfires have been around for 420,000,000 years or more./. Since vertebrates finally crawled out of the sea after 358,000,000 million years ago or so, it's safe to say that land vertebrates have always been around fire. So if any creature, by living with fire, develops the ability to make fire, there have been a huge number of opportunities for them to do so.

    And many animals do, in fact, use fire. For example, they prefer cooked food to raw food and they scavenge dead bodies of fire-killed animals. The incentive to use fire has been there since forever (in vertebrate terms). The ability to make it has not. Hominids (genus Homo) are apparently the first and only species to do this, which suggests that there's something different about us.

    Moreover most animals have tended to use environmental heat to incubate their eggs, since it's less work than using their own body heat. This can be as simple as laying them under a sun-warmed rock, or as complex as (for alligators, megapode birds, and apparently some dinosaurs) laying them in rotting vegetation that keeps them warm. This hasn't fostered intelligence, though. Megapodes, for example, are notorious for showing no parental care at all. And their chicks can fly soon after hatching, a trait they share with some of their quail and pheasant relatives. Instead the mothers generally evolve to be very good at finding the right temperature at which to position their eggs, and they keep them there.

    So yes, it's been done on Earth, and no, so far it hasn't pushed the evolution of intelligence, culture, or tool use. Instead it's driven the evolution of thermal sensitivity. While birds do get unreasonably intelligent for their size, I'm having trouble envisioning one, say, smelting bronze or forging iron. Hard to do that with only a bill, especially if you've also got to be small enough to fly. Building a starship requires all this and much more.

    1498:

    whitroth @ 1010: I'm still confused - why is
    a) quantum entanglement... over fibre? Why?
    b) I was under the impression that information could not be transmitted over entanglement.

    Don't know the answer to 'a', but if you can switch the entanglement on and off, you can send information.

    1499:

    Pigeon @ 1018: I don't mean private certs, I mean just plain http without any attempt at encryption. I've heard they can whine and moan if you don't switch it off, but Charlie seems to be saying that they're not just whining and moaning, they're refusing to load the page at all. I've not had anyone complain about that degree of breakage.

    The internet was doomed the moment they opened it up to corporate exploitation for profit. It's been going down hill ever since. Information may want to be free, but the corporations are determined to keep it locked up behind their paywalls.

    Still trying to catch up.

    1500:

    Well, you've pretty well proved my point for me there.

    1501:

    Entanglement right now seems to be used to make "man-in-the-middle" snooping attacks detectable. As soon as someone reads the information, entanglement is lost. If you find that your entangled message gets to you without entanglement, either a) the apparatus screwed up (probably the most common explanation, actually), or b) someone else read it before you did.

    As for the reason to transmit entangled photons over fiber, if the entanglement is to prevent snooping, then the use of fiber should be obvious. Also, I don't think there's any way to broadcast entangled photons in anything other than a high vacuum.

    1502:

    Heteromeles @ 1025: Thoughts on FTL:

    1. Why doesn't anyone posit the Gremlin Drive? Over the last two weeks, I've had two cases where stuff disappeared, only to reappear in places that I'd searched repeatedly (once in a bag I'd emptied searching for the item, today when a knife I'd lost some time ago turned up on the driver seat of my car, poking my butt from the seat crack). Obviously these items went down the "wrong leg of the trousers of time." Why hasn't any writer exploited this for FTL? It's at least as good as Harry Harrison's bloater drive.

    I'm familiar with the phenomenon, but what use is it if you always end up in the wrong place and not where you thought you'd be? How would you get back from there and how would you get back to any previous location again?

    It would be like Columbus sailing for China and ending up "finding the new world", but when he tried to sail back to Spain he ended up in Finland. And when he tried to sail to the new world again he ended up in Australia. And who knows where the "return" journey would take him?

    But, you know what would be a REAL practical miracle of modern science would be if someone would invent a a bandaid (sticking plaster?) that would mold itself to the end of your thumb and not start coming off in 5 minutes, and wouldn't interfere with typing.

    I slipped with a wood chisel several years ago and it sliced into the tip of my thumb. Ever since, when the weather gets cold & dry the scar opens up again and I need to put a bandage on it. But making one conform to the shape and stay on is crazy making. And it does interfere with typing because I "touch" type & the thumb is used for the space bar.

    1503:

    David L @ 1026:

    The problem is that most of the rights were created a century ago, and who owns them now doesn't map very well to where people are living now or what they're doing with the water, hence the water wars.

    It is my understanding that there are way more rights than water. Even when the river is flowing strong. Which it hasn't in a decade or few. Boulder Dam looks like a big mistake.

    Personally I'm wondering what the politics will look like when they have to start turning off the generators due to lack of water.

    https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/483754-trump-order-redirects-california-water-supply-after-reversal-from

    FWIW, I think the Glenn Canyon Dam was the bigger mistake.

    1504:

    I agree about verb tense. One of the great shortcomings of English is that our verbs capture evolutionary processes really, really badly. The actual way limbs evolved to do fire--by dint of lucky accidents until selective pressures took over at the very end--can't be said concisely in English.

    As for the rest, while I'm not convinced that it's impossible to use a wild vine or something similar as raw cordage, in general, making cordage seems to be a two-handed operation. So trying to design a one-handed fire making critter by substituting cordage for the other hand gets awkward. Better to go with multiple tentacles, although I'm not convinced you get similar leverage with a tentacle as you do with an arm.

    Speaking of weight movement (#1496, not your post). An octopus dragged 700 lbs. That is impressive. A 70 year-old Jack LaLanne swam a mile, handcuffed and shackled, towing 70 rowboats with 70 people in them. That's impressive too. The upshot is that octopi are surprisingly strong, but even if one could breathe air for an extended period, they have no internal skeleton, so getting a firemaking apparatus aligned and holding it in position would require them to brace against something. The bigger problem is that for fire starting, everything has to be dry, so we're talking a completely terrestrial octopus, which basically isn't an octopus any more. If you want to start talking about land octopi, perhaps Rhinogradentia would be a better starting point.

    Another issue, at least for human evolution, is that for most of our existence, we were nomadic and either left our possessions cached or lugged them with us. That's why fire apparatus and tinder carrying devices tend to be really portable, of the two sticks variety. A big apparatus to make fire is certainly possible, but if you run out of food in the local area and can't take your firemaker with you, it's fairly worthless. A species evolving to rely on a bulky firemaker has a really stable source of food, so stable in fact that one has to question what use evolving intelligence is to it in the first place. Brains are metabolically expensive, and if you've got a stable source of food, why not use the resource to make more babies instead of brains?

    1505:

    @Paws4thot, 1491: "#1465 - I can't see why you think the wormhole can function as a transceiver before it's established (call that mission time 40Y), or will transmit information generated before that time."

    The way that I understand the latest thinking on semi-plausible wormholes, the two ends are created at the same time, and one end has to be towed STL to where ever you want it to end up (because, basically, you cant create an opening to a tunnel unless the tunnel already exists, which implies the other end of it exists as well). Thus, both ends are established at the beginning of the journey.

    1506:

    Heteromeles @ 1047: It's worth reminding everyone periodically that Clinton won the election by several million votes, but lost the electoral college.

    Whether Sanders is in the same boat I can't say, but the voter popularity poll is less important than whether Sanders will win in a few key states in the Midwest.

    Where I blame Clinton's campaign (and the mainstream democratic party for that matter) is that they seem to keep forgetting this, which really is unforgivable. This is the reason they're in the business, and they don't do it as well as they need to.

    I blame that mealy-mouthed, holier-than-thou prick James Comey and his October Surprise letter and the FTF New York Times with their decades long anti-Clinton vendetta.

    Comey knew the corrupt republicans he "notified" were going to blast it all over Fox Newz, he knew the so called "mainstream" media would follow along like sheep and it would be the only story covered during the eight days remaining until election day and he knew it was DoJ & FBI policy NOT to initiate anything that could conceivably be seen as a partisan intervention in an election. He chose not only to ignore those long standing policies, but to trample them in the mire.

    He put his own desire to promote his legacy above the needs of the nation and his oath to the Constitution.The only reason I don't call it TREASON is the Constitution's strict & restrictive definition of that crime. But he BETRAYED this country, he BETRAYED his office and he BETRAYED his so called principles.

    Every time the Democrats try to be republican-lite to appeal to a few key states in the Midwest they LOSE. Better they should remember to be Democrats, work to get Democrats to the polls in November and to fight republican Gerrymandering so those Democratic voters are allowed to vote and have their votes actually get counted.

    1507:

    Gremlin drive? Hell, I've got a far better one, just so long as you have life support: this one transports you into the sock dimension (where all those single socks in the wash go), and then you come out. Of course, you have to fit in a dryer....

    1508:

    Oh, hell, after I hit submit, I was telling Ellen about it, and realized that it would be great for spies.... I may have a story out of that.

    1509:

    Um, nope. They're times the square root of (1-(v^2/c^2), so everything gets multiplied by -1, so both are imaginary, just one is +i, and the other -i.

    1510:

    Also 1998: ok, to break man-in-the-middle attacks, that makes sense. Otherwise, I see no difference between that and sending light signals.

    1511:

    Greg Tingey @ 1056: David L
    Biden is more of the "same old" - though I simply cannot see how anyone remotely near sane could possibly vote for DT under any circumstances.

    It's like Abraham Lincoln said:

    "You CAN fool SOME of the people all of the time."

    And who says Cheatolini iL Douchebag's voters are even "remotely near sane"?

    1512:

    Scott Sanford @ 1062:

    But yes, I quite agree that if the communists or far left had seriously gotten embedded in rural California, back when they tried in the 1900s-1920s, politics would be seriously different in California.

    In more ways than one.

    There's probably nobody left who remembers this firsthand but according to later reports there were once Russian moles in the Screen Actors' Guild, there to undermine what they presumably saw as the decadent Hollywood entertainment empire. They made a stink at various SAG meetings, and everybody who's been on the internet since 2016 can easily imagine that.

    One of the SAG representatives, drafted into being there under the convoluted demographic rules of the time, was a young guy who'd rather have been out making movies than sitting through boring meetings, Ronald Reagan. They pissed him off enough that he went into politics and was suspicious of Russians the rest of his life.

    Or so goes the legend.

    Like most legends it's mostly bullshit.

    Reagan was a corporate stooge for the Hollywood Studios; a scab & an undercover FBI informant. He was the "President" of the Screen Actors' Guild who signed the residual payment agreement that shut out actors who worked in film before 1960 from receiving any payment for their prior work being sold to Television.

    While there were certainly "communists" in Hollywood in the 1920s & 1930s, they majorly turned against the Soviet Union in the wake of the August 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

    Most Hollywood "communists" were just social justice liberals & anti-fascists, taken in by the USSR's self-portrayal during that period. The few that actually made it to the USSR were soon disillusioned and turned to other left-wing, anti-fascist movements.

    Reagan was a "liberal Hollywood Democrat" until he married actress Nancy Davis and before the civil rights era "began" in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education and the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation. The Democrats moved forward and Reagan moved right.

    1513:

    No, not at all. You are failing to distinguish falsehoods that are incompatible with known facts and fantasy/speculation that is compatible with them but has no factual evidence for it. In particular, much of what the professional theoretical physicists do falls into the latter category - including, but not limited to, almost everything done by the black hole divers and big bang brigade. And note that fantasy that is incompatible only with unproven extrapolation of known results falls into the LATTER category.

    Yes, SF authors often say "sod it" and just use one of the former rather than accept the limitations of the latter, which is perfectly reasonable. But that is NOT justification for confounding them!

    Re #1501: as far as I know, that is essentially ALL that quantum communication entanglement gives us, from a practical point of view. In theory, it allows for the distribution of a fixed (usually small) number of random bits, but that can be done more easily in more old-fashioned ways. The jury is still out on whether quantum computing entanglement gives us anything practical.

    1514:

    #1441 - You've just made the same mistake as Erturs; assuming that we will accept "proof by assertion" that Time can flop signs when you want it to, when there is no evidence (not even from time dilation experiments) that this is so.

    You're thinking that the transformation from Bob's coordinate system to Alice's is different from the transformation from Alice's to Bob's. It's not. The only free parameter in the Lorentz transformation is speed, and it's squared anyway. So you get the same transformation both ways.

    In Earth's frame of reference Bob's moving clock ticks slower, and in Bob's frame of reference Earth's moving clock ticks slower. Just look at the statement: all we need is that the clock be "moving". It doesn't have to be moving in a direction, the effect is direction independent.

    You don't have to believe me, do the algebra yourself. Or look it up online or in any relativity textbook.

    This can only lead to a paradox if Bob and Earth can communicate at speeds greater than c.

    1515:

    Bellinghman @ 1068: Contrarily, Antarctica was a tropical rainforest for much of the last 100 million years

    I suspect that the main effect of lesser insolation would be slower growth. The lesson we have from studying mountainous areas in today's tropics is that vegetation gets sparse at altitude, where there's the same sunlight (perhaps more) as at lower altitudes but it's colder.

    Continental drift. 100 MYA Antarctica wasn't sitting down there around the South Pole. It didn't arrive there until about 35 MYA. Before that it was up in the mid-latitudes. Plenty far north enough for tropical rain forests.

    1516:

    I agree entirely. And what makes the particular class of breakage under discussion extra annoying is that the technical aspects have sufficient nerd appeal that people are completely taken in by the bullshit surrounding it and don't realise it is simply another consequence of the ill-advised decision you refer to.

    Adhesive temporary repair tapes for humans: in the UK we have two main varieties. One type is a strip of pink PVC or something similar, with glue on one side and an absorbent pad in the middle. Some of these have "Band-Aid" trademarks and stuff on the packet, most of them are generic. They are basically shit in exactly the way you describe, and the "Band-Aid" ones are if anything worse than the generic ones.

    The other type is the same basic idea but made out of some kind of coarsely-woven fabric rather than PVC. These are much better. The fabric is quite stretchy so it's much better at conforming to rounded surfaces like a finger end, and the glue is better at adhering both to skin and to the fabric so they are a lot less keen to creep and slime off. And the fabric is more permeable to air so they have less tendency to foster a festering soggy mess underneath. This type is also available in a continuous roll that you cut lengths off as needed, for really big cuts.

    I do find though that these things are only really suited to the kind of cuts that I don't notice until I find blood on things some time later, by which time the cut has clotted on its own and doesn't need anything doing. Cuts that I do notice at the time need some more positive action to stop them bleeding, and what I use is a wad of bog paper over the cut secured by insulating tape wound tightly round and round. The pressure restricts the blood supply allowing the cut to clot more easily, and also makes it go numb so it stops stinging. Once it has stabilised I take everything off and leave it bare; it heals better if the air can get at it. This is what I did when I sliced the tip of my own finger off.

    1517:

    There already is a bird that builds compost heaps to incubate its eggs while it wanders off doing something less boring than sitting on a nest. I can't remember what it's called but I'm pretty sure it lives in Australia, so it's probably those buggers who lit the place off.

    1518:

    Continental drift. 100 MYA Antarctica wasn't sitting down there around the South Pole. It didn't arrive there until about 35 MYA. Before that it was up in the mid-latitudes. Plenty far north enough for tropical rain forests.

    Sorry, I'm afraid Antarctica has been pretty close to polar for a long time. Here's a map (published in Nature) from 105 MYA

    You are correct: it was forested, but not with tropical rain forest. For that time period there is no modern analog, but for more recent times (up to Oligocene) when Antarctica wasn't forested, the decent analogy is the rain forests of Chile, Tasmania, and New Zealand.

    1519:

    One of my classmates (grade school and high school) was an airline pilot (he's retired). I'm not sure he's even 5ft4.

    1520:

    A friend of mine was working on an odd programming job in Dayton in the mid-80s. He enjoyed that museum. He said the moved the XB70 in first, then parked the rest around and under it. (He was also there for the airshow that year.)

    1521:

    Re: ' ... they have no internal skeleton, so getting a firemaking apparatus aligned and holding it in position would require them to brace against something.'

    Nope - they can and do anchor/use their other arms as levers as first noted by Jacques Cousteau who showed one opening a screw-cap jar. Opening a screw-cap isn't that different from holding and rubbing a couple of sticks together or chipping stones at each other. So, no internal skeleton needed to make a fire. Plus, with eight arms, the octopus can rotate pairs of arms so wouldn't give up/tire as easily as a creature limited to two arms. (I wonder how fast an octopus can move its arms/tentacles? - If faster than a human, that would also help.)

    As for staying out in the air (out of water) long enough. How long would be needed and would it have to be continuously or with all of the body exposed to the air? Marine labs have noted that their octopi are remarkably good at escaping their tanks and even lab rooms. There's even footage of one that 'walked' across the lab, snatched something and then returned to its tank. And this was an isolated octopus that figured this out all on his/her lonesome.

    1522:

    And then there are the beetles that lay eggs in just-burned wood. (Heat-seeking fire beetles!) And the plants that have evolved to require fire (or at least smoke-filled rain) to sprout.

    1523:

    bigger piles compost and produce heat. Now the birds

    Birds are not the only reptiles that do this.

    1524:

    invent a a bandaid (sticking plaster?) that would mold itself to the end of your thumb

    We have them in Straya, maybe merkins just have weird thumbs?

    Here's a 1 minute video that explains the technique, there are lots of diagrams but they all show the side of the finger not the tip and I know you struggle with that kind of "like this, but different" thinking.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rN0hjWITW0

    1525:

    JBS Yes ... There is a now-long-outdated geology textbook which is a longtime classic: L D Stamp's "Britains Structure & Scenery" - one of the "New Naturalist series - number 4 - published 1946 I read & re-read my father's first edition. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a modern update, taking account of the Plate Tectonics revolution, complete with maps showing where the various parts of what is now Britain were on the surface of the globe at the appropriate period ... And the "New Nats" seem to be on the way to losing their plot, again, which is a shame.

    Pigeon @ 1517 Megapodes

    1526:

    reference to the warp field's symmetry

    How does that help? You engage the warp drive in earth orbit, you disengage it while heading away from (or towards) earth at 0.9c. Where did your kinetic energy come from? Coz if you're heading towards earth we're going to see that kinetic energy real soon now, so it clearly exists.

    My example of Earth to (+0.9c) to(-0.9c) to Earth was just to make the numbers obviously add up to more than 1, because "I'm carrying more than my own mass as expendable mass" is a known hard problem.

    1527:

    Otherwise known as "where the fuck did that mound of stuff in the middle of my golf course come from" birds.

    A gold course I ride past on my way to work had brush turkeys for a couple of years, but they seem to have mysteriously vanished for no reason{tm}. Their mound one year was in a "nature reserve"/wetland corner that I could see, then next year was in what is quite appropriately known to golfers as a hazard. Then they vanished.

    1528:

    Apart from raccoons, my favorite candidate for potential fire-maker is the octopus. Why this creature might want to would probably be based on situational circumstances: (a) Curiosity (b) Self-defense (c) Food

    With humans, it's pretty clear that fire was useless for all-night (or all-day) warmth unless you lived in an enclosed space. Curiosity wouldn't be enough to get the tribe to gather fuel daily. Self defense - nah, unless the predator had to get past the fire to get at any of the tribe members.

    So fire was most likely a way to enlarge the available food supply, by softening tough stuff. This is particularly important when you have a tribe, because a tribe always has a weakest member (young, or old, or sick) whose life prospects are much improved by easier-to-eat food. It's also important during droughts and the like, when non-preferred food is all there is. And, of course, a tribe that grows can (joke!) eat the lunch of a tribe that doesn't.

    1529:

    Greg Tingey @ 1082: David L
    OUR problem is that we were presented with a putatively honest but grossly incompeten shit, who is prabably a traitor & a serially-lying shit with a history of fucking up.
    We got the latter

    Still, at least some part of your population voted for the pathological liar. How are Cheatolini iL Douchebag's cult members any less rational than Bozo's insanely clownish posse?

    1530:

    There's a noticeable difference between temperate rainforests and tropical rainforests -- a simple search in Google for images of both types shows temperate rainforests to be, typically, a forest of trees with little middle-region growth, tall bare trunks rising up into the canopy. The ground cover is commonly plants like ferns which grow well in limited light.

    The middle-region of a tropical rainforest between the canopy and the ground is thick with branches, vines and thick branching growths on the trunks of the canopy trees and the ground cover is also thick and lush, consisting of leafy plants fed by the copious amounts of sunlight that makes it down through the canopy. Without that sunlight the ground cover would be much reduced. That's why I raised an eyebrow at the idea of tropical rainforests in Newfoundland, even with raised temperatures due to climate change in the future there isn't enough sunlight = reduced photosynthesis = much less growth, especially under a forest canopy.

    1531:

    Charlie Stross @ 1097: A sign of bad space opera: ships hiding behind asteroids in an asteroid belt, ship crews listening to the tiny asteroid fragments pinging off their hulls, ships dodging asteroids.

    (Typical asteroids are a couple of million kilometres from their nearest neighbours, with relative velocities that make rifle bullets look sluggish. If they were any closer/slower, they'd aggregate together into a new planet.)

    A sign of not-quite-so-bad hard SF: ships bouncing between Oort cloud comets. There's typically about one per volume of space inside the Earth's orbit; they're 150M kilometers apart, or more. In other words, months to years of travel between dirty snowballs. And if you want to travel in a vaguely straight line, suitable candidates are almost certainly a lot further apart.

    Still, we're talking about Science FICTION, so a bit of artistic hand-wavium on how you found your dirty snowball & how fast you're able to capture it might be tolerable as long as you don't claim any "facts" that are obviously impossible with the technology regime of your putative star-hopper.

    Good writing should hold up even in the face of contradictory Science!

    1532:

    That is, if they hadn't turned against the USSR after Stalin's show trial purges in '36.

    My father's group was one that said, "nope", and went left.

    1533:

    What! Next you're going to tell us that giant tasty spaceship-eating worms hiding in asteroids can't exist?!

    Humph.

    1534:

    Charlie Stross @ 1141: On hold right now, but one of the features of the universe of "Ghost Engine" is the idea that a wormhole empire needs: a universal/absolute time and coordinate system (for organizing travel/communications), a common trade language, a common trade currency, and a universal unique identifier system (like UUIDs but for real-world as well as virtual objects). Otherwise shit goes sideways, sooner or later.

    Shit always goes sideways sooner or later. Isn't the essence of story telling explaining how it does in a way that people can relate to?

    1535:

    We have them in Straya, maybe merkins just have weird thumbs? ... Here's a 1 minute video that explains the technique

    Now you're being rude or don't understand what it means to be a touch typist.

    Hell a paper cut on my finger tips slows me down. And most anyone else who can touch type much faster than a good hunt and peck person.

    1536:

    Heteromeles @ 1276: This gets back to the whole question of how a space force fights war in space. It appears that, once you've analyzed the potential fights can take place, hybrid warfare that uses information war and psychological ops against the ship and its crew may be the most impactful tactic, with physical confrontation between ships coming in second, and physical confrontation within ships a distant third. Or that might just be my 21st Century bias about the nature of warfare kicking in. And I'm not a trained analyst, just someone creating worlds for space opera.

    I remember a short story I read about an earth ship encountering some alien ship in a planetary system both were apparently exploring.

    Their combat was relatively short with the earth ship dropping a 5 lb iron weight out the airlock before changing course, while the alien ship dumped a load of gravel & changed course ... eventually with a bit of Newtonian maneuvering scattering small dense objects where they might intersect the other ship's path, along with some short hyper-space jumps, the two ships managed to cripple each other & the last survivor from each ship manages to make a crash landing on a survivable surface. The earth man sets up a beacon to transmit the first contact message back to earth & prepares to defend the beacon from the alien.

    Presumably the alien does the same and it's implied that in the coming years, while awaiting a rescue that might never come, they will continue hunting each other on the planetary surface with the aim of destroying each other's beacons.

    The victor in the encounter will be the being whose message reaches their home planet first.

    1537:

    timrowledge @ 1285:

    Referring back to “ So slide rules vs computers. I'd say the SR-71 did OK. Plus Concorde was near max speed. SR-71 not so much.”

    They’re different fish. One was designed to carry one or two military personnel and some surveillance equipment or a couple of missiles as fast as could be managed at the time, and to hell with comfort, convenience, cost and fuel. The other carried 100 paying customers on routine scheduled flights, at the same kind of speeds, to and from normal airports with no special equipment at each end nor inflight refueling . It could also carry more ordnance, at least in theory.

    If I need to send a platoon of 21SAS or other Special Circumstances units somewhere fast I know which I’d prefer to have on hand.

    I think that's David L's comment you're replying to. I just asked about "antipodes rockets" & why we don't have them. If you needed to get 21SAS to the other side of the world in a hurry, an antipodes rocket might come in handy.

    For me the engineering marvel of the SR-71 is how quickly they produced a flyable aircraft. Project Archangel began in second quarter 1958 and the first A-12 flew on 25 April 1962.

    1538:

    For me the engineering marvel of the SR-71 is how quickly they produced a flyable aircraft. Project Archangel began in second quarter 1958 and the first A-12 flew on 25 April 1962.

    Especially since - new engines to go to Mach 3+ - how to machine titanium in large scale work - how to source the titanium (from the USSR without them knowing who the buyer was?)

    1539:

    Ah... I was confused by your use of "warp drive" to refer to STL propulsion. My general understanding of the term "warp drive", which seems to be congruent with the usage in these discussions, is that it is a device for evading the c-limit by making its own little private bubble of space that can go from A to B without going through the bits in between. The versions of that idea which have at least some support from real science, which are the basis of the ideas here, have a nasty habit of requiring "a galaxy" or "several universes" or similar energy equivalent, and even the less extravagant versions still want an amount large enough to be impractical if you can't come up with some way to fiddle it.

    Whatever is powering the STL travel of the Alice and Bob relativistic spaceliner fleet is not a warp drive, because the whole point about those examples is that the ships are accelerating normally in ordinary space and aren't evading relativity.

    I quite agree about it not being able to carry enough fuel. It doesn't matter when the ships are just counters in a game of arguing the toss about relativistic time effects, but it does get on my tits when authors postulate actual practical transport at those speeds and think "antimatter rocket fuel" or something like that is an adequate power source. (And they are similarly dismissive of the "red nose problem" (yours would go red if there was a deluge of GeV protons hitting it)).

    1540:

    Yeah... What happens if America decides they want the north of Scotland back?

    1541:

    ok, I was confused by your idea that somehow a warp drive would mean you could leave earth, rendezvous with a photon that had left earth, drop out of warp, jump back in, then return, while somehow not ever needing to accelerate your ship to lightspeed when you're visiting the photon.

    To me it doesn't matter whether you're riding a unicorn, teleporting, using a warp drive or riding a rocket, if you go from "here" (wherever that is) to "there" where the two locations are travelling at vastly different speeds, there's an amount of kinetic energy that changes hands.

    The travel isn't the thing that matters here, it's that at some point you visit two different parts of this universe and spend time there. Doesn't matter if you "just" jump from Earth to Mars when they're in opposition, somehow in this universe you need to go from travelling very fast this way to very fast that way.

    1542:

    D. Mark Key@1493:

    @erturs 1472: Thank you for the clarification, but that wasn't the question I was asking. I'm taking a crack at the restriction that prevents Bob from replying to Alice that you outlined in 1289.

    Ah, I see. I was trying to prevent the paradox by preventing Bob from replying FTL to Alice, setting up a restriction like "if Bob ever receives an FTL message he can never send one again". That prevents his reply. But I don't think it works, because Bob and Alice could also communicate via slower than light means with each other and with a third party Charlie, and I think this could still permit the paradox.

    1543:

    I wish "the speed of light" in relativity texts could be renamed to "the speed of gravity". It might make some things a bit more intuitive. In a hand-wavy and plausible sounding way (but probably wrong in the details):

    (1) Gravity is deeply connected with spacetime, so of course its speed is special. (2) It's not surprising that massless particles travel at the speed of gravity. (3) Photons are massless, so the speed of light is the same as the speed of gravity. (4) "I can travel faster than sound, so why can't I travel faster than light?" becomes "...why can't I travel faster than gravity?", which no longer seems quite so analogous.

    1544:

    "...while somehow not ever needing to accelerate your ship to lightspeed when you're visiting the photon."

    I don't think that was my idea, but if modified to remove the specific requirement of a particular type of drive, it is in fact correct. You don't need to accelerate to lightspeed to match velocities with the photon, because you can't chase photons down like that: a photon always travels at the speed of light, so you always measure its speed as 3e8m/s no matter how hard you're chasing it. To "visit" or "rendezvous with" a photon can only mean letting it smack into a detector of some sort; you can't cruise alongside it pulling faces at it out of the window or anything.

    "Doesn't matter if you "just" jump from Earth to Mars when they're in opposition, somehow in this universe you need to go from travelling very fast this way to very fast that way."

    Certainly (well, certainly if you want to land there rather than just flick Mars the Vs as it goes whizzing past), but that's a different kettle of fish. Those "very fasts" are still several orders of magnitude less than c (unless you're going to a ridiculously distant galaxy), so you're similarly orders of magnitude below the total conversion rocket fuel limit.

    1545:

    I may be rehashing material you've all seen before, but I found this line of thinking interesting:

    (1) Either there is a limit to how quickly you can send messages, or there isn't. If there isn't, you can communicate instantly (or effectively instantly for any value of "effectively".)

    (2) If there is a fastest speed you can send messages, then call it M. M has some interesting properties:

    (3) M is the same for everyone. If Nathan could send messages faster than you, you'd just get him to send on your behalf.

    (4) If you are in a spaceship, then you must always travel at speed less than (or equal to) M, because spaceships can carry messages. This is true no matter how much the spaceship accelerates.

    (5) If you are in a spaceship and shoot a message out the front, it still can't go faster than M. So the ordinary law of addition of velocities cannot apply to messages traveling at speeds close to M.

    Any other ones that are obvious? (I'm aware of many other properties of M, (3) automatically implies a whole bunch of things, but not sure if there are easy arguments for them.)

    1546:

    I dunno, I reckon you'd just get an even worse problem with people jumping off the Tower of Pisa and what have you...

    Since a photon travels at the speed of light, it "experiences" what you might call infinite time dilation, and from its "point of view" it is absorbed at the same time as it is emitted, however far it's travelled in between. Is it at all useful to think of a photon as connecting points in time? It seems to me that you have to think something like that to make sense of the idea of particles interacting by exchanging virtual photons.

    1547:

    I kind of joke about the photon having a god's eye view of the universe: omnipresent, but in a different way than the word usually means.

    You're right, that the photon's eye view of the universe is effectively that it connects two things. It's experience is being absorbed as it was emitted, no matter how far apart the two interactions are.

    Gravitons have the same view of the world, except that (I think?) the speed of gravity is independent of material, unlike light, which can be slowed down by the medium it passes through.

    1548:

    (5) If you are in a spaceship and shoot a message out the front, it still can't go faster than M.

    Why? You're still using relativity in a situation where relativity cannot apply.

    I see a couple of possibilities: M is infinite or near enough as makes no different (a message can go round the universe and back to you in less than a second, say). Even "warp factor 10" isn't really going to affect that, but what if it does? That message round the universe takes 0.99 seconds assuming you can send it then stop, rather than simply sending and receiving from a moving ship.

    Or messages travel at some multiple of c, and ships at some lower multiple (they could go slower, including speed c or 0, but for now...). Let's say 1000c and 100c just for fun. So a message transmitted from a ship travelling at 100c will arrive before one transmitted by a stationary messenger at the same distance from the target. I don't see the problem.

    I suspect the real problem is that the energy required might be large. Or the suspension of (dis)belief might be beyond mere mortals.

    OTOH, some religious people believe that the speed of gods perception and action are both infinite. So apparently that can be believed. Sadly none of those people seem willing to discuss the use of god(s) for FTL communication, let alone travel.

    1549:

    My parents (both engineers) read EE Smith in grad school primarily because it amused them, not just the whiz-bang aspect, but because the experiments and developments in his book generally worked the first time, something they never experienced at their lab benches.

    One of the joys of reading George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories is the sense that the author really understood engineers' lives. The technology is foreign to modern readers (cutting a cam would be as exotic as the Martian relay tube) but we still understand messing around in workshops and trying several things that don't work before finding something that does.

    1550:

    JBS I don't think you get it.... Douchbag was & is insane & a liar ... Hilary was not the ideal choice, but she's at least rational. WE were given two madmen, neither of whom was actually acceptable - & both of whom are liars. Fortunately, we vote for our MP's, not the parties & it makes a difference. My local Labour ( Social Democrat, not Marxist ) candidate was re-elected with an INCREASED majority.

    Nojay Er... no. Yhe coverings of the trees & everything in the Cornish & Scottish temperate coastal forests is over evrything.

    Pigeon Even more fun if the SNP want the whole Avalonian belt back, instead! Like this, perhaps? @ 1546 That problem was considered & maybe dealt with in Feynman particle diagrams, where a "down" trajectory implies reverse time-travel There's also the problem that, from the p.o.v. of a ship or photon travelling at "c" - it's clocks are running normally, but the rest of the universe's clockas are running "slow" Where is the preferred,or otherwise "absolute" frame of reference ... because there isn't one, is there?

    1551:

    There are three major "layers" in a forest, especially a dense rainforest -- there's a canopy of green leaf or needles, the light gathering engine of growth that feeds the big trees supporting the canopy. There's a middle layer of branches of those trees further down that catch some of the light that gets through the canopy and then there's a ground layer of vegetation that grows via photosynthesis on what's left. That's a very simplified model, it ignores fungi and other non-photosynthetic lifeforms but it's something to work with.

    A tropical rainforest's canopy will get about 5kWh per diem average since it's in the tropics, close to the equator. A good chunk of that energy will penetrate down into the middle layer and cause lots of growth in vines and intermediate tree branches etc. Quite a bit of energy, maybe 1kWh per diem will make it down to the ground and encourage rich growth in ground-based plants.

    A temperate rainforest gets 2 or 3kWh per diem average on the canopy because it's at a higher latitude away from the equator. A fraction of that energy makes it down to the ground, 1/2kWh per diem or less since not much gets intercepted by tree branches and other growths in the middle region. A notable feature of temperate rainforest growth is bare straight trunks rising up into the canopy and thin (compared to tropical rainforest) ground cover, typically ferns and other plants that don't need a lot of light to grow compared to others.

    1552:

    JBS ... I don't think you get it.... Douchbag was & is insane & a liar ... Hilary was not the ideal choice, but she's at least rational. WE were given two madmen, neither of whom was actually acceptable - & both of whom are liars.

    Greg. You may think what you see from your distance translates to this but from over here both choices in 2016 were a disaster for a plurality of voters. Which is why DT got elected. HC was a known disaster that many hated. DT was an unknown disaster that many didn't really know so "why not"? "Got to be better than HC." [eye roll]

    Not defending what happened but your thoughts on the process back then and now don't really line up with the reality on the ground over here.

    1553:

    Colorado River

    The Washington Post has an article up about how the Colorado river flow is down 20% from "historical" levels.

    No link per Charlie's request.

    1554:

    Greg is also utterly wrong about Corbyn. A better analogy would be: Corbyn is (was) the UK's nearest thing to Bernie Sanders.

    Luckily for the USA, there's no obvious equivalent of Brexit for Bernie to fall to pieces over. Unfortunately, Democrat party internal politics is far more dominated by The Money than Labour party internal politics, so Bloomberg is still a plausible spoiler.

    (Being me, you'd be unsurprised to learn that my preferred outcome would be a Sanders/Warren[*] ticket, winning the White House, with a Democrat majority in both the Senate and Congress and a clear two year run at fixing what the Republicans deliberately smashed. Also, I'd like a pony and the moon on a stick while you're at it.)

    [*] I'd prefer AoC, but she's too young/junior/inexperienced this time round. Trotsky sends his apologies.

    1555:

    Greg. You may think what you see from your distance translates to this but from over here both choices in 2016 were a disaster for a plurality of voters. Which is why DT got elected. HC was a known disaster that many hated. DT was an unknown disaster that many didn't really know so "why not"? "Got to be better than HC." [eye roll]

    More to the point, Hillary Clinton was a political figure with decades of history behind her. Her opponents in the right wing had found her too capable, and the base had been trained to hate her as a cardboard monster. (That Putin feared her turned out to be important too.) Bill was kind of a goofball but a second successful Clinton presidency would have been infuriating for the Republicans.

    It casts some perspective on how spectacularly terrible Donald Trump was that once he captured the party's nomination Hillary Clinton got endorsements from Republicans. Serious, conservative Republicans. I don't think we'll ever have another presidential candidate who gets the unanimous support of every living president of both parties.

    A lot of the shouting base couldn't pivot fast enough to keep up with party leadership, or just liked the bullying racist. :-(

    1556: 1505 - Surely this model involves towing a "tube" the length of the light distance long with you? Since we've been talking about the Sol-Centauri "hop", call that 4 light years long. Sol - Barnard's Star is 6LY in the opposite direction. (picked as being about the next nearest star system after Centauri).

    Even if you're right so far, when you're at Year 40 of the project and the wormhole is at Centauri, looking through it shows light from project year 36 (or later). Light from PY4 is now 32 light years further away!

    1514 - I've never even attempted to argue that time dilation is not a real thing; just that your argument requires a re-transmission of a message that has not been received because time dilation is an effect experienced by a body in motion which means that duration passes slower for that body. It does not mean that duration stops or reverses EVER! I haven't found even a suggestion that either Voyager or New Horizons (all 3 picked for speed and range) have responded to a signal earlier than expected! 1526 - I've not done the maths in detail, but EE Smith's Lensman series does consider the galactic orbital speed of stars, and the speed of planets around their system, as factors in space flight (The 6 volumes from Triplanetary to "Second Stage Lensman" are also rattling good reads, and accurate where I do have the knowledge to fact check a sequence). 1529 - There are 650 constituencies in the UK. Bozo was elected in exactly one of these (other people stood in the other 649). If we presume that each constituency contains the same number of active voters (not actually true, but this is an illustration) and Bozo won a bare overall majority in his constituency, that would mean he got (1/1300)+1 of the votes cast. Trumpolini actually did poll 48% or so of the plebiscite in the 2016 US Presidential Election. 1540 - Well, Norf Merca (any nation therein) has never owned the North of Scotland. OTOH I think that Scotland and Norway's biggest issue with forming a new union would be Englandshire. 1543 & 44 - I'm not talking about putting salt on the tail of a photon then chasing it round the solar system. I'm talking about reading the signal that this photon represents, which I think we'll all agree propagates at c? Now, if that's agreed, and it propagated in a straight line at time D, then at any given instant after D, it must be at a Range c/D from its origin? Even if it is read by a reader moving at 0.5c (enough that their perceived D' will be less than D) from the viewpoint of anyone not this reader, the reader is reading the information at D, not D', and can't re-transmit it any earlier.
    1557:

    Um, you're inferring the wrong cause.

    AFAIK, there are two big differences between temperate and tropical rain forests.

    One is that a big part of Earth's plant diversity consists of plants that are intolerant of freezing. Plants groups that are either entirely frost intolerant (palms, lianas) are either absent from temperate forests or have really rare representatives (ivy, grape, palmetto).

    So frosts are one reason we don't see these species in temperate rain forests. And before you go on about it not freezing on coastal temperate rainforests, let me point out that I went to school in a temperate rainforest (Humboldt State, on the coast in redwood country) and I can assure you, yes it does.

    The other reason is time. The problem with an icehouse world is that ice ages radically rearrange plant distributions. In California, redwoods grew in Los Angeles 15,000 years ago, but their southern natural limit is about 350 miles-ish north now, and their stronghold is hundreds of miles north of that. Plants migrate at different speeds in response to changing climates, so what you see in many northern forests are not all the species that tolerate the current conditions, but the species that got there after the ice receded. This is a major force structuring the diversity of Midwestern forests for example, because the ice age refugia were on the Carolina coast and 10,000 years later, some trees (notably beeches) are still just getting to Wisconsin. California has high plant diversity (for a temperate area) because its plethora of mountains provided a lot of refugia (sunny south-facing slopes), so plants didn't have to move quite so far. And in the tropics, forests never froze, so they additionally house all those frost intolerant species, including the low-light species we now use as houseplants.

    Your third issue is that you assume that current conditions are indicative of past conditions, and that the key factor is sunlight hitting the Earth. For the peanut gallery, sunlight hits the solar equator at around 1000 w/m2 at ground level, and it falls off as cosine( degrees solar latitude) to 0 at 90 degrees. 0 degrees solar latitude is where the sun is vertical at noon, and it varies between +23.5 and -23.5 degrees relative to Earth latitudes over the course of the year. Anyway, this is what you get taught in school if you had a unit on modeling climate.

    Turns out this is incomplete. When people try to model hothouse Earth using only solar flux corrected for latitude, the polar regions especially show up as much cooler than the fossils of frost intolerant plants in the Arctic and Antarctic show they actually were. Palms did indeed grow at 70oN back in the Paleocene and Eocene. The climatologists suspected for many years it had something to do with clouds, but they lacked the computing power to model cloud behavior at the scales needed to find out.

    Last year they published one of the first cloud modeling results. It wasn't for the whole Earth, just for a block of atmosphere off the California coast. According to the model, when atmospheric CO2 reaches around 1200 ppm, the upper atmospheric winds change to start shearing the tops off stratocumulus clouds, making the sky much clearer. That effect is stable until atmospheric CO2 drops below around 400 ppm. Because stratocumulus clouds cover around 1/3 of the Earth at any time, and are disproportionately concentrated near the poles, this is a huge change. When the global climate modelers plugged in the loss of clouds, all of a sudden their latitudinal temperature gradients match what the fossils show actually happened.

    Long story short, what you think the plants are doing as a response to the latitudinal light gradient is actually how the plants are responding to latitudinal light gradient plus latitudinal cloud gradient plus remnants of historical latitudinal temperature changes due to glacial movements 10,000 and more years ago plus differential plant migration speeds plus winter freezes acting as an environmental filter to keep out plants that are frost intolerant.

    This is a better explanation of why temperate rainforests look different from tropical rainforests.

    For everyone else: if you're creating an alien world that's a hothouse? Make the default sky a clear, merciless blue. Cloudy skies are for icehouse worlds, and the Earth's been in hothouse mode for around 80% of the last 400 million years.

    1558:

    About the 2016 US Presidential vote:

    About 138 million people voted, which is not quite 56% of the voting age population in the US at the time.

    Of those, 65.8 million voted for Clinton, 63 million voted for Trump.

    Trump won because of the electoral college system, not because he won the popular vote. If we polled the entire voting age population, the most popular candidate was "I'm not gonna vote."

    This is why in US elections, two of the major efforts always underway are getting out the vote of your supporters (by getting people riled up for or against something) and suppressing the vote of your opponents (by making them cynical about politics, making them think it's a foregone conclusion, and other tactics to make them think that their votes don't matter so they stay home).

    The only reason to bring this up here is that, when you think you're being arch and sophisticated about US politics, by saying that a vote doesn't matter anyway, because it's rigged and predetermined and anyway no candidate is good enough, chances are you're being played by your political opponents, you're falling for their propaganda, and you're spreading it around. Even if you're outside the US.

    As a political friend of mine put it, US elections aren't like taxis, where the candidate takes you to where you want to go. Instead they're like buses, where you get on board with the one that's going closest to where you want to go, then you get out and start walking everyone the rest of the way. That's why it's so important to vote, even if the best candidate isn't quite who you want.

    1559:

    @ Heteromeles 1433 and Everybody: I told David Brin over on Contrary Brin that we talked about his weaponized gravity laser, and he says "hi" and is open to questions about it...

    Re: Reactionless drives: per Atomic Rockets: Friends don't let friends use reactionless drives in their universes... It's a poor man's planet-cracker.

    @Everybody: re FTL, etc. I opened a whole shelf of canned worm(holes). Thank you for all the discussion. How could one detect a wormhole? (I'll have another question later.)

    Cheers, Keith

    1560:

    Preaching to the choir mate. My point was simply to demonstrate that Trumpolini enjoys a much high proportion of popular support (even if not 50% + 1 of votes polled) than Bozo actually does.

    1561:

    Charlie Sanders is SANE Corbyn isn't. Sanders is a USA patriot Corbyn is a Traitor I could go on ( And on & on ... ) but I won't. Incidentally, I'm not sure BOZO is sane - he's certainly borderline, because of th ME, ME, Me, me ... syndrome. He MIGHT, easily sell us down the river to the USA ... See three lines above, rinse & repeat .....

    I agree about a Snaders/Warren ticket, or Sanders/Somebody (NOT Bloomberg) with "somebody" being able to pick it up & run with it if Bernie falls over. Oddly enough .. AoC would be good as well - she appears to be a leftish Social Democrat

    Heteromeles As low as that? Indicates the level of either/or/both voter suppression & deep apathy ??

    Keith Ah, yes Run reactionless drive up to 0.8c & aim at target - yes?

    1562:

    Bernie Sanders is a champagne socialist with two homes and a 600,000 dollar lakeside dacha to his name. He's accumulated millions of taxpayer dollars from being a Senator for 40 years while achieving little, legislatively speaking.

    The GOP puke cannon is primed and ready to fire if he becomes the non-Democrat nominee (he's still an Independent Senator) for President for the Democratic Party. First up would be a criminal investigation into his wife's handling of the finances of the small college she ran into bankruptcy -- where did the money go? There's his medical history which he isn't releasing any more, what's he got to hide? He'd be the first-ever major party candidate with a heart attack as a known pre-existing condition. Etc., etc.

    1563:

    Charlie Stross @ 1334:

    A ballistic missile warhead will not reach ground at anything like orbital velocity even if it was powered all the way down, thanks to air resistance.

    Nevertheless, they deliver a hell of a punch:

    Yeah, but wouldn't my supposed "antipodes rocket" be doing just the opposite? Putting on the brakes to slow down for landing?

    Otherwise, what are you going to do with the return portion of the ticket?

    And if Musk can figure out how to land his boosters on a barge, why couldn't an "antipodes rocket" operate from city center to city center? Just park one barge in Sidney harbor and another in the Thames ... the Hudson River, the Seine, the Clyde ...

    1564:

    I rather like that idea - another story idea, asking a god to transport your starship.

    Geez, can you imagine the interstellar wars? I mean, if your god's more powerful than their god, you can stop them from getting to other stars.

    1565:

    John Hughes @ 1344: Yeah, I've seen the timelines. I just found the idea that there were no computers available in the mid to late 1950s a bit weird.

    (Concord PS: pity the mach-3 ramjet powered Nord Aviation project went nowhere).

    I think the question is were the "available" computers available for the design teams to use? I don't think Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works had access.

    1566:

    Bernie and Warren, in either order, would be a dream ticket.

    Bernie, if it's not clear, isn't as socialist as me - I would talk about nationalization, like, say, the rails, and let the railroad companies lease lines. And, of course, fully fund Amtrak, and give passenger trains priority.

    Or, at the very lease, massively reregulate the telecom industry.

    Oh, and for non-USAns, just to make clear - when Charlie said AOC's too youung/legally, this is explicit: the US Constitution says no one under 35 can be President, so that's cut in stone.

    1567:

    You're not accounting for hijacking scenarios.

    This is why we periodically hear sonic booms: some pilot switched their radio to the wrong channel or there's a malfunction or they dialed in the wrong transponder code and the air force sets up an intercept.

    It's a lot harder to bring down a ballistic passenger transport in flight if you suddenly discover it's making a suicide run on the White House.

    1568:

    Um, sorry, I see his net worth is now around $2M. And a lot of that was due to his run in '16 - he wrote a book afterwards that made a lot of money.

    So, drop the champagne socialist, please.

    1569:

    I wasn't specifically going for her age (I thought minimum for POTUS was 30, not 35) but her lack of experience; first term in Congress is functionally insufficient -- she's still learning how stuff works in DC (although she's had a crash course so far).

    Obama was probably about as young as a POTUS can plausibly be, without the backing of a family political machine (like the Kennedy dynasty).

    1570:

    Indeed. I think thanks are due to erturs for such patient and persistent production of multiple explanations.

    1571:

    Bernie and Warren, in either order, would be a dream ticket.

    Yes, for us too. Pity about that electability thing and "socialism" being a major scare-word in the US. Of course, neither B nor W are anything like classical socialists, which makes the matter even more vexing.

    1572:

    Agreed. Thank you Erturs!

    1573:

    David L @ 1372: Little bit.

    Anytime you do something radical in engineering terms a V2 is a nice dream to have.

    If anyone wants to see both a Concorde and SR-71 they are on display at the Air and Space museum annex next to Dulles airport. Short Lyft/Uber ride from the airport if you have a long layover or want to allocate some time before or after a flight.
    https://airandspace.si.edu/udvar-hazy-center
    All indoors.

    They have a Shuttle, Concorde, SR-71, WWII German rocket plane, and almost everything else from the early days before WWI up to the recent past. You get to walk up close to most of them. Totally boring for my wife but I enjoyed the line of engines ordered by time. (Those things back in the 40s were just plain big.)

    The WWI exhibit has lots of planes and replicas suspended from the ceiling with walkways between the 10' to 20' above the floor.

    [1] Parking for the museum was free until the locals caught on and would park there and take a taxi to the airport. Now it is $15 / day.

    Alternatively, if you're able to drive to DC, the outlying DC Metro Park-and-Ride lots do have free parking on the weekends and a day pass for the Metro is about the same price. If you arrive early in the morning you have time to see Udvar-Hazy PLUS the original Air & Space Museum along with other Smithsonian Museums along the National Mall, visit Arlington, the Washington, Lincoln & Jefferson Memorials and still make the last train back to your park & ride lot.

    Just avoid the weekends when they have major historical anniversaries. I was there for the 75th Anniversary of VE Day and the last leg out to Udvar-Hazy is on a bus. I wasted a significant part of my day stuck in traffic because EVERYBODY was trying to get out there to see the old warbirds fly-in.

    Udvar-Hazy also has a B-29 (Enola Gay I believe) & a Lockheed Constellation that I think was Eisenhower's "Air Force One".

    But the coolest thing I saw there was they have a gallery overlooking the restoration workshop so you can see what they're currently working on. The last time I was there they had the only surviving example of the Horten Ho 229 in that shop being restored.

    1574:

    So, drop the champagne socialist, please.

    Agreed. Socialism, along with communism, are more fright words in US politics than political stances. Yes, I know there are socialists and communists out there. If you ever get to talk with them...they're not Bernie Bros.

    Politically, Bernie would have been a mainstream democrat in the 1930s-50s, so far as I can tell from his policies. I prefer Warren, mostly because she's younger, tougher, and more organized, but I'll take either of them. My biggest knock against Warren is that she doesn't have the campaign staff that Bernie has, and it shows. If they teamed up, they'd be hard to beat.

    Given the many problems with the Democratic Presidential Election machine, I don't blame Bernie for running a largely independent operation (he's officially a democrat right now, by the way). Given how power seems to act quite like an addictive drug, what Bernie's done is akin to setting up a rival cartel but saying you're in fact a close ally of one of the two big existing cartels. Except that they only do character assassinations, not physical assassinations. What he seeks to do is basically a nonviolent coup of the democratic cartel, and a lot of what they're doing in response is about what you'd expect.

    And speaking of cartels, I'm a democrat, so me comparing the democratic money laundering system to a cartel is speaking from a peak at the inside. The Republicans appear to be far, far worse.

    1575:

    David L @ 1394: Surely "Crazy Eddie" is a |Niven/Pornelle reference?

    If you saw many of these the term "crazy Eddie" comes to have only one meaning.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml6S2yiuSWE

    Yeah, that's the "Crazy Eddie" I remember. FWIW, when I read Mote I thought that's probably where Niven/Pournelle got the name from.

    1576:

    Tim H. @ 1401: My understanding is the surviving XB-70 has a bomb bay full of computers & telemetry.

    Maybe it used to, but it's been on display at the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB for quite a while now, and they've probably removed all the "secret" stuff that was once in there.

    1577:

    We're pretty much done warping FTL (thanks to all who participated), but when I started thinking about gravity lasers (devices that emit gravitons in particular directions and therefore at controllable frequencies), I realized just how incomplete my notion of relativity is.

    First off, there's no space accessible to us that's not warped by gravity. We're mostly influenced by terrestrial gravity, but if we get outside that, we're influenced by solar gravity. But the sun orbits around the center of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way's moving towards the Great Attractor, and who knows what other objects are pulling on us. Long story short, the Lorentz Transformations, which assume linear motion is possible, are an approximation, like Newtonian gravitation.

    Then there's the problem that gravitons propagate at light speed. I'm pretty sure that real physicists account for this in their models of how galaxies work, but it's weird to think that Earth is in a stable orbit following a gravitational distortion that left the Sun six minutes ago, while the Sun is orbiting a black hole that's 26673 light years away, so it's following a gravity track that's in part 26,673 years old. And the Great Attractor is 200 million (light) years away, +/- 50 million light years.

    So if SgrA* disappeared, I think the sun would continue on its path for another 26,673 years before it flew off.

    Weird.

    And it gets even weirder if spacetime deformations can be emitted as particles traveling in straight lines, as apparently required by a warp drive and definitely required by tractors or pressors. We don't see these effects in the everyday world because the gravitational wave pulses we normally experience are on order 10^-20m, or a small fraction of a proton's width, which is why we need huge LIGO detectors to spot them. What we're talking about with a warp or impulse gravity drive (sorry!) are amplitudes in the meters to hundreds of meters.

    I'm sure there's a lot of theory that already fills in this great void in my knowledge, and it's not something I'm terribly keen to learn. But it does point out that what's actually going on Out There is far weirder than what we learned in college physics. Far, far weirder.

    Cool!

    1578:

    whitroth @ 1420: I never even thought of trying out for the Moon race - astronauts, those days, were required to be a) *under* 5'10" (I'm 6', though now with the partial knee replacements, I seem to be shorter), and b) no glasses.

    You shrink as you get older. Life beats you down.

    I maxed out at 6 ft in my early teens & maintained it up until my 30s. Now, on a good day, I'm maybe 5 ft 10½ in.

    1579:

    Vulch @ 1436:

    Don't ask a starship pilot to immediately fly an airplane after landing a starship.

    In my much younger days a youth group leader I knew frequently got port and starboard wrong despite having spent several years in the merchant navy. He'd been an engineer and in the ship(s) he'd worked on the instrument panel at his station had him facing aft, so all the starboard side equipment was controlled from the left side of the panel and port on the right...

    Port is a RED wine. Port and LEFT both have 4 letters. The RED lights are on the LEFT side of the ship.

    QED: Port is the left side of the ship.

    If you're facing aft, Port is still the left side of the ship

    1580:

    All this talk about Bob & Alice, I'm wondering what ever happened to Carol & Ted?

    1581:

    But wait, there's more: simulation of galaxy formation without dark matter.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-galaxy-formation-simulated-dark.html

    1582:

    _Moz_ @ 1523:

    bigger piles compost and produce heat. Now the birds

    Birds are not the only reptiles that do this.

    Back in 1980 Mother Earth News featured a "compost heap water heater"

    https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/compost-heater-zmaz80sozraw

    1583:

    I rather like that idea - another story idea, asking a god to transport your starship.

    The God Engines by John Scalzi? Though not quite asking...

    1584:

    DonL @ 1528:

    Apart from raccoons, my favorite candidate for potential fire-maker is the octopus. Why this creature might want to would probably be based on situational circumstances:
    (a) Curiosity
    (b) Self-defense
    (c) Food

    With humans, it's pretty clear that fire was useless for all-night (or all-day) warmth unless you lived in an enclosed space. Curiosity wouldn't be enough to get the tribe to gather fuel daily. Self defense - nah, unless the predator had to get past the fire to get at any of the tribe members.

    So fire was most likely a way to enlarge the available food supply, by softening tough stuff. This is particularly important when you have a tribe, because a tribe always has a weakest member (young, or old, or sick) whose life prospects are much improved by easier-to-eat food. It's also important during droughts and the like, when non-preferred food is all there is. And, of course, a tribe that grows can (joke!) eat the lunch of a tribe that doesn't.

    Cooking food breaks down UN-digestable proteins into forms that can be digested.

    Place your fire in the mouth of even a small cave and it will provide warmth to those farther back in the interior especially if you build a "reflector" in front of the cave mouth. Plus, fire provides a deterrent to four legged predators. If you can make stone axes, you can build "shelter" and trap significant heat even if it's not completely enclosed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFzLChy3VPE

    Also shows creating a fire with "flint & steel". It's a lot easier with modern tools, but primitive peoples could probably do a better job just because they did it all the time unlike modern "weekend warriors".

    1585:

    All this talk about Bob & Alice, I'm wondering what ever happened to Carol & Ted? One of my favorite parts of the discussion was when Heteromeles # 1352 gender-swapped Alice and Bob. I don't recall that anywhere in the literature about Alice and Bob (academic, mostly related to cryptography) that I've read; does anyone else know of any instances?

    1586:

    to Lars @314: And a completely off-topic question for someone (Heteromeles I think?) about a comment that was posted a year ago or something like that, that I haven't gotten around to asking about until now: A claim was made that Russia lost more people to starvation(?) after the downfall of the Soviet Union than was lost during Stalins regime. Do I remember that statement correctly, and are there sources available for further reading? Much appreciated if one can be pointed to. That would actually be me. The theory was popular around certain communist circles for quite a while now, and though I disagree with those people in general terms on many relevant points, I would say this is a valid argument. It is also much more complex than it seems at the first glance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_crisis_of_Russia People would say something like "Stalin regime had all those starvation, purges, violence and gulags" and then compare it to enlightened era of liberty and democracy in the 90s. Actually quite a lot of people with liberal education do that. Their opinion is irrelevant.

    Any scientifically proven demographic facts have to be confirmed through statistic, and it is going to be obvious that there is no such thing as person that died from starvation. Or from being shot by government. There is always circumstances and a lot of critical research involved - while these factors are deemed to be majorly contributing ones, they are not the only ones to be accounted. And this is something that cannot be ignored about aspects of life and death. Long story short, there's very little statistics for great many "starvation" cases in the first half of 20th century, so mostly people operate with a term "excess death rate", or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement They set up arbitrary number roughly corresponding to certain event ("normal" level) and compare the impact of event to this value. Roughly speaking, in situation of draught, people can die from a lot of contributing factors - diseases, poisoning, weak health, exhaustion, malnutrition. These factors also take root in other events - population dynamics, government mismanagement, crimes and war.

    So, what's the difference? It is only in the circumstances. For ex-USSR they are, of course, difference from early USSR, but they are at least as devastating. And the contributing factors are also almost the same. Birth rate is through the floor, people are suffering from poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, unemployment, displacement, crime and conflicts. The demographic crisis is real thing, and if anybody would say that "there was no communism so it is ok" - well, there you have a typical example of liberal totalitarianism, ignoring reality at level unthinkable before. They would say "this is a bad thing, of course, but it is not our fault" when it is absolutely definitely their fault and they are perfectly content to do same thing again. (Actually, current term "liberal" in post-USSR has a very strict definition and I would elaborate a bit on that later)

    Anyway, if anybody argues that there's no such thing as genocidal liberalism, take a look at this graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Cross Current generation is again going to decline for a bit (after a small recovery period) because of delayed effects of world war. Also this. https://hbr.org/2017/06/white-americans-mortality-rates-are-rising-something-similar-happened-in-russia-from-1965-to-2005

    1587:

    _Moz_ @ 1524:

    invent a a bandaid (sticking plaster?) that would mold itself to the end of your thumb

    We have them in Straya, maybe merkins just have weird thumbs?

    Nope. My thumb looks just like the one in the video except for the deep scar in the end that keeps opening up whenever the weather gets real cold & dry. Figure if the thumbnail were a clock face, I have a vertical scar at approximately 10:00 O'clock that runs from front to back on the tip. The original cut extended back under the nail bed. I could see the tip of the bone through the cut.

    Here's a 1 minute video that explains the technique, there are lots of diagrams but they all show the side of the finger not the tip and I know you struggle with that kind of "like this, but different" thinking.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rN0hjWITW0

    Those are the same kind of Band-Aids we have here, except that he seems to be using the plastic strips & I'm using flexible fabric ones that stretch a bit as you pull them down so they conform better.

    I'm already familiar with that technique. Tried it years ago & it wasn't satisfactory. The flaw is you are touching the adhesive, pulling it loose & sticking it back multiple times. After you do that, the adhesive won't stay stuck. It will only stay on if you put a glove on over it. As soon as you take the glove off, it's going to fall off. As soon as you do anything that makes you need to wash your hands, IT'S GOING TO FALL OFF!

    Plus it leaves those ears sticking out on the sides.

    My scar is located right where contact with the fleshy part of the bottom side of the thumb will flex it and keep it from healing. It's the exact spot where my thumb contacts the space bar. The bandage needs to help prevent that flexing.

    I learned to touch type back in high-school. I've been doing it so long (50+ years) that I can't really "hunt & peck".

    To "hunt & peck" I have to search the keyboard to find the letters where touch typing my muscle memory knows exactly where they are. The bottom side of my thumb (9 O'clock to the nail) rests on the space bar and the bandage interferes every time I need to put a space between words.

    I know it's a lazy technique; I know my thumb is supposed to hover over the space bar. If my high-school typing teacher could see me typing she would be outraged. But those ears sticking out would still be in the way even if I was doing it properly.

    Your method doesn't even work as well as the kludge I currently use - place the pad of the bandage over the scar & stretch the tails around the thumb at an angle (without splitting them), one going clockwise & the other anti-clockwise and then use a strip of athletic tape to wrap around the thumb to hold the tails in place.

    Something like a finger cot with a pad at the tip and adhesive on the sides could be perfect, but I don't know how you'd keep the pad sterile or keep the adhesive from becoming prematurely stuck. I've had the scar for several years now, and I've tried a whole lot of "like this, but different" trying to find anything that works.

    1588:

    Pigeon @ 1540: Yeah... What happens if America decides they want the north of Scotland back?

    Say what!!?

    1589:

    to Charlie Stross @1254:

    Then when Lenin dies and the big T moves up (Stalin is purged) Hitler ends up in charge of the Red Army. Speaking about poor "buddy" Adik, this is very highly unlikely that he would go any further than platoon commander - or maybe try to blend into NKVD. Stalin would not be purged no matter what - after all, he was the purge embodied. Even after that, there's a lot evidence of sabotage on frontlines before the beginning of war, so probably there were a lot of such people who secretly admired German superiority and did not count on Red Army to survive.

    "In Hitler's stavka everybody's scatty". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovx534lotx4

    to JBS to @1512:

    Like most legends it's mostly bullshit. The particular feature of some legends, especially political, is they are multi-level. Once you're through first layer of bullshit, there's still many layers to go through. So I'm not going to claim to be a ultimate truth-teller, I'm just going to throw in several points.

    While there were certainly "communists" in Hollywood in the 1920s & 1930s, they majorly turned against the Soviet Union in the wake of the August 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Actually it was the other way around - first the USSR turned away from them because they failed to establish conditions for world revolution and failed to stop the establishment of fascist states. They thought that it is possible to somehow agree on terms, appease the capitalist predators and make the better world together. Which of course resulted in formation of Axis powers and all the prerequisites of war. Also Munch agreements, a bunch of other non-aggression pacts, and I should not need to remind you that USSR pact was the last of them all. And so on. Well, considering what happened to these European "socialists" in the next 10 years, let's take a minute of silence to commemorate their poor souls. Ahem.

    Most Hollywood "communists" were just social justice liberals & anti-fascists, taken in by the USSR's self-portrayal during that period. The few that actually made it to the USSR were soon disillusioned and turned to other left-wing, anti-fascist movements. Modern movements are, unfortunately, fully integrated on international corporate machine and it is impossible for them to not serve the interests of the capital. After all, we have all sorts of "socialists" and "communists" who were claiming that a) USSR had wrong socialism b) USSR have never had any socialism at all c) socialism have never really existed. d) socialism is to be fought with utmost persistence e) all of the above. I would compare it to Trotskism. It seems that the ideological basis of it lies in the idea that Marx was expecting world revolution to start in the places with most concentration of capital on the planet - countries like US or in British Empire, but contrary to that it is what considered "fringe" empire made this attempt and all the "enlightened" ones suppressed all internal dissent. Seems like they can't outlive such a tragedy.

    to whitroth @1532: That is, if they hadn't turned against the USSR after Stalin's show trial purges in '36. See what am I talking about. historically, peak of the purges was in 1938, and even then only small amount of people knew anything about activities of secret police (truth be told, they don't know much more even after 80 years, so there). 1936 was when the civil war in Spain was over and the disposition of powers before WWII was pretty much determined. Nobody was worried about world revolution anymore, everybody were getting ready to backstab each other.

    1590:

    There's also a post at Science News, which is probably more respectable. (www.sciencenews.org)

    1591:

    Thanks everyone for the FTL discussion, and I'm sorry about all the walls of text. Even those who disagreed with me pointed out very good ways of looking at the problem and have helped me to clarify my understanding.

    E.g. why it's not paradoxical to say that both Alice and Bob see the other's clock as slowed. The only way it can cause a paradox is if (a) one turns around, or (b) they can communicate faster than light. If one turns around, then the coordinate frames "Alice (before she turns)" and "Alice (after she turns)" are different (the velocity is different) and "Alice" is no longer the same observer in the relativistic sense of an inertial reference frame. This also helps understand the twin paradox.

    1592:

    But wait, there's more: simulation of galaxy formation without dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2020-02-galaxy-formation-simulated-dark.html

    Oooh, another dive down the rabbit hole. Thanks! That was actually a fun article to read.

    If MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics, the notion that they used to generate a simulated galaxy) works, that would satisfy my tidiness instinct. Dark matter seems to be getting silly, since we keep not finding it.

    Alas, I made the mistake of checking Wikipedia to see what else someone thought was important about the MOND family of theories.

    That in turn led me to find a paper where a dark matter boffin proposed in arXiv tried to explain MOND's apparent successes "as resulting from an effect of "gravitational polarization", of some cosmic fluid made of dipole moments, aligned in the gravitational field, and representing a new form of dark matter. We invoke an internal force, of non-gravitational origin, in order to hold together the microscopic constituents of the dipole. The dipolar particles are weakly influenced by the distribution of ordinary matter; they are accelerated not by the gravitational field, but by its gradient, or tidal gravitational field."

    I'm not particularly interested in reading the paper, but it looks like a reasonable source for raw phlebotinium to fuel SF warp drive, should someone be so inclined. Call them Blanchet particles, if you want to give credit. Or don't. The only reason for caring is that you need to be able to polarize gravity to make a warp field work, if I understand correctly (and I probably do not)

    Anyway, now I reach down and pull myself back out of the rabbit hole, ears first.

    1593:

    The northern bit of Scotland and the eastern edge of North America used to be part of the same land mass, before the spreading ridge that now runs down the middle of the Atlantic opened up. See the link Greg posted.

    1594:

    Oh, come on, there's a much better, long established name for that: phlogiston.

    1595:

    I have bad news for you: I just realized how you can positively prove who was moving close to the speed of light and who wasn't: Heinlein's Time for the Srats, where one twin goes on the starship, and the other doesn't. Whichever one is younger is the one that's moving close to c.

    1596:

    Re: wormholes. To carefully analyze any wormhole communication, we do have to remember that any real system involves parts of real space. That is, to get from planet A to planet B via wormhole you have to get from A to the wormhole and then from the wormhole to B.

    A-W and W-B are usually considered small distances that we can ignore but they are real nonempty spacetime intervals and hence subject to relativity.

    In fact the only way to always prevent a paradox in a loop X -> Y -> Z -> X where the communicators X, Y, and Z can move at arbitrary different sublight velocities is to either (a) make the communication links "different" somehow, or (b) to effectively communicate at no more than light speed.

    1597:

    I have bad news for you: I just realized how you can positively prove who was moving close to the speed of light and who wasn't: Heinlein's Time for the Srats, where one twin goes on the starship, and the other doesn't. Whichever one is younger is the one that's moving close to c.

    Your mental model is that there is an absolute speed and so you can say "one is moving close to c" without specifying "close to c as measured by X". This turns out not to be how things work. The X doing the observing is key.

    An "observer" in special relativity is always moving in constant motion. So if Alice turns around then there are two "observers": "Alice before she turns", and "Alice after she turns", and these three "observers" are all in motion relative to each other.

    1598:

    Another way to think of it is that to do an experiment someone has to do the measurement. The person doing the measurement has their own coordinate system from the moving twins.

    For consistent results the math has to work out the same for all 3 of Alice, Bob, and Zac who is recording measurements. All calculations must be performed in Zac's frame of reference, in which both Alice and Bob may be moving.

    1599:

    asking a god to transport your starship

    It's been done by one of the recent-ish space opera people. The gods concerned were corporeal but ran off belief, and it was quite a dark story in some ways.

    1600:

    I will send you an email about this. I have an idea...

    1601:

    I disagree. Phlogiston is a "superseded scientific theory." In other words, someone who wasn't BSing seriously proposed that it was part of how the world worked. Turns out he was wrong, but disproving wrong ideas is part of what science is for.

    Phlebotinum and handwavium are two of the many components of the highly variable, complex, and useful compound known as narrativium, which despite its name is not an element. For creatives, high quality narrativium is worth its weight in iridium, or sometimes californium for gem-quality samples.

    Unfortunately, phlebotinum and handwavium are unstable. If used improperly or in too pure a form, either element can spontaneously decay into low-grade bullshit. The resulting stew of phlebotinum, handwavium, and bullshit is an unsavory mess that's typically abandoned rather than remediated.

    1602:

    Sorry Charlie, for hijacking this thread... the FTL questions have been really interesting and have made me think long and hard about my view of relativity. But if you give me a yellow card I will absolutely accept that I've earned it.

    All:

    Carol in a spaceship is talking to Ted on Earth via ansible. Carol's clock is ticking in the background. Carol is moving relative to Ted. How much time (as measured by Ted on Earth) passes between ticks?

    This is an easy one: we know about time dilation, so we know that Carol's clock is ticking slower. As measured by Ted, there is a little bit more than one second between ticks. As she speeds up, her time slows down and so Ted perceives the time between ticks to get longer.

    Just as a tick is about to start on her spaceship, Carol decides to say something to Ted. Carol is standing next to the clock. Ted will hear the tick and the word start at the same time.

    How long does the word take to get from Carol's mouth to Ted's ear?

    The ansible itself may be assumed to be infinitely fast: but as Carol speeds up her messages to Ted slow down. In the limit, as the spaceship approaches the speed of light, Carol's real, measured message speed falls to the speed of light from the other side.

    It's only an issue for moving spaceships. On Earth we get to communicate as fast as we want. But the whole principle of relativity (not even Einstein's relativity, but dating as far back as Galileo) is that the laws of physics are the same for people on Earth as for people on spaceships, no matter how fast they're moving. It's not impossible that relativity is wrong, of course: it could happen. But if relativity is true, then nobody can communicate faster than light.

    1603:

    I love how you're still mixing in a combination of "things relativity requires" and "things relativity forbids" and trying to use relativity to understand how that works.

    Your final sentence seems to be an excellent summary, but you seem to regard it as definitive proof that relativity is the final word. I see it more as "if we can do X, and X is forbidden by theory Y, then they Y is clearly false".

    Now all we need is someone to actually build a FTL device.

    1604:

    OK, I'm having no luck with temporal arguments it seems. How about a spatial argument: there must be some upper limit to how fast you can get from point A to point B. Otherwise, you could continually flit between A and B and be (for all practical purposes) in both places at the same time.

    Perhaps there's a universal speed limit U, that you can't go infinitely fast, but c < U and we can still go faster than light. That's possible. But the error bars on experiments (e.g. with the GPS) show that U is only a tiny little bit faster than c, if it is at all.

    And before you say "no problem, we'll just use hyperspace to get around it" remember that I didn't say how you got from point A to point B, merely that if you're allowed to get from A to B as quickly as you like, then you might as well be in both places at the same time.

    The speed of light prevents both temporal and spatial paradoxes.

    1605:

    you might as well be in both places at the same time.

    Well the electron is in a lot of places all the time, I don't see the problem.

    Saying that "primitive muggins throwing junk out the back of their spaceships can't go faster than c" is a bit like observing that Richard Pearse couldn't fly faster than sound. Yeah, but Pearse wasn't the final word on heavier than air flight and there's no reason to think that rockets are the final word on space travel.

    An awful lot of the fictional FTL systems have various limitations for plot reasons. But given that every other mode of moving stuff we know of also has limitations (even the "free" movement through time has the caveat that not doing it is hard), I don't see why you insist that if FTL is possible at all it must necessarily be infinitely fast and completely free.

    To me at least, saying "in the right circumstances a portal opens that lets you move from A to B faster than light can go there without the portal" or "given device X you can move faster than light while passing through the intervening space (and good luck with that)" causes anything more than "darn, I really liked relativity as a theory, I'm sad to see it go". And perhaps "point that thing somewhere else".

    Maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the problems, but to me this is no more paradoxical than any of the other weird shit people make up about how the universe works. Dark matter, gravity waves, white holes, electron decay, they're right up there with phlogiston when it comes to actually observing them. But sure, if you squint the right way while looking at a stream of random numbers you can see whichever of those that you want.

    So if someone comes along and says "I can take a TV reporter of your choice to Mars for the afternoon" I'm going to watch what happens rather than telling the idiot they're deluded and that my pet theory says they can't do it. Sure, odds on I'm going to see someone making weak excuses, but you never know. And worse, just as with Pearse, there will be people even after the 200th time the machine works saying "he's faking it" even as the corpses pile up on Mars...

    1606:

    H @ 1592 Dark matter seems to be getting silly, since we keep not finding it. Snark, Boojum or Phlogiston, then?

    1607:

    And before you go on about it not freezing on coastal temperate rainforests, let me point out that I went to school in a temperate rainforest (Humboldt State, on the coast in redwood country) and I can assure you, yes it does.

    I dropped into Google Street View to check that out and I approve; that's a campus with a reasonable number of trees.

    For comparison I went to The Evergreen State College (this is Red Square at the center of campus, and I lived here). If anyone wants to say "That's not a campus that's a forest!", I won't argue.

    1608:

    There you go again. Now I realize that you're a mathematician doing yeoman's service to relativity, but you're treating it like it's a Truth carved in Aeternium next to the Throne of God.

    It isn't. And we know this, not because of handwaving warpships, but because quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible with each other, in part over how they treat time, in part over how to quantize distortions in space-time (quantum gravity).

    If something (presumably AI at this point) ever figures out the self-consistent equations that unite both relativity and quantum mechanics, they'll have to modify general relativity, perhaps mildly (akin to the Modified Newtonian Dynamics alternative to dark matter mentioned above), perhaps radically (for example, by determining that time and possibly gravity are emergent properties of the configuration space we actually live in). But if general relativity is the best we ever do, then it's more a sad but noble testament to our inability to understand that part of reality, not a holy writ.

    Does quantum gravity imply warpships? Almost certainly not. But we can and should keep playing with the idea, because it reminds us that the difference between science and western-style religion is that to do the latter, you're required to follow some arbitrary assumptions, while in science, everything is potentially subject to modification, and you have more freedom to choose whether to defend an idea or play with it.

    Remember that freedom. It's important.

    1609:

    Guilty as charged, Heteromeles (and Moz): I am a mathematician, and I do sometimes come across too strongly for relativity. There is always a a little bit of wiggle room, and there is always more that we have to learn about the world. I could be wrong!

    I do take consolation that even if relativity is absolutely true I could still (theoretically) jump in a rocket ship and travel to Alpha Centauri as fast as I want. The equations of general relativity basically describe acceleration (like gravity) as "warping space".

    The limitation that makes present day "warp drives" like the car in my driveway unable to do what SF warp drives do is that when they warp space, the space has to "go somewhere" and it goes into time. So if I warp space enough so that Alpha Centauri is just a step away, and take that step, then I travel 4 years into the future. My car's warp of time is so incredibly tiny that I never even notice, but the Alpha Centauri trip might be inconvenient.

    If I had a backwards time machine, though...

    1610:

    Humboldt State, on the coast in redwood country

    In Humboldt County ! I do hope the students were familiar with Temporarily Humboldt County by the immortal Firesign Theatre.

    1611:

    Place your fire in the mouth of even a small cave and it will provide warmth to those farther back in the interior especially if you build a "reflector" in front of the cave mouth. Plus, fire provides a deterrent to four legged predators. If you can make stone axes, you can build "shelter" and trap significant heat even if it's not completely enclosed.

    Yes, the oldest evidence for repeated use of fire is from caves. Unfortunately, that's because evidence anywhere else had a really low chance of being preserved down to our time. That said, I'm fairly sure that constructed enclosures (permanent or temporary) postdate the discovery of fire. Permanent ones certainly have been found, but weren't very old, compared to cave fire.

    The trouble with ascribing fire technology to its use in caves, is that caves aren't really that common, and a lot of them are too darn far from the bottom land with the readily available food. An interesting exception is coastal caves, like Pinnacle Point Cave(s) or Blombos Cave in South Africa, which have evidence the occupants ate shellfish.

    If good caves are rare, then I don't really want to assume that all the people not living in them made no contribution. Hence the suggestion that fire's use for processing food (and rocks!) could have been dominant.

    1612:

    It's probably worth reading up on the !Kung before you venture much further down this path. IIRC, until recently they had to deal with a full panoply of Africa's large predators. They didn't build bomas (thorny acacia exclosures) as other people in dryland Africa did. Instead they used fires both for warmth and as a method of defense against carnivores. In general, carnivores avoid fires, and if they don't, someone's typically awake and ready to use a burning branch against some idiot predator that came too close.

    Identical behavior has been reported for the Mlabri of South East Asia, although it's much harder to find the reports. The shelters they built were barely lean-tos, but they kept fires blazing in case they had to deal with tigers, which were a major cause of death for them.

    So yes, cooking fires are essential, and often fire warmth is essential, especially where blankets are impractical (as parts of the tropics like montane New Guinea). In places where large carnivores are a serious issue, use of fire for defense is also important. Further back in history when there were rather more large carnivores, it probably was more essential, but its use until the ethnographers got there to document it is good enough.

    1613:

    Now I realize that you're [erturs'] a mathematician doing yeoman's service to relativity, but you're treating it like it's a Truth carved in Aeternium next to the Throne of God.

    I should know better than to get into this, but I don't see erturs as doing anything like that. E is just accepting the initial proposition -- Special Relativity, Causality(aka temporal order), FTL, pick two -- and discussing it in those terms.

    SR has passed a whole bunch of tests in the last 115 years, so the matter currently seems to come down to picking one of the other two. If anything comes along that casts SR into doubt, then the discussion could change.

    1614:

    Well, I just said special relativity was subject to revision under quantum gravity/Theory of Everything, so I think we've got the answer right there. If FTL can be shown to exist, special relativity will have to be revised, just as Newtonian gravity was.

    Also, if anyone wants to delve into the actual math, you might be interested in Warp Field Mechanics 101, a presentation from the 100 year starship workshop that OGH attended back in 2011. NASA was taking the idea seriously enough to see if warp bubbles can exist in real life. They haven't reported finding them, so either they haven't found anything (almost certainly) or they have found warps and aren't reporting it for national security reasons (almost certainly not, but I haven't fed my pet tinfoil hat recently and it's looking depressed).

    Finally, I'll note that I'm most passionate about this,not because I think FTL is possible, but because it seems a fair number of wannabe SF writers lurk (or post) on this site. I happen to be one of the weirdos who believes that working within strong constraints brings out real creativity, so the point of talking about starship design (STL or FTL) is to expose the strong constraints in order to see if it helps make the resulting art more creative. I think it would be cool if that happened. Hopefully I'm not alone in this regard?

    1615:

    Since you’re a mathematician maybe you can tell me. My “The stardrive and only the stardrive has a reference frame” kluge works for special relativity. Is it possible to do the same with regards to general relativity? Can such a special frame be coherently defined?

    1616:

    1045: That's right, people will vote their money. Those who have it, even if they don't like Trump, will often hold their noses and vote for him in suburbia due to the economy lookin' good for those who have it. Most people in America don't, so will often vote for Sanders due to Medicare For All etc. etc. even if they think socialism is unAmerican. That's why he does better in the polls vs. Trump than the other candidates, except Biden, who gets by on people remembering things were better under Obama, second term anyway. 1106: You are simply factually wrong, America was always divided 50/50 just like I said, till it was over, and now Trump is benefitting. For the actual numbers, best source is realclearpolitics.com. 1107, it seems Trumps' "impeachment bump" has lasted longer than I thought it would, impeachment was the best thing to happen to Trump ever according to the current numbers it seems. Just like Bill. 1108: The UFW was born in the sixties not the '70s, when it peaked. And Chavez, far from its only founder, destroyed it, as any labor historian will tell you. And not just through the weirdo cultist "Synanon game" stuff, but because of his false strategies. Abandoning strikes for boycotts seemed like a good idea at the time, but killed the union, especially after the union goal of putting farmworkers under California labor law backfired in the '80s, by making the "secondary boycotts" by other unions of grapes etc. that made the boycott strategy effective illegal under Taft-Hartley. 1993 was also the year of the very last farmworker march the UFW ever had, which I went on. That was a last gasp of a union that Chavez had turned into a shell, all of the efforts of his cultist epigones were going into media campaigns that nobody except folk like the labor support committee in my union I was the fundraiser for at the time were paying any attention to anymore. Whitroth, try not to talk about things you don't know anything about.

    1617:

    Don L @ 1611 Caves are common in limestone geologies ... see the (much later) Cresswell Crags - inhabited at the end of the last glaciation.

    Relativity / FTL / Causality As stated, more than once -"WHat does the maths say?" - BUT as mentioned up-thread, more than once, there's this SLIGHT problem in that at least one of our current understandings of Relativity & QM has got to be wrong. Yes? I have a horrible suspicion that directly studying & re-studying both Relativity &/or QM is going to get us nowhere. It's probably going to be an "outside" observation or insight that will prove to be the vital key.

    JH Latest comments on the US seem to indicate that "Bernie" might be the candidate to beat DT

    Oh & it looks as if Coronavirus is now loose in Europe - N Italy to be exact.

    1618:

    Latest comments on the US seem to indicate that "Bernie" might be the candidate to beat DT

    From here on the ground in the western US, agreed. (I do happen to know someone who was very hands-on in the recent Nevada primary, but as he has occasionally appeared here I won't speak for him.) Actual people love Bernie Sanders, so much so that internet trolls are already out trying to undermine him. Two points:

    Russia has already come sniffing around his campaign and Bernie has told them to fuck off, exactly as Donald didn't. He has also called Putin an "autocratic thug," also exactly as Donald didn't.

    Primaries have just begun but the FiveThirtyEight primary forecast has the chances of having a majority of pledged delegates at 39%. That sounds good but not great until you check the rest of the pack, where the next most likely candidate ranks at 9%. (The 'no majority' option is ahead at 41%.) Elizabeth Warren, while a fine choice, is currently not a front runner in this part of the race.

    I would love to vote for a Sanders/Warren pairing.

    1619:

    That's still more time than the Orange Cheeto had done.

    I rather wish there was not an age rule, but an experience rule. Perhaps one that said you could only run for President if you'd completed a full term as Senator, Congresscritter or State Governor. That way the voters could see how competent you were. They might still vote a total incompetent in (see the current UK cabinet), but at least they'd have had a chance.

    1620:

    Port is a RED wine

    Except when it's not. But it's red enough of the time, and while it can have other colours it never manages to be a green wine, so I'll allow you the mnemonic. We'll just take it as 'Port is mostly a RED wine.

    1621:

    The mnemonic my mother taught me was "No nice Red Port Left" (personally I can't stand the stuff). She was a wartime WRN - not sea-going, but she was an electrician and worked on running lights and the like so she had to know which way to wire things.

    1622:

    Actual people love Bernie Sanders, ? That's Trump's shtick, that only his supporters are real people. Greg, analyses differ greatly re the electability of B. Sanders vs D.J. Trump. There is a lot of well-known negative material (some old, and some new e.g. recent heart attack and medical records) against Sanders that has never been seriously deployed against him at a national level. Trump's support also has exploitable fault lines; it will be a very ugly election cycle if Democrats and their allies fight back effectively. (Not looking forward to it personally. Choices, perhaps hard.) The prediction markets, e.g. https://www.predictit.org/markets/13/Prez-Election and the online betting sites are mainly amusing at the moment.

    1623:

    I rather wish there was not an age rule, but an experience rule. Perhaps one that said you could only run for President if you'd completed a full term as Senator, Congresscritter or State Governor. That way the voters could see how competent you were.

    Yes and no. For a long-term example of how well this works, look at the Vatican. The slightly more subtle problem is with people like California Gov. Newson, who's so obviously considering higher callings that he gets buttered up (and played) by every lobbyist you can think of and some you can't. Since unlike the last Gov. Brown (who was no angel either), he's not evidently smart enough to see every time he's getting played, were he to make it into higher office, he'd be compromised from the get-go.

    That's the putative advantage of having a non-entity run for office, that (s)he'd be relatively uncorrupted and uncompromised by virtue of being an outsider. The counterargument is, of course, Trump, who demonstrates that a) notional billionaires have the resources to run for office, but not necessarily the brains or experience to do the job, and b) notional billionaires can be owned/pwned as much or more as any career politician.

    The real problem right now is that the Democratic and Republican parties both suck, are both massively beholden to their big money donors, and both evidently don't know much about winning elections. The Republicans may be better, but some of that skill may be simply a willingness to compromise the vote count in various ways that the democrats can't or won't do.

    The other problem is that campaigning is different than governing, and the US has definitely drifted into a time where campaigning is the dominant part of politics. And we desperately need good governance right now, instead.

    Were I to take a broom to the US Constitution, I'd add an a couple of amendments.

    One is the old hat, which is that, for the purposes of the Constitution and the processes it regulates, corporations are not considered citizens or people, and money is not considered speech.

    A second is that federal political campaigns can start no sooner than 365 days before an election, with extra verbiage to define how this plays with free speech, freedom of assembly, and so forth. Additionally, all federal campaign advertising is to be paid for by the federal government.

    Now I suspect this last is illegal, but it would be nice to have short, sharp elections, not these horribly expensive slog-fests that only enrich the media tycoons.

    1624:

    Charlie Stross @ 1554: Greg is also utterly wrong about Corbyn. A better analogy would be: Corbyn is (was) the UK's nearest thing to Bernie Sanders.

    I think that's why I'm having such a hard time seeing his point. I think his hatred for Corbyn blinds him to the alternative.

    Luckily for the USA, there's no obvious equivalent of Brexit for Bernie to fall to pieces over. Unfortunately, Democrat party internal politics is far more dominated by The Money than Labour party internal politics, so Bloomberg is still a plausible spoiler.

    (Being me, you'd be unsurprised to learn that my preferred outcome would be a Sanders/Warren[*] ticket, winning the White House, with a Democrat majority in both the Senate and Congress and a clear two year run at fixing what the Republicans deliberately smashed. Also, I'd like a pony and the moon on a stick while you're at it.)

    Or even a Warren/Sanders ticket with clear majorities in the House & Senate. Even then, it's going to take a lot longer than two years to clean up the mess the corrupt republicans made of the courts. And I hope that if the Democrats DO get in they won't make the same mistake Bill Clinton and Obama made of letting the corrupt criminal activities of their predecessors slide. The only way to clean up republican corruption and make it stick is to prosecute the criminals and put them in jail for a long, long time.

    [*] I'd prefer AoC, but she's too young/junior/inexperienced this time round. Trotsky sends his apologies.

    That's where I disagree with you. I think AoC is doing a great job right where she is and that's where she needs to be and more importantly, that's where the country needs her to be.

    1625:

    Heteromeles @ 1592:

    But wait, there's more: simulation of galaxy formation *without* dark matter.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-galaxy-formation-simulated-dark.html

    Oooh, another dive down the rabbit hole. Thanks! That was actually a fun article to read.

    If MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics, the notion that they used to generate a simulated galaxy) works, that would satisfy my tidiness instinct. Dark matter seems to be getting silly, since we keep not finding it.

    What if we HAVE found it, but just didn't recognize it in the dark?

    1626:

    JBS Sanders is a USA patriot Corbyn ... Refused point-blank to support a defensive war against a fascist dictatorship ( Falklands ) Cosies up to extremist religious terror groups [ And I DO NOT MEAN legitimate Palestinians, I mean Hamas / Hizbollah ] Has behaved disgracefully with regard to the various anti-semitism problems in the Labour Party

    He had several YEARS of open opportunities to eviscerate two tory "leaders" over Brexit & their right-wing policies - & muffed it every single bloody time. ... Mainly, of course, because he has an extreme-left-wing ( Almost, if not actually Marxist view, actually ) opinion that the EU is a "Bankers ramp" & wanted us out of the EU so that he could then construct his "socialist utopia" on the wreckage. Note the similarity of that to the ultra-right's desire to build a oligarch's utopis on the wreckage, after Brexit? Generally speaking - he hasn't got a fucking clue.

    REMINDER: I voted for my succeful Labour candidate, who is a Social Democrat.

    1627:

    Yay! I think I've finally caught up.

    1628:

    What if we HAVE found it, but just didn't recognize it in the dark?

    I don't think we've found dark matter. Instead, at least according to the popular press, we have two good candidates, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and axions. The lack of evidence for WIMPs is heading towards annoyingly convincing at this point (my personal bias), and the hunt is heating up for axions. There may have been observations of axions (a hypothetical beast cooked up to deal with problems with charge parity in particle physics) and they may be cold dark matter, if it turns out they exist and do have the right characteristics. But the potential observations are too limited at this point to say for certain. As with the WIMPs, many searches are turning up no axions at all, at least none with the characteristics the experiments were designed to look for.

    That's why alternative explanations like MOND are rather interesting, because tweaking equations to deal with the realms for which we have no good experimental evidence is quite normal in theoretical physics, even the stuff that makes it into Wikipedia. All the proposals to create quantum gravity do this, some in quite striking ways (like Barbour's timeless physics). In its way, theoretical physics is just as speculative as SFF, it just uses different mechanisms, different publication models, and (of course) different publishers.

    In the MOND case, the various models tweak how gravity acts at low accelerations, such as one would find due to the attraction among stars in a galaxy, and these effects disappear at the scale of gravitational accelerations humans normally experience. That a MOND model actually led to the modeled formation of a galaxy is fairly important news (IMHO), because apparently the standard model doesn't always do that, even with dark matter added in.

    As for explanations of dark matter that depend on, say, dark matter being made of a huge number of tiny little gravity dipole/warp spheres, it's a nice idea, but if it turns out to be true, I think it would require a substantial rewrite of the standard particle bestiary. Not impossible, but it's sort of like betting on a unicorn to win a horse race. If unicorns exist, they could probably do that, but that is a fairly high barrier to overcome first, wouldn't you agree?

    1629:

    I DO NOT MEAN legitimate Palestinians, I mean Hamas / Hizbollah

    Can you explain how you see the difference between democratically elected by their citizens and legitimate please?

    1630:

    Stop. I mean it, stop right here. You are responding like a chatbot - I write something, and you respond to things I said previously, and NOT TO WHAT I WROTE IN THE POST YOU'RE RESPONDING TO.

    What frame of reference are the twins in when the one in the relativistic starship returns home, and is still young, and the one who stayed behind is old?

    1631:

    What frame of reference are the twins in when the one in the relativistic starship returns home,

    All of them, of course. There is no frame from which it is impossible to observe the twins (very difficult, maybe).

    If the above seems not to make sense, that would be because you are still working from a faulty notion about what a frame of reference is.

    I suspect that erturs hasn't quite realised just how you are persistently misreading him, and that is why he is not getting through to you, and you keep blaming him.

    JHomes

    1632:

    There is no frame from which it is impossible to observe the twins (very difficult, maybe).

    Does this mean you reject the dark energy and accelerating universe theories?

    If I recall correctly the accelerating universe idea says that there are bits of the universe so far away from us that their relative speed is greater than that of light, so without FTL we can't possibly observe them. Since that acceleration continues, a twin that travelled far enough would end up in a currently-accessible part of the universe that is now inaccessible due to the accelerating expansion of the space they'd travelled through. Thanks to time dilation the twin(s) could even be alive to experience the problem. (Not?) experience the effect? Notice that they couldn't see each other any more? Whatever.

    1633:

    I'm not sure that I have a good enough understanding of the acceleration proposal to frame a coherent reply. My lay notion is that the ongoing acceleration will outpace the twin, who will therefore remain in an observable part of the universe, but I can't back that up,and might be completely wrong.

    However, if the twin does drop off the observable (to the other twin) universe, then they are not coming back, and the two will never get together again to compare ages.

    My general take on this is that once part of the universe does expand so fast we can never observe it, then for our purposes it might as well not exist.

    My original point, such as it was, is that a frame of reference is tied to an observer, not to what is being observed.

    JHomes.

    1634:

    I find it amazing how you appear to completely misunderstand what I wrote, and then accuse me of not understanding.

  • Are you arguing that, for velocities significantly under, say, 10% of the speed of light, that we still can't view the universe as Newtonian?

  • One goes out, then returns. The one who stayed on earth aged. Therefore, when the twin who went out comes back, we know as a matter of fact that they were the one who traveled close to the speed of light, and it was not the case that the Earth traveled close to the speed of light... or are you disputing that?

  • 1635:

    Actually, I had to go make lunch, and was thinking about this, so let me expand and, hopefully, clarify.

    The relative frames of reference are ONLY RELEVANT at very large distances, very high gravity fields, and very large STL velocities. For all other cases, relativity is literally a moot point.

    Further, we can distinguish who was traveling in a high gravity field or close to c, and who was not.

    Is there anything I just said that is not valid? If so, in what way is it not valid WHEN NOT MOVING CLOSE TO c, or in a high grav field? Demonstrate that I cannot prove it using the twin example.

    1636:

    Since I don't see it linked yet, emerging pandemic vs GHG emissions, early effects. Keep in mind that debt-fueled economic stimulus could reverse these reductions. And these are (roughly, if one squints) first-order effects - the markets are panicking (late, duh) about global supply-chain disruptions, and similar first--order effects elsewhere as the pandemic globalizes. Analysis: Coronavirus has temporarily reduced China’s CO2 emissions by a quarter (19 February 2020, Lauri Myllyvirta) As China battles one of the most serious virus epidemics of the century, the impacts on the country’s energy demand and emissions are only beginning to be felt. Electricity demand and industrial output remain far below their usual levels across a range of indicators, many of which are at their lowest two-week average in several years. These include: - Coal use at power stations reporting daily data at a four-year low. - Oil refinery operating rates in Shandong province at the lowest level since 2015. - Output of key steel product lines at the lowest level for five years. - Levels of NO2 air pollution over China down 36% on the same period last year. - Domestic flights are down up to 70% compared to last month. All told, the measures to contain coronavirus have resulted in reductions of 15% to 40%

    1637:

    Well, serious pandemics are the most likely way that we'll meet our greenhouse gas reduction goals, unfortunately. That and famine, or nuclear or total cyberwar. I prefer option 3 (social and technological change), but apparently I'm in the minority.

    The problem's been known for decades, that global civilization is so thoroughly linked that there's little buffer between cultures or countries. Up until a bit over 500 years ago, a pandemic in Eurasia, like the Black Death, wouldn't have affected the cultures of the Americas or vice versa. The notion of the Ppanamerican pandemics of the 16th-18th Centuries being responsible for the Little Ice Age gets weird, mostly because no one agrees on when the Little Ice Age began or ended. But starting with the 20th Century with things like the Spanish Flu, global pandemics have become a serious problem. Today, every city is basically 1-2 days from every other city, so keeping an infectious disease from becoming a pandemic is hard.

    Actually, every year the flu is a pandemic, but we just deal with it. So far in the US (Oct 1-Feb 15), something like 16,000-41,000 people have died from influenza, while 280,000-500,000 have been hospitalized (CDC source). This barely made the news, because apparently this is an improvement from last year.

    Flu deaths are largely irrelevant anyway. Per the World Population clock, US flu deaths are something like 1-3% of our annual population increase. So they're basically a rounding error. Fear over the coronavirus is better as a temporary greenhouse gas curb, but I'll be shocked if the virus causes permanent emissions decreases.

    1638:

    Ah, you see the thing is that there's a difference between extremist terror groups who are small and getting fucked on, and extremist terror groups who are large and doing the fucking. To be an accepted member of the British establishment you have to be on the right side, which means supporting the big ones and not calling them extremist terror groups. (This also means you don't come up against a contradiction in those cases where the British establishment is the extremist terror group.)

    All the noise around Corbyn is about condemning him to the public for not supporting the establishment view while not calling attention to what the establishment view actually is. They are particularly fond of the deliberate misapplication of a certain term to imply that their respective alignments are essentially the opposite of what they really are, since the context makes it peculiarly suited to be abused in this way.

    1639:

    114: Whitroth, whaddyaknow, once upon a time we were neighbors. My old man headed the Jimmy Carter for Prez campaign in Fairfax County in 1980. Yeah, Virginia has gone quite blue with all the ex-northern federal government employees dominating Northern Virginia more and more day by day, and their kids (like one of my sisters) moving elsewhere in Virginia for cheaper housing. Not at all like when I was in a segregated elementary school in the early '60s, where the third grade Yankees and Rebels duked it out on the playground during recess every day (as a newly arrived carpetbagger kid, I was naturally a Yankee and did my best.) BTW, did you notice that in the first Virginia Democratic Party voter poll, Sanders is leading, not Warren? Suburbia nationwide is definitely another story, as the polls make clear. 115: Warren tried to swing to the center as the "unity candidate" for a few debates, which was disastrous for her, she lost a huge number of votes to Sanders. Now she is trying to swing back left, hoping to be acceptable to Bernie delegates if the DNC really does want to use the superdelegates to keep Sanders off the ballot. The DNC would be much more likely to get away with that with Warren than with anyone else.

    1640:

    Not exactly neighbors - I'm in MoCo. But VA - yeah, last year? year before? They elected the first open socialist to the state house, District 5.

    Ellen and I did go down to Arlington a couple weeks ago to see Warren in person. She's good.

    Oh, and my answer to the folks who say, "Oh, but she looks and sounds like a schoolmarm", is why, would you rather have someone in office who looked and sounded like Blevins? (If you've never heard the Austin Lounge Lizards do Old Blevins, you should).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCwmgH246AA

    1641:

    1624: Warren/Sanders? Unthinkable, Sanders would laugh at the idea, goes against all traditional ticket balancing, and he definitely wants to win. Be it noted that of all the candidates left, she is the one who does worst in a matchup with Trump, usually worse even than Buttigieg. I do think Sanders will get the nomination. My best guess on VP would be Klobuchar, whom the DNC would be delighted to see as the next Prez if Sanders croaks, and Sanders might see as the ideal ticket balancer. They don't need a nonwhite veep, as both Sanders and the DNC will figure that nonwhites will automatically vote for him vs. Trump anyway so no need to alienate racist white voters. A certifiable moderate who usually has done well in the debates. Biden would be an amusing choice, he has experience in the job and the soul of a vice president, but since the only real job of a veep is to fill in if the Prez kicks off, he is too old. As is Warren for that matter.

    1642:

    A cynic might even suggest that legitimate groups buy arms from British manufacturers while terrorists use other suppliers.

    1643:

    1. Are you arguing that, for velocities significantly under, say, 10% of the speed of light, that we still can't view the universe as Newtonian? That's a good enough approximation for most purposes. 2. One goes out, then turns round and returns. The one who stayed on earth aged. Therefore, when the twin who went out comes back, we know as a matter of fact that they were the one who traveled close to the speed of light, and it was not the case that the Earth traveled close to the speed of light... or are you disputing that? As seen by the twin who went out, turned round, and came back, yes the Earth was travelling at close to the speed of light. The difference between them is not that one was travelling at close to the speed of light and the other was not. As far as each of them was concerned the other was travelling at close to the speed of light, and relativity says that neither of them has any claim to be the Right One. But one of them turned round and came back, whereas the other did not, and that is the crucial distinction.

    JHomes.

    1644:

    Sanders/Warren might be more likely, as that would keep all the suits hoping that Sanders doesn't kick off and put Warren in charge. The downside is that she'd be out of the senate.

    There are a couple of things I'd suggest: --The news media wants desperately to warp this into a horse race. There's no particular reason to along with this reading of the presidency. It's just the only story the ijits know how to tell any more.

    --As noted in a previous post, one of the normal psyops all campaigns engage in is trying to suppress the turnout for their opponents. Therefore, if you're thinking "yeah, I like candidate [X], but they have no chance of winning, so.... Congratulations, you're almost certainly on the receiving end of a psyop. There's no particular reason to actually let someone else fuck with your head now is there?

    --As noted in a previous post, a bunch of other countries have found out how easy it is to fuck with the US elections through psyops and other tricks pioneered by the CIA and KGB. So if you find your opinion getting yanked in some direction by someone's forceful and clever BS, congratulations, you're likely on the receiving end of someone's psyop. You don't have to fall for this either.

    Oh, and if you have been hit by someone's psyop? Don't feel you share it to appear clever. That just makes you a tool in someone else's psyop campaign.

    1645:

    Wrong. I can tell who went close to the speed of light, because one is a lot older than the other.

    No matter what you do, you cannot assert that the Earth was traveling close to the speed of light, because the one who did travel close to c has less time recorded on their clock.

    Unless there's some transform that I'm not aware of, that the slower you go, time speeds up.

    1646:

    Wrong. I can tell who went close to the speed of light, because one is a lot older than the other. No you can't tell that. You can tell which one had to turn round and come back. No matter what you do, you cannot assert that the Earth was traveling close to the speed of light, because the one who did travel close to c has less time recorded on their clock. The one that turned round to come back has less time on their clock. Before turning round, they did see the Earth flying off into the distance at close to the speed of light. It's the turning round that makes the difference.

    If neither turns round, then each will continue to see the other as not aging as fast, but they will never get back together to find out which is right (answer: neither and/or both). Unless of course the Universe is closed, and after trillions of years they come back the long way round, in which case I would suspect that they would find themselves still the same age (but that's just my guess).

    JHomes

    1647:

    Heteromeles Agreed on one thing ... that it is now far too late for "Quarantine" measures. COVID-19 has an incubation period of at least up to 14 days & it's "out". Worst-case scenario is between a 1%-5% fatality rate ... And this is where it gets interesting, particularly if you do one of my favourite tricks & turn the numbers upside-down. Let's say there are 8 "billion" people on the planet, but "only" one in a hundred is going to die out-of-course, nothing to worry about ... Except that's 80 million people, isn't it, without taking account of the many who are "invalided out" for a week or a fortnight. A 5% rate gives you 400 million dead. Exceptions - not everyone will get it, some will get it with no symptoms ( "Typhoid Mary" - something in which COVID-19 seems to operate? )

    However, what we should be aware of is the continuing possibilty, frequently remarked on by experts ( which I am NOT ) of a really nasty zoonosis, with something like a 10%+ fatality rate, with bed-rest necessary for say a month for the remaining 90% with an incubation period of (say) 4 weeks ....

    Pigeon & Moz "Terrorists" / "Freedom Fighters" / Irsael / Palestine One of the major parts of this Problem is ... recent history ... i.e. anything since 1947 & specifically since 1967. The "arab" countries refused point-blank to ever accept Israel's existence - even now, people travlling in that area often carry two passports .... After 1967, Israel openly stated - "We have conquered all of this territory, of yours. By the rules of war we could keep it, but excepting Jerusalem, we don't actually want it - you can have ALL OF IT ( apart from the Jerusalem bit ) BACK. In return for recognition & we can all be civilised" This was rejected & rejected & rejected & the terror-attacks - including the important one - Entebbe - continued. Which resulted in an entirely understandable counter-reaction inside Israel ( "If they reaaly don't want peace, then fuck'em" ) And the consequent rise of the extreme right inside an already right-wing party ( Likud ) & "Bennie" Now .... yeah, well .... And of course, the one that continues to hurt my brain ... which I heard on the radio about 4 years back, where both an advocate of Isreali "settlement" & IIRC a representative of Hizbollah said an absolutely identical thing about the conflict: " .... but GOD has given us this land" Oh shit.

    I would remind you about Corbyn's stance on the Falklands - OK? Oh & the demonstrable fact of total incompetence - he could have brought the tories down & stopped Brexit, but no, his ideology was more important than saving the country politically & economically. [ Moz @ 1642 - cynical, but on the money. I think our arming the Saudis, w.r.t. Yemen is an utter disgrace, f'rinstance. ]

    US election I had to look Klobuchar up. What's her stance on UHC?

    1648:

    You're not getting relativity, I'm afraid. For both of them, it's the other who is 'moving at near light speed'. But in the usual scenario, one slows down and comes back again. It's the change in velocity that matters. The traveller has undergone acceleration, a lot of it. And it is the traveller who has changed frame of reference.

    Were you to change the setup so that the first twin goes out, and then stops, and then the second twin goes out, and stops where the first one is - then they'd both have undergone the same acceleration, and they'd be the same age. Yet both would have seen the other travelling at near light speed relative to themselves.

    1650:

    You know, I started out more or less convinced that objections to FTL with respect to our current understanding of physics could be overcome, but now, thanks to the arguments with Erturs, I'm rather more skeptical than I was before. It seems to me, based on the examples and objections that have been discussed, that it really is true that you can either have SR, or FTL, or causality, pick any two. Thank you Erturs, for contributing to a very enlightening debate.

    1651:

    1647: Coronavirus is scary because it's highly infectious, but the death rate from it is rather low, Worse than an ordinary flu, but considerably less than SARS, to say nothing of Ebola. The grand worldwide panic over Coronavirus is probably more damaging than Coronavirus itself. BTW, what is UHC?

    1652:

    UHC = "Universal Health Care"? Warren is in favor of Sanders Single Payer Plan. So long as the R's have the Senate, never going to happen.

    1653:

    @1649: [snort!]

    I suppose they're driving Tanky McTankface.

    1654:

    DMK @ 1652 But that's the point ... The R's are expected to take damage from their long association with the DT. How many Senate seats to the D's need to get a simple majority? 4 by my count, if correct. How likely is that in November?

    1655:

    You know, I started out more or less convinced that objections to FTL with respect to our current understanding of physics could be overcome, but now, thanks to the arguments with Erturs, I'm rather more skeptical than I was before. It seems to me, based on the examples and objections that have been discussed, that it really is true that you can either have SR, or FTL, or causality, pick any two. Thank you Erturs, for contributing to a very enlightening debate.

    The only problem with that is that we know that relativity in general will have to be drastically revised to deal with quantum mechanics, because they don't deal with time at all the same way, and they vary fundamentally on how they deal with the curvature of space-time. Special relativity says it's fundamentally about deformations of our 3+1 dimensional universe, while quantum mechanics talks about it in terms of quantized particles where time is in principle reversible.

    Anyway, I agree that FTL is almost certainly impossible. But it's probable that the reason it's unlikely is that, even if it's physically possible, it requires materials and technologies that basically can't exist, even if they violate no physical laws: solids that stable and superconducting at 7000K, for example. And worse, analogous barriers probably apply to STL generation ships.

    The other problem is climate change may permanently close the door on any mega-scale engineering in a few decades, so if we don't know how to do it now, the best we may achieve is a sad "yeah, FTL's possible" as we watch the institutions that could have taken us to the stars with better planning and management fall into ruin.

    But I tend to be gloomy. Perhaps some Russian mega-billionaire will invest in the breakthrough technologies and set off to conquer Proxima Centauri B instead of meddling with global politics. That would be fun to watch at least, even if I didn't get to go.

    1656:

    Now you're deliberately changing the results of the experiment. In the case I presented, when ONLY ONE goes out and comes back, have we not determined that it is that twin, and not the one who stayed on earth, who went close to the speed of light?

    1657:

    Greg @1647: I had to look Klobuchar up. What's her stance on UHC?

    Thanks; as someone who's voting in the Virginia primary on 3 March, this was worth investigating. It appears that Senator Klobuchar wants to modify the current health legislation, the Affordable Care Act, expanding protections for those with Alzheimer's and other dementia-related conditions, plus expanding support for caregivers, adding child care provisions, and increasing the ability of Medicare Part D (sourcing medications for those 65+) to negotiate for lower drug prices.

    The USA's political process is SO badly broken; the Citizens United Supreme Court decision released a toxic cloud of dark money into a political process already woefully dependent on financial support for election campaigns, with all the opportunity for influence buying that follows.

    What, as a citizen of the USA, I would like to see, is: - A change to the law to require that all private health insurance be run only by non-profit entities; - A Federally-operated public health insurance plan open to all ages (Medicare for All), but not with required participation; - Changes to the laws regulating patenting of medicines to: -- Limit the escalation of prices for medicines (see - escalation of insulin prices in U.S.) -- Decrease the patent protection period for new medicines, accelerating the availability of "generic" formulations from competing drug companies - Ideally, remove private money from political campaigns; at a minimum, reverse Citizens United - Greatly shorten the duration of campaigns: The UK and German approach (which I have observed first hand) are far easier to survive

    All of these are opposed by The Money, so unlikely to occur. sigh

    1658:

    Re: 'Coronavirus is scary because it's highly infectious, but the death rate from it is rather low, Worse than an ordinary flu, ...'

    Except a large portion of the population have acquired some immunity to the ordinary flu either from personal previous experience or via vaccine. (I haven't read anything to suggest that anyone has any immunity to this virus.)

    As for the mortality rate - I've been watching the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site and if you go by only China, it's 3.48% overall (5% in Wuhan and 1% for rest of China). Regardless, these results are after a helluva lot of intensive medical care plus a complete quarantine of its population.

    Could be wrong, but given the growing anti-vaxer movement, I have some doubts that the typical USian would comply with such a quarantine. Plus, unlike China, the US does not have universal healthcare. This combination of factors suggests that the mortality rate in the US would be at the higher end.

    What's weirdest to me about this virus is how it seems to fade/resolve only to come back with a vengeance.

    1659:

    Dave P You forgot one BAN "Civil Forfeiture" immediately. I found out about this about 18 months back & went ... "You WHAT!?" Open theft against the most vulnerable ..... For bonus points: Impeach Gosuch & possibly Kavanaugh ( Or have I go that the wrong way round? )

    SFR Virus' do that ... they mutate, flare up, die down, change virulence. IF it really get loose in the USA, with their fucked-over non-medical system" the results could be darkly & sickly amusing for those of us telling them that they need UHC.

    1660:

    Re: 'Virus' do that ... they mutate, flare up, die down, change virulence.'

    But --- all in the same person, during the same infection? That's pretty fast.

    Had originally wondered whether the second wallop was some sort opportunistic secondary infection - but apparently not.

    1661:

    Greg Tingey 1654: The Dems would need a net gain of 4, yes. That's harder than it sounds, since most seats up for re-election are safe seats for one party or the other. 538 has an interesting article on it, if you want detailed odds: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/were-checking-in-on-all-those-2020-senate-races-a-few-gop-incumbents-look-vulnerable/ If the election were held today, and everything followed the odds, the Dems would likely gain two seats from the Reps, and also lose one, for a net gain of one. But even if they gain a simple majority, they are not expected to win a filibuster-proof super-majority.

    I don't think the R's are going to take a great deal of damage from their association with the D--he is still the only candidate promising to protect the interests of working class/business class whites, and they are the base. Of course we are all hoping the independents break democratic.

    Heteromeles 1655: "...The only problem with that is that we know that relativity in general will have to be drastically revised to deal with quantum mechanics, because they don't deal with time at all the same way, and they vary fundamentally on how they deal with the curvature of space-time. "

    Sure, but I am not aware of any data that would indicate that the resolution between them will involve exceptions to SR in terms of FTL. FTL breaks the sequence of events, according to SR. It's hard to see a way around that. Just as likely, QM will need to be modified to accomodate SR.

    I'm more optimistic regarding technological progress. If it's possible at all, we will eventually get there, even if it takes hundreds of years. Maybe friendly aliens with FTL will arrive next year, and educate us.

    Whitroth 1656: "In the case I presented, when ONLY ONE goes out and comes back, have we not determined that it is that twin, and not the one who stayed on earth, who went close to the speed of light?"

    No, we have not. We have determined which twin turned around and returned to their point of origin. If they don't do that, each twin will perceive the other (or would, if they had a way to perceive the other twin) as having aged more slowly than they have. Hurts the brain, right?

    Dave P, 1657: "The USA's political process is SO badly broken; the Citizens United Supreme Court decision released a toxic cloud of dark money into a political process already woefully dependent on financial support for election campaigns, with all the opportunity for influence buying that follows."

    I think you have hit the nail on the head. What we really need is an amendment to the Constitution that will reverse the "money as speech" interpretations, and cap all political spending in election years. Really, we need to eliminate professional political lobbying as an industry, during and between elections. Money and Democracy do not mix.

    1662:

    1652 and 54: As long as Republicans and Democrats control the Senate, single payer is probably not happening. The great majority of Democratic Senators and Representatives, like Ms. Klobuchar, may want to tinker with Obamacare a bit, but do not want to go to single payer. Obamacare at the moment is actually fairly popular, and it would be too much trouble to try to transform the whole health care system, which would be a huge amount of work for the country, and for them too. Lose too many campaign contributors, even though a lot of businessmen, large or small, would be delighted to be able to get rid of all employer-paid health plans. They would only go for single payer if their hand was forced, and as long as all "progressives" in America vote for them, and you don't have mass strikes like in the '30s or urban revolts and anti-government mass movements like in the '60s, they won't have to.

    1663:

    I'm more optimistic regarding technological progress. If it's possible at all, we will eventually get there, even if it takes hundreds of years. Maybe friendly aliens with FTL will arrive next year, and educate us.

    You've read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life?" It's possible that aliens arriving to teach us FTL won't end destructively, but may make our own FTL mandatory....

    1664:

    You wrote:

    We have determined which twin turned around and returned to their point of origin. If they don't do that, each twin will perceive the other (or would, if they had a way to perceive the other twin) as having aged more slowly than they have.

    Really? How would the twin that went perceive the twin that stayed on Earth to have aged more slowly, assuming the latter sent a message via interstellar laser?

    1665:

    have we not determined that it is that twin, and not the one who stayed on earth, who went close to the speed of light?

    Some of us are saying, not merely that we have not determined it, but that it is not even wrong.

    I was thinking of creating a detailed explanation of just why I, at least, am so sure that it is you who has a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick. But it would be quite a wall o' text, especially as it would need a lot of detail to head off even honest and inadvertent misreadings (and no, I am not accusing you of any other kind), and I doubt that either our fellow commentators or OGH would appreciate it.

    So I will remind everyone of a certain xkcd cartoon, and sign out of this.

    I will say, however, that you are correct in saying that Bellingham has changed too much that matters for it to be a useful comparison.

    JHomes

    1666:

    No.

    If you think you have determined that, then you are still misunderstanding relativity. If you are in the 'frame of reference' of Earth (i.e. not moving relative to it), then you will see light passing at the speed of light, and it will be at ~300,000 km/s. If you are the traveller heading out, you are in that traveller's initial frame of reference. If you see light passing you, it will be moving at the speed of light, and will still be at ~300,000 km/s. And when you are heading back, in your second frame of reference, light passing you is still doing so at ~300,000 km/s.

    Note that the speed of light is the same no matter which direction it is going - it doesn't seem slower if it is 'coming from behind you'. That's what the Michelson-Morley experiment showed — despite the Earth's movement, there was no difference in the speed of light across the Earth's trajectory compared to along it.

    I apologise for confusing you by adding the second scenario.

    1667:

    One of the amusing parts of the history of relativity is how many experiments were intended to prove that such an insane idea couldn't possibly be... oh, darn, not AGAIN

    1668:

    Yeah. I can understand why people get so frustrated, to the point of calling other people names (well done erturs for keeping your cool) — it doesn't make intuitive sense that x + c = c for all values of x. In the Galilean world it wouldn't, and the Galilean world is what we actually experience.

    1669:

    Bellinghman How sensitive is "our" instrumentation? How fast would one have to go to test whether that actually holds? Even 0.1c is pretty rapid - a lot faster than anything we have produced so far IIRC One does, unfortunately, need to do the experiment with something moving really rapidly, to see if any discrepancy is observed. { Or not, as the case may be. )

    1670:

    @Whitroth: If they livestreamed video to each other continuously, neither slows down or turns around relative to the other, then they will each perceive the other twin to be moving more slowly than they are.

    1671:

    One will be clearly getting older. There really isn't any way around that.

    1672:

    How sensitive is "our" instrumentation?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment

    Back in 1971 someone flew atomic clocks around the world and they disagreed with each other in the predicted manner. These days GPS etc is sufficiently accurate that without taking into account relativity they wouldn't work.

    OTOH, whitroth's attachment to a privileged frame of reference doesn't work either. GPS wouldn't work the way it does if he was right (the gravity bits would stay the same, but the speed bits would have to change). Both twins see each other as red-shifted according to their relative speed, and see the other twin as aging slowly due to that speed. Perhaps think of it in astronomical terms - two stars or galaxies are moving away from each other. Does one have a privileged frame such that it ages while the other star is time dilated? Because we could see that effect from here, unless of course we're the privileged frame for the entire universe in which case... OMG, the Christians are right, we're the centre of the universe!

    1673:

    Sure, but what does it mean? The mathematical model that predicts the outcome of the twin "paradox" is based on the idea that the difference is due to a change of one twin's inertial frame of reference, which is another way of saying "he slowed down and turned around." It's not due to his speed.

    This would be a lot easier to explain if we could use light cones.

    1674:

    This would be a lot easier to explain if we could use light cones.

    Ask and you shall receive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iJZ_QGMLD0

    1675:

    Apropos of nothing, if you're a (wannabe) SFF writer and want to research alien worlds...

    ...Or if you want to hear what a field botanist sounds like in real life (yeah right,*)...

    ...you can waste hours on the You Tube channel Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Okay, the Chicago/Italian accent's layered on artistically thick, as is the pose that he's an amateur botanist. This guy's a really, really well-educated pro. But worth watching. Kinda fun too.

    I'm envious of the millimeter scale ruler he's got tattooed on his middle finger. I was never brave enough to get one of those myself. Kinda regret it now.

    *No one I know uses their technical vocabulary with quite such abandon or artistry. It's fun to hear it outside the classroom.

    1676:

    Greg, one easy test of time dilation (if that is what you are referring to), is particle decay rates at varying particle speeds; specifically muon decay is often mentioned in undergraduate physics. Experimental testing of time dilation (wikipedia) Basically, if one presumes that the decay rate of a particle is constant in the particle's frame of reference, then the lower rates of decay observed when particles move quickly (relative to the speed of light) are evidence of time dilation.

    (Human time perception changes such as tachypsychia, e.g. "leaves bobbing gently in the gale" are also interesting, though not (generally suspected to be) related; the neuroscience on these effects is not very good, yet.)

    1677:

    if we could use light cones.

    The trick is to find a treat that the light is really keen to get...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4XkyFntiuw

    1679:

    Oh cool. start with a quantum-entangled pair of black holes and you can use them to teleport a qubit into one and out the other. Wave your magic SFF wand, and that looks like a traversable wormhole, no?

    Well, no. But it is cool.

    1680:

    @ Everyone: Still wondering about how to detect a wormhole.

    Also, a different type of relativistic paradox-question (I‘m using this: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html):

    1) An object accelerates, and its length diminishes relative to its rest length, and its mass increases (Although, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html Problems with variable mass) v= 0.8660254037844386 c, l = 0.5, m=2.0….

    I then posit a derived quantity called “relativistic density” (Rp) which at v= 0.8660254037844386 c, Rp= 4….

    2) Let’s say I have an ultra-relativistic “light-squeezer” (Sorry, Alastair Reynolds) which can approach c so closely so Rp increases by a factor of more than 2E16, more than the density required to create a blackhole….

    3) As it’s going by Terra, someone on the light-squeezer sees this San Jose Earthquakes ball and says: “Oy, we’re all Manchester United here!” and chucks it out the airlock. (Yes, I know you wouldn’t do this in reality, but this is a thought experiment.) ISTM that a Terra-side observer would see a small black hole (and not a bunch of Hawking radiation) which should presumably immediately evaporate coming out (at v very close to c) of another, larger black hole also moving very close to c...

    I’ve not heard this brought up anywhere, so I’m clearly misunderstanding something. Could someone explain (in as lay terms as possible) what I’m misunderstanding?

    1681:

    That is a fun question. Part of the answer (I think) is that the metric is changing as well as the object? If it's moving so fast it's piling up space around it, then would it not get shorter (distance metric) and have a slow internal clock rate (temporal metric?). Probably wrong as usual.

    This, I think, may have been the basis of the suit to stop the Large Hadron Collider. Someone posited that it would spawn black holes that would Swallow The Earth (David Brin got there first), but anyway, the lawsuit was dismissed. However, the LHC did in fact go looking to see if it would generate low-mass black holes, and apparently it didn't generate any.

    The lack of tiny artificial black holes sucks for multiple reasons. One is that they can't be used as a kewl new power source (see David Brin), nor can they be dropped into the Earth by accident (see David Brin), nor can they be quantum entangled and turned into traversable black holes.

    Rather worse, there's a Randall Sundrum model of Brane cosmology that posited large extra dimensions as a way to deal with all the freaky dark matter/dark energy/hierarchy problem stuff on the way towards a Nobel. For our purposes as wacko SF writers, this flavor of Brane Cosmology looked like it would have been convenient for both hyperspace and warp drives. Alas, the lack of tiny, artificial black holes also apparently was a coffin nail for that theory.

    Oh yeah, the hierarchy problem: gravity's a lot weaker than the other fundamental forces, and some people see that as a problem. Brane cosmology posits that the reason it's weaker than the others is that unlike the others, gravity's leaking into other dimensions (hence also dark matter). One test for the presence of curved hidden dimensions would be if gravity (moving at its C) arrived significantly faster or more slowly than did photons (moving at their C). Alas, the first test of this happened in 2017, when a merging neutron star was caught by all the LIGO detectors and detectors of photons of various frequencies at pretty much the same time. That's the other coffin-nail in the Randall-Sundrum brane cosmology.

    However, if you want to get into alt-cosmology, you've got a clear path, if LIGO detects gravitons going faster than photonic C, LHC spitting out micro black holes, and the ability to entangle holes and then inflate them. That gives you hyperspace, warp, and wormholes, all through one Brane-y model. With a bit of handwaving, of course.

    Apparently we don't live in that universe though. I'm sad.

    1682:

    Greg Tingey @ 1647: US election
    I had to look Klobuchar up. What's her stance on UHC?

    What's "UHC"? ... not that it matters now since she's dropped out and endorsed Biden, although I guess his stance on UHC now matters.

    1683:

    Greg Tingey @ 1654: DMK @ 1652
    But that's the point ...
    The R's are expected to take damage from their long association with the DT.
    How many Senate seats to the D's need to get a simple majority? 4 by my count, if correct.
    How likely is that in November?

    My guess is it's barely within the realm of possibility. I won't be surprised if they do, I won't be surprised if they don't.

    1684:

    whitroth @ 1664: You wrote: [You Who?--- sorry, couldn't help myself]
    We have determined which twin turned around and returned to their point of origin. If they don't do that, each twin will perceive the other (or would, if they had a way to perceive the other twin) as having aged more slowly than they have.
    ---
    Really? How would the twin that went perceive the twin that stayed on Earth to have aged more slowly, assuming the latter sent a message via interstellar laser?

    I believe the "twins" are a reference to Heinlein's "juvenile" novel Time for the Stars. In that story identical twins are chosen because they can form an instantaneous telepathic link over interstellar distances. One twin goes on the ship & the other stays home. They don't rely on interstellar lasers for communications.

    One problem they face is the twin who stays home ages & dies while the traveling twin remains young. If the traveling twin cannot establish a telepathic link with one of the stay behind twin's descendants, communications are lost. At the end, a Faster-Than-Light ship was developed in the interim and is dispatched to collect the crews of the Slower-Than-Light exploration ships & return them to Earth after many years have passed, but the crew has aged much less than those who remained on Earth. For them less time has passed than for those who stayed on Earth. Tom, the twin who traveled to the stars finds that he is now the same age as his own great-grandniece with whom he has been telepathically communicating since she was a child.

    1685:

    Really? How would the twin that went perceive the twin that stayed on Earth to have aged more slowly, assuming the latter sent a message via interstellar laser?

    Let's assume that they both agree to send a birthday greeting every year, and that the twin that leaves sets out on the initial birthday, at half the speed of light (as perceived by the stay-at-home).

    The first signal takes no time at all.

    A year later, the travelling twin sends out the message. But it's got half a light year to cover, so the stay-at-home sees it arrive 6 months after he's sent his message out. But for his own message to get to the traveller, it has to cover the half light year. So it's going to arrive later than the one the traveller sent.

    So both are sending out their birthday greetings, only to have to wait longer and longer each year for their twin's message to arrive, because the gap continues to increase. Each sees the other 'living more slowly'.

    (The above is not mathematically rigorous, but it should show the general idea.)

    1686:

    There is/was an international encryption standard where the NSA representatives were very insistent that certain constants were best, and got them specified; Wait, are you talking about the S-box design in the Data Encryption Standard? The main weakness with that standard was that the NSA forced the key to 56 bits. ("Nice cipher, the key is too big"). The S-Box design was done with knowledge (reinvention, perhaps) of and hardening against a cryptanalytic technique that wasn't published in the open literature until the 1990s. "The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and its strength against attacks" (D. Coppersmith, 1994) I haven't found an open access pdf (it's on sci-hub fwiw); here are the relevant bits. Don was impressively coy about who exactly found that technique as(/or before) DES was being designed in the early 1970s (IBM or NSA or both?), and whether there were additional weaknesses (I once asked; I think he was annoyed.) Wikipedia suggests that more has come out since. The entire algorithm was published in the Federal Register [2], but the design considerations, which we present here, were not published at that time. The design took advantage of knowledge of certain cryptanalytic techniques, most prominently the technique of "differential cryptanalysis," which were not known in the published literature. After discussions with NSA, it was decided that disclosure of the design considerations would reveal the technique of differential cryptanalysis, a powerful technique that can be used against many ciphers. This in turn would weaken the competitive advantage the United States enjoyed over other countries in the field of cryptography. Many people speculated, however, that the lack of disclosure was due to some "trap door" or hidden weakness in the DES. One of the purposes of the present paper is to dispel this notion and to indicate that, in fact, the reason for not publishing the criteria lay in the hidden strengths of the algorithm, not hidden weaknesses.

    1687:

    Apropos of nothing, but if you want to read a door-stop of papers by people employed as scientists and engineers studying space propulsion and starflight, see if you can find a copy of MG Millis and EW Davis Davis (2009) Frontiers of Propulsion Science. You can find analyses of warp flight, relativity and FTL, and all the other groovy stuff we blew a few hundred entries talking about. With graphs and equations, if those are your preferred languages

    I'm reading a university copy obtained through interlibrary loan.

    1688:

    Moving on from DES to AES-256, it continues to perplex me that NSA has approved it for 1) general use and 2) use at the top secret level in the US government. Maybe it's a NOBUS thing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

    If so, it seems to me that NOBUS is a synonym for HUBRIS, which brings on NEMESIS.

    1689:

    I may be misremembering, and confusing the (later) weak key issue with NSA's insistence on an inadequate key length. I heard what I posted from IT security experts (i.e. not conspiracy theorists, but possibly paranoid).

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