Re: Methane threatens to bake humanity like Turkeys in an Oven

On 5 Feb, 10:59, "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 4 Feb, 17:17, "George Dishman" <geo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:> "Ian Parker" <ianpark...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

Ion drive to lift from the Moon? Not even close. From
a small asteroid with microgravity perhaps but you then
still have to get it to L1. In fact what ou would do if
the manufacturing technology was available would be to
land a mass driver on the asteroid, push it to the right
location, then start processing at that point. You don't
want to be moving a vast thin plate around and coping
with the tidal forces as it passes the Earth.

Lift from an Asteroid. Of course you can't have ion drive from the
Moon. As far as manoevering a thin plate is concerned. In point of
fact that would be easier in space than a solid mass. After
manufacture it could be used to concentrate sunlight and fuel the ion
drive.

The focus would be far from the plate and any thrust
would cause it to buckle.

As far as tidal forces are concerned. These are taken care of in your
gravitational calculation. All spacecraft to the outer solar system
have used slingshots.

Spacecraft are small, the plate is immense. Tidal
forces arise because the gravity on one side differs
from that on the other and would tend to pull a thin
structure apart.

We are well used to performing the calculations
needed to traverse complex gravitational fields.

Sure, you can calculate the force easily but you still
have to build something strong enough to withstand
those forces.

What I propose is similar to George Bush's return to the Moon -
only with one difference - No astranauts. The moror skills of an
astronaut can be replicated completely by machines.

We are nowhere close to that level of technology. The
rovers on Mars are the best. If there was an astronaut
there, he could blow the dust ou of the failed motors
and get them working again. The rovers can't even do
that and if they could it would still take a human
operator to control it remotely. A computer could
easily detect the motor had failed but wouldn't be
able to work out why or how to repair it and again we
are many years away from anything like that capability.

How much is the ISS and NASAs infatuations costing?

A tiny fraction of the cost of building smelters and
manufacturing plant to process your asteroid in
orbit. The ISS would be nothing more than a
proof-of-concept prototype for your idea.

A far lower sum
would bring capabilities up. You are right though to focus on the low
level of achievment of NASA.

I never mentioned them, you keep ranting on about
them. I'm not interested in your political ravings.

As far as working out why a component had failed. This is quite
simple. How would we do it? Well we would probably take a circiut
diagram, put probes on the various points. We would check the
continuity of circuits in (for example) the coils before coming to the
conclusion that the armature had burned out. If we had a new part we
would then repair the motor. If we did not have the part a robot could
not repair it,

Exactly.

but then neither could an astronaut.

Yes he could, he could unwind the coil, fix the break
and rewind it. I've done that. The whole point is that
a robot can only do the repairs it was designed for
in advance while a human can improvise. It's not
about inteligence, the difference is dexterity.

In fact the
example you give is a rather poor one because car firms like Ford
ALREADY have a plug into which you can place a probe and a computer
then dianoses the fault.

Yes, and then a humnan has to do the repair, that's
the part you are missing all the time.

It is in fact an integral part of an engine
management system. My car has its ABS controlled from EMS and
increasingly a variety of functions are going onto EMS. I could sttick
a probe in drive the car and proform an emergency stop while going
fast round a corner on a wet road. The system will tell me what is
happenning, and any faults with ABS. Expert systems are in fact used
in fault diagnosis including medicine - which is really just another
form of fault diagnosis and repar. The barrier is not the ability of
the system to diagnose it is patient acceptability and the fact that
diaglogue has to be done via NL (elastic station The season of spring
= La estacion de ressorte). In a car we do not use NL and a probe on
EMS is a lot simpler.

How far should Ford take it? It depends on whether they are paying
their mechanics $180 million a week>

OK one might say
can you automate everything.

You might, the rest of us have a much better grasp on
reality.

We are not talking here about emotion or any real deep thought
process, ..

Right, we are talking about the ability to do physical
changes to hardware.

we are simply talking about analyzable dynamical systems. In
fact a task can be viewd as the solution of equations something that
has been done for yonks.

Solving equations never repaired a toaster.

Out of what? The closest we have got so far is to assemble
blocks that have already been constructed:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/selfrep.ws.html

That is vastly different from sending a machine to an
asteroid. The simplest chips in those blocks took billion
dollar fabs to manufacture and that is after the silicon
and dopants have been mined, refined and grown into crystals.

No it isn't! Point is that an asembly from pre prepared components can
be viewed as a dynamical task. ....

Point is - there are NO pre-prepared components! All
you have is a few boulders and maybe some ice. It
is getting from that to the parts that is the task. Bolting
the parts together is trivial.

We will achieve what you are considering eventually using AFM

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html

http://research.chem.ucr.edu/groups/bartels/

but we are _many_ decades away from using it for macroscopic
objects.

The NASA establishment
seems to believe in something like "Intelligent Design" (As does the
boss) Astraunauts seem to be enddowed with the kind of "vital force"
postualated by (some) 19th century chemists. My contention is that
anything an astranaut can do a machine can do - probably better.

Go ahead then, see if you can get farther than Cornell.
Or just publish the drawings for a self-contained machine
nanotech machine that can make a copy of itself out of a
lump of raw asteroid using AFM without any preprocessing.

I am endeavoring to show how to do it. I am in fact a retired
scientist and my aim is to interest other people in worthwhile
projects. Nanotech is frequently talked about. The best route to VN is
via CAD/CAM. Nanotech is problematic when doing anything other than
reproducing itself. CAD/CAM will make anything compliant.

Again CAD/CAM is irrelevant, the problem is the lack
of physical effectors driven by those CADCAM designs
to actually produce hardware.

Stanford and Cornell are doing a great job - don't get me wrong.

I agree, but the fact remains that there is a huge gap
between where they are now and what is needed to
manufacture anything using atomic scale methods.

My
only criticism is that Andrew Ng to take an eample is also qworking on
linguistics - writing some great papers by all account. However we
would move faster with a TOTALLY DEDICATED effort. I think people like
IKEA and B&Q should sponsor students. If I were a university teacher I
would feel the need to teach a balanced AI course. To be a teacher a
Spanish, just as every teacher is "a teacher of English".

And how would that help anyone smelt alumino-silicate
rock into aluminium scaffolding poles and solar cells?

As far as total amounts are concerned. This has in fact already been
discussed by other people (see sci.space.policy) 1/10 of the area of
the Earth's circumferance has been discussed. In the case of VN the
weight is largely irrelevant. A non VN Earth transportable solution
with mirrors weighing 55kg/km^2 has been proposed. Rigidity is not in
fact a probem. If you did want a rigid structure you would spin it.

Nope. If you spin it face on between the Earth and Sun
today, it is edge on in three months :-( It will spin
once a year on an axis perpendicular to the ecliptic.

You are right. However as I have said a non rigid solution would be
what you would probably go for.

Think what the forces would be if a CME hit one side of
the shield. Has anyone calculated that or the strength
needed to avoid destruction? Your are talking about an
emormous mass to make this survivable.

NO - we can still think about spin but now in a gedanken sense.

Nonsense, to get rigidity you need real spin and you can't
do that as explained above.

The
oder of magnitude of forces at L1 will be > 5km/h. This is not an
enormous force. I talk in terms of speed since the strength required
has the dimensions of speed. I fact it need not be strong at all.

Rubbish, the typical CME has a mass of 10^9 tonne and is
moving at 500 km/s ! Your mass of 0.055 gsm is tissue
paper, fine for a small solar sail but in a non movable
configuration it wouldn't survive even the smallest CME. A
plate of hundreds of km diameter capable of surving a CME
would need to be hundreds of tonnes per km^2 and if 700 km
in diameter (I think you said 10% of the Earth diameter)
would be 35 million tonnes at 100 tonne/km^2 and more
likely to be a billion tones.

Smelting that much aluminium out of asteroidal rock
is not going to be done by Sonic the Hedgehog, even
if he can use Javalink.

Sure, but we won't have that sort of technology until late
in the century at best - too late for sure.

How come we will be getting strong AI according to Blair's think tank?

Who cares, where do you intend to get 35 million tonnes
of refined metal ?

George

.

Relevant Pages

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