AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[james_davis_nicoll]

AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.


You'll know why when you get to it.

William Hyde's fault

Comments

[fabricdragon.livejournal.com]

sadly every time i try to read it my system hangs up.. i have an acient computer and probably there is a video ad on the page...

whats up?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I knew as soon as I saw "moon" in the URL. I will confess I've forgotten why you have the despair reaction to He3, but I know well that you do.

On the broader issue, can it *possibly* be energy-effective to ship petroleum an average of 9 AU from Titan to Earth orbit? The difference in orbital velocities is 20km/s, and that rotational energy has to come from somewhere.

Ah, unless I've dropped a 0 somewhere, I think it can't be. Gasoline has an energy content of 44 Mj/kg, and the difference in kinetic energy is ~400 Mj/kg (1 kg x (20,000 m/s)^2).

[elsue.livejournal.com]

Actually, having as I do absolutely no knowledge of helium 3 mining, I don't know which part of the article calls for an anguished cry....

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think James screams every time He3 is mentioned. It's a bug in the system.

[bedii.livejournal.com]

I thought it was a feature! I mean, I go outside whenever there's a press release that mentions Helium 3 and listen hard and suddenly I know what direction North is.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't work for me. He's west and a little south.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

In the interests of making James cry some more...

Has anyone seriously (for questionable values of the term) looked into the idea of converting the fuel to energy onsite and then pulsing it towards receivers in Earth orbit? (distances and dissipation ratios be damned!)

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Would that make James the screaming, cat-fancying Mecca of SFF?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, saw the words "lunar mining" and didn't even have to bother going to look.

Why so serious?

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

You're reporting nothing but bad news. Did you miss last week's story about the flying car that got FAA approval?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I bet someone has for solar.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Yes, but solar is much less insane -- no need to go to Titan or the moon when you can put up a collector in earth orbit and a receiver somewhere in, say, the Sahara.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The Moon is not a rich source of helium three. It's a somewhat less bad source than the Earth. Getting the 3He out of regolith is energetically expense, to the point where it would take less energy per kg to haul stuff off the Sun. The gas and ice giants are a clearly superior source. Granted, we lack the ability to do this but it's not like we know how to sift large amounts of regolith either. The gas and ice giants are just more obviously hard to exploit.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough:

WE DON'T HAVE COMMERCIAL FUSION, NOT EVEN OF THE VASTLY EASIER D+T REACTION, AND WE HAVE NO PROSPECT OF GETTING IT ANYTIME SOON.

Basically, advocacy of lunar 3he should be taken as proof of brain death and it should be legal to harvest organs from anyone who advocates it.

Re: Why so serious?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Several flying cars have obtained FAA approval. Like, since the 70's. And they were also all fugly nonsensical things, rather than lifting-body ferraris. Goddammit, the fact that it's not the first ever flying car or first flying car to obtain FAA approval is not hard to check.

I also love that 9/11 has led to the legalisation of torture and other violations of people's basic human rights BUT THE FLYING CAR MEME LIVES ON.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

I see where you're going, you slyboots! You want to use their brain tissue as high-density, impermeable shielding for muon-catalyzed fusion, right?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Also: what's wrong with FISSION? Is uranium ore -- never mind thorium -- so rare we have to mine it on Mars, or something?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Cold War cooties + Three Mile Island cooties + Chernobyl cooties.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Earth is the richest-known source ofuranium and thorium, which makes fission fuels useless as a driver for space exploitation.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And a strange notion that nuclear fusion is inherently clean.

Re: Why so serious?

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

By all means, then, return to the breaking news story of "someone on the internet thinks that lunar He3 mining is a good idea."

[dewline.livejournal.com]

The Sahara, the Sonora, Death Valley, the Great Australian Desert...any or all of the above.

Re: Why so serious?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Manually-driven flying cars are a terrible idea even if they were physically practical, which they're not. But I could see flying cars driven in fully automatic mode by a sufficiently advanced autopilot being OK from a safety perspective.

On the other hand, if everyone is using sufficiently advanced autopilots, ordinary non-flying cars become much less of an annoyance. The great flying-car fantasy is a fantasy of soaring above a traffic jam; networked flow control for autopiloted cars could eliminate a lot of jams in the first place.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

But think of the children! If we run out of helium, how will they have balloons for their birthday parties?

Re: Why so serious?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Except, of course, for the inevitable traffic jams caused by some moron making an emergency landing via parachute with their flying car on the road.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

But it is. SimCity told me so, and I think Civ backed it up.

[wintermuted.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Don't even need to check the link. I've been waiting for just this response since I saw the article this morning.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

It's all part of the Heliotrinitarians' dastardly plan. First, they start with the media...then they'll control the soda-pop manufacturing...

ONLY YOU CAN SAVE US, NICOL JAMES!

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I think I'll just reread "We Open on Venus". I forget the author's name but the setting was a theater troupe landing on a planet with massive hydrocarbon resources (as in "seas of gasoline").

I believe the anti-smoking ordinances involved the death penalty...

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that the rest of Reynolds' columns follow that tendentious sort of line.

[slrose.livejournal.com]

Christopher Stasheff.

[(Anonymous)]

He was long confined to the second page of the Business section, which was a recognized place for paleoconservative loons. Terence Corcoran owned it for years before fleeing the liberal Hell of the Globe for the National Post.

I have serious doubts about Reynolds' ability to read and understand anything.


William Hyde

Re: Why so serious?

[(Anonymous)]

That's what the disintegrator rays emplaced alongside the Highway Of The Future are for.

Bruce

[hattifattener]

And He3 should have, ummm, about 4% more lift than He4! Superior party balloons! Nothing is too good for our children, about whom won't anyone think?

Re: Why so serious?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Or without parachute, even. Because they've been ignoring that little flashing light that's been telling them to get the car serviced, and they read on the internet how to disable the safety interlocks that should keep them from flying a poorly maintained car.

Re: Why so serious?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Manually-driven flying cars are a terrible idea even if they were physically practical, which they're not.

Yet we tolerate manually-driven groundcars AND manually-operated aircraft, both. Perhaps you also consider both of these terrible ideas. If not, how would manually-driven flying cars be any different?

As for practical, a few previous designs have proved to be quite practical, as I expect the Terrafugia Transition will be. They fly, they drive, the owners can operate them safely.

I believe that two of the four or five Taylor Aerocars are still in operable condition; I have seen one of them fly with my own eyes.

They might never make economic sense, because of design compromises and costs, but I don't see "physically practical" to be a barrier.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I liked the namecheck of Ralph Lorenz, who is cool.

[raycun.livejournal.com]

I laughed as soon as I saw the headline, tbh. Helium 3 was the obvious punchline, but was there any good direction for that article to go in?

Re: Why so serious?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Number of aircraft << number of provate automobiles. Furthermore, pilots of aircraft are generally assumed to have some basic level of competence before being allowed to fly on their own. For cars, I believe the primary qualifications are "use turn signals", "don't hit stuff", and "be 16+ years of age".

Manually driven ground cars are, generally, speaking, restricted in their operating environment and failure modes, even the most spectacular ones, are similarly generally restricted to that environment.

And speaking of failure modes, the majority of failure modes for automobiles when operating do not result in a crash. Your engine gives out, you can usually get to the side of the road. Your wheel goes flat, you can usually get to the side of the road. Your transmission fails, you can usually get to the side of the road. Failure modes for an air vehicle tend to be slightly more dramatic.

And, to finish with a bit of snarkiness, consider the following phrase: "Your aircar, made by the fine people at Toyota."

[silburnl.livejournal.com]

It does however make them useful as a driver for an alien invasion plot (V, I'm looking at you).

Regards
Luke

Re: Why so serious?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Manually driven groundcars are a terrible idea. They were introduced at a time when attitudes toward safety were very different, and we're used to them now. They kill people all the time; it's an everyday occurrence. When we have some viable alternative, they'll rapidly disappear from the streets.

Manually driven aircraft have sufficiently strict licensing controls that most people don't bother to become trained to operate them, though almost anyone can. The SF aircar fantasy is one of mass ownership, not specialized applications. I can only see that happening in a modern liability and regulatory environment if they're point-and-click simple to operate, and safer than modern cars.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

For me, it was the SECOND line which made me repeat James Nicoll's noise:

"Saturn’s Titan is a vast reservoir of hydrocarbons"

Combined with the word "mining" in preceding line... YEESHHH...

I want to complain about the blinking

[(Anonymous)]

Please do not use the blink tag ever. Seriously. If you want to emphasize something, it rather defeats the purpose when you actually hide it 50% of the time.

Look, even the people involved with early browsers make sure to disavow themselves from the blink tag:

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia says lunar regolith contains 0.01 ppm of He3. For comparison's sake (because I'd just finished researching the subject), gold deposits on Earth are being worked right now, at yields of 5 grams/tonne of ore. Still a full two orders of magnitude higher than the concentrations on the moon, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of economical extraction out of hand.