…would make a great stimulus and green energy project.
From my point of view, just think what the demand for that much material lifted from earth would do for launch costs. Unless they used SLS, of course.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Some Opinions On Gun Control
A lot of people have them, but Larry Correia’s are particularly worth reading, for those willing to be rational on the subject.
You Can’t Save Gun Control
…with word games.
But word games are all they have, really. There are certainly no facts or logic involved.
The “Claim The Moon” White House Petition
“Why I did it.”
It’s a dumb reason. He provides reasons why someone might want to claim the moon, but none for why anyone else should pay any heed whatsoever to such a claim.
Even ignoring the fact that it would be a blatant violation of the Outer Space Treaty, there is no traditional or even historical basis on which the nation could claim the entire body, nor is it necessary. Even if we could get an international consensus that off-planet property rights, or even sovereignty claims, are a good thing, we have to establish some criteria for making such claims beyond the fact that we stuck a flag on it four decades ago. Traditional claims, at least in modern times, involve actually occupying and improving the claim. For the U.S. to claim the entire moon without having even bothered to do anything significant on any part of it for almost half a century would rightly be viewed as almost as ludicrous as the Eros claim a few years back. It’s a planet too far.
How Stupid Was The Assault-Weapons Ban?
A Quick Bleg
Can someone point me to links in the past few days with the idiotic nonsense that the Founders didn’t anticipate semi-auto weapons?
[Update a while later]
Folks, I’m not asking for arguments against it. I have a devastating piece to do that. I’m looking for links to historical and illogical ignorami who argue for it.
Eugene Volokh’s Gun Thoughts
He has two posts up now, one on why it’s hard to prevent mass shootings, and one on why bans on “assault weapons” (a phrase that means nothing to the gun community, and that no one can define with any coherence) will do nothing to do so.
No Flying Cars
…but the future is bright.
The present is pretty good, compared to mid-century. I hope she’s right about the future.
109 Years Ago
The Wrights had their first controlled flight of a heavier-than-aircraft on this date in 1903. I had three separate pieces on the event back on the hundredth anniversary, which was also the day that SpaceShipOne first flew supersonic.
[Late evening update, after all the kvetching in comments]
Jeez, Looeeze, people.
OK, first controlled flight of a powered heavier-than-aircraft. Happy now?
No Gravity Required
This is good news for space settlement:
The scientists ran their experiment on Arabidopsis plants—a go-to species for plant biologists. The control group was germinated and grown at the Kennedy Space Center (A), while the comparative group was housed on the International Space Station (B). For 15 days, researchers took pictures of the plants at six-hour intervals and compared them. Their results surprised even them: the plants in space exhibited the same growth patterns as those on Earth.
The researchers were looking for two specific patterns of root growth: waving and skewing. With waving, the root tips grow back and forth, much like waves. Skewing occurs when a plant’s roots grow at an angle, rather than straight down. Scientists don’t know exactly why these root behaviors occur, but gravity was thought to be the driving force for both.
So much for that theory. This means the potential for fresh food at ISS, if you’re a vegetarian (or even if not). They should be learning how to do weightless hydroponics. Of course, we still don’t know if animals, and particularly humans, can gestate, or how, and that’s true of partial gravities as well. And we’re not likely to until SSI gets funding for its variable-gravity lab.