Hey, I’m old enough to remember when the administration used to say that no deal was better than that.
To be honest, though, I don’t think they ever really believed it. They’ve always been desperate for a deal, and are getting more so as the clock ticks. And the Iranians know it. I’ve never seen a worse negotiator than Barack Obama.
It might be real, but the Left’s “solutions” to it are a fantasy.
Sarah Hoyt says don’t get wobbly (but she uses a few more words than that).
Will they go to church?
Of course, for some, science is a religion.
Imagine the maximum discharge of the Mississippi (~20,000 m^3/s) being issued in Green River, Wyoming.
What would be the environmental impact?
I’m thinking it would green up the west pretty nicely.
[Saturday update]
I put this in comments, but decided to update the post:
Someone can check my math, but ignoring wall friction in the pipeline, raising a gallon of water 6000 feet takes a head of about 0.02 kW-hrs (a little over 7 kJ). So a tiny fraction of a penny. At a speed of half a meter, for 2000 km, I get about 0.02 watts to move it up the hill (again, ignoring wall friction), over a period of six weeks or so. Seems affordable to me from an energy standpoint. Rather than pipelines, actually, it would make more sense to have a series of aquaducts with pumping stations, for less friction, and probably lower construction cost. At that velocity, 200 meters deep and 200 meters wide would do the job. I’m sure it could be optimized for speed and dimensions.
Of course, max outflow of the Mississippi might be overkill, so a useful system might be quite a bit smaller.
Joe Pappalardo has the story. I wonder how much of it is due to environmental impact assessment, and if so, if it would be as hard if they were doing an airport instead? Back in 2004, we tried to extend the categorical exception that the aviation industry gets from the National Environmental Protection Act to space transportation, but the result was weak tea, leaving waivers up the discretion of the head of the EPA. Something I’d like to see in an amended version of the Commercial Space Launch Act would be to make it a clean extension, with no discretion from Gina (or any future administrator). It would be interesting to see if that made it veto bait for Obama, though.
Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:
The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.
As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.
Are Germany and France joining it?
I don’t think this is right:
America is actually moving away from Europe politically and culturally, becoming more like Latin America in character and more concerned with east Asia. Increasingly Britain may have less in common with the United States, let alone Commonwealth countries like India, and more in common with English-speaking Germany – and even France where English proficiency is finally catching up.
If we’re “becoming more like Latin America in character,” it’s because we have people in power who seem happy for us to become a banana republic. Most of America remains more in the Anglosphere than the UK itself, which is becoming more European. It’s not just about language.
No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:
Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.
Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”