posted
I want to melt a bar of gold on the ISS and let it form itself into a perfect sphere, when in liquid state. No flaws, marks or seams. Mmm...
I saw an astronaut do it with raspberry lemonade once, I've been smitten since.
Conversely, they want to start ball-bearings factories in orbit. The perfect spherical shapes, so far unattainable on Earth, are the graal of engineers of that trade. Minimum wear and tear.
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
Registered: Aug 1999
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Although a bar of gold would be more pleasent to trade in....
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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quote: As a test of national will and skill, Chinese spaceflight is vastly preferable to, say, invading Taiwan. I promise to watch Chinese manned spaceflight with great interest, and I might even buy the mission patch and decals, but frankly, there isn�t much there there. There haven�t been men or women out of low-earth orbit in some 30 solid years. We don�t seem to miss them in any way that is quantifiable.
There is little point in stepping onto the moon, leaving flags and footprints, and then retreating once again. The staggering price of shipping a kilogram into orbit has not come down in decades. In the meantime, unmanned spacecraft grow smaller and more capable every year. Until we bioengineer ourselves to enjoy cosmic rays, or until we�ve got rockets that can lift a Winnebago made of solid lead, this technology belongs on the museum shelf.
posted
That was a very good article, but I'm pretty disappointed he chose to add cosmetic implants or DVDs to the list and not tobacco. He can't be too smart if he neglected tobacco, Sol.
What is "Schismatrix"?
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Tobacco is a really interesting choice, Nim. Not something I had considered, but it makes a lot of sense. Though, I think the thrust of the article is that these are technologies that Sterling thinks not only should be replaced but are likely to be. I don't see people giving up tobacco. (Actually, I don't see them giving up nuclear weapons, either.)
Schismatrix is a novel Sterling wrote, and aside from being, in my opinion, fantastic, it imagines a set of manned spaceflight technologies that meet his criteria, among other things.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Tobacco isn't exactly a technology, just a plant that contains a drug in it. Yes, it certainly has widespread effects, not just to those who smoke. I think, though, that unlike coal, which has an entire infrastructure built around it, tobacco is simply a product. An influential product, yes, but still just a product.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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As I light a cigarette and ponder what to type next the though that there are other ways of dying that are just as bad occurs to me. Healthy joggers dropping dead from heart failure, auto accidents, terrorist bombings, to point out a few things.... Although I do try to keep my habit to myself, not smoking around children or non smokers, I find it ironic that things happen in various places that are just as bad. States without motorcycle helmet laws, we must pay for those that have accidents and bump there heads when a simple helmet would have protected the person anyway, is one such example. The multitude of stupid lawsuits that people get in to court, that some idiotic jury agrees with, that only cost everyone more money as the prices for things increase. People that drive like lunitics, kill another driver, then are disabled themselves and collect SSI and what not for being a fucking lunitic....
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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posted
OTOH, there's plenty of technology to tobacco. Were the industrial producing, transportation and marketing of cigarettes to cease for some reason, there is very little chance that the users would start growing their own tobacco instead. It's just not worth the effort; it's far easier and more productive to grow mild drugs, if you are into this green thumb thing to begin with.
All the elements of the tobacco industry could be converted to "beneficial" use if freed from the current applications, so there's some validity to saying that tobacco is "a technology that deserves to die".
posted
MinutiaeMan: If the guy in the article thinks breast implants are a technology, then smoking is too. The way you convert a plant into a product, adding filters and papers plus a bunch of purposely addictive chemicals. That's a series of stages that have seen a lot of development the last 20 years, newer filters, increased addiction curve. It is absolutely a technology.
The two things that connect smoking and implants are vanity and popularity. I've seen too many stupid guys and girls start smoking just to be around the popular people in school. And girls who get implants to try and patch the holes in their egos, guys who get their lips fattened, lol for the last one.
Ritten mentioned: "heart failure, auto accidents, terrorist bombings"
I won't turn this thread into a smoker-bashing one, I just have to respond to your post.
You don't get heart failure from jogging, jogging is healthy. You get it if you have a bad heart or if you jog too much, or both combined. Even then, it's at random, and from trying to do something good. Smoking is bad from the start.
Auto accidents also happen by chance, bad timing, wrong day to drive while hung-over. Health issues from smoking doesn't exactly come at random, they are inevitable.
Terrorist bombings can't be compared to smoking at all. The one is a phenomena, the other is a habit. All the same, I believe smoking kills more people per year than terrorist bombings.
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Just thought of something. I remember hearing a description of fire in Zero-G, that it was spherical and pulsating, very different from ordinary fires.
How about smoke? If you light a cigarette on a shuttle or on the ISS (although it's forbidden, for obvious reasons) would the smoke just gather around the tip of the cigarette, growing slowly like a cotton ball in water?
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
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posted
I'm not sure exactly what would happen but I imagine the convection currents would make it spread out a lot more than you're suggesting.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
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-------------------- "Lotta people go through life doing things badly. Racing's important to men who do it well. When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting."
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