Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 22-26 August 2011 (1996-2000)
Carl-E:
--- Quote from: Boradis on 27 Aug 2011, 15:01 ---
--- Quote from: Carl-E on 27 Aug 2011, 11:06 ---Whenever studying biological systems, I'm always amazed at how efficient evolution has made them.
--- End quote ---
Evolution just plain sucks. I know this is his rant about intelligent design, but it also makes a good case for how incredibly inefficient, sloppy and haphazard evolution is. Not that it isn't amazing and all that, but anything that seems efficient only looks that way if you overlook the fact that it took about four billion years to arrive at that configuration. A good point WRT us comes up at the four minute mark in the above video where he points out we eat, breath and drink through the same hole, thereby guaranteeing a percentage of us will choke to death yearly. That's not efficient.
--- End quote ---
I like that video! Not familiar with him, but certainly my knda guy. However, there's really nothing in that about efficiency. Somene else already mentioned the choking thing, and in fact fewer orifices is more efficient - multiple purpose devices are always more efficient than single-purpose items. While there are a lot of ways that we can fail, and yes, most of the universe is inhospitable to our form of life, every inch of this ball is covered with life (even deserts and the ocean floor - what we haven't killed off). Fact is, evolution has managed to filll damn near every niche of this planet with some form of life, and it all works (well, worked) together, very efficiently. Sure it took a long time to fill all those niches, it's an undirected process. No one said to the spoonbill, "You know, you might get more bugs out of the mud if that were a little wider...".
As for us, we're susceptible to a lot of things. But our numbers are still growing, despite the chokings, deaths by accident, wars, birth defects, etc. We are extremely well adapted to what we do.
Of course, it may be the death of us, but that's the way the system works...
--- Quote from: Boradis on 27 Aug 2011, 15:01 ---
--- Quote from: HiFranc on 27 Aug 2011, 14:55 ---
--- Quote from: Skewbrow on 27 Aug 2011, 14:37 ---[...]
@Boradis: I think that most if not all commercial nuclear reactors generate electricity by first turning water into steam that then turns turbines. I may be wrong about this as I only read about this somewhere last spring during the Fukushima incident. I don't know how the reactors at nuclear powered submarines do it.
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It's all of them (including ships and subs). All nuclear reactors are are pretty expensive kettles. ;-)
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That's exactly my point. You can't turn that into a rocket.
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I'm no nuclear engineer. I have no idea what kind of revolutionary propulsion system he had in mind, and neither do you. Just because you can't adapt existing reactor systems to spaceflight doesn't mean there isn't some neutron-shedding reaction that will push a rocket through space! My point was that the economic system dictates the directions of research in this country (and most of the rest of the world), so we don't get revolutionary breakthroughs very often, if ever.
Akima:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 28 Aug 2011, 09:24 ---On the whole I prefer the native plurals to the original (e.g. forums, not fora). However, I instinctively say automata rather than automatons, and I imagine that even you say data rather than datums.
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Not to mention media instead of mediums, unless referring to people who claim to speak to the spirits of the dead. Except many (perhaps most) people use "data" and "media" as if they were singular. Plural forms of nouns are so unnecessary in any event. English-speakers are not confused by sheep, deer or salmon, and millions of Chinese and Japanese people do without plural forms entirely.
Edit: Campaign Against Plural Nouns would be CAPN. Say "Yes, CAP'N!" :-D
Akima:
--- Quote from: Boradis on 25 Aug 2011, 07:21 ---If that's what he said, he has a grossly oversimplified view of the difficulties of space travel. It's not that we lost interest it's that orbital velocity is incredibly hard and escape velocity is even harder. Until a breakthrough in propulsion or materials comes along we're going to be stuck on one planet.
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I've been thinking about this since you posted it, and I'm not sure that I buy it. I know that climbing out of the gravity well is very difficult, but it hasn't become any more so since Apollo 17 brought crewed spaceflight beyond Earth's orbit to an end. In 1972. Nearly 40 years ago. Using technology developed back in the 1960's. I was thinking about this when the final Space Shuttle mission ended. The Space Shuttle first made an orbital flight more than thirty years ago. The Russian Proton rocket first flew in 1965. I don't doubt that Proton, like the Shuttle, has undergone development since its first flight (the latest model first flew a decade ago), but could we not do better today if we only wanted to? Compare the pace of progress in space-launch technology with that in areas we really do care about, like mobile phones and killing people.
I think there is something in Jeph's idea that we, or at least our rulers, just lost interest. The technical hurdle has not grown any higher, but we're achieving less in leaping it than we did in 1968. The political motivation for Apollo was primarily international dick-waving, and using space-flight for that just went out of fashion, until arguably my homeland started treading the same path.
Carl-E:
--- Quote from: Akima on 28 Aug 2011, 15:38 ---Campaign Against Plural Nouns would be CAPN. Say "Yes, CAP'N!" :-D
--- End quote ---
Aye, aye!
Is it cold in here?:
Nuclear propulsion for the really hardcore
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