AngelLestat

There are some definitions differences between Theory and Scientific Theory. The same for Evidence and Scientific Evidence. If your hypothesis is base on a mathematical model that can describe any particle in the universe, and you tested and it works for each particle, then; it is evidence that supports your theory. It can not be called a Scientific Theory, but for sure can be called a Theory.

Beyond those points, I guess the most important thing is that you just need a single internet service to be connected in any place of the world and no matter where you go. This mean you don't need anymore an internet provider for your house and a telephone-internet provider for your cellphone, which you lose signal and where you change country they charge you a lot extra. You can have your computer, cellphone or any device you have with a single internet account access. Then any need of communications is done in a cheap way with skype, whatsapp or any other app you may have. You can be in the middle of a desert or in the middle of the jungle that you will get always connection. All this with the lowest latency which guarantee a good price-demand for the service.

Another way to see it is from the application point of view. Blue origins or Virgin Galactics: They can send some tourist to experiment 5 min of zero-g and see the curvature of the earth. That is the only application of this technology. (You can also experience this with a hydrogen balloon, Red Bull style) SpaceX: Is our way out to leave earth, where hundreds of space applications and business can be done, is the door to visit other planets, asteroids or way beyond those.

This is the way you analyze a business plan? They use a different frequency, also you would not sale internet to each person in the world, not even mention your worst example of each person on the most denser city. Take into account you have more than 4000 sats, this mean more than 1 sat for populated areas, because farm areas would not require much and you still can get connection of those sats. Then as last, to calculate a business plan you need to calculate the cost, and how much clients you can have (there is a limit). So you divide the revenue for those clients, the lifetime of the service and the overall cost plus the technology value that you can sale to other companies trying the same thing.. Then there are many economic and business strategies that can be applied to increase the revenue or reduce the overall cost. As final point.. a lot of the biggest companies in the world are interested, like samsung, google, WorldVu, etc. You really believe than none of these companies add 2+2 to know if it worth or not? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spacex prices will go down at the same time their confidence in return their stages rise, also more often they launch, is easier for them to deal with ground operation, planning, etc. The prices will go down faster than everybody here thinks, and the business applications will rise at the same time. In other words.. the same thing I am saying since I am in this forum.

eww stop with the spacex vs blue origin. What blue origin was nice.. but just that, is not any different of what virgin galactic accomplish years before. Therein lies the real difference. Spacex can revolution access to space.. and when I talk about access to space I mean "real space". Reach space (the hard definition) is get enough speed to keep something there for many years. That speed is not even compare with the one that virgin galactics or blue origin achieve; and these companies efforts, has nothing to do with the things that we all here treasure, "real space". So was Elon Musk being evil with his comments? No.. he just wanted to point the real difference..

I dont think they will do that, I guess this booster will remain some way intact (just few test) to be preserved as historic prop. You can search for fissures without open the whole thing, with special lights or tune machines that measure the sound of each part. If I would be Elon musk, with the next booster that achieves landing, I will refill it with fuel, then I ensemble a fake payload, and I will repeat the process many times. That is the best way to test something.

Why disassemble? If the static fire works.. and they test that sensors and circuits work. Is enough. Just the fact that it landed, is the best proof that it works. I will like to see this booster in a special location as a monument for the first recovered stage.

For the city lights in the background, the city lights looks nice, but 10 min of exposure it would generate less defined points, like an average bright or over exposure. But well, maybe I am wrong and the city lights were very far and much less bright compare to the rocket.

I have an idea how that picture was taken.. you open the diaphragm so light can enter to the ccd, once the first burn finish, you put the tap to the lens, then when the stage is going back, you remove the tap again until it lands, then you finish the picture.. But that requires a good exposure calculation. Maybe there was more than one camera doing the same thing at different exposures.

Well, historic day.. I was watching the stream with my family. Congrats Elon.. Thanks for proving that few people with great vision and ideas can do more than thousands of pessimistic in their lifetime.

Looks amazing Blackrack, great job! Is a shame that this game never was done with performance in mind. So not sure if I would be able to enjoy it.

About hospitals or other services, is not an instant switch unless they had some batteries to backup the change. It takes some time. On cellphones this is the circuit. D1 to D4 are diodes, current just follow one direction (this is because the power transformer works with AC and needs to be DC. The C1 or C2 are capacitors, they are needed to convert the power wave into something more linear. But all that should be included in the same charged, not in the cellphone, so in resume, we can said that the cellphone is always (in some way) taking power from the battery, that is why we dont notice the switch.

That is a weird case, is not the rule in the rest of the world. And what is your solution? Waste water before someone else waste it for you? It does not have much sense. What I am saying is that never is good to waste water, that is something everybody should learn since childhood. Then when they grow up they design, think and act according to that. Then the amount of water save it is a lot.

You read me when I said in the Energy Storage topic that in Argentina 1/5 of the vehicles use CNG? But what you achieve with that? You are still releasing a lot of co2 to the air, unless you produce that CNG or LNG from hydrogen and capturing co2 from the air. Also in LNG, you lose some efficiency in the change of state gas-liquid the same as hydrogen. easy, if you want to know the tank volume you will need from a gasoline or diesel engine vs a fuel cell with hydrogen, you just multiply the volume by 3, but you also need to discount the volume of the engine system, because fuel cell + electric engine takes less volume than a OTTO or CI engine. I also explain you this in detail in the energy storage topic comparing normal cars with the fuel cell honda clarity. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/126804-energy-storage/&do=findComment&comment=2310548 Trucks usually consume 3,5 km by liter, this mean they need a tank of 285 liter to achieve a range of 1000km, so if you have a fuel cell truck it would need a 850 liters tank. In comparison this mean a sphere of 40cm radius for 285 liters, or a sphere of 58cm radius for 850 liters. You really think that little extra space matters in a truck? There are already a fleet of these fuel cell trucks but with only 400km range (because the company does not need more) called tyrano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibLa654H9-E Fleets of fuel cell vehicles for companies are the first step for fuel cell vehicles, this is already happening in many places, because the same company makes the hydrogen to refill their vehicles. Hydrogen can be used also in normal diesel trucks, just a little extra hydrogen improves the efficiency of the diesel combustion. A lot of trucks use this trick: This same concept was used for the germans with their zeppelins. I told you in the last post, that 25% is wrong, that was real 10 years back.. the real value for today is close to 45% (given by 78% for electrolysis and 55% for fuel cells), and that is not even close to the theoretical limit. Fuel cells has a teoric limit of 88% and electrolysis almost 100% because it uses the ambient temperature to increase the efficiency. One more thing, efficiencies does not matter, the only thing that matter in energy is power/energy/cost. You can have a weird tech that it gives you 10% efficiency in the power generation and 10% efficiency in the consumption, but it may be still cheaper than other technologies, so it does not matter how much energy you waste meanwhile is clean and cheap (the world does not warm up by waste heat, just by co2). You mean the air battery? Yeah that might be decades away, I can also mention that a pure graphene layer under an electrical voltage can split the water vapor from the air to produce hydrogen, it was already proven in laboratory, it would increase the range of a vehicle by a lot. But that is still a dream that it does not worth even being mentioned. What vehicle is more power/weight/efficiency sensitive than a rocket? I already mention how a jet plane can work with hydrogen reducing the fuel consumption by more than half. And not sure why you keep mentioning fuels that release Co2 as a solution. Sorry.. but you are in the wrong side of this debate, Using hydrogen to solve the problem of renewable intermittency at the same time you solve the co2 problem from the transport sector is a win-win that can not be denied. That is why you see all car companies making their own h2 car and why countries are promoting all kind of h2 tech and financing fuel stations or other commercial applications.

That picture is taken with a zoom lens I imagine (or high resolution). Because at simple eye it would look smaller.

Today at 8pm in cape canaveral there will be winds of 48kmh at surface level, 20kmh at 5500m and 60kmh (in similar rocket direction) at 10000m. So I think there is not trouble due wind. http://earth.nullschool.net/#2015/12/21/0000Z/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=-79.29,24.14,2048/loc=-79.760,25.864

I dont understand your main point with all this? Is like I said before, you just need to be worry of the water you extract from the aquifer and does not go back, or go back polluted. If you used as irrigation, a great part of that water goes back (in X years depending your aquifer deep). Some other part is evaporated and increase a bit the raining in the zone. (That is why jungle places get so much raining, because they absorb almost all the water in the ground and evaporates that to repeat the cycle). In some places ok you need to be worry if you extract a lot of that aquifer water than it will end in some other place.

I don't believe in dyson spheres, I will bet a lot that there is none in the universe. But in case you want to build one for no apparent reason.. I dont find any trouble with its construction and stability. The main point is to harvester almost all the energy from the star at the lower cost dont you? Well, you must use the least amount of material possible, then is easier.. You just need a lighter PV film in sphere around the star. Solar sails moves using the light pressure, so your sphere does not need to be so close or light enough to counter gravity due the same high radiation pressure. If the sphere moves just a little out of its gravity center, it means it has a side where it receives more light pressure because is closer to the sun.. so the system is always in equilibrium. Your sphere just need to be strong enough to resist solar flares, which they can increase the force over the limits on one side. But you can also solve that if you can turn the angle of some PV panels (in a netsphere) to let pass the extra pressure.

Really? Ok, just one example give me, "class 8 trucks". how do you power them with batteries? Range 1000km and you can not lose much time recharging. My estimation.. you can not even have an utility city truck with 150km of range at the same cost of a hydrogen truck with 1000km range, plus other issues that I am sure you will ignore. If you can not with that example, not sure what it would be your solution for airplanes or ships.

Is not the way you are imagine.. You dont convert hydrogen to electricity again. You need to see the big picture. The co2 problem with energy is not just about electricity, is all the energy sectors. This graph will give you an idea, but is kinda oldand just for USA. So from this graphic, you can see that even if you solve the co2 emissions from the electric power sector, you still need to solve all other sectors that are using fossil fuels. You can not solve the transport issue with just batteries, first the trucks class 7-8 have the biggest fuel consumption, like 75% vs 25% of trucks class 1-6 + cars. And batteries only work with low range cars, forget about utilities cars where you can not wait 20m or hours to recharge the battery. Then airplanes or ships will not work with batteries either.. Is a problem of cost that comes with the range and weight of vehicles. So.. all those sectors needs chemical energy, and if you can not use fossil fuels because the co2, then why not you dont produce all the energy (from all sectors) with wind and solar and you storage all excess of the grid in hydrogen that can be used in transportation and for heat. You mention 25%, I guess you get that number from this image which is very biased. But this image is not accurate because is very old, those are not current values in fuel cells or electrolysis. Normal electrolysis efficiency with a cheap PEM is 80%, you can use the same PEM to internal compress the hydrogen, in this case the power lose is just 3% in compression, this will give us a overall efficiency of 78%, then today fuel cell efficiency in comercial cars is 55% which give us a grid to motor efficiency of 43%. But the efficiencies does not matter in energy production and consumption in case are clean, only the overall cost matters. Any grid needs energy storage, base load as nuclear or fossil thermal plants does not work, because they need from 48 hours to 12 hours to shutdown and restart. That is why many times you have moments where the cost of the energy is negative.. The energy owners will pay you to consume that energy, because is more cheap for them than shutdown and restart plants. To not lose all that energy, the most cost efficiency method is power to gas, if you want to storage 1 or 2 hours of power with batteries, well... you can do that.. but if you want to storage 4 or 6 hours, then the cost triples, not with hydrogen, in that case you just need a bigger tank, and surface (material cost) increase at ^2 and volume at ^3. I will explain the natural gas in the next quote. Because if you capture co2 from the atmosphere or other process and you inject that to hydrogen, you get methane... but that co2 added increase the energy in the combustion and is easier to storage for longer periods (months or years). In this way you are not producing extra co2.

That link talks about batteries, and is true on batteries. But you can storage all you want using hydrogen. Here is the thing, Hydrogen will be always better than batteries when you talk about "range" or "hours of backup". Even that this graph not show, you can also use hydrogen to storage energy by very short amounts of time (miliseconds). Here is much better explained why is so convenient to storage energy using hydrogen http://www.autoblog.com/2014/11/14/bibendum-2014-itm-power-make-free-hydrogen/ Read the whole article. Normal industrial alkaline electrolysis reach 73% efficiency, but if you remplace that with PEM electrolysis you can reach 80% or more, if you use waste heat (for example 150c from other process) your efficiency rises to 95%. Now PEM electrolyzers cost was highly reduce, you may have numbers and prices from 2005. There is a wiki page that only use data from 1995 to 2006, so in these kind of technologies try to get data from the last year. These last times hydrogen technologies receive a lot of attention and investments, because now is needed, not before. Now they learn how to reduce the amount of platinum used using vapor deposition on copper or other nano tech techniques which does not reduce the efficiency (against pure platinum). There is also many technologies searching how to remplace the platinum with cheaper alternatives, there is one that already reach 80% efficiency with higher working time without decrease in the efficiency and a lot cheaper. It needs extra testing but is very promising. Ok tell me, what is the environmental impact of wind and solar? I want info from this year or at least 2014.

You can not guide based on those numbers. Because the water footprint statistics are intended to provide strategy information on what kind of entrepreneurship is advisable for a certain location. This is the thing I have against some green advocates, they use those numbers (to scare or impress people) which are not designed to reflect real water consumption, then people believes that it does not matter to leave the tap open because if they eat a single beef will be much worst. But that is not true, the only water consumption that you need to be worry, is the one you extract from the aquifers and does not go back (or go back with a big amount of pollutants). But the water footprint also counts rain water or other cycles (which in fact refill the aquifers), they also count all the water that needs to fall to the ground, so a small % of that is absorbed by the grass, then a % of that is absorbed by the cow (they dont count the water that returns to the ground by evaporation or by pee), and then, they use the same system to calculate transport and all process until it reach your table.

Nuclear will disappear faster than Fossil sources. How I know this? Because I understand all variables and because is already happening. Nuclear has 2 flaws, people don't want them around and is expensive. From my point of view, all measures, economics, tech and investment are converging to a mix of fossil fuel with renewables, where the main source is renewables using hydrogen as storage. -There are new cheap ways to produce hydrogen (with carbon capture that you can also sell) from fossil fuels. -Renewables can produce all the energy they want meanwhile all excess is converted to hydrogen directly in each fuel station. -The government will provide for free electrolyzers to fuel stations which will be added to the cost of renewable (which is still cheaper than nuclear). The last levelized energy cost study: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf

I read the book long long time ago, I watch the first chapter yesterday, it seems "pretty" accurate. Of course you will have a lack of details as always, the only thing that I did not like from the series (but I dont remember how exactly was in the book) is that all solutions just seems like socialist measures. In this matter I guess Arthur was kinda more serious in all economics and strategic measures to solve the world's problems. But well, the series seems pretty well done.. I am waiting to see the next two chapters. By the way, the book is not so big, so 4 hours of filming seems ok for the adaptation.

That language is not just for pilots, in fact was invented since the invention of radio communications. The audio of long frequencies is always bad, so the only way to ensure good understanding was with this. I made a curse of ham when I was little. They give me a licence that was "Delta Papa Bravo - Whisky Sierra Eco".