PakledHostage

Keeping things reasonable: I'd love to go but I've resigned myself to the fact that it will never happen. Realistic destinations for mere mortals (i.e. space tourists) within my lifetime will probably be limited to LEO and the Moon. Nobody is going to pick me to go to Mars because I don't have the superhuman credentials necessary.

If it was real life, the 777's primary flight computers would have commanded the elevators to pitch the aircraft nose down.

But again, that's a ridiculous argument. Traditional auto manufacturing corporations like Mercedes, GM, VW etc have value that results from how their in-house technology allows them to make money. Sure some of the ideas that they are using were invented by others but as a corporate entity, each of these companies have heir own unique capability to generate profits. Tesla is no different. They've hung their hat on their self driving technology, their battery technology and their supply chain management. Some of it may need further refinement, but it still has enough value that people are willing to give them money to iron out those wrinkles in very reasonable anticipation of a future pay off.

I was thinking of their self driving technology when I wrote my earlier post, but I also think it is unfair to equate a modern Tesla with an electric car from 100 years ago. Battery technology, motor control systems, manufacturing techniques and materials, and on and on have all advanced sufficiently in the intervening years to make the comparison ridiculous. They are no more alike than a modern Mercedes is like the Benz-Patent Motorwagen.

But Tesla's technology is worth something, so I don't think it is going to die any time soon. You see that in the stock price. Its market cap isn't all about hype. (Although Musk does engender more than his share of hype and fanboyism.) They may have some wrinkles to iron out but the company has lots of earning potential in the years ahead if/when they get that sorted out. Investors will inevitably keep throwing them money because electric vehicles are an up and coming thing. (And I say that even as someone who probably won't be buying an electric car for at least a decade or more because I am too cheap to buy new vehicles and I think the technology needs to mature a bit before it will be practical for my type of driving.) While your point is valid in principle, I think 300 kW is too high for an average power consumption. It might use that much going up a hill, but not on the flat highway. I'd expect it to be closer to half that or less on level roads. I'd be very surprised to learn that they were that far along. You'd think it would be bigger news if that were the case. Tunnels long enough to be useful for a Hyperloop would be among the longest tunnels in the world.

Since we're solidly off topic anyway, I'll add this: I was up in L'Anse Aux Meadows (a UNESCO world heritage site) this past summer and the Parks Canada interpreters explained how the Norse settlers there were able to produce iron a thousand years ago using only locally sourced materials. Parks staff even built a furnace a couple of years ago to duplicate the task using only middle ages technology to prove that it was possible. But the point remains: If we wipe ourselves out for some reason, any civilization that arises after us will have a harder time getting going than we did because the easy to get at resources have been used up. That seems self evident to me. Why are we even debating it? Whether that is coal, oil or ore, the easy to get at stuff is gone. Future civilizations would inevitably mine our garbage dumps for metals, but they wouldn't have the abundant cheap energy that we are fortunate to have.

Which is why they'd be mining our garbage dumps. But it isn't a coincidence that that epoch (if you want to call it that) corresponds with the period of technological and economic advancement that makes the modern world possible. The availability of cheap energy was fundamental to the advances of the last century. Biofuels don't have the same net energy density as oil because it costs more energy, land and time to produce them. We are only in a position today to start to transition to a post-oil economy because we are sitting an economic and technological foundation built via that oil economy.

I've read that we may never be able to restart if we fall off the rails for some reason, because all of the easy to get at resources like oil and ores have already been extracted. Future civilizations would be restricted to mining our garbage dumps.

Stop looking at your phone and talk to people instead? And maybe go easy on the punch?

Good point. Why limit it to wind?

<old man rant> I really wish that they would go back to quoting wind chills in Watts/square metre... Quoting wind chill as a "temperature" dumbs it down and encourages exaggeration. While it may have "felt like -21°C" to someone standing out on the open prairie bearing the full brunt of the wind, the thermometer in that person's hand would only ever read -5°C (or whatever the air temperature happens to be). I think a lot of people fail to understand that difference. The vast majority of people that day wouldn't ever experience the "feels like" temperature because they wouldn't ever be out in the wind. But those same people would go merrily about telling the barrista at Starbucks that "it is -21°C outside!" as they stomp the snow off their shoes and take off their gloves to clean the fog off their glasses while ordering their latte. That wrankles this curmudgeon... Now you might argue that the W/m^2 number is equally meaningless for the same reason (i.e. because most people won't actually be exposed to the wind so they won't experience that degree of cooling), but the urge to exaggerate is at least removed if the weather report just says "it's -5°C with a wind chill of 1000 W/m^2". The technical meaning/relevance of that 1000 W/m^2 number may be lost on most people, but they can still treat it as an index of how much they need to bundle up if they plan to go skating or ice fishing somewhere out in the wind. It isn't much different than the UV index that the weather office quotes in the summer time. </old man rant>

If it is, then it is news to me. Everything I have read (independent of the video) says that we are moving roughly in the direction of Vega at about 220 km/s. Making a sanity check by looking up the current night sky in Stellarium shows Vega in sufficiently close proximity to the galactic plane for this to be believable? But feel free to educate me.

You're dating yourself...

Thanks for clearing that up. Or a poet. One of the best mountaineering books that I have ever read (Summit Fever by Andrew Grieg) was written by an author who was chosen to accompany a British expedition to Mustagh Tower in Pakistan solely for his writing abilities. The expedition's patron requested that a writer be invited along so that the writer could capture the experience in words, allowing the financier to experience the expedition vicariously. What made the book particularly enjoyable was that Grieg himself was only a very casual climber, so he told the story from the perspective of a mere mortal, rather than from that of your typical 70's/80's British hard man. If I were a billionaire financing an expedition to Mars, I'd take inspiration from that 1984 British Mustagh Tower expedition and ask that a writer/poet and maybe also a photographer be on the crew manifest.

Santa? Is that you?

I think Diche Bach was being facetious in his first line. He and I have corresponded about our respective outdoor pursuits. He's not in the "Adventures make you late for dinner" crowd. But the point remains: While pushing the frontiers of exploration has long been a noble pursuit, it doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with colonization and settlement. As DDE said, nobody is clamoring to live in Antarctica or Spitsbergen, even though they are both incredibly beautiful and would be high on many people's lists of places that they'd like to travel to.

I don't know of too many frogs that can teach themselves how to play Goh well enough to beat Lee Sedol, teach themselves how to play Atari games, or even learn how to drive a car for that matter... Just sayin'.

Off topic, but Eurocopter (Aérospatiale) did "land" an AS350 on the summit of Everest some years ago: And people have flown paragliders off the top on several occasions. A top-level Nepalese paraglider pilot named Babu Sunuwar even flew his climbing guide off the top in a tandem kite about six years ago for a documentary called "Ultimate Descent":

I couldn't agree more. Star Wars is an entertaining "space Western" who's sins against real world physics can be forgiven. Gravity, on the other hand, is cliche ridden schlok that is going to burn for all eternity.

I had another opportunity to shoot an ISS transit of the Sun today. I still didn't get the timing exactly right so I only captured 5 frames and missed the first 1/3 of the transit. You can see two faint sunspots (2686 and 2685) in the top-right section of the image. The ISS is a bit smaller in this image than it was in my attempt from August because the Sun is lower in the sky now, so the ISS was further away from me during the transit (the prediction website says that it was ~830 km away at the time that the photo was taken). I am beginning to think the prediction website that I am using (http://transit-finder.com/) is out by ±1 second or so. That's still pretty good, but my camera can only manage a high speed burst for about 2 seconds, so I can't just start early or I'd miss the end of the transit (a full transit of the Sun's disk takes about 1 second). Maybe there will be a transit close to the summer solstice next June and I'll have the bugs worked out of my timing by then so I can catch a full transit while the ISS is as close to the zenith (and as close to me) as possible. Supposedly it is as large as 60 arc seconds across when it is directly overhead.

What's that? The net increase in orbital speed about the galactic center? If so, then my 40 km/s estimation based on nothing more than mental math using small angle approximations isn't bad... And possibly also a sign that I've played too much KSP?

So there's enough information floating around now that I can come up with some ballpark estimates for the questions that I posed above: It came from the Sun's prograde direction about the galactic center with a hyperbolic excess velocity of about 20 km/s. We are orbiting the galactic center at about 220 km/s, so that means it was orbiting the galactic center at roughly 200 km/s before the encounter. It has a relatively small hyperbolic eccentricity of about 1.19, so it pretty much did a U-turn, when viewed from within our frame of reference. As a result, it will leave our system going about 20 km/s faster than the Solar system about the galactic center, meaning it has been boosted into a higher orbit, with a net increase in orbital speed of (very roughly) 40 km/s as a result of the encounter with our Sun. And out of curiosity, I looked up the galactic escape velocity for our region of the Milky Way: it is about 537 km/s. An object would have to have a hyperbolic excess velocity greater than ~320 km/s in the Sun's prograde direction about the galactic center to escape, so there's no risk of this thing escaping.

I had a moment to read the articles more carefully and some of what is written about the orbital characteristics didn't make sense. Like the orbital speed being 44 km/s - where? At perihelion inside of Mercury's orbit? It wouldn't be on an escape trajectory then? Or was that supposed to be the hyperbolic excess velocity, in which case "wow"!? I really wish they weren't so vague. They could have quoted the orbital eccentricity, etc, and eliminated a lot of questions... Fortunately there is already a Wikipedia article on it though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/2017_U1 It includes more useful information. Edit: The fact that it is moving very roughly perpendicular to the ecliptic is also consistent with it coming from interstellar space, but does anyone know if "we overtook it" or if "it overtook us"? In other words, was it moving faster or slower about the galactic center than us? And as it passed relatively close to the Sun, will it now have a larger or smaller mean orbital radius about the galactic center? P.S. Here's a video showing how the Earth moves, including a segment about how the solar system moves around the galactic center. I'll leave the link because it is somewhat relevant to this discussion:

This is actually really interesting. The article confirms my recollection that we have never before observed an extra-solar object transiting our system. This is the first time we've ever seen one go by.

This. About the same level of excitement as in the lead up to this scene in the movie, followed by about this reaction upon arrival: