Happy Thanksgiving Forum!
May you all have a blessed day.
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, November 28, 2024
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32 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
I hope that everybody’s Thanksgiving is joyous!
Safe travels and good days!
Where’s the traditional WKRP clip, guys?
Some Thanksgiving traditions are non-optional!
I’m mulling over some odd interstellar trade economics…
As I’ve mentioned before, space travel has a first mile problem. That is, the most expensive part of sending anything to any area of the Solar System is getting it into Earth orbit first. Once in orbit, propelling things elsewhere gets cheaper. Contrast the size and thrust of the Saturn V first and second stages with the third one. The latter is all you need to send two vehicles and three people to the Moon. the first two is what’s required to get the third one to orbit.
A secondary issue is that we can put into orbit only relatively small payloads. Xlon’s harebrained Xtarship lunar lander will require multiple Xtarship launches to Earth orbit merely to fuel the lander (if it ever works at all).
If you could obtain resources from smaller gravity wells, like the Moon (see how small the upper stage of the Apollo lunar lander was, and it was sufficient to put it into lunar orbit), or even better the asteroids, we could build huge structures in space and even, perhaps, in a few centuries do all or most of our resource extraction and manufacturing in space.
Ok. now suppose you develop some form of magic FTL drive, which we agree to call a hyperdrive. Now suppose this drive has an energetically monetary cost equivalent to, say, that of a large container ship that can cross the Pacific from say India to Alaska. Not the same energy cost, but the monetary cost for that energy.
This would make interstellar travel relatively cheap, say about what a long cruise might cost. But you’d still need a small fortune to get off the Earth.
This raises all sorts of interesting situations. Manufacturing would be cheaper in space, because the costs of shipping stuff to Earth would be low. But then how would you pay for such things, when sending stuff to space is hideously expensive?
So, yeah, it’s kind of a contrived situation. Naturally the race would be on to really lower launch costs, which is not and will never be a simple thing. Maybe such exotic constructs like a space elevator/orbital tower, or a skyhook, or even a maglev track built on the slopes of Everest to accelerate a rocket to hypersonic speeds before it expends a drop of propellant and oxidizer might work.
Or they might not.
What we need is more magic: a Trek like, or even Stargate like, teleportation device.
With almost all the votes, finally, counted, the country is in the pink.
And that redshift is why rational Democrats are worried about their future.
@Kathy:
The unexpected economics of interplanetary teleportation was a major theme of the original Venus Equilateral stories from the 1940s.
If only the Pilgrims would have practiced DEI this would have never happened.
Odds that Biden will pardon this Turkey?
@DrDaveT:
Thanks. I might look it up later.
Niven delved into complications from teleportation within Earth across several short stories. He also made creative use of it by filtering what can go through a teleporter (which required more magical tech).
Australia passes social media ban for children under 16
With the continued evidence that social media is bad for kids (and adults, as well), we’re going to see more actions such as this. FLA is already in litigation around a proposed ban. Reform of Section 230 is increasingly popular and both the liberals and conservatives on SC have expressed a willingness to review its application. After all, how can it be claimed that a host is simply a common. carrier, when moderation services are provided and algorithms are providing recommendations.
@JKB:
1.6%. That’s the GOP edge. Trump’s vote count rose by 1% since 2020.
I understand that you and your ilk are desperate to find a landslide, but it ain’t there. Biden’s margin in 2020 was not a landslide, yet it was far bigger than Trump’s edge this time. Your rapist cult leader squeaked in. You are not riding the wave, you’re splashing in a puddle.
I’m a bit hesitant to add fuel to the Democratic postmortem, but I think it’s worth listening to yesterday’s installment of The Duncan & Coe History Show
Alexis Coe is a presidential historian. She weighs in on Biden’s legacy, and in particular the result of the 24 election. One thing she suggests is that Biden should have resigned not just from the race, but from the presidency, thus making Harris the president.
Part of her argument is that it would have allowed Harris to perform the office (for 100 days…) and look presidential, and this might have helped her win in November. Crucially she poses Harris could have then distanced herself from Biden’s policies.
Maybe. Counterfactuals are no falsifiable. And reasonable arguments rationally presented can be quite convincing, especially when your podcast co-host kind of agrees.
For that matter she also agrees with my assessment that Biden should have limited himself to one term, and announced it in plenty of time for a primary process to play out. But see the paragraph above, My counterfactuals are no more falsifiable than anyone else’s.
@Kathy:
A number of years back, I read an amusing academic paper discussing how time dilation would effect the discount rate of money in an interstellar economy with relativistic space travel.
Dave Johnson:
https://bsky.app/profile/dcjohnson.bsky.social/post/3lbytj25ow223
Happy Thanksgiving
Alice’s Restaurant Massacree
Many happy Turkeyings, colonials!
You know what I’d be thankful for? A day where the headlines didn’t contain the mention of trump, musk and Taylor Swift (and I enjoy Swift)
@Sleeping Dog:
I think that was back sometime in the 70s…
@Stormy Dragon:
I think I found a reference to it.
The gist seems to be how to calculate interest payments, when the people in the ship experience far less time than those on the planets.
I think something similar got mentioned in The Forever War. Though there’s FTL travel, it’s limited by natural phenomena (I really didn’t pay attention to how it was explained) and some specific type of star or something. So the troops and combat ships spend loads of time at high fractions of c.
The issue was whether the military personnel should accrue pay over time as measured by ship’s time or Earth time. I think they settle on Earth time. So when the survivors of the misadventure finally make it home, they have millions waiting for them.
@charontwo:..Build Back Better…
This is all wrong.
My cousin has informed me that the lowercase bbb is 666 in disguise.
You know, the mark of the beast.
Well, maybe not…
@JKB: That was so cute. Now explain to us why you’ve sunk to consulting a car wash owner for support of your views. (h/t Wikipedia)
@Kathy:
I wouldn’t worry about that. FTL is not possible unless space-time is made irrelevant, so it’s a fair assumption it would be instantaneous from both perspectives. I think Frank Herbert got that much right. “Folding space”, or “traveling across the universe without moving”. Quantum entanglement indicates at that or perhaps some other level space-time is indeed irrelevant, so there’s a thread to hang on there.
Frank had to resort to magic though. Perhaps because our brains are not structured to ever view the furthest reaches of the universe as the same distance as the tips of our noses. Just not comprehensible.
For Kathy-
Stowaway discovered on board flight from New York to Paris
But did they have a carry on bag?
Did the FA say ‘Will the stowaway please stand up?’ They probably didn’t.
Whoever they are, the stowaway at least had the brains not to try this.
@dazedandconfused:
There’s speculation that spacetime is an emergent property of quantum systems. So maybe it’s not so much that spacetime’s irrelevant, but perhaps it can be made to emerge in a different way.
Science fictions i much more fun, and far more expansive, when FTL is allowed. Thus far, esoteric physics proofs of warp drives aside, it requires magic. I do try to restrict myself to one magical plot element per story I don’t always succeed.
@Bill Jempty:
I hope the aviation blogs today will have more information.
Not long ago, no one but passengers with a boarding pass could go through security, but I think some airports allow non-passengers to go through. So that’s unclear.
Once past security, there are tricks to get past the gate agent. A lot depends on whether they scan boarding passes or not, or whether one can talk them into not scanning it. I’ve seen now and then the pass won’t scan at the gate, the agent takes a look at it and lets the passenger through.
Kathy’s first law: all systems can be gamed.
As to the wheel well, odds are if the mechanism doesn’t crush you, the cold and thin atmosphere will kill you.
@JKB:
Come on now: 49.8% of the popular vote, just short of the magical 49.9% that defines turning a sea change. You can’t troll me that easily.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I’ve been looking up submission guidelines for SciFi magazines. Four or five state they won’t take stories written with generative AI, but they all display a warning like this:
On the one hand, I get they wouldn’t want the stuff currently put out by generative AI. On the other hand, if they did, they could just prompt the AIs themselves and not have to pay alleged authors.
But on the gripping hand, there’s some irony in SciFi magazines not enthusiastically embracing cutting edge futuristic technology 😀
Happy holidays to all.
I decided to use the World Calendar as the standard in my SciFi stories.
Fact is the current calendar is good enough and doesn’t need to be replaced*, unlike the Julian calendar a few centuries ago. The World Calendar is just more convenient.
All quarters have 91 days and all days of the week are fixed to a date. The obvious downside is that 91 times 4 is 364, not 365. No problem. there’s an extra day, not part of any month, between December 30th and January 1st. This would be a holiday, New Year’s Day, rather than Jan 1st (which would always be a Sunday anyway).
For leap years, there’d be another such day, in principle between June 30th and July 1st. But it could be placed between any other quarter. It would work as current leap days do, once every four years, except on years that end on 00, except on such years that are evenly divisible by 400 (hey, blame whoever set the Earth’s solar year at 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 45 seconds; were it an even 365 days and six hours, a leap year every four years would suffice).
Thing is when/if we colonize other worlds, their calendars won’t match Earth’s. In a lot of SciFi, Earth’s day and year are defined as standard, and people use them for interplanetary and/or interstellar business, in addition to using a local day and year. This is shown as being so even in stories where Earth is long forgotten (like Asimov’s Foundation saga).
Fair enough. But why not use a World Calendar as the standard, regardless of what calendar Earth uses? Make the Earthans** use two calendars like everyone else! Down with Terran Time Supremacy and all that!
Besides, I like throwing around dates like February 30th, or April 31st.
*At least not until the length of the day changes enough that 365 days are more than one year. That will take a while. the figure I recall is Earth’s day gets like 2 or 3 milliseconds longer every century. By the time we add a whole hour to the day, the planet may no longer be habitable.
**I like that term better than Terrans, Earthers, and in particular Earthlings. The last one makes us all sound cute and squishy. I first heard it used in an episode of Stargate SG-1
Happy Thanksgiving, my OTB friends. It was a hard day. I don’t even remember last year, it was too close to my Dad dying.
I think I need grandkids, or better friends, but what I know is I shouldn’t keep cooking for my Dad anymore. Too many leftovers.
@Jax: I remember when my Dad died. It sucked. Hoping for better Thanksgivings in your future.