Questions about "The High Frontier"

Hop David wrote:
Hop David wrote:

Pat Flannery wrote:
(snip)

Do you honestly believe miners are a bunch of clumsy morons? You
arrogant, ignorant, little prick.

I DID NOT WRITE THAT.
You have just defined and damned yourself with a outright lie and
fabrication that reflects far more upon your character than you will
ever inflect on mine by such a loathsome and cowardly tactic.
If you claim that I wrote that, then I want to see the entire posting of
mine it appeared in, and a Google link to the same.
Failing that, I want a personal apology from you or I intend to file a
complaint to your ISP.
No, on second thought I won't.
Frankly, you're not worth the effort.
So I questioned your conception of humanity in relation to the future of
mankind in space, and rather than summoning a response to such a
disagreement, you have resorted to outright lies. If nothing else, this
certainly shows how tenuous your own belief in your espoused ideas is -
as brittle as a eggshell, as strong as a soap bubble.
I'll tell you one thing though... you just made a far better and far
more convincing argument in that brief posting that the people who hold
the belief in the near-divine future of humanity somewhere out in space
are a lot closer to followers of a religious cult than rational
individuals than I could have done with several thousand words.
O'Neill's book really did screw up a lot of people very badly.
You among them, obviously.
Somebody in the psychological field really should do a study on all this.
They could make their whole career with a seminal paper on the things
that led individuals to a world view like this from a psychological
perspective.
Utopianism, science replacing religion as a new faith, and a desire to
literally ascend into the heaven where everything will be perfect and
untainted by the dross and vulgarity of the world one is living in,
without that unpleasant necessity of dying first. ;-)

Pat

On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:38:18 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

I DID NOT WRITE THAT.

....As long as this thread has progressed, I'm starting to see more of
this happening. Apparently some of you guys aren't watching your
attribs while trying to trim your quotes. Keep a cooler head about
yourselves, and watch those attribs before you flame each other for
the wrong reasons!


OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

Eivind Kjorstad wrote in news:fguvti$a6e$1
@news.netpower.no:

John Schilling skreiv:

There's a difference between mechanization and robotics. Almost none
of the machinery used in modern mining would qualify as robotic.

Is that then, in your opinion, a difference of principle, or just a
difference of degree ?

Machines, very few of them robots, have *assisted* many people in mines.

What separates a non-robot machine from a robot-machine ?

How much human supervision is a robot-machine allowed until it reaches the
point where it becomes a non-robot-machine?

Does it make any difference if that supervision is provided at a console
next to the machine down the mine, or at a console at the surface, or at a
console some miles away?

bealoid skreiv:
Eivind Kjorstad wrote in news:fguvti$a6e$1
@news.netpower.no:

John Schilling skreiv:

There's a difference between mechanization and robotics. Almost none
of the machinery used in modern mining would qualify as robotic.
Is that then, in your opinion, a difference of principle, or just a
difference of degree ?

Machines, very few of them robots, have *assisted* many people in mines.
What separates a non-robot machine from a robot-machine ?

How much human supervision is a robot-machine allowed until it reaches the
point where it becomes a non-robot-machine?

Does it make any difference if that supervision is provided at a console
next to the machine down the mine, or at a console at the surface, or at a
console some miles away?

I don't know, that's why I asked John, what exactly he considers the
principal difference.

In -my- opinion there is no hard line between "machine" and "robot",
it's just a question of degree. Some machines are -more- roboty, other
machines are -less- roboty.


Eivind Kjørstad

Just a question--how much are things simplified
if we can assume simplified surface mining
techniques are used?

For example, for lunar mining only loose
dust/regolith is used.

Maybe the lunar material is collected using
a hexagonal formation of inverted funnels.
A puff of oxygen gas throws up a bunch of
lunar dust/regolith. Around the "impact" is
a formation of six upward pointed funnels,
so dust/regolith collects at the center.

Since there's no atmosphere to worry about,
even fine dust particles will quickly fall down
back into the collection funnels. At the base
of each funnel are heating elements to
begin processing the ore; as the ore near the
bottom is melted it flows into heated pipes
for the rest of the processing.

This mechanism may be less efficient than
scoops, but the reduced maintenance issues
may be worth it. The only moving parts are
valves for the gas puffers and wheels for moving
from one place to another.

Isaac Kuo

Eivind Kjorstad wrote:
bealoid skreiv:

Eivind Kjorstad wrote in news:fguvti$a6e$1
:


John Schilling skreiv:


There's a difference between mechanization and robotics. Almost none
of the machinery used in modern mining would qualify as robotic.

Is that then, in your opinion, a difference of principle, or just a
difference of degree ?


Machines, very few of them robots, have *assisted* many people in mines.

What separates a non-robot machine from a robot-machine ?

How much human supervision is a robot-machine allowed until it reaches the
point where it becomes a non-robot-machine?

Does it make any difference if that supervision is provided at a console
next to the machine down the mine, or at a console at the surface, or at a
console some miles away?


I don't know, that's why I asked John, what exactly he considers the
principal difference.

Can't speak for John. But from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot

# can sense its environment, and manipulate or interact with things in it
# has some degree of intelligence or ability to make choices based on
the environment, or automatic control / preprogrammed sequence

But these criteria would exclude teleoperated "robots". A backhoe arm is
a form of teleoperated arm and not many would regard that as robotic.

It seems to me its an ambiguous term.

But whatever name you give to a machine, John's point still stands:
Where are the working mines with no people in it because they've all
been replaced by machines?

There are none. And it will stay that way for sometime to come.

Hop

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

That was the argument for the Shuttle also, but the turnaround time of an
orbiter and restacking for relaunch never came down to even a tenth of
what they thought it was going to be.

Exactly. Rather than saying that NASA was wrong about the turn-around time,
and also wrong about the cost/lb, we might more charitably say that the
unexpectedly low launch rate kept them from even approaching the hoped-for
cost/lb improvements.

Lack of payload volume was only secondary to the amount of man-hours
required to get a orbiter back home, checking it out, recertification it
for flight, and stacking it again f or relaunch.

Yep, that's the problem all right.

And fission reactors are a lot cheaper way of getting the power than SPS
is.

Perhaps. But the cost for energy from fission would be higher if the costs
of waste disposal and reactor decommissioning were fairly factored in.

If they ever get fusion to work, kiss the whole concept goodbye.

Maybe. Fusion might turn out to be so expensive that SBSP could still
compete.

That's a virtually inexhaustible source of power with no radioactive
waste.

Let's say "considerably less radioactive waste".

Give me an explanation of how that's done from a technical point of view.
Show me a concept of making a chemical rocket that has a isp of around
1,000.

You seem to assume that the cost/lb is primarily a function of ISP. That
may not be the case.

Bet you didn't picture a CPU that had a multi-gigahertz processing
capability twenty-five years ago, or a hard drive that could store 500
megs... and have those both sitting inside of something of around two
cubic feet in size in your living room either.

Yes, but has any of that lead to a robot that you can tell to go upstairs
and get your glasses? That's the kind of thing we were anticipating we'd
have by the 21st Century.


--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By all that you hold dear on this good Earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn

On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:50:29 +0100, Eivind Kjorstad
wrote:

John Schilling skreiv:

There's a difference between mechanization and robotics. Almost none
of the machinery used in modern mining would qualify as robotic.

Is that then, in your opinion, a difference of principle, or just a
difference of degree ?

Machines, very few of them robots, have *assisted* many people in mines.

What separates a non-robot machine from a robot-machine ?

Classically, it's a robot if it has the ability to sense and respond to
the external environment.

Pragmatically, it only counts if the "sense and respond to the external
environment" bit applies to the normal exercise of the primary function
of the device; safety overrides and/or feedback control of secondary
functions need not apply. A car does not become a robot when you add
anti-lock brakes; it becomes a robot when it steers itself down the
road.

And at present, robot mining machines are at about the same state of
the art as robot cars. The real work, in transportation and mining,
is done by manually controlled heavy machinery.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

On Nov 8, 9:38 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Hop David wrote:
Hop David wrote:

Pat Flannery wrote:
(snip)

Do you honestly believe miners are a bunch of clumsy morons? You
arrogant, ignorant, little prick.

I DID NOT WRITE THAT.

No, you didn't and I believe Hop was expressing regret at what he
wrote:

Quote from Hop:

"I've always regarded you as a gentle soul and a wonderful story
teller.
It distresses me to read some of my replies to you in this thread. "

On Nov 9, 1:19 am, IsaacKuo wrote:
Just a question--how much are things simplified
if we can assume simplified surface mining
techniques are used?

That's a good point, and something I've never considered before.
Asteroid mining may throw up some much dirt that the rock disappears
in a haze of rubble. Potentially quite hazardous, if it gets into
moving parts and coats solar panels. Maybe the dust could be dealt
with by using electric fields to contain it. The Hayabusa probe may
not even have been able to get a sample from the asteroid it visited.