March 11th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Business, Design, General, News, Sci-tech, Web
TechEBlog has a great video of what is apparently Dean Kamen’s robotic arm.
This is the guy who brought us the iBot and Segway.
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March 6th, 2007 | Published in Blog, General, Web
On the weekend I was browsing around Youtube and found a bunch of old shows I loved to watch as a kid. It’s funny looking back on it now…
I used to love this show. HE traveled the universe with talking animals in giant spaceship made of a barrel. The sound effects were the best. Here’s more!
Crime fighting teens. Hells yeah! Theme song brings it all back…
Much more after the jump
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February 21st, 2007 | Published in General, Sci-tech
Yep. The Clooney one. That’s the way I roll. For some reason I thought about Solaris when I read Interstellar Ark. Its a proposed philosophy for interstellar travel.
An interstellar ark.
Wouldn’t it be cool to travel to exosolar planets?
Being able to travel instantly between any point would be ideal.
It sucks that the speed of light is the fastest anything can go.
Space is big. really really big.
There is two realistic options. The short strategy and the long strategy.
Short Strategy : the relativistic rocket
You cant accelerate any faster than 1g, or 1 earth gravity {9.8 meters per second per second}. The alternative is being crushed for years and years.
When you get near the speed of light time slows down for you, while the rest of the universe keeps going at it’s normal speed.
Accelerate at 1g constantly for 2 of your years, and 3.75 years will have passed back on Earth.
Accelerate at 1g constantly for 12 of your years, and 113,243 years will have passed back on Earth.
Cool. Really puts the Relative in Special Relativity eh?
Oh, you can only brake at 1g as well, so to travel 100,000 light years, or the farthest point in the galaxy, would take 22.4 of your years.
The problem is, this plan takes a lot of energy. A whole lot.
You cant have your cake and eat it. You can go fast expensively or slow cheaply.
The best realistic idea we have now is a matter-antimatter powered gamma ray laser rocket.
Even with this ultra efficient rocket, you’d need 10 billion kilograms of fuel for each kilogram of spaceship.
So we can set aside the short strategy until we learn some more physics.
But how many good planets could there be?
They should be pretty comfortable, mostly rocky, and relatively close by.
We should start to see some earth sized ones with the next generation of space telescopes.
Only about 20% of nearby stars are nice enough to live next to.
About half of them are pairs, and too unstable to keep nice planets.
Assuming about 10% of the rest have rocky planets then there’s about 1664 of them within 100 light years.
If 1% of those are Earth-or-better, that’s at least 16 great places we can go to…
Read onto to find out about the much more practical Long Strategy…
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