[extropy-chat] Darwin Award

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 12:30:22PM -0700, jeffrey davis wrote:

> This is an economic problem.  Man hours per kilogram of payload. To lower

It's also an ecological problems. Perchlorate/metal/resin boosters, boranes
and fluorine and dimethylhydrazine/NOx need not apply. It has to be clean, 
and not even seed the stratosphere too much. Hydrogen/oxygen is basically the only
thing left.

Fred Hapgood keeps this great line as his .sig:

In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

> this cost, to lower the man hours per kilo, you need to have more of the
> work done by machines, ie automation.  It's not magic, and it's some

Another issue is failure rate. You need something at least as safe as
the civilian air fleet.

> futuristic über-tech. You don't need full-on self-replication with 100
> percent closure. A lesser degree of closure will do.  In the end it's still
> just advanced automation.  It's irrelevant whether it's nano-, micro-, or
> macro-tech.
> 
> I'm working on it.

Good luck. We really need an affordable way to get a ton or so into LEO.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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