Talk-Polywell.org

Lots of developement costs befor practical deployment is needed. Also, any power satallite would need to be launched to GEO or above (like a Lagrange point), not low Earth orbit, if you want to stay out of Earth's shadow for more than half of each orbit. This would considerably increase launch cost...

If the mass efficiency of solar cells goes up, launch costs can meet it half way. Thin film solar may not be efficient in watts per cubic meter, but its quite good at watts per gram. One company has apparently developed a thin film capable of 4300 watts per kilogram in space conditions ( http://www....

The wealthy will end up running the system, unlike of course, what we have now. Well, I didn't say the second part at least. According to Wikipedia, there are 469 billionaires in the USA, and between 9 and 16 million millionaires, and apparently 173 million taxpayers. Somehow I don't think the Rich...

People who pay taxes should be apportioned votes in accordance with how much they pay into the public treasury. People who pay no taxes should STFU and get a job. I have long said that elections should always be held on April 15, and your ballot should be the back of your tax return. It's a nice id...

Yeah, nobody was expecting WB-100 anyway, but I was hoping for at least a WB-8. I mean, WB-7.1 at $300,000 is what you'd expect a single university to fund after WB-7 is dropped by the Navy. Unless this is for some kind of mini, short-term contract directly leading into rushed approval of a bigger o...

Only 300 grand? Modifications to the existing wiffleball? Not good news.

You can screen for extremes of intelligence and skill, or you can screen for extremes of compassion and self/familial sacrifice. Good luck trying to get all things in one person.

Actually, why are we arguing about the Ares V and Falcon 9's anyway? Whatever the case, my point is merely that with extremely light materials, economies of scale in launch, and or lunar materials, SBSP may barely be economical even without a radically improved launch design, and we both know that t...

No, the DIRECT guys designed the Jupiter and its derivates, which is a very different vehicle to the AresIV, which as you said will never be build (I therefore did not think that you were actually talking about it). I generally dont pay much attention to vehicles that will never be built and this v...

Unless you are talking about a launch vehicle that I have yet to hear off, then this should called AresV not Ares IV. Okay, the Ares V then. The Ares IV will never be built anyway. But I'm surprised, as an apparent space enthusiast, that you've never heard of it. It as a design configuration consid...

There are many ways to make getting things into space cheaper. Magnetic launch assist tracks, space fountain, etc. These things require very large development costs and get cheaper per kg the more launches you make, so if you wanted to do something like replace half our power with sbsp, it would be ...

I won't disagree with that. The only real problem I see with genetic engineering is when people don't recognize the talents that come with a genetic tradeoff. Information is key to making good decisions, and we certainly need better genetic correlations than we have right now. If a few genes are cor...

Best just to let the re-engineering be available and let the market work it out. A few people will want their kids to be different, or won't care, or will have a religious prohibition against genetic modification. That will preserve the gene pool in case we ever need it. The rest will quietly ensure...

So, how long until they build a full speed, full scale one?

The place for windfarms is on farms in the upper Mid-West. So far there is no proof that soy beans are adversely affected by wind turbine noise. In 2015... the Geat Soybean Blight strikes... crops mysteriously fail, and nobody knows why. One scientist, studying the effects of rock music on beans in...