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Raenir Salazar posted:Perhaps as a somewhat out there question, but would ice asteroid mining be something that could solve water insecurity if the logistics were solved? "If the logistics were solved" is a pretty big "if"!
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Jul 4, 2021 23:33
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Munin posted:I think it is fair to take the initial pitch, which was definitely of the "this will solve the North's water problem" variety, when assessing the eventual outcome. I do agree that is it stupid if your takeaway is that it did nothing. I guess the question if it was designed to solve " current problems" versus "total water supply", the system at least now is designed to be mostly supplemental. It may be the case with climate change it becomes the primary water supply for the region but that is still a bit off. It is true you can use water rationing and rates to guide usage, but at the same time, since the region it is supplying has both significant agricultural and industrial output, the question becomes how much rates will cut into that output versus subsidizing it with more water. In addition, as I said, in a more extreme climate scenario (but still very much a possible one), it may be necessary to supply it with the canal alone and in that case obviously everything has to change but nevertheless, life would still continue. I would say it is still significantly more cost-efficient than desalination plants or something more exotic (space elevators aren't possible yet and as is space ice mining). However, in comparison, the US West anything is in a bit more of a pickle when it comes water if both the Sierra Nevadas/Rockies go simply because it would be much harder to build a canal from anywhere useful (also the Cascades would probably be under a significant pressure of their own). Desalinization plants are probably going to have to be built. Admittedly, the North-South project is late and way over budget, but considering the needs and the threats, it is very hard to actually say it is useless or really failed here. Of course, if the Yangtze is dry then all bets are off but if the Tibetan plateau goes...it isn't a good sign for mankind. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jul 4, 2021 |
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Jul 4, 2021 23:34
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Silver2195 posted:"If the logistics were solved" is a pretty big "if"! I mean a space elevator (assuming China's research into carbon nanotubes is on pace) would solve those logistics pretty well. Retrieving large quantities of material from space is trivial with a space elevator; a little less trivial with a sky hook/loop which can fairly cheaply get stuff in and out of orbit, probably not as much though. Without any of those I suppose you could process the water/ores in space and parachute/glide them down; or develop a reuseable rocket system that can with quick turnaround get back into orbit; as more of space gets used the incentivies to iterate on the technology and economies would scale would help drive down the price. e: Tbf space asteroid mining *is* something the private sector is seriously looking into and is raising funds for, I think the moment it becomes feasible in the next 50 years is going to be a part of the puzzle that China glomps onto.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:51
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When did people start thinking China was on pace to make a space elevator, or is that somewhat out of left field.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:58
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Kavros posted:When did people start thinking China was on pace to make a space elevator, or is that somewhat out of left field. Nonono, no one thinks this. China is however making cool strides in carbon-nanotube research and China is one of the few countries with interest/political will to do megaengineering projects so if a space elevator was feasible its simple extrapolation to assume China will run full tilt to be the first.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:07
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If we're going to indulge in this sort of sci-fi scenario, why not posit, say, a hyper-efficient and large-scale method for filtering the salt from seawater? That would solve the problem more directly.
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 00:56
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Silver2195 posted:If we're going to indulge in this sort of sci-fi scenarios, why not posit, say, a hyper-efficient and large-scale method for filtering the salt from seawater? That would solve the problem more directly. But do you know of such a method; there's a difference between "I wave a magic wand and all my problems are solved" and "I wave a magic wand to build a really really tall building".
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Jul 5, 2021 01:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:But do you know of such a method; there's a difference between "I wave a magic wand and all my problems are solved" and "I wave a magic wand to build a really really tall building". what’s the difference?
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Jul 5, 2021 01:04
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fart simpson posted:what’s the difference? Because we can imagine and extrapolate what "really tall building" means in a way that can facilitate discussion. While saying "Well what about water desal thats 99% efficient" is just kinda wild mass guessing when there's nothing even hypothetically being researched that will work that well. Basically speculation needs some sort of grounding to make it understandable, interesting, and ultimately needs to be to some degree hypothetically feasible in that the steps can be identified. We can identify the steps in which China could take an interest in exploiting resources in da belt and how it aligns with their national interest. As far as I know there's no steps between current desal technology and magic desal technology; at least identify interesting intermediate steps that are googleable and exist in Youtube videos to provide an entertaining bit of popular science and go "Huh, that's cool."
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Jul 5, 2021 01:13
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Raenir Salazar posted:Because we can imagine and extrapolate what "really tall building" means in a way that can facilitate discussion. While saying "Well what about water desal thats 99% efficient" is just kinda wild mass guessing when there's nothing even hypothetically being researched that will work that well. you think it’s more realistic, interesting, and relevant to talk about china harvesting ice asteroids for agricultural irrigation than it is to talk about more efficient desalination? are you sure?
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Jul 5, 2021 01:18
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fart simpson posted:you think it’s more realistic, interesting, and relevant to talk about china harvesting ice asteroids for agricultural irrigation than it is to talk about more efficient desalination? are you sure? Curious, it seems you have misunderstood my meaning, probably because you missed that it's in response to Silver's post: quote:If we're going to indulge in this sort of sci-fi scenarios, why not posit, say, a hyper-efficient and large-scale method for filtering the salt from seawater? That would solve the problem more directly. How does it reach this hyper-efficiency. What is the hypothetical breakthrough in material science that will bring this about that will result in desalination to not have the drawbacks it currently has even if you were to scale up and massively invest in it? Is it nuclear fusion? China is making good progress on nuclear fusion which is cool, but is that what Silver has in mind?
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Jul 5, 2021 01:34
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Raenir Salazar posted:Curious, it seems you have misunderstood my meaning, probably because you missed that it's in response to Silver's post: who cares? you missed his point. he doesn't actually want to talk about sci fi desalination, he's saying the entire line of discussion is nonsense. which it is.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:40
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fart simpson posted:who cares? you missed his point. he doesn't actually want to talk about sci fi desalination, he's saying the entire line of discussion is nonsense. which it is. I assume Silver is contributing to the conversation in good faith and that it was in earnest. I certainly care, you don't have to participate in the discussion if you don't want to. 
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Jul 5, 2021 02:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:I assume Silver is contributing to the conversation in good faith and that it was in earnest. Thank you for your faith in me, but I'm afraid I was being somewhat sarcastic there.
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Jul 5, 2021 02:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:Those people typically aren't on the street assaulting people; unless they're an example of the former upper-middle class who are about to or already have lost their business and blame it on China. So Donald Trump and Marsha Blackburn are working class then
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Jul 5, 2021 02:59
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Yossarian-22 posted:So Donald Trump and Marsha Blackburn are working class then I don't recall who Marsha Blackburn is but Donald Trump is still last I checked, a part of the 1%?
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Jul 5, 2021 03:11
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The point being that you relegated discrimination against Chinese people to a white working class issue when it clearly isn't one. In general poor people commit more street violence but that doesn't mean bigotry is exclusive to that sector of society
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Jul 5, 2021 03:15
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Yossarian-22 posted:The point being that you relegated discrimination against Chinese people to a white working class issue when it clearly isn't one. In general poor people commit more street violence but that doesn't mean bigotry is exclusive to that sector of society No one said it's exclusive to it? But ultimately they're the ones voting in people who fan those flames that result in street violence; it's a feedback cycle.
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Jul 5, 2021 03:18
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/13/white-trump-voters-are-richer-than-they-appear/ https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/9/15592634/trump-clinton-racism-economy-prri-survey https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/poverty-doesnt-make-you-racist "As the data show, among high-school-educated white voters, it is the richer members of that group who most dismiss the salience of racial discrimination. The poorest white people are the only income group where a majority believes racism drives the racial economic gap—undercutting the idea that racism is the result of economic suffering. The denial of racism is strongest among high-school grads making $90,000 or more a year. The same is true of college grads and those with graduate degrees: those with higher incomes generally deny the prominence of racism at higher rates than lower-income members of the same educational level. Rather than racism being driven by personal economic pressure, far more compelling are theories that see white racism as stemming from voters justifying their own relative economic success, and their “fear of falling” (as Barbara Ehrenreich put it) if society became more equal." Yossarian-22 fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 03:33
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Yossarian-22 posted:https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/13/white-trump-voters-are-richer-than-they-appear/ I don't see how that actually relates to anything I actually said in addition to this not having much to do with China at this point. Also your own sources contradicts what I assume your argument is: quote:Since the 2016 elections, Democrats have endlessly debated how to reach the “white working class”—a demographically imprecise group alleged to have gone for Trump in big numbers. As multiple studies have shown, all white voters are in fact intensely polarized into two groups: one, open to progressive appeals, that recognizes racism is a reality in our society, and a second group, unfortunately larger, that thinks racial inequality barely exists and was mobilized by Trump’s racist appeals.
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Jul 5, 2021 03:43
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Again, you make the same classist argument of dismissing xenophobia and racism as a "white working class" issue when income doesn't correlate with racism at all. Moreover it is often exclusionary policies enacted by suburban or bourgeois whites that have the greatest impact on discrimination, in addition to hiring practices. That's not to say that the working class can't be racist, but the trope of the "white working-class" Trump voter has been debunked time and time again. Two-thirds of Trump voters made over $50k per year. As many made over $100k as less than $50k. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/ Anyway my previous post was edited for clarity because one quote in particular should make this clear Yossarian-22 fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 03:48
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Raenir Salazar posted:But do you know of such a method; there's a difference between "I wave a magic wand and all my problems are solved" and "I wave a magic wand to build a really really tall building". Space elevators will never happen. Imagine building a bridge from Los Angeles to Sydney. That's just over 10,000km. Can you imagine that ever being done? The cost? The time? The resources? Now imagine someone building a bridge 70,000km long, vertically.
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Jul 5, 2021 04:51
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Yeah china will just have to farm their ice asteroids the old fashioned way, by rocket-shippe
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Jul 5, 2021 04:59
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Space elevators will never happen. There are many things wrong with this, first of course is you're making a fallacious analogy here between the difficulty a bridge on Earth of an arbitrarily long length and making a space elevator when these are such completely different engineering challenges as to not even be apples and oranges but the difference between a piece of fruit and an asteroid. This is an analogy with zero basis in fact. You're not building a 70,000 km bridge of concrete and steel up into the sky, that's a fantasy completely out of left field and wrong that you don't seem to understand what a space elevator even is. If someone wanted to extend a rope from an airplane a km up from the water dragging a buoy behind it no sane person suggests building a step ladder up to the plane! Currently space elevators are still science fiction not because of how difficult they may or may not be to build, but because the cable with the strength requires hypothetical materials that don't exist yet; and of course may never exist; but that still of course doesn't make your comparison a valid one; and you don't seem to know what current proposals suggest which isn't to build it from the ground up like a skyscrapper, but probably from a space station in orbit extending the cable threading down to Earth via robots. Maybe the base of the elevator is probably some small mountain size steel and concrete structure as it needs to be able to hold the cable that is being held aloft via centrifugal forces of the Earth's rotation, but that's not even remotely on par with a 70,000 mile long bridge to nowhere. However China doesn't even need a space elevator right now to make good use out of space and asteroid mining, they can build Skyhooks with modern technology. The point though of mentioning space elevators is that they are (a) cool and (b) China is probably the only nation that if the means were available that would be able to muster the political will due to geopolitical necessity to build one; forcing the West to play catchup. Given their position in the South China Sea they might even be well positioned to take advantage of the ease of building one close to the equator. Because (c) since in the future China might find themselves cut off from important resources that the Belt and Road Initiative might not be able to compensate for, especially in the case of a war with the US over Taiwan which could result in the Straights of Malacca being blocked; getting resources from the asteroid belt might be something China's leadership might be keeping a very serious eye on because it solves many of their problems with ready relative ease.
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Jul 5, 2021 05:13
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Space elevators will never happen. These are very dissimilar things. Visual sci-fi does a terrible job conveying this. There is no additional structure besides the ground mount, it is purely the tether. If/when a sufficiently strong tether can be made of arbitrary length, an Earth based elevator could be made. If levels of investment remain similar, China would probably have a better shot at a space elevator than most other current space faring nations. e:f;b Corky Romanovsky fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 05:22
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quote:There are many things wrong with this, first of course is you're making a fallacious analogy here between the difficulty a bridge on Earth of an arbitrarily long length and making a space elevator when these are such completely different engineering challenges as to not even be apples and oranges but the difference between a piece of fruit and an asteroid. This is an analogy with zero basis in fact. You're not building a 70,000 km bridge of concrete and steel up into the sky, that's a fantasy completely out of left field and wrong that you don't seem to understand what a space elevator even is. even if this were the right thread for this kind of thing as opposed to some kind of Megastructure Dream Theory Stellarisposting thread, your eagerness to scrap on the subject isn't helping make sky elevator advocacy come off as grounded and reasonable. also china is not going to be making a space elevator
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Jul 5, 2021 05:24
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Staluigi posted:eagerness to scrap on the subject isn't helping... come off as grounded and reasonable. This hasn't stopped people from doing the same about other subjects.  Staluigi posted:also china is not going to be making a space elevator I think this is the key point that should be focused on that is most relevant for this thread, not on the feasibility of the structure in question; why do you think China wouldn't be making one; if they had the means? Are they not geopolitically and geographically well suited? If they made a engineering and scientific breakthrough tomorrow that enabled them to mass produce at economically sustainable scales the materials why wouldn't they?
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Jul 5, 2021 05:32
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Is my web browser malfunctioning, or did I accidentally click the spaceflight thread in SAL?
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Jul 5, 2021 05:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:why do you think China wouldn't be making one; if they had the means? why wouldn't china be making mecha or ringworlds or dyson spheres if they had the means? should we waste time on the discussion? myself i am patiently waiting for china to achieve Zero Active Turbo-Gross Genocides, which will be a greater achievement than any of those things and more pertinent in any sense
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Jul 5, 2021 06:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:This hasn't stopped people from doing the same about other subjects. they don’t have the means. nobody does. as far as i can tell, it’s not even a priority for any country on earth. there’s not really anything to discuss
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Jul 5, 2021 06:10
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<snip>Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Is my web browser malfunctioning, or did I accidentally click the spaceflight thread in SAL? Yeah, this isn't the thread for it EDIT: but this is still cool as poo poo 
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Jul 5, 2021 06:26
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Raenir Salazar posted:This hasn't stopped people from doing the same about other subjects. what do you think it would do to the global geopolitical climate if china got a space elevator? do you think it would lead to military action?
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Jul 5, 2021 08:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:Currently space elevators are still science fiction not because of how difficult they may or may not be to build, but because the cable with the strength requires hypothetical materials that don't exist yet; and of course may never exist; I was gonna pick on the extended derail, but this is some S-tier comedy posting. Please continue!
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Jul 5, 2021 13:17
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fart simpson posted:what do you think it would do to the global geopolitical climate if china got a space elevator? do you think it would lead to military action? Do you think it would? I'm not sure why it would; Singapore would likely become exponentially richer as a result and every neighbouring country would benefit; and of course any nation that desired to cheaply make use of it.
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Jul 5, 2021 14:47
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fart simpson posted:what do you think it would do to the global geopolitical climate if china got a space elevator? do you think it would lead to military action? just imagine the 85-year-old man in a half-buttoned space suit who sits on a wooden stool chainsmoking cigarettes and pushing the buttons of the space elevator for everyone
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Jul 5, 2021 15:46
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If technologically we could make a space elevator, China would be working on one. and the USA would engage in a spite race to build one faster because that is pretty much what we did when the soviets started putting rockets in space.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:07
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fart simpson posted:they don’t have the means. nobody does. as far as i can tell, it’s not even a priority for any country on earth. there’s not really anything to discuss So as it turns out this is wrong! China actually does in fact plan on building a space elevator by 2045. And so far via google cost estimates of a space elevator range from like 6 to 10 billion dollars which is nothing on the scale of national budgets; I was expecting an estimate closer to a trillion dollars which is a major investment on par with the F-35 program over 30 years or 1 Iraq War but its doable for superstates like EU, China or the US; but a mere ten billion dollars is a rounding error as far as most large economies are concerned. A private sector company like Amazon could do it. quote:Wang Xiaojun, Director of the state-owned Chinese Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), explained during a conference addressed to academics last Wednesday the three phases of the Asian country’s plan for future expeditions to Mars.
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Jul 5, 2021 18:09
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Raenir Salazar posted:So as it turns out this is wrong! The article is quoting a single dude who happens to be the director of one of China's space launch providers. Extrapolating from his wish-casting and saying "China plans to build a space elevator" is a bit of a stretch. Xiaojun speaks for China the country probably as much as Elon Musk speaks for USA the country. That is, not at all. Your cost estimates are grossly off. The "6 to 10 billion dollars" numbers seem to be coming from questionable sources, such as (in the case of $6 billion) the president of International Space Elevator Consortium. Aside from the fact that it's impossible to estimate the cost of what is basically a science-fiction project (which would also be the most ambitious construction project in human history by far), we don't even have the capability to manufacture graphene at the amounts or lengths necessary, or the means to actually deploy it as a vertical tether. There are several threads around the forums where you can post about a Space Elevator and very knowledgeable people will explain why it's a fantasy project: Space thread here in D&D Space and Spaceflight thread in Science, Academics and Languages Physics and Astronimy thread in Science, Academics and Languages An entire subforum dedicated to space (it even has a space elevator thread!)
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Jul 5, 2021 19:02
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Slow News Day posted:The article is quoting a single dude who happens to be the director of one of China's space launch providers. Extrapolating from his wish-casting and saying "China plans to build a space elevator" is a bit of a stretch. Xiaojun speaks for China the country probably as much as Elon Musk speaks for USA the country. That is, not at all. I think there's some unpacking that needs to be done. First I already post in the space thread so I think it is unnecessarily patronizing and assuming the conclusion to suggest I should go to some other thread to be "told" that it's a fantasy project; that's just unnecessarily antagonistic way of approaching it. I am aware of the various and potential problems and pitfalls, I was there, in those threads, in some of those discussions. I am not convinced it is impossible, but if you want to move the discussion there you can do so and we can continue it there. Second, that there is a through line here in how the discussion started and developed; I had mentioned/asked off hand, would ice asteroid mining help solve China's water problems, if the problems of transporting those materials to China can be solved. In response to someone else's post I mentioned off hand a space elevator might be one answer, or a skyhook, and so on. As I had already mentioned a skyhook isn't science fiction. There's a weird sort of tunnel vision where a number of people decided to hyperfocus on that one minor off hand thing instead of the broader point of discussion. I responded to posts that were incorrect or levied fallacious arguments like comparing constructing a space elevator to construction a 70,000 mile long bridge because they're egregious; and while discussing a space elevator may not be super thread relevant I at least made the attempt to keep it relevant to discussing China each time I could. Third, I'm not going to address the specific details of your post because I don't particularly wish to keep the discussion about space elevators in the China thread but the point of those links is to show that there is a real world interest and that there is arguably a legitimate basis to discuss certain kinds of "scifi" projects as it pertains to China in the same vein as China's nuclear fusion experiments. If Elon Musk tomorrow said he wanted to partner with China's space agency to build a space elevator I think that would be newsworthy and worth posting about in the thread just as much as Elon Musk saying anything else would have been by default, considered to be newsworthy for USPol. It was specifically in response to the argument "no one is interested in it, so there's no point in discussing it". By the USPol standard newsworthyness tends to be always acceptable to post about stuff and then only split off to its own thread if it overwhelms all other discussion and in this case well; I'm not sure what other discussion was there. Everyone either agrees genocide is wrong and China is doing it or they don't and having to read repeated posts denying ongoing genocide gets difficult you know.
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Jul 5, 2021 19:42
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think there's some unpacking that needs to be done. didn’t you bring up this ice asteroid idea in response to the discussion about how pumping tons of freshwater from south china to north china isn’t efficient enough to supply all the future water needs of north china? how do you think they’d get the asteroid water from the space elevator (near the equator) to north china even if your idea worked?
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Jul 6, 2021 16:13
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