Centauri's Thoughts

40 years ago today, man set foot on another world. Even though it was only a quarter million miles away (compared to say, the asteroid belt or Mars) it was the furthest we had gone and under the most severe conditions at the time.

I was in grade school at that time, and the way things were going, I thought sure we'd ALL have the opportunity to live and work in space if we chose to. Well, that certainly didn't happen. Those who get to work in space these days are few indeed.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do out there, but I know I wanted to be involved. I studied as many things about the sciences as I could, and especially anything that could be useful for space. This started with chemistry, physics, electronics, and progressed later into the math involved for calculating orbits and masses, and finally the jump into astronomy. about that time the web took off and I was in heaven (In my own way). I could study ALL of these subjects as much as I wanted (and I did).

Sadly, we are still no closer for the “the common man” to go live and work in space, and by the time it DOES happen, I'll be too old!

We are exploring some robotically, and through space telescopes we are seeing even more, but our human presence in space is a mere 250 miles away.

I'd love to know that we have colonies in space and on other worlds, and have even had a hand (mentally) at designing such structures, although I haven't yet posted that.

I can only hope we do better in the NEXT 40 years!

This is potentially great news. A laptop battery with 2 hours of life could have 20, and an electric car with a 100 mile range could have 1,000. It will be interesting to see how all this develops.

Reference: NewScientist

I came across an interesting article in New Scientist today, and its something I have pondered for a while, specifically the trapping. A charged particle (electron, proton, positron, or anti-proton) can all be trapped magnetically, but an atom of anti-hydrogen is neutral.

It's a problem ATRAP and ALPHA are still working on. "Capturing antihydrogen atoms is the current frontier, and it's a challenge," says Rolf Landua, a physicist at CERN who advised on the Angels and Demons movie and is rumoured to be the inspiration for Leonardo Vetra, an antimatter scientist in the original story. "So far nobody has managed to do it, but I'm pretty sure we will." Still, encasing a smouldering chunk of antimatter in a portable antihydrogen trap as happens in the book is a quite a way off, he says.

See the entire article here

Lithium Ion batteries can be made to charge MUCH faster by changing part of the process of how they are made

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

This is a factor of 18, so a laptop that takes 2 hours to charge now would only be 6.66 minutes. A large Lithium Ion battery (say for a hybrid or EV car) needing an 8 hours charge would be reduced to 26 minutes.

The whole article is here and another reference here.

Update: now up by factor of a 100

Now Kang and Ceder have found that coating each ball with a thin layer of lithium phosphate accelerates this process even further, perhaps because the coating is an excellent conductor of lithium ions, swiftly transporting them to and from the surface of the nanoballs.

If cellphone batteries can be made using the material, they could charge in 10 seconds flat, the researchers calculate (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07853). Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes - compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries - though this would require a very high-powered charger.

Reference: newscientist.com

this is interesting

The Langley group's conclusion: if you want a spaceship that operates like an airplane, power it with rockets and only rockets.

Trying to build a spaceship by making airplanes fly faster and higher is like trying to build an airplane by making locomotives faster and lighter - with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn't the right way to proceed. The problems are fundamentally different, and so are the best solutions.

I know they are looking at both approaches, and air-breathing hybrids with rocket engines seems in the news, so this gives pause for thought.

We have been taking advantage of the sun-harvesting planet for eons. Either in living form as food, or as trees and shrubs we cut down and use for fire. Farther down the chain is hydrocarbons as gas and oil.

Our efforts at harvesting sunlight so far could be improved, and there are a few techniques which are being looked at or experimented with.

One sure method is concentrating the solar energy onto a smaller cell. Of course this has (thermal) limits, but it generally a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with solar cells is the light bandwidth in which they convert light to power. Of all the whole color spectrum of light, PV cells are very narrowband in what they can convert. The obvious solution should be to convert much of the incoming light (via prismatic lens or something similar, so that as much light power can be extracted.

This technique could be used for all PV cells whether on Earth or in space.

The Kepler mission is due to launch next week (March 6th)

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

The method used will be the “transit” method (star-crossing orbit). We have seen venus do this: here and here.

Of course, this method wont detect every planet orbiting a star, because the planet must pass directly in front of that star, and given solar systems random alignment compared to ours, the Kepler mission is figuring lower odds for detection. But given the large survey sample (100,000) they feel that the number found will tell us more about how common planets are in other solar systems.

References and more reading:
Keplers Home Page

space.com article

Scientific American Article

This stuff looks pretty wild! Interesting video

This same video has also been getting coverage on CNN's edge of Discovery.

We started eons ago as separate beings with separate thoughts, completely isolated.

Through the advent of language, we got better at communicating with each other, but this was still a long ways from truly understanding anothers thoughts. We are a sea of of islands, each completely distinct in thoughts.

As time went on, we got better at communicating with each other. Not only in spoken word, but with the written word as well. Writing also allowed people to speak across time, for once something was written, it could be read at any time, whether that was ten minutes later, or ten years, or ten centuries!

In the past ten years, our level of communications has gone up yet another level. Our written word is not just a daily newspaper or a letter. We went from e-mail, to web pages, to blogs, to chat, twitter and IM.

Communication now is almost instantaneous amongst so many of us, and the connectedness of us is starting to resemble the kind of connection in a large brain. Each of us has many contacts, and each of those contacts has many more, and not all of them overlap. the concept of a “meme” spreading over the global community is somewhat like a “thought” becoming known to the whole.

The concept of the Borg in StarTrek: The Next Generation was a bunch of beings tied together at the thought level. We are working our way towards this, although we have a long ways to go. for one thing, we dont (as of yet) have a chip implant to be always connected to the centralized system (thats coming!). There is also the question of being able to turn it off (the Borg didnt have this choice).

The way we can currently get legions of computers to work together on a problem (via the SETI distributed method, or parallel processors) could prove very interesting when this is applied to human minds. Imagine if solving a problem suitable for human could be sent to 100 or a 1,000 minds to each ponder and resolve all or a part of it, together.

IF we dont blow ourselves up, I feel this last point will not be a question of if – but when

While working within the FluxWorld power grid, and enhancing the system, I have come to understand some interesting things while simulating a live power grid with loads.

Even though my system knows all of the loads and all of the sources (which a real-time power grid may not), there is always room for management. I can see why the implementation of a “smart-grid” is so important.

I spend my time managing turning sources on and off as needed, for maximum efficiency.

Even though my loads dont change from day to night, they very well could, and because of solar and wind power, my sources change as well.

The effective management of energy resources on the grid by not putting more power than is needed on the wires, and yet, not having insufficient power (causing brown-outs or black-outs) is indeed an interesting ad tricky balance. Of course, the “brute-force” method of ensuring there is never a black out is to over-power the grid all the time. Unused power sits on the wires as “potential”, but it was still generated and used resources to put it there.

None of this, of course, speaks of storage. TheGrid is TheGrid, and has never utilized storage (like a battery). There are a few methods I have heard of, like pumping water up into a reservoir at night, to generate power during the day, but thats about it. There is just no good (efficient) way to save off terawatts or petawatts of energy at this time.

As we use more and more energy, all of this will become more critical, if we are to survive.