America is so divided now. So maybe it's better just to divide America into liberal America and conservative America. This is better for both left and right side.
Buy as many as you can, do nothing else, sell at 2090. Ended with 30 billion net worth.
I have to sell at 2090, because I need to click thousands of times to sell all the estate.
In China we have a single, big, timezone. It's a bless, there's no need to convert time when you are travelling. I live at northwest China, has more than two hours difference from Beijing. You only need to delay your living pattern by 2 hours, so no bonus for late sleepers.
> It's a bless, there's no need to convert time when you are travelling.
Hah, and people here are all for having timezones. "Imagine how crazy it would be to have the sun coming up at 3AM in some places and 7PM in others!" I can't be sure without trying, but I'd argue it's pretty much equally messed up with and without timezones. Right now as a computer guy, I know time zones make everything more complicated.
When traveling somewhere for business you make an appointment anyway, so you know when you have to be somewhere and can plan accordingly. For holidays you'd look up the local sunrise time (which varies pretty much everywhere on earth anyway, albeit a bit more predictably now).
Elon Musk @elonmusk · Jan 26
Final one: anything launched by a railgun (if you could ever reach ~ Mach 27) would explode upon exiting the barrel in our dense atmosphere
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/559629011983147008
What if you have an enclosed track in a partial vacuum that runs up along a mountain and exits where the air is thinner? Everest is 8.8km tall, and air at that height has 1/3 the pressure as at sea level [1]. If you can build a 1km tower on top to extend the track, you can get down to 1/4 the pressure.
But why can't we use the railgun to replace just the first stage of a rocket? Due to the tyranny of the rocket equation that would mean outsized savings in fuel and payload.
It would be exiting the barrel at far less than mach 27 so this wouldn't be an issue.
Even without a first stage, wouldn't that mean that the railgun would need to account for dealing the energy needed to accelerate a couple hundred thousand tons of rocket fuel to any reasonable speed? As per Newtons 3rd law?
This is correct. And the power needed for larger rockets is well beyond what we currently generate with traditional power plants on earth.
For instance, the space shuttle with SRBs and SSME's firing would require more than five Hoover Dams to match (11.7 gigawatts, vs 2.074 gigawatts). The Three Gorges Dam puts out 18.3 gigawatts, but the Saturn V first stage did somewhere around 190 gigawatts.
You could get away with less of course, since with rockets the first stage must lift the immense mass of itself, but with a railgun you will have significant efficiency losses with all of the energy conversions involved. I would expect a heavy-lift railgun to consume at least a significant percentage of a large nation's entire power supply. So we'd be looking at ludicrously sized capacitor banks, or some very large power plants that sit idle without anything to do while we aren't launching rockets.
No doubt that's true in the individual case, but surely you'd attempt to run a "train" into the atmosphere with this kind of thing? Meaning that each projectile is slipstreaming behind the one in front.
It still might not be possible, but it seems like friction would be much less of a problem. Although starting up would be a significant issue with many thousands of projectiles hitting earth at high velocity - you'd want to run it 24x7 indefinitely.
That doesn't sound like a low cost project, though; certainly well beyond our current capabilities. But you might achieve very nice energy efficiency with it.
This is my imagination vs your imagination, so neither of us really has anything resembling an argument, but I'm wondering if in such a scenario the following projectiles might not find themselves running into the plasma wake left by the preceding projectiles. As such, your scenario might actually be worse than firing things one at a time.
The plasma wake will be less dense than the atmosphere displaced by the leading projectile, but it'll be much hotter and comprised of [#] much heavier atoms.
[#] "comprised of" is a correct usage, for anyone sucked in by the poor guy obsessed with editing it out of Wikipedia (many words have opposing meanings and some great English poetry depends on this; the term causes no confusion amongst native speakers; etymology is irrelevant to modern usage...)
>[#] "comprised of" is a correct usage, for anyone sucked in by the poor guy obsessed with editing it out of Wikipedia (many words have opposing meanings and some great English poetry depends on this; the term causes no confusion amongst native speakers; etymology is irrelevant to modern usage...)
The tyranny of the minority, in this case, is comprised of a single man, whose idiosyncratic reign of grammatical terror is now reaching out from Wikipedialand into the Greater Internet.
In my mind, I'm picturing this being used to shoot pretty much blocks of solid materials, not anything delicate, so the only issue is how much they are slowed down; by the time we could build something like this, fabricating in space is not going to be an issue.
Of course, by the time we could build this (assuming its even possible), mining asteroids could already have surpassed it.
