Nowhere, I sincerely hope. I know your premises included easy maintainability, but as you pile automation upon automation your reliability is headed for the toilet. You'll soon need a second home/warehouse to store all the maintenance supplies.... Not to mention the extremely adverse effects upon your health as your muscles and limbs atrophy through disuse.... Then there's all the extra power required when a whole community wants to emulate this lifestyle...not just electronics with modest power needs, but also major electro-mechanical devices with serious power consumption.... Then there's all the excess heat this community generates with all its gadgets (each with at best characteristic electro-mech. efficiency)... Then there's all the noise a whole town of electro-mech. gadgets would generate on a continuous basis....just like living next to the freeway... Etc., etc., etc.
Two types of pencil are employed in orbit, a strengthened mechanical, with a lead that does not snap and wax pencils that have peelable sticks. How would I know, I dated a flight engineer at NASA in Clear Lake.
This is what I was worried about in the first place. I was hoping that all parts could be automatically replaceable by machine, instead of by Superindentant Henry Orbit. Is there anywhere out there that has this as a design goal? Are there different fasteners in use (other than screws) that lend themselves to easy machine use?
No, I will have more time to exercise because of all the conveniences.
Then we need to build more nuclear power plants.
I don't care about this at all.
Just build berms between the houses, to deflect the sound up. Anyway, you are totally exaggerating all the potential drawbacks.
You've lost your sense of wonder and fun (if you ever had it as a kid). That same sentiment could be applied to the efforts of Rutan, Carmack, Bezos and Musk. I hope there are enough people who thought like I do as kids, and who are ready to go back to it as adults.
I really think that posts like this, from the extraordinary guestbook of the enclosed url, has exposed more about the Scott Peterson trial than all the rest of the media. It's a very insightful read...
838 Date: 2004-08-19 19:40:20 Tom Wilk The Amber Frey, country club boys are Giv Anybody who claims that Scott murdered Laci is not a competent, crim What a joke ! Wednesday's scheduled cross-examination of Amber Frey was postponed until next week. I think the murderers who use bimbos like Amber Frey to blackmail married men are nervous and they need to make sure that the bimbo does not say anything she ain't supposed to.
My point was that Jetson's-like home automation isn't the answer to all your problems and will most likely be the cause of a few. If the history of engineering tells us anything, for every problem that technology solves, it creates another one. In the US, food is now relatively plentiful, yet now many people are obese and suffer from heart disease. Automobiles make distant personal travel feasible, yet destroy atmospheric conditions in major metropolitan areas. The mere application of our technologies has allowed us to safe guard our population, but now many nations are hopelessly overpopulated and are desperately seeking means to curb their population growth. This doesn't mean that technology is bad, just that we must exercise caution in our research and application and be prepared for bumps along the way.
So yes, perhaps I have lost my sense of wonder. But I'd prefer wisdom over wonder any day.
But WHY? It's because of a knee jerk hatred of large opulent vehicles. If they were hydrogen powered, what possible downside could there be to EVERYONE having a Hummer? They are large and safe, and they look cool too.
Because they are too DAMN BIG for personal transportation. Our roads, parking lots and garages are not sized for such a large vehicle to be used for normal transportation.
The resources consumed in the manufacture and eventual disposal of one Hummer could be used for two (or more) reasonable sized vehicles.
From personal observation I can say that most Hummer drivers are not able to properly handle such a mammoth vehicle.
Large does NOT equal safe. Many SUV type vehicles are not as safe for the occupants as a standard sedan due to their propensity to roll over in extreme driving conditions like swerves or blow outs. While the Hummer is not as prone to roll over due to it's extreme width as other SUV's it's height and limited driver visibility introduce other hazards to it's occupants and others sharing the road.
Exactly my point. The references I presented proved your ignorant insult of NASA wrong, yet instead of acknowledging your error you seem to prefer projecting your faults onto others. Seems immature.
What references? I went over this thread and find nothing but some retoric about pencil dust. If you feel that qualifies as references, then this is a sterling example of how our educational system has gone to hell. And that "ignorant insult" comes from personal experience in aerospace and weapons systems. They can't design a space station quiet enough to sleep in without earplugs, and that is the long and short of it. It's amazing how there are many proven designs for air moving systems that are virtually silent, have little mass, and consume little power- but somehow, this was not considered important. They were informed about the thermal expansion and wobbling involved with deploying solar panels of any significant size, but they ignored that advice, much to the consternation of the early Hubble team. The problem of humidity concentrating on metal surfaces near airlocks was also a simple enough one to solve, but once again... and there are hundreds of such examples. Some such examples I have personally had to deal with in one way or another in electronic and flight hardware systems. And with that, this exchange is at an end.
Cheers!
Sir Charles W. Shults III, K. B. B. Xenotech Research
1) makes it not stand out and ugly
2) keeps it sellable valuable.
Guy building a house down the hill a bit. The roofers were just starting work and I stopped and teased him a bit for no solar panels. Not even pipes left for later water install.
He lamented that "building green" or just different generally wasn't seen as a plus. "Oh, this costs $20k more than the other equiv house, so we want it for less. We don't care that there will never be a power bill or much of a heating bill and that's its efficiently heated and very well insulated."
So that all said, as you've trashed Nasa, you now ask Dr Cheung questions (well, demand answers).
It may not take a rocket scientist to do H.A., but he IS a rocket scientist.
Remember, in cartoons, power is abundant. It comes from dinosaurs. You want flying cars, but reality has shown that the personal helicopters planned for in the late 40's are, well, complex.
Given that people can barely handle their 6000# SUVs, I'm delighted that they aren't in gas guzzling loud choppers.
"Smart Roads" would be nice and are testing out in San Diego test areas. The roadside has small radios that can tell the car where it is. Review I read described it as "really sort of boring. You start the car down the road; let go of the wheel" and, er, relax and just half pay attention.
I suppose most of the drivers have the second part of that down (attention-wise).
Many large SUVs are, in fact, illegal on many residential streets (gross vehicle weight* over 6000lbs). (gvw != curb weight).
And if you hadn't really notices, gas is getting scarcer and more in demand.
Right now we face wood shortages (all going to iraq - a 2x6 is over twice the price is was 2 years ago. The lumber for a nearby house that cost $50k now costs $112k).
Concrete and oil shortages. I group these because of a HUGE and NEW demand from china and india (two rather large chunks of asia).
I travel in Japan, Indonesia and through Europe. I don't see a ton of HUGE cars there. In fact, I see things like the Smart car (swatch + merceded
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as the smallest of lots of decent cars.
If americans can get over this perception that every vehicle they own MUST be able to carry a load of lumber and a half a soccer team, then perhaps our general quality of life can go up.
Most 2nd cars get less than 30miles/week put on them.
Imagine going into town and having abundant parking, because it's not filled with Navigators (yeah, those must be big in the off road world).
Cities and Valleys with 30mpg cars have less pollution.
Stuff we can and should be doing NOW? Your city/town should make most of the city owned cars alternative fuel. LNG, hybrid, 100% electric (ZEV), etc. Trucks/busses should use
20-25% biodeisel.
Why? Because as a city with purchasing power and some infrastructure, they can afford to lead and do it on a scale that will work. They own their own diesel tanks. And they can put alternative mixes in.
All these schools and muni buildings which are ALWAYS struggling for budget are fairly permanent. Same tenant's been in my school since
1890. Run a bond and put solar panels on them. Barring federal grants or other incentives, it will STILL pay for itself in 12 years or so. After that, ITS FREE!
A jail in the bay area put up a HUGE solar panel system.
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for 20 years, expected life: 25-30 years. In 25 years, it WILL SAVE $15,000,000.
There's you're jetsons. Every city building make it's own power. We don't need to build tons more power plants because we have dozens of them scattered around the city, generating like heck during the peak hours.
But you go buy your hummer. You won't park it in the garage, cause it's filled with your nintendos and old playstations and bikes you'll never use (cause you drive a hummer and your an obese american). And live your lifestyle.
Me? I have a computer than can turn on the lights when I walk into a room, a button to turn on the DVD and TV and dim the lights. And my power bill is $0.
Had the builders just left $100 of copper pipe from the utility room to the roof, flashed and just capped off, I'd have free hot water too, for under $2000 of panel. As it stands, it would be another $1000 or more for plumbing and routing the pipes.
Jetson's starts with building the buildings capable of being smart. And insulated. And not outstandingly ugly (or "different").
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