greenmaji said:
It just seems from the fist picture that there are areas that the polarzation is aligned both north and south in a near single location... (alot of them actually)
Well, first off, you should ignore the slug when he says that it is impossible. He clearly is not aware of Clarke's second law”
Arthur C. Clarke said:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist say that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.
The fact of the matter is that NASA already has the idea in practical use. LEO satellites at the end of useful life pay out a long, thin wire (along the lines of what is used for fly-by-wire anti-tank missiles) that due to centrifugal force tends to extend straight away from the satellite. Now, just like a wire being dragged through the magnetic field of a generator, this sets up a current in the mass and a consequent magnetic field. Due to the fact that the filed around the satellite can never perfectly match the field that it is being dragged through, this creates a sort of “magnetic drag” (similar to the magnetic braking that is used on roller coasters but at a much lower level). Over the subsequent weeks or months, the satellite is dragged into a lower orbit where air resistance becomes the dominant force and it burns up. Really, it is rather a neat way to clean up the LEO corridor.
Also, it bears noting that as a space craft passes through it's own unique trajectory, it will pick up a specific voltage that is unique to that craft. For this reason, any vehicle that is intended to dock with another will have a pre-docking probe that allows the two vehicles to equalize the voltage differential between them. If you have ever seen the guys who repair 100,000+ volt cables while they are energized or a helicopter landing in the dessert, you will have seen a similar device in use.
All of that having been said, The slug does get a few points on it being a fairly low power deal. Space craft engineers can count on a steady 1,300 watts per square meter of useful solar electricity (actually about 40% of that given the efficiency limits of current technology but even so...). In order to compete with the power that you can get from solar, you would have to get into practical engineering and there are a few very good reasons why this is just not done. But let me skip over that for now.
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As far as the home brew fusion matter goes, this kid actually built a machine that is older than I am. It is called a fusor and yes, fusion is relatively easily achieved. Of course, as has been noted, nobody has succeeded in getting more power out of one than one must put into it to make it operate. Speaking of what kid can do, the fusor was invented by none other than Philo Taylor Farnsworth, the boy genius who invented television when he was only 14.
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The_Jizzler said:
didnt tesla do some kinda work on this? i saw something about him being able to transmit and generate energy from the ionosphere via some voodoo. i think the HAARP project is somehow similar? transmitting energy more than generating it though.
No, he did not. Further, I love the idea of him having worked voodoo. You just regressed science about 800 years in a single sentence.
Not that I have any major problem with Tesla. After all, he did invent alternating current. However, he went a bit mad towards the end of his life and he gets undeserved credit for having done things during that period that supposedly scientists don't know about today. Either that or have only recently rediscovered.
One of the guys whom I work with is a Tesla freak and he is convinced that Tesla invented a device that you can put in the ground outside your house that will extract free energy from the earth. Come on now! If free energy was real and discoverable in the 1930's, don't you think that by now with our far more basic understanding of how the universe is constructed, we would have it by now? But if I try to bring that point up with the guy, he just starts going on about how UFO's command alien technology that is going to solve all of our problems. And why would aliens have that technology unless they already messed up their own civilizations far worse than what we have managed to do? He has yet to provide an answer to that.
