Ambrosia Software Web Board: Since I can't make decisions.. - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Yeah, basically I have to give a five minute presentation tomorrow on one of those two topics. They're both going to be boring, but which would be less so?

Also.. any ideas for putting last minute presentation together? Powerpoint is drab, so don't suggest it. It's a last resort.

Yeah.. you're my last hope

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the board overwhelmingly concludes that you should give a presentation on Taz.

And if you don't like Powerpoint, you could always get one of those huge pads of paper and draw out key concepts, flipping pages as you go.

Talking about space travel presents far too many opportunites to be dead wrong. Stick to fiction.

(See my comments on Space Travel kicking Fiction's ass on the B&B topic.)

dude3, on May 6 2007, 09:07 PM, said:

Like I could ever be wrong

I could incorporate Taz into the imagination one. Or heck.. he could be part of both!

mrxak, on May 7 2007, 05:24 AM, said:

Wait, you posted this on B&B as well? You'd trust that lot to tell you what to do?

Oh, now there's a copy of it here...

I'd go with the space travel one, because I know the general points, strengths, and weaknesses of many of the engines that are being proposed, and their limits. Common among most of them is that they're expensive and rely on stuff that doesn't exist yet.

In the short term, elevators of woven carbon nanotubes are in development. These would cut launch costs of just about anything by a very large margin.

Cosmic radiation is currently a big issue for any manned spacecraft leaving the protection of Earth's magnetic field for extended periods of time. Two solutions that spring to mind are creating your own magnetic field (very powerful-and uninhabitable because it's so powerful), or bringing a very big sphere of water with you.

Nuclear engines (fission as well as fusion) would require large amounts of fuel to start and stop motion. Fusion is the more obvious choice, as you can simply expel the plasma, and tweak the exhaust stream with magnetic fields. Fission engines would rely on a propellant heated by a fission reactor. Both would be very massive for interstellar purposes, but they wouldn't be bad if you just want to go to Mars.
Fusion engines might not have to carry all their propellant with them-gathering stray ions from the void would theoretically feed a fusion engine enough to sustain it as it moved at a large fraction of the speed of light.
Antimatter is an excellent propellant-if you can refine it and contain it until you're ready to use it.
A solar sail would have to be very (one atom, microperforated to save mass) thin, and ideally it would be reflective. It would produce less and less thrust as you got away from the sun. The equation for thrust would be an inverse square curve-double the distance, divide thrust by 4. An unmanned probe could start very close to the sun, and possibly achive hundreds of gravities of acceleration.
A laser sail would rely on a source that wouldn't fade out very much as you got away from your start position. It would rely heavily on political stability over long (thousands of years) periods of time.
Ion engines don't put out much thrust, but are very efficient. These have been tested on a few deep space probes.
A manned ship propelled by nuclear bombs (I kid you not-this has been proposed) would have to be very large (big asteroid) and hold very many (tens of thousands) bombs. Finding and refining the necessary fuels would get very expensive. Such a ship isn't as far out as it would seem. Testing on this concept was cut short when above-ground nuclear testing was banned, and carrying nukes in space became bad form.
Shooting a ship out of a large railgun has been proposed. The acceleration wouldn't be too bad if the gun were long enough. It would save lots of mass on the ship-it would only have to carry engines and propellant for braking, as compared to engines and propellant for both accelerating and braking.

On top of this, if you want people on these ships, you will have to work out issues of supporting them. Carrying years of food, water, air, and everything else a crew might need gets very big very fast. Age sets in very fast in interstellar space. The above make suspended animation look like a good idea, as it allows you to get around many of those issues.

It doesn't matter whether you're wrong or not, nobody will care about what you said fifteen minutes after you stop talking, much less far enough in the future to where it matters. Make the space thing about how the only hope for humanity is off this planet, not merely some speculation of what form space travel, if it ever comes into being, will take. Hell, I'll even write out the basic structure for you:

"Hello everybody. Father Thomas Berry, passionist Catholic priest, cultural scholar, and noted champion of deep ecology, is notable for his assertion that the impending environmental crisis will not, in fact, lead to the ultimate and final demise of mankind, but will rather lead us to a new, enlightened age wherein we will rethink our entire way of life and become one with the sacred forces of nature in what he terms the "Ecozoic Age." Now, Father Berry takes a notably optimistic view of things with this expansion on enlightenment era teleological drives of society towards a sort of ideallic cosmopolitan order, however, while not necessarily framed as a short run prediction of mankind's future, ultimately it must be considered on on the cosmic time scale. The simple fact of the matter is, regardless of whether we can stop the impending environmental disaster or not, greater disaster lies in wait for us in the great, indeterminate future. Someday, some cataclysmic event will befall the Earth resulting in the end of humanity.

While presumably the human race will someday come to an end anyway at the death of the last star, our penultimate destiny need not necessarily be tied inexorably to the destiny of the rock upon which we presently find ourselves sitting. We must, therefore, make a concerted effort to send off at least some part of the human race to colonize the galaxy in order to better our odds of survival. This consideration has been explored almost since the beginning of the Science Fiction (or speculative fiction for you counterculturalist SF nerds) movement, championed in the most visible manner by Robert A. Heinlein. In addition to being a running theme througout his collected works, Heinlein made a series of notable speeches on the subject of space travel to various organizations, many of them scholarly in California, about how our destiny exists with the stars if it is to ultimately exist anywhere. <insert more about Heinlein here, you can find a couple of his speeches on the subject online>

In the scientific community, astronomer Carl Sagan and, more recently, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking have made similar calls to action. <insert more about Sagan and Hawking here>

Indeed, while our efforts to preserve life here on Earth are certainly admirable and necessary undertakings, if truly we are to take as a goal the continued survival of the human race, we must make every attempt to stack the deck in our favor, eliminating the possibility that a single event, perhaps even of our own making, could completely eliminate the only known consciousness in the universe. We must diversify and disperse. To space... For survival! Thank you."

-Pufer

This post has been edited by Pufer: 07 May 2007 - 12:51 AM

Wow.. you didn't have to go to all that trouble!

And yeah SA I did. Nobody was on TT and I was desperate

I went to most of that trouble for my high school senior paper, and haven't forgotten it. The bit about cosmic rays was something I found in a Scientific American a while back-and still haven't forgotten.

Pretty sweet.. My space travel paper was more on what's happening now. It focused on this specifically

www.virgingalactic.com

And I ended up doing imagination. Thanks guys

Photographic memory is more useful than imagination what with fact being stranger than fiction and all.

-Pufer

Cross post.

Imagination is always better, because you can make it up as you go along, and no-one is the wiser. Whereas there will always be at least two people in the room who are experts in space travel etc and will sneer at you if you get it wrong.
At least, that's what I've always found.

...and what's to prevent two people from sneering at you no matter what topic you pick?

I'd prefer to have them sneering about something I actually know stuff about, so's I could sneer back at them.
I once had to do an impromptu speech on wardrobes, if that's any help.

Ah. That makes sense. Of course you could always babble about something that everybody goes "Huh?" at. Like The History of Fruit Cake Tossing or something similar.

If I had to do a presentation on that, I'd totally get an A. I'd bring in fruitcake and throw it at the teacher. Then tell him that it's tradition in Tazmania.

CrazyChick, on May 8 2007, 03:35 PM, said:

That's why you make the presentation on areas of the topic for which you are an expert, can supppose that nobody else will be an expert on, or at least can become an expert easily enough on. Look at the above example presentation I wrote out. I talk about Thomas Berry, Heinlein, and the statements made by two scientists. I happen to be somewhat of an expert on Berry (look for my review on his newest book Evening Thoughts, coming to an academic journal near you this year), but presumably nobody else is (in fact, I imagine that 99% of the folks out there who aren't involved in ecotheological theory know absolutely nothing about him) so anyone could get away with talking about him. I also happen to know one hell of a lot about Heinlein and he's a big enough character that there's a lot of information on him to be found, but is from just long enough ago in the past that you won't get challanged by anyone on him due to ignorance. And the bit about Hawking and Sagan only refers to what they did in fact say, specific knowledge about either of them is unnecessary. The key to doing well in anything is to talk about what you know (or at least what nobody else knows), not to give a general overview of something encompassing stuff that you don't understand.

-Pufer

I still voted for DINOSAURS!

I am moderately annoyed that this poll is missing them.

Excuse me sir, next time I will make sure to include them. My bad

Taz got hax'd out.