The Greater Brisbane Area under all this rain! And Tornados, apparently.
The Medician Stars, as Galileo dubbed his discovery in orbit around Jupiter, reimagined as terraformed worlds by 1Wyrmshadow1, on his Deviant Art page. James Oberg discussed their terraforming in his (now classic) “New Earths” (1981), as has Martin Beech in his more recent “Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds” (2009) and Martyn Fogg in “Terraforming:
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There are Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. The worst lies are told with seemingly significant statistics. Though I’m not a statistician, I am an Australian, and the (ab)use of Australian crime statistics by the NRA in the USA is downright annoying. Less annoying, but more worrying, is how people swallow such crud holus bolus. However,
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Turning a source of heat – such as concentrated sunlight – into useful power (say, electrical power) is not an easy proposition. There’s a dizzying array of options – thermal engines using different thermodynamic cycles, photovoltaic arrays, thermoelectrics and thermionic conversion. The last was used extensively in early space power generators using small reactors or
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Using Carbon-NanoTube (CNT) sheets that we can make now, we might push towards ~2,200 km/s. Of course there will be structural mass and the payload reducing the top speed – thus we might hit ~1,800 km/s tops with CNT sheets, if made perfectly reflective. Even for lower reflectivity the speed will be about ~1000-1500 km/s.
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Carbon is the material of the Future. Graphite, graphene, bucky-balls and nanotubes all have amazing properties. And then there’s diamond – which seems to come in several varieties, albeit rare and/or theoretical. Making enough of any of the allotropes – different carbon forms – is rather tricky, aside from raw graphite, which can be mined.
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