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Description
They accidentally made it radioactive. It was a storage issue and nothing to do with the components of the plush. It’s mild but not mild enough.
If you know what i mean.
Enough to make my muffins blow.
Welcome to the derp age, to the derp age.
“As of now, there isn’t any cost-effective technology to mine asteroids.”
That’s what SpaceX changed - I’m faily certain that that’s why companies like PRI and Deep Space Industries started up, the dramatic drop in cost made these things cost-effective. Well, that, and people inspired by spaceflight are tired of seeing it not happen and are thinking of, exploring, and even investing in ways to make it happen for profit.
I mean, these aren’t pipe dreams or kiddie projects - I know PRI has actually put satellites and telescopes into orbit already. The plan is to use resources on the asteroid - do electralysis on water to make liquid hydrogen/oxygen propellant - to get the propellant for the return trip, and mine materials like platinum and rare earth metals that are worth a lot more than gold, that are relatively abundant in some asteroids.
They know what they’re doing.
But self-replicating machines are kind of a pipe dream, as of the moment. They’re up there with carbon nanotubes in “sure, if it can happen, it’d be fantastic, but don’t look to it for practical solutions.”
(agree)
When they actually bring back billions of dollars–maybe even trillions in some cases–worth of material with only millions of dollars worth of cost, then I’ll be impressed. As in, actually getting to an asteroid and mining. As of now, there isn’t any cost-effective technology to mine asteroids. Self-replicating mining drones may be the answer.
PRI
First company to figure out how to mine and transport ore back to Earth from an asteroid cheaply will instantly become the richest company in history.
I also read about some kid genius once who was experimenting with nuclear power stuff, and he wasn’t in trouble -rather, he was extolled for it. I guess he must’ve gotten permissions or handled the legalities somehow? I dunno.
@Flying Pancake
Thank goodness SpaceX has already reduced the price/kg down to 1/4th and counting - with succeeding plans to make it a hundredfold cheaper than this - and now as a result, private companies are starting up to mine asteroids and that’s actually happening. No joke. It’s pretty awesome.
Then there’s SLS and Orion, but we’ll see if NASA actually pulls them off or if some stupid president tells them no again.
Too bad “because it’s there” isn’t a convincing enough reason to inspire interest in exploring space.
Of course that era wasn’t perfect, but having so many people so invested in accomplishing what is probably the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a species had to have been pretty awesome.
We’re going to need a sudden wrench thrown at us from someone to capture our scientific attention and fascination the way Sputnik did. Otherwise now that we won the space-race and got to the Moon, there has been no serious interest.
I think we might somewhat remember the other economic issues at the time that was neglected by Washington in favor of going into panic mode over to the Soviets who only instigated us by making more and more elaborate claims to America they were launching grandiose projects in an effort to cause administrative and monetary mis-management in stupid shit to crash the US.
At the time America was undergoing an economic recession and programs needed funding to alleviate the difficulties of the rest of the US and we couldn’t focus so much on the space agency as the highly energetic folks in Washington wanted us, or had us do so throughout those earlier days. Not to mention the nearly insane level of nearly hostile competition between the Navy, Army, and Airforce rocket programs to get something going; all the while Eisenhower insisting our space program be civilian over military so he could write ‘peace’ all over it.
Essentially, David Hahn, a very smart Boy Scout with apparently no common sense whatsoever, decided to construct a breeder reactor in his garden shed, and harvested the necessary materials from various household sources (americium from smoke detectors, thorium from lanterns, radium from clocks, tritium from gunsights, and lithium from batteries). The reactor never actually worked, but he eventually attracted police attention and the FBI, EPA, and nuclear regulatory commission showed up to clean up the yard and bury the shed in a nuclear waste site. The part I think is weird, though, is that as much as this sounds like the product of 1950s era nuclear optimism/naivete, it actually happened in 1994.
@AaronMk
Man, I wish we could have that sort of enthusiasm for space again.
Space stuff is my jam :p
Expected disgust, got awww.
On the topic of “boy scout science”, but not related to nuclear energy I was listening to an audio book about the early stages of the Space Race in 1950’s America and “Space Fever” in general society. In it, the narrator read that public school physics/science classes everywhere were getting swept up in space science everywhere, and in one high-school class I think they decided to establish a set of experiments to study the effect of high G-forces on a living thing, they picked mice and determined a centrifuge would be their best bet (other options included a rocket powered skate-shoe).
Their first centrifuge was attached to a washing-machine motor and the base was a slab of pine or some other soft craft wood. It malfunctioned and promptly shattered into many pieces and exploded about the classroom on initial tests and they went back to the drawing board.
In any case, by the end of it all they failed to record much or it was all lost save for in the end the grand total of lab-rats they had did not diminish; but multiply. Appearently they had held on for so long the captive rats for study had bred before being tested prompting as the writer put: “An impromptu and unexepected lesson in reproduction/reproductive biology”.
I don’t know why it comes to mind, just that it did when I read your post. If you’re interested in seeking it out it’s called “A Ball, A Dog, And A Monkey”. It was very fun to listen to as I stacked and stocked boxes overnight at work.
Lol, I was just thinking of that. What happened, anyways?
Ah, okay; I knew it was small, just wasn’t sure if it was too small.
(Though I bet you’d get a pretty good reading if you got a bunch together and reenacted the “atomic boy scout” incident.)
The amount of radiation from a smoke detector is so small that it can hardly be detected by a household radiation detector.
@AaronMk
Alternately, you could always check in and around your smoke detectors.
Maybe there I’ll find something higher than 0.3 μS/h.
Find a wet clay pit and have fun looking for radon.
Wish they didn’t. I have a radiation detector I’m dying to try out (no really).
That’s because it never shipped; 4DE canceled production for unknown reasons.