User talk:Prometheuspan~enwikibooks

User talk:Prometheuspan/archive1

User talk:Prometheuspan/archive1

apparently i have been listed as possibly in contravention to wiw. So, I'd like to go over that. --

Wikibooks hosts instructional resources
Since this clause of this policy statement is increasingly being used as a rationale for deleting content from this project, I think a major discussion needs to take place (again) on this topic. Perhaps with some time passing from the original arguments and changes that were made earlier, perhaps we can hold a rational discussion on this topic. --- Honestly, I would be willing to pull out materials from my notes which show that my stated goal even before i found wikibooks or had even heard of wikibooks was to write Textbooks. I have 10 year old freindships that i could probably get to attest that this has been a brewing idea of mine for that long.

The evolution of the idea is important, originally i was going to write textbooks on POV issues, which i am an expert on. However, a year long retreat into the wilderness made me realize i was too bent from arguing. So i thought about what i knew and where i might want to go with it, and the concept of ThinkStarship was born.

Its first incarnation was "Geeks of all trades" a now defunct phpbb website i managed to create with the help of a freind. --


 * Wikibooks hosts instructional resources. As a general rule, most books you might expect to find in the non-fiction section of your local library or bookshop are not acceptable because of the list of exclusions in this policy. This is for textbooks. A textbook is a book which is actually usable in an existing class.

--- Honestly here, ThinkStarship rapidly departs the stated convention. Its Textbooks are for theoretical colleges inside of theoretical space ships, and for theoretical libraries onboard same. So "existing class" i suppose no, don't meet that as a criteria. However, I think that the idea here is sound to generate texts with a space exploration/ colonization theme. Its a big umbrella, and a great human motivator. ---


 * As a general rule, most books you might expect to find in the non-fiction section of your local library or bookshop are not acceptable because of the list of exclusions in this policy. The primary mission for Wikibooks is the creation of textbooks for instructional purposes.  A textbook is a book which is actually usable in an existing class.  Other content may exist on Wikibooks, but it should still act in a supporting role for textbooks as a general instructional resource.

- My textbooks would be textbooks in every sense other than that they are for classes which don't exist yet. Somehow, it seems like that isn't any different from most Wikibooks; You can't have a text for an existing class being written right now; Texts being written right now are for classes LIKE existing classes in the very immediate future. ---

Once consequence of this, however, is that content like Voter's Guide, Colonising Mars, and most of Computer and video games bookshelf would be subject to deletion. These topics have been debated before, but the big question is how do you make a policy here that permits some creativity but at the same time focuses the effort here to textbooks and textbook-like content? --Rob Horning 13:34, 18 March 2006 (UTC) --- Good question. I don't see how this really makes everything as subject to deletion as you are saying. What is looks like to me is more of a guidelin of the direction current efforts should go in. I hope in any case that this is what is meant. As an interesting aside, I have now secured by means of making freinds a new potential host site, but, I'd rather stick here as it does help me to focus and because its a great support mechanism. Plus, I really do think what i am doing is not only in the purview of Wikibooks, but is sort of on the cutting edge actually to solve the problems that the rule is otherwise adressing. For instance, if wikipedia ran a "collaboration" effort to come help ME out, we would have a very focused and streamlined path to generate the minimum set of textbooks to quallify the library as an operational educational library.


 * I wouldn't even try. I don't think thats what wikibooks should be doing.  Wikibooks was made for instructional resources.  Some of those fit in a classroom setting.  Some of them are more practical knowledge (how-to books, for example).  Others are fields that don't fit in a college or high school classroom.  These items should not be excluded, just because they aren't "textbooks".  Keep wikibooks as accepting non-fiction, and explicitly exclude areas we don't want.  Its always possible to add exclusions if we find more material we don't want.  Its next to impossible to remove exclusions, because a book will never grow to critical mass to see if its useful to us.  It would be deleted long before then.  --Gabe Sechan 22:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I keep hoping that Wikibooks will make a "Fiction" bookshelf, and that this would relieve me of SOME of the burden of living up to the standard placed before me. Still, and even so, The point here in the main is and always has been to write the library document that would be carried into space. That is simultaneously paralell in mission in many ways with wikibooks.


 * So should we revert Jimbo's addition here?

- No, I don't think we need to revert the wording, i think we need to explore what the meaning is in a non-alarmist mindset. I don't feel threatened by the wording as is, tho the interpretation might be a problem; obviously i do ride the edge of several different layers of the criteria for being here. Trying to walk that line as best i can is something i am growing into more slowly than i would have hoped, but its a worthwhile adventure, and I am aware of the conventions and believe that the minor indulgences i am asking for are justified by my mission; to write textbooks. ---

Certainly what it means needs to be expanded a bit more somehow, even if I agree with your sentiments here. Jimbo's wording can be, and is interpreted strictly on many VfD discussions as just textbooks alone and nothing more, with more of an attitude of going for more strictly college textbooks at that. Wikibooks has certainly gone beyond that, and I think this official policy needs to reflect that change somehow, or some serious discussion should happen if we are to remove all non-textbook material altogether. -- From my POV the whole removal and deletion thing is so overused. Rather than think in terms of deleting and moving, why not think in terms of organizing and creating a sense of order thus that we veer wikibooks in a direction?

The two schools of thought were certainly played out with the Jokebook, where the inclusionists want to keep it here, and the deletionists wanted it gone for good never to come back. It certainly sits right on the threshold of what could be considered an instructional material by a very loose definition.


 * I'm not trying to play that VfD out here again, but the point I'm making is that this is an unsettled question, and similar books are going to be popping up here on Wikibooks again and again with this issue unresolved. It seems as though Jimbo is either undecided himself on this issue, or that it is to become a continual point of argument for Wikibooks in the future, where each borderline case is to be decided by VfD.  That doesn't sound right either.  --Rob Horning 21:02, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

- The problem is that its an informational engineering attempt made too simple. It needs a lot of fleshing out and a lot of thought. Other, very different methods ought to be employed to achieve the same goals. -

Protection of minors and adult material
nothing thinkstarship intends to do on wikibooks would ever cross over G methinks. Theres a plan in the works to move once the textbooks as such are finished andto go to a new host site where who knows what will happen, but that is in the far future and not really anything concerning wikibooks.


 * I disagree. First off, having a garuntee mean anything is impossible-  we'd either need a huge number of admins, or we'd need to switch to an approval based edit system instead of a wiki.  Both of those are unacceptable answers.

--- I think an automated welcoming system as we have right now is probably sufficient, the problem is conveying quickly to potential authors where to take their potential traffick, esp if it doesn't fit here. -


 * I think that it is a bad idea to have all the negative "Wikibooks is not..." instructions full stop. We really should be able to define what wikibooks is in positive terms (with it being implied that wikibooks is not anything that doesn't fall within what wikibooks is), Jguk 06:32, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree, and plus, a page directing people to other places for adding materials on subjects x,y and z would be nice. --

I have removed it because it is too drastic of a change. It needs some discussion (here on en.wikibooks.org) first. --Kernigh 21:18, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Prometheuspan 21:50, 22 April 2006 (UTC) just buzzing around and thought to throw in 2 cents. "too drastic of a change" is true, but more complicated than that and potentially misleading. The original charter is "textbooks" and video games really never did meet those criteria. What happened was a loose interpretation of the rules, owing probably in part to wanting to have ANY material on a newly started project. Wikibooks is full of stuff which doesn't really fit the prime criteria. Again, I think a bookshelf labeled "Fiction" and another labeled "POV" are probably very good ideas.

Is there a wikicity on videogames that isn't too specific? (biggest problem with wikicities, they are tiny micro-umbrellas.)

Another thought; there ought to be more than just a "what wikibooks is not" page, as in a "where to go to contribute on topics x,y,and z" page. Thanks fer listening... Prometheuspan 21:50, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

explain
"I don't understand"

Gawsh, i think i do, and, i'd like to explain.

this is about the information resource function of informational engineering, and what happens if the content as a whole ends up significantly departing from what is in the libraries best interest for convincing the general public that we are indeed a library.

Its a social and informational engineering tactic, and as such, it is remarkably sensible.

The flipside from my head is the problem of excessive exclusivity. This is a GOOD tool for the purpose of insuring the success of Wikibooks as an information resource AT ITS CURRENT EVOLUTIONARY STATE. It is a Bad overall idea for the long term library because it limits the scope and size of the umbrella.

The larger the umbrella, the more applications the information service has, the more clients the information service gets.

I'd like to quote Jimbo. --- We have to draw a line somewhere, and we can argue internally endlessly without getting much resolution. So a useful technique is to try really hard to reference some external standards. - This is true; we need standards by which to generate reliable and useful information as an information service. The real question here, is how and why and what and the particulars and details of those standards. A key issue from my perspective is the duration of implementation of an engineering tactic. Prometheuspan 21:23, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

> 1. What about guides to games that are not video or computer games? > These can include guides on how to play chess and go (which we already > have), bridge, whist, etc.. together with suitable strategies; > conceivably this may also include more modern games such as risk or > monopoly or cluedo. To my mind, guides on well-known intellectual games > such as these have educational value and are worth keeping, but your > comments would be welcome.

My question would be whether or not there exist classes at accredited institutions on the subject which use something similar _as a textbook_.

Notice how this works: first, we can be quite broad in what constitutes a textbook, for example at my sister's cooking school, they use a cookbook for a textbook, no question.

But in virtually every university, there are classes on Shakespeare which use Hamlet as material, but not as _textbook_ per se.

I am unaware of any course at any accredited institution which teaches risk or monopoly or clue. Chess and go, probably, but I actually don't know. Doom? No. --- For good psyche reasons, nobody writes textbooks using Doom as a reference resource. Could it be done in theory? Sure. Not by me, and, more to the point, what is there isn't that.

The problem we are trying to solve here is that geek pursuits are not always scholastic, and geeks have the time and energy and motivation to write books for geeks that aren't scholastic. Might this ever be in the pervue of Wikibooks? Maybe 10 years from now when Wikibooks has an up and functioning library. Right now, it causes system friction. Entropy ensues. Prometheuspan 21:23, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

> 2. Your comments included a direct reference to wikibooks having > textbooks suitable for "elementary school, high school, or college > courses" (and I'm not sure what age groups you meant by "college" as it > seems to mean different things in the US from what it means in the UK). > I trust this list was not meant to be exhaustive and that you would > agree that textbooks related to professional learning (eg accountancy), > adult learning (eg cookery) and (if not covered by "college") university > learning are suitable for wikibooks.

Yes! I think we should be quite broad about it. The key point is that there have to be some kind of courses offered by some kind of serious institution of learning. --- While i agree, in theory, and in principle with the engineering tactic, i think that the primary flaw is that there lacks provisos or explanations. What problems are you trying to solve with the "rule" Jimbo?

Perhaps the more important question is "Can we think of some other standards which would be more inclusive and still adress the problem?"

Personally, I don't think that is such a tall order. I remember a similar moment for my poor little "caught in the middle" brain on Dennis Kuciniches website not so long ago. On the issue of abortion. You see, I totally want there to never be an Abortion ever. I think that is a great and wonderful goal. However, legislating that won't solve as many problems as it will create, and the real solutions to the real problems are an order of magnitude more complicated than that. In order to never have abortions, you have to engineer a more just and supportive society with also a saner approach en totalia to human sexuality. The problem is circular. Those persons most opposed to Abortion are incidentally those perpetuating the social paradigm which is most responsible for Abortions as a social outcome. Prometheuspan 21:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

discussion methods
Hey, you new to Wikibooks? - yes. sorry. -- Please don't cut lines through other people's arguments :) It is harder to follow. Can you just use the indent notation?

Sure, but, i don't see how it works to keep ideas together. maybe you could explain the convention better?


 * It is pretty simple to indent in Wikibooks, in the form of "chatting" long term in an argument/debate. You can use the "edit this page" to see how I did this.
 * Level 2 indent
 * Level 3 indent
 * So on, so forth
 * To Infinity :) --Dragontamer 23:06, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

wow, kewl, I'll try that as soon as my head digests it fully.


 * Erm... you just cut lines through my paragraph again :-/ The issue here is now I don't know who said what anymore.

--- okay, well, on my talk page, methinks i still do it my way. maybe i should label comments especially. I am sorry but this is how i think. I will not cut into the middle anymore esp you personally since you make the point. Maybe you can add the names. Maybe i go try to clean it up? Sorry again. ---

Their words are separated from their signature. When more than one person is talking, the issue gets very bad indeed. Take for example what you did at the Staff Lounge. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see immediatly if it is you or Robert Horning who is talking. Because of the lines it appears that those comments Robert made were done by anonymous contributors. Look at the lines you cut through in this section already. Just with 5 or so lines, we have 3 unsigned comments, any of which can belong to you or me. When there are more than 2 people in a discussion, it only gets worse.


 * The ideal thing to do is to just add your comments below their post with one more indent level. Also, it is reccomended not to use the lines. I realize other wikis use the line notation for their discussion pages, but here at wikibooks, things are done differently. --Dragontamer 23:58, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

No personal attacks comment
I didnt understand your comment on User:Jguk's talk page. RobinH 12:48, 26 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I hadn't seen your comment earlier (someone else had made a comment on a separate issue later, so when I checked the diff I didn't see it). I certainly don't read what you said as a personal attack.


 * I understand how you feel about THINKSTARSHIP whilst its location is uncertain. About that, I can only say two things. 1) that it is not my decision, but the community's as to whether it meets WB:WIW (as amended by Jimbo). 2) that regardless of where that discussion ends up, it is no-one's intention to delete any wikibook covered by Jimbo's addition to WB:WIW from the internet. Plenty of time will be given to any book falling foul of that to find an alternative wiki which would welcome it. The conclusion from this is that any amendments and improvements you make to the book will stay.


 * Another point I can usefully make is that if you could provide a clear explanation of why you believe it complies with the Jimbo-amended WB:WIW (assuming that you do believe that), that may help resolve the issue quickly. Without wishing to be rude, I have so far had difficulty in following the line of your arguments, which makes it more difficult for me (and no doubt others) to come to a view on this matter. All the best, Jguk 20:47, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Prometheuspan 01:17, 27 April 2006 (UTC) Thanks for your answer. My argument is pretty complex. I think that Jimbos actual wording and idea are being blown out of proportion here. I'm caught in an interesting middle. I totally agree with Jimbo in theory, via the lens of my interpretation of what i think he means. I don't think that everybody elses interpretation is realistic, and seems alarmist. I agree with Jimbo, mostly because i understand the information engineering angle. It is exactly the kind of thing i could see myself saying 3 years from now when ThinkStarship gets big and has a lot of participants. I think that I have tried to make an argument that thinkstarship is within the WB:WIW, I suppose it doesn't help that this is interspersed with comments where i try to get people to see what i see in terms of the wisdom of what he is actually saying on the one hand, and the difference between what he is actually saying, and how it looks to me like everybody is misinterpreting that. To start with, the way its worded doesn't make it sound like its to be applied to anything in the past; its a foreward moving information engineering concept, nothing in the things said leads me to believe he meant it to be retroactive. Secondly, it looks like a pretty open ended Guideline, not an absolutist and certainly not a literalist rule. From my perspective, Jimbo made a sensible new suggestion, and by virtue of imagining it to be retroactive, everybody has gone into a sort of panic attack. I'm glad you asked me this, I think i'll repost it to Jimbo. ThinkStarship actually factually does sort of sit on the fuzzy line between fiction and fact, and on those grounds, I can't claim absolutely to see myself as totally totally totally within WB:WIW. In fact, to some extent, Thinkstarship is sort of one big toe over the line, and the rest very much in line. More important to me personally is that ThinkStarship actually looks to me to have essentially a paralell mission statement to the whole of Wikibooks; To generate an online library of textbooks covering every subject. In an absolutist or literalist interpretation of the rules, especially the "Must be reasonably useful to existing class", I don't think ThinkStarship would pass. "Existing Class" is a pretty strong qualifier. However, in a non absolutist and non literalist interpretation, ThinkStrships materials would be applicable to Classes in the very near future. Those classes would teach the subjects in question from a different angle than is currrently being used; Thats what a "Thematic Unit" does to a subject. Lastly, even tho i am VERY sympathetic to Jimbo, I agree with the assessment that he is out of the loop. Its hard to continue to be a BENEFICIENT dictator when your participation is only 44 edits. I think he should get his self over here and spend some time working with us before making Information engineering rules. The evolution of a place like wikibooks is somewhat organic, and won't conform to expected rules. What Jimbo can't understand is the molasses sort of way that books creep foreward as compared to articles. I think we should quit deleting things in general, and start shelving them appropriately. I keep saying over and over; get a "fiction" and "pov" bookshelf. We probably don't want to encourage those shelves to become populated, but the fact is, people are going to come here and write stuff which they think in good faith is "textbook" and which isn't. Instead of deleting it, I think we should consider it a starter book, and look for ways to improve it.

Third response to brain dump commentary
First, sorry for the delay getting back to you. I have been, and am still, extremely busy.

Regarding your most recent responses in the ThinkStarship thread:

''I'm feeling pretty sensitive to "odd" ideas lately. I have some good ideas and some mediocre ideas. All of my ideas are pretty well covered by science on the one hand and my willingness to allow process to be what it is, not what i assume on the other. Please forgive me if this sounds annoyed, but all i am doing here is trying to get the experts together to get them to solve the problems, not pretend that i allready have the answers.''

The thing is, some of the design choices you've made assume that you already have the answers. I'll try to give a better explanation below.

This is all very interesting and i hope that you will consider making a presentation of this kind of information in the actual document.

Regarding me adding material to WikiBooks for this project, I'm actually not sure this is the best place to put it. You're pitching this as a textbook, but what it actually appears to be is a "design study", which is a different type of beast. Further, anyone with sufficient skill to be in a position to help actually implement a space colonization project will already have expertise in the areas you'd be teaching about in any textbook collection associated with ThinkStarship. I can see a WikiBooks project happening after the design study is done, to teach people about it, but what would best serve the interests of the project at present would be just improving existing texts on orbital mechanics, spacecraft design, existing proposed space habitat designs, ecology of closed systems, and so forth. This sidesteps the question of whether or not ThinkStarship belongs on WikiBooks by restricting contributions to things that definitely _do_ belong here.

If I find myself with large amounts of free time, I'll probably put an expanded version of my comments here on my own site, but that's not likely to happen any time soon.

I think that this (nuclear pulse propulsion) ''is the primary form of "nuclear powered" rocket which i had been exposed to, but it was described very differently from what you have here. The bombs were going off almost inside the engine.''

Then it wasn't an Orion-style drive. You might be thinking of inertial confinement fusion drives, that cause a pellet to undergo fusion and explode, but I've already commented on them. We can't presently build them, and any technology for them in the planning horizon you're using would be too heavy to use for a space drive.

Thats not true, my one claim to reasonable knowledge is that i found out 20 years ago basically what you are saying (about Bussard Ramjets) ''and was so heartbroken than i tinkered the idea up a lot to make it work in any case. My ramscoops aren't used for much in most cases other than to get more speed once allready moving, and they are nuclear powered magnetic/plasma driven, which means that they double as a magnetic thrust system.''

Again, what you are describing isn't a ramscoop. Any ramscoop that tries to collect hydrogen from the interstellar or even interplanetary medium has to be going fast enough that you don't need it for your colonization project, and _also_ gives a net loss for the reasons mentioned for Bussard drives.

There are "nuclear powered magnetic/plasma" drive designs, but I've already covered these under "nuclear-electric" drives. The closest to what you describe seems to be the VASIMR drive, but any electric drive will have similar performance characteristics. I like Hall effect thrusters because they can be bought off the shelf right now and are very well understood, but both VASIMR and Hall thrusters avoid the erosion problems ion and classic plasma drives have, and so would be suitable.

''This isn't true, i do know how big space is, and, this is why i am talking about asteroid colonization, you see, a key component of the plan is to piggyback onto objects that are allready traveling around the solar system. Cruithnes closest pass is only abit farther out than the moon.''

Then you aren't factoring in how long you have to wait for your orbits to synchronize with each other. A requirement of any realistic colonization scheme is that you get from point A to point B in a short enough time that your environment maintenance systems don't break down. I'd handwaved this at 5-10 years in my original estimates. Unmanned probes can last a lot longer because they aren't as complicated and don't have to perform continual recycling. Colonies can only get away with longer lifetimes after being founded because they have a large amount of matter and energy freely available, making partially open-loop systems possible and relaxing power constraints. Your ship can't afford this, which I explain in more detail below, and you'd be stuck on the asteroid for a very long time before it passed close to another object you were interested in.

I don't think trying to avoid the problem by colonizing these _small_ asteroids is feasible. You have the problem of trying to run industry in microgravity, as previously mentioned, as well as lacking hydrogen (in the inner solar system), and having a higher rate of mass loss from your colony (matter lost goes away, rather than staying on the body you've colonized). You can't just spin the colony habitat - industry will be spread out all over the place, especially for power generation.

''i have contemplated these problems and still consider going after small rocks to be the best early tactic. I am not alone in this, a lot of other people have similar ideas.''

I've heard lots of people propose this, but haven't heard any reasonably sound plans for _how_ to do it. Certainly the claims of massive economical paybacks from the ones I've heard aren't convincing (we're already sitting on top of a ball of metal with lithophillic elements pre-concentrated). We already know how to build colonies and industry on larger bodies, so I fail to see why we wouldn't have these as the first targets of colonization.

''Again, I am not a physicist and i don't do algebra. I have on the other hand studied ecology sciences in pretty good depth, and I think i know what is possible. I'd be going for a garden as soon as the ships got into space because i know thats the best way to do it.''

This is the difficulty that I mentioned a couple of times above: you're assuming that something is the best solution without working the math to see when it makes sense and when it doesn't.

I ran numbers last week for recycling of air, water, and food, and got the following. The key is that it's _not_ free - you at the very least have to add power plant weight to handle the recycling load, and for air and water, that's the dominant constraint. Breakeven of stored supplies vs. recycling happens when supplies weight exceeds the weight of the recycling equipment (assumed here to mostly be power plant weight unless otherwise noted).


 * The power plant is assumed to produce 100 W/kg. This is quite good for a closed-loop system; I was assuming 10 W/kg for my original posts. Cars get about 300 W/kg of engine-related system, but are open-loop. The higher the power to weight, the more maintenance it's going to need, and you can't do much maintenance on spaceship turbines sitting next to a live fission reactor, so 100 W/kg is probably _optimistic_.


 * Recycling oxygen takes about 20 MJ/kg (mostly the cost of electrolyzing the water produced as an intermediate step). Humans consume about 1 kg/day (based on figures at Breathing on Wikipedia), or about 1e-5 kg/second. Power required to recycle oxygen is therefore about 200 W per person. This corresponds to an added power plant weight of 2 kg. Breakeven happens after 2 days for our plant specifications, or 20 days for a more conservative plant, so air recycling is desirable. Reclamation of hydrogen from the methane produced isn't perfect, but it's close enough that this figure isn't thrown off much by the need to store extra water for hydrogen production.


 * Recycling water takes a bit more than 2 MJ/kg (mostly the "heat of vaporization" of converting it to steam to distill). Humans consume about 2 kg/day on average (based on figures at Drinking on Wikipedia), or about 2e-5 kg/second. This includes water in food, but most foods in storage will be dry, so it's a good estimate. Power required to recycle water is therefore about 40 W/person. This corresponds to an added power plant weight of 0.4 kg. Breakeven happens in hours for our plant specifications, or about 2 days for a more conservative plant, so water recycling is desirable.


 * Producing food requires between 0.1 and 0.3 hectares per person, based on the best yields for crops given in Wikipedia's articles on agriculture in the first world. Power needed to light that crop area is an average of about 200 W per square metre (averaging over the day/night cycle and angle change for illumination on Earth), or 200 kW per person under the most productive possible conditions. This requires about 2000 kg of added power plant per person at 100 W/kg. Dried food consumed by a human is about 100 kg/year (0.3 kg/day), so breakeven against storage happens in 20 years for our power plant specifications, or 200 years with a conservative power plant, even if we ignore the weight of the crops and the hydroponics trays. Even the shortest breakeven time estimate is much longer than the estimated length of the trip, so producing food on the ship isn't practical.

You'd grow food on the ship if you were travelling between the stars, because the trip time is much longer than your breakeven time. You'd also grow food at a colony, because you get most of the weight of the power plant from local materials instead of materials you have to haul with you, making the breakeven (for transported materials vs. transported dried foods) much earlier. You wouldn't use it on an interplanetary ship, because carrying dried food is lighter.

It's important to be able to calculate this type of tradeoff, as it tells you what you can do under any given set of conditions, and what conditions you'd need to do any given thing.

It (a rotating colony) solves more problems than it generates.

I think you're underestimating the engineering problems it generates. A ship can do it, but a ship doesn't have to touch anything, and only has to do it for 10 years. A colony has lots of nonrotating infrastructure (for mining and power generation), which suffers the microgravity problems noted above and previously, and which your rotating colony has to interface with.

It's not impossible, but I don't see why we'd willingly do it.

Muscles atrophy probably in less than .4 G.

I don't see why muscle atrophy is a problem. Colonists would only have to move around at 0.1 G. I'd worry more about malfunctions of the body's internal organs or development problems for children born at the colony, and the numbers I'd heard cited for that said 0.1 G was acceptable. This lets us colonize all of the large gas giant moons, though unfortunately not Pluto or Ceres. It also provides enough gravity that heavy industry won't have insurmountable problems.

''I think that you are missing the point. I am a realist and a pragmatist. I know that there are serious problems to be solved. I am anxious for us to start working to solve them. If we don't have operational robots in time to lanch the first ships, then we will have other things to do wha they might have.''

My point is that you should assume that you're _not_ going to have operational autonomous general-purpose robots by launch time. The NASA study's estimate for a self-maintaining autonomous general-purpose facility was that it would be complex enough to require 1e+11 bits to describe the design. A human being, on the other hand, has a design stored in about 1e+10 bits. So, please realize that you're proposing to design from scratch a system ten times more complicated than a human being, when we can't even design a self-replicating single celled organism from scratch right now. It'll _eventually_ be something we know how to do, but if you want colonization in full swing in 50 years, you'll need to work with things we know how to build _now_. Going from "design idea using known parts" to "fully functional spaceship ready to move colonists" takes multiple decades. Going from "first colony ship launched" to "multiple colonies established and mostly self-sufficient" also takes multiple decades. Taking any technology from "first experimental demonstration" to "something that can be reliably used" takes at least a decade for things that are fundamentally _simple_. A system as complex as the robots you propose would take vastly longer, for reasons mentioned in my previous post (design difficulty and debugging difficulty go up worse-than-linearly with complexity). Any book on systems engineering or software design can explain why this is the case in far more detail than I am doing here, if you don't want to take my word for it.

In summary, to be realistic and pragmatic, you have to have tools that let you assess what approaches work best for moving your colony ship and keeping it habitable, and you have to assume that you'll be working with technology that's either widely available now or that has fully working prototypes now if you want colonization to occur in your intended timeframe.

--Christopher Thomas 00:52, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

thanks christopher, i am sure you are right, and i am a dolt, and that this entire project is in violation of WB:Not.

You may be interested in the vote for deletion. thanks for your time and interest. Prometheuspan 20:28, 10 May 2006 (UTC)


 * If I thought you were a dolt, I wouldn't have bothered replying to you. I'm trying to _help_ you. Take it or leave it. --Christopher Thomas 03:23, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

THINKSTARSHIP
May I just check whether you have taken a personal copy of the content on THINKSTARSHIP? The way the VfD is heading, it may be that the book is deleted as not being consistent with wikibooks' inclusion criteria, and I don't want to risk you losing your work as a result. All the best, Jguk 23:03, 18 May 2006 (UTC)


 * He appears to have been on sabbatical since May 10th. If you have a way of contacting him by email, I'd suggest doing so. I'm tempted to spider a copy of the TSS material on general principles, but it'd be time-consuming enough that I think I'll refrain (my primary interest was in implementation of colonization technologies, which wasn't the main focus of the material presented). --Christopher Thomas 06:18, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

I have copies of the materials that got development from me more than the outline level. The material presented was setup material, obviously the idea here was to explore colonization specifically. If you were trying to help, then you should have worked on the "help" part a little more. Prometheuspan 21:04, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

possibly related wiki
I think you may enjoy reading and editing Space Transport and Engineering Methods, Futurology, and the future wikia. --DavidCary (talk) 02:23, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Prometheuspan. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Prometheuspan~enwikibooks that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:37, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:23, 19 April 2015 (UTC)