From: Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Date: Thu Jan 23 1997 - 05:55:57 MST
On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> I really don't care. I know that any time people say something is
> impossible, someone else goes and proves them wrong.
Seen any perpetual motion machines lately? Or are they all locked up in
that big warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant, the captured alien
saucers and the 200mpg carburettor?
> it happened with
> the Wright Bros., when the head of the Smithsonian Institution had
> previously said that heavier than air flight was impossible, it happened
> with Robert Goddard, when "experts" said that rocket engines would not
> work in a vacuum,
Here's another one: 'they' always said that we couldn't travel faster than
sound.
And guess what... all those claims were true in a limited engineering
sense (there were problems that would be hard to solve), but contradicted
the laws of physics as they were known at the time. Rockets could
obviously work in a vacuum if supplied with oxidiser, heavier than air
flight simply required light enough materials, and bullets had been
travelling faster than sound for decades; in fact, the V2 had done so in
WWII, though that was probably classified. As absolute claims they were
simply wrong, and any reasonable physicist could have shown why.
> Frankly I am surprised than anyone on this list would not have learned
> from such recent history.
There is nothing impossible about wiping out life on Earth from the moon.
You just build yourself some kind of total conversion generator (you can
do that with a black hole, right?) to convert lunar soil into energy and
use that to launch millions of thousand ton rocks towards the Earth at 50
km/s.
What is impossible is doing so in the kind of small-scale scenarios that
we've been talking about, because it contravenes fundamental laws of
physics such as conservation of energy. None of the predictions that
people always bring up to defend such claims contravene these laws.
Mark
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