
What if Randall teamed up with Mary Roach for his next project?
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eSOANEM wrote:If Fonzie's on the order of 100 zeptokelvin, I think he has bigger problems than difracting through doors.
slinches wrote:Also, the OTC isn't a disease. In fact, it's the cure. As we all know, Time heals all wounds.
"Here's another example along those lines: "The human body is 98 percent water. That means we're all this close to drowning".
He takes an acknowledged fact and forms a joke out of it. It's something anybody can look up in a book."
MitraSmit wrote:I have no knowledge about this subject whatsoever, so if this question is stupid, please forgive me - but I was wondering if the strong UV wouldn't slowly desintegrate your body? Randall doesn't mention it at all, but I would expect it to have at least some small influence on the decay of human tissue...
orbit somewhere in interplanetary space. There, over the course of millennia, you'd be slowly baked by the Sun's radiation and pitted and powdered by micrometeorites.
You're cooling space-based computers by radiation?keithl wrote:I study this stuff because I am designing a new kind of "solid-state" satellite swarm. Lower orbits, not geostationary, but long term stability imposes constraints on orbits and operation.
Is there a reason you specifically wanted your corpse to be naked?
niauropsaka wrote:You're cooling space-based computers by radiation?keithl wrote:I study this stuff because I am designing a new kind of "solid-state" satellite swarm. Lower orbits, not geostationary, but long term stability imposes constraints on orbits and operation.OK, I mean, you don't have a choice.
You realise that they're going to be in full sunlight most of the time, right?
keithl wrote: if someday there are more than a trillion thinsats in MEO orbits.
rhomboidal wrote:If there isn't a mind-numbingly god-awful movie called Space Mummies released this summer, I will be very, very disappointed.
keithl wrote:niauropsaka wrote:You're cooling space-based computers by radiation?keithl wrote:I study this stuff because I am designing a new kind of "solid-state" satellite swarm. Lower orbits, not geostationary, but long term stability imposes constraints on orbits and operation.OK, I mean, you don't have a choice.
You realise that they're going to be in full sunlight most of the time, right?
Glad you asked! Yes, full sunlight, and the thinsats will get hot, perhaps 90C. We are designing for for that, There Are Tricks, including some clever work at Intel for flexible bump bonding. The bigger problem is when the thinsats orbit into the Earth's shadow, they get Very Cold Very Fast. A deep thermal cycle every four hours. We hope to use NASA Goddard's high emissivity ultrablack coating on the spaceward side for good thermal emissivity, and will rotate the thinsats at "night" to keep that side illuminated by the Earth's infrared emissions. The rotation also reduces night sky light pollution on Earth, an ecological problem if someday there are more than a trillion thinsats in MEO orbits. Which is ridiculously ambitious, I mean, how could we ever run out of 4 billion IPv4 addresses, so why bother planning for it?![]()
Later versions of the thinsat will have an infrared filter on the sunward photovoltaic side, which will reflect most of the heat-producing incoming IR in the "daytime". The thinsat will still be somewhat hotter because we reduce half the emission surface, sending all the heat out the back. It is still a win, because it reduces front side starward IR emissions in rotation, keeping thinsats much warmer at "night". As a bonus, the directed IR light pressure works against solar light pressure, and permits some mass reduction. We would sell our grandmothers to save one gram of launch weight per thinsat.
BTW, all computers cool by radiation. The terrestrial ones use the Earth's stratosphere as a radiator.
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