Real Issues / Real Candidates

One fly in the ointment is that mining enough helium-3 to power a city like Detroit for a year, about 220 pounds, would require digging up a 3/4 square mile piece of moonscape to a depth of nine feet.
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Pic Left: Obama, Barack, iii -- Moon Miner.
Lawson's Criterion for Fusion
Once a critical ignition temperature for nuclear fusion has been achieved, it must be maintained at that temperature for a long enough confinement time at a high enough ion density to obtain a net yield of energy. In 1957, J. D. Lawson showed that the product of ion density and confinement time determined the minimum conditions for productive fusion, and that product is commonly called Lawson's criterion. Commonly quoted figures for this criterion are
deuterium-tritium fusion

The closest approach to Lawson's criterion has been at the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at Princeton. It has reached ignition temperature and gotten very close to Lawson's criterion, although not at the same time.

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Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not the same as nothingness. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property of space that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. One version of Einstein's gravity theory makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy. This energy would not be diluted as space expands, because it is a property of space itself; as more space came into existence, more of this energy-of-space would come into existence as well. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster as time passes. Unfortunately, no one understands why space should contain the observed amount of energy and not, say, much more or much less.


Pic Left: Takamok
"Dark energy" is the consequence of one of Einstein's predictions about space, that "empty space" can possess its own energy. This form of energy could cause the universe to expand faster as time goes on, as it appears to be doing.

If it's true that we've doomed the universe by looking too closely, you can bet that aliens would not be happy about it. Sure enough, in his 1992 novel Quarantine, science fiction writer Greg Egan wrote about how a quirk in human neurology causes us to collapse the waveforms of anything we observe - and as a result, we've been destroying vast swaths of the cosmos with our telescopes. For this reason, they isolated us from the rest of the universe with the "Bubble:"
The Bubble is a perfect sphere, twelve billion kilomerters in radius (about twice the orbit of Pluto) and centered on the sun. It came into being as a whole, in an instant...
The Bubble presents an immaterial surface which behaves, in many ways, like a concave version of a black hole's event horizon. It absorbs sunlight... and emits nothing but a featureless trickle of thermal radiation.

http://thougtfulquotes.blogspot.com/2008/01/thirteen-richard-k-morgan_4056.html

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=985
And a late breaking story, more important than 3He:
Paris attempted

to dance on stage with the rapper, who was having none of it. 50 Cent shouted "Get the F--K off my stage." Paris broke down in tears, crying to a party planner "but it's my party." PageSix.com reports that several members of Hilton's entourage swarmed paparazzi at the party, but weren't able to stop photos of Hilton tearing up from being taken. The site also reports that Hilton and 50 Cent remain friends after the incident.
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2008-02-04 16:13:17
MooPig wants to know:
How did Paris and 50 cent repair their friendship?
Did 50 cent give her a shoe-shine, and a hanky?
Did Paris go ‘girl gone wild’ on his half-buck self?
Or, did the Greek army step up and dance on 50 cent’s stage?