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Seeing as we're on a roll today...

Researchers believe Sun will die in 5 billion years

You have to remmember that the surface of mars is at a nice -81 F (-63 C) and there is no oxygen
, so an internal combustion or any other "burning" propellant to produce motion is out of the question. You're stuck with either bringing your own energy, or having to rely on solar cells to power your vehicle.

Not everything that works so well on Earth will work on other planets. I'd recommend reading a part of this article (search for "thermal expansion" and read that paragraph).

I don't know, but a combination of this list of continents and this list of continental plates would possibly agree...

But Mars does have iron in its core. Or at least it is thought to: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronom y/planets/mars/

You're right about savvy, though savey seems to kinda work too.

Oh, and while Eric the Red's name is spelt without the "k," my name, Erick, is spelt with it.

Consider the size of the universe. Then consider all of your knowledge of the universe. Now consider how likely intelligent life exists. The fact of the matter is, we are a very small and insignificant on the grand scheme of things. How can you, with any confidence, "doubt there is another intelligent lifeform out there". I would think that an assertion like that would require more knowledge than any of us have currently.

When considering the size of the universe, consider these figures:
Size of the sun: 1,299,400 Earths

Size of Jupiter: 1316 Earths

(scroll to bottom, look at volume)

Speed of Light: 186,000 mi/per sec

Diameter of our Galaxy = 90,000 light years or 5,865,696,000,000 (almost 6 trillion) miles across

Number of stars in the Milky Way: 200 - 600 Billion

The universe is HUUGE - and this is just what we are able to see....



Number of stars in the visible universe = 2000 billion billion or 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Number of superclusters in the visible universe = 270 000

Number of galaxy groups in the visible universe = 500 million

Number of large galaxies in the visible universe = 10 billion

Number of dwarf galaxies in the visible universe = 100 billion

We are on a teeny-tiny planet next to an average star, in unremarkable galaxy - let's not take things out of context.

While I won't say it is likely that there is intelligent life, I would reserve judgement until there is more data - as should anyone concerned about truth.

that everyone knows the names of Edison

The Bill Gates of his era. Heard of Humprey Davy or Sir Joseph Swan at all? By the time that Edison had come up with his filament bulb Lord Armstrong was already lighting Cragside, his home, with Swan's bulbs.

People don't always remember the people who are important. Only those with good publicity machines or who were right bastards.

So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks.

Now that's teh funny!

Actually, it would work quite well if your primary predator was the adult, married male (homo sapiens desperatus). Viceroy butterflies avoid being eaten by looking like poisonous Monarchs. A bird that takes a bite out of a Monarch is highly unlikely to even attempt a Viceroy. Similarly, these bugs would avoid being picked up by curious males, since we've picked up shiny rocks before and been hurt in the hip pocket.

Technically everything north of (and including) Panama is in North America: USA, Canada, and Mexico being the largest by area. Here's some maps of North America, which lists 25 countries, most of which are island nations.

In surface area (which is what matters in telecom), the continent of Europe is est. 3,837,000 Sq. Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km) vs North America at 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km). The United States alone comes out to 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.

That line wasn't in the BBC article. It seems very unlikely. A cursory Google search turns up Jurassic Plants which says

Conifers (like Araucarioxylon) were the dominant land plant during the Jurassic period. Other land plants included Ginkgophytes (like Ginkgos), club mosses, horsetails, ferns, seed ferns, Sphenopsids (like Neocalamites), Filincophyta (like Matonidium), Cycadeodia (like Otozamites, Ptilophyllum, and Cycadeoidea), and cycadophytes.

Mesozoic Era conifers included redwoods, yews, pines, the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria), cypress, Pseudofrenelopsis (a Cheirolepidiacean).

The Jurassic Period was 206 to 144 Million Years Ago the coelacanth is 400 million years old!

So what's wrong with that?

Hell, most English speaking folks still refer to hard disk space (correctly, if you think about it) as 'memory'.

It's their language, and if you need to learn it, you will.

If not, then you can carry on drinking the six packs and eating burgers until even a Cadillac (named after a Frenchman, in case you were wondering) is too small for your fat American asses.

Nope. When stars the size of our sun collapse, they turn into white dwarves. In order to become a neutron star, you need to start with a star with a mass between 1.5 to 3 times the mass of our sun. To reach black hole stage, you need to start with a star with a mass more than 3 times our sun.

-T

Well, one problem is GETTING hydrogen. As the article points out,

"And consumers of natural gas -- already the primary source of hydrogen for everything from hydrogenated foods to NASA rockets -- learned this week that natural-gas supplies are at their lowest levels in 25 years."

Hmmm...I'd think that researchers would be looking for economically viable and environmentally friendly ways of getting hydrogen from a very abundant source on this planet. Or maybe I'm just crazy.

(I think Johnny WiFi might be more productive. "He roams the land, planting accesspoints as he goes...")

Enchanted Learning

A lot of teachers, as in all the computer literate ones, use this one at the local primary school.

Young kids might like Enchanted Learning.

Yeah, nice safe herbivores. Kinda makes you wonder what a bunch of these guys could do if a notion was to strike them.

Wickipdedia may not be all that reliable. It also says HERE [wikipedia.org] That it was "first been spotted by Galileo Galilei over 300 years ago".

This site HERE Says Hooke discovered it. My original source is the 6th Edition of "Universe", by Freedman and Kaufmann.

This site has a biographical sketch of Hooke that also gives him credit for discovery ths spot, and also gives him credit for determining the rotation of the giant planet using the spot as a reference point.

It seems as if Cassini and Hooke are used interchangebaly at times! I wonder if in 300+ years people will use Gates and Jobs interchangebly when talking about early computer history? Or will everything be attributed to Al Gore?

~Z

...then it's time to ship some sort of rocket engine up there to move it. In that case we have to question just how much thrust it can structurally take before it breaks into pieces, leaving our engine shooting off into nowhere.

Woops. Consider that the Saturn V could deliver just 49 tons to the Moon's orbit.

The Tunguska object, would have massed more than 500,000 tons -- maybe 5,000,000 tons. The asteroid Apollo, 1.6km in diameter, masses 20 billion tons -- 20,000,000,000 tons . How much power do we need to divert it?

The bottom stage of the Saturn V generates something like 160,000 horsepower, for something like 160 seconds. That is, if my arithmetic is right, something like 10^12 joules. Of course we couldn't get an intact Saturn V delivered to an approaching asteroid -- not with chemical rockets. The Saturn V could only deposit 50 tons to the Moon's orbit. But suppose we could? If the asteroid Apollo was going to impact right in the centre of Earth how far in advance would we have to light the candle of this theoretical Saturn V to divert the asteroid enough to miss us?

Kinetic energy == mass * velocity squared / 2

10^12 joules transmitted to 2*10^13 kilograms? If my Physics is not too rusty, will impart a velocity of one twentieth of a meter per second. Five centimetres a second? That is 0.18 km / hour.

At that rate you would have to light the candle on that theoretical Saturn V at least four years before impact to prevent the collision.

To be really safe, because tidal forces would rip the asteroid apart prior to impact. Tidal forces ripped Shoemaker-Levy 9 into fragments. So you would be better served lighting the candle decades in advance.

Now, consider how big a payload could we deliver to a comet or asteroid years or decades in advance? Miniscule.

So, what about using atomic charges? Asteroids might be as fragile as piles of rubble. A single charge might shatter the asteroid, leaving an uncontrollable cloud, still aimed at us like buckshot from a giant shotgun.

Would it matter if the asteroid shattered, if we didn't use one charge, but rather dozens, or hundreds, designed to explode more or less simultaneously? In the sixties there was lipservice paid to using atomic charges for peaceful demolition work here on Earth. The best known plan was to blast a 2nd, sea-level, Panama canal. One of the odd things you learned if you read about this was that if the charges all exploded at once you would get a trench with remarkably straight, even walls.

Or, consider how a shaped charge anti-tank warhead works. The charge is turned into a kind of lense of explosive. The business end has a conical hole carved in it. That cone is coated by a thin layer of copper. When the warhead explodes, the explosion travels through the explosive. When it gets to the apex of the conical hole it begins to focus the metal into a jet. I came across some really cool slow motion pictures of this process -- can't find them now though.

So, what if we landed a network of charges over one hemisphere of the asteroid, and had them go off in a rapid sequence? Could the expanding concussions redirect rubble away from the Earth, leaving a small amount of very rapidly moving small particles going east, and the rest of the asteroid going west, with essentially none coming right at us? If the asteroid shatters, would the overlapping concussions focus the bulk of the rubble in a single direction? Would charges spread all over the surface of one hemisphere help preserve the structural integrity of asteroid in a way a single charge wouldn't?

detect an asteroid the size of Texas headed straight at us?

Just for the record, Texas is 266,807 sq miles . Does it make sense to compare a two dimensional item like a state to a three dimensional object like an asteroid? How? Compare the surface area of the asteroid to Texas? 4 pi r^2 is the formula for the area of a sphere.

Maybe one should use the largest cross section? This site says Vesta , the third largest asteroid, is the size of the state of Arizona. This site and this site list some of the larger asteroids.

Let me suggest that the chance of Ceres sneaking up on us is not one in a billion, or one in a trillion. Let me suggest it is zero.

Are there any asteroids the size of US states that haven't been discovered yet? None with Earth crossing orbits.

Are Kuiper Belt Objects asteroids? If so Ceres is no longer the largest asteroid. . But it is even more unlikely that something would divert a Ceres size KBO from past the orbit of Pluto to Earth orbit.

How long would it take to divert an asteroid from an Earth impact? Decades? Centuries? Millenia? Anyhow, Deep Impact had the incoming object be a comet. Even with a project to find deadly NEOs, we could still be snuck up on by a long period or extra-solar comet.

You'll be happy to know sand is a renewable resource, continuously produced as water and weathering break down a negligibly thin upper part of the the 20 mile thick silicate crust of the planet. The crust itself also has a renewal cycle

Yes, it certainly would. Now if they had said, "the world's largest fearsome carnivore..." Blue whales can grow as large as 120 tons, according to this site. (Compared to this beast's measly 50 tons.)

I couldn't find any 100 mile deep ocean, but I guess our atmosphere is about 300 feet deep.

Unfortunately, I think it's just that Koreans just must die really easy. Take the whole Fan Death thing for example. You can't really blame video games - it's more like those moths that live only for a few days - only they usually don't spend the time playing Quake.

The space elevator has been featured in a lot of books, most recently David Gerrold's "Jumping off the Planet".

This is a great idea, but it has one big problem. It isn't energy - The idea of generating energy by dangling something into the atmosphere from space has been explored and proven that it will work.

The problem is this: With every gram of matter you chuck into space (or even lift from the surface), the rotation of the Earth slows in direct proportion to the cargo's mass relative to the mass of the Earth. In other words, every time we throw something in to space,the Earth will slow down just a bit, no matter how small the load. Proving yet again that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Fine, you say. It'll take a TREMENDOUS amount of mass to be lifted into space to stop the rotation of the Earth. I completely agree. However, if the Earth slows .000001%, (about 9 hundredths of a second, enough to win/lose a car race) then the days will get measurably longer unless we bring an equal amount of mass down.

Just to sate your curiosity, the earth weighs about 5.98 X 10^24 kilograms (or, 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, metric, roughly speaking. Source.). That said, it would just take us lifting 59,800,000,000,000 trillion tons into space to affect the aforementioned change. Again, a tremendous amount, right?

Consider this: New York city alone produces 13,000 tons of residential waste a DAY, and they've run out of places to put it (Again, Source). That's 4.7 Million tons a year. And they're currently paying PA to dump is for them. There are other cities with the same problem. Exactly how long do you think it will take for someone to decide to move the waste even farther away? Like Space? And that's just residential.

That's only one example. Let's add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 Metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of high level radioactive waste water (Call Claire at the Yucca Mountain Project (dept. of civilian radioactive waste mgmt. for more info -Link or 1-(800) 225-6972). Okay, lets add the "extra" garbage of all of the other states, countries, provinces etc who have run out of places to put their waste. It adds up REALLY quickly.

And that's not including the actual mass of the elevator itself, including it's anchor.

Mind you, I still think we should build it, I just don't think we should use it as a tool to get rid of our problems that's we're too stupid to fix, but smart enough to move out of sight.

Read, learn, grow.

The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,568 years. That means that half of the C-14 decays (into nitrogen-14) in 5,568 years. Half of the remaining C-14 decays in the next 5,568 years, etc. This is too short a half-life to date dinosaurs; C-14 dating is useful for dating items up to about 50,000 - 60,000 years ago (useful for dating organiams like Neanderthal man and ice age animals).

Well If my math and this page is correct, the average depth of the oceans on earth is 4500m (and they cover 70% of the surface).

I wonder how mars would look if all that ice melted... how high are the mountains on mars? How much of the surface would actually be covered in water if the average depth was 500m?

Less action than JP2, but thankfully a couple less glaring plot holes.

Hearing a phone from inside a dinosaur's belly, and again in his excrement pile later is a really far fetch. None so much as a T-Rex getting out, eating shipmates, and returning to his pin though...

If you want to computer animate dinosaurs again for your movie, please try to get a better shuttle to the screen than Jurassic Park again Hollywood.

Sheesh, we only saw the 'Park' proper in the first film... But no, you had to release dinosaurs at the end of this movie to threaten us about a forth. I assume those were Quetzalcoatlus'?

The defini tio n of planet requires that it be in orbit around a star and does not product light on its own. In fact, the article refered to them as planet-like.

The good points:

Almost all of them fall into the less than 8 character long breed
There was a fair number of them (13 or 15 if I remember well)

Completely useless if you don't speak russian... I mean, is it pchelka or pcholka or ptshiolka.... ;-)

On the other hand, the US sent some monkeys in space too, and one of them was called ham... ham or hal? the confusion would be quite deadly ;-)

Anyway, with a masquerading firewall, I could setup my own domain, my own naming convention without being bothered by anybody. From the outside all my computers are called by00..something

Go wild, after all those servers mean much more to you than they do to the marketing department, so why should you let them choose a name for your babies ;^)

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Surely there must be some constraint if we assume that this object isn't extragalactic in origin?

If you have a second nucleus in the gas cloud which is gravitationally bound to the first one, but isn't in a region of gas density sufficient for friction to pull it into the same plane of rotation, anything that accretes from it will stay in whatever orbital plane it had to begin with (ignoring outside perturbations). And captured bodies can go any direction at all, depending on how they make their approach. There are no constraints of physics.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that