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My bad.

A little bit more explanations in this article: https://www.zmescience.com/sci...

About the same pics of Neptune.

In the longer-term, floating solar swarms can be installed along trade routes currently followed by container ships, and used to recharge them in mid-journey. Larger and larger percentages of motive power can be supplied to hybrid ships over time, until they are finally using their ICEs only for emergencies or in inclement weather.

Or, we could keep those solar collectors on shore and use them to produce synthetic fuels. Then the fuel can be poured into any existing ship that burns diesel fuel, with no sulfur like in bunker fuel or low grade marine fuel. That means no stopping in the middle of their route, no dangerous at sea recharges, and no fancy batteries that don't exist yet.

Waiting for battery powered ships to become economically viable is, quite literally in this case, waiting at port for a ship that may never come. We've been synthesizing hydrocarbons for a very long time. This hasn't been done to make fuel, except in times of war, due to the costs. It has been used for a long time now to make high performance lubricants. The US Navy has a program to both bring down the cost and scale up production.
https://www.zmescience.com/res...

Which is more likely to be successful sooner? These solar swarms of recharging ships for cargo carriers that do not yet exist? Or, a fuel synthesis process that allows the use of most any source of electricity to produce fuels that work in every ship at sea, and every plane in the air, right now?

Another alternative for large "green" ships is the use of nuclear power. This is a technology that has been at sea for decades. A technology that 60 years ago, almost to the day, sailed to the North Pole. A technology used in Russian icebreakers. If you want to discuss "inclement weather" then I believe that nuclear power passed that test a long time ago.

US outsources not only production but also polution.

Which has a way of coming back... no respect... We need a wall

Pollutants are measured in areas where they are a concern, such as where mine tailings flow into the sea. But the GBR is 2300 km (1400 miles) long, and it is implausible that chemical waste or effluent could have so much effect across such a vast area.

~25% of California's air pollution comes from China. That's around 6700km away. It is not as implausible as you think.

Citations:

https://www.zmescience.com/eco... https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

It doesn't have to pack any power. Using a solar sail, it could exit the solar system at about 0.05c (80 years to go 4ly) just using sunlight. But it could be boosted to a much higher speed by also aiming earth or space based lasers at the sail. If we can get it up to 0.2c, that is only 20 years to destination.

This is all space-fantasy theory just like we can send nuclear-powered Orion space ships, except we've never built anything like it. It has a greener profile but it relies on equally unlikely theories that we can build huge sails many kilometers wide of materials so thin and light they're almost like air and have them travel for years at fractions of c without hitting anything that'll rip them apart. The biggest test we've done is 14x14m and the biggest non-fantasy use is that it might be enough to deorbit a satellite.

Velocities of 0.05% the speed of light could be obtained by solar sails carrying 10 kg payloads, using thin solar sail vehicles with effective areal densities of 0.1 g/m2 with thin sails of 0.1 um thickness and sizes on the order of one square kilometer.

The other alternative is lasers... but the world's probably most powerful laser weapon is 30 kWh, all those super high power lasers only deliver a burst of a few microseconds. To send one ton to Alpha Centauri in 40 years you need a 3.6 km sail and a 65 GW laser. Yes, a few million times stronger and not just for a burst. The world produces about 24 TWh a year, divide by 365*24 and you can power a 2.7 GW laser continuously. That is to say, all the power on earth isn't even 5% of what we need. Maybe the day we have fusion reactors, but then.... why not put one on the ship itself. Still going to be easier.

You are right that we have a long history of people crying wolf. As part of a course on the policy and ethical implications of AI, I am teaching the history of Luddite reactions from the printing press to the more recent robotic "revolution". Even recently with ATMs, there was a prediction of fewer branches and tellers which did not happen. So we're good right? Well...

Unfortunately, there is one thing that should stand out as being potentially different this time -- in previous instances of the Chicken Little scenarios, it was those who were worried about being displaced that were sounding the alarm, not those creating the technology. This time, it's the other way around. The vast majority of AI researchers, particularly in the private sector, are bullish on the elimination of most blue-collar and service jobs (even management and hedge fund investors are not safe) in the not too distant future. And if you have doubts, we have ample room to believe that the changes are not 50 years away:

• Manufacturing jobs are finally returning to North America...for robots
• Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%
• BBC News: Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
• Attention all humans of Shanghai! Robo chefs will now whip you up a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds flat
• Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• China Has Launched the Robocops You Have Been Waiting For
• Robots are already replacing fast-food workers Trump’s pick for labor chief, the CEO of Hardee's and Carl’s Jr., likes the idea.
• Inside Silicon Valley’s Robot Pizzeria
• Fmr. McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour
• Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees

And other things to think about....

• Dallas Police Used Robot With Bomb to Kill Ambush Suspect
• Microsoft Foresees AR Tracking Your Keys, Milk, Entire Life
• White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots
• McKinsey's 2016 Analy

http://www.zmescience.com/othe...

Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%

Keep in mind.. these were workers earning under $5,000 per year. How is that going to work with U.S. labor?

Apparently you can slow or stop photons. The speed of light c in a vacuum is constant as far as we know.

AFAIK, although you can slow the net propagation of photons (aka the electromagnetic wave dual of a photon) through a material, you cannot slow a photon.

Read the linked article, that was exactly the point of that experiment, not only to slow it, but to stop and then make it go again.

Most physicists would define a photon as having no mass, yet it would carry momentum proportional to its energy. Mass is seen as a property of a particle that makes it resist changes in speed, but photons always travel at the speed of light (in a vacuum) -- never speeding up, or slowing down... and never at rest.

Apparently you can slow or stop photons. The speed of light c in a vacuum is constant as far as we know.

AFAIK, although you can slow the net propagation of photons (aka the electromagnetic wave dual of a photon) through a material, you cannot slow a photon.

Most physicists would define a photon as having no mass, yet it would carry momentum proportional to its energy. Mass is seen as a property of a particle that makes it resist changes in speed, but photons always travel at the speed of light (in a vacuum) -- never speeding up, or slowing down... and never at rest.

Apparently you can slow or stop photons. The speed of light c in a vacuum is constant as far as we know.

No other country? Don't downplay Myamar and Liberia!

http://www.zmescience.com/othe...

There was a slow cooling for about 6000 years, followed by an abrupt change in trajectory over the last century. The warming over the last century has been attributed to fossil fuel emissions.

It looks like we've seen a slow cooling of temperatures over the last 6000 years - since the peak of the current interglacial. There was an abrupt reversal over the last century: http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-c...

Look at this image, then you'll understand why they can't make symmetric controllers.

We are not ready to accept apologies from anybody," says Luis Jaime Castillo, the vice minister for cultural heritage. "Let them apologize after they repair the damage.

First, the damage cannot be repaired. But second, Greenpeace has NOT issued a real apology. Their disgraceful excuse for an apology is here:
http://www.greenpeace.org/inte...

The obvious missing element is an apology for defacing a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Instead, they offer mere apologies for how things LOOK, and the typical "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" not-pology. Peru should throw all of the activists in Prison, and when the Executive Director shows up in Lima, lock him up too.

Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, the image of the message doesn't even look real in the first place, and they could have gotten the exact same image from Photoshop. Here's the worthless Greenpeace image:
http://www.iflscience.com/site...

And here's the damage the fuckers caused:
http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-c...

Prison sentences for all.

I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.

Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?

I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;

Gore doesn't have a private jet.

both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.

How does a jet consume energy without existing?

In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.

That's not true for any of the past 420 million years

IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.

plant life, or land animals either

Bullshit

as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.

Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.

Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around

Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.

As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.

Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.

It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.

No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.

And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.

Bullshit

We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.

Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless

The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!


Why did /. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it. .

They seem to have some grasp of economics too.

http://www.zmescience.com/rese...

Even so, chickens (& geese) worry me more.

Hold your horses: that shit takes significant amounts of time. Unless there were snow-topped mountains in the Yucatan, there was no ice to acclimatize to. It's easy to adapt to periodic ice—even if every single bacterium gets wiped out one year, new bacteria can still enter from the outside environment each year until an antifreeze protein is developed and a foothold established.

The more extreme the new conditions, the harder life has to work to adapt. As it is, there are only a handful of bacteria (examples) that can withstand the conditions typical of Mars, and they had a great deal of time to practice. And that's not counting the expected dose of DNA-shredding radiation, which is bearable by even fewer critters. (The tardigrade being one hilarious exception—but they go into hibernation mode when in space and would never wake up on Europa's surface.)

Interestingly, the Atacama Desert in Bolivia seems to have terrain high enough for bacteria to evolve considerable radioresistance, amongst other things. If the Yucatan had enough height at the time, there's a tiny chance it was a similar biome, but in general the Cretaceous period is known to have been very humid, so this seems unlikely.

http://www.zmescience.com/other/map-of-countries-officially-not-using-the-metric-system/
http://www.ibtimes.com/america-liberia-myanmar-anti-metric-system-holdouts-1109357

There are three countries that are not officially metric: Liberia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), and the USA. Liberia seems to be moving towards full metrification faster than the US, but what would we expect from such a forward thinking nation?

Wonder who doesn't use metric? http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/metric-system.png/

The numbers the Guardian cites are somewhat dated and don't reflect the very recent American switch over from coal to natural gas. Many electricity operators have converted their coal plants to burn natural gas instead, because hydrofracking has made natural gas so cheap in the USA. This trend will continue and the result has been a net reduction in CO2 emissions, so much so that right now I believe the USA is on track to beat the EU at the CO2 reduction game (kickass!), because the Germans are retiring their nukes and using coal now in the winter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428947/a-drop-in-us-co2-emissions/

and, while I disagree with this article about the risks / rewards of fracking, it is worth pointing out that as America switches to natural gas, the Europeans are buying our coal...

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/co2-drop-us-25092012/