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Wave/Sea Power - What Are the Dangers?
worldwide_ants writes: "My main worry about power generation from waves, is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of the moon into the earth, since the moon would have to expend more energy in generating tides, and thus lose it's kinetic energy.
How serious a problem is this? What are the solutions?
Could we send a rocket up to give the moon a 'kick' once in a while?" This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov novel I once read ...
Also the fact that we add leap seconds does not mean that the earth's rotation is slowing, it means that it is slower than the definition of one second according to atomic clocks. The existance of leap seconds does not mean the earth is still decelerating; a change in the frequency of leap second insertion would indicate the earth was slowing down.
Now, it so happens that, yes, the earth's rotation does appear to be decelerating by 1.79 milliseconds per day per century, i.e., 100 years from now a day will be 1.79ms longer than today is. Earth rotation time and the SI second matched up around 1820, which means that in another 180 years leap seconds will be twice as frequent as they are today.
Th danger is not in harvesting the tides for power. The very existance of tides is alreday slowing down the earth. Stopping the tides would be a GOOD THING. But that's not gonna happen. No. What we need to do is make the tides cause less friction, so they don't slow the earth so much. We can do this by pumping billions of barrels of oil per second into the oceans of the world. This would greatly reduce friction with the land and ensure that our grand children will have a moon to look at.
Dubya's Oil buddies won't be pleased.
Alex
Several years (maybe 20?) I read a book with the premise that all of the oil we're taking out of the ground has caused the earth to start wobbling. The solution, I think, was to anchor a bunch of oil tankers in the right places around the oceans. It was a good read. The preface to this book stated "If you think about it....don't."
I just learned about this thing called plate tectonics, and boy am I worried that someday the North American shelf might collide with China.
STOP PLATE TECTONICS NOW!
Good greaf... gimme a break. Oh, let's see... it would be what... a few hundred thousand years before that happens. We'll either 1) have the technology to prevent it 2) be using antimatter for power so we won't even need to get power from waves, or 3) will have already killed ourselves off. hhmmm... considering that I would say this is a STUPID F**KING TOPIC.
Alright guys... what did you do with the real Slashdot?!?!?
Do you honestly believe this or are you just spouting some rhetoric from the soap box? Simple disproofs of your statment are:
If you are ruled to be in the gullible simpletons segment, you couldn't espouse that view and thus also couldn't vote on the passage of such legislation.
Or, correctness and wrongness are also a function of time. Me saying your a big fat doo-doo head is only correct during a certain period of time. Assuming you wash your hair and loose weight, this would invalidate my previous correct statement. Since statements cannot be unsaid, ruling that wrong statements cannot be said is logically incorrect since a vast usefully majority of correct statements are eventually or previously wrong.
If you were going merely going for the rhetoric angle, how bout I use the human body metaphor: I num your right arm (cuz it's wrong) and you opperate a metal press for 8 hours. (Which really sucks). Lets see how long you believe having any part of a whole not speak to its fullest then.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
I'm breaking the chain. Yes I am. I am.
Actually it makes the majority of Americans fools. Sounds about right to me.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
What happened to the really funny Slashdot stuff, like when Rob said that he had been getting a lot of mail that Slashdot was way too narrow, and made all of the tables about 800 characters wide.
Now *that* was funny, especially all of the apoplectic responders.
Although I think this is a relatively lame Slashdot 4/1 (compared to other years), this particular entry is the best I've seen all day.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They might look vertical to us, but they're actually moving pretty quickly horizontally, and they also push east to get into orbit, with the reaction mass knocking against the atmosphere to earth back a bit.
Of course, for the ones that come back down (e.g. the Space Shuttle, Mir, etc) we get the momentum back when they return from orbit.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Sure. The moon is moving away from the Earth, not toward it. Bad joke, try again.
So is there any actual news today?
My understanding of this is that it has to do with the fact that the moon rotates the same direction that it revolves around Earth. In cases where a moon revolves and rotates in opposite directions, it gets closer. Of course, I don't know why. It's just what I heard about it.
Yes, in fact I've taken enough physics courses to know that very often there's often more at play than just what they teach you in a high school physics class. I'm sure most high school physics classes don't take air resistance into account for newtonian physics calculations (mine didn't), but it most certainly does have a measurable impact in real life. It isn't discussed because it adds a whole new layer of complexity.
I've taken enough physics to know that there is alot that I don't know about physics (and for good reason, too), and to realize that the spin of large bodies very well may have an effect on their relative movement, but the topic was not discussed to eliminate the extra layer of complexity that is unnecessary for non-physics majors. In fact, other forces could also be at play here (contrary to what you say). One I can think of now is magnetic fields. But I make no claims about that. Just showing that other forces can indeed affect something like this.
Want to know who is in control of /. today? It isn't Hemos or CmdrTaco, they must have been locked in a closet somewhere. Why else would they not have posted yet?
CmdrTaco and Hemos, if you are out there: All of today's news are belong to JonKatz, Cliff, timothy, michael, jamie, and pudge. OK, the April Fools joke is old now, cut the crap and get back to real news.
Since this moon is moving farther away all the time, this shouldn't be a problem.
clancey
right, but forces acting on it(like gravity) affect its inertia.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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No, because I'm not counting 1 April.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Actually we are slowing down the earth in another way too. The power generated by damns is collecting energy from the earth's spin. Fortunately, this is happening at such a low rate that the Sun will supernova first, and probably enough other annoying events our children wont wake up to have the atmosphere disappear because we.. stopped.
Are we there yet? No.
Are we there yet? No.
Are we there yet? No.
-----------------------------------------
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
just a moment...
Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them. (the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).
Secondly:
Really? Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist. Look around at the research being done in Germany. If people were willing to take the long road, and make a couple of sacrifices now, it is possible to develop the technology, as it exists, into a viable source of energy.
Also, back on the topic. Tidal energy plants would also change the general tidal levels, which is yet another problem with them...
just my $.022
hmmmm?
This sounds to be "technically correct" to me. By putting satellites into orbit, we are effectively increasing the radius of the Earth around its axis of rotation, and the rotation should slow down in the same way that figure skaters spin slower by extending their arms. Mind you, this effect is probably on the order of 1e-30 percent.
The sun will go red giant when it expends most of it's fuel. The corona will expand out to about where Earth's orbit is now. The damn hippies will roast along with everybody else.
http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/dialectp.cgi?dial ect=hckr&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Finde x.html
Ms seems to have left a loophole (minor) if they did this intentionally. =-D
Whatever you do, don't become a scientologist. Xenu's not sane in the least. I mean, this crazy space alien dude killed all the humans with a giant volcano. WTF!?!
Correct, but you forgot that by the time all of this happens, California will have sunk into the Pacific Ocean. End of story.
BTW, I am a lunatic. Raging, that is...
I always go the wrong way around the turnstile things at the entrances of office buildings and the like in an attempt to correct the negative force on earth's spin imparted by those less-enlightened individuals that go around the "correct" way. It really sucks when I try to do this with one of those one-way turnstile things -- ouch, but at least it's for the good of humanity.
Uhhh, no!
Trust me, its moving away, the tides act to slow the earth's rotation, because its transfers the rotational energy to the moon, which causes it to gain momentum, hence, it is slowly escaping the earth's gravitational feild. Jesus, learn something other than watching that bullshit they show on tv for once....
and no duh its april first, this was a lame attempt at some bad april fool's day comedy, its lame, I'm just intolerant of people being outright dumb.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Look, if your gonna say something this lame to get your ass on slashdot you might as well get your facts straight. The moon is moving AWAY from the earth!!!!! NOT CLOSER! Are you mental or have you never taken an intro to astro class ever?!?!?!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Things will get wet!
For example, on Fjear-Nation, comedy is pretty much all we do, so we had to do something drastic for april fool's day... we put the OSDN bar on our pages and pretended to sell out to VA Linux... Slashdot should do something like that, it'd be really funny, slashdot selling out to a media conglomerate like that!
No, scam to get april fools laughs... so who's the clueless PHB now?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
when everyone's expecting something to happen and nothing happens that's when it's funny.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
would be the one where April Fool's is completly ignored.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
getting sick of these April fools posts?
the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as someone bitching about someone bitching about the quality of jokes for one day on /. speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities...
but at least you knew that already.
(sorry)
-- Point? None! Cob.
Actually, you are precisely correct. The waves or tides would pull "exactly" the same energy from the moon as they do now, we'd just be redirecting it into our power grid. The problem would be finding coastal areas where there are just rocks and no rare species of life that would be displaced from their ecological niches.
I finally laughed out loud. I think it's funny because the constant stream of April Fool's jokes has succeeded in wearing me down. It's like Chinese water torture. A few more postings today and I'll admit to anything. I was the second man on the grassy knoll.
By the way, I feel it is important to point out that the Parrot programming language, as currently documented, infringes on several of my regular expression indentation patents.
Memorization is copying; copying is theft! Seeing is recording; recording is theft! Learning is downloading; downloading is theft!
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
You know to me it is quite a commentary in regards to the general quality of /. that so many people are taking these stories seriously. Does anyone else remember nano-pants?
I love the lengthy treatises being written by some people to discredit these stories. Even more frightening are the people who appear to feel the stories actually have merit ("Good heavens, where will the moon hit? I must buy property on the other side of the Earth.")
Instead of buying property on the other side of the Earth, I suggest you simply look up the next time it rains hard and inhale deeply for several minutes -- or do the same in the shower. I hear a good inflow of water cleans out the sinus passages.
As a courtesy to humanity please do this before you reproduce. :)
Thank you.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
You *almost* got this completely right. The tides continuously slow the Earth's rotation, most of the the energy so extracted is transfered to the moon, forcing it further out. The rest of the energy extracted is lost to friction (heat generation). Most likely, our puny efforts to tap into the tides will end up making use of the rotational energy that would have been converted to heat anyway.
I dunno it's alright. Just pretend it's a sneak peek into what this site will be like every day in a couple years.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Ahhh, but it's gravity is caused by it's inertia. It's inertial mass anyway.
This whole April 1st thing would be much funnier if there was one or two stupid stories mixed in with the others. Much subtler, but as soon as anything becomes big and run by people who are making too much money, subtelty goes out the window. Witness holywood movies.
And it's April 2nd where I am.
:wq
The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.
He always told me "I'm going over to my other place", but he would never reveal were it was. Now I know...
(I know this was a lame joke and should be funny and that...)
It comes from the earth's rotation. The same energy that pushes the moon`s orbit higher and higher (as someone else already mentioned) until earth's rotation is coupled to the moon's revolution around the earth as Pluto's is to Charon's.
(I know this story was a lame joke and should be funny and that... but... err, forget it.)
April Fools jokes are supposed to be not entirely obvious.
This is obvious, especially since they've been doing it all day!
It needs to stop.
Moon is not closing on earth, just the opposite! There's one great introduction to Earth-Moon dynamics in talkorigins.org.
They'll just be a year long. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
You know, for us people around the World with a time difference to the US, this is so unfair... first we have to endure 24 hours of April Fool's jokes here, and then Slashdot keeps fooling on for another bunch of hours... I can't take it anymore!! Pleeease... stop it!! All your April Fool's jokes are belong to Slashdot...
But seriously... to sum it up, my favorites today were the DALnet one, The Register's one, and the Parrot one. Parrot and DALnet were really terrific considering how much work they put into it. Those ones were really cool, thanks for some good laughs! But after all, it's time to get serious again folks...
I like how you all spelled "dam" "damn". hehe. Damn the water to hell!! The Bastards!
I think that what is throwing off the earth's balance is the millions of fat asses in north america. We need to fatten up the Australians to counter our fatitude.
"My memory is a bit hazy these days, you see."
This happens to everyone. One day we'll believe we've forgotten why.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The joke part of it comes later when all the stories are updated as true...or not.
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
Sharks. With frickin' laser beams.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I'm not opposed to the idea of a young earth, but some of the arguments in that first link have been disproved.
"There is no known method of removing 27 billion tons of sediment in a year."
I thought they get compressed into sedimentary rock? Or dissolved in seawater and deposited on the seafloor like the minerals that form in the shower if you have hard water.
"At the rate at which technology is increasing and has increased over recorded history, how can you justify the approximately 993,000 years of utter stupidity where humans could not even develop one single written langauge?"
I can easily justify that. We're still utterly stupid. It only takes a few abnormally smart people to come up with an idea and the rest of us copy it. Standing on the shoulders of giants. The increase in literacy over the past 1000 years - that's how I justify it.
"The current rate of decay is at 26 nanoteslas a year."
Averaged over the past century, sure. However, that decay all happened between 1900 and 1960, then it stopped. Besides that, there's a whole lot of evidence that says the magnetic field flips, not decays.
"Small, ice filled comets enter the earth's atmosphere at a rate of approximately one in every twenty seconds. Each comet releases about 100 tons of water into the atmosphere as it vaporizes. If the earth was indeed billions of years old, the earth's oceans would contain several times the volume of water that they hold today."
Who says the rate of comets hitting the earth is anything like constant? We'd need to watch them over a period of about 500 million years to really see long-term patterns.
"The rings orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young."
Why not bring up the spokes in Saturn's rings? Or the braided rings, or the moons that trade orbits, or the elliptical rings... nobody knows what's up with the Saturn system. That place is weird. I wish people would help the astronomers instead of criticizing them.
Also, I don't buy the shrinking sun idea. We happen to know that the sun has gotten 1% brighter over the past century. Going back through the weather record, it seems the earth was cold about 300 years ago, hot about 1000 years ago, and colder before then, until about 6000 years ago when it was really warm, then 10000 years ago, ice age. That's a whole lot of variability. Even if the sun were shrinking, which I don't believe, how could we tell a long term pattern from just a century or two of data?
"Helium leaks through the earth's crust and most of which is contained within the earth's atmosphere. If the earth were as old as Darwinists claim it to be, there should be thousands of times more helium in the atmosphere than there is."
I thought the helium floats to the top of the atmosphere and is stripped away by tides.
"The Earth's rate of rotation is slowly but measurably declining. Based on this, Lord Kelvin, the nineteenth century physicist who introduced the Kelvin temperature scale, argued against an old planet. His point: if the Earth were billions of years old, its centrifugal force would have been so great during its alleged molten state that the equatorial regions would have bulged out. This would have given the Earth a different shape, since it would have retained much of the bulging as it cooled and consolidated."
Take a look at the Great African Rift Valley. Or the perpendicular lines radiating away from the mid-atlantic sea rift. Or other similar formations. It sure looks to me like the Earth has changed shape. I guess the Earth's crust is thinner than Lord Kelvin thought. Maybe the Earth has sagged in a little.
Re: the Population Problem
Humanity may be old or young, but human civilization is quite young. Between 6-150 millenia old, depending on who you ask. Before civilization, we would have struck a balance with nature instead of overpopulating like we do now. Without civilization, humans die off very quickly. The overpopulation argument doesn't bother me.
Don't get me wrong, I think the earth might be young. It also might be old. I don't know. However, you Young Earth people need to get some new arguments - a lot of your current ones have been disproven.
"The moon gives kinetic energy to the waves by its gravitational field. Newton's Second Law (which says that when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an opposite force on the first object) does not apply to fields."
The moon's field acts on the tides, and the tides' fields act on the moon.
"As you can see, the moon would not "expend" more energy moving the tides if we were using tidal power."
It would expend more energy, just a negligible amount. If we held the tides back a little, they would exert more force on the moon, causing it to fall away from the earth a little faster.
"You can't exhaust the moon's "supply" of gravity."
Right. We'd be talking about exhauting the moon's supply of kinetic energy, which is very large but finite.
Gravity, its not just a good thing, its the Law!!
I think your sig sums up the state of slashdot pretty well..
Doesn't launching rockets speed up the rotation? :)
-- Without the right to carry and use self-defence tools, we effectively have no right to life.
A Bugg
A Bugg
E = Wmoonsgravity = Uwater = Kwheel OK, this is the process, the moon applies a force (it's gravity) over a distance (the linear distance that the water is moved in the tide). This distance has a component relative to earth that is parallel to a line to the center of the earth, therefore giving the water potential energy relative to the earth. The moon does this for the water WHETHER OR NOT WE USE THE WATERS POTENTIAL ENERGY IN THE NEXT STEP. In the next step, as the water is pulled back to sea, and a component of position loses distance relative to the center of the earth, that energy can be converted to the kinetic energy of say a wheel which works in a generator to make electricity. But at this point the conversion from potential to kinetic energy concerns only the water and the wheel, kinetic energy of the wheel has been generated due to the waters potential energy relative to the earth. The moon loses no energy due to the wave-wheel interaction. Thanks, Travis forkspoon@hotmail.com
There is no problem with this as it seems that the full moon would have no generate absolutely no energy to turn people into raging lunatics, as it is apparent by today's stories that this has already happened naturally. But we can still fire rockets at the moon for fun to see if it is really made of blue cheese.
Actually, posting nothing would have been a much better april fools joke, as it would have driven people more insane...
even with anti Jon Katz filters
You know, I can't see the logic in this. Both the moon and Earth gather how many thousands of tons of space dust, debris per day? I forget right off, but the ammount is staggering. (I tend to think that a marginally large percentage of that dust gets trapped in my computer cases, but that is a different issue--I digress) My point being that if both bodies have been gaining mass, then the mutual gravitational pull will increace, as long as the distance between them is constant. In other words, the moon would have to have some very large force on it for it to be moving away. Maybe it's due to the spin as dosowski said, I know that I don't have the physics knowledge behind that sort of problem, so I won't go there.
(The Sky, it's a' Fallin')
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
That link you posted up there (earth age) is so full of misleading information... :(
I thought I've heard some stoopid things... but that just takes the cake.
Where the hell is solar power? Weren't we supposed to be using that by now? Or...would we end up draining the sun?
Even though the story is an April Fool's joke, it is a valid physics question. Kudos to Claudius for bothering to actually work out the math, instead of just bitching about how lame the jokes are this year. If I had some moderator points left, I'd mod you up.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Let me try to understand this question....
/. article that talked about Nuking the Moon
The Asker is saying that by using wave energy as a power source, the moon will some how lose energy?
I don't see the connection, and surprisingly, am pretty well versed in thermodynamics.
To believe the moon would AT ALL, EVER, be affected in such a way first assumes that our use of waves will somehow make the seas more turbulent than they are.. which won't happen, due to the complex nature of how water in the oceans interacts; it's really hard to grasp chaos-theory stuff. I digress.
I mean you'd have to get a pretty fucking huge soliton wave going to make any gravitational effect at all; soliton waves hundreds of miles long already regularly travel through the ocean, and don't SEEM to be doing jack shit as far as pulling in the moon... so the effect of our disturbance in the water would have to be REALLY REALLY INCONCIEVEABLY MASSIVE for it to REGULARLY create soliton waves all throughout the ocean.
Nothing short of that would do a damn thing. Moon-tidal stuff happens on a global scale, and unless you can stop the oceans moving, nothing we do to the sea will change the moon's kinetic energy in that way.
Someone please tell me where my embarassing and glaring error lies.
I DO seem to remember another
The energy expended would be the same, it would just be used to power turbines rather than to shift sand. The larger problem here wouldn't be if the moon comes crashing into the Earth, it's the ecological impact. If the waves energy isn't being used to form the Earth's beaches and support life as they used to, what will happen? Many species rely on waves to survive.
I'm probably so wrong it's not funny (since I'm just a humble high school physics student). So someone please correct me.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
Daniel Zeaiter
daniel@academytiles.com.au
http://www.academytiles.com.au
This is kind of like how human beings are changing the climate with pollution, is it not? About as likely and scientific, if you ask me.
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"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Ok, I gota bitch about the Nuclear power plants NOT being a problem thing.
Shit, where the hell have you been??
Ever heard of the Columbia river? That large one on the west coast, Lewis and Clark, all that?
Turns out it is now polluted by nuclear waste, not very nice. In another few years Hanfords storage bins are gona be leaking even more into it, what did the goverment say?
Nothing, reported it, issue dropped.
Heh, nice to know.
Snake river is having the same issue, a power plant by it is leaking waste into it.
You see, nuclear power plants create waste. ALOT of waste in fact, a whole lot of very DANGERIOUS waste. Shit, coal, hell, say inside, where a gas mask, you can DO something about air pollution, or at least you can avoid it.
Heh, Lead Clothing is about the only way to escape from radiation.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
One little pellet? Yah, one little pellet that will be one little radioactive pellet for a VERY long time.
I am not saying that coal plants are safe, far from it, they are horrible for the enviroment, but Radioactive waste isn't exactly pretty either, and keeping it away from civilization isn't exacly easy you know, people have seemed to, must have been when you where not looking for a second or so, spread out a bit.
Shit, all over the place. About the only place that we do NOT live are considered to be nature reservations, and rightly so, we shouldn't intrude on them, and radioactive waste is DEFINFLY considered intrusion. Hell, what's more, even if you DO find a safe place to put it, it is going to do nothing more then delay the problem a few hundred, or even thousnd, years. Though quite frankly I doubt it will delay things more then a few decades.
And no no, don't bitch to me about how we are "just about to discover" a radical new imporovment in our methods of cleaning up nuclear waste. Shit, that has been going to happen Any Day Now(TM) for Quite Some Time Now(C), vapour ware is vapour ware, never make world impacting descisions based on technology that you MAY or MAY NOT have in a few years, tends to fuck things up if other things get off schedual!
What we _DO_ need to research is alternative powers sources, and I am _NOT_ talking about solar or wind power, Anybody have a any better idea's? Come on folks, entire universe of science out there, there _HAS TO BE_ a better way to make power that doesn't involve glow in the dark fish food as a byproduct.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Or at least, that's what it would do, if it wasn't slowly getting farther and farther away from the Earth.
-Loki
the fool who approves these articles, or the fools who follow-up?
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Okay, here goes. The energy converted to heat through friction of the world's oceans against the tidal floor comes from the rotational energy of the Earth-Moon system, thus causing the two bodies to slow orbitally relative to each other. BUT, the angular momentum of the system does not change so that, in order for the angular momentum of the system to remain constant while velocities are slowing, the radius of the orbit must increase. Thus, the Moon is moving away from us, not towards us. The time-scale of this is on the order of millions or billions of years though so that, regardless of the human interaction, we'll all be dead before any noticable effects occur (which would be the loss of tides, no the Moon crashing to the Earth).
This fear is nonsense.
The tides do add a tiny bit of "friction" to the earth-moon interaction. It does take work to move a fair chunk of the ocean back and forth since water is a little viscous - that is, it has friction to forces trying to move it. Mostly it just sloshes back and forth comfortably.
Other forces such as the other planets, tides on the Sun, etc. are more important.
However tidal power generation would affect at best one-billionth [trillionth?] of the ocean so any impact it has would be undetectable and unimportant.
Remember though that when the moon is close to earth it has to go very fast to stay up. As it goes further away it does not have to move so fast. Thus lost energy makes it go further away. The energy losses are to the earth-moon system as a whole not just to the moon's kinetic energy.
Claus
Which Earth?
Which Moon?
Sorry, but in about 4.5 billion the sun will become a red giant and destroy both Earth and the moon.
So in 100 billion yeary, there will be nothing that crashes into nothing...
Claus
Don't worry about accelerating the descent of the Moon into the earth; The moon is leaving earth orbit and is expected to be free from earths gravity in like 10,000 years or something just as stupid.
Ace
Do you think I can get insurance to cover damages if the moon were to hit my car?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Was this question made up? If someone REALLY asked "will wave power cause the moon to crash", now that WOULD be funny.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Some April Fool's stuff is ok, to a point. But frankly, this stuff got old after the 500th fake press release/revolutionary discovery/whatever I read today. I wish all these web news sites would actually post some REAL NEWS instead of page after page of infantile pranks. LinuxGames, Slashdot, and basically every other site I visit throughout the day, is litered with this stuff I have to wade through. I can't even tell the real stuff from the fake today.
A couple of jokes worthy of a chuckle is fine. But every damn site I go to has a dozen or so gag postings, and it gets real old real fast. I can't wait for this day to be over, so we can all be returned to our regularly scheduled programming.
Well, I dunno about most of you, but as of the current time (12pm here), 1/2 the world is now in 2nd April, so maybe this is getting a little late.
Seems that most Americans don't care about the rest of the world, so facts like this don't matter to them...
"Zee whole point of April Fool's is ruined if your joke is so obvious that it doesn't fool anyone. Vhy don't come up with a believable joke!!!"
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
You may get wet.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Static electricity... Put the goat on a perspex sheet.
This is actually funny, unlike the other stuff slashdot has posted today.
I just wonder if I find this funny because the other stuff posted is so bad?
No, not at all. Processing huge quantities of raw silicon to achieve the purity you need. Mixing it with the appropriate doping agents. Cooking the log and cutting slices off it, which then need to be etched and doped with the opposite polarity of silicon. And then you need to package it and attach leads to it. All for a 0.6V/cell and 400mW of energy in full sunlight.
And solar cells are solid state devices, they tend to last for hundreds of years before they stop working.Sure they do. By extension, then, you've never had a semiconductor device fail? (After all, they last for hundreds of years but have really only been popular for 40 years or so.)
Semiconductors *do* fail. Sometimes, the doped regions at their PN junctions change spontaeously and the device in question goes leaky or open. Sometimes they get damaged by static electricity, perhaps a lightning strike nearby. And sometimes they simply crack from thermal cycling, a problem exacerbated by the size of the dies.
Oops. What's this? The die is the size of the solar cell and therefore a chunk of silicon so big that it makes a Pentium III appear modest? Made of brittle silicon, which is basically glass processed in neat ways? And you're going to expose it to full sunlight and then full night every day and expect it's going to last for hundreds of years?
Learn a little about semiconductor engineering, please. Unless you know what a pin contact transistor is, or what the forward voltage of a germanium PN junction is, please feel free to restrain yourself from commenting - or voting - while your definite lack of understanding of the topic puts us all in peril.
Battery, fuel cell, or flywheel.Battery/flywheel = inefficient.
Battery = full of nasty, toxic chemicals, the more efficient the battery, the more nasty and toxic the chemicals. And they need to be replaced every couple of years. If the battery in your car is x square feet in size to run a ~1300W motor (your starter) for 15 minutes (good battery, approximate amount of total time you could crank your engine and still have the battery sort of work), how big do you think the batteries to run Los Angeles from dusk to dawn are going to have to be?
Again, it's best for you to cease deciding how the world should work from the depths of your ninth-grade education.
Of course battery technology still sucks, but it is getting better.Yup. We wanted to play MP3s using ENIAC and decided it wasn't feasible. So now we've got this UNIVAC all hooked up and ready to go...
The only problem is that secondary (rechargable) battery technology was quite mature in the 1940s. Alas, it doesn't move as fast as the computer industry.
Or maybe you are being such a retard for an April fools joke?This retard apparently has a greater understanding of electrical and mechanical engineering than you do, my friend.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
How serious a problem is this?
Uhhh... I think that there'd be no actual effect on the moon, since the energy expended bringing the tides higher and lower would instead end up (minutely) being harnessed to make electricity.
As in, you're not making the moon do any more work, you're simply harnessing that which it already does.
A more immediate problem with tidal power (and why it will never be allowed) is that the same communists and environmentalists who don't want gas, coal or nuclear power plants will protest this too because it will cause a marine devastation of a scope unparalleled by all the hydroelectic dams in the world all put together.
Evidently, when the dead fish start washing ashore near the tidal power plant, all those same people who were promoting it as environmentally friendly will freak out about how it's another sign of corporate evil and human greed.
Then, they'll tell us we all need solar power, and that it has to be done. Never mind the fact that it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it harnesses over its lifetime, or the fact that we'll have to somehow save up this meager energy during night time...
Nuclear power sucks, but until fusion is practical, it's the least evil way of producing our energy. And unless there's some great solution to all the inefficiencies of solar cells and wind power, I'd bet money that 20 years from now, we'll still be having this idiotic, repetitive argument.
Remember, these are all technologies that were said to be practical at the first Earth Day in 1969. Where are they now? Still not practical. Still not possible.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
... All Your Bad Slashdot Jokes Are Belong To Us.
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
i would, except i don't see banner ads anymore.
thank you, webwasher.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
With regards to melting icebergs, do this little experiment...
Put ice cubes in a glass, fill to the brim with water so that the cubes float above the rim of the glass, and wait for the cubes to melt. (north pole)
Ice caps (over solid land) are a different issue. (south pole)
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Strangely, you are actually correct.
You don't need cows... I've got you covered!
The funny thing is that the Earth's rotation is slowing down due to constant micrometeorite bombardment causing it to gain mass. This is why they add all those leap-seconds on new years.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Interesting theroy indeed.
Can't be April fools because it was posted on Monday April 02, @09:04AM according to my slashdot. 9 hours too late for the Australians
in comedy, timing is everything.
Trav
Leg Godt!
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a Beowulf cluster of these!
LOL!
Oh, april 1st, very funny, come on everyone, laugh :o)
This sig is intentionally left blank
Could we send a rocket up to give the moon a 'kick' once in a while?
No. The amount of energy that it would take to move the moon back to its proper location would equal (ideally) everything we could generate from the tides. Throw in friction, and it becomes a losing battle. We'd be better off just using the potential energy inherent in the rocket system as energy directly.
I'm not exactly sure, but I think the funny part is supposed to be that these are real submissions kept stored for future april fools use from the last year or so. The editorial remark on the story preceding this one would lend credibility to that idea. That would at least explain why the large majority of these are stupid rather than funny (though there is, admitedly, a gray area where the two cross).
The moon gives kinetic energy to the waves by its gravitational field. Newton's Second Law (which says that when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an opposite force on the first object) does not apply to fields.
"My main worry about power generation from waves, is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of the moon into the earth, since the moon would have to expend more energy in generating tides, and thus lose it's kinetic energy."
As you can see, the moon would not "expend" more energy moving the tides if we were using tidal power. You can't exhaust the moon's "supply" of gravity.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, how can a line that crosses a point inside the circle (the Earth) be tangent to the circle. The Earth will always be inside the circle, because the Earth will always be closer to the moon than the sun is.
Ehhm, I'm not gonna do the arithmetics on this, but if you're gonna send a rocket to the moon to give it a kick, you might as well keep using ordinary power stations. Might be a bit more efficient.... ;)
How do you obtain energy using tides/waves?
I'm a little confused on the details.
Question everything.
is the greasy stuff on my mouse wheel?
Today, in an historic first for NASA, the controversial nuclear powered Accelerative Lunar Isotopic Combustion Engine was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 6:32 AM EST on it mission to help raise the now sagging lunar orbit. Thirty-Two billion dollars in the making, this ambitious and scientifically risky program was needed to compensate for years of careless 'Tidal Force Conversion' by many industrialized nations world-wide.
The launch occured on schedule and appeared to be fairly routine until Florida Space Systems launch controller Howard 'Buz' McCrackin substituted the usual "...Three..Two..One..Zero...Liftoff, We Have Liftoff!" traditional rocket sendoff announcement with the yet to be explained "...Three..Two..One..TO THE MOON ALICE!"
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Of course you do! Right off a cliff. AC. Hmph!
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I'll have to go for #4
"Huh? Did they post anything different then usual?"
April fools, I know, but the moon is slowly orbiting farther and farther from the earth, not closer. Please Slashdot, you could do a lot better...
---
It's going to be really hard to make this not seem like an April Fool's joke, but I'm being serious.
We are actually changing the rotation of the earth. Very very slightly. We've done this by building so many dams (and therefore, reservoirs) near the equator, while at the same time, melting the ice caps. Basically, we've removed a whole bunch of weight from the axis, and added a whole bunch of weight to the equator.
Damn, it sounds like I'm kidding. But I'm not.
And tidal energy slows down ROTATION, not orbital velocity. That's why the same face of the moon points towards either at all times.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Your worried about the moon crashing into the Earth if we produced energy from tides. Do you know how stupid that sounds? Who was your highschool physics teacher? If you knew anything about physics, this is impossible.
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
Finally somebody who understands... The person who made this April-fools joke watched Armageddon and Deep Impact too often.
For the moon (and all things in orbit) the orbit closest to the earth (or wherever it's revolving around) constitutes the higest energy since it moves the fastest. The lowest energy is, ligically, no orbit at all. Loosing energy means a LAGRER orbit.
But has anybody thought about the fact that the tides actually slow down the earth (like the moon has allready stopped rotating relative to the earth). And so does the sun. Oh my gosh! If the earth stopped rotating there will be one hot side and one cold side. Massive storms will ravage our planet! Help!
Don't count on it. The sun will have died before that time. What?! Argggh! The sun is dying! The end is near!
Either you're april fooling us or you're unaware that the Earth's rotation actually IS slowing. It may or may not be from missles and dams, but whatever the cause, this is why we have to add one or two leap seconds to every year.
--------------------------------
Slashdot seams to be running more lame stories that sound like they are made by Dilberts BOSS.
All to generate more hits/comments to make more revenue for this adds.
here is a better link:
http://www.eren.doe.gov/RE/ocean_wave.html
there are lots of good sites to be found on google that discuss this topic.
My guess is that the /. staff is rolling over the floor laughing ...yaddayaddayadda because of the replies on their April posts...
Umm...how do you suggest that? Do we attach some kind of...oh...nevermind.
rofl@insightful...hehe
Even nerds need humor in their lives (All your base, the dopefish culture, etc.). Sure, most of this stuff is not funny...but would it kill some of you guys to lighten up just once a year at least?
All we have to do is ask all the Chinese nicely if they would mind paddling in the sea at once in the opposite direction, and the effect will be neutralized.- ----------
-----------------------------------
The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity
{YEATS}
It's still 1 April for another ~4 hours slashdot time( I aught to get around to changing my clock, it being daylight savings time and all), so you're going to have to put up with the AFJs for a little while longer. Though if they post another AFJ, I'll just have to put up my manifesto promoting hermaphroditism.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
The black boxes are pretty cool. For a little less money I'd want one or two. -miko
Miko O'Sullivan
The moon is not our toy. It is reckless and irresponsibe for us to be using the moon for our own energy needs. I personally have been using the moon as my private dumpster, but I think that I might be messing with other nations' space programs. For us to continue to exploit space would be a disgrace.
Even if the waves were harder to make the moon would produce the same amount of energy methinks. That would make one wonder if the waves would get harder and harder to tap for our energy untill we just gave up. Wait a minute... if we stopped stopping up the oceans then it would be easy to make tides again and the lunar generatted tides would commense once more tempting the human redundance (sorry I can't spell) to tap it again!
-- geekcode: GU d-- s+: a---- C++ UL++ P-- L++ E--- W++ N++ o K- w-- O M- V- PS PE- Y PGP- t 5 X R tv+ b
That Moon-falling thing is, I recognize, a growing concern. But the real problem is what will happen with all those solar panels, when the sun fades away. Then all those damn hippies will come crying for nuclear power to heat their communes or whatever. Then when the sun becomes a big black ball, will we learn the big lie of so-called "renewable-energies". Humpf! I almost cannot wait!
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Um, maybe you're correct, but I've always understood inertia to mean objects resting, moving, or traveling in a straight line and all that jazz. Whereas momentum had to do with the amount of force behind whatever is moving. Ah, whatever.
Inertia is the tendency of a body to, unless affected by another force, keep its same velocity (rate of change of position over change in time).
Momentum is the force excerted by an object times the mass of the object.
Newton said (and we all trust Newton) that as an object A excerts a force F on an object B, object B excerts an equal and opposite force on A.
The clever fellow also said that the force excerted by an object is the mass of the object times the acceleration (change in velocity over time, i.e. change in change in position over time over time).
To change the motion of the earth, it would take huge forces, since the earth A) is quite heavy and B) moves at a rather blinding speed and therefore has a huge momentum. This is not unrelated to the inertia, so actually both would fit in the original post.
Disclaimer: I slept through a lot of my physics lessons. Don't tell.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
You forgot the obvious choice.
CowboyNeal.
The One,
The Only,
--The Kid
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
Still, I really do miss the news. For what it's worth, the site might as well be down today, there really wouldn't be much of a difference.
This is nutty. One might think that a better April Fools' Joke might come out of people with higher intellects, but apparently not. This comes directly from my "Stars for 'Tards" class on basic astronomy - Gravity is a relative problem. Since the moon is slowly moving outside of the Earth's gravitational fiel, the tides are much lower than they were only a few years ago, which means that the massive amounts of erosion of the planet via the tides has made it so the environment is being changed. Eventually, it is possible that the moon will break off and begin orbit of the sun on its own, rather than orbiting the earth. If, like Saturn, the Earth was large enough, there would be a threshold where the moon's interiro gravity would break it apart prior to "crashing" into the earth, and thus make a planet with rings of matter around it. However, we'd have to have a medium-sized planet, and because the Earth is a dense planet instead of a gaseous planet, we have a solid moon. It doesn't make sense to use waves for long-term energy solutions, since eventually we won't have them anyway. And if this was an April Fools' Joke, it was a pretty lame one. Solar energy expenditure will more than likely be the method which humans will turn to provide more electric energy. Right now, I've seen people working on solar panel systems on their houses in California that are able to heat the water in their houses and sell electricity above what they use back to the grid.
"We got plenty of youth, what about a fountain of smart?" - Rick Fraga
This is nutty. One might think that a better April Fools' Joke might come out of people with higher intellects, but apparently not. This comes directly from my "Stars for 'Tards" class on basic astronomy -
Gravity is a relative problem. Since the moon is slowly moving outside of the Earth's gravitational fiel, the tides are much lower than they were only a few years ago, which means that the massive amounts of erosion of the planet via the tides has made it so the environment is being changed. Eventually, it is possible that the moon will break off and begin orbit of the sun on its own, rather than orbiting the earth. If, like Saturn, the Earth was large enough, there would be a threshold where the moon's interiro gravity would break it apart prior to "crashing" into the earth, and thus make a planet with rings of matter around it. However, we'd have to have a medium-sized planet, and because the Earth is a dense planet instead of a gaseous planet, we have a solid moon.
It doesn't make sense to use waves for long-term energy solutions, since eventually we won't have them anyway. And if this was an April Fools' Joke, it was a pretty lame one. Solar energy expenditure will more than likely be the method which humans will turn to provide more electric energy. Right now, I've seen people working on solar panel systems on their houses in California that are able to heat the water in their houses and sell electricity above what they use back to the grid.
"We got plenty of youth, what about a fountain of smart?" - Rick Fraga
It leaves slashdot thinking...either they're the funniest people on earth (yeah right) either that or they're piss drunk.
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
acutally pbs' NOVA has a special about this. the moon IS moving away from earth because the graviational pull is lessening. I'm sory, but you're wrong. check out a few search engines, if you're not lazy
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
our best bet is to not just check the pages for a few days.
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
I can just imagine the next phase-- methane gas powered cars from cow farts.
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
just laugh when people start dying. that may be harsh, but it'll be funny. hehe, silly people on the equator. sucks for them (and yes, this is sarcasm =P)
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
Makes me wonder what New Years Day is like here on /. there probably is goatsex.
-Tar Ciryatan, Angry Hermit-
WE had this kind of discussion in a Physics class one day.
We determined that if everyone in the world walked the same way for a while (a long while) we would be able to change the speed of the earths rotation... Therefore throwing the atomic clocks into disarray
hmm... I would have thought that given the moons mass of 10 to power of 24 kg and its velocity in space it would be insignificant. How many wave power stations are there now...? However, should it be otherwise so, given mankinds alarming propensity to ignore the warning signals of impending global enviromental problems and actually take action against these existing ones, letalone potential ones, it still seems futile. And Dubbya, way to go with your Kyoto Accord denials. We here in the rest of the world salute you. History will recall your stupidity, all the facets of it.
from goat sex!
I understood that the moon was actually slowly moving away form the earth. Also I am not sure but I think the amount of wave power generators needed would not have much effect
I'll drink to that. Slashdot has been biting the big donkey dick for quite some time now.
Actually, the equation of the earth's orbit is as follows:
K m1 m2 / R (thats G,morons) = m1 v / R
(K=Newton's const. m1=moon mass m2=earth mass R=DUH! v=the linear speed of moon) Which leads to:
K m1 m2 / R = m1 v1
K m1 m2 / R = p
(p is moons' impulse) So, the height of the moon is:
R = K m1 m2 / p
K,m1,m2 are constants - or should be huh
Therefore R is only in relation with p. As you may know,
p = mv
Therefore, it has the a directory tangent to the trajectory of the moon. On the other hand, the force of interaction between the waves and the Moon (-G, that is) is a ray in the circle of the moon's trajectory, therefore it forms with p a 90 angle. Therefore,
THE MOON'S INTERACTION WITH THE WAVES CANNOT MODIFY ITS SPEED OR TRAJECTORY
Now, you may ask 'Right ! so where does the energy in the taides come from ? Well, from the spinning of the Earth. It's quite basic: imagine the Earth spinning with the same angular speed as the moon's around it (that is, the moon would be seen at the same location in the sky). This wouldnt generate tides, would it ? But the Earth doesnt spin that way. Now, imagine an iron ball on a moving platform. You get a magnet and close it to the ball. The ball starts rolling on the platform. The magnet is, of course, the moon and the ball is a wave. Now, because there is a roll, there is friction, and the band is pulled back (slowed). Basically, thats the same thing that happens on Earth: it is slowed (or accelerated.. who knows?) by the waves. Therefore, the second proved conclusion arises:
THAT GUY WITH THE OIL LEAKS WAS, without knowing, MORE RIGHT THAN ALL OF YOU !!!
Or... ? You see, in the example above I've assumed the magnet always on the same side of the ball, therefore the pullback force was constant. Now, if the magnet would circle the ball, while it's back it would generate pullback force, and while it's fwd it would generate draw force, and, naturally, they would compensate each other, giving a 0 energy change. Now, let's put sandpaper under the ball. It will increase the friction, so the ball will move less. But, as shown before, the energy will still be constant. Thats what happens when we put to use the waves' energy: with the turbines,we only increase the friction with the waves, but earth's energy will remain constant: So, for the final conclusion:
THE MOON WONT FALL ONTO THE EARTH, THE EARTH WONT ROTATE SLOWER, WE'LL JUST HAVE SMALLER WAVES !!!
If anyone didnt fall asleep reading this, or understood any of it, or has any comment on this, PLEASE EMAIL ME. That way, I'll know I didnt work for nothing...
Another thing.. this theory doesnt work for the one who asked this question. By asking it, he made lots of people spend huge amounts of energy. And that energy he will have to compensate. So, enjoy life.. I'd say you life energy will wear off in approximately.. oh, dear, is't that late!? uh... God rest thy mass.
----
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I know a good tagline when I steal one
Speaking of Australians, our toilets up here in fat ass North America flush clockwise. So, in what direction does fat ass Southern hemisphere toilets flush?
Don't tell me they flush them clockwise too, that imbalance would make this world go down under quicker than I thought.
Oh, there was rioting by advocates this archived article reports.
Whoever's at the controls of /. today: Take the hint & cut the crap. It's not clever, it's not interesting, it's not not worth a damn. If you honestly can't find anything that belongs under the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" banner then just go silent.
Posting stupid article after stupid article is NOT getting you folks any favor-points.
What if /. were hijacked by script-kiddies? Could we tell today?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The oil won't lubricate the earth-water interface because the oil will spread out on top of the water into a thin enough film that it'll float instead of sinking down to the ocean floor.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Just wanted to applaud the subtlety of your wit, anticipating that not only would Slashdot make the mistake of saying "different than" instead of "different from", but that they would also make the mistake of using "then" rather than "than".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Recognizing that someone else didn't get a joke is not the same as not getting it yourself.
As far as social situations are concerned I'm sure I handle them as least as well as someone so easily provoked as you seem to be to an entirely disproportionate amount of anger over trivial matters .
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Oh man, that 2 directions bit almost made me squirt coffee out of my nose. heheheh
Interestingly, we have slowed the rate of decrease of the earth's rotation measurably from hydropower. Hydropower dams are typically at reasonably high latitudes, and a lot of water has been stored there; closer to the axis of the earth than it would have been otherwise. Some calculations show that we'd have had dozens of more leap-seconds had this not been happening.
Global warming, though, will throw this all for a serious loop. If the icecaps continue to shrink and the sea level rises a few to ten meters; truly massive amounts of water will move further from the axis, slowing the earth by many seconds/year. I have no idea what the effect of this might be.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Either you're pulling a lame April fool's or you don't know physics. Either way dude...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Expend it's energy? Gravity does NOT get expended. The moon's gravity causes the tides, not its inertia.
Thank God April 1st is almost over this is getting pretty fucking annoying.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
California's plate is moving North, not down jackhole.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...is that when you are GMT-10 (or whatever we are in Melbourne now that daylight savings have finally finished), all of the slashdot April fools jokes are posted on April 2nd. When none of them are even remotely funny, you just end up confused. I think we need an agreed timezone for April fools jokes (AFAIK, people have always maintained that if you do your joke after April 1st, you are the fool - where does that leave slashdot?).
Well, the thing with the moon is kinda true. Heard a serious physicist say that the moon will crash into the earth in about 100 billion years (I made up that number don't remember what exactly it was) and that our sucking energy from its rotation through tidal dams will reduce that by a few hundred years.
Ok so I made up the 100 billion, I can never remember numbers but it was something along those lines maby it was 100 million but that sounds too short, shrugs.
at something like a inch a year. A long time ago the moon appeared to be far far bigger than it is now.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The moon's mass is about 7.4 * 10^22 kg. The earth's mass is about 6.0 * 10^24 kg. The moon is about 3.8 * 10^5 km away. This works out to 7.6 * 10^28 joules of gravitational energy. Assume that the earth draws 10 terawatts of power from waves. (Our getting so much is a very dubious assumption, but it's fine for the sake of making estimates). This means that we can draw power at this rate for on the order of 7.6 * 10^15 sec before a macroscopic change in the moon's position would result; this time intervals which works out to about 240 million years. I would suspect that before a quarter of a billion years passes someone will have figured out how to solve the problem.
Who knows, perhaps we'll want to keep the moon closer to Earth for power generation purposes--the lunar tides would be alot stronger then, and ostensibly the energy-from-tides mechanism would be more efficient.
TheVoiceOfReason writes: "My main worry about "ask slashdot", is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of human evolution by opening the forum to morons and their silly questions, since the readers would have to expend more energy in generating filters, and thus lose their will to live. How serious a problem is this? What are the solutions? Could we send a rocket up to give the editors a 'kick' once in a while?"
Happy April 1, kids.
No sig.
Well, I did want to mention this in my original post, that yes the earth is slowing down, but by far the greatest factor has to do with the very slow cooling of the earth's mantle and core. Not anything that mankind could do without some tremendous source of energy as of yet undiscovered.
I remember reading about it in geology class, but the exact reason escapes me. My memory is a bit hazy these days, you see.
Um, maybe you're correct, but I've always understood inertia to mean objects resting, moving, or traveling in a straight line and all that jazz. Whereas momentum had to do with the amount of force behind whatever is moving. Ah, whatever.
I meant to say "momentum" in place of "inertia" up there. Danged physics definitions.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Alas, voting is a right bestowed on the gullible simpletons, too. The only failure of democracy is that everyone gets a chance to be heard, even if they're simply wrong.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Some of it sucks, some of it doesn't - just like Slashdot on any other day. Jeez.
sulli
RTFJ.
If the moon descends to the point that it crashed into the sea, then a gigantic tidal wave would cause an enormous power surge in all the sea- and wave-powered electricity grids.
But things would settle down after that.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Eventually the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon as the Moon already is to Earth. At this point IIRC the Moon will be about 350,000 miles out (rather than the 250,000 it is now). Isaac Asimov ran all this out in an essay in A Choice of Catastrophes.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
however lame the april fools joke was, i was still interested and looked around a little. here is a link to an article by msnbc:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/493172.asp?cp1=1
overall i think it was pretty good for the mildly curious
The long and the short of it is:
- The Moon is moving away from the Earth. This has been known from first principles for centuries and has been measured directly by laser ranging ever since Apollo 11 placed retroreflectors on the surface.
- The cause has nothing to do with any change in gravity. The gravitational pull between Earth and Moon is decreasing because of the increase in Earth-Moon distance.
- The reason the Earth-Moon distance is increasing is because the Earth's spin is being transferred to the Moon via tidal forces.
- The faster-spinning object (Earth around its own axis) is slowed down,
- the slower-spinning object (Moon around Earth) is accelerated, and
- the acceleration raises the Moon into a higher and slower orbit.
- There is plenty of historical evidence for the slowing of the Earth's rotation; there are fossils showing daily and annual cycles from a few billion years ago, and at least one of these shows a 400-day year; Earth was spinning about 11% faster in those days.
I hope that clears up a few things.--
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Let's generate power from goat sex!
You know it's been a boring day on slashdot when that gets moderated "Interesting."
Not "Funny", no, no, that's "Interesting."
Yowch.
I remember /. on April 1st for the past several years or so was great. There were stories posted for April Fools that were just hystical (like the Seattle riots with the guy shouting "Death to all GUI's!!" as he was being dragged off by police). This is just getting out of control. The whole point of an April Fools joke is that it's not evident until *after* the fact (basically, you fooled someone into believing something false). This stuff is pitifully obvious. So stop. Please. Yes, the All Your Base thing was funny because it was blown out of proportion. It is NOT likewise for /.
Why bother.
The real problem is the damage we're going to cause with the slingshot effect. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, stealing momentum from a planet to send our satellites to others...
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction: we're sending planets hurtling back the way the satellites came!
--
I'm sorry, but damning water is insignificant compared to the millions of holiday travelers distributing their fat mass South every winter and moving right back North to their summer homes *every* year.
This is going to swing the earth's seasons off balance and this planet is going to be spinning in two directions.
Being here in California where we're more reliant on wind power than tidal power (and we've all seen how reliable that is recently), I'm more worried about the proliferation of wind farms around here. I mean, what happens when we've farmed all the wind? Most of the weather patterns for the entire United States start in the Pacific and travel via the wind eastward over the country. If we use all the wind here in California for power, suddenly all those clouds and the jetstream and stuff will stop here, the rest of the country will get sucked into a terible drought and pilots won't be able to make up for the late departure from SFO to JFK!
Think about it, the US will be devistated, the dot-com stocks will crash taking the economy with it, the country will go into uncontrolled recession, the free world will fall and the commies will take over. At least if the moon were to fall, NASA could send it into some uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean, just like they did with MIR.
I always figured that the April 1 stories are nothing but an excuse for the editors to get back at people like you. Frankly, I'm amazed that there are so many people reliant upon slashdot. You might want to think about all the other days you're dissing the regualr stuff before bitching that you want it back now.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Now THAT is class. Someone who takes April 1 so seriously that they even redo their banner ads.
Funniest stuff I've seen or heard all day.
The moon is spiraling away from the earth, not towards that. The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.
This question belongs in April 1, methinks.
The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.
BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe the catch is still to come tomorrow or so, A poll with the questions
:)
o one of the stories posted on april 1st was serious?
o one of the stories was remotely funny
o I submited all stories posted april 1st
o Huh? Did they post anything different then usual?
Must admit, im gonna have trouble picking my vote
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
This reminds me of something funny I once heard a few years back. I was talking to one of my dad's friends who was postively convinced (and just a little drunk) that mankind was slowing down the rotation of the earth by launching lots of rockets and space shuttles from it.
I shit you not.
Nevermind that a rocket's thrust is completely insignificant in any timeframe compared to the inertia of the earth. And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Sitting is making the laws of gravity work harder, so they will have to stop soon sending us all out into outer space except for those who grab onto something who will have the joy of plumetting into the sun as the orbits misalign spelling death for everything.
You know, the really sad thing is, tomorrow's stories won't be much different.
Or else I'm going to seriously gripe about my article on "the courtship and mating dances of orange and black umbrellas" not getting posted.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type