Your comment is based on pure opinion, and not science.
The Antarctic loses a huge portion of its ice each summer, and it then rebuilds in the winter. But that is the ice that is FLOATING. The majority of the ice in Antarctica is on land, not on the water. And that ice has been declining at an ever faster rate for decades. The effect all this fresh water has on the ocean and ice formation, has little to do with the overall melting.
This strikes me as being your classic To Good To Be True story. It has long been known that there was ice made of Methane and Water - frozen together. But since when did it exist at the surface? This ice normally requires the pressure of the deep seas to keep it from reverting to it's gaseous form. How is it that they found this where it could be used on the surface?
From: U.S. Geological Survey
Marine and Coastal Geology Program
>Methane hydrate is stable in ocean floor sediments at water depths greater than 300 meters, and where it occurs, it is known to cement loose sediments in a surface layer several hundred meters thick.>....
Me thinks this story has some credibility problems.
Ask an executive who makes million dollar bonuses to be RESPONSIBLE for his or her actions?
How un-American is that.
Only poor children without health care and a decent house to live in are supposed to be held responsible for their actions, not the Neo-Con, "Passionate" conservatives that run our companies into the ground and then bail with golden parachutes while you apply for unemployment.
I see there has been great interest in this story, although a huge portion of the replies seem to have strayed off the point -- while all the discussion about the military and US using it for monetary interests is amusing, it seems rather an obscure connection to the topic.
I just wanted to comment on the question of why there is no mainstream press coverage of such and an important possible breakthrough. MONEY. Dare I say it again, IT'S THEY MONEY!!!!!!! If you can't patent it, you can't charge a ridiculous price for the drug. The pharmaceutical industry will spend tens millions trying to show this is not a safe drug, or that it won't work for cancer. Or they will use political connections and contributions -- AKA bribes -- to see to it that this threat to their multi-billion dollar cartels is squashed.
If you don't believe this, ask yourself why the millions of dollars in advertising for this new drug on the market that has both Norvasc for blood pressure and Lipitor for cholesterol in the same pill. Could it be that they can patent this new combination drug and charge obsceen prices for it, when you could instead purchase the generic versions of the two drugs -- both have come off patent -- separately for pennies on the dollar in comparison????
I have been reading the many comments about this scheme. Many of them are quite amusing, and some are well thought out. I have a question which those of you with some geology background may be able to answer for me.
Living in the mid-west of the United States, I have seen instances where whole towns have been "sucked up" buy subsidence caused from removing large coal deposits under the towns years ago. Now the overlying ground is falling into the caverns left from the mining and the ground above is falling in, taking the towns with it.
As all this mud is ejected, won't the land in the area of the mud volcano eventually start to fall in to replace the missing volume from the mud that has come to the surface? This situation even has the added disadvantage of having millions of tons of mud accumulating on the surface above to put downward pressure on the surrounding soil, thus hastening the collapse?
While you are welcome to your opinion, I still have to maintain it is not the side by side design, but rather the fact that there is a giant fuel tank involved in the configuration.
Had the orbiter been designed with either 3 or 4 SRB's, it would not have required an external fuel tank as the orbiters main engines would not have been required to reach orbit. There would have been no fuel tank to torch when Lockheed-Martin made the stupid decision to get the SRB manufacturer to sign off on a launch of the Challenger at temperatures well below those recommended by North American Rockwell(NAR) officials, or even their own engineers, just to save face on their first shuttle launch. NAR had overseen all the prior launches, Challenger was L-M first under a new contract forced on NASA by a penny pinching Congress and political favors. There also would have not been an external fuel tank to drop debris onto the Columbia, thus dooming it, had there been 3 or 4 SRB,s.
To me it all comes down to the decision to build the main engines into the orbital capsule. Something that had not been done prior to the shuttle.
I also do not believe that having the shuttle built to place the orbiter above the fuel tank and boosters would have saved the Challenger. The force of the explosion would have damaged the orbiter beyond recovery. I can think of no instance where a catastrophic failure of a main lift vehicle has not led to the loss of the payload as well.
I have to disagree with your contention that the side mount design for the shuttle was the cause of the "unsafe-ness" of the design. I believe is is a bad design on the central fuel storage tank that has caused all of the problems. Had the tank been designed with the insulation on the inside of a lightweight metal skin, surrounding the fuel tanks, rather than trying to coat the outside, there would have been no way for the insulation to fall off. It may not have saved the Challenger Crew, but it most certainly would have prevented the Columbia tragedy. The other possible design would have been to have either three or four boosters, instead of just two, and not need to power up the main engines beyond an idle on launch. Then there would not be a center fuel tank to have insulation fall off of. Keep in mind that the shuttle is the only vehicle we have used that had the main earth to orbit engines built integral to the crew compartment, rather than as an added module which could be jettisoned if needed or when used.
A rather clever, if pointless comparison. The whole point in trying to make the shuttles do everything, was that congress would only authorize one system. And it had to be able to do a whole list of unrelated and often conflicting things. Sure it would have been nice to have had several different systems, but who was going to pay for them? Remember also that the Delta launch vehicle, which was one of the only alternatives to using the shuttle to launch a satellite in those days, was plagued with failures.
While I agree with some of what you stated, including the lack of learning from past mistakes. I must disagree with some of your contentions about what led to the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
The Challenger was the first major loss "in flight" of a crew. What has been well covered up is that the decision to launch on that cold morning was more about corporate ego on the part of the launch team and a head in the sand attitude from NASA. North American Rockwell, which designed and built the shuttle fleet, had been in charge of all the launches prior to the Challenger. It was their people as subcontractors for NASA who were actually making the recommendations to 'go' or 'no go'. Due to budget cuts and short sighted micro management by non-engineers, NAR was replaced by Lockheed Martin as the support contractor who readied the shuttle for launch. And Lockheed Martin did not want it's first launch delayed, so they put pressure on Morton-Thiokol to "adjust" the criteria for launch for the rubber o-rings that sealed the joints of the solid rocket boosters. NAR advisors who were there to guide Lockheed-Martin through their first launch, were ignored by the Lockheed-Martin team.
As for the Columbia, all the looking in the world would have done no good, the crew was doomed seconds after lift-off when the falling foam insulation punctured the heat shield on the leading edge of the orbiter wing. There was not enough fuel in the orbiter to reach the only 'life boat' in space, the International Space Station, as they were in a much lower orbit than the station. There was no shuttle which could have been rolled out and launched, even throwing away every safety rule, that could have reached the Columbia before they ran out of air. Even the Russians could not have gotten a Soyuz capsule to them in time.
What is sad is they did not learn anything from the deaths, just how to "cut and run" from the shuttle program, with the arbitrary 2010 date to decommission the fleet.
An aside - Next time you look up to the night sky and wonder at the awesome beauty, take a second to ask God to hold our departed astronauts close to him.
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Your comment is based on pure opinion, and not science. The Antarctic loses a huge portion of its ice each summer, and it then rebuilds in the winter. But that is the ice that is FLOATING. The majority of the ice in Antarctica is on land, not on the water. And that ice has been declining at an ever faster rate for decades. The effect all this fresh water has on the ocean and ice formation, has little to do with the overall melting.
This strikes me as being your classic To Good To Be True story. It has long been known that there was ice made of Methane and Water - frozen together. But since when did it exist at the surface? This ice normally requires the pressure of the deep seas to keep it from reverting to it's gaseous form. How is it that they found this where it could be used on the surface? From: U.S. Geological Survey Marine and Coastal Geology Program >Methane hydrate is stable in ocean floor sediments at water depths greater than 300 meters, and where it occurs, it is known to cement loose sediments in a surface layer several hundred meters thick.> ....
Me thinks this story has some credibility problems.
WHAT ! ! ! ARE YOU CRAZY ? ? ?
Ask an executive who makes million dollar bonuses to be RESPONSIBLE for his or her actions?
How un-American is that.
Only poor children without health care and a decent house to live in are supposed to be held responsible for their actions, not the Neo-Con, "Passionate" conservatives that run our companies into the ground and then bail with golden parachutes while you apply for unemployment.
I see there has been great interest in this story, although a huge portion of the replies seem to have strayed off the point -- while all the discussion about the military and US using it for monetary interests is amusing, it seems rather an obscure connection to the topic.
I just wanted to comment on the question of why there is no mainstream press coverage of such and an important possible breakthrough. MONEY. Dare I say it again, IT'S THEY MONEY!!!!!!! If you can't patent it, you can't charge a ridiculous price for the drug. The pharmaceutical industry will spend tens millions trying to show this is not a safe drug, or that it won't work for cancer. Or they will use political connections and contributions -- AKA bribes -- to see to it that this threat to their multi-billion dollar cartels is squashed.
If you don't believe this, ask yourself why the millions of dollars in advertising for this new drug on the market that has both Norvasc for blood pressure and Lipitor for cholesterol in the same pill. Could it be that they can patent this new combination drug and charge obsceen prices for it, when you could instead purchase the generic versions of the two drugs -- both have come off patent -- separately for pennies on the dollar in comparison????
I have been reading the many comments about this scheme. Many of them are quite amusing, and some are well thought out. I have a question which those of you with some geology background may be able to answer for me.
Living in the mid-west of the United States, I have seen instances where whole towns have been "sucked up" buy subsidence caused from removing large coal deposits under the towns years ago. Now the overlying ground is falling into the caverns left from the mining and the ground above is falling in, taking the towns with it.
As all this mud is ejected, won't the land in the area of the mud volcano eventually start to fall in to replace the missing volume from the mud that has come to the surface? This situation even has the added disadvantage of having millions of tons of mud accumulating on the surface above to put downward pressure on the surrounding soil, thus hastening the collapse?
While you are welcome to your opinion, I still have to maintain it is not the side by side design, but rather the fact that there is a giant fuel tank involved in the configuration.
Had the orbiter been designed with either 3 or 4 SRB's, it would not have required an external fuel tank as the orbiters main engines would not have been required to reach orbit. There would have been no fuel tank to torch when Lockheed-Martin made the stupid decision to get the SRB manufacturer to sign off on a launch of the Challenger at temperatures well below those recommended by North American Rockwell(NAR) officials, or even their own engineers, just to save face on their first shuttle launch. NAR had overseen all the prior launches, Challenger was L-M first under a new contract forced on NASA by a penny pinching Congress and political favors. There also would have not been an external fuel tank to drop debris onto the Columbia, thus dooming it, had there been 3 or 4 SRB,s.
To me it all comes down to the decision to build the main engines into the orbital capsule. Something that had not been done prior to the shuttle.
I also do not believe that having the shuttle built to place the orbiter above the fuel tank and boosters would have saved the Challenger. The force of the explosion would have damaged the orbiter beyond recovery. I can think of no instance where a catastrophic failure of a main lift vehicle has not led to the loss of the payload as well.
OUCH! ! ! brutal . . . . even if true.
I have to disagree with your contention that the side mount design for the shuttle was the cause of the "unsafe-ness" of the design. I believe is is a bad design on the central fuel storage tank that has caused all of the problems. Had the tank been designed with the insulation on the inside of a lightweight metal skin, surrounding the fuel tanks, rather than trying to coat the outside, there would have been no way for the insulation to fall off. It may not have saved the Challenger Crew, but it most certainly would have prevented the Columbia tragedy. The other possible design would have been to have either three or four boosters, instead of just two, and not need to power up the main engines beyond an idle on launch. Then there would not be a center fuel tank to have insulation fall off of. Keep in mind that the shuttle is the only vehicle we have used that had the main earth to orbit engines built integral to the crew compartment, rather than as an added module which could be jettisoned if needed or when used.
A rather clever, if pointless comparison. The whole point in trying to make the shuttles do everything, was that congress would only authorize one system. And it had to be able to do a whole list of unrelated and often conflicting things. Sure it would have been nice to have had several different systems, but who was going to pay for them? Remember also that the Delta launch vehicle, which was one of the only alternatives to using the shuttle to launch a satellite in those days, was plagued with failures.
While I agree with some of what you stated, including the lack of learning from past mistakes. I must disagree with some of your contentions about what led to the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
The Challenger was the first major loss "in flight" of a crew. What has been well covered up is that the decision to launch on that cold morning was more about corporate ego on the part of the launch team and a head in the sand attitude from NASA. North American Rockwell, which designed and built the shuttle fleet, had been in charge of all the launches prior to the Challenger. It was their people as subcontractors for NASA who were actually making the recommendations to 'go' or 'no go'. Due to budget cuts and short sighted micro management by non-engineers, NAR was replaced by Lockheed Martin as the support contractor who readied the shuttle for launch. And Lockheed Martin did not want it's first launch delayed, so they put pressure on Morton-Thiokol to "adjust" the criteria for launch for the rubber o-rings that sealed the joints of the solid rocket boosters. NAR advisors who were there to guide Lockheed-Martin through their first launch, were ignored by the Lockheed-Martin team.
As for the Columbia, all the looking in the world would have done no good, the crew was doomed seconds after lift-off when the falling foam insulation punctured the heat shield on the leading edge of the orbiter wing. There was not enough fuel in the orbiter to reach the only 'life boat' in space, the International Space Station, as they were in a much lower orbit than the station. There was no shuttle which could have been rolled out and launched, even throwing away every safety rule, that could have reached the Columbia before they ran out of air. Even the Russians could not have gotten a Soyuz capsule to them in time.
What is sad is they did not learn anything from the deaths, just how to "cut and run" from the shuttle program, with the arbitrary 2010 date to decommission the fleet.
An aside - Next time you look up to the night sky and wonder at the awesome beauty, take a second to ask God to hold our departed astronauts close to him.