That's just the point (although not exactly correct, H2 is the most abundant compound in the universe, and carbon monoxide is second... but still very abundant). The concepts of "life occurring wherever there's water", "water being everywhere", and the Fermi Paradox do not play well together. If life occurs wherever there's water then there should be millions of pan-galactic civilizations in the Milky Way. The very point that water is so abundant strongly argues against the "follow the water" hypothesis.
And I'll repeat my point, since you apparently missed it (with your "already know works great") remark: the fact that LAWKI "works great" with water is practically a truism, because water is by far the easiest source of hydrogen to come by on Earth, and LAWKI is built on CHONPS. Even LAWKI (let alone whatever other potential kinds might exist) can already deal with all sorts of other hydrogen-bearing molecules found in the universe, such as CH4, H2S, and NH3. And this on a world where those things are not common at the surface.
The argument that life depends on water because on Earth we find life wherever we find water is like an anthropologist in ancient China saying that human life depends on rice, because wherever rice can grow, you find people, and human civilization is adapted around the cultivation of rice. It misses the point that rice is just one potential source of the nutrients that humans need, and that their civilization adapted to the cultivation of rice, rather than there being some simple A=B relationship between humanity and rice cultivation.
But this all misses a more important point, in that the question is not about what "highly evolved life can use to live and reproduce". The actual issue is about what conditions are required for abiogenesis. And we have absolutely no clue about that whatsoever - just widely divergent hypotheses. What we can say is that when it happened on Earth, Earth was a very different place, and whatever sort of peculiar environment set it off is almost certainly long gone. And not knowing what that environment was, we have no ability whatsoever to say how common it is - except to point to the Fermi Paradox and say "probably not bloody common at all".
According to what studies specifically? The Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox are not fast friends. The former insists there should be life. The latter says we should already have seen it. Many attempts have been made to explain the latter in a way that doesn't contradict the former. We really don't know what the right answer is.
Honestly, I'm very much in opposition to the "follow the water" people. The argument goes, "everywhere that we find liquid water on Earth, we find life - so we just need to find liquid water elsewhere, and we should find life". Which I find to be patently absurd. It's a truism that anything life is made of, it has to be able to get, in some sort of reactive form. On Earth, water pretty much has to be the source for hydrogen, and hydrogen is one of the elements that make up all LAWKI (that is, CHONPS). That says absolutely nothing about whether water must be the source of hydrogen, or whether forms of life that don't use hydrogen are possible. It just says that life on Earth is well adapted to build itself out of the elements found on Earth. Well, duh, that's going to happen by definition.
The other related argument is that life appeared on Earth shortly after the planet cooled, so not only should life form wherever there is water, but it should do so quickly. You know, as if the seas as a whole simultaneously and spontaneously evolved life proto-cells across their breadth, rather than there existing some particular isolated location that happened to have the right conditions for life, which seems vastly more likely, and which the vast majority of abiogenesis theories call for. We do not know what that situation was, and can only speculate on it. But assuming that wherever you have liquid water you're going to have paired with it such a situation is such a huge unsupported leap of logic. And one thing we can say for certain about Earth's early seas is that they were nothing like today's; they were bright green, full of unreduced iron. Earth was a dramatically different place then.
Water is bloody everywhere in the universe. Liquid water not that much rarer. If you accept the "follow the water" peoples' ideas, than life should exist in almost every solar system, and on the surface in a good number. That's just turning the dial on the Drake Equation up to 11, and consequently, doing the same with the Fermi Paradox. Fermi Paradox solutions like "life evolving toward intelligence is rare" flies flat in the face of evolution, and "intelligence reaching sentience is rare" is way too much human hubris, insisting on some sort of magical Rubicon-crossing intelligence jump that sets us apart from other animals. In reality our problem-solving ability isn't so vastly greater than our nearest relatives; the main Rubicon that we've leaped across, the one thing that we do vastly better than our relatives, is communication - the ability to convey ideas to our fellow humans. And "communication" hardly seems like some sort of unevolvable barrier.
It seems much more likely to me that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is just that life is not a common occurrence, not something that just spontaneously and quickly generates wherever you have water; that life is rare, rare enough that cosmological distances keep us from encountering each other.
I'd also like to add that I think the chance of planetwide extinctions (especially before life is really tuned) is perhaps underrated. The more we learn of our neighbors - even here in our middle-of-nowhere location around our relatively tame star - the more we learn that they haven't always been as they are now. Venus, for example, appears to have once had seas of comparable scale to Earth. If the "follow the water" people are right, then life should have evolved there. But of course Venus hardly resembles Earth at all day. It's not even just the issue that Venus has lost the vast majority of its water; Venus's entire crust (with the possibility of some small exceptions) was resu
If you were writing that hundreds of years ago, that's be a perfectly normal statement. Queen comes from Old English cwen (queen, woman, wife) - having originally been in the context of "wife (of a king)", and only later to refer only specifically to royals. It stems from the proto-germanic kwoeniz (wife), from PIE gwen (woman, wife), cognate of Greek gyne (woman, wife), Gaelic bean (woman), Sanskrit janis (woman), etc.
Lots of words related to women have changed over time, it's sort of weird. In Middle and Old English, woman was wif, which later became wife; the word "woman" comes from "wifman", or "woman-man", in the context of the gender-neutral usage of man that's been steadily dropped from English over the past half century (aka, more like "woman-person"). Wif still exists in English in a context closer to its original meaning in the word "midwife" - "woman who is with" (mid being a cognate of the Old Norse miðr (with), seen today in languages like Icelandic "með", Danish "med", etc)
Even "girl" has changed. "Gyrle" used to refer to babies only (more commonly female, but of either sex). Boys were "knave gyrles" and girls were "gay gyrles" (yeah, the latter term has changed a bit;) ). The word "boy" existed at the time, but more often referred to a servant or commoner rather than being a generic term for "young male".
Yes, but nuclear weapons were not. Don't get me wrong, people were speculating about harnessing the energy of the atom for weapons. H. G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1914 in "The World Set Free", but they were like ordinary bombs that continued exploding for days. Heinlein wrote about the development of a nuclear weapon to end World War II 1940 ("Solution Unsatisfactory"), but it was about a dirty bomb. If you have anything from before 1925(*) that's so accurate of a description of what nuclear weapons actually were, I'd like to see it. He got the minimum size wrong, but apart from that, that's pretty prophetic.
BTW, the autopilot invented in 1914 was just a self-leveling system with a compass - it wouldn't be anywhere near accurate enough for guiding flying weapons. Flying weapons "by wireless or other rays", aka remote controlled (passive or active) aircraft is an entirely different thing. Something that actually was done in World War II, but a decade and a half after Churchill wrote that.
This doesn't make him some sort of Nostradamus, but it does mean that he was paying close attention to the technological developments of his time and thinking over their implications with an analytic mind.
1) Your decision to bow out does not mean that most others did.
2) Thanks for driving the points home that you a) do not know of a single example proposed that worked by this means (otherwise you would have mentioned it), and b) have no response to your lack of knowledge of what the Hyperloop Alpha design even is.
Next time you feel the need to knee-jerk criticize something, learn what it actually is first.
Because in every single thread and in every single forum this has come up on I have asked people claiming that Hyperloop is not new to cite *one* - just *one* - example of anyone ever previously proposing a ground-effect / air bearing train in a reduced atmosphere utilizing compressors to prevent air buildup. Despite all of the ranting and raving, not a single person has ever been able to do so.
I present the same "put up or shut up" challenge to you. Cite a single example. Fiction or reality. Maglev trains? Vactrains? Pneumatic trains? Sure, all old concepts. And more to the point, very different concepts than Hyperloop Alpha. It's not maglev. It's not a vactrain (and doesn't even work in a vacuum). And it's certainly not a pneumatic train.
Of course, use of compressors to _reduce_ air pressure was certainly not in them, because that is not actually possible.
You clearly have no understanding of how Hyperloop Alpha works. The compressors do exactly what it says on the tin: compress air. A train moving through a rarified atmosphere inside a tube builds up a column of increasingly high pressure air in front of it. The compressors on the front of Hyperloop cars draw in this air (avoiding buildup), compress it to even higher pressures, and shunt it to the air bearings (boosting lift), as well as to COPVs (for storage) and to behind the vehicle.
You did not have picture books that promoted a ground-effect / air bearing train in a reduced atmosphere utilizing compressors to prevent air buildup ahead of it.
And I didn't have picture books when I was a child that presented smartphones or the internet. The existence or nonexistence of something in a child's picture book has no bearing as to what will become practical and when. Engineering and economics problems are addressed on their own merits. If you have an engineering or economics issue, state it, in details, with numbers (not hand-waving or simple incredulity). No links to someone else's giant rant, I don't have a week to spend debunking someone who's not even part of the conversation - write your own criticisms.
It depends. Retiring to Mars isn't all that hard, so long as you don't plan to live all that long while you're there. Doesn't take ITS, you could do that with Falcon Heavy. It's even easier if you don't need to make it there alive; you could do that with Falcon 9;)
It's Deep Blue, and that was in 1997, under 20 years ago. AI that can beat experts in Go (a much harder task) was achieved just late last year.
And I'm sorry, but if you haven't noticed how much better neural nets have gotten in the past 10 years, or even the past five, or even the past two, you haven't been paying attention. The last company I worked for used them to dissect brain scans, and that was 5 years ago. Now they're embedded into things like image searching, text translation tools, voice recognition, etc. Seriously, haven't you noticed how dramatically these things have gotten better over the past decade, or have you forgotten about how terrible they used to be? You tell Google Photos to search for pictures of a beer on your phone, and it will actually find pictures of beer you've taken. Remember this comic, treating image recognition as an AI Hard problem? That was just from 2 1/2 years ago. It was already becoming obsolete then. This sort of image recognition task is the stuff we grew up being told that only humans can do; now computers are getting as good at it as humans. The best face recognition apps are now as good in random controlled trials as humans.
That doesn't mean that we're going to have "conscious AI" tomorrow. Consciousness isn't just training to a task. But we keep shrinking the bounds of what makes us unique as humans. I'm certainly not willing to bet that there will never be some point where we cross that line altogether.
I missed the part when Musk said "we need to do X by next Tuesday".
We do not know how the human brain works
Again, I missed the part when Musk said "we need to do X by next Tuesday".
This is a fantasy pipe dream.
I missed the part where time ceased progressing and technology ceased advancing.
Elon could say we need to build 1) lightsabers and 2) blockade runners to fight 3) the Empire when they get here
1) Not in line with physics, and impractical 2) Does not describe a concrete thing with traits arguably superior to alternatives 3) Does not exist, with no prospect of it existing... (...depending on how strictly you want to define it, either A) "... any time soon", or B) "... ever."
Yeah, I love my country.:) We're packed with natural treasures. Geology that changes in realtime** can do that;)
** Seriously, it really does change over human timescales. Right near Ásbyrgi there's a lake called Skjálftavatn which feeds the excellent fishing river Lítlaá. Neither existed until the 1970s, when tectonic activity from the eruption at Krafla rerouted the underground springs.
The only one of those I don't recognize is -wick;) Oh wait, maybe that's "vík"? Like in Reykjavík? A vík is a place where the coastline sort of gives way, so a small bay would fit.
You can add to your list -ea, -a, -y correspond to "ey", meaning "island". For example, Swansea = Sveinsey = Sveinn's Island; Lundy = Lundey = Puffin Island; Westray = Vesturey = West Island; etc.
They're different letters. Ö is like the "e" in "bed" said with rounded lips, while O is sort of like "Aw", while Ó is like "Oh"
And the words just long and look alien to you because you don't know the root words, and thus where to split them. Pro tip: because the joining form in Icelandic is usually eignarfall (possessive), try splitting them at common eignarfall endings (-a, -ar, -s, and less commonly -u) into components at least four letters long. So in this case: Eyja.... Fjalla.... Jökull. Which is literally "Of islands", "Of mountains", "Glacier". "Glacier of the Mountains of the Islands". "The islands" in this context being Vestmannaeyjar (the island chain just offshore from it).
If you want to know how to pronounce it, just remember the song...:) Pro tip for the "ll" sound: put your tongue on the top of your mouth so it blocks all airflow, let pressure build up behind it, then let the air spill out to the sides with a pop.
Also, one thing that's neat when the subglacial eruptions go off is the sigkatlar (I think the english is "ice cauldrons") that form on the top of the glacier. They can get huge - when Bárðarbunga went off, the main (shallow) section of ice that was sinking was the size of New York City (surrounded by deeper but steeper sigkatlar). The big, shallow ones are harder to see, but the smaller ones are often ringed by fissures - which may not look that impressive from far away, but they're really huge.
As a side story: while Bárðarbunga ended up with its last eruption breaking out in the most fortunate place it could have, there would have been something kind of amusing (amid the devastation) had it actually gone off straight over its magma chamber. Many decades ago a plane crashed on the glacier, right over the caldera; the survivors had to survive for days on the ice, in terrible weather, until rescuers could get to them. Because of the huge precipitation rate there, the plane is now deep inside the ice over the caldera. But had it erupted with an explosive eruption from the caldera.... the airplane would have flown again;)
I guess it depends on the situation. But the three main ways they tell if there's been a small jökulhlaup are a) monitoring flow rates, b) monitoring electrical conductivity of the water, and c) monitoring water temperature. Rising flow, EC and temperature are all signs of jökulhlaup. You also often get a sulfrous smell to the water and reduced clarity.
You got it backwards. Katla's the one that would go off without giving the airlines any notice. It's actually a serious safety issue; some people are arguing for a permanent no-fly zone over her, because she tends to go off with no warning whatsoever. Not always, but often. And she tends to have explosive eruptions. It's doubtful that an airplane approaching her would have time to divert before the ash cloud reached it.
The irony is that the French Revolution led to the Napoleonic Wars, which Denmark losing Norway, which led to them clamping down on their other strikecolonies/striketerritories, which led to resentment, the Icelandic independence movement, and ultimately independence from Denmark.
Yeah, Laki was really horrific. It's hard for polar volcanoes to affect the climate like equatorial ones do, but the scale of the amount of gas released was nonetheless so great that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans. The African and Indian monsoon failed, leading to severe famine in Egypt; 6 million people died. Benjamin Franklin was the first person to correctly attribute the cause of the weather to an Icelandic volcano eruption (although he incorrectly stated it as Hekla, which seems to have been the only Icelandic volcano that people in that timeperiod seemed to know, due to its habit of dusting mainland Europe with ash;) )
Once every 100-200 years Iceland has some truly catastrophic eruption. Laki has had two since the settlement period. Askja, Katla, and Hekla are other sources. Barðarbunga is a real giant (largest lava eruption of the Holocene), but it hasn't had any catastropic eruptions in a while. It's still quaking up a storm since it's last "little" one (little by its standards, still bigger (both volume and flow rate) than any eruption Mauna Loa has ever had).
Not in historic times there haven't been. The fact that Iceland's volcanoes launch these sort of superfloods once every several hundred years is something not seen elsewhere in the world. This canyon, for example:
is under 10k years old. It was carved primarily by just one or two superflood events, but the flow rate estimates (based on the size of the boulders thrown around) are as high as 900000 cubic meters per second. In Icelandic, if a flood is less than 45000 cubic meters per second it's defined as "non-catastrophic". By comparison, the Niagara River at Niagara falls is 2400 cubic meters per second.
The very word for this type of flood is Icelandic - "jökulhlaup". Literally "glacial run". And the name for the sediment deposits they leave behind is also Icelandic in origin - "Sandur" (literally "sand").
Sorry, but the context is Iceland. And in Icelandic it's hún sól. The sun is feminine. Hér er sólin, um sólina, frá sólinni, til sólarinnar. Here is the sun, about the sun, from the sun, to the sun.
You could say "Hér er sólinn, um sólann, frá sólnum, til sólans", which is a masculine declension, but then you'd be talking about the sole of a shoe, not the sun;) That was actually the basis a gag on Næturvaktin, which is the Icelandic equivalent of The Office - starring Reykjavík's former mayor (Jón Gnarr) as Stalinist gas station manager with delusions of grandeur.
I'll take volcanoes any day over heat.:) And monsoons... what, you mean precipitation? Yeah, I think we've got that covered;) Mýrdalsjökull (Katla's glacier), along with neighboring Eyjafjallajökull, and further away Vatnajökull, are the wettest places in Europe, with over 10 meters of precipitation per year (although we don't have the record for wettest inhabited area... because living on top of a glacier on top of an active volcano would be pretty damned stupid;) ).
That's "Hún Jörð" ("Mother Earth") by the band Sigur Rós - it's an abbreviated version of the Lord's Prayer in Icelandic, except to the Earth instead of God. Also, screaming. Good music for volcanoes preparing to go off.
Or, if you want something more directly volcanic themed, there's always Jón Leif's Hekla. It's often described as the loudest piece of classical music ever composed, although that's only if you perform it with its full design intent of instruments, which I don't think anyone's ever done. Said instruments include "four sets of rocks hit with hammers, steel plates, anvils, sirens, cannons, metal chains, choir, a large orchestra, and organ".
I agree, to the extent that I think they should have an "antidote" on hand: an engineered variant immune to the gene drive, to release where, when and if a gene-drive species escapes
Tell that to all of the extinct species throughout history. If there's one thing the geological record shows us is that nature quite often *doesn't* find a way.
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That's just the point (although not exactly correct, H2 is the most abundant compound in the universe, and carbon monoxide is second... but still very abundant). The concepts of "life occurring wherever there's water", "water being everywhere", and the Fermi Paradox do not play well together. If life occurs wherever there's water then there should be millions of pan-galactic civilizations in the Milky Way. The very point that water is so abundant strongly argues against the "follow the water" hypothesis.
And I'll repeat my point, since you apparently missed it (with your "already know works great") remark: the fact that LAWKI "works great" with water is practically a truism, because water is by far the easiest source of hydrogen to come by on Earth, and LAWKI is built on CHONPS. Even LAWKI (let alone whatever other potential kinds might exist) can already deal with all sorts of other hydrogen-bearing molecules found in the universe, such as CH4, H2S, and NH3. And this on a world where those things are not common at the surface.
The argument that life depends on water because on Earth we find life wherever we find water is like an anthropologist in ancient China saying that human life depends on rice, because wherever rice can grow, you find people, and human civilization is adapted around the cultivation of rice. It misses the point that rice is just one potential source of the nutrients that humans need, and that their civilization adapted to the cultivation of rice, rather than there being some simple A=B relationship between humanity and rice cultivation.
But this all misses a more important point, in that the question is not about what "highly evolved life can use to live and reproduce". The actual issue is about what conditions are required for abiogenesis. And we have absolutely no clue about that whatsoever - just widely divergent hypotheses. What we can say is that when it happened on Earth, Earth was a very different place, and whatever sort of peculiar environment set it off is almost certainly long gone. And not knowing what that environment was, we have no ability whatsoever to say how common it is - except to point to the Fermi Paradox and say "probably not bloody common at all".
According to what studies specifically? The Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox are not fast friends. The former insists there should be life. The latter says we should already have seen it. Many attempts have been made to explain the latter in a way that doesn't contradict the former. We really don't know what the right answer is.
Honestly, I'm very much in opposition to the "follow the water" people. The argument goes, "everywhere that we find liquid water on Earth, we find life - so we just need to find liquid water elsewhere, and we should find life". Which I find to be patently absurd. It's a truism that anything life is made of, it has to be able to get, in some sort of reactive form. On Earth, water pretty much has to be the source for hydrogen, and hydrogen is one of the elements that make up all LAWKI (that is, CHONPS). That says absolutely nothing about whether water must be the source of hydrogen, or whether forms of life that don't use hydrogen are possible. It just says that life on Earth is well adapted to build itself out of the elements found on Earth. Well, duh, that's going to happen by definition.
The other related argument is that life appeared on Earth shortly after the planet cooled, so not only should life form wherever there is water, but it should do so quickly. You know, as if the seas as a whole simultaneously and spontaneously evolved life proto-cells across their breadth, rather than there existing some particular isolated location that happened to have the right conditions for life, which seems vastly more likely, and which the vast majority of abiogenesis theories call for. We do not know what that situation was, and can only speculate on it. But assuming that wherever you have liquid water you're going to have paired with it such a situation is such a huge unsupported leap of logic. And one thing we can say for certain about Earth's early seas is that they were nothing like today's; they were bright green, full of unreduced iron. Earth was a dramatically different place then.
Water is bloody everywhere in the universe. Liquid water not that much rarer. If you accept the "follow the water" peoples' ideas, than life should exist in almost every solar system, and on the surface in a good number. That's just turning the dial on the Drake Equation up to 11, and consequently, doing the same with the Fermi Paradox. Fermi Paradox solutions like "life evolving toward intelligence is rare" flies flat in the face of evolution, and "intelligence reaching sentience is rare" is way too much human hubris, insisting on some sort of magical Rubicon-crossing intelligence jump that sets us apart from other animals. In reality our problem-solving ability isn't so vastly greater than our nearest relatives; the main Rubicon that we've leaped across, the one thing that we do vastly better than our relatives, is communication - the ability to convey ideas to our fellow humans. And "communication" hardly seems like some sort of unevolvable barrier.
It seems much more likely to me that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is just that life is not a common occurrence, not something that just spontaneously and quickly generates wherever you have water; that life is rare, rare enough that cosmological distances keep us from encountering each other.
I'd also like to add that I think the chance of planetwide extinctions (especially before life is really tuned) is perhaps underrated. The more we learn of our neighbors - even here in our middle-of-nowhere location around our relatively tame star - the more we learn that they haven't always been as they are now. Venus, for example, appears to have once had seas of comparable scale to Earth. If the "follow the water" people are right, then life should have evolved there. But of course Venus hardly resembles Earth at all day. It's not even just the issue that Venus has lost the vast majority of its water; Venus's entire crust (with the possibility of some small exceptions) was resu
If you were writing that hundreds of years ago, that's be a perfectly normal statement. Queen comes from Old English cwen (queen, woman, wife) - having originally been in the context of "wife (of a king)", and only later to refer only specifically to royals. It stems from the proto-germanic kwoeniz (wife), from PIE gwen (woman, wife), cognate of Greek gyne (woman, wife), Gaelic bean (woman), Sanskrit janis (woman), etc.
Lots of words related to women have changed over time, it's sort of weird. In Middle and Old English, woman was wif, which later became wife; the word "woman" comes from "wifman", or "woman-man", in the context of the gender-neutral usage of man that's been steadily dropped from English over the past half century (aka, more like "woman-person"). Wif still exists in English in a context closer to its original meaning in the word "midwife" - "woman who is with" (mid being a cognate of the Old Norse miðr (with), seen today in languages like Icelandic "með", Danish "med", etc)
Even "girl" has changed. "Gyrle" used to refer to babies only (more commonly female, but of either sex). Boys were "knave gyrles" and girls were "gay gyrles" (yeah, the latter term has changed a bit ;) ). The word "boy" existed at the time, but more often referred to a servant or commoner rather than being a generic term for "young male".
Yes, but nuclear weapons were not. Don't get me wrong, people were speculating about harnessing the energy of the atom for weapons. H. G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1914 in "The World Set Free", but they were like ordinary bombs that continued exploding for days. Heinlein wrote about the development of a nuclear weapon to end World War II 1940 ("Solution Unsatisfactory"), but it was about a dirty bomb. If you have anything from before 1925(*) that's so accurate of a description of what nuclear weapons actually were, I'd like to see it. He got the minimum size wrong, but apart from that, that's pretty prophetic.
(*) - That quote was published in 1929 and written in 1925.
BTW, the autopilot invented in 1914 was just a self-leveling system with a compass - it wouldn't be anywhere near accurate enough for guiding flying weapons. Flying weapons "by wireless or other rays", aka remote controlled (passive or active) aircraft is an entirely different thing. Something that actually was done in World War II, but a decade and a half after Churchill wrote that.
This doesn't make him some sort of Nostradamus, but it does mean that he was paying close attention to the technological developments of his time and thinking over their implications with an analytic mind.
1) Your decision to bow out does not mean that most others did.
2) Thanks for driving the points home that you a) do not know of a single example proposed that worked by this means (otherwise you would have mentioned it), and b) have no response to your lack of knowledge of what the Hyperloop Alpha design even is.
Next time you feel the need to knee-jerk criticize something, learn what it actually is first.
Because in every single thread and in every single forum this has come up on I have asked people claiming that Hyperloop is not new to cite *one* - just *one* - example of anyone ever previously proposing a ground-effect / air bearing train in a reduced atmosphere utilizing compressors to prevent air buildup. Despite all of the ranting and raving, not a single person has ever been able to do so.
I present the same "put up or shut up" challenge to you. Cite a single example. Fiction or reality. Maglev trains? Vactrains? Pneumatic trains? Sure, all old concepts. And more to the point, very different concepts than Hyperloop Alpha. It's not maglev. It's not a vactrain (and doesn't even work in a vacuum). And it's certainly not a pneumatic train.
You clearly have no understanding of how Hyperloop Alpha works. The compressors do exactly what it says on the tin: compress air. A train moving through a rarified atmosphere inside a tube builds up a column of increasingly high pressure air in front of it. The compressors on the front of Hyperloop cars draw in this air (avoiding buildup), compress it to even higher pressures, and shunt it to the air bearings (boosting lift), as well as to COPVs (for storage) and to behind the vehicle.
You did not have picture books that promoted a ground-effect / air bearing train in a reduced atmosphere utilizing compressors to prevent air buildup ahead of it.
And I didn't have picture books when I was a child that presented smartphones or the internet. The existence or nonexistence of something in a child's picture book has no bearing as to what will become practical and when. Engineering and economics problems are addressed on their own merits. If you have an engineering or economics issue, state it, in details, with numbers (not hand-waving or simple incredulity). No links to someone else's giant rant, I don't have a week to spend debunking someone who's not even part of the conversation - write your own criticisms.
It depends. Retiring to Mars isn't all that hard, so long as you don't plan to live all that long while you're there. Doesn't take ITS, you could do that with Falcon Heavy. It's even easier if you don't need to make it there alive; you could do that with Falcon 9 ;)
It's Deep Blue, and that was in 1997, under 20 years ago. AI that can beat experts in Go (a much harder task) was achieved just late last year.
And I'm sorry, but if you haven't noticed how much better neural nets have gotten in the past 10 years, or even the past five, or even the past two, you haven't been paying attention. The last company I worked for used them to dissect brain scans, and that was 5 years ago. Now they're embedded into things like image searching, text translation tools, voice recognition, etc. Seriously, haven't you noticed how dramatically these things have gotten better over the past decade, or have you forgotten about how terrible they used to be? You tell Google Photos to search for pictures of a beer on your phone, and it will actually find pictures of beer you've taken. Remember this comic, treating image recognition as an AI Hard problem? That was just from 2 1/2 years ago. It was already becoming obsolete then. This sort of image recognition task is the stuff we grew up being told that only humans can do; now computers are getting as good at it as humans. The best face recognition apps are now as good in random controlled trials as humans.
That doesn't mean that we're going to have "conscious AI" tomorrow. Consciousness isn't just training to a task. But we keep shrinking the bounds of what makes us unique as humans. I'm certainly not willing to bet that there will never be some point where we cross that line altogether.
I missed the part when Musk said "we need to do X by next Tuesday".
Again, I missed the part when Musk said "we need to do X by next Tuesday".
I missed the part where time ceased progressing and technology ceased advancing.
1) Not in line with physics, and impractical
2) Does not describe a concrete thing with traits arguably superior to alternatives
3) Does not exist, with no prospect of it existing... (...depending on how strictly you want to define it, either A) "... any time soon", or B) "... ever."
Sola dosis facit venenum.
Also, omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina.
Yeah, I love my country. :) We're packed with natural treasures. Geology that changes in realtime** can do that ;)
** Seriously, it really does change over human timescales. Right near Ásbyrgi there's a lake called Skjálftavatn which feeds the excellent fishing river Lítlaá. Neither existed until the 1970s, when tectonic activity from the eruption at Krafla rerouted the underground springs.
What's "enlightened" about a person speaking the language of the place where they live?
The only one of those I don't recognize is -wick ;) Oh wait, maybe that's "vík"? Like in Reykjavík? A vík is a place where the coastline sort of gives way, so a small bay would fit.
You can add to your list -ea, -a, -y correspond to "ey", meaning "island". For example, Swansea = Sveinsey = Sveinn's Island; Lundy = Lundey = Puffin Island; Westray = Vesturey = West Island; etc.
They're different letters. Ö is like the "e" in "bed" said with rounded lips, while O is sort of like "Aw", while Ó is like "Oh"
And the words just long and look alien to you because you don't know the root words, and thus where to split them. Pro tip: because the joining form in Icelandic is usually eignarfall (possessive), try splitting them at common eignarfall endings (-a, -ar, -s, and less commonly -u) into components at least four letters long. So in this case: Eyja.... Fjalla.... Jökull. Which is literally "Of islands", "Of mountains", "Glacier". "Glacier of the Mountains of the Islands". "The islands" in this context being Vestmannaeyjar (the island chain just offshore from it).
If you want to know how to pronounce it, just remember the song... :) Pro tip for the "ll" sound: put your tongue on the top of your mouth so it blocks all airflow, let pressure build up behind it, then let the air spill out to the sides with a pop.
Also, one thing that's neat when the subglacial eruptions go off is the sigkatlar (I think the english is "ice cauldrons") that form on the top of the glacier. They can get huge - when Bárðarbunga went off, the main (shallow) section of ice that was sinking was the size of New York City (surrounded by deeper but steeper sigkatlar). The big, shallow ones are harder to see, but the smaller ones are often ringed by fissures - which may not look that impressive from far away, but they're really huge.
As a side story: while Bárðarbunga ended up with its last eruption breaking out in the most fortunate place it could have, there would have been something kind of amusing (amid the devastation) had it actually gone off straight over its magma chamber. Many decades ago a plane crashed on the glacier, right over the caldera; the survivors had to survive for days on the ice, in terrible weather, until rescuers could get to them. Because of the huge precipitation rate there, the plane is now deep inside the ice over the caldera. But had it erupted with an explosive eruption from the caldera.... the airplane would have flown again ;)
I guess it depends on the situation. But the three main ways they tell if there's been a small jökulhlaup are a) monitoring flow rates, b) monitoring electrical conductivity of the water, and c) monitoring water temperature. Rising flow, EC and temperature are all signs of jökulhlaup. You also often get a sulfrous smell to the water and reduced clarity.
You got it backwards. Katla's the one that would go off without giving the airlines any notice. It's actually a serious safety issue; some people are arguing for a permanent no-fly zone over her, because she tends to go off with no warning whatsoever. Not always, but often. And she tends to have explosive eruptions. It's doubtful that an airplane approaching her would have time to divert before the ash cloud reached it.
The irony is that the French Revolution led to the Napoleonic Wars, which Denmark losing Norway, which led to them clamping down on their other strikecolonies/striketerritories, which led to resentment, the Icelandic independence movement, and ultimately independence from Denmark.
Yeah, Laki was really horrific. It's hard for polar volcanoes to affect the climate like equatorial ones do, but the scale of the amount of gas released was nonetheless so great that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans. The African and Indian monsoon failed, leading to severe famine in Egypt; 6 million people died. Benjamin Franklin was the first person to correctly attribute the cause of the weather to an Icelandic volcano eruption (although he incorrectly stated it as Hekla, which seems to have been the only Icelandic volcano that people in that timeperiod seemed to know, due to its habit of dusting mainland Europe with ash ;) )
Once every 100-200 years Iceland has some truly catastrophic eruption. Laki has had two since the settlement period. Askja, Katla, and Hekla are other sources. Barðarbunga is a real giant (largest lava eruption of the Holocene), but it hasn't had any catastropic eruptions in a while. It's still quaking up a storm since it's last "little" one (little by its standards, still bigger (both volume and flow rate) than any eruption Mauna Loa has ever had).
Not in historic times there haven't been. The fact that Iceland's volcanoes launch these sort of superfloods once every several hundred years is something not seen elsewhere in the world. This canyon, for example:
Ásbyrgi
is under 10k years old. It was carved primarily by just one or two superflood events, but the flow rate estimates (based on the size of the boulders thrown around) are as high as 900000 cubic meters per second. In Icelandic, if a flood is less than 45000 cubic meters per second it's defined as "non-catastrophic". By comparison, the Niagara River at Niagara falls is 2400 cubic meters per second.
The very word for this type of flood is Icelandic - "jökulhlaup". Literally "glacial run". And the name for the sediment deposits they leave behind is also Icelandic in origin - "Sandur" (literally "sand").
Sorry, but the context is Iceland. And in Icelandic it's hún sól. The sun is feminine. Hér er sólin, um sólina, frá sólinni, til sólarinnar. Here is the sun, about the sun, from the sun, to the sun.
You could say "Hér er sólinn, um sólann, frá sólnum, til sólans", which is a masculine declension, but then you'd be talking about the sole of a shoe, not the sun ;) That was actually the basis a gag on Næturvaktin, which is the Icelandic equivalent of The Office - starring Reykjavík's former mayor (Jón Gnarr) as Stalinist gas station manager with delusions of grandeur.
I'll take volcanoes any day over heat. :) And monsoons... what, you mean precipitation? Yeah, I think we've got that covered ;) Mýrdalsjökull (Katla's glacier), along with neighboring Eyjafjallajökull, and further away Vatnajökull, are the wettest places in Europe, with over 10 meters of precipitation per year (although we don't have the record for wettest inhabited area... because living on top of a glacier on top of an active volcano would be pretty damned stupid ;) ).
Speaking of Mother Earth and Iceland... ;)
That's "Hún Jörð" ("Mother Earth") by the band Sigur Rós - it's an abbreviated version of the Lord's Prayer in Icelandic, except to the Earth instead of God. Also, screaming. Good music for volcanoes preparing to go off.
Or, if you want something more directly volcanic themed, there's always Jón Leif's Hekla. It's often described as the loudest piece of classical music ever composed, although that's only if you perform it with its full design intent of instruments, which I don't think anyone's ever done. Said instruments include "four sets of rocks hit with hammers, steel plates, anvils, sirens, cannons, metal chains, choir, a large orchestra, and organ".
I agree, to the extent that I think they should have an "antidote" on hand: an engineered variant immune to the gene drive, to release where, when and if a gene-drive species escapes
Tell that to all of the extinct species throughout history. If there's one thing the geological record shows us is that nature quite often *doesn't* find a way.