Too bad 123dcatch is such a terrible app. And not so much for the matching as the bad interface and the fact that the servers are down half the time. The backend could of course stand to be improved as well, but at least they should take care of the low-hanging fruit...
Also, they have a pay version.... which is as a really expensive subscription and provides little that your average user would want. I'd be willing to pay for nothing more than the free app.... if they'd actually put forth the effort to fix and improve it. Because when it works it's great. Otherwise...
A novel tear extract with high energy density and exceptional corrosive properties Ji Yeon Woo, Seo Jin Son, Hyo, Se Hee Choi et al 13 Feb 2015 DOI: 10.1111/bph.12793
Abstract:
A newly available resource of tears (H. sapiens spp. Ted Cruz) has been analyzed for its potential uses in industry and medicine. Tears were acquired by presenting the subject with a low income McDonalds employee from Queens and presenting her with a valid medical insurance card for a program subsidized by the government. Attempts to collect the tears into a glass vial proved insufficient as the fuming fluid rapidly corroded the glass and ate its way into the floor. After several attempts, small quantities of tears were finally isolated in teflon-coated containers chilled in liquid nitrogen. An swirling, oily ichor was concentrated from the bulk of the tears via fractional freezing. Tests revealed that upon exposure to sunlight the substance bursts into flame with a measured energy density of 168kJ/g. Spectral analysis of the extract proved inconclusive, yielding only an image of Ayn Rand taking soup away from orphans. Further study of the substance was hindered by the mass resignation of the clinical team.
First off, what magical world do you live in where every investment in a higher-risk financial product pays off? What I couldn't give if I could invest in the world you envision;) The program as a whole already broke even after just three years in play. All of the outstanding loans are now just profit for the government.
Is this the highest interest rate investment the government could have earned money with? Of course not. But that was never the point; it helped the companies that succeeded vastly scale up. While making money. And not only do they get the interest payments, but they also indirectly get the tax revenue from all of these much larger companies and all of the knock-on effects.
And clearly the massive government investment in both R&D and incentives that let companies achieve economies of scale did nothing to create the current environment where, with the technology developed and economies of scale on hand, companies can make an unsubsidized profit even without subsidies - right? The two things are totally disconnected.
The problem was that the wrong people realized it. There was a report at Thiokol on the tests that had been suggestive that at such low temperatures the O-rings provided no failure redundancy like they did at warmer temperatures due to the slow "extrusion" time, but the Thiokol people arguing with NASA to delay the launch were unaware of it, and so all they could express was "concerns" that a double O-ring failure might be a risk in those conditions.
There was also a problem with the inadvertent misuse of statistics. One of the elements used to argue for the launch was a graph of O-ring failures vs. temperature which showed no strong trend. However, the graph had only failures on it, not successes. When you add the successes into the chart you can see that the overwhelming majority of launches at warm temperatures had no O-ring failures, while every last low-temperature launch had at least one failure - and STS-51-L was off the chart even colder.
More to the point, the launch also wasn't stupid just from the point of the SRB O-rings, but also because of the risk of ice strike on the orbiter... it was a really awful decision in general, opposed by an awful lot of people. But a lot of it came down to whole chains of people not asserting themselves enough with a good enough case to cause the momentum to stop. Engineers at Rockwell and Thiokol tried to get their managers to stop things, the managers tried to get their representatives at NASA to stop things, the representatives tried to stop the launch... but each time the level of urgency got watered down, and so the people at the top really never got a sense of how strongly the lower-down people felt that the launch should not go on as planned. There never was a manager who was told by a bunch of his people, "You have to stop, it's too dangerous!" responded "Screw you guys, I'm going ahead with it anyway". It was just a lot of people being told "Well, we're rather uncomfortable with this..." but not being given a persuasive enough argument to take to the higher-ups. NASA knows that there is always an element of risk with each launch, and that if they don't accept any risk, they'll never launch anything. But the people making the call never did get same sense of how high the risk was that the engineers had.
Yep, the safety records of Russian systems are not very pretty, particularly in recent years where the whole program keeps going downhill. They've not killed anyone onboard recently, but that's pure luck - they've had plenty of accidents with unmanned Soyuz that could easily have killed the crew, many onboard near-incidents which could have killed the crew, plenty of crew injuries, and the death of ground crew. And the sort of faults they're getting are just humiliating - forget things like "didn't realize that we lost O-ring redundancy at temperatures below 40F", the sort of errors the Russians have been making are along the lines of "installed a sensor upside down and repeatedly whacked it with a big hammer to make it fit" (actual failure cause). And their management is just absurd. After one accident that could have killed the crew on return, they responded by superstitiously banning two women from being on the same spacecraft. "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about.'' (the article incorrectly states that the crew was "unharmed", the initial Russian statement, but one of the astronauts had to be hospitalized due to a compressed spinal column)
The fact that one technology doesn't address all the problems doesn't make it worthless.
When its alternatives do address acidification, yes, that is an argument against it.
Nonsense. Decreasing insolation doesn't "hide" warming, it reduces energy input into the system. Sure, when you stop blocking the energy you'll begin warming again, but the energy you reflected away will not come "rushing back".
Wrong. Earth is at 400ppm milestone, and we're doing on artificial albedo increases. We'll call this status X. Now let's say we begin this process tomorrow. Earth's CO2 keeps rising... 450... 500... 550... 600. But we keep increasing the albedo so that the temperature stays the same as it is today.
What happens when the machines get shut off?
Water vapor has a very short atmospheric residence time. Everything will be back to its no-albedo-boosted state within a couple weeks. So all of the sudden we go from 400ppm temperatures to 600ppm temperatures. There will be some delay because of thermal inertia of course, but the issue is, you're just hiding the problem, not actually doing anything about it. And when you stop hiding it, it comes running back.
Again, that just means we need to study it rather than guess.
Every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar not spent on something else. There are geoengineering processes which don't have all of these problems and are more worthy of study, and need more study (I'd put forth, as one example among many, ocean seeding). And that money could also go toward advancing the technology to reduce carbon emissions or capture emitted carbon.
However, I don't see anyone else actually proposing to do anything.
That's just advertising how little you follow this topic.
Seriously though, for all we know, historically Earth has seen higher temperatures and much higher CO2 levels, and life on the planet was flourishing, much bigger and much more diverse than it is today.
And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions. So I'm not really sure what your point is.
To reiterate, the issue is not that the planet is changing, but how fast the planet is changing. Life takes time to adapt.
Carbon is vital to all life, and sitting in the depths of the planet it ain't doing anyone any good.
Boron is also needed by all complex life, but that doesn't mean we should be digging up huge amounts of it and dumping it into our air, either.
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification * Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back * They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections. * There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
Not too much to judge about you. But a heck of a lot to judge about her. "Yeah, I'm going to take this guy for free housing and money and labour, and in exchange for that I'm going to do the one thing that would hurt most spouses the most, rather than being honest with him about me not being physically interested in him - because that could possibly ruin this good freeloading thing I've got going on!"
BTW, I find it amazing how many people manage to reach adulthood without noticing that pretty much every relationship starts out full of passion and longing but slowly degrades into a more roomate-like mode. It doesn't mean that John the gardener that you met a couple weeks ago is actually everything you've always longed for and that you had just been deceiving yourself about ever having loved your spouse - it's that you're a human freaking being and this is how human emotions work. And the exact same thing will happen with John the gardener, and you'll once again convince yourself that you never really felt anything for him either, but hey, this NEW guy, wow, he's the real thing, you've never felt so alive with anyone as with HIM!
Just a heads up to anyone who may potentially be moving into an affair-risk situation (as opposed to the douchebags deliberately setting out to find someone to cheat on their spouse with behind their back): That is to say, to anyone who doesn't want to be a cheater but finds themselves unexpectedly developing feelings toward someone who isn't their significant other:
1. Yes, you ARE capable of cheating on your spouse, and you put yourself more at risk by thinking that you're above that sort of thing.
2. No, you should NOT talk to the person you may be starting to get feelings for about said feelings, and you should NOT listen to them talk about theirs. They are the absolute worst person possible to talk about it if you don't want to end up in an affair. If you feel you simply have to talk to someone and can't talk to your spouse about it, talk to random strangers online. Do NOT talk to the person you have feelings for.
3. If you want to avoid ending up in an affair, you need to get this person out of your life. Which can sometimes be hard, due to work or all sorts of other situations where you may encounter them. Just remember: you need to weigh the difficulty of the steps to get them out of your life vs. consequences of an affair v. And once again, see point #1.
4. Yes, your feelings for the new person will go away with time not being around or communicating with them.
5. Once the emotional chaos is dulled or gone (NOT while you're still deep in the middle of it), reflect on what it was that led to the situation in the first place. What was the need in your life that wasn't being fulfilled that pulled you in that direction? Work with your significant other to try to get it met. Communicate your needs - and listen to theirs too. And if your significant other ultimately proves unwilling or unable to meet your needs, then it may be time to begin to think about ending the relationship - talk with them to try to do it amicably. But never make decisions like that when you're in the throw of emotions because of Someone New(TM). It will completely colour your views.
Yes, it's a book for people who don't know science.
Hydrazine is N2H4. React O2 and you get two H2O and one N2.
Which says nothing about how much volume they take up as liquids. You can only use that approach when dealing with ideal gases maintained at a constant temperature and pressure. The volume of water you get from burning a liter of hydrazine is only about 1,15 liters. Liquid density and number of moles have no inherent linkage. Do you think that if you take a bottle of styrene and polymerize it into polystyrene that it suddenly shrinks down to just a couple percent of its former size?
The author makes this mistake over and over and over again, and it's the sort of thing that would get you a D in high school chemistry.
The potatoes were genetically engineered and he had bright lights. I agree that its unlikely, but it is at least plausible.
The potatoes were there to be cooked as thanksgiving dinner, and no, it's not even slightly, remotely possible. Your lights have to replace Earth sunlight. They have him taking Mars sunlight (44% as strong) striking 200 square meters solar panels, which the author describes as "an astounding 10.2% efficiency" with no hint of sarcasm (that's actually a terrible efficiency). The panels aren't sun tracking, so you're looking at a capacity factor of 20%-ish in a sunny location *if* they're kept perfectly clean, which of course the book keeps telling us that they're not. So now these 200 square meters of solar panels are creating an electricity equivalent of the sunlight that hits 1,8 square meters of ground with the sun overhead on Earth. But wait, we're not done! Just assuming that 100% of it goes into powering the lights, you have to then account for the inefficiencies of the lights. The most efficient lighting in the world today are lab-scale LEDs with an EQE of about 30% (note: this is different from luminous efficiency, which is weighted by the frequencies the human eye is sensitive to). If we assume no other losses in the system (very much false), then we have the amount of sun that strikes half a square meter of ground on Earth... to grow 100 square meters of potatoes.
Now, there are some potential improvements there. The lights could be frequencies that plants use more efficiently than broad-spectrum sunlight. And there's the fact that the sun strikes plants at different angles (although they still intercept more than a fixed-angle planar solar panel, it's only simple cosine losses). But if you want to account for things like that, then you need to whack off another 30% or so of the energy for dust, another couple dozen percent for energy used on life support and other habitat functions, another 5-10% for wiring and conversion losses, you need to drop your light efficiencies to a more realistic 10-20%, and so forth. And where's he supposed to get lights tailored to plant growth? The book simply says he uses the habitat's regular room lighting.
It's orders of magnitude off. Which should be obvious to anyone who took even the slightest amount of time to think about what was being proposed. Or has ever seen a greenhouse where plants are grown under light. And speaking of that, he's talking about using normal room lighting to grow plants. The sun hits the surface of the Earth at about 1000W/m^2. Going with 20% efficient LED light bulbs, that means you need 5kW of light bulbs per square meter to match it. Meaning if these were say 30W LED bulbs (very bright for that sort of efficiency), you'd still be having to place 167 of them per square meter to match the sun. Is your room lit up like that?
And heck, I'm only even talking about the lighting here, it's just one of about two dozen different reasons why the entire concept as presented in the book is a complete non-starter, from him doing absolutely nothing to remove the perchlorate salts from the regolith (regolith apparently being a word that this "botanist" doesn't know - although
The book was terrible. One an average of at least one god-awful mockery of science per page and the main character "scientist" who writes like an 11-year-old boy and apparently doesn't know a single technical term for anything.
The terrible science wouldn't be so bad if the author didn't keep rubbing it in the reader's face, and I'm not even talking about the "growing potatoes with about 2-3 orders of magnitude too little light while planting them stacked on top of each other like cordwood" aspect. For example, again and again he kept doing the idiot version of chemistry, like:
"Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"
(Morbo voice: "Stoichiometry does not work that way!")
It's so hard to pick the most terrible example from the book... one that's definitely a contender was the "habitat went up to 64% hydrogen and down to 9% oxygen without him noticing" part;) Really, the high sqeaky voice didn't tip him off? The unconsciousness wasn't a clue?
Though him freaking out about the RTG was pretty priceless too... really, the whole thing is like a MST3K film in book form. I have trouble taking people seriously when they claim they thought it was a good book.
The worst radiation event known in history, a 775 AD event, would cause a dose of 0,09 gray over 20 hours - and that's at the top of the "habitable zone", 62km. Based on on Fig. 6, at 53km the dose would be something like 1e-6 to 1e-4 Gy. Radiation sickness requires a whole body dose of over 2 gray. So not even close. The constant GCR flux looks to be about 1e-7Gy/20h, or about 0,00438 Gy/yr.
Think of it this way: Venus's atmospheric shielding depth at Denver air pressures is basically roughly the same as Earth's at Denver; Mars's thin atmosphere provides little shielding. Neither Venus nor Mars have magnetic fields, so they're both at the same disadvantage - but Venus still has its thick atmospheric shielding. The only disadvantage Venus has to Mars is being closer to the sun - but that's completely overwhelmed by its significant advantage in terms of atmospheric shielding (and the distance to the sun has no effect on GCR).
As to why one would colonize Venus, it's the same reasons one would want to colonize Mars: to become a multi-planet spacefaring civilization. It also, as mentioned, offers some benefits in terms of scientific research, more than sending humans to Mars does. And if Venus's unusual extreme surface environment has perchance provided concentrations of rare, valuable minerals, it could potentially be useful for mining for export, which would benefit from having humans on-site for low latency operations and maintenance.
Hyperloop is not a railway. You might as well just compare it to a port on pylons or a mall on pylons if you want bad analogies.
The closest thing in terms of construction to Hyperloop is an oil pipeline. It has much more difficult approval aspects due to environmental issues and near universal public dislike, and of course corrosion challenges and such; but its geometry tolerances are much lower. So it's still not a perfect match, but it's at least closer than comparing Hyperloop to rail. And the costs per unit distance for oil pipeline in the US for the same diameter as Hyperloop track are indeed comparable to the Hyperloop cost estimates.
Now, part of the reason for Hyperloop's reduced costs vs. rail - and let's not play this down - are that it does less. It has less total throughput and not as many stops. But it's also much faster and cheaper. Versus air, it's much higher throughput, although not quite as fast (although still much cheaper). It is designed to be a low cost intermediary between rail and air travel.
By not having as many stops, not only does Hyperloop avoid having to build stations, but it also allows them to stay over cheap, easy right-of-way locations like being elevated over interstate medians rather than having to go into a whole bunch of cities. The other key aspect is loading. Train bridges spend most of their time unloaded, but when a train passes over, they face incredible loading until it's moved across. They have to be built very strong to tolerate this. Hyperloop instead uses frequently launched vehicles that are an order of magnitude ligher than a HSR train. This dramatically reduces track loading and thus support weight.
I really don't get the lack of interest in Venus, almost as much as I don't get the obsession with Mars. I mean, Venus is basically Earth's evil twin. And while we're getting to understand Mars quite well, we have no idea why Venus ended up so different from us. It's kind of a big deal and huge outstanding question. We also understand so little about its surface and the processes that are active there today.
I know, I know, people obsess over Mars rather than Venus because of the idea that people will go colonize Mars but not Venus, so that makes Mars cooler. But... really? Mars has almost no atmosphere providing radiation protection, a low solar constant, planetwide storms of electrostatic dust, longer orbit transfers, more difficult capture, frigid temperatures, and low gravity that human bodies may or may not tolerate well for prolonged periods of time.
Now, compared to the surface of Venus, Mars is positively a paradise. But nobody would send manned missions to the surface of Venus; they'd send them to the Venusian cloudtops at around 53km. A colony there would involve airships and floating cities, and people could walk outside in nearly Earth gravity in shirtsleeves at Denver pressures / Phoenix temperatures so long as they wore goggles and a breathing mask. Basically, it'd be like something straight out of a steampunk novel.
There is sulfuric acid, but it's not as concentrated as most people envision - it's more like living downwind of a volcano. The concentration of sulfuric acid (and also, less talked about, carbon monoxide) will require eye protection but should probably not require skin protection. One obviously, as mentioned, needs a mask. The atmosphere provides an abundant source of easily acquired carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur - much more easily acquired than on Mars. It also provides smaller amounts of argon, helium, neon, chlorine, and fluorine at the same livable altitudes. Phosphorus can be found in the clouds at lower altitudes (below 33km) as phosphoric acid and phosphorus anhydride. So you have your basic building blocks for a full-featured petrochemical industry, aka, what you need to keep your craft aloft and make new ones, make and repair suits, etc. And even regular Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. You also have all of the basic requirements for life (CHONP). It might even be possible to breed plants that can be grown outdoors on Venus at those altitudes - gardens dangling off of the bottom of floating cities. How freaking steampunk is that?
Obviously you're not going to have people walking on the Venusian surface. But here's where you get to the other issue, that putting humans on Venus is also more purposeful than on Mars. Think of robotic Venusian landers. At the surface, there's A) little light to provide solar power, B) you'd fry almost any known type of solar power source, C) and thermal power sources like RTG are given an incredibly difficult job due to the high ambient temperature. Also, the easiest way to cool a craft - simply having a coolant reservoir onboard - only gives you limited time at the surface. Having scientific instruments not get destroyed in the conditions at the surface is greatly challenging. And if you want to do sample return, you need "lightweight", which something designed to tolerate Venusian surface conditions most definitely won't be.
Basically, to research the Venusian surface well, you pretty much need a floating base of some kind, for submarine-like diving airships to stop at between surface dives. There they'd be able to recharge their batteries, offload samples, have their coolant swapped out or chilled, etc. The floating bases either examine samples there and/or function as a staging point for an ascent stage for return. Now, there's no fundamental requirement that such bases be manned. But at least you need something floating there, which makes it much easier to simply work humans into the mix. Plus, since each diver would have very limited time
Indeed. Hyperloop is more the sort of thing you'd use to cross large bays, seas, or oceans, not little channels. But, that adds an additional layer of complexity, so of course early incarnations will be on land.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad 123dcatch is such a terrible app. And not so much for the matching as the bad interface and the fact that the servers are down half the time. The backend could of course stand to be improved as well, but at least they should take care of the low-hanging fruit...
Also, they have a pay version.... which is as a really expensive subscription and provides little that your average user would want. I'd be willing to pay for nothing more than the free app.... if they'd actually put forth the effort to fix and improve it. Because when it works it's great. Otherwise...
They're working on it, but it's difficult.
First off, what magical world do you live in where every investment in a higher-risk financial product pays off? What I couldn't give if I could invest in the world you envision ;) The program as a whole already broke even after just three years in play. All of the outstanding loans are now just profit for the government.
Is this the highest interest rate investment the government could have earned money with? Of course not. But that was never the point; it helped the companies that succeeded vastly scale up. While making money. And not only do they get the interest payments, but they also indirectly get the tax revenue from all of these much larger companies and all of the knock-on effects.
And clearly the massive government investment in both R&D and incentives that let companies achieve economies of scale did nothing to create the current environment where, with the technology developed and economies of scale on hand, companies can make an unsubsidized profit even without subsidies - right? The two things are totally disconnected.
The problem was that the wrong people realized it. There was a report at Thiokol on the tests that had been suggestive that at such low temperatures the O-rings provided no failure redundancy like they did at warmer temperatures due to the slow "extrusion" time, but the Thiokol people arguing with NASA to delay the launch were unaware of it, and so all they could express was "concerns" that a double O-ring failure might be a risk in those conditions.
There was also a problem with the inadvertent misuse of statistics. One of the elements used to argue for the launch was a graph of O-ring failures vs. temperature which showed no strong trend. However, the graph had only failures on it, not successes. When you add the successes into the chart you can see that the overwhelming majority of launches at warm temperatures had no O-ring failures, while every last low-temperature launch had at least one failure - and STS-51-L was off the chart even colder.
More to the point, the launch also wasn't stupid just from the point of the SRB O-rings, but also because of the risk of ice strike on the orbiter... it was a really awful decision in general, opposed by an awful lot of people. But a lot of it came down to whole chains of people not asserting themselves enough with a good enough case to cause the momentum to stop. Engineers at Rockwell and Thiokol tried to get their managers to stop things, the managers tried to get their representatives at NASA to stop things, the representatives tried to stop the launch... but each time the level of urgency got watered down, and so the people at the top really never got a sense of how strongly the lower-down people felt that the launch should not go on as planned. There never was a manager who was told by a bunch of his people, "You have to stop, it's too dangerous!" responded "Screw you guys, I'm going ahead with it anyway". It was just a lot of people being told "Well, we're rather uncomfortable with this..." but not being given a persuasive enough argument to take to the higher-ups. NASA knows that there is always an element of risk with each launch, and that if they don't accept any risk, they'll never launch anything. But the people making the call never did get same sense of how high the risk was that the engineers had.
Yep, the safety records of Russian systems are not very pretty, particularly in recent years where the whole program keeps going downhill. They've not killed anyone onboard recently, but that's pure luck - they've had plenty of accidents with unmanned Soyuz that could easily have killed the crew, many onboard near-incidents which could have killed the crew, plenty of crew injuries, and the death of ground crew. And the sort of faults they're getting are just humiliating - forget things like "didn't realize that we lost O-ring redundancy at temperatures below 40F", the sort of errors the Russians have been making are along the lines of "installed a sensor upside down and repeatedly whacked it with a big hammer to make it fit" (actual failure cause). And their management is just absurd. After one accident that could have killed the crew on return, they responded by superstitiously banning two women from being on the same spacecraft. "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about.'' (the article incorrectly states that the crew was "unharmed", the initial Russian statement, but one of the astronauts had to be hospitalized due to a compressed spinal column)
When its alternatives do address acidification, yes, that is an argument against it.
Wrong. Earth is at 400ppm milestone, and we're doing on artificial albedo increases. We'll call this status X. Now let's say we begin this process tomorrow. Earth's CO2 keeps rising... 450... 500... 550... 600. But we keep increasing the albedo so that the temperature stays the same as it is today.
What happens when the machines get shut off?
Water vapor has a very short atmospheric residence time. Everything will be back to its no-albedo-boosted state within a couple weeks. So all of the sudden we go from 400ppm temperatures to 600ppm temperatures. There will be some delay because of thermal inertia of course, but the issue is, you're just hiding the problem, not actually doing anything about it. And when you stop hiding it, it comes running back.
Every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar not spent on something else. There are geoengineering processes which don't have all of these problems and are more worthy of study, and need more study (I'd put forth, as one example among many, ocean seeding). And that money could also go toward advancing the technology to reduce carbon emissions or capture emitted carbon.
That's just advertising how little you follow this topic.
Seriously though, for all we know, historically Earth has seen higher temperatures and much higher CO2 levels, and life on the planet was flourishing, much bigger and much more diverse than it is today.
And we also know that when the planet has rapidly transitioned between climactic periods, it's been associated with mass extinctions. So I'm not really sure what your point is.
To reiterate, the issue is not that the planet is changing, but how fast the planet is changing. Life takes time to adapt.
Boron is also needed by all complex life, but that doesn't mean we should be digging up huge amounts of it and dumping it into our air, either.
If you say the word "plant" a few more times, and add in a couple other buzzwords like "sustainable" and "holistic", you're sure to get funding!
* Does absolutely nothing to prevent ocean acidification
* Provides only masking - if they ever stop (lack of funding, discovery of profound negative consequences, or whatever), all the warming that they've been hiding comes rushing back
* They're just as likely to increase temperatures by increasing IR reflectance as they are to decrease it by increasing albedo. The least well understood aspect of the planet's climate, by a large margin, is clouds; they make up the vast majority of the error bars in the IPCC projections.
* There's a whole raft of staggeringly huge potential downstream disruptions, many of which could increase the problem - for example, reduction of photosynthesis.
I'm actually a moderate to slightly pro-geoengineering. But this is one of the dumbest geoengineering ideas out there. No, I don't think it's worth even wasting the money to try, that money should go to other more worthwhile projects.
What's the straw man? Seems to match the definition.
Re. the "popular books should always win" concept, I think Martin said it best:
“The reward for popularity is popularity! It’s truckloads of money! Do you need the trophy, too?”
It's like Slashdot doesn't even try any more.
No, but he does "chemistry" that's just as bad - that's the point you seem to be missing.
Not too much to judge about you. But a heck of a lot to judge about her. "Yeah, I'm going to take this guy for free housing and money and labour, and in exchange for that I'm going to do the one thing that would hurt most spouses the most, rather than being honest with him about me not being physically interested in him - because that could possibly ruin this good freeloading thing I've got going on!"
BTW, I find it amazing how many people manage to reach adulthood without noticing that pretty much every relationship starts out full of passion and longing but slowly degrades into a more roomate-like mode. It doesn't mean that John the gardener that you met a couple weeks ago is actually everything you've always longed for and that you had just been deceiving yourself about ever having loved your spouse - it's that you're a human freaking being and this is how human emotions work. And the exact same thing will happen with John the gardener, and you'll once again convince yourself that you never really felt anything for him either, but hey, this NEW guy, wow, he's the real thing, you've never felt so alive with anyone as with HIM!
Just a heads up to anyone who may potentially be moving into an affair-risk situation (as opposed to the douchebags deliberately setting out to find someone to cheat on their spouse with behind their back): That is to say, to anyone who doesn't want to be a cheater but finds themselves unexpectedly developing feelings toward someone who isn't their significant other:
1. Yes, you ARE capable of cheating on your spouse, and you put yourself more at risk by thinking that you're above that sort of thing.
2. No, you should NOT talk to the person you may be starting to get feelings for about said feelings, and you should NOT listen to them talk about theirs. They are the absolute worst person possible to talk about it if you don't want to end up in an affair. If you feel you simply have to talk to someone and can't talk to your spouse about it, talk to random strangers online. Do NOT talk to the person you have feelings for.
3. If you want to avoid ending up in an affair, you need to get this person out of your life. Which can sometimes be hard, due to work or all sorts of other situations where you may encounter them. Just remember: you need to weigh the difficulty of the steps to get them out of your life vs. consequences of an affair v. And once again, see point #1.
4. Yes, your feelings for the new person will go away with time not being around or communicating with them.
5. Once the emotional chaos is dulled or gone (NOT while you're still deep in the middle of it), reflect on what it was that led to the situation in the first place. What was the need in your life that wasn't being fulfilled that pulled you in that direction? Work with your significant other to try to get it met. Communicate your needs - and listen to theirs too. And if your significant other ultimately proves unwilling or unable to meet your needs, then it may be time to begin to think about ending the relationship - talk with them to try to do it amicably. But never make decisions like that when you're in the throw of emotions because of Someone New(TM). It will completely colour your views.
Yes, it's a book for people who don't know science.
Which says nothing about how much volume they take up as liquids. You can only use that approach when dealing with ideal gases maintained at a constant temperature and pressure. The volume of water you get from burning a liter of hydrazine is only about 1,15 liters. Liquid density and number of moles have no inherent linkage. Do you think that if you take a bottle of styrene and polymerize it into polystyrene that it suddenly shrinks down to just a couple percent of its former size?
The author makes this mistake over and over and over again, and it's the sort of thing that would get you a D in high school chemistry.
The potatoes were there to be cooked as thanksgiving dinner, and no, it's not even slightly, remotely possible. Your lights have to replace Earth sunlight. They have him taking Mars sunlight (44% as strong) striking 200 square meters solar panels, which the author describes as "an astounding 10.2% efficiency" with no hint of sarcasm (that's actually a terrible efficiency). The panels aren't sun tracking, so you're looking at a capacity factor of 20%-ish in a sunny location *if* they're kept perfectly clean, which of course the book keeps telling us that they're not. So now these 200 square meters of solar panels are creating an electricity equivalent of the sunlight that hits 1,8 square meters of ground with the sun overhead on Earth. But wait, we're not done! Just assuming that 100% of it goes into powering the lights, you have to then account for the inefficiencies of the lights. The most efficient lighting in the world today are lab-scale LEDs with an EQE of about 30% (note: this is different from luminous efficiency, which is weighted by the frequencies the human eye is sensitive to). If we assume no other losses in the system (very much false), then we have the amount of sun that strikes half a square meter of ground on Earth... to grow 100 square meters of potatoes.
Now, there are some potential improvements there. The lights could be frequencies that plants use more efficiently than broad-spectrum sunlight. And there's the fact that the sun strikes plants at different angles (although they still intercept more than a fixed-angle planar solar panel, it's only simple cosine losses). But if you want to account for things like that, then you need to whack off another 30% or so of the energy for dust, another couple dozen percent for energy used on life support and other habitat functions, another 5-10% for wiring and conversion losses, you need to drop your light efficiencies to a more realistic 10-20%, and so forth. And where's he supposed to get lights tailored to plant growth? The book simply says he uses the habitat's regular room lighting.
It's orders of magnitude off. Which should be obvious to anyone who took even the slightest amount of time to think about what was being proposed. Or has ever seen a greenhouse where plants are grown under light. And speaking of that, he's talking about using normal room lighting to grow plants. The sun hits the surface of the Earth at about 1000W/m^2. Going with 20% efficient LED light bulbs, that means you need 5kW of light bulbs per square meter to match it. Meaning if these were say 30W LED bulbs (very bright for that sort of efficiency), you'd still be having to place 167 of them per square meter to match the sun. Is your room lit up like that?
And heck, I'm only even talking about the lighting here, it's just one of about two dozen different reasons why the entire concept as presented in the book is a complete non-starter, from him doing absolutely nothing to remove the perchlorate salts from the regolith (regolith apparently being a word that this "botanist" doesn't know - although
Which, of course, he wasn't.
And that is why you liked The Martian. ;)
It's almost like you didn't even read my original post.
The book was terrible. One an average of at least one god-awful mockery of science per page and the main character "scientist" who writes like an 11-year-old boy and apparently doesn't know a single technical term for anything.
The terrible science wouldn't be so bad if the author didn't keep rubbing it in the reader's face, and I'm not even talking about the "growing potatoes with about 2-3 orders of magnitude too little light while planting them stacked on top of each other like cordwood" aspect. For example, again and again he kept doing the idiot version of chemistry, like:
"Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"
(Morbo voice: "Stoichiometry does not work that way!")
It's so hard to pick the most terrible example from the book... one that's definitely a contender was the "habitat went up to 64% hydrogen and down to 9% oxygen without him noticing" part ;) Really, the high sqeaky voice didn't tip him off? The unconsciousness wasn't a clue?
Though him freaking out about the RTG was pretty priceless too... really, the whole thing is like a MST3K film in book form. I have trouble taking people seriously when they claim they thought it was a good book.
The worst radiation event known in history, a 775 AD event, would cause a dose of 0,09 gray over 20 hours - and that's at the top of the "habitable zone", 62km. Based on on Fig. 6, at 53km the dose would be something like 1e-6 to 1e-4 Gy. Radiation sickness requires a whole body dose of over 2 gray. So not even close. The constant GCR flux looks to be about 1e-7Gy/20h, or about 0,00438 Gy/yr.
Think of it this way: Venus's atmospheric shielding depth at Denver air pressures is basically roughly the same as Earth's at Denver; Mars's thin atmosphere provides little shielding. Neither Venus nor Mars have magnetic fields, so they're both at the same disadvantage - but Venus still has its thick atmospheric shielding. The only disadvantage Venus has to Mars is being closer to the sun - but that's completely overwhelmed by its significant advantage in terms of atmospheric shielding (and the distance to the sun has no effect on GCR).
As to why one would colonize Venus, it's the same reasons one would want to colonize Mars: to become a multi-planet spacefaring civilization. It also, as mentioned, offers some benefits in terms of scientific research, more than sending humans to Mars does. And if Venus's unusual extreme surface environment has perchance provided concentrations of rare, valuable minerals, it could potentially be useful for mining for export, which would benefit from having humans on-site for low latency operations and maintenance.
Hyperloop is not a railway. You might as well just compare it to a port on pylons or a mall on pylons if you want bad analogies.
The closest thing in terms of construction to Hyperloop is an oil pipeline. It has much more difficult approval aspects due to environmental issues and near universal public dislike, and of course corrosion challenges and such; but its geometry tolerances are much lower. So it's still not a perfect match, but it's at least closer than comparing Hyperloop to rail. And the costs per unit distance for oil pipeline in the US for the same diameter as Hyperloop track are indeed comparable to the Hyperloop cost estimates.
Now, part of the reason for Hyperloop's reduced costs vs. rail - and let's not play this down - are that it does less. It has less total throughput and not as many stops. But it's also much faster and cheaper. Versus air, it's much higher throughput, although not quite as fast (although still much cheaper). It is designed to be a low cost intermediary between rail and air travel.
By not having as many stops, not only does Hyperloop avoid having to build stations, but it also allows them to stay over cheap, easy right-of-way locations like being elevated over interstate medians rather than having to go into a whole bunch of cities. The other key aspect is loading. Train bridges spend most of their time unloaded, but when a train passes over, they face incredible loading until it's moved across. They have to be built very strong to tolerate this. Hyperloop instead uses frequently launched vehicles that are an order of magnitude ligher than a HSR train. This dramatically reduces track loading and thus support weight.
I really don't get the lack of interest in Venus, almost as much as I don't get the obsession with Mars. I mean, Venus is basically Earth's evil twin. And while we're getting to understand Mars quite well, we have no idea why Venus ended up so different from us. It's kind of a big deal and huge outstanding question. We also understand so little about its surface and the processes that are active there today.
I know, I know, people obsess over Mars rather than Venus because of the idea that people will go colonize Mars but not Venus, so that makes Mars cooler. But... really? Mars has almost no atmosphere providing radiation protection, a low solar constant, planetwide storms of electrostatic dust, longer orbit transfers, more difficult capture, frigid temperatures, and low gravity that human bodies may or may not tolerate well for prolonged periods of time.
Now, compared to the surface of Venus, Mars is positively a paradise. But nobody would send manned missions to the surface of Venus; they'd send them to the Venusian cloudtops at around 53km. A colony there would involve airships and floating cities, and people could walk outside in nearly Earth gravity in shirtsleeves at Denver pressures / Phoenix temperatures so long as they wore goggles and a breathing mask. Basically, it'd be like something straight out of a steampunk novel.
There is sulfuric acid, but it's not as concentrated as most people envision - it's more like living downwind of a volcano. The concentration of sulfuric acid (and also, less talked about, carbon monoxide) will require eye protection but should probably not require skin protection. One obviously, as mentioned, needs a mask. The atmosphere provides an abundant source of easily acquired carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur - much more easily acquired than on Mars. It also provides smaller amounts of argon, helium, neon, chlorine, and fluorine at the same livable altitudes. Phosphorus can be found in the clouds at lower altitudes (below 33km) as phosphoric acid and phosphorus anhydride. So you have your basic building blocks for a full-featured petrochemical industry, aka, what you need to keep your craft aloft and make new ones, make and repair suits, etc. And even regular Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. You also have all of the basic requirements for life (CHONP). It might even be possible to breed plants that can be grown outdoors on Venus at those altitudes - gardens dangling off of the bottom of floating cities. How freaking steampunk is that?
Obviously you're not going to have people walking on the Venusian surface. But here's where you get to the other issue, that putting humans on Venus is also more purposeful than on Mars. Think of robotic Venusian landers. At the surface, there's A) little light to provide solar power, B) you'd fry almost any known type of solar power source, C) and thermal power sources like RTG are given an incredibly difficult job due to the high ambient temperature. Also, the easiest way to cool a craft - simply having a coolant reservoir onboard - only gives you limited time at the surface. Having scientific instruments not get destroyed in the conditions at the surface is greatly challenging. And if you want to do sample return, you need "lightweight", which something designed to tolerate Venusian surface conditions most definitely won't be.
Basically, to research the Venusian surface well, you pretty much need a floating base of some kind, for submarine-like diving airships to stop at between surface dives. There they'd be able to recharge their batteries, offload samples, have their coolant swapped out or chilled, etc. The floating bases either examine samples there and/or function as a staging point for an ascent stage for return. Now, there's no fundamental requirement that such bases be manned. But at least you need something floating there, which makes it much easier to simply work humans into the mix. Plus, since each diver would have very limited time
No, good sir, I'm on the level!
Indeed. Hyperloop is more the sort of thing you'd use to cross large bays, seas, or oceans, not little channels. But, that adds an additional layer of complexity, so of course early incarnations will be on land.