The speed of light also comes into play in the Fermi Paradox. It's quite possible that for a billion years there's been a vast galactic scale civilization in the universe emitting copious amounts of readily-identifiable radiation. But if that galaxy is more than a billion light years away, it would be physically impossible for us to see them.
There's lots of things about the universe that would make it hard for advanced lifeforms to spot each other unless they're close.
And I fully agree about our own solar system (although I personally think Mars is a terrible place to look and Europa is overrated). There's so many "worlds" in our solar system with fluids (including water, although I wouldn't be so bold as to say that it's a requirement for all life) and energy sources to harness. Organic chemicals seem very common too, even complex ones.
Of all of the bodies in the solar system, I think Enceladus has the best potential payoff in terms of "dollars vs. chance of finding evidence of life". Namely because you don't even have to land on it to do a sample return (but if you do want to land on it for better sample collection, it takes little energy to take off again). And because it emits its internal sea straight up into space. And its internal sea has interesting properties - namely, it's a hyperbasic sea caused by serpentinization of its rocky core, which is a process that also releases hydrogen, giving a potential fuel source to hydrogen-metabolizing life.
That said, my dream mission is still a Titan sample collection/return mission using an RTG-powered rotary nacelle craft to fly in hops all across the planet over the course of a year, recharging its flight batteries overnight on the surface and taking small samples from every potential terrain - dune fields, rivers, the various seas, cryovolcanoes, etc. It would then re-dock with its ascent stage (single solid stage similar to a small Pegasus stage), lift the ascent stage out of the atmosphere (to reduce drag) and as fast as possible until it's drained its flight batteries (which would happen quickly with the added load), ditch all unneeded weight and fire the ascent stage to re-dock with the ion-powered orbiter that got it there. The orbiter, having spent the past year skimming the outer layers of Titan's atmosphere for return propellant that doubles as an atmospheric sample return, would then return to Earth, possibly skimming Enceladus's plumes and Saturn's atmosphere on the way for more sample returns.
No question that would be a flagship mission, though, requiring two RTGs and three stages. An Enceladus-only return could probably be done on Discovery or New Frontiers budget (probably the latter).
It's a serious point. Our own radio signals are probably indistinguishable from background noise from Alpha Centauri, and they're actually reducing with time, not increasing.
Rather than than looking for "stray radio communication" (you really think an advanced society is going to lose lots of energy to stray communications?), we should either be striving for extreme optical / UV resolution (satellite-based interferometer telescope) so that we can spatially resolve surface spectra on extrasolar planets in our area to look for signs of life; and in general look for signs of energy release that might be associated with interstellar travel, such as antimatter annihilation, directed thrust, solar sail reflection, etc.
eDiversity was founded in 2015 by Ayotunde Okonjo, a self-taught Pakistani refugee of African descent. Spending her teenage years in Ecuador facing discrimination as a lesbian of colour, Ayotunde overcame the challenges of her muscular dystrophy and moved to Silicon Valley where she met Kiri Chey, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and Heba Mohammad, a Yemen-born teacher of the Chemehuevi Uto-Aztecan language, and together their shared interest of underground Soviet-era outsider art and Haitian folk dancing brought them together to form eDiversity.
At eDiversity, we utilize crowdsourced design and 3d printing to provide innovative solutions to underprivileged children as a solution to the global energy crisis. In addition to our LEED platinum-certified central office, we operate five international branches in Kiribati, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the South Sandwich Islands, the latter of which also qualifies as an internationally recognized penguin reserve.
We seek $5,5m in seed funding for 2.5% of the company.
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
I find it amazing how much people obsess over the cost of production and disposal of a couple hundred pounds of the mass of an EV, and ignore the environmental cost of production and disposal of the rest of the bloody vehicle, both in the case of gasoline cars and EVs. Really, you think that ICE just popped out of the ground preformed? You think mining platinum for a catalytic converter or lead for a lead-acid starter battery is a harmless process? Lead is far more toxic than lithium.
1) Most lithium isn't "mined". It's produced from playas where you have a salt crust with briny water underneath. Evaporation ponds are set up on the surface (where it should be added no life more complicated than extremophile bacteria live, and whose surface is identical over vast stretches of land). The brine is pumped into the evaporation ponds to concentrate it and then the lithium salts are selectively crystalized out. The playas are seasonally flooded so there's no year-to-year water loss, and on some the entire top surface gets flooded out, resurfacing it. If you took down your hardware one year, all signs that you were ever there would be gone the next.
2) Lithium salts are relatively nontoxic. Some places actually bottle natural lithium-rich mineral waters and sell them as a health drink. The symptoms of consumption of lithium at below a toxic (high) level are feelings of calm and a reduced risk of suicide. Long-term consumption of lithium-rich water has been linked in one study to longer lifespan.
3) Contrary to popular myth, there are many places on Earth to get lithium. Afghanistan is not a major player, and is not likely to become a major player for a long, long time.
4) Contrary to popular myth, lithium salts are not expensive. They're so cheap that among the biggest consumers of lithium are glassware/glazing and greases.
5) Contrary to the name, lithium is not the largest, nor most expensive, component of lithium-ion batteries.
6) That "it's better not to junk an old guzzler" car is - you guessed it - also a myth. Which you should be able to figure out just from some extremely rudimentary analysis. The average US driver drives over 12k miles per year. If your car gets 24mpg then that's 500 gallons of gasoline, or 1400kg per year. Forget that most of a car's mass gets recycled at end of life, forget about the consequences of all of the oil leaks and the like caused by old decrepid cars - you burn your car's weight in gasoline every year. And the average car on the road is about 10 years old, meaning an average lifespan of 20 years.
I don't know where you're getting your "59-62%" figure from, it's usually higher than that. The US grid is about 93% efficient, generator-to-socket. Grid losses are far lower than most people give them credit for. Chargers are typically 92-94% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is. beyond the charger, charging is usually 90-99% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is and what sort of pack the vehicle has and pack management the vehicle does. Powertrains during operation (including battery losses) are usually 65-95% efficient, depending on torque and RPM conditions and the vehicle, with a usual operational average of 85%-ish. A small portion of the energy, depending on the type of driving, is returned via regenerative braking, which on li-ion EVs is usually 60-70% round trip efficiency (lower on NiMH hybrids). Ignoring regen, the whole picture is usually 70%-ish.
You're right about the efficiency of gasoline cars, but to be clear, it's not that the engine can't achieve higher - it's that maximum efficiency (usually 35%-ish) is confined to a narrow torque / rpm band. Gearshifting helps you pick your RPM / torque combination but you don't have control over power (the combination of the two) - that's dictated by the driving conditions. And then of course on top of that you have idling and no regen potential.
Concerning the production of electricity, it's important to note trends. Electricity is in most countries in the world, including the US, trending toward cleaner, both in regards to CO2 and to health-related pollutants. Gasoline, however, is trending toward dirtier - it involves more energy to extract and/or refine. There's no reason to expect these trends to reverse in the forseable future.
Haven't found a copy of the study yet but I did find this map supposedly from the paper, which already right there doesn't just wave red flags, it applies for a zoning permit to make a factory for automated red-flag-waving robots. Compare it to a map of coal power generation - they don't match up at all.
Without having the paper, I don't know what screwy thing they're doing with the data, but there's clearly something they're doing screwy with the data.
Why are we dignifying it by calling it a "study"? It's not published in a journal. It's not undergone peer-review. It's a "working paper" on the NBER website. It's not the same thing. If it was legitimate, they would have submitted it to a legitimate journal and gotten it published. They have not, as it stands.
How long is it going to take for news sources to bother to check whether something has undergone peer-review before they start citing it as "science"? Let alone the "most comprehensive study yet"?
Picture reversing the time vector. Do you think you can gently throw an object to Charon escape just by choosing some clever trajectory? No? Then why do you think it will work that way and land with a gentle velocity with time flowing in the opposite direction?
That's the point. The escape velocity on Charon is 580 meters per second. So even something with no momentum when it arrived at Charon would be falling at 580 m/s (1300 mph) when it hit the ground. Picture shooting Mount Everest into the ground at that velocity. Is this really what you'd expect to see as a result, it holding together and just sitting in a hole? Of course not, it'd shatter and explode massively, kick out a rim, fill in the transient crater with debris, etc - aka, a crater forming event. And that's the bare minimum impact velocity, realistic impacts would be far harder (dozens of kilometers per second) in the overwhelming majority of situations..
I love how Alan Stern and the rest of the team go through lengths to call Pluto a planet. This time he even laid particular emphasis on calling Pluto-Charon a binary planet.:)
Great team. Great project. Great results. Just amazing.
It's really weird. I've heard a lot of people speculate that it's just an asteroid that "landed gently" in Charon's low gravity or something by being on a really lucky trajectory. But it just doesn't work that way. Picture running the time axis in reverse. Does one think that there's a particular trajectory that they could pick the rock back up and throw it back into space without requiring a lot of energy? The fact is that even on a body like Charon, big chunks of rock can't just gently settle down.
It seems more complicated than that (even ignoring that impacts don't generally make heart shapes). For example, have you seen the carbon monoxide data? It's all clustered in that area. Why would an asteroid make carbon monoxide cluster there?
There's some really interesting things going on. Take a look at this picture and think of what it looks like to you:
It's the shape of a liquid welling up through a crack and freezing due to a drop in pressure.
To me, this shows all the signs of a cryosea underneath an ice cap. Which leads to the question: can that occur on Pluto? And the answer is, "probably". With N2, CO, and CH4, you can get eutectics with triple points as low as 51K (a naive solar equilibrium-temperature calculation for pluto's surface, without any other sources of heat, reaches up to 55K). Add neon into the mix and it gets down to 24,6K. The key is, these liquids can't exist on the surface - they require pressure to exist. Which means that they can only exist as aquifers and subglacial lakes/seas. Pure nitrogen requires about 18 meters of pure nitrogen ice (more because it'd have pore space and be mixed with lower density ices). Pure neon would require about 3x as much.
The flat areas in Tombaugh Regio have two radically different appearances. One is the aforementioned area that looks like sea ice with frozen cracks (Sputnik Planum). The other is what's being called a "pitted" terrain. The latter touches the "shore" of the regio, while the former is deep in the middle (at least, from the pictures revealed so far). If one wanted to step even further out onto the limb here, they could posit that the "pitted" terrain involves these ices sitting directly on "bedrock" (which in a pluto context here is water ice), while the terrain that looks like sea ice would have liquid dozens of meters or more down.
But this is all just along one line of thinking. There's just so many possibilities right now. One notices, for example, similarities with various pluto features and frost-heaving earth features like pingos and ice wedges. But it could be something completely new entirely. This isn't water we're dealing with.
A real crazy thing is to think about how there might be vertitable explosive processes on Pluto. Solid nitrogen that forms due to decompression undergoes an energetic glass to crystalline transition. And overall does really weird stuff when freezing (start about a minute in).
Also note that there is nitrogen being lost from Pluto. Lots - 500 tonnes an hour. Over geological timeperiods, that's a massive, massive amount. Pluto loses its atmosphere 2 1/2 orders of magnitude faster than Mars. And yet it's still there. So where's it coming from? The team already pointed out that there doesn't seem to be a planetwide layer of deep nitrogen ice. To me that only seems to leave the possibility that it comes from deeper within the planet. But for it to move from deeper within to the top means a fluid (an aquifer), not an ice (either that or serious tectonics dragging up 500 tonnes an hour!). And given that Pluto's crust provides pre
My mother sometimes sends me checks from the states. The bank cashiers are always confused by them and have to get their managers, who eventually sign off on them. The last time I was at the bank with a check the cashier spent several minutes insisting to me that they can't accept checks before going back and getting approval.
Good to see you guys catching up on credit cards. When are you going to finally modernize your banking system as well?;)
Anyway, I can attest to the point of this article, in Iceland you see those little portable card readers (I don't know what they're called in English, they look like this) everywhere, whether it's someone walking around between tents at a campsite collecting the day's fees or some unknown band playing a little gig in a bar - a lot more often than you see them in the states.
The main problem with this solution is the amount of power the fan would draw.
Solar Impulse is a 30kW airplane. Cooling fans are nothing compared to that. Furthermore, I also wrote: "Or if you want it to be passive, a greenhouse window opener to open up the insulation when it gets hot".
This isn't rocket science here. Everyone who works with large format battery packs knows that you can't just cover them in foam insulation and pretend that's good enough. You don't have to go to the sort of extremes Tesla and GM go to - Nissan's Leaf doesn't even use cooling fans. But it does use cooling channels with passive forced air coming from the car's motion, as well as pad heaters to warm them up when it's too cold. Because they're not so daft as to think that you can just pack them in insulation and call that good.
They probably know more about batteries than you will ever learn.
You know nothing about me, let's leave it at that.
They are attempting something very difficult that hasn't been done before, There will be problems.
As I said - "I'm not faulting them for their oversight - bad decisions happen in every engineering project."
But as I also said: "But this doesn't strike me as any sort of unusual nor unexpected situation. News flash, temperature-sensitive batteries need proper temperature regulation rather than just being slathered in foam, details at 11...."
Building a manned solar powered airplane to make such long runs is very much a new and challenging thing. Designing large format battery packs, not so much.
What's wrong with, you know, a simple thermostat-controlled fan, like most large battery packs use? Or if you want it to be passive, a greenhouse window opener to open up the insulation when it gets hot?
I'm not faulting them for their oversight - bad decisions happen in every engineering project. But this doesn't strike me as any sort of unusual nor unexpected situation. News flash, temperature-sensitive batteries need proper temperature regulation rather than just being slathered in foam, details at 11....
Or maybe he meant "morel boost". I mean, they're based out of California so some trendy hipster food with wild mushrooms and the word "boost" in the name might be what's needed to get the job done.
"Yes, André, I finally finished replacing the batteries. But, wait a minute, what's this?..." (BAM! BAM!) "Oh damn it, I just noticed that there's some serious cracks in the fuselage! I'm going to need several more months to get her flightworthy..."
Do realize that LORRI isn't just a camera, it's actually more of a telescope. And they can expose the images as long as they want, and even stack them if they want.
If you think it's hard to get pictures on the sunlit side, that's nothing - they actually plan to try to get pictures on the side *not* lit by the sun, just by the pathetically weak light reflected by Charon. Getting images on the lit side is easy, but the dark side is going to be very difficult, involving lots of stacking.
I'm glad to see this finally coming to a head. It seems that every last bloody body that we've encountered in the solar system has been the same story: "Wow, this is showing signs of activity, we expected it to be a cold dead world because it's too small....". It's about time that people accept that there's something we've been overlooking in terms of heat release. At least one thing, possibly multiple in different situations.
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The speed of light also comes into play in the Fermi Paradox. It's quite possible that for a billion years there's been a vast galactic scale civilization in the universe emitting copious amounts of readily-identifiable radiation. But if that galaxy is more than a billion light years away, it would be physically impossible for us to see them.
There's lots of things about the universe that would make it hard for advanced lifeforms to spot each other unless they're close.
And I fully agree about our own solar system (although I personally think Mars is a terrible place to look and Europa is overrated). There's so many "worlds" in our solar system with fluids (including water, although I wouldn't be so bold as to say that it's a requirement for all life) and energy sources to harness. Organic chemicals seem very common too, even complex ones.
Of all of the bodies in the solar system, I think Enceladus has the best potential payoff in terms of "dollars vs. chance of finding evidence of life". Namely because you don't even have to land on it to do a sample return (but if you do want to land on it for better sample collection, it takes little energy to take off again). And because it emits its internal sea straight up into space. And its internal sea has interesting properties - namely, it's a hyperbasic sea caused by serpentinization of its rocky core, which is a process that also releases hydrogen, giving a potential fuel source to hydrogen-metabolizing life.
That said, my dream mission is still a Titan sample collection/return mission using an RTG-powered rotary nacelle craft to fly in hops all across the planet over the course of a year, recharging its flight batteries overnight on the surface and taking small samples from every potential terrain - dune fields, rivers, the various seas, cryovolcanoes, etc. It would then re-dock with its ascent stage (single solid stage similar to a small Pegasus stage), lift the ascent stage out of the atmosphere (to reduce drag) and as fast as possible until it's drained its flight batteries (which would happen quickly with the added load), ditch all unneeded weight and fire the ascent stage to re-dock with the ion-powered orbiter that got it there. The orbiter, having spent the past year skimming the outer layers of Titan's atmosphere for return propellant that doubles as an atmospheric sample return, would then return to Earth, possibly skimming Enceladus's plumes and Saturn's atmosphere on the way for more sample returns.
No question that would be a flagship mission, though, requiring two RTGs and three stages. An Enceladus-only return could probably be done on Discovery or New Frontiers budget (probably the latter).
It's a serious point. Our own radio signals are probably indistinguishable from background noise from Alpha Centauri, and they're actually reducing with time, not increasing.
Rather than than looking for "stray radio communication" (you really think an advanced society is going to lose lots of energy to stray communications?), we should either be striving for extreme optical / UV resolution (satellite-based interferometer telescope) so that we can spatially resolve surface spectra on extrasolar planets in our area to look for signs of life; and in general look for signs of energy release that might be associated with interstellar travel, such as antimatter annihilation, directed thrust, solar sail reflection, etc.
IMHO.
About Us:
eDiversity was founded in 2015 by Ayotunde Okonjo, a self-taught Pakistani refugee of African descent. Spending her teenage years in Ecuador facing discrimination as a lesbian of colour, Ayotunde overcame the challenges of her muscular dystrophy and moved to Silicon Valley where she met Kiri Chey, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and Heba Mohammad, a Yemen-born teacher of the Chemehuevi Uto-Aztecan language, and together their shared interest of underground Soviet-era outsider art and Haitian folk dancing brought them together to form eDiversity.
At eDiversity, we utilize crowdsourced design and 3d printing to provide innovative solutions to underprivileged children as a solution to the global energy crisis. In addition to our LEED platinum-certified central office, we operate five international branches in Kiribati, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the South Sandwich Islands, the latter of which also qualifies as an internationally recognized penguin reserve.
We seek $5,5m in seed funding for 2.5% of the company.
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
I find it amazing how much people obsess over the cost of production and disposal of a couple hundred pounds of the mass of an EV, and ignore the environmental cost of production and disposal of the rest of the bloody vehicle, both in the case of gasoline cars and EVs. Really, you think that ICE just popped out of the ground preformed? You think mining platinum for a catalytic converter or lead for a lead-acid starter battery is a harmless process? Lead is far more toxic than lithium.
1) Most lithium isn't "mined". It's produced from playas where you have a salt crust with briny water underneath. Evaporation ponds are set up on the surface (where it should be added no life more complicated than extremophile bacteria live, and whose surface is identical over vast stretches of land). The brine is pumped into the evaporation ponds to concentrate it and then the lithium salts are selectively crystalized out. The playas are seasonally flooded so there's no year-to-year water loss, and on some the entire top surface gets flooded out, resurfacing it. If you took down your hardware one year, all signs that you were ever there would be gone the next.
2) Lithium salts are relatively nontoxic. Some places actually bottle natural lithium-rich mineral waters and sell them as a health drink. The symptoms of consumption of lithium at below a toxic (high) level are feelings of calm and a reduced risk of suicide. Long-term consumption of lithium-rich water has been linked in one study to longer lifespan.
3) Contrary to popular myth, there are many places on Earth to get lithium. Afghanistan is not a major player, and is not likely to become a major player for a long, long time.
4) Contrary to popular myth, lithium salts are not expensive. They're so cheap that among the biggest consumers of lithium are glassware/glazing and greases.
5) Contrary to the name, lithium is not the largest, nor most expensive, component of lithium-ion batteries.
6) That "it's better not to junk an old guzzler" car is - you guessed it - also a myth. Which you should be able to figure out just from some extremely rudimentary analysis. The average US driver drives over 12k miles per year. If your car gets 24mpg then that's 500 gallons of gasoline, or 1400kg per year. Forget that most of a car's mass gets recycled at end of life, forget about the consequences of all of the oil leaks and the like caused by old decrepid cars - you burn your car's weight in gasoline every year. And the average car on the road is about 10 years old, meaning an average lifespan of 20 years.
I don't know where you're getting your "59-62%" figure from, it's usually higher than that. The US grid is about 93% efficient, generator-to-socket. Grid losses are far lower than most people give them credit for. Chargers are typically 92-94% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is. beyond the charger, charging is usually 90-99% efficient, depending on how fast the charge is and what sort of pack the vehicle has and pack management the vehicle does. Powertrains during operation (including battery losses) are usually 65-95% efficient, depending on torque and RPM conditions and the vehicle, with a usual operational average of 85%-ish. A small portion of the energy, depending on the type of driving, is returned via regenerative braking, which on li-ion EVs is usually 60-70% round trip efficiency (lower on NiMH hybrids). Ignoring regen, the whole picture is usually 70%-ish.
You're right about the efficiency of gasoline cars, but to be clear, it's not that the engine can't achieve higher - it's that maximum efficiency (usually 35%-ish) is confined to a narrow torque / rpm band. Gearshifting helps you pick your RPM / torque combination but you don't have control over power (the combination of the two) - that's dictated by the driving conditions. And then of course on top of that you have idling and no regen potential.
Concerning the production of electricity, it's important to note trends. Electricity is in most countries in the world, including the US, trending toward cleaner, both in regards to CO2 and to health-related pollutants. Gasoline, however, is trending toward dirtier - it involves more energy to extract and/or refine. There's no reason to expect these trends to reverse in the forseable future.
Haven't found a copy of the study yet but I did find this map supposedly from the paper, which already right there doesn't just wave red flags, it applies for a zoning permit to make a factory for automated red-flag-waving robots. Compare it to a map of coal power generation - they don't match up at all.
Without having the paper, I don't know what screwy thing they're doing with the data, but there's clearly something they're doing screwy with the data.
If you're pro-science and pro-facts then why are you citing a non-peer-reviewed paper?
Some people over on reddit are tearing into it just based on the preview.... I'm still looking for a fully copy.
Why are we dignifying it by calling it a "study"? It's not published in a journal. It's not undergone peer-review. It's a "working paper" on the NBER website. It's not the same thing. If it was legitimate, they would have submitted it to a legitimate journal and gotten it published. They have not, as it stands.
How long is it going to take for news sources to bother to check whether something has undergone peer-review before they start citing it as "science"? Let alone the "most comprehensive study yet"?
Picture reversing the time vector. Do you think you can gently throw an object to Charon escape just by choosing some clever trajectory? No? Then why do you think it will work that way and land with a gentle velocity with time flowing in the opposite direction?
That's the point. The escape velocity on Charon is 580 meters per second. So even something with no momentum when it arrived at Charon would be falling at 580 m/s (1300 mph) when it hit the ground. Picture shooting Mount Everest into the ground at that velocity. Is this really what you'd expect to see as a result, it holding together and just sitting in a hole? Of course not, it'd shatter and explode massively, kick out a rim, fill in the transient crater with debris, etc - aka, a crater forming event. And that's the bare minimum impact velocity, realistic impacts would be far harder (dozens of kilometers per second) in the overwhelming majority of situations..
I love how Alan Stern and the rest of the team go through lengths to call Pluto a planet. This time he even laid particular emphasis on calling Pluto-Charon a binary planet. :)
Great team. Great project. Great results. Just amazing.
It's really weird. I've heard a lot of people speculate that it's just an asteroid that "landed gently" in Charon's low gravity or something by being on a really lucky trajectory. But it just doesn't work that way. Picture running the time axis in reverse. Does one think that there's a particular trajectory that they could pick the rock back up and throw it back into space without requiring a lot of energy? The fact is that even on a body like Charon, big chunks of rock can't just gently settle down.
It's just a really weird thing to see.
It seems more complicated than that (even ignoring that impacts don't generally make heart shapes). For example, have you seen the carbon monoxide data? It's all clustered in that area. Why would an asteroid make carbon monoxide cluster there?
There's some really interesting things going on. Take a look at this picture and think of what it looks like to you:
Link.
Doesn't it look like... well... a shoreline?
Now take a look at those fractures in Sputnik Planum - notice how they have a curious inner ridge:
Link
Where else have we seen that before? Oh right, Europa:
Link
It's the shape of a liquid welling up through a crack and freezing due to a drop in pressure.
To me, this shows all the signs of a cryosea underneath an ice cap. Which leads to the question: can that occur on Pluto? And the answer is, "probably". With N2, CO, and CH4, you can get eutectics with triple points as low as 51K (a naive solar equilibrium-temperature calculation for pluto's surface, without any other sources of heat, reaches up to 55K). Add neon into the mix and it gets down to 24,6K. The key is, these liquids can't exist on the surface - they require pressure to exist. Which means that they can only exist as aquifers and subglacial lakes/seas. Pure nitrogen requires about 18 meters of pure nitrogen ice (more because it'd have pore space and be mixed with lower density ices). Pure neon would require about 3x as much.
The flat areas in Tombaugh Regio have two radically different appearances. One is the aforementioned area that looks like sea ice with frozen cracks (Sputnik Planum). The other is what's being called a "pitted" terrain. The latter touches the "shore" of the regio, while the former is deep in the middle (at least, from the pictures revealed so far). If one wanted to step even further out onto the limb here, they could posit that the "pitted" terrain involves these ices sitting directly on "bedrock" (which in a pluto context here is water ice), while the terrain that looks like sea ice would have liquid dozens of meters or more down.
But this is all just along one line of thinking. There's just so many possibilities right now. One notices, for example, similarities with various pluto features and frost-heaving earth features like pingos and ice wedges. But it could be something completely new entirely. This isn't water we're dealing with.
A real crazy thing is to think about how there might be vertitable explosive processes on Pluto. Solid nitrogen that forms due to decompression undergoes an energetic glass to crystalline transition. And overall does really weird stuff when freezing (start about a minute in).
Also note that there is nitrogen being lost from Pluto. Lots - 500 tonnes an hour. Over geological timeperiods, that's a massive, massive amount. Pluto loses its atmosphere 2 1/2 orders of magnitude faster than Mars. And yet it's still there. So where's it coming from? The team already pointed out that there doesn't seem to be a planetwide layer of deep nitrogen ice. To me that only seems to leave the possibility that it comes from deeper within the planet. But for it to move from deeper within to the top means a fluid (an aquifer), not an ice (either that or serious tectonics dragging up 500 tonnes an hour!). And given that Pluto's crust provides pre
My mother sometimes sends me checks from the states. The bank cashiers are always confused by them and have to get their managers, who eventually sign off on them. The last time I was at the bank with a check the cashier spent several minutes insisting to me that they can't accept checks before going back and getting approval.
Checks have no place in this modern world.
Good to see you guys catching up on credit cards. When are you going to finally modernize your banking system as well? ;)
Anyway, I can attest to the point of this article, in Iceland you see those little portable card readers (I don't know what they're called in English, they look like this) everywhere, whether it's someone walking around between tents at a campsite collecting the day's fees or some unknown band playing a little gig in a bar - a lot more often than you see them in the states.
Solar Impulse is a 30kW airplane. Cooling fans are nothing compared to that. Furthermore, I also wrote: "Or if you want it to be passive, a greenhouse window opener to open up the insulation when it gets hot".
This isn't rocket science here. Everyone who works with large format battery packs knows that you can't just cover them in foam insulation and pretend that's good enough. You don't have to go to the sort of extremes Tesla and GM go to - Nissan's Leaf doesn't even use cooling fans. But it does use cooling channels with passive forced air coming from the car's motion, as well as pad heaters to warm them up when it's too cold. Because they're not so daft as to think that you can just pack them in insulation and call that good.
You know nothing about me, let's leave it at that.
As I said - "I'm not faulting them for their oversight - bad decisions happen in every engineering project."
But as I also said: "But this doesn't strike me as any sort of unusual nor unexpected situation. News flash, temperature-sensitive batteries need proper temperature regulation rather than just being slathered in foam, details at 11...."
Building a manned solar powered airplane to make such long runs is very much a new and challenging thing. Designing large format battery packs, not so much.
Right about average. The average US driver drives 13.476 miles per year and goes an average of 10 years between accidents.
Potassium nitrate foliar spray!
What's wrong with, you know, a simple thermostat-controlled fan, like most large battery packs use? Or if you want it to be passive, a greenhouse window opener to open up the insulation when it gets hot?
I'm not faulting them for their oversight - bad decisions happen in every engineering project. But this doesn't strike me as any sort of unusual nor unexpected situation. News flash, temperature-sensitive batteries need proper temperature regulation rather than just being slathered in foam, details at 11....
Or maybe he meant "morel boost". I mean, they're based out of California so some trendy hipster food with wild mushrooms and the word "boost" in the name might be what's needed to get the job done.
"Yes, André, I finally finished replacing the batteries. But, wait a minute, what's this?..." (BAM! BAM!) "Oh damn it, I just noticed that there's some serious cracks in the fuselage! I'm going to need several more months to get her flightworthy..."
Do realize that LORRI isn't just a camera, it's actually more of a telescope. And they can expose the images as long as they want, and even stack them if they want.
If you think it's hard to get pictures on the sunlit side, that's nothing - they actually plan to try to get pictures on the side *not* lit by the sun, just by the pathetically weak light reflected by Charon. Getting images on the lit side is easy, but the dark side is going to be very difficult, involving lots of stacking.
I'm glad to see this finally coming to a head. It seems that every last bloody body that we've encountered in the solar system has been the same story: "Wow, this is showing signs of activity, we expected it to be a cold dead world because it's too small....". It's about time that people accept that there's something we've been overlooking in terms of heat release. At least one thing, possibly multiple in different situations.