Except that the planets haven't, according to current research, always been where they are, so it's not accurate to say that a particular planet "cleared" its own neighborhood. Jupiter cleared most planets' neighborhoods. And anyway a "cleared" measure is largely just a measure of distance from the star rather than a measure of any planet's properties.
Concerning extrasolar "planets" (which the IAU says aren't really planets): The "cleared the neighborhood" claim isn't about being merely "outweighed". Eris "outweighs" the other stuff in its neighborhood, as does Ceres, but they're still called dwarfs. There is no way that we could resolve the "cleared the neighborhood" pseudo-standard for exoplanets (even if they weren't explicitly ruled out) with any sort of technology we're going to have in the next century.
As for the doubles, sorry, the IAU refused to consider that - yet another stupid decision on their part. And, yes, Jupiter-Sol should be considered a (bare minimum) binary object - but, critically, not a "binary star" or "binary planet" because they're neither both stars nor both planets.
And yet another issue, the IAU isn't even paying attention to their own stupid standard. Quaoar is significantly larger than Ceres and its diameter is known to a margin of error of a mere 5 kilometers - why exactly isn't it a dwarf planet? The IAU hasn't bothered to declare any new dwarf planets since 2006, even though there's tons that should be declared who we know to far better accuracy than was known to the IAU when they made their previous declarations.
The concept of a planet is pretty intuitive - it orbits a star and its big enough that its gravity has pulled it into a sphere. That's what pretty much everyone on Earth outside of the IAU understands a planet to be. The concept that you have to try to pretend that diversity doesn't exist in order to shrink down the list to a number whose names schoolchildren can memorize is a horribly unscientific approach.
We need to accept the universe that nature has created for us. There are terrestrial planets. There are gas giants. Ice giants. Eccentric giants. Hot jupiters. Super-earths. Water worlds. And yes, dwarf planets. They're all planets by pretty much any reasonable definition. In fact, they're a lot more similar to terrestrial planets than gas giants are.
We should be thrilled by the number of worlds in our solar system instead of intimidated by it and trying to write them out by a ridiculous definition that leads to absurd consequences. And uses nomenclature ("dwarf") that even the IAU itself doesn't use elsewhere (do they plan to declare "dwarf stars" to not be stars?). An "adjective-noun" is also a member of the group "noun" in any realistic nomenclature.
Extrasolar planets aren't planets according to the IAU either. You could have an exact replica of Earth orbiting an exact replica of the sun with an exact replica of Earth's "neighborhood" and it'd still not be called a planet. And even if they didn't arbitrary exclude them, we'd have no way to be able to determine if any of them had "cleared their neighborhood" without sending a probe there - aka, effectively impossible at this point in time. Not that "cleared the neighborhood" makes any sense, there's lots of objects in Earth's neighborhood, and new ones keep entering our neighborhood. And many of the planets don't appear to have formed in their current neighborhood anyway. Plus, Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And since when does what something "is" have anything to do with where it happens to be currently located? Would it make any sense for a cow be declared a "dwarf cow" and not really a cow if it was exactly the same but in a location that had several cowlike animal species near it? Would it make sense to make a definition of a "dwarf river", with the only rationale being to limit the total number of rivers in the world to 8?
I can just imagine an IAU-inspired Star Trek:
Kirk: "What is that planet on the viewscreen? Prepare a team to beam down to the surface."
Spock: "Actually, captain, we cannot be certain that it is a planet."
Kirk: "Spock, I can see it right there, it's a planet - it's a huge round thing orbiting its star."
Spock: "Yes, captain, but I have not yet completed my scan to see whether it has 'cleared its neighborhood'; I need to first find out if any asteroids that cross its orbit. The survey will take a few hours to complete."
Kirk: "But Spock... it's right there, it's a planet! It's even got oceans, an atmosphere, clouds - it's a veritable second Earth!"
Spock: "It could be a dwarf planet, which isn't really a planet, despite being having 'planet' in the title." (beat) "Captain, I have been reviewing the IAU's definition; because it's not orbiting the sun, it's not only not a planet, it's not anything at all."
Kirk: "Okay, okay - somebody prepare a team to beam down to the nothing-at-all that looks like a damned planet!"
A fraction of a percent of the AMA has, out of concern of students having to learn so many bones, voted to declare that there are only 8 bones in the human body, and all of the others are dwarf bones, and that those don't really count as bones. And to tell the difference between a bone and a dwarf bone you have to do a detailed study using a definition that nobody can agree on. But, if you move a bone from one part of the body to the other, it can change between being a bone and not being a bone. Also, other mammals don't have bones at all - their bodies are held together by "something" that isn't defined at all.
Only a tiny fraction of those present at the AMA vote were in a field doing anything with anatomy; the rests were bacteriologists. But nonetheless, despite the criticism by anatomists, the AMA has adamantly refused to revisit their decision.
One of the researchers who posted on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum wrote about his efforts to design a miniprobe to decelerate at Pluto - if I remember right, 20kg - using atmospheric drag. But the calculations showed it would have to be made of something with a density like that of carbon aerogel (even silicon aerogel would be too much), making deployment of the deceleraiton system unrealistic, and undergo huge G-loads. He also added that people always suggest inflatable decelerators, but the problem with them is that they begin vibrating and rip themselves apart.
I have my own crazy ideas for deceleration involving magnetic and/or RF traps to hold fine ionized (or superconducting) dusts or ions in place around a craft (thus removing all issues of deployment difficulty and structural strength from the equation and allowing for a ridiculously thin layer). No, I haven't yet done any simulations to know whether the mass of such a system works out better than that of a typical drag chute.
But collapsing powers can be dangerous. If art mimicked reality then the Klingons would be slowly trying to reestablish their power base with invasions, assassinations, etc, but the federation would keep avoiding doing anything to stop them out of fear of provoking them and ending up in war. But the Klingons would no matter what the Federation actually did continue to view the Federation as being deliberately provocative and trying to encircle them and take advantage of their collapse.
I am of precisely the opposite opinion of you. Energy wouldn't be the problem, minerals would be.
First of all, plastics are essentially zero problem if energy isn't scarce. The concept that plastics requires "oil from the ground" is a complete myth. "Oil" can be made - easily - given water, carbon dioxide (from the air), and energy. It can also be made from pretty much anything containing carbon and hydrogen, burned with insufficient oxygen to form "town gas" (H2 + CO). The only reason we use oil to make plastics is because, as it stands, it's the cheapest way. As far as energy goes, oil is actually a very expensive source - compare the price per joule to the price per joule of coal or natural gas. Oil is used because it's convenient for transportation applications.
One can readily envision a world where we dramatically increase our energy output without requiring significant demands on the environment, such as say the development of an economical form of fusion power. But what's harder to envision is a "post scarcity" situation where we extract vast amounts of mineral resources in a manner everyone is happy about. I mean, people are already furious about the damage we do to the environment to account for our current levels of consumption - what about this sort of future where "anyone can get anything whenever they want"? I once was on the naive belief that perhaps we might reach a situation that people could be happy with for resource extraction by in-situ extraction means rather than surface mining, so that all that you need on the surface is a borehole and an access road (and even the latter could technically be made to disappear given sufficiently low transportation energy costs to haul things there and away through the air). But people seem as mad if not even more mad with in-situ resource extraction as they are with surface mining - look at all of the fracking protests.
In what sort of situation are we supposed to get all of the mineral resources for such a society in a manner in which everyone will be happy?
Not exactly. 62Ni has a higher binding energy per nucleon than 56Fe. The misconception exists because not much 62Ni is produced in supernovae while large amounts of 56Fe is; for the most part, 56Fe represents the highest binding energy reached in a supernova..
Alpha emitters are harmless outside the body, but inside the body they're far worse per unit decay energy than beta or gamma emitters. Read about how ridiculously dangerous polonium 209 is, for example - there's a reason it was chosen by the Russians as an assassination tool. Even with orders of magnitude higher half life than 209Po, 239Pu is still very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. If you had some "scattered as shot across the floor", you're making an inhalation hazard.
And that a gram is more than a couple thousand times times the LD50 level.
A gram of D+T also represents nearly a hundred bloody megawatt hours of power generation.
But anyway, back to cost. The LD50 for tritiated water is, what, 0.1mg/kg? So a lethal dose costs $50. That's orders of magnitude more expensive than a lethal dose of almost any common poison on Earth. Cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, any rat poison, insect poison... pretty much anything toxic that comes to mind in your every day life costs orders of magnitude less for a lethal dose than tritium. Inventories in the kilograms? Some industries keep inventories of toxic materials in kiloton quantities.
No, it's toxicity can't be ignored. But on the scale of "poisonous things", tritium is pretty far down there.
Well, if you want to absorb neutrons, you want a neutron poison like boron. If you want to moderate them, you want something rich in some combination of hydrogen (most effective, but too capture prone for some needs), deuterium (pretty good at moderating, extremely low capture, very expensive), helium (zero capture, fairly expensive, not a very efficient moderator, esp from a volume perspective), carbon (pretty low capture, fair at moderation, cheap, but need to avoid buildup of wigner energy), or oxygen (quite low capture, cheap, but subpar at moderation).
No, deuterium is not radioactive. Tritium is trivially radioactive. No, the fissile material is bombarded by the fusion neutrons; it's hybrid fission/fusion.
No, this engine proposal is quite doable. Because most of the power doesn't come from fusion, it comes from fission. It's a subcritical fast reactor which uses fusion neutrons only to achieve criticality. It's like an ADR. ADR designs usually only call for about 10% or so of the neutrons from an accelerator; the same would apply for a fission neutron source.
Some people freak out about tritium because it's radioactive. But really, while tritiated water is poisonous, we deal with lots of stuff in our everyday lives that are far more dangerous, with far lower LD50s. And outside the body it does nothing, the beta is just too weak to penetrate. And given that tritium costs about $50k per gram, you're never going to encounter a large quantity of it at once.
It's worse - as is noted below, it's not actually a fusion engine proposal, but rather a hybrid fission/fusion proposal. It's not a new concept, but the key is, a lot of (read: "most of") the power is to come from fission.
I really can't think that Boeing would be so daft as to think that anyone would ever use this on Earth. Surely the point of the patent is to use it for exploration of other planets. Right? I hope so...
Note that it's not 100% necessary for neutron bombardment to create radioactive material. One of the nice things about incident induced radioactivity is that it's avoidable and/or manageable... albeit with tradeoffs that usually mean that accepting some radioactivity is the best option. You could for example have enough of a neutron absorbing material to fully consume the neutrons - for example, boron, which breaks down via the huge cross section B10(n,alpha)7Li reaction. 7Li neutron capture produces 8Li, which quickly decades into 8Be (releasing a ton of energy), which virtually instantly breaks down into two alphas. B10 neutron capture (much rarer than (n, alpha) yields B11, which is stable. B11 neutron capture produces B12, which very rapidly breaks down into C12 (stable). C12 neutron capture is rare and turns into stable C13. The only way you get to anything that's radioactive that doesn't instantly break down is to get a rare neutron capture of C13 after going through all of those previous steps, some of which are rare. And that "radioactive isotope" is only C14, which is a naturally occurring radioisotope we're evolved to live with, with a not very powerful decay. And if you isolate it (which isn't anywhere on the difficulty scale of, say, removing actinides from nuclear waste), it's highly valuable.
Another good example would be to make your structure out of beryllium. Beryllium is a superb metal in almost every respect and would be widely used in the world if not only for two niggling details: its dust is highly toxic and it's very expensive. But things do get built out of it (and it's not hazardous when there's no dust). 9Be capture produces 10Be, which is radioactive, but with a half life of 1.5 million years, the radiation level is extremely small, you'd need a lot of it to present a hazard. Which would never happen; 10Be has a reasonably high neutron capture cross section, becoming 11Be, which breaks down into 11B, which we've already covered above.
You can also get additional reactions to the above cases with fast neutrons, but they generally only improve the situation.
Pretty much anything out of light elements poses little to no hazard from induced radioactivity. You start to get a bit once you get to aluminum, but not much - aluminum has to go through an awful lot of captures to turn into a silicon or phosphorus isotope with a relevant half life, the amount transmuted is pretty irrelevant in most situations. It's only if you need higher strength or heat tolerance than aluminum (or better, lithium-aluminum) can give you that you start getting into problems - titanium, iron, iron alloying agents, other common structural metals, they all have significant issues with induced radioactivity. But even with them, it's still nothing on the scale of, say, waste fuel rods.
This will be short, as this post is way late - but given that the organization seeking independence for Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire called itself the " Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization", clearly your claim that this is an invention of Tito is nonsense. IMRO fought the Ottomans under the slogan "Macedonia for Macedonians", and for about a decade managed to maintain a sort of semiautonomous region before being nearly wiped out; they only then switched courses to trying to get Macedonia taken over as a region of Bulgaria to get away from the Ottomans (a region still to be called "Macedonia"). When there was later talk of trying to partition up Macedonia, they reacted by assassinating the Bulgarian prime minister (eventually the Bulgarian army wiped out IMRO).
Of course Tito took advantage of and encouraged Macedonian identity. But it existed long before that; the folk tales of the area have always talked of their connection to ancient Macedonia (which, by the way, is supported by the genetics - the speakers of the southern Slavic languages don't have significant amounts of any of the so-called "Slavic genes", such as haplogroup R1a; genetically, they're mostly "locals", and more to the point, the (largely immigrant) residents of Greek Macedonia have even more of the haplogroup!)
And for what it's worth, you should probably be aware of what a "Bulgarian" is to begin with - given that the Bulgars weren't Slavic, they were Turkic (both genetically and linguistically), and not from Bulgaria, but Ukraine (most closely related to the Crimean Tatars today). They "took over" the people in present-day Bulgaria and beyond, and I put that in quotes because there's no evidence that the locals at all resisted their "conquest"; they had been heavily taxed by the Byzantines. But rather than imposing a turkic language and culture on the locals, the turkic language and culture of their new leaders steadily died out over the course of about 200 years.
The short of it is, "Bulgarians" just means "the locals who were already in the area at the time Bulgar raiders freed them from the Byzantines". Thraco-bulgarians were the people of Thrace (now Bulgaria) so conquered. Macedono-bulgarians were the people of Macedonia so conquered.
There's a lot more that could be written, but I'll leave it at that.
Slovenia was not the center of a province called "Rome" for hundreds of years. Northern Mexico was not part of a province called "America" for hundreds of years. The appropriate analogy would be if the US later collapsed, and the southewestern border states were overrun by Mexicans (and then later other peoples), and then much later said people insisted on being called Americans, even though they had interbred with their conquerors.
Note that the people in Greek Macedonia are no more "direct descendants" of the ancient Macedonians than the people of modern Macedonia. Probably less, due to the huge refugee influx that was settled there.
Due to the fragmentary attestation of this language or dialect, various interpretations are possible.[8] Suggested phylogenetic classifications of Macedonian include:[9]
An Indo-European language that is a close cousin to Greek and also related to Thracian and Phrygian languages, suggested by A. Meillet (1913) and I. I. Russu (1938),[10] or part of a Sprachbund encompassing Thracian, Illyrian and Greek (Kretschmer 1896, E. Schwyzer 1959). An Illyrian dialect mixed with Greek, suggested by K. O. Müller (1825) and by G. Bonfante (1987). A Greek dialect, part of the North-Western (Locrian, Aetolian, Phocidian, Epirote) variants of Doric Greek, suggested amongst others by N.G.L. Hammond (1989) Olivier Masson (1996), Michael Meier-Brügger (2003) and Johannes Engels (2010).[11][12][13][14] A northern Greek dialect, related to Aeolic Greek and Thessalian, suggested among others by A.Fick (1874) and O.Hoffmann (1906).[11][15] A Greek dialect with a non-Indo-European substratal influence, suggested by M. Sakellariou (1983). A sibling language of Greek within Indo-European, Macedonian and Greek forming two subbranches of a Greco-Macedonian subgroup within Indo-European (sometimes called "Hellenic"),[8] suggested by Joseph (2001), Georgiev (1966),[16] Hamp & Adams (2013),[17]
There's no question that ancient Macedonian was related to Greek (most likely to a northern dialect such as Aetolian) - the question is how and to what degree vs. that of the Illyrians and Thracians. As mentioned, by the 3rd century BC it had become nearly fully absorbed, but not without first contributing words and grammar of its own. An example of the Greek view toward the Macedonians was that Macedonians were initially banned from competing in the Olympic Games (which was only for Greek Men); the first Macedonian to be allowed to compete was Alexander 1, who was made to first prove that he was of sufficient Greek ancestry (note: if that incident ever even happened - there's some suggestion that Alexander's competition in the Olympics may have been a later addition to try to prove their Greek credentials). But even if we take the story at face value, the fact that they demanded proof that he was sufficiently Greek (something not asked of any other competitors) should be a more than sufficient indicator of their views of Macedonians at the time.
Greece: "Hey Russia, I'm broke. Can you help me out with some money? I'll be your best friend!" Russia: "Um, okay." (beat) "Hey, China, I'm broke. Can you help me out with some money? I'll be your best friend!" China: "Um, okay." (beat) "Wait, uh oh......"
Oh, and as for leaving the EU: you may end up unpleasantly surprised. There's only one treaty that governed Greece's accession to the EU and Eurozone, not too. You can't be "half in violation" of a treaty and kicked out of "half of it". If you start printing your own parallel currency, you're in violation of the treaty, and you're out of both the EU and the Eurozone.
Now, of course, Brussels could legislate a new mutually agreed upon exception for you. But do you really think they want to?
I'm not from Macedonia, although I know people there. Both of your sides need to read up on your history. Macedon was located between the traditional Greek city-states and the Thracian tribes (and others like the Illyrians), and had a culture and language closer to that of the Greeks but with strong Thracian and Illyrian influence (for example, they used both Greek, Thracian, and Illyrian names). The ancient Macedonians sought recognition as "Greek" from their southern neighbors, as Greece was the heart of wealth and culture; by contrast, the ancient Greeks debated heavily among themselves whether Macedonians were actually Greeks or not and many were not willing to accept them. The issue was only settled they were conquered by Philip (obviously not wanting to say that they had been conquered by barbarians;) ) The Macedonian leaders' habits of adopting the cultures of the countries that they conquered made it a relatively moot point anyway. Macedon was near present day Thessalonica. The country of Macedonia's claim to the history of Philip and Alexander is pretty weak; they did not extend their empire particularly far up the Vardar / Axios (at the time, Illyria), and where they did they stayed near the river. However, future rulers of Macedonia did. By the time of the Roman conquest, what was Macedonia had become modern Macedonia plus modern Albania and the northern half of Greece. This become the Roman province of Macedonia, which existed for hundreds of years. Classical Greece remained its own separate entity under Roman control, Achaia.
Let's repeat: Modern Macedonia was the center of the Roman province of Macedonia for hundreds of years. Yes, they have a right to the name.
During the Byzantine times, a series of waves of Slavic invaders (the most powerful being a later wave, the Bulgars) moved into the area, overrunning not just today's Macedonia, but the entire interior of Greece. Their control of these areas lasted hundreds of years and they interbred with the local populations. Greek speakers retained control of the coasts, and eventually re-expanded back into the interior; the populations there were subsequently re-Helenized.
The area that is modern day Macedonia was subsequently traded off between one empire and the next all the way up to the modern period. Greece, after gaining its independence from the Ottomans (again, initially only in the southern portion of of what is modern Greece - the part that was traditional, pre-Macedonian-era Greece), progressively took over Ottoman lands to the north and northeast in the 1800s, expanding into the area formerly occupied by the city-state of Macedon, and even the areas once occupied by the Thracians. These areas were steadily Helenized, especially in the 1920s with the influx of large numbers of Anatolian Greek refugees - 270 thousand in Thessaloniki alone.
The basic summary of it is: there are no ancient Macedonians anymore, and nobody has a "pure" claim on the name. But both sides have ancient Macedonian "breeding". Neither speak the ancient Macedonian language (even the ancient Macedonians stopped speaking their language by the 3th century BC), although Greek is certainly closer. Both Greek Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia are located in the heart of areas called Macedonia for centuries - Greek Macedonia being the heart of the original Macedonian empire, and the Republic of Macedonia being the heart of the later kingdom and the Roman province of Macedonia. So yes, you have every right to criticize the Republic of Macedonia's cooption of Alexander and Philip. But you're in the wrong when you try to act like they have no claim to the name.
Should each state in the US have its own currency? Yes, less (fewer) currencies often are a good thing. A powerful shared currency provides all sorts of benefits versus a bunch of little weak currencies. But the devil is in the implementation details. 49 of 50 US states (Vermont is the exception) have laws banning the running of deficits, and states can't issue debt in the same manner as the federal government. This exposes state budgets to a lot more risk to flucuations in their economies, but this is partly compensated for by federal spending on services that states don't have to pay for. Europe did not set up anything like this, and it's paying the price for it.
Hopefully this will provide the impetus for the sort of fiscal integration system necessary to avoid these problems in the future. No, they're not going to agree to just pass off most national services to Brussels. But they could create an equivalent, such as an EU-wide "insurance system" to countries that provides temporary payouts to countries experiencing downturns, so that they don't have to suffer great pain during brief recessions due to an inability to run a short-term deficit. Longer term fundamental issues of changing economic strength would however have to be dealt with as the aid slowly tapers off.
(The EU could also really use an insurance system against the economic consequences of major trade decisions, such as embargos, so that countries like Russia can't play them against each other by retaliating hard against certain states more than others)
Europe appears to be prepared to maintain the current minimal level of bank support going until the 20th (yep, these bank runs are happening even with the banks still receiving some support, just not as much as they were before). On the 20th Greece will miss a payment that will give then the grounds to withdraw the remainder of the support propping up the banks - any banks still around then will probably collapse immediately (assumedly being nationalized). If Greece doesn't resort to printing currency (whether they call it an "IOU" or not) before then, they will have to at that point.
Greece has a press in Athens to print 20 euro notes and has recently started talking about using it to make up their Euro shortfall. They're seriously playing with fire here, as that would be counterfeiting if they're not authorized to do so. There's talk about launching lawsuits to try to get the courts to grant them the right to print more euros. But how far they're willing to play that risky game if they don't get any sort of authorization... well, only time will tell. If Greece prints counterfeit euros, there's really no limit to how extreme this thing could escalate - Europe would be forced to wall off trade with Greece and even potentially travel restrictions to avoid them getting into circulation. The calm, measured response on Greece's part would just be to introduce a parallel drachma currency rather than printing euros, but Syriza isn't exactly famous for calm, measured responses. And nobody has a drachma press - it takes longer to set up a press for mass production of a new currency than one might think. Really, where this all could lead is hard to speculate....
Ooh, fun thought: if you leave the EU then we won't have to listen any more to all of your "FYROM" whining whenever Macedonia wants to do anything with Europe. That'll be nice.:)
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Except that the planets haven't, according to current research, always been where they are, so it's not accurate to say that a particular planet "cleared" its own neighborhood. Jupiter cleared most planets' neighborhoods. And anyway a "cleared" measure is largely just a measure of distance from the star rather than a measure of any planet's properties.
Concerning extrasolar "planets" (which the IAU says aren't really planets): The "cleared the neighborhood" claim isn't about being merely "outweighed". Eris "outweighs" the other stuff in its neighborhood, as does Ceres, but they're still called dwarfs. There is no way that we could resolve the "cleared the neighborhood" pseudo-standard for exoplanets (even if they weren't explicitly ruled out) with any sort of technology we're going to have in the next century.
As for the doubles, sorry, the IAU refused to consider that - yet another stupid decision on their part. And, yes, Jupiter-Sol should be considered a (bare minimum) binary object - but, critically, not a "binary star" or "binary planet" because they're neither both stars nor both planets.
And yet another issue, the IAU isn't even paying attention to their own stupid standard. Quaoar is significantly larger than Ceres and its diameter is known to a margin of error of a mere 5 kilometers - why exactly isn't it a dwarf planet? The IAU hasn't bothered to declare any new dwarf planets since 2006, even though there's tons that should be declared who we know to far better accuracy than was known to the IAU when they made their previous declarations.
... without including others
Exactly. They should be included, obviously.
The concept of a planet is pretty intuitive - it orbits a star and its big enough that its gravity has pulled it into a sphere. That's what pretty much everyone on Earth outside of the IAU understands a planet to be. The concept that you have to try to pretend that diversity doesn't exist in order to shrink down the list to a number whose names schoolchildren can memorize is a horribly unscientific approach.
We need to accept the universe that nature has created for us. There are terrestrial planets. There are gas giants. Ice giants. Eccentric giants. Hot jupiters. Super-earths. Water worlds. And yes, dwarf planets. They're all planets by pretty much any reasonable definition. In fact, they're a lot more similar to terrestrial planets than gas giants are.
We should be thrilled by the number of worlds in our solar system instead of intimidated by it and trying to write them out by a ridiculous definition that leads to absurd consequences. And uses nomenclature ("dwarf") that even the IAU itself doesn't use elsewhere (do they plan to declare "dwarf stars" to not be stars?). An "adjective-noun" is also a member of the group "noun" in any realistic nomenclature.
Extrasolar planets aren't planets according to the IAU either. You could have an exact replica of Earth orbiting an exact replica of the sun with an exact replica of Earth's "neighborhood" and it'd still not be called a planet. And even if they didn't arbitrary exclude them, we'd have no way to be able to determine if any of them had "cleared their neighborhood" without sending a probe there - aka, effectively impossible at this point in time. Not that "cleared the neighborhood" makes any sense, there's lots of objects in Earth's neighborhood, and new ones keep entering our neighborhood. And many of the planets don't appear to have formed in their current neighborhood anyway. Plus, Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And since when does what something "is" have anything to do with where it happens to be currently located? Would it make any sense for a cow be declared a "dwarf cow" and not really a cow if it was exactly the same but in a location that had several cowlike animal species near it? Would it make sense to make a definition of a "dwarf river", with the only rationale being to limit the total number of rivers in the world to 8?
I can just imagine an IAU-inspired Star Trek:
A fraction of a percent of the AMA has, out of concern of students having to learn so many bones, voted to declare that there are only 8 bones in the human body, and all of the others are dwarf bones, and that those don't really count as bones. And to tell the difference between a bone and a dwarf bone you have to do a detailed study using a definition that nobody can agree on. But, if you move a bone from one part of the body to the other, it can change between being a bone and not being a bone. Also, other mammals don't have bones at all - their bodies are held together by "something" that isn't defined at all.
Only a tiny fraction of those present at the AMA vote were in a field doing anything with anatomy; the rests were bacteriologists. But nonetheless, despite the criticism by anatomists, the AMA has adamantly refused to revisit their decision.
One of the researchers who posted on the Unmanned Spaceflight forum wrote about his efforts to design a miniprobe to decelerate at Pluto - if I remember right, 20kg - using atmospheric drag. But the calculations showed it would have to be made of something with a density like that of carbon aerogel (even silicon aerogel would be too much), making deployment of the deceleraiton system unrealistic, and undergo huge G-loads. He also added that people always suggest inflatable decelerators, but the problem with them is that they begin vibrating and rip themselves apart.
I have my own crazy ideas for deceleration involving magnetic and/or RF traps to hold fine ionized (or superconducting) dusts or ions in place around a craft (thus removing all issues of deployment difficulty and structural strength from the equation and allowing for a ridiculously thin layer). No, I haven't yet done any simulations to know whether the mass of such a system works out better than that of a typical drag chute.
But collapsing powers can be dangerous. If art mimicked reality then the Klingons would be slowly trying to reestablish their power base with invasions, assassinations, etc, but the federation would keep avoiding doing anything to stop them out of fear of provoking them and ending up in war. But the Klingons would no matter what the Federation actually did continue to view the Federation as being deliberately provocative and trying to encircle them and take advantage of their collapse.
I am of precisely the opposite opinion of you. Energy wouldn't be the problem, minerals would be.
First of all, plastics are essentially zero problem if energy isn't scarce. The concept that plastics requires "oil from the ground" is a complete myth. "Oil" can be made - easily - given water, carbon dioxide (from the air), and energy. It can also be made from pretty much anything containing carbon and hydrogen, burned with insufficient oxygen to form "town gas" (H2 + CO). The only reason we use oil to make plastics is because, as it stands, it's the cheapest way. As far as energy goes, oil is actually a very expensive source - compare the price per joule to the price per joule of coal or natural gas. Oil is used because it's convenient for transportation applications.
One can readily envision a world where we dramatically increase our energy output without requiring significant demands on the environment, such as say the development of an economical form of fusion power. But what's harder to envision is a "post scarcity" situation where we extract vast amounts of mineral resources in a manner everyone is happy about. I mean, people are already furious about the damage we do to the environment to account for our current levels of consumption - what about this sort of future where "anyone can get anything whenever they want"? I once was on the naive belief that perhaps we might reach a situation that people could be happy with for resource extraction by in-situ extraction means rather than surface mining, so that all that you need on the surface is a borehole and an access road (and even the latter could technically be made to disappear given sufficiently low transportation energy costs to haul things there and away through the air). But people seem as mad if not even more mad with in-situ resource extraction as they are with surface mining - look at all of the fracking protests.
In what sort of situation are we supposed to get all of the mineral resources for such a society in a manner in which everyone will be happy?
Not exactly. 62Ni has a higher binding energy per nucleon than 56Fe. The misconception exists because not much 62Ni is produced in supernovae while large amounts of 56Fe is; for the most part, 56Fe represents the highest binding energy reached in a supernova..
Alpha emitters are harmless outside the body, but inside the body they're far worse per unit decay energy than beta or gamma emitters. Read about how ridiculously dangerous polonium 209 is, for example - there's a reason it was chosen by the Russians as an assassination tool. Even with orders of magnitude higher half life than 209Po, 239Pu is still very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. If you had some "scattered as shot across the floor", you're making an inhalation hazard.
A gram of D+T also represents nearly a hundred bloody megawatt hours of power generation.
But anyway, back to cost. The LD50 for tritiated water is, what, 0.1mg/kg? So a lethal dose costs $50. That's orders of magnitude more expensive than a lethal dose of almost any common poison on Earth. Cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, any rat poison, insect poison... pretty much anything toxic that comes to mind in your every day life costs orders of magnitude less for a lethal dose than tritium. Inventories in the kilograms? Some industries keep inventories of toxic materials in kiloton quantities.
No, it's toxicity can't be ignored. But on the scale of "poisonous things", tritium is pretty far down there.
Well, usually one uses electron volts to measure the energies in the above reactions, but if you want watts just divide eV/s by 6.24e18.
Well, if you want to absorb neutrons, you want a neutron poison like boron. If you want to moderate them, you want something rich in some combination of hydrogen (most effective, but too capture prone for some needs), deuterium (pretty good at moderating, extremely low capture, very expensive), helium (zero capture, fairly expensive, not a very efficient moderator, esp from a volume perspective), carbon (pretty low capture, fair at moderation, cheap, but need to avoid buildup of wigner energy), or oxygen (quite low capture, cheap, but subpar at moderation).
Not to mention that there's tons of ways to make 3He here on Earth. Including the natural decay of tritium.
No, deuterium is not radioactive. Tritium is trivially radioactive. No, the fissile material is bombarded by the fusion neutrons; it's hybrid fission/fusion.
No, this engine proposal is quite doable. Because most of the power doesn't come from fusion, it comes from fission. It's a subcritical fast reactor which uses fusion neutrons only to achieve criticality. It's like an ADR. ADR designs usually only call for about 10% or so of the neutrons from an accelerator; the same would apply for a fission neutron source.
Some people freak out about tritium because it's radioactive. But really, while tritiated water is poisonous, we deal with lots of stuff in our everyday lives that are far more dangerous, with far lower LD50s. And outside the body it does nothing, the beta is just too weak to penetrate. And given that tritium costs about $50k per gram, you're never going to encounter a large quantity of it at once.
It's worse - as is noted below, it's not actually a fusion engine proposal, but rather a hybrid fission/fusion proposal. It's not a new concept, but the key is, a lot of (read: "most of") the power is to come from fission.
I really can't think that Boeing would be so daft as to think that anyone would ever use this on Earth. Surely the point of the patent is to use it for exploration of other planets. Right? I hope so...
Note that it's not 100% necessary for neutron bombardment to create radioactive material. One of the nice things about incident induced radioactivity is that it's avoidable and/or manageable... albeit with tradeoffs that usually mean that accepting some radioactivity is the best option. You could for example have enough of a neutron absorbing material to fully consume the neutrons - for example, boron, which breaks down via the huge cross section B10(n,alpha)7Li reaction. 7Li neutron capture produces 8Li, which quickly decades into 8Be (releasing a ton of energy), which virtually instantly breaks down into two alphas. B10 neutron capture (much rarer than (n, alpha) yields B11, which is stable. B11 neutron capture produces B12, which very rapidly breaks down into C12 (stable). C12 neutron capture is rare and turns into stable C13. The only way you get to anything that's radioactive that doesn't instantly break down is to get a rare neutron capture of C13 after going through all of those previous steps, some of which are rare. And that "radioactive isotope" is only C14, which is a naturally occurring radioisotope we're evolved to live with, with a not very powerful decay. And if you isolate it (which isn't anywhere on the difficulty scale of, say, removing actinides from nuclear waste), it's highly valuable.
Another good example would be to make your structure out of beryllium. Beryllium is a superb metal in almost every respect and would be widely used in the world if not only for two niggling details: its dust is highly toxic and it's very expensive. But things do get built out of it (and it's not hazardous when there's no dust). 9Be capture produces 10Be, which is radioactive, but with a half life of 1.5 million years, the radiation level is extremely small, you'd need a lot of it to present a hazard. Which would never happen; 10Be has a reasonably high neutron capture cross section, becoming 11Be, which breaks down into 11B, which we've already covered above.
You can also get additional reactions to the above cases with fast neutrons, but they generally only improve the situation.
Pretty much anything out of light elements poses little to no hazard from induced radioactivity. You start to get a bit once you get to aluminum, but not much - aluminum has to go through an awful lot of captures to turn into a silicon or phosphorus isotope with a relevant half life, the amount transmuted is pretty irrelevant in most situations. It's only if you need higher strength or heat tolerance than aluminum (or better, lithium-aluminum) can give you that you start getting into problems - titanium, iron, iron alloying agents, other common structural metals, they all have significant issues with induced radioactivity. But even with them, it's still nothing on the scale of, say, waste fuel rods.
This will be short, as this post is way late - but given that the organization seeking independence for Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire called itself the " Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization", clearly your claim that this is an invention of Tito is nonsense. IMRO fought the Ottomans under the slogan "Macedonia for Macedonians", and for about a decade managed to maintain a sort of semiautonomous region before being nearly wiped out; they only then switched courses to trying to get Macedonia taken over as a region of Bulgaria to get away from the Ottomans (a region still to be called "Macedonia"). When there was later talk of trying to partition up Macedonia, they reacted by assassinating the Bulgarian prime minister (eventually the Bulgarian army wiped out IMRO).
Of course Tito took advantage of and encouraged Macedonian identity. But it existed long before that; the folk tales of the area have always talked of their connection to ancient Macedonia (which, by the way, is supported by the genetics - the speakers of the southern Slavic languages don't have significant amounts of any of the so-called "Slavic genes", such as haplogroup R1a; genetically, they're mostly "locals", and more to the point, the (largely immigrant) residents of Greek Macedonia have even more of the haplogroup!)
And for what it's worth, you should probably be aware of what a "Bulgarian" is to begin with - given that the Bulgars weren't Slavic, they were Turkic (both genetically and linguistically), and not from Bulgaria, but Ukraine (most closely related to the Crimean Tatars today). They "took over" the people in present-day Bulgaria and beyond, and I put that in quotes because there's no evidence that the locals at all resisted their "conquest"; they had been heavily taxed by the Byzantines. But rather than imposing a turkic language and culture on the locals, the turkic language and culture of their new leaders steadily died out over the course of about 200 years.
The short of it is, "Bulgarians" just means "the locals who were already in the area at the time Bulgar raiders freed them from the Byzantines". Thraco-bulgarians were the people of Thrace (now Bulgaria) so conquered. Macedono-bulgarians were the people of Macedonia so conquered.
There's a lot more that could be written, but I'll leave it at that.
Slovenia was not the center of a province called "Rome" for hundreds of years. Northern Mexico was not part of a province called "America" for hundreds of years. The appropriate analogy would be if the US later collapsed, and the southewestern border states were overrun by Mexicans (and then later other peoples), and then much later said people insisted on being called Americans, even though they had interbred with their conquerors.
Note that the people in Greek Macedonia are no more "direct descendants" of the ancient Macedonians than the people of modern Macedonia. Probably less, due to the huge refugee influx that was settled there.
As described here:
There's no question that ancient Macedonian was related to Greek (most likely to a northern dialect such as Aetolian) - the question is how and to what degree vs. that of the Illyrians and Thracians. As mentioned, by the 3rd century BC it had become nearly fully absorbed, but not without first contributing words and grammar of its own. An example of the Greek view toward the Macedonians was that Macedonians were initially banned from competing in the Olympic Games (which was only for Greek Men); the first Macedonian to be allowed to compete was Alexander 1, who was made to first prove that he was of sufficient Greek ancestry (note: if that incident ever even happened - there's some suggestion that Alexander's competition in the Olympics may have been a later addition to try to prove their Greek credentials). But even if we take the story at face value, the fact that they demanded proof that he was sufficiently Greek (something not asked of any other competitors) should be a more than sufficient indicator of their views of Macedonians at the time.
Greece: "Hey Russia, I'm broke. Can you help me out with some money? I'll be your best friend!"
Russia: "Um, okay." (beat) "Hey, China, I'm broke. Can you help me out with some money? I'll be your best friend!"
China: "Um, okay." (beat) "Wait, uh oh......"
Oh, and as for leaving the EU: you may end up unpleasantly surprised. There's only one treaty that governed Greece's accession to the EU and Eurozone, not too. You can't be "half in violation" of a treaty and kicked out of "half of it". If you start printing your own parallel currency, you're in violation of the treaty, and you're out of both the EU and the Eurozone.
Now, of course, Brussels could legislate a new mutually agreed upon exception for you. But do you really think they want to?
I'm not from Macedonia, although I know people there. Both of your sides need to read up on your history. Macedon was located between the traditional Greek city-states and the Thracian tribes (and others like the Illyrians), and had a culture and language closer to that of the Greeks but with strong Thracian and Illyrian influence (for example, they used both Greek, Thracian, and Illyrian names). The ancient Macedonians sought recognition as "Greek" from their southern neighbors, as Greece was the heart of wealth and culture; by contrast, the ancient Greeks debated heavily among themselves whether Macedonians were actually Greeks or not and many were not willing to accept them. The issue was only settled they were conquered by Philip (obviously not wanting to say that they had been conquered by barbarians ;) ) The Macedonian leaders' habits of adopting the cultures of the countries that they conquered made it a relatively moot point anyway. Macedon was near present day Thessalonica. The country of Macedonia's claim to the history of Philip and Alexander is pretty weak; they did not extend their empire particularly far up the Vardar / Axios (at the time, Illyria), and where they did they stayed near the river. However, future rulers of Macedonia did. By the time of the Roman conquest, what was Macedonia had become modern Macedonia plus modern Albania and the northern half of Greece. This become the Roman province of Macedonia, which existed for hundreds of years. Classical Greece remained its own separate entity under Roman control, Achaia.
Let's repeat: Modern Macedonia was the center of the Roman province of Macedonia for hundreds of years. Yes, they have a right to the name.
During the Byzantine times, a series of waves of Slavic invaders (the most powerful being a later wave, the Bulgars) moved into the area, overrunning not just today's Macedonia, but the entire interior of Greece. Their control of these areas lasted hundreds of years and they interbred with the local populations. Greek speakers retained control of the coasts, and eventually re-expanded back into the interior; the populations there were subsequently re-Helenized.
The area that is modern day Macedonia was subsequently traded off between one empire and the next all the way up to the modern period. Greece, after gaining its independence from the Ottomans (again, initially only in the southern portion of of what is modern Greece - the part that was traditional, pre-Macedonian-era Greece), progressively took over Ottoman lands to the north and northeast in the 1800s, expanding into the area formerly occupied by the city-state of Macedon, and even the areas once occupied by the Thracians. These areas were steadily Helenized, especially in the 1920s with the influx of large numbers of Anatolian Greek refugees - 270 thousand in Thessaloniki alone.
The basic summary of it is: there are no ancient Macedonians anymore, and nobody has a "pure" claim on the name. But both sides have ancient Macedonian "breeding". Neither speak the ancient Macedonian language (even the ancient Macedonians stopped speaking their language by the 3th century BC), although Greek is certainly closer. Both Greek Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia are located in the heart of areas called Macedonia for centuries - Greek Macedonia being the heart of the original Macedonian empire, and the Republic of Macedonia being the heart of the later kingdom and the Roman province of Macedonia. So yes, you have every right to criticize the Republic of Macedonia's cooption of Alexander and Philip. But you're in the wrong when you try to act like they have no claim to the name.
Should each state in the US have its own currency? Yes, less (fewer) currencies often are a good thing. A powerful shared currency provides all sorts of benefits versus a bunch of little weak currencies. But the devil is in the implementation details. 49 of 50 US states (Vermont is the exception) have laws banning the running of deficits, and states can't issue debt in the same manner as the federal government. This exposes state budgets to a lot more risk to flucuations in their economies, but this is partly compensated for by federal spending on services that states don't have to pay for. Europe did not set up anything like this, and it's paying the price for it.
Hopefully this will provide the impetus for the sort of fiscal integration system necessary to avoid these problems in the future. No, they're not going to agree to just pass off most national services to Brussels. But they could create an equivalent, such as an EU-wide "insurance system" to countries that provides temporary payouts to countries experiencing downturns, so that they don't have to suffer great pain during brief recessions due to an inability to run a short-term deficit. Longer term fundamental issues of changing economic strength would however have to be dealt with as the aid slowly tapers off.
(The EU could also really use an insurance system against the economic consequences of major trade decisions, such as embargos, so that countries like Russia can't play them against each other by retaliating hard against certain states more than others)
Europe appears to be prepared to maintain the current minimal level of bank support going until the 20th (yep, these bank runs are happening even with the banks still receiving some support, just not as much as they were before). On the 20th Greece will miss a payment that will give then the grounds to withdraw the remainder of the support propping up the banks - any banks still around then will probably collapse immediately (assumedly being nationalized). If Greece doesn't resort to printing currency (whether they call it an "IOU" or not) before then, they will have to at that point.
Greece has a press in Athens to print 20 euro notes and has recently started talking about using it to make up their Euro shortfall. They're seriously playing with fire here, as that would be counterfeiting if they're not authorized to do so. There's talk about launching lawsuits to try to get the courts to grant them the right to print more euros. But how far they're willing to play that risky game if they don't get any sort of authorization... well, only time will tell. If Greece prints counterfeit euros, there's really no limit to how extreme this thing could escalate - Europe would be forced to wall off trade with Greece and even potentially travel restrictions to avoid them getting into circulation. The calm, measured response on Greece's part would just be to introduce a parallel drachma currency rather than printing euros, but Syriza isn't exactly famous for calm, measured responses. And nobody has a drachma press - it takes longer to set up a press for mass production of a new currency than one might think. Really, where this all could lead is hard to speculate....
Ooh, fun thought: if you leave the EU then we won't have to listen any more to all of your "FYROM" whining whenever Macedonia wants to do anything with Europe. That'll be nice. :)