Seriously, who wants to receive a rat's ass about Iceland? And who writes about countries on the asses of rats and then gives them out to people? Let me tell you, someone like *that* is who the US government should be investigating!
Jonsdottir said, 'This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media.
Notes to the Guardian (and to Slashdot for just copy-pasting it):
1) The name is "Jónsdóttir", not "Jonsdottir". I assume you know how to use accented characters; this isn't the 1980s. Jonsdottir is not only incorrect, but it would have a different pronunciation.
2) "Jónsdóttir" isn't a last name. It's a föðurnafn, or "patronymic". Think of it as an adjective, not a name -- in terms of actual usage, "Birgitta Jónsdóttir" should be thought of as "Birgitta, whose father is Jón." Saying "Jónsdóttir said" is like saying "Whose father is Jón said". You don't refer to people by their patronymics alone; they're only there for when you need clarity. Even phone books in Iceland are sorted by first name.
Anyway, I was going to make some joke about how, given the typical ignorance of most people about Iceland, and of Americans about the outside world in general, I wouldn't be surprised if the US tried to subpoena her kennitala (Icelandic "Social Security Number" equivalent)... but then I realized that I'd have to take the time to explain what's funny about that and it'd ruin it.;)
I'm from America, and am posting this as I'm being driven to the airport to catch a flight to Reykjavík to sign work and residence permit applications with my new employer.;) To anyone who's never been there: Iceland is just plain awesome. And to anyone who has the attitude of, "I wish I could move to X place..." -- don't be complacent. You *can* make a change in your life. It's not fantasy; people do it all the time. Right now: pull up a web browser, find an overseas job site, and start applying.:)
But... you don't seem to understand. You see, the sky daddy has a son, a cosmic Jewish zombie who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
There's an infinite number of things people fail to believe -- fingernail unicorns, pizza trolls, earbud elephants, bacterial senates, quagga cell phones, nuclear power plant elves, and on and on. To treat every belief of "Absurd-Thing-#81231237 does not exist" as though it's equivalent to a religion is to render the statement "does not exist" meaningless. There's *always* a possibility that any statement is false, even something like 1+1=2 -- but there's an implicit "beyond any reasonable doubt" in there. Aka, one could say, "I don't believe in God any more than either of us believe in fingernail unicorns, pizza trolls, earbud elephants, bacterial senates, quagga cell phones, and nuclear power plant gnomes, any more than we believe that 1 + 1 is not 2."
Are you going to call Mathematics a religion because Mathematicians don't qualify the equals sign in "1+1=2"? After all, there could be an practical-joking alien race that excels in mind control manipulating your neuron firing patterns to make you think that something that's actually an absurd statement is in fact perfectly logical....
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found themself shouting out answers to the problems in the Physics Bowl episode and getting weird looks from housemates;)
While things like this usually turn out to be experimental error, I don't think it's such a crazy notion. The bottom line is, we don't really know what causes the sort of wacky behavior that our universe exhibits at the extremes (quantum mechanics on the small end, relativity on the big end). It seems to me that our universe is in all likelyhood the manifestation of some other, very different exterior system.
Here's an example of shifting paradigms The standard interpretation of our universe involves an unknown "Dark Energy" pushing the universe apart, accelerating the expansion from the Big Bang. This is visible in such phenomena as photons gaining or losing energy as they pass through large-scale gravity wells, due to the energy of the potential well changing over time. Well, what happens if instead of viewing us as living in an inflating universe, we change the paradigm and view us as existing in a constant universe, but "shrinking"? Reduce the Planck length (and thus Planck time), for example, and all existing distances will seem magnified, all objects bound by forces will attempt to collapse inward, etc. Non-bound structures seem to be being pushed apart, an object passing through a large gravity well can gain energy, and so forth. But you also can get some interesting other phenomina. For example, if the changing of distance occurs irrespective of c, causing the ratio of c to change relative to other constants, this can be perceived as a shift in the speed of light as the universe ages -- something that some lines of evidence require in order to explain various phenomena in the early universe. In particular, this shifting-constants view is nice for explaining the flatness of the universe.
You could even take it one step further and posit that the the constants for distance or time are dependent on how many interactions with other particles or how strong the interactions with other particles the universe must consider for them (sort of a "compute time" analogy). For example, in a denser early universe, particles would each interact more strongly with many more particles than the average particle interacts with today (in particular, the strong force, since it's distance-limited). If this were to manifest in terms of variation in, say, an increase in Planck length/Planck time, you'd find that as the universe aged, it'd seem like the universe was being "pushed apart". Is a "compute time" analogy applicable to the universe? Who knows. But that's really the issue: we don't know what's causing our fundamental "constants" or some of the bizarre behavior of the universe to occur, so we can hardly act as though we know for certain that any given "constant" is really constant at all regions of spacetime. All we can go on is whatever data we take in, and new observations and analyses can reveal new insights.
"I don't care what papers he backed and what papers he didn't. "
Right. You don't care whether he backs denier papers -- all you care about is grabbing a couple random quotes with no context (something that can be done for pretty much any denier). As if the latter is what matters and the former is irrelevant.
Um, Muller was one of the main people who supported McKitrick and McIntyre's paper against the "Hockey Stick Graph". Before that, he was a big backer of Soon and Baliunas's denialist work.
What we're seeing here is a lovely bit of revisionist history. *Most* of the denialist scientists accept at least some tenets of global warming, so you can dig up old quotes for almost any of them. But it's simply a fact that Muller was one of the leading critics of the "Hockey Stick Graph", and now he's gone and published a graph that confirms the Hockey Stick.
As if ENSO and other factors don't dominate along the timescale of one decade.
Saying "there's been no warming in the last decade; therefore, global warming is BS" is like saying "I've not hit any stoplights in the past 5 miles; therefore, I'm not going to hit stoplights ever again." It's statistically insignificant.
Our planet's climate is a noisy system, due to weather and various oceanic and atmospheric current patterns. The noise is stronger than the signal. The signal needs several decades in order to dominate the noise.
FYI: At short timescales, noise dominates the climate signals (due to many factors, but one of the biggest being ENSO). The climate signal only dominates in time scales. So saying "global warming has stopped over a scale of X years", where X is less than ~25 or so, is absurd. Which is what that conversation about "statistical significance" that the article tries to obscure is about.
The issue is not *that* climate is changing. It's *how fast* climate is changing.
The last time Earth experienced a GHG surge and corresponding temperature rise and ocean acidification analogous to what we're now creating was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). It left the world such a different place that we declare what followed a new geological era (the Eocene).
We're currently quite busy creating the Anthropocene.
Okay, first off, to start at the end: your article about "picking apart some of the so called science in Avatar" begins with "Fortunately, James Cameron has a knack for science that rivals his moviemaking skills."? And did you read the section he added near the end after reading reader comments? He retracted most of his (already limited) criticisms to boot!
Come on, why not just give it up and accept that it's hard sci-fi and Firefly isn't?
Okay, back to the beginning.
The problem with the four legged animals as big as tigers and elephants and such is that it seems baseless.
It's not baseless at all. It's incredibly common even on Earth, let alone on a planet with a fully independent line of evolution. We have countless leg combinations. And even if you only want to count macroscopic animals (BTW: on a lower-gravity body like Pandora, the boundary for "macroscopic" becomes much larger), we have quadrapeds, bipeds (including all birds), some rare tripeds (kangaroos engage in tripedal movement at certain gaits), and animals with no legs, which is equivalent in locomotion to having an infinite number of infinitely small legs. At various times in Earth's history, animals with many legs *have* been the largest or among the largest species alive. For example, Jaekelopterus rhenaniae or Arthropleura
I haven't seen the movie since it came out but I don't recall there being any hard sci-fi reason that would explain all organisms having a way to interconnect. The compatibility between all organisims is overly complex and far fetched, and it's hard to think of any plausible reason why that would have come about (based on what I remember).
Are you kidding? On Earth we've come up with all sorts of absurdly complex, incredibly limited ways to try to communicate with each other (including between species, and even between life of different kingdoms -- let me tell you, a plant making its fruit turn bright colors and smell nice when the seeds inside are developed isn't just a coincidence).... and you're seriously trying to claim that on a planet that has a natural *planetwide superconducting network on it*, lifeforms wouldn't be at a massive evolutionary disadvantage to not be tapped into it? To reiterate, all tapped into that *same network*, *together*? The equivalent on Earth would be if sound on Earth carried for hundreds or thousands of miles and to make and to hear a sound, all species must use roughly the same frequency band. You really think that's not some *huge* evolutionary pressure toward long-range interspecies communication?
Terraforming is entirely plausible.
In the same sense that building a planet entirely out of plastic Elvis dolls is possible. But I really don't have time for this, because this is a week-long debate, and it's entirely tangential to the main point, that terraforming gravity is *literally* impossible. And on that subject...
Not sure what you mean by "terraforming gravity"...I don't see why they couldnt have only terraformed planets that had gravity similar to earth in the first place.
Because the Firefly universe is already absurd enough to begin with given how many habitable-zone worlds they cram into a single star system, and when you add the constraint that they additionally all have between, say, 0.8 and 1.25g, the concept gets even more ridiculous.
Anyway, I disagree that it is that far-fetched or would require absurd amounts of energy to create it.
Then you disagree with basic physics. Your problem, not mine. A gravity well represents a *tremendous* amount of energy. If you can violate that, you can create a perpetual motion machine.
In Avatar, when they are all standing on their ship and not floating, I would say that is the result of artificial gravity
What, exactly, is the problem with four-legged? In case you didn't notice, our planet is full of animals with numerous legs. As for the Na'vi, I can only assume you didn't bother to read my post, given that I clearly wrote:
the film team did interfere with the appearance of the Na'vi in order to make them more humanlike to make the audience bond with them better, mind you
The backstory and the world designed by the consultants involved a much more catlike, more unusual Na'vi. The team found that audiences had trouble identifying with them and had to change it. It's one of a series of a few notable but limited changes they had to make for such purposes.
Which selective pressure would have resulted in all animals being able to network with each other?
How on Earth do you not see the answer to this one?
The planets were earthlike because of teraforming, something which is plausible
First off, terraforming is borderline fantasy unless you're talking *extreme* future (waaaay too long of a conversation to have here), but beyond that, you can't "terraform gravity", which is why I wrote (and you again ignored), "even gravity."
Artificial gravity is also not that far fetched
Artificial gravity is just as far fetched as light sabers and the Force. Even if there was some way to create it, it would require a laughably absurd amount of energy to do so. AND it would need to behave totally unlike normal gravity, or else tidal forces would rip everything to shreds on those scales.
, and I think you would find it is also in Avatar
No, it is not in Avatar. The ISV Venture Star is based on Dr. Pellegrino's "Valkyrie". The crew live in pods at the end of two rotating arms -- just your standard "fake it using centripetal force" craft.
What makes you think their communicate was faster than light?
Did you even watch the show and movie? They're *constantly* having real-time conversations with people in the distant reaches of the solar system.
I'm sorry -- I get it. You liked Firefly and didn't like Avatar. You're hardly alone in that regard. But "good" does not inherently equal "hard" (nor does "good" inherently equal "not hard"). Some books/shows/movies/etc simply have better plots and writing than others.
Why was the lack of sound in space actually wrong?
If you put a speaker cone in space and turn it on to full blast, you hear nothing. It impacts essentially nothing, and thus there's no propagating wave to reach you. If you put an explosion in space, you *do* hear it. An explosion is a rapidly expanding wave of compressed gasses; it doesn't need a medium to carry sound. Basically anything that impacts or alters your spacecraft, space suit, etc in any non-trivial manner is audible.
In support of that, I'll point out that cross-country HVDC lines are relatively fragile and dynamite is cheap
1) One or two lines will not carry all of the nation's power. 2) Most carrying capacity on the grid is designed for peaks, and the average consumption is far lower. 3) Backup systems, such as peakers, are automatically a part of any sound grid -- present and future. 4) There's tons of infrastructure that dynamite can likewise damage.
Abundant, low impact power can achieve amazing things in terms of increasing carrying capacity. Iceland will soon be a net *tomato exporter*, for example. They build geothermal power plants, generate power from the water which they use to run lights in greenhouses, and use the waste heat to heat the greenhouses. Super-dense, high productivity grow operations. You can see some examples up north here. Iceland has long been self-sufficient in fish, dairy, eggs, and meat, but is increasingly becoming self-sufficient in vegetables, too. If Iceland can do it, and EGS can bring this kind of abundant heat and electricity to anywhere else in the world, the rest of the world will be able to as well.
Take a look at GTherm's technology. No shaft corrosion problems because the water never touches the rock. Heat is transferred to the water by a thermally conductive grout; it's basically a giant underground liquid-cooled heat sink. Which also eliminates the huge problem in EGS of not knowing where your water is actually going to go after you inject it until you physically try it out. Probably the biggest problem EGS has is that you have little control over how the reservoir rock is going to behave. Your injected water could just flow through some unknown cracks into some other layer and be lost for good rather than making it into your recovery well(s). Its just so random. The GTherm approach is for a single modular system that's virtually identical no matter where you put it. All that varies from place to place is the difficulty in drilling through different kinds of rock and the heat/depth profile (aka, in general, how deep you need to go).
Yes, there are idiots. So? Even the Audubon Society supports wind power, so long as you do the (required) bird safety studies and best-practices for bird strike amelioration. Bird turbine deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to most anthropogenic bird death causes, even taking into account its currently limited scale. Our worst are glass windows and the raising of housecats, but everything from habitat destruction to hunting to industrial waste ponds to vehicle strikes kills far more birds than wind turbines. The "wind turbines are bird cuisinarts" notion came from one old, specific wind farm, built in as horrible of a location and manner as possible (Altamont Pass). It was from before the bird strike issue was well known. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway, using small, low, closely spaced, fast-spinning turbines whose tower structure was inviting for birds to try to perch on. It was a perfect recipe for disaster, and doesn't apply at all to modern wind farms.
There are some concerns about EGS, mainly about earthquakes; however, the quakes are low-level, and all you're really doing is just accelerating what was going to come naturally. Apart from that, geothermal is about as non-intrusive of a power generation method as you can get -- just a plume of steam rising in the distance. There's even one interesting geothermal approach being pursued out there that eliminates even EGS's problems. Instead of drilling open "wells", then fracking a reservoir, then running water through the reservoir, instead you drill a self-contained water-cooled "heat sink" of thermally-conductive grout. Your water working fluid never touches the rock (only the grout does), so it never takes on corrosive minerals or waste gasses, there's no earthquakes (because there's no fracking), and it works reliably, equally well everywhere in the world with the same heat gradient (instead of just in areas with good potential reservoir rock layers) since you don't have to get water to run through a fracked rock layer in just the right manner (one of the big problems with EGS is that you never really know where your water is going to go once you inject it until you drill the well, frack the rock, cross your fingers and try).
Once again we encounter this silly notion that most power in the US is used for "people" (residential needs). Residential electricity consumption is just over a third of the total US electricity demand. If power is cheaper in some part of the country, heavy industry and high electricity-consumption commercial will move there. That's why we have so many of our aluminum smelters in the Pacific Northwest, feeding off of cheap hydro. It's why aluminum is Iceland's leading export despite there not being a single bauxite mine in the country.
Furthermore:
A) There are "hot" areas out east as well -- just not as major or widespread. But you honestly don't need much; the total power potential from EGS is so much greater than the demand. B) You don't have to produce from the hottest areas; it just means more well cost per unit power generated to use a cooler area. C) Power *can* be shipped cross-country with rather low losses, via HVDC lines. Which are surprisingly affordable; HVDC has a lot of per-terminal cost but a not-unreasonable per-mile cost.
Lastly: "Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas".
In case you didn't notice, the greatest heat potential areas *are* near the west coast.
The space ship in Avatar was actually based on a real-world published scientific spacecraft design, and the designer was a scientific consultant. No FTL, realistic distances and travel times, realistic payload ratios, relativity accounted for, etc. Proper evolutionary trees, with adaptations relative to the local planetary conditions (designed by a biologist; the film team did interfere with the appearance of the Na'vi in order to make them more humanlike to make the audience bond with them better, mind you). Setting a non-earthlike world, but in a realistic manner (for example, a shirtsleeves-but-not-breathable atmosphere, akin to that of Venus's upper atmosphere). Everything about the moon designed to properly account for the physics of having a large amount of room-temperature superconductors unevenly distributed underground on a moon -- strong localized flux lines, levitating objects that are flux pinned, a huge radiation belt, etc. The "planet-wide communication network" fits right into the concept of underground room-temperature superconductors; on Earth, organisms have learned to communicate using much more difficult methods, even plants (for example, acacia trees spread messages to each other when they're being eaten, encouraging each other to produce more toxins). I could go on and on, but you get the idea. They had a *very* detailed, scientifically-backed backstory.
Firefly: all planets fully Earthlike -- even gravity. A preposterous number of worlds within the habitable zone of the star system. Faster-than-light communication. Spaceships which "slowly pass each other" in space. Artificial gravity. Psychic powers. Relativistic speeds without relativistic effects. And the one thing that Firefly is often complimented for getting *right* -- no sound in space -- is actually wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Flest enskumælandi löndum mun ekki fjarlægja kommur egar kommurnar eru í frönsk nöfn. T.d., "Renée".
Ég get skilið að ýða japansku eða kínversku nöfn, en íslenska stafrófið er ekki svona óvenjulegt. Mér finnst.
Not CCP -- Isavia. But still, atvinnu hjá íslenskt fyrirtæki ;)
Posting this from my hotel room with a nice view of the Hallgrímskirkja. :)
Seriously, who wants to receive a rat's ass about Iceland? And who writes about countries on the asses of rats and then gives them out to people? Let me tell you, someone like *that* is who the US government should be investigating!
Notes to the Guardian (and to Slashdot for just copy-pasting it):
1) The name is "Jónsdóttir", not "Jonsdottir". I assume you know how to use accented characters; this isn't the 1980s. Jonsdottir is not only incorrect, but it would have a different pronunciation.
2) "Jónsdóttir" isn't a last name. It's a föðurnafn, or "patronymic". Think of it as an adjective, not a name -- in terms of actual usage, "Birgitta Jónsdóttir" should be thought of as "Birgitta, whose father is Jón." Saying "Jónsdóttir said" is like saying "Whose father is Jón said". You don't refer to people by their patronymics alone; they're only there for when you need clarity. Even phone books in Iceland are sorted by first name.
Anyway, I was going to make some joke about how, given the typical ignorance of most people about Iceland, and of Americans about the outside world in general, I wouldn't be surprised if the US tried to subpoena her kennitala (Icelandic "Social Security Number" equivalent)... but then I realized that I'd have to take the time to explain what's funny about that and it'd ruin it. ;)
I'm from America, and am posting this as I'm being driven to the airport to catch a flight to Reykjavík to sign work and residence permit applications with my new employer. ;) To anyone who's never been there: Iceland is just plain awesome. And to anyone who has the attitude of, "I wish I could move to X place..." -- don't be complacent. You *can* make a change in your life. It's not fantasy; people do it all the time. Right now: pull up a web browser, find an overseas job site, and start applying. :)
Axiom: An intelligent being which created and runs the universe exists.
Which is the appropriate scientific response to this?
A) Accept this on faith
B) Begin trying to explain why said being exists, how said being works, and creating experiments to probe for said being
I think you know the answer to that.
But... you don't seem to understand. You see, the sky daddy has a son, a cosmic Jewish zombie who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
There's an infinite number of things people fail to believe -- fingernail unicorns, pizza trolls, earbud elephants, bacterial senates, quagga cell phones, nuclear power plant elves, and on and on. To treat every belief of "Absurd-Thing-#81231237 does not exist" as though it's equivalent to a religion is to render the statement "does not exist" meaningless. There's *always* a possibility that any statement is false, even something like 1+1=2 -- but there's an implicit "beyond any reasonable doubt" in there. Aka, one could say, "I don't believe in God any more than either of us believe in fingernail unicorns, pizza trolls, earbud elephants, bacterial senates, quagga cell phones, and nuclear power plant gnomes, any more than we believe that 1 + 1 is not 2."
Are you going to call Mathematics a religion because Mathematicians don't qualify the equals sign in "1+1=2"? After all, there could be an practical-joking alien race that excels in mind control manipulating your neuron firing patterns to make you think that something that's actually an absurd statement is in fact perfectly logical....
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found themself shouting out answers to the problems in the Physics Bowl episode and getting weird looks from housemates ;)
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait...
While things like this usually turn out to be experimental error, I don't think it's such a crazy notion. The bottom line is, we don't really know what causes the sort of wacky behavior that our universe exhibits at the extremes (quantum mechanics on the small end, relativity on the big end). It seems to me that our universe is in all likelyhood the manifestation of some other, very different exterior system.
Here's an example of shifting paradigms The standard interpretation of our universe involves an unknown "Dark Energy" pushing the universe apart, accelerating the expansion from the Big Bang. This is visible in such phenomena as photons gaining or losing energy as they pass through large-scale gravity wells, due to the energy of the potential well changing over time. Well, what happens if instead of viewing us as living in an inflating universe, we change the paradigm and view us as existing in a constant universe, but "shrinking"? Reduce the Planck length (and thus Planck time), for example, and all existing distances will seem magnified, all objects bound by forces will attempt to collapse inward, etc. Non-bound structures seem to be being pushed apart, an object passing through a large gravity well can gain energy, and so forth. But you also can get some interesting other phenomina. For example, if the changing of distance occurs irrespective of c, causing the ratio of c to change relative to other constants, this can be perceived as a shift in the speed of light as the universe ages -- something that some lines of evidence require in order to explain various phenomena in the early universe. In particular, this shifting-constants view is nice for explaining the flatness of the universe.
You could even take it one step further and posit that the the constants for distance or time are dependent on how many interactions with other particles or how strong the interactions with other particles the universe must consider for them (sort of a "compute time" analogy). For example, in a denser early universe, particles would each interact more strongly with many more particles than the average particle interacts with today (in particular, the strong force, since it's distance-limited). If this were to manifest in terms of variation in, say, an increase in Planck length/Planck time, you'd find that as the universe aged, it'd seem like the universe was being "pushed apart". Is a "compute time" analogy applicable to the universe? Who knows. But that's really the issue: we don't know what's causing our fundamental "constants" or some of the bizarre behavior of the universe to occur, so we can hardly act as though we know for certain that any given "constant" is really constant at all regions of spacetime. All we can go on is whatever data we take in, and new observations and analyses can reveal new insights.
Just my two cents. :)
"I don't care what papers he backed and what papers he didn't. "
Right. You don't care whether he backs denier papers -- all you care about is grabbing a couple random quotes with no context (something that can be done for pretty much any denier). As if the latter is what matters and the former is irrelevant.
Um, hello -- Muller's backing of Soon and Balinuas? And there's lots of others, too. He's stuck up for denier papers pretty consistently.
Um, Muller was one of the main people who supported McKitrick and McIntyre's paper against the "Hockey Stick Graph". Before that, he was a big backer of Soon and Baliunas's denialist work.
What we're seeing here is a lovely bit of revisionist history. *Most* of the denialist scientists accept at least some tenets of global warming, so you can dig up old quotes for almost any of them. But it's simply a fact that Muller was one of the leading critics of the "Hockey Stick Graph", and now he's gone and published a graph that confirms the Hockey Stick.
As if ENSO and other factors don't dominate along the timescale of one decade.
Saying "there's been no warming in the last decade; therefore, global warming is BS" is like saying "I've not hit any stoplights in the past 5 miles; therefore, I'm not going to hit stoplights ever again." It's statistically insignificant.
Our planet's climate is a noisy system, due to weather and various oceanic and atmospheric current patterns. The noise is stronger than the signal. The signal needs several decades in order to dominate the noise.
FYI: At short timescales, noise dominates the climate signals (due to many factors, but one of the biggest being ENSO). The climate signal only dominates in time scales. So saying "global warming has stopped over a scale of X years", where X is less than ~25 or so, is absurd. Which is what that conversation about "statistical significance" that the article tries to obscure is about.
The issue is not *that* climate is changing. It's *how fast* climate is changing.
The last time Earth experienced a GHG surge and corresponding temperature rise and ocean acidification analogous to what we're now creating was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). It left the world such a different place that we declare what followed a new geological era (the Eocene).
We're currently quite busy creating the Anthropocene.
Okay, first off, to start at the end: your article about "picking apart some of the so called science in Avatar" begins with "Fortunately, James Cameron has a knack for science that rivals his moviemaking skills."? And did you read the section he added near the end after reading reader comments? He retracted most of his (already limited) criticisms to boot!
Come on, why not just give it up and accept that it's hard sci-fi and Firefly isn't?
Okay, back to the beginning.
It's not baseless at all. It's incredibly common even on Earth, let alone on a planet with a fully independent line of evolution. We have countless leg combinations. And even if you only want to count macroscopic animals (BTW: on a lower-gravity body like Pandora, the boundary for "macroscopic" becomes much larger), we have quadrapeds, bipeds (including all birds), some rare tripeds (kangaroos engage in tripedal movement at certain gaits), and animals with no legs, which is equivalent in locomotion to having an infinite number of infinitely small legs. At various times in Earth's history, animals with many legs *have* been the largest or among the largest species alive. For example, Jaekelopterus rhenaniae or Arthropleura
Are you kidding? On Earth we've come up with all sorts of absurdly complex, incredibly limited ways to try to communicate with each other (including between species, and even between life of different kingdoms -- let me tell you, a plant making its fruit turn bright colors and smell nice when the seeds inside are developed isn't just a coincidence).... and you're seriously trying to claim that on a planet that has a natural *planetwide superconducting network on it*, lifeforms wouldn't be at a massive evolutionary disadvantage to not be tapped into it? To reiterate, all tapped into that *same network*, *together*? The equivalent on Earth would be if sound on Earth carried for hundreds or thousands of miles and to make and to hear a sound, all species must use roughly the same frequency band. You really think that's not some *huge* evolutionary pressure toward long-range interspecies communication?
In the same sense that building a planet entirely out of plastic Elvis dolls is possible. But I really don't have time for this, because this is a week-long debate, and it's entirely tangential to the main point, that terraforming gravity is *literally* impossible. And on that subject...
Because the Firefly universe is already absurd enough to begin with given how many habitable-zone worlds they cram into a single star system, and when you add the constraint that they additionally all have between, say, 0.8 and 1.25g, the concept gets even more ridiculous.
Then you disagree with basic physics. Your problem, not mine. A gravity well represents a *tremendous* amount of energy. If you can violate that, you can create a perpetual motion machine.
No, that's
What, exactly, is the problem with four-legged? In case you didn't notice, our planet is full of animals with numerous legs. As for the Na'vi, I can only assume you didn't bother to read my post, given that I clearly wrote:
The backstory and the world designed by the consultants involved a much more catlike, more unusual Na'vi. The team found that audiences had trouble identifying with them and had to change it. It's one of a series of a few notable but limited changes they had to make for such purposes.
How on Earth do you not see the answer to this one?
First off, terraforming is borderline fantasy unless you're talking *extreme* future (waaaay too long of a conversation to have here), but beyond that, you can't "terraform gravity", which is why I wrote (and you again ignored), "even gravity."
Artificial gravity is just as far fetched as light sabers and the Force. Even if there was some way to create it, it would require a laughably absurd amount of energy to do so. AND it would need to behave totally unlike normal gravity, or else tidal forces would rip everything to shreds on those scales.
No, it is not in Avatar. The ISV Venture Star is based on Dr. Pellegrino's "Valkyrie". The crew live in pods at the end of two rotating arms -- just your standard "fake it using centripetal force" craft.
Did you even watch the show and movie? They're *constantly* having real-time conversations with people in the distant reaches of the solar system.
I'm sorry -- I get it. You liked Firefly and didn't like Avatar. You're hardly alone in that regard. But "good" does not inherently equal "hard" (nor does "good" inherently equal "not hard"). Some books/shows/movies/etc simply have better plots and writing than others.
If you put a speaker cone in space and turn it on to full blast, you hear nothing. It impacts essentially nothing, and thus there's no propagating wave to reach you. If you put an explosion in space, you *do* hear it. An explosion is a rapidly expanding wave of compressed gasses; it doesn't need a medium to carry sound. Basically anything that impacts or alters your spacecraft, space suit, etc in any non-trivial manner is audible.
1) One or two lines will not carry all of the nation's power.
2) Most carrying capacity on the grid is designed for peaks, and the average consumption is far lower.
3) Backup systems, such as peakers, are automatically a part of any sound grid -- present and future.
4) There's tons of infrastructure that dynamite can likewise damage.
Abundant, low impact power can achieve amazing things in terms of increasing carrying capacity. Iceland will soon be a net *tomato exporter*, for example. They build geothermal power plants, generate power from the water which they use to run lights in greenhouses, and use the waste heat to heat the greenhouses. Super-dense, high productivity grow operations. You can see some examples up north here. Iceland has long been self-sufficient in fish, dairy, eggs, and meat, but is increasingly becoming self-sufficient in vegetables, too. If Iceland can do it, and EGS can bring this kind of abundant heat and electricity to anywhere else in the world, the rest of the world will be able to as well.
Take a look at GTherm's technology. No shaft corrosion problems because the water never touches the rock. Heat is transferred to the water by a thermally conductive grout; it's basically a giant underground liquid-cooled heat sink. Which also eliminates the huge problem in EGS of not knowing where your water is actually going to go after you inject it until you physically try it out. Probably the biggest problem EGS has is that you have little control over how the reservoir rock is going to behave. Your injected water could just flow through some unknown cracks into some other layer and be lost for good rather than making it into your recovery well(s). Its just so random. The GTherm approach is for a single modular system that's virtually identical no matter where you put it. All that varies from place to place is the difficulty in drilling through different kinds of rock and the heat/depth profile (aka, in general, how deep you need to go).
Yes, there are idiots. So? Even the Audubon Society supports wind power, so long as you do the (required) bird safety studies and best-practices for bird strike amelioration. Bird turbine deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to most anthropogenic bird death causes, even taking into account its currently limited scale. Our worst are glass windows and the raising of housecats, but everything from habitat destruction to hunting to industrial waste ponds to vehicle strikes kills far more birds than wind turbines. The "wind turbines are bird cuisinarts" notion came from one old, specific wind farm, built in as horrible of a location and manner as possible (Altamont Pass). It was from before the bird strike issue was well known. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway, using small, low, closely spaced, fast-spinning turbines whose tower structure was inviting for birds to try to perch on. It was a perfect recipe for disaster, and doesn't apply at all to modern wind farms.
There are some concerns about EGS, mainly about earthquakes; however, the quakes are low-level, and all you're really doing is just accelerating what was going to come naturally. Apart from that, geothermal is about as non-intrusive of a power generation method as you can get -- just a plume of steam rising in the distance. There's even one interesting geothermal approach being pursued out there that eliminates even EGS's problems. Instead of drilling open "wells", then fracking a reservoir, then running water through the reservoir, instead you drill a self-contained water-cooled "heat sink" of thermally-conductive grout. Your water working fluid never touches the rock (only the grout does), so it never takes on corrosive minerals or waste gasses, there's no earthquakes (because there's no fracking), and it works reliably, equally well everywhere in the world with the same heat gradient (instead of just in areas with good potential reservoir rock layers) since you don't have to get water to run through a fracked rock layer in just the right manner (one of the big problems with EGS is that you never really know where your water is going to go once you inject it until you drill the well, frack the rock, cross your fingers and try).
Once again we encounter this silly notion that most power in the US is used for "people" (residential needs). Residential electricity consumption is just over a third of the total US electricity demand. If power is cheaper in some part of the country, heavy industry and high electricity-consumption commercial will move there. That's why we have so many of our aluminum smelters in the Pacific Northwest, feeding off of cheap hydro. It's why aluminum is Iceland's leading export despite there not being a single bauxite mine in the country.
Furthermore:
A) There are "hot" areas out east as well -- just not as major or widespread. But you honestly don't need much; the total power potential from EGS is so much greater than the demand.
B) You don't have to produce from the hottest areas; it just means more well cost per unit power generated to use a cooler area.
C) Power *can* be shipped cross-country with rather low losses, via HVDC lines. Which are surprisingly affordable; HVDC has a lot of per-terminal cost but a not-unreasonable per-mile cost.
Lastly:
"Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas".
In case you didn't notice, the greatest heat potential areas *are* near the west coast.
The space ship in Avatar was actually based on a real-world published scientific spacecraft design, and the designer was a scientific consultant. No FTL, realistic distances and travel times, realistic payload ratios, relativity accounted for, etc. Proper evolutionary trees, with adaptations relative to the local planetary conditions (designed by a biologist; the film team did interfere with the appearance of the Na'vi in order to make them more humanlike to make the audience bond with them better, mind you). Setting a non-earthlike world, but in a realistic manner (for example, a shirtsleeves-but-not-breathable atmosphere, akin to that of Venus's upper atmosphere). Everything about the moon designed to properly account for the physics of having a large amount of room-temperature superconductors unevenly distributed underground on a moon -- strong localized flux lines, levitating objects that are flux pinned, a huge radiation belt, etc. The "planet-wide communication network" fits right into the concept of underground room-temperature superconductors; on Earth, organisms have learned to communicate using much more difficult methods, even plants (for example, acacia trees spread messages to each other when they're being eaten, encouraging each other to produce more toxins). I could go on and on, but you get the idea. They had a *very* detailed, scientifically-backed backstory.
Firefly: all planets fully Earthlike -- even gravity. A preposterous number of worlds within the habitable zone of the star system. Faster-than-light communication. Spaceships which "slowly pass each other" in space. Artificial gravity. Psychic powers. Relativistic speeds without relativistic effects. And the one thing that Firefly is often complimented for getting *right* -- no sound in space -- is actually wrong.