You gotta differentiate between the engineering and the management here - I am by no means a luddite, I find the engineering effort fascinating. However, for every brilliant engineer and technician working a rig under such extreme conditions, there seems to be a pointy-haired boss overriding engineering decisions and forcing to cut corners. That's the problem here.
One other thing, if you work at the leading edge of technology, you better make sure that your project fails safe. A blowout such as this should have been the design-basis accident that absolutely has to be contained. Obviously, the oil industry did not think so - wells blow out all the time. On land and on shallow water this was somewhat acceptable most of the time, as there are proven techniques to manage the well afterwards. Without having such techniques for DW operations, the safety should have been stepped up.
I generally agree - but it hugely depends on the orbit in question. The range of difference in conditions can't really exceed the stable range of the chemistry making up a particular form of life by much. As I argued, this has most likely to be carbon based. Of course this still leaves the possibility of life on such planets, but the probability is in my opinion much lower than on planets with more stable orbits. Moons - now they are a completely different question. I completely agree with your points there. I am not making any statements about general probabilities of life, we have way to few informations for that. I am just saying there are some biophysical constraints that rule out certain places.
Life is based on chemistry and on thermodynamics. There are constraints that have to be universal. Life needs a certain complexity of the underlying chemistry that allows somewhat stable information storage and the possibility of teleonomic structures paired with enough reactivity to actually allow a metabolism. Life needs thermodynamic boundary conditions that allow for dynamic equilibria. We can compare different environments with regard to these boundary conditions and give very rough estimates of relative probabilities for life to evolve. Of course we can't quantify that, but whatever form life might take out there, it is bound to be restricted by these very elementary conditions.
Of course they do. Obviously it happened at least once. The question I am trying to discuss is not whether such things can happen, but rather how often we would expect them to happen. That's all. My point still stands - planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth. A lot of our physicochemical and biochemical knowledge speaks for that. Now, of course, we suffer under the bias of our exoplanet detection methods, so I would not draw conclusions to the overall probability of frequency of life in the universe. Our statistics are skewed towards the non-earth like planets, because we detect them easier.
You need a working biochemistry before you can evolve anything. You are at best proposing a mechanism how life could move into a more extreme environment - and then there are still limitations. Thermodynamics is one unforgiving bitch.... There still has to be a somewhat stable environment to kickstart the process. And yes, you are of course right that this could be a local zone of beneficial conditions. That still lowers the probability of the process, though - and I have the suspicion that this probability is low enough even in a large scale decent environment.
Ahh, naturally. The ebil gubbermint held the pure, benevolent entrepreneurial supermen running BP back. If only the free market fairy would have been allowed to descend on the well and shut it down by gently slapping it with the Invisible Hand until it realized the error of its ways. If only...
Other solvents - yeah, possible. Other base compounds than carbon? Well, I won't say impossible, but at least extremely unlikely. Boron has a somewhat complex, but in fact rather boring chemistry (sorry for the pun). Life needs complexity, flexibility and adaptability in its underlying chemistry. Si *might* be a candidate, with a silane chemistry quite similar to that of carbon - might be stable enough at lower temperatures to form some kind of biochemistry. Apart from that, I don't see any likely candidate.
For a full plug & abandon procedure, they'd not only have to pour some cement, but actually go down the bore again, pull the string, place multiple seals and cement those, so as to protect from further blowouts. That might not be possible at all here, so some basic cementing might have to suffice until the relief well is done. While this is looking good at the moment, we have just reached a temporary solution, at the time being just a temporary seal with the mud pumps holding against the reservoir pressure. We have to hope that the engineers manage to transform that into a static solution. I am pretty sure that the relief wells have to be completed - I don't see how a long term solution could be achieved without getting down to the bottom of the well otherwise. All this hugely depends on the condition of the bore - is the casing intact? Obstructions? Partial collapse?
True, but highly elliptical orbits pose not only the problem of harsh conditions, but of rapidly changing, oscillating conditions. This becomes a problem for the evolution of a biochemistry because every complex chemical system is only stable in a rather narrow interval. If the oscillation is large enough, there might just be no stable biochemistry possible.
Given that you need a reasonable amount of complexity to implement the basic necessities of life, in particular information storage, as well as a metabolism, I don't see much of an alternative to a carbon-based biochemistry. Carbon-based chemistry is the most versatile system, able to build a near infinite variations of molecules - this is a singular property among all the elements.
However, organic molecules tend to be not overly stable outside of a rather small temperature range. On the one hand, this is good for life, because it provides the necessary chemical reactivity and flexibility to make a living system possible. On the other hand, this severely limits possible habitats for extraterrestrial life. On the gripping hand, the conditions on Earth are not just favourable for any random biochemistry, they are favourable for the most complex class of chemical compounds possible. This does not exclude the possibility of other biochemistries adapted to other conditions, it does, however limit the set of possible conditions for life.
I was just giving him the benefit of the doubt, as much as he explained that he was just describing the position of society at large. Apart from that, I completely agree with your position - that crap is worth lashing out against. I just was in an exceptionally benevolent mood, trying not to hit the messenger by accident...;)
True, but the fashion *industry* is completely fad-driven anyway. If I want timeless clothing, I don't need a "young creative designer", I go to my experienced, skilled tailor and have a new suit made. But that's not the segment of the industry where the real money is made.
Where the person is wrong is that sex somehow deserves to be in the gutter.
And yet, you are speaking of a relationship "degrading" to sex from the supposedly ideal "platonic". How is that cognitive dissonance working out lately?
Yeah, Rockstar can go fuck themselves when it comes to PC ports, which are usually of a shitty quality to top their insane DRM. Actually, given that I do not have a console and will not get one, they can go fuck themselves completely.
No need to start calculating here - He resources are severely limited, as not every natural gas reservoir is containing He in significant concentrations. The best source are still the gas wells in the southern US, though other producers have stepped up their yield lately. Helium will run out long before all gas wells run dry - at which point we still can produce hydrogen from electrolysis or thermolysis. Losing He as a lifting gas for lighter-than-air vehicles is a minor problem. I used to work with He-cooled cryomagnets, which will be a pain in the arse to maintain when you gotta switch to other coolants, probably to hydrogen. That will not only affect labs - think of MRI machines in hospitals. Also, think of its use as inert gas for welding, as component of air mixtures for professional diving and also for air mixtures used in intensive care respirators.
A few meters is an understatement. This is the zone where the Mississippi sediments are deposited. The mud layer will be hundreds of meters strong, gradually compacting into rock. To collapse the hole, you would have to go through the whole sediment layer - at which point you can as well drill a relief well.
Sure, but I was under the impression that the casing is under compression, as the inside gas/oil pressure would be more than offset by the pressure the rock exerts on the pipe. Even if not, the hole is not just cemented, but lined with a steel casing, so the tensile strength of the steel would be the limiting factor. Over the ocean floor, yeah, there you got a pressure differential from inside to out, but there you are only dealing with steel tubing.
From my personal experience - questions are a dime a dozen. Coming up with a good question is not that hard as soon as you are into the field and know the literature. Coming up with a good unambiguous experiment to answer it and interpreting that data in way that actually gives you an answer was the harder part from me. Might have come with the field, though. When you see some new interpretation and suddenly realize that you are thinking about a concept no one else has ever though of before, those are the times that reward you for all of the stress. You wouldn't by chance need a biochemistry PhD in your group? I dropped out of academia after some post-doc work because the funding dried up, but I am starting to miss it....;)
I did not say that you can't achieve anything in your garage. What I am saying is that the odds are against you, so you should not set out with the goal of making that big discovery, but rather with the goal of having fun. If nothing comes out of it, well, you had fun, if something comes out of it - all the better.
I generally agree with your point here - just one minor nitpick: How does the tensile strength of cement matter here? From all I learned about the situation, the cement would be subject to lots of pressure, but not to tension. Did I miss something there?
Slashdot Mirror
Man... I read "beer" instead of "beets"... I was so ready to go into a full-scale nuclear flame-war there!
To come back on topic, you make beets taste actually good, but for that you need a damn good chef. Could be used as a test of his competence.
Punch cards. Kids these days! I want a cuneiform printer that imprints my data into clay tablets. That stuff last for millennia!
You gotta differentiate between the engineering and the management here - I am by no means a luddite, I find the engineering effort fascinating. However, for every brilliant engineer and technician working a rig under such extreme conditions, there seems to be a pointy-haired boss overriding engineering decisions and forcing to cut corners. That's the problem here.
One other thing, if you work at the leading edge of technology, you better make sure that your project fails safe. A blowout such as this should have been the design-basis accident that absolutely has to be contained. Obviously, the oil industry did not think so - wells blow out all the time. On land and on shallow water this was somewhat acceptable most of the time, as there are proven techniques to manage the well afterwards. Without having such techniques for DW operations, the safety should have been stepped up.
I generally agree - but it hugely depends on the orbit in question. The range of difference in conditions can't really exceed the stable range of the chemistry making up a particular form of life by much. As I argued, this has most likely to be carbon based. Of course this still leaves the possibility of life on such planets, but the probability is in my opinion much lower than on planets with more stable orbits. Moons - now they are a completely different question. I completely agree with your points there. I am not making any statements about general probabilities of life, we have way to few informations for that. I am just saying there are some biophysical constraints that rule out certain places.
Life is based on chemistry and on thermodynamics. There are constraints that have to be universal. Life needs a certain complexity of the underlying chemistry that allows somewhat stable information storage and the possibility of teleonomic structures paired with enough reactivity to actually allow a metabolism. Life needs thermodynamic boundary conditions that allow for dynamic equilibria. We can compare different environments with regard to these boundary conditions and give very rough estimates of relative probabilities for life to evolve. Of course we can't quantify that, but whatever form life might take out there, it is bound to be restricted by these very elementary conditions.
Of course they do. Obviously it happened at least once. The question I am trying to discuss is not whether such things can happen, but rather how often we would expect them to happen. That's all. My point still stands - planets with highly excentric/elliptical orbits are less likely to develop life than stable planets like earth. A lot of our physicochemical and biochemical knowledge speaks for that. Now, of course, we suffer under the bias of our exoplanet detection methods, so I would not draw conclusions to the overall probability of frequency of life in the universe. Our statistics are skewed towards the non-earth like planets, because we detect them easier.
You need a working biochemistry before you can evolve anything. You are at best proposing a mechanism how life could move into a more extreme environment - and then there are still limitations. Thermodynamics is one unforgiving bitch.... There still has to be a somewhat stable environment to kickstart the process. And yes, you are of course right that this could be a local zone of beneficial conditions. That still lowers the probability of the process, though - and I have the suspicion that this probability is low enough even in a large scale decent environment.
Ahh, naturally. The ebil gubbermint held the pure, benevolent entrepreneurial supermen running BP back. If only the free market fairy would have been allowed to descend on the well and shut it down by gently slapping it with the Invisible Hand until it realized the error of its ways. If only...
Other solvents - yeah, possible. Other base compounds than carbon? Well, I won't say impossible, but at least extremely unlikely. Boron has a somewhat complex, but in fact rather boring chemistry (sorry for the pun). Life needs complexity, flexibility and adaptability in its underlying chemistry. Si *might* be a candidate, with a silane chemistry quite similar to that of carbon - might be stable enough at lower temperatures to form some kind of biochemistry. Apart from that, I don't see any likely candidate.
For a full plug & abandon procedure, they'd not only have to pour some cement, but actually go down the bore again, pull the string, place multiple seals and cement those, so as to protect from further blowouts. That might not be possible at all here, so some basic cementing might have to suffice until the relief well is done. While this is looking good at the moment, we have just reached a temporary solution, at the time being just a temporary seal with the mud pumps holding against the reservoir pressure. We have to hope that the engineers manage to transform that into a static solution. I am pretty sure that the relief wells have to be completed - I don't see how a long term solution could be achieved without getting down to the bottom of the well otherwise. All this hugely depends on the condition of the bore - is the casing intact? Obstructions? Partial collapse?
True, but highly elliptical orbits pose not only the problem of harsh conditions, but of rapidly changing, oscillating conditions. This becomes a problem for the evolution of a biochemistry because every complex chemical system is only stable in a rather narrow interval. If the oscillation is large enough, there might just be no stable biochemistry possible.
Given that you need a reasonable amount of complexity to implement the basic necessities of life, in particular information storage, as well as a metabolism, I don't see much of an alternative to a carbon-based biochemistry. Carbon-based chemistry is the most versatile system, able to build a near infinite variations of molecules - this is a singular property among all the elements.
However, organic molecules tend to be not overly stable outside of a rather small temperature range. On the one hand, this is good for life, because it provides the necessary chemical reactivity and flexibility to make a living system possible. On the other hand, this severely limits possible habitats for extraterrestrial life. On the gripping hand, the conditions on Earth are not just favourable for any random biochemistry, they are favourable for the most complex class of chemical compounds possible. This does not exclude the possibility of other biochemistries adapted to other conditions, it does, however limit the set of possible conditions for life.
I was just giving him the benefit of the doubt, as much as he explained that he was just describing the position of society at large. Apart from that, I completely agree with your position - that crap is worth lashing out against. I just was in an exceptionally benevolent mood, trying not to hit the messenger by accident... ;)
Aye, exactly. And I prefer to do as much direct business with such people as possible.
True, but the fashion *industry* is completely fad-driven anyway. If I want timeless clothing, I don't need a "young creative designer", I go to my experienced, skilled tailor and have a new suit made. But that's not the segment of the industry where the real money is made.
Fair enough - guess that was a bit of a misunderstanding. Sorry for lashing out.
Where the person is wrong is that sex somehow deserves to be in the gutter.
And yet, you are speaking of a relationship "degrading" to sex from the supposedly ideal "platonic". How is that cognitive dissonance working out lately?
Indeed - but since when is violence on TV not ok for the children?
Either way threatens to make them into Perl programmers. Would someone PLEASE think of the children?
Yeah, Rockstar can go fuck themselves when it comes to PC ports, which are usually of a shitty quality to top their insane DRM. Actually, given that I do not have a console and will not get one, they can go fuck themselves completely.
No need to start calculating here - He resources are severely limited, as not every natural gas reservoir is containing He in significant concentrations. The best source are still the gas wells in the southern US, though other producers have stepped up their yield lately. Helium will run out long before all gas wells run dry - at which point we still can produce hydrogen from electrolysis or thermolysis. Losing He as a lifting gas for lighter-than-air vehicles is a minor problem. I used to work with He-cooled cryomagnets, which will be a pain in the arse to maintain when you gotta switch to other coolants, probably to hydrogen. That will not only affect labs - think of MRI machines in hospitals. Also, think of its use as inert gas for welding, as component of air mixtures for professional diving and also for air mixtures used in intensive care respirators.
A few meters is an understatement. This is the zone where the Mississippi sediments are deposited. The mud layer will be hundreds of meters strong, gradually compacting into rock. To collapse the hole, you would have to go through the whole sediment layer - at which point you can as well drill a relief well.
Sure, but I was under the impression that the casing is under compression, as the inside gas/oil pressure would be more than offset by the pressure the rock exerts on the pipe. Even if not, the hole is not just cemented, but lined with a steel casing, so the tensile strength of the steel would be the limiting factor. Over the ocean floor, yeah, there you got a pressure differential from inside to out, but there you are only dealing with steel tubing.
From my personal experience - questions are a dime a dozen. Coming up with a good question is not that hard as soon as you are into the field and know the literature. Coming up with a good unambiguous experiment to answer it and interpreting that data in way that actually gives you an answer was the harder part from me. Might have come with the field, though. When you see some new interpretation and suddenly realize that you are thinking about a concept no one else has ever though of before, those are the times that reward you for all of the stress. You wouldn't by chance need a biochemistry PhD in your group? I dropped out of academia after some post-doc work because the funding dried up, but I am starting to miss it.... ;)
I did not say that you can't achieve anything in your garage. What I am saying is that the odds are against you, so you should not set out with the goal of making that big discovery, but rather with the goal of having fun. If nothing comes out of it, well, you had fun, if something comes out of it - all the better.
I generally agree with your point here - just one minor nitpick: How does the tensile strength of cement matter here? From all I learned about the situation, the cement would be subject to lots of pressure, but not to tension. Did I miss something there?