Is the universe old enough for such creatures to have evolved?
That's a thorny question. Certainly there is a question of "stellar generations", needing several cycles of material through stars to produce substantial quantities of the various different elements involved in life. If you think about stars like the Sun with a 10^10 (10 Gyr) year life span, then that becomes an issue. but since those stars tend to die quietly, they don't contribute much variety to the interstellar medium and so the next generation of stars. It's the big stars, which go out with a (moderately) big bang, which scatter material to the, errrmm, stars. And they have much shorter lifetimes (my handy-dandy stellar lifetime lookup table tells me 1.0 Msol lasts 10.00 Gyr, 2.0 Msol lasts 1.25 Gyr, and a 10.0 Msol star 0.0211 Gyr). So while there is definitely a composition trend between the oldest stars and more recent ones (and therefore, probably, in their planetary systems), I'm not sure how much of a problem that would be in dense star-forming regions like globular cluster progenitors.
Once you've got your planet, the geological record is that life certainly evolves quickly - on a 1 Gyr timescale, and maybe on a quarter of that timescale (the carbon stable isotope ratios in some very ancient zircon crystals are not incompatible with the carbon having been processed through a metabolism-like system).
If you can find the right sort of bar, that's definitely a "four beer question".
Mount Everest could be a slug, but it moves so slow that we would never know it as anything but a lifeless rock.
It's a nice idea, but not unexplored. You might be unaware of it, but there are people who do study things that operate on such long timescales. They're "geologists" (and a number of astronomers play in this end of the paddling pool of process rates too). Sorry, nothing wildly interesting there.
We do a fair bit of "origin of life" work too - because if there is any evidence of the origin of life on Earth, it's going to be in a rock, and subject to billions of years of taphonomy.
I'll leave it to a denizen of a cellar at CERN to talk about the other end of the process rate scale.
Crops are grown using synthetic fertiliizers that rely on the Haber Bosch process to provide the nitrogen compounds.
And the potassium and phosphorus (the other members of the "big three" of fertilizer science) come from... unicorn farts? Or, are they mined? Out of holes in the ground? Just possibly.
Have you read a review of K and P resources recently? It's not pretty reading. Particularly if you've got children.
Would you like to attend the next training course I run on H2S safety? I need a new sacrificial lamb after my last one died. Well, "was sacrificied". For some reason, the farmer thinks the way I kill them is cruel and sends them to the slaughterhouse instead.
The boundary between significant neurological consequences (I've known people with such brain damage. It's not pretty.) and rapid death is quite narrow - a factor of 3 in concentration, less if the victim loses motor control. Getting an atmosphere that well mixed is quite hard if you're doing it from localised sources (eg anoxic basins in the deep oceans).
You don't even need to go to the exotica of botflies - something like 30% of clean, freshly-showered western people are infested with eyelash mites. And there are no doubt hundreds of other species which live on humans. Whether they cause any problems (or benefits) is another question.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that in the shit in their bowels there are more bacteria than there are human cells in their bodies. And if there weren't you'd be a very unwell person.
Depleted uranium is radio-active for billions of years
DU is only mildly radioactive
ANYTHING which is mildly radioactive is so for billions of years. ANYTHING which is radioactive for billions of years is only mildly radioactive. The two properties are two side of the same coin. Or two parameters in an equation containing only constants otherwise.
When I was a kid in the UK in the '60s I was vaccinated with BCG.
When I was a toddler in the 1960s, my granny died of TB. Unsurprisingly, when I got my TB test in the 1970s, I was positive - I'd been exposed to the bacterium enough that my immune system had a response to a challenge dose. So I didn't get BCG'd, because I was already immune. Since then I've worked in TB clinics (test on joining, test on leaving) and I've had three call backs to be re-tested because someone at my workspace has come back from working abroad and then developed TB (XDR, fatal in one case if the grapevine is correct).
TB is expected to become endemic again in the UK in the near future as drug resistance spreads. It certainly remains a quite common diagnosis. If they've stopped vaccinating schoolkids, then that's a false economy. My immunisations passport remains up to date.
Clearly you're not a geologist. A pet rock is not just for PetRockDay, but it's for life. Longer than your species' life. Longer, indeed. than your phylum's life.
[hugs my 3 billion year old Scourian amphibolitite ; caresses my billion year old stromatolites]
If that were the sort of conversation that happened at TGI Fridays, I might be tempted to travel for two hours each way to the nearest one. If I wanted to eat at a restaurant. Somehow, I doubt it would rate.
You seem to have swallowed the same idea as the original (?) authors.
TechTimes reports:
[The theorem] was developed by ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who was born in 570 B.C.
The theorem was known to the Babylonians around a millennium before Pythagoras was born - and a bane of schoolchild mathematicians then, including having to "show their working" when proving it. We've got both the teacher's crib tablets and the pupils' homework tablets (literally half-baked - sun dried).
The biggest mystery associated with "Pythagoras' Theorem" is how he got his name attached to it. It's like calling an algorithm (named for Muá¥ammad ibn Musa al'Khwarizmi, died ~850 CE) a Gauss (also a major mathematician, 1777-1855 CE) just because Gauss used some of the methods al'Khwarismi developed and published a millennium before.
None of those points address the fundamental issue: the testimony of police is believed without corroborating evidence.
This is Scotland, not America or England. Nobody's evidence is accepted by the court as proof without corroborating evidence. In particular, confessions are not accepted without corroborating evidence.
Which is one of the reasons that cops go round in pairs. One can corroborate the other's report - or disagree. And you don't keep the same partner for more than a few shifts.
Unlikely - the electrolyte in the batteries is almost certainly trashed. Even if the panels produce decent power, without the battery the re-boot process will draw more current than the panels can produce.
This is astoundingly dark. The transmittance of light through the atmosphere is 1/e^tau so that only 1/50,000 (0.002%) of the sunlight is getting through!
The analogy I've been using is of being under a volcanic ash cloud. Literally turning day into night.
That's the first time I've heard that concern, and I speak to past and present rover drivers on a routine basis. They've never mentioned it. They're not particularly worried about the absolute temperatures, because the presence of all that atmospheric dust prevents the ground from seeing outer space and so the temperatures dno't get absolutely low. What they're concerned about is that the power available is unable to keep the liquid electrolyte in the batterieswarm, and the batteries will either develop copper internal short circuits when the panels start re-charging them, or the electrolyte will actually start to electrolyse, damaging the batteries capacity and cycle lifetime. That's what they think killed Spirit.
A complete power-down, losing even the clock, will make the re-start process much more complex. Which means it is more prone to failure, retries, more battery cycles... the drivers are optimistic, but strained.
it can create a sudden jÃkulhlaup (their term for lahar)
No, sorry, jokullhlaups (hey, how'd you get Slashdot to swallow an o-umlaut - it doesn't like mine!) are not lahars. Lahars are rainfall loosened landslides of soil and/ or fresh ash coming down the slopes of a volcano. Jokullhlaups are caused by the rapid emptying of a sub-glacial lake formed by an eruption under the icecap (could also be steam venting from a fumarole field). As the water breaks out of the icecap it will typically pick up a lot of glacial debris from the surrounds, so the effects on anything downstream are similarly devastating but there can be a delay of months between the eruption and the jokullhlaup. The eruption may not even break the ice surface - the Grimsvotn eruption of about 2008 was going for nearly a month before it broke through to open air - so the outside world might never know about it apart from the earthquakes.
For some of those, you can see the English analogue, can't you? Icelandic is a Germanic language too.
I've been having a binge on Scandi-Noir while also continuing to work on my German, and even *I* can start to hear and understand the German roots in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
I found a "Student Edition" crib/ guide book for Beowulf in a second-hand bookshop last week, and thought three times before putting it back on the shelf. I'm regretting that. Russian practice this afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a thorny question. Certainly there is a question of "stellar generations", needing several cycles of material through stars to produce substantial quantities of the various different elements involved in life. If you think about stars like the Sun with a 10^10 (10 Gyr) year life span, then that becomes an issue. but since those stars tend to die quietly, they don't contribute much variety to the interstellar medium and so the next generation of stars. It's the big stars, which go out with a (moderately) big bang, which scatter material to the, errrmm, stars. And they have much shorter lifetimes (my handy-dandy stellar lifetime lookup table tells me 1.0 Msol lasts 10.00 Gyr, 2.0 Msol lasts 1.25 Gyr, and a 10.0 Msol star 0.0211 Gyr). So while there is definitely a composition trend between the oldest stars and more recent ones (and therefore, probably, in their planetary systems), I'm not sure how much of a problem that would be in dense star-forming regions like globular cluster progenitors.
Once you've got your planet, the geological record is that life certainly evolves quickly - on a 1 Gyr timescale, and maybe on a quarter of that timescale (the carbon stable isotope ratios in some very ancient zircon crystals are not incompatible with the carbon having been processed through a metabolism-like system).
If you can find the right sort of bar, that's definitely a "four beer question".
Say that thee times quickly at Bletchley Park and you'll resurrect the unholy trio of Lovelace, Babbage and Turing.
It's a nice idea, but not unexplored. You might be unaware of it, but there are people who do study things that operate on such long timescales. They're "geologists" (and a number of astronomers play in this end of the paddling pool of process rates too). Sorry, nothing wildly interesting there.
We do a fair bit of "origin of life" work too - because if there is any evidence of the origin of life on Earth, it's going to be in a rock, and subject to billions of years of taphonomy.
I'll leave it to a denizen of a cellar at CERN to talk about the other end of the process rate scale.
And the potassium and phosphorus (the other members of the "big three" of fertilizer science) come from ... unicorn farts? Or, are they mined? Out of holes in the ground? Just possibly.
Have you read a review of K and P resources recently? It's not pretty reading. Particularly if you've got children.
The boundary between significant neurological consequences (I've known people with such brain damage. It's not pretty.) and rapid death is quite narrow - a factor of 3 in concentration, less if the victim loses motor control. Getting an atmosphere that well mixed is quite hard if you're doing it from localised sources (eg anoxic basins in the deep oceans).
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that in the shit in their bowels there are more bacteria than there are human cells in their bodies. And if there weren't you'd be a very unwell person.
[SELF : mixes up some nice toxic dinoflagellate "red algae" poison in your local ocean.]
ANYTHING which is mildly radioactive is so for billions of years. ANYTHING which is radioactive for billions of years is only mildly radioactive. The two properties are two side of the same coin. Or two parameters in an equation containing only constants otherwise.
The people of Eurajoki would beg to disagree with you.
When I was a toddler in the 1960s, my granny died of TB. Unsurprisingly, when I got my TB test in the 1970s, I was positive - I'd been exposed to the bacterium enough that my immune system had a response to a challenge dose. So I didn't get BCG'd, because I was already immune. Since then I've worked in TB clinics (test on joining, test on leaving) and I've had three call backs to be re-tested because someone at my workspace has come back from working abroad and then developed TB (XDR, fatal in one case if the grapevine is correct).
TB is expected to become endemic again in the UK in the near future as drug resistance spreads. It certainly remains a quite common diagnosis. If they've stopped vaccinating schoolkids, then that's a false economy. My immunisations passport remains up to date.
Clearly you're not a geologist. A pet rock is not just for PetRockDay, but it's for life. Longer than your species' life. Longer, indeed. than your phylum's life.
[hugs my 3 billion year old Scourian amphibolitite ; caresses my billion year old stromatolites]
Do you have an evidential basis for that belief?
If that were the sort of conversation that happened at TGI Fridays, I might be tempted to travel for two hours each way to the nearest one. If I wanted to eat at a restaurant. Somehow, I doubt it would rate.
You missed an Adams-ism : "Perhaps they themselves died of as a result a disease contracted from a particularly poorly sanitized beaker."
The theorem was known to the Babylonians around a millennium before Pythagoras was born - and a bane of schoolchild mathematicians then, including having to "show their working" when proving it. We've got both the teacher's crib tablets and the pupils' homework tablets (literally half-baked - sun dried).
The biggest mystery associated with "Pythagoras' Theorem" is how he got his name attached to it. It's like calling an algorithm (named for Muá¥ammad ibn Musa al'Khwarizmi, died ~850 CE) a Gauss (also a major mathematician, 1777-1855 CE) just because Gauss used some of the methods al'Khwarismi developed and published a millennium before.
Perhaps you're under the misapprehension that stone circles are actually even rough approximations to circles.
With GDPR, the company has to bear the cost of compliance, not you.
Unless, of course, you're a second-class non-citizen, like an American, or a Briton in 270-something days.
This is Scotland, not America or England. Nobody's evidence is accepted by the court as proof without corroborating evidence. In particular, confessions are not accepted without corroborating evidence.
Which is one of the reasons that cops go round in pairs. One can corroborate the other's report - or disagree. And you don't keep the same partner for more than a few shifts.
Unlikely - the electrolyte in the batteries is almost certainly trashed. Even if the panels produce decent power, without the battery the re-boot process will draw more current than the panels can produce.
The analogy I've been using is of being under a volcanic ash cloud. Literally turning day into night.
A complete power-down, losing even the clock, will make the re-start process much more complex. Which means it is more prone to failure, retries, more battery cycles ... the drivers are optimistic, but strained.
The entire point of ground truthing a measurement is to check that the remote instruments are actually working correctly.
They got the memo, but not being written in their language, but in American English, they didn't bother to read it.
No, sorry, jokullhlaups (hey, how'd you get Slashdot to swallow an o-umlaut - it doesn't like mine!) are not lahars. Lahars are rainfall loosened landslides of soil and/ or fresh ash coming down the slopes of a volcano. Jokullhlaups are caused by the rapid emptying of a sub-glacial lake formed by an eruption under the icecap (could also be steam venting from a fumarole field). As the water breaks out of the icecap it will typically pick up a lot of glacial debris from the surrounds, so the effects on anything downstream are similarly devastating but there can be a delay of months between the eruption and the jokullhlaup. The eruption may not even break the ice surface - the Grimsvotn eruption of about 2008 was going for nearly a month before it broke through to open air - so the outside world might never know about it apart from the earthquakes.
I've been having a binge on Scandi-Noir while also continuing to work on my German, and even *I* can start to hear and understand the German roots in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
I found a "Student Edition" crib/ guide book for Beowulf in a second-hand bookshop last week, and thought three times before putting it back on the shelf. I'm regretting that. Russian practice this afternoon.