Why are you expecting them to stop? That's a huge waste of fuel.
Like I said, put them into a ship with big enough storage to drop off a colony-forming ship every 10 generations - let them do the deceleration, mine your consumables, and re-supply the mothership. If that's happening every 10-20 generations, then you've got a release valve for your society (something that we don't have at the moment, but designing a society with release valves is one of the influences you can have across the millennia). And if (again, racing certainty) some of your would-be colonists get freaked by leaving the mothership behind, then the colonists have a release valve as they're establishing their society since there will be a re-supply mission accelerating back to the mothership next generation.
you've confirmed there's a hospitable panet (gravitational lens telescopes are your friend)
Short of manipulating a large (planetary mass?) lump of neutronium (which I'm not sure can exist), we don't have even a vague direction for such an object. And if we had to do that, we might well find it easier to go there (or send robots and relay stations) than to build such a telescope.
would you be happy if our lives today were bound to the vision of some ancient Roman emperor?
Some people seem to want to bind themselves to the pronouncements of some Roman carpenter, of whose existence we're by no means confident and whose diktats are based another half-millennium further back when (putative) his ancestors were slaves. At least we're pretty confident in the existence of the Roman emperors, even if some of them were as mad as a box of badgers. (I'm actually planning a walk along Hadrian's Wall - after that, I can securely attest to the existence of a Wall, with at least legion-marks referring to Hadrian ; after which, disbelieving in his existence would be perverse. In a generation ship, the existence of the ship, and it's constructors, would be hard to ignore.)
Like I said, that's why you build your society with (ir-)regular break points. Whether you have the ship travelling on a loop, or just driving straight(-ish) on for the horizon... well that might be something that you re-assess every millennium or so. It would be another break point. Maybe you build into the design so that every 10 dropped-off colony ships, you can fission your mother ship into two and then continue to grow each on their chosen routes. Each generation would still need to be making choices, but equally each generation would be subject to constraints (as we are) which were imposed on us by ancestors only a (relatively) small number of generations ago. If you're an American, then almost certainly one of your ancestors chose to travel half-way around the world less than ten generations ago ; if you're not an American, then almost certainly several of your ancestors chose to NOT travel half-way around the world less than ten generations ago. How do you feel about those choices, whichever way they went?
Assuming 20-30 years per generation
Big assumption. The pressure to use medical developments and technologies to extend life is strong. On the assumption that the mammal body plan can't be pushed beyond 200 years, why would you go around doing momentous things like breeding before your 80s? Remember that for most of human history it was reasonably common to co-exist with your grandchildren, but seeing great-grandchildren was pretty rare. I'm trying to think of a mammal (or bird ; I don't know about reptiles or elasmobranchs at all, to cover the disparity of the vertebrates) that does routinely see it's great-grand offspring. If you wanted to change the generation ship people into a new species, that might be one of the most effective ways to do it - change life spans.
Of course, I suppose after generations on a world-ship it's quite possible that not everyone would want to settle down.
I'd say that's a racing certainty. It's not a trope I've seen exercised much in SF (a notable exception being "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. The necessity for a mutli-generational approach would tend to cramp things like character development (BHM spans a period IIRC of some 60,000 years, as the colony ship has to lay over to carry out repairs, and in the process need to, erm, build a moon. In orbit around "Harlequin." (Niven is Old School SF.)
There are interesting things to think about in such a situation and a mission. Including, particularly, how do you man a mission that is going to be profoundly multigenerational. How do you know you're going to be able to motivate the 79th generation after launch?
Those strong magnetic fields would, indeed, change the energies of electron orbitals (indeed, of proton orbitals inside complex nuclei too), but they'd do so in accord with the laws of physics. That would (probably ; IANA quantum mechanical chemist) change the laws of chemistry to be different to those that apply in lower magnetic fields (and lower field gradients too). However the underlying laws of physics will still be the same.
There's a very definite hierarchy of precision and strength of lawfulness in the sciences. If we accept economics as being a science (the dismal science), then it's "laws" are much looser than the laws of biology. (I was reading a paper last night on the laws of social evolution of non-breeding behaviour, couched in terms of probability of various outcomes, and the consequent effects on probably descendent count for each member of the population ; those laws were couched very much in economic terms, of calculating probabilities.) The laws of biology are much stricter ; egg plus egg does not make a fertilized egg ; 23 chromosomes plus 24 chromosomes makes for a pretty fucked-up organism, if it's viable at all ; oxygen metabolic enzymes plus sulphide (or hydrosulphide) ion makes for a broken or non-functional enzyme molecule. The laws of chemistry underlie the laws of biology and are considerably stricter ; in aqueous solution, silver ions plus chloride ions precipitates silver chloride if the solubility product of AgCl is exceeded (assuming no thiosulphate ion in solution) ; argon reacts with fewer elements than xenon, and forms less stable compounds ; silver chloride has the sodium chloride structure at NTP. The laws of chemistry themselves are founded on the laws of physics - those precipitations and crystal structures are basically the result of electrostatic interactions (as are the more subtle interactions of quantum mechanics in forming covalent bonds) ; when people talk about "unknown new laws of physics that will give us FTL travel, I invite them to jump out of a tall building and try to argue for an exemption from the laws of gravity.
In your example, the changes to the emergent laws of chemistry result from adherence to the more fundamental laws of physics.
If you can drag up a few string theorists, I can bring some mathematical philosophers ; we can throw them into a pit and let them fight it out to see if physics or maths is more fundamental to the universe. I'm not a great fan of either marshmallows, or popcorn, but I can bring a barbie and some great venison burgers.
It also has an optional 'pull-down conversation mirror' that lets drivers check on kids without turning around."
A driver who even thinks about turning around to check on what the passengers are up to should lose their driving license until they've successfully re-passed their driving test.
That's why you strap them in. That's what you have other adults in the vehicle for. That's why you train the kids from before potty-training to not touch their seat belts on pain of straight back home and no fun for the rest of the day. That's why you train the kids over the same time scale to not distract the driver.
The laws of physics (and chemistry) are the same pretty much everywhere
Where, precisely, do we know that the laws of physics are different from those we see here? "pretty much everywhere" implies that there is somewhere that isn't included. Where is that?
even at small fractions of light speed, remain expansionistic, and avoid completely eradicating ourselves or transcending as a species we could colonize the whole friggin galaxy in only a few billion years.
Billion? A few tens of million years.
The galaxy is about 100,000 LY across. If we can get to 1% of c, then moving out to cover the galaxy would take (order of) 10 million years transit time. Since you're using generation ships, then while you're in flight you can be preparing a colonisation ship in the centuries between stellar encounters and drop the settlers off (and along with them, your political dissidents, mutants and space-sick passengers and other problems) ; if they think the star is settleable (does it have asteroids ; never mind the planets for the next x generations) then they stop, otherwise they do some quick (decades) mining for consumables and then depart to catch up with the mother ship.
I'd guess that "we" could colonise the galaxy in 100 Ma. Of course, by then, the species would certainly have changed, and probably fragmented into significantly different species. Certainly cultures would have changed drastically.
But it's all SF for the next number of generations.
Hmm, well I suppose if you were under hard acceleration it probably wouldn't be healthy for anything caught in the exhaust at close range,
In some SF universes that is codified as a "law" of warfare. e.g. "The Kzinti Lesson : a reaction drive is a weapon in proportion to it's efficiency as a drive."
A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.
Well, they could have just invented a god of mathematics and had done with it. But they were pretty smart cookies, so they'd probably have noticed the stupidity of admitting a supernatural explanation of any sort into their attempts to understand the natural world.
Your analogy is wrong. You need to cut the top off the safe and then perform the rest of your experiment.
Air guns (they've never been called "sonic cannons" ; the author has been channelling early Hawkwind) are fired at a depth of 5~10m below water level, suspended from floats towed behind the survey boat. Normally there's a string of multiple hydrophones trailing along behind the air gun, held at a similar depth by tension between floats (pulling them up) and a hydroplane (underwater wing) pulling them down. Sometimes we lower a hydrophone (or several, for redundancy) into an existing well bore and lower it to the bottom, maybe as much as 7 or 8 km away from the surface, but we never lower air guns to that depth because they wouldn't work.
Understand, I am pro oil drilling, pro nuclear power... and all sorts of other things you likely find unsavory. But this just seems wanton to me. I'm not a monster or an idiot... and this seems like madness.
Then TFA's writer has achieved his (her? I forget which) purpose of spreading FUD about what has been a routine technique in other parts of the world for decades, with appropriate mitigation strategies in place.
Agreed. There are other forms of diving injury that whales (and other non-human air-breathing divers) suffer from, but they're generally chronic and cumulative. Crush injuries to bones with isolated fluid-filled cavities which can't equilibrate fast enough, for example. Humans get the same, which is part of the reason that sat divers take several days to get to depth.
The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends
Whales don't get "the bends" (in the sense of decompression sickness). When they dive, they stop breathing (Doh!) and the air in their lungs rapidly compresses until their lungs have collapsed and the air is in the (relatively non-absorbent) bronchae and cranial air passages. Then, when they come back up, there isn't the excess of nitrogen dissolved in the blood that needs to exsolve and forms the bubbles that cause decompression sickness.
What gives human divers decompression sickness is that we breathe air while we're at depth. That allows our bloodstream to equilibrate with an effectively unlimited supply of nitrogen at depth, whereas the whales (dolphins, seals, penguins, etc) have only the one pair of lungs full of air to equilibrate against.
Don't worry, you're by no means the first person to get this wrong. I've had to talk other trained SCUBA divers through the maths before.
There are other forms of diving injury to which whales etc are subject, but they're not "the bends." And while they leave marks on the bones (as they do on human divers too), they're not enough to incapacitate the animals (though they can destroy a commercial diver's career).
Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher
The overwhelming majority of the "fracking boom" is drilling for gas, not oil. Yes, it is possible to frack shale (as in the gas boom) for oil, but it's much, much less common than fracking for gas.
Of course, in conventional (i.e. non-shale) reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil (and gas, but more rarely) production has been going on since the 1950s without arousing any particular attention. Of the about 200 wells on my CV, dozens of them have probably been fracked since I drilled and steered them. I wouldn't know ; it's not a question I'd ever waste my time asking.
I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb.
Considering that air guns are powered by air compressors typically driven by diesel engines consuming a couple of gallons per hour, the average power isn't that high. The peak power is higher, because the guns fire in pulses, using the air as a storage medium.
The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.
For seismic analysis, particularly for differentiating between oil-filled rock, gas-filled rock and water-filled rock, we need lots of high frequencies in the projected sound, so that we can measure the difference of absorption at different frequencies. To get those high frequencies, we need bubbles of relatively small size. That constrains the power we can put into the water. Producing bigger guns will produce more power, but will not answer our geological questions, and so would be a waste of money. We'd have to run multiple surveys (big guns versus small guns) across the same area, almost certainly causing more harm than doing one survey.
See my comment up-thread. TFA is ill-informed and written to generate FUD, not to inform people. These aren't new techniques, and procedures for mitigating the effect of seismic air guns on sea life - particularly cetaceans - are well-known and used throughout the industry.
But in the absence of being able to issue warnings in "dolphin language"
The "cetacean communication experiments which were stopped were ones attempting to teach dolphins (I forget the species, but only one species) to speak English. Work to understand the communications of cetaceans continues to this day.
Your "dolphin language" phrase implies that you think there is one "dolphin language" ; what we're pretty sure of is that there is one language per species ; there are 40 "dolphin" species in 17 genera (closely related groups), and about the same number of other cetaceans. We're pretty sure that some species have multiple, geographically constrained languages - "dialects" if you will. So your "dolphin language" suggestion implies learning to speak something like 100 distinct dialects, some probably very distantly related to others.
You don't know the procedures that have been followed for years. I first approached my Boss about getting qualified as an MMO in about 2005, but he couldn't see a business case for it - I don't have the time in my regular employment to spend 1/2 hour doing nothing but sweeping the horizon with binos.
Shame - I'd have liked to get paid for a week of going whale-watching.
Those figures sound broadly comparable to regulations that I've seen controlling the exposure of diving workers to loud noises in their work place (pneumatic tools, stand-off distances from explosive cutters, that sort of thing). I didn't memorise the details as I didn't need them, but those figures sound broadly comparable.
There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.
There is - if you're doing "Seismic While Drilling". You can bump up the signal to noise ratio at your hydrophone 5, 6, or 7 kilometres below the seabed, without having to use huge air gun arrays (the compressors and air banks for which take up a lot of deck space ; deck space is always at a premium).
However, TFA is about shooting area-wide seismic coverage, not SWD. Because of the turning circle of (say) a 5km long, 16-wide array of streamed hydrophones, you keep them in constant motion. If you didn't, the hydrophones will get displaced from their required relative positions. Positioning typically needs to be precise to tens of centimetres. (Yes, many companies use (D-)GPS to confirm the positioning of the hydrophones, and record those positions for every shot.)
I mean, people have been detonating underwater *atomic bombs* - how do you think that compares to the sound of a pop of air?
Just to put this into perspective : the air guns are suspended over the side of the drilling vessel about 20m from the side of the vessel ; if they're streamed behind a seismic boat, they're in the order of 100m behind the boat.
Shocking as it may seem, we don't design equipment that will damage our other equipment. Which is why the energy released from air guns is considerably lower than (for example) that released by a depth charge or a torpedo.
Can they give "warning shots" for some time period ahead of time to clear the area?
We call them "mitigation shots".
I don't know American regulations, but Norwegian regulations require a visual observer ("MMO", Marine Mammal Observer) to scan for cetaceans (whales, dolphins) by day and an acoustic monitor ("PAM", Passive Acoustic Monitor) to be deployed for at least 30 minutes before starting the guns. If a cetacean is spotted within a kilometre of the air guns (why they're using the name "sonic cannon" except to drum up FUD, I don't know), or an acoustic detection is made, then a start up sequence of one shot every 30 seconds, ramping from zero power to operating power over 30 minutes. The specific aim is to alert the cetaceans to something noisy happening, and to impel them to move away.
(I don't have a qualification to operate as an MMO, but I have to work with them on almost every exploration well that I drill, and I am absolutely flat-out no-questions-asked required by my employer's to comply with the MMO's recommendations. Here is a list of the exceptions : [LIST BEGINS][LIST ENDS] ; list length 0 bytes. Can I be less ambiguous about this?)
This is NOT new technology. The mitigation procedures are NOT new. TFA is pure FUD.
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Like I said, put them into a ship with big enough storage to drop off a colony-forming ship every 10 generations - let them do the deceleration, mine your consumables, and re-supply the mothership. If that's happening every 10-20 generations, then you've got a release valve for your society (something that we don't have at the moment, but designing a society with release valves is one of the influences you can have across the millennia). And if (again, racing certainty) some of your would-be colonists get freaked by leaving the mothership behind, then the colonists have a release valve as they're establishing their society since there will be a re-supply mission accelerating back to the mothership next generation.
Short of manipulating a large (planetary mass?) lump of neutronium (which I'm not sure can exist), we don't have even a vague direction for such an object. And if we had to do that, we might well find it easier to go there (or send robots and relay stations) than to build such a telescope.
Some people seem to want to bind themselves to the pronouncements of some Roman carpenter, of whose existence we're by no means confident and whose diktats are based another half-millennium further back when (putative) his ancestors were slaves. At least we're pretty confident in the existence of the Roman emperors, even if some of them were as mad as a box of badgers. (I'm actually planning a walk along Hadrian's Wall - after that, I can securely attest to the existence of a Wall, with at least legion-marks referring to Hadrian ; after which, disbelieving in his existence would be perverse. In a generation ship, the existence of the ship, and it's constructors, would be hard to ignore.)
Like I said, that's why you build your society with (ir-)regular break points. Whether you have the ship travelling on a loop, or just driving straight(-ish) on for the horizon ... well that might be something that you re-assess every millennium or so. It would be another break point. Maybe you build into the design so that every 10 dropped-off colony ships, you can fission your mother ship into two and then continue to grow each on their chosen routes. Each generation would still need to be making choices, but equally each generation would be subject to constraints (as we are) which were imposed on us by ancestors only a (relatively) small number of generations ago. If you're an American, then almost certainly one of your ancestors chose to travel half-way around the world less than ten generations ago ; if you're not an American, then almost certainly several of your ancestors chose to NOT travel half-way around the world less than ten generations ago. How do you feel about those choices, whichever way they went?
Big assumption. The pressure to use medical developments and technologies to extend life is strong. On the assumption that the mammal body plan can't be pushed beyond 200 years, why would you go around doing momentous things like breeding before your 80s? Remember that for most of human history it was reasonably common to co-exist with your grandchildren, but seeing great-grandchildren was pretty rare. I'm trying to think of a mammal (or bird ; I don't know about reptiles or elasmobranchs at all, to cover the disparity of the vertebrates) that does routinely see it's great-grand offspring. If you wanted to change the generation ship people into a new species, that might be one of the most effective ways to do it - change life spans.
I'd say that's a racing certainty. It's not a trope I've seen exercised much in SF (a notable exception being "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. The necessity for a mutli-generational approach would tend to cramp things like character development (BHM spans a period IIRC of some 60,000 years, as the colony ship has to lay over to carry out repairs, and in the process need to, erm, build a moon. In orbit around "Harlequin." (Niven is Old School SF.)
There are interesting things to think about in such a situation and a mission. Including, particularly, how do you man a mission that is going to be profoundly multigenerational. How do you know you're going to be able to motivate the 79th generation after launch?
There's a very definite hierarchy of precision and strength of lawfulness in the sciences. If we accept economics as being a science (the dismal science), then it's "laws" are much looser than the laws of biology. (I was reading a paper last night on the laws of social evolution of non-breeding behaviour, couched in terms of probability of various outcomes, and the consequent effects on probably descendent count for each member of the population ; those laws were couched very much in economic terms, of calculating probabilities.) The laws of biology are much stricter ; egg plus egg does not make a fertilized egg ; 23 chromosomes plus 24 chromosomes makes for a pretty fucked-up organism, if it's viable at all ; oxygen metabolic enzymes plus sulphide (or hydrosulphide) ion makes for a broken or non-functional enzyme molecule. The laws of chemistry underlie the laws of biology and are considerably stricter ; in aqueous solution, silver ions plus chloride ions precipitates silver chloride if the solubility product of AgCl is exceeded (assuming no thiosulphate ion in solution) ; argon reacts with fewer elements than xenon, and forms less stable compounds ; silver chloride has the sodium chloride structure at NTP. The laws of chemistry themselves are founded on the laws of physics - those precipitations and crystal structures are basically the result of electrostatic interactions (as are the more subtle interactions of quantum mechanics in forming covalent bonds) ; when people talk about "unknown new laws of physics that will give us FTL travel, I invite them to jump out of a tall building and try to argue for an exemption from the laws of gravity.
In your example, the changes to the emergent laws of chemistry result from adherence to the more fundamental laws of physics.
If you can drag up a few string theorists, I can bring some mathematical philosophers ; we can throw them into a pit and let them fight it out to see if physics or maths is more fundamental to the universe. I'm not a great fan of either marshmallows, or popcorn, but I can bring a barbie and some great venison burgers.
SNAFU.
A driver who even thinks about turning around to check on what the passengers are up to should lose their driving license until they've successfully re-passed their driving test.
That's why you strap them in. That's what you have other adults in the vehicle for. That's why you train the kids from before potty-training to not touch their seat belts on pain of straight back home and no fun for the rest of the day. That's why you train the kids over the same time scale to not distract the driver.
This is a technology which should not exist.
Memo from Self : Like I was going to do that? After the last time I worked on a Mac?
Where, precisely, do we know that the laws of physics are different from those we see here? "pretty much everywhere" implies that there is somewhere that isn't included. Where is that?
Billion? A few tens of million years.
The galaxy is about 100,000 LY across. If we can get to 1% of c, then moving out to cover the galaxy would take (order of) 10 million years transit time. Since you're using generation ships, then while you're in flight you can be preparing a colonisation ship in the centuries between stellar encounters and drop the settlers off (and along with them, your political dissidents, mutants and space-sick passengers and other problems) ; if they think the star is settleable (does it have asteroids ; never mind the planets for the next x generations) then they stop, otherwise they do some quick (decades) mining for consumables and then depart to catch up with the mother ship.
I'd guess that "we" could colonise the galaxy in 100 Ma. Of course, by then, the species would certainly have changed, and probably fragmented into significantly different species. Certainly cultures would have changed drastically.
But it's all SF for the next number of generations.
In some SF universes that is codified as a "law" of warfare. e.g. "The Kzinti Lesson : a reaction drive is a weapon in proportion to it's efficiency as a drive."
Well, they could have just invented a god of mathematics and had done with it. But they were pretty smart cookies, so they'd probably have noticed the stupidity of admitting a supernatural explanation of any sort into their attempts to understand the natural world.
Air guns (they've never been called "sonic cannons" ; the author has been channelling early Hawkwind) are fired at a depth of 5~10m below water level, suspended from floats towed behind the survey boat. Normally there's a string of multiple hydrophones trailing along behind the air gun, held at a similar depth by tension between floats (pulling them up) and a hydroplane (underwater wing) pulling them down. Sometimes we lower a hydrophone (or several, for redundancy) into an existing well bore and lower it to the bottom, maybe as much as 7 or 8 km away from the surface, but we never lower air guns to that depth because they wouldn't work.
Then TFA's writer has achieved his (her? I forget which) purpose of spreading FUD about what has been a routine technique in other parts of the world for decades, with appropriate mitigation strategies in place.
Sharktopusnado, I'm afraid.
Agreed. There are other forms of diving injury that whales (and other non-human air-breathing divers) suffer from, but they're generally chronic and cumulative. Crush injuries to bones with isolated fluid-filled cavities which can't equilibrate fast enough, for example. Humans get the same, which is part of the reason that sat divers take several days to get to depth.
Whales don't get "the bends" (in the sense of decompression sickness). When they dive, they stop breathing (Doh!) and the air in their lungs rapidly compresses until their lungs have collapsed and the air is in the (relatively non-absorbent) bronchae and cranial air passages. Then, when they come back up, there isn't the excess of nitrogen dissolved in the blood that needs to exsolve and forms the bubbles that cause decompression sickness.
What gives human divers decompression sickness is that we breathe air while we're at depth. That allows our bloodstream to equilibrate with an effectively unlimited supply of nitrogen at depth, whereas the whales (dolphins, seals, penguins, etc) have only the one pair of lungs full of air to equilibrate against.
Don't worry, you're by no means the first person to get this wrong. I've had to talk other trained SCUBA divers through the maths before.
There are other forms of diving injury to which whales etc are subject, but they're not "the bends." And while they leave marks on the bones (as they do on human divers too), they're not enough to incapacitate the animals (though they can destroy a commercial diver's career).
The overwhelming majority of the "fracking boom" is drilling for gas, not oil. Yes, it is possible to frack shale (as in the gas boom) for oil, but it's much, much less common than fracking for gas.
Of course, in conventional (i.e. non-shale) reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil (and gas, but more rarely) production has been going on since the 1950s without arousing any particular attention. Of the about 200 wells on my CV, dozens of them have probably been fracked since I drilled and steered them. I wouldn't know ; it's not a question I'd ever waste my time asking.
Considering that air guns are powered by air compressors typically driven by diesel engines consuming a couple of gallons per hour, the average power isn't that high. The peak power is higher, because the guns fire in pulses, using the air as a storage medium.
For seismic analysis, particularly for differentiating between oil-filled rock, gas-filled rock and water-filled rock, we need lots of high frequencies in the projected sound, so that we can measure the difference of absorption at different frequencies. To get those high frequencies, we need bubbles of relatively small size. That constrains the power we can put into the water. Producing bigger guns will produce more power, but will not answer our geological questions, and so would be a waste of money. We'd have to run multiple surveys (big guns versus small guns) across the same area, almost certainly causing more harm than doing one survey.
See my comment up-thread. TFA is ill-informed and written to generate FUD, not to inform people. These aren't new techniques, and procedures for mitigating the effect of seismic air guns on sea life - particularly cetaceans - are well-known and used throughout the industry.
The "cetacean communication experiments which were stopped were ones attempting to teach dolphins (I forget the species, but only one species) to speak English. Work to understand the communications of cetaceans continues to this day.
Your "dolphin language" phrase implies that you think there is one "dolphin language" ; what we're pretty sure of is that there is one language per species ; there are 40 "dolphin" species in 17 genera (closely related groups), and about the same number of other cetaceans. We're pretty sure that some species have multiple, geographically constrained languages - "dialects" if you will. So your "dolphin language" suggestion implies learning to speak something like 100 distinct dialects, some probably very distantly related to others.
Big task.
You don't know the procedures that have been followed for years. I first approached my Boss about getting qualified as an MMO in about 2005, but he couldn't see a business case for it - I don't have the time in my regular employment to spend 1/2 hour doing nothing but sweeping the horizon with binos.
Shame - I'd have liked to get paid for a week of going whale-watching.
Those figures sound broadly comparable to regulations that I've seen controlling the exposure of diving workers to loud noises in their work place (pneumatic tools, stand-off distances from explosive cutters, that sort of thing). I didn't memorise the details as I didn't need them, but those figures sound broadly comparable.
There is - if you're doing "Seismic While Drilling". You can bump up the signal to noise ratio at your hydrophone 5, 6, or 7 kilometres below the seabed, without having to use huge air gun arrays (the compressors and air banks for which take up a lot of deck space ; deck space is always at a premium).
However, TFA is about shooting area-wide seismic coverage, not SWD. Because of the turning circle of (say) a 5km long, 16-wide array of streamed hydrophones, you keep them in constant motion. If you didn't, the hydrophones will get displaced from their required relative positions. Positioning typically needs to be precise to tens of centimetres. (Yes, many companies use (D-)GPS to confirm the positioning of the hydrophones, and record those positions for every shot.)
Just to put this into perspective : the air guns are suspended over the side of the drilling vessel about 20m from the side of the vessel ; if they're streamed behind a seismic boat, they're in the order of 100m behind the boat.
Shocking as it may seem, we don't design equipment that will damage our other equipment. Which is why the energy released from air guns is considerably lower than (for example) that released by a depth charge or a torpedo.
We call them "mitigation shots".
I don't know American regulations, but Norwegian regulations require a visual observer ("MMO", Marine Mammal Observer) to scan for cetaceans (whales, dolphins) by day and an acoustic monitor ("PAM", Passive Acoustic Monitor) to be deployed for at least 30 minutes before starting the guns. If a cetacean is spotted within a kilometre of the air guns (why they're using the name "sonic cannon" except to drum up FUD, I don't know), or an acoustic detection is made, then a start up sequence of one shot every 30 seconds, ramping from zero power to operating power over 30 minutes. The specific aim is to alert the cetaceans to something noisy happening, and to impel them to move away.
(I don't have a qualification to operate as an MMO, but I have to work with them on almost every exploration well that I drill, and I am absolutely flat-out no-questions-asked required by my employer's to comply with the MMO's recommendations. Here is a list of the exceptions : [LIST BEGINS][LIST ENDS] ; list length 0 bytes. Can I be less ambiguous about this?)
This is NOT new technology. The mitigation procedures are NOT new. TFA is pure FUD.
No, for domestic workers.
Well, "domestic" to those of us living in Scotland, Norway, Nigeria, Netherlands, Lithuania ...
After all, we've seen what Americans can do when they're trying to drill holes in the ground offshore America; we're hardly likely to do worse.