I would disagree with your sig. Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that we are small rodent-like creatures living in the underbrush.[...] We are their descendants, but we have undergone massive changes since we were them.
As the theropod dinosaurs are increasingly well known, in terms of both species count, and the level of detail of individual species, it is becoming increasingly evident that many of the characters that we used to consider uniquely "avian" are actually synapomorphies with the rest of the theropods. The wide distribution if scale-derived integumentary structures ("feathers" in birds ; feather-like forms in other theropods) is probably the best known example, but the presence of pneumatic bones is also a theropod characteristic, not just an avian one. And that is a big structural rearrangement. Or, possibly, since the same character is also found in ancient pseudosuchians ("pseudo-crocodiles", they're closely related to crocodiles, but not direct ancestors), they're a primitive character for all archosaurs (birds + dinosaurs + crocs + pterosaurs + (IIRC) mosasaurs, but not ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs), which were lost in the ornithischian clade of the dinosaurs.
There, I said it : "clade". Rude word in polite company. But, unfortunately, the jaw-cracking terminology and eyeball-searing deductive rigour of cladistics is necessary to sort this stuff out. As well as adequately preserved, discovered, adequately prepared and adequately described, material.
Palaeontology is a fast moving field, despite the boxes of dusty bones all around the department.
Are you sure there's not another formation in/upstream of the Great Rift?
I've not heard of such. But I don't have close knowledge of the Rifts. Great, Eastern or Western. There's certainly some weird volcanism associated - hyper-alkaline, highly potassic, things like the "baking soda volcano of (pardon my spelling, it's too late to be looking it up) Oldo Lengai. Those have some pretty exotic chemistry - "baking soda volcano" is not exactly a jest. I have a very vague memory of uranium minerals being reported in association with carbonatites (Oldo Lengai is a carbonatite volcano), but not as ores.
As a geologist with an apparent interest in the area, perhaps you would care to speculate on the surrounding formations suitability as such a dump over the last few hundred million years?
Africa is a big place, with a complex geological history. But generally, for a long-term dump (hundreds of millions of years is ridiculously too long a time scale; a few hundred thousand years is entirely adequate from a radiation safety point of view) you want to be away from water (most of Africa outside the Namib and Sahara deserts is pretty damp, and the Sahara has been damp in large parts within the history of our species), and you want to be away from active volcanics, earthquakes, etc. Which leaves you with mid-continental deserts - depressingly similar to Yucca Mountain. There may have been lots of pork barrel involved in the lobbying for (and against) the proposed repository there, but it's not a particularly bad site. Nor, to be honest, is Sellafield/ Seascale, or the place the Finns are proposing.
Clearly water made it in eventually,
Huh? In Oklo? Water was an essential component in Oklo - without the water (these were seabed deposits, IIRC) to act as a moderator, you'd have had hardly any nuclear interaction at all. To get efficient fission of 235-U you need slow neutrons, but 235-u yields fast neutrons ; so you need a moderator.
If you're going to shoot down an argument for nuclear energy on the basis that it brings in a "single point of failure", how can you suggest that a geothermal plant would be better?
Iceland already has multiple geothermal plants scattered around it's widely dispersed population and industry. It also has considerable hydroelectric, having suitable terrain.
Adding deep wells to reach higher temperatures would allow for increased power generation at sites that need it. I note that the site they've been working on is on the north coast, which is relatively sparsely populated, but does contain at least one major aluminium smelter. So I'd guess that they're looking to boost output there above what they can reliably get from local hydroelectric.
You're thinking, perhaps, of one power plant to supply the entire country? since the large majority of the Icelandic population live close to the coasts, and the interior is relatively lightly populated, that's not a model that is going to be efficient due to power line losses. Add in the inevitability of geological disturbances (volcanoes, earthquakes) and dispersed power production becomes inevitable.
This happens in Switzerland when mountain lakes held back by ice give way. A whole massive amount of water occasionally washes entire towns away.
Hmmm, that's certainly not impossible, but I can't think of a SWISS example that you're thinking of. There was an Italian town severely trashed in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Of the order of a thousand dead. But that was in consequence of a (earthquake assisted) slope failure above an artificial dam, leading to the dam being over-topped. Hardly the same thing. Nasty, but that's the closest I can think of to your description. There are also some very large landslide scars in several parts of the Alps, but I think they're all prehistoric, or at least pre-urbanisation. [Self : wikis : "Monte Toc landslide (260 millions cubic metres) falling into the Vajont Dam basin in Italy, causing a megatsunami and about 2000 deaths, on October 9, 1963" ; close enough for my memory.]
Allegedly, this is how the Dakota Badlands were formed.
I think that you mean the Channelled Scablands, which IIRC are in Idaho (not my country or continent) ; but yes, probably a jokullhlaup. (When it comes to glaciers and water, the Icelanders often have an appropriate word. In this case, the translation is approximately "icecap vomiting". Which fits closely enough.)
Had to look it up, but parent is right about Mars having ~24hr days (24:40 to be exact). I never realized that.
Several years ago, Scott Maxwell - one of the more recent Mars rover drivers - wrote an app for his phone to tell him what the time was on Mars, because he, like many of the rest of the rover management team, was required to work on a Martian day-night cycle, not a terrestrial one. So that meant slipping 2 hours on the clock every 3 earthly day-night cycles.
He now write software for some American company, but still tweets as #Marsroverdriver. Once a Mars rover driver, always a Mars rover driver.
the US does not require transports of category-1 to be protected by armed guards,
What is to guarantee that having an armed guard is going to protect the load in transit? A bottom-dollar gun-toting guard given a choice between getting shot for his minimum-wage job and saying "take it"... isn't going to take a bullet.
That's if he (or she) isn't in the pisser when the truck is stolen.
And when we manage to blow ourselves back to the stone age, we'll never be able to leave it without 'external' help - for the same basic reason, all the easy to access resources that made advances possible are gone.
I agree that the using up of resources would be a problem for a re-emerging civilisation, but I don't think that it's quite as bad as you make out. what tends to happen is that early-established mines (oilfields, etc) tend to be exploited as technology has been expanding, but then are abandoned as newer, more easily exploited or larger resources are found. Specific examples : the Romans started mining lead in the Peak District of England in about 60AD (in the process leaving lead pollution traces detectable in the Greenland ice sheet) and it continued until the early years of last century before being rendered uneconomic by discoveries in the New World. But the mines are still there, and still have ore in them. Not a lot, but it is still there. Example #2 : I was just researching the natural nuclear reactors at the Oklo mine in Gabon (equatorial Africa) and discovered that the mine was actually being shut down because it's unable to compete with other larger mines. But it's still got ore in and is workable.
Civilisation collapse isn't a nice prospect, but it's not a total dead end.
The only relevant parts are fl and fi (chance of life, and chance of life evolving into intelligent life), and we will never find them out even in approximation.
You use the word "never" in a thread about events on a geological and/ or astronomical timescale? The only way you could be serious about using that word could be if you expect our species to become extinct before we get an answer to the question "is there other intelligent life in this galaxy". Which I guess is possible, but pretty pessimistic.
As "sandertje" says, we're already capable of measuring the composition of (some) exoplanet atmospheres. When we find one that is significantly out of equilibrium (suggesting the presence of life, and possibly indicating it's chemistry), we'll have our first estimate for fl. And I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll find an indicator for fi too, whether by radio, laser, maser, or anal probe.
the fact the Varican has one of the planet's largest observatories.
Another bit of bullshit from some religious twat. Learn to do your fact-checking before spouting shit in public. With 5 instruments on two sites and 16 senior staff, it's a perfectly respectable observatory, but claiming that it's one of the planet's largest is just plain stupid. Fuck - I've worked at comparable observatories and I'm only an intermittent amateur astronomer.
For comparison, one of the largest observatories in the world is the European Southern Observatory, with 700+ staff, a Mâ150 budget, 6 major instruments comprising 10 major telescopes and hundreds of anciliary ones (some instruments are arrays of telescopes). Different league.
Hell, we know of at least one "natural" nuclear reactor in the great rift valley
I don't know why you've got quotes around the "natural".
The Oklo complex contains many distinct reactive centres. It's in Gabon, on the Atlantic coast, not in the Rift Valley which is on the other side of the continent. There are at least 15 activity centres in the Oklo mine and another one in a different mine some 35km SE from Oklo. A number of boreholes (for assessing more reserves) suggest activity at other centres, but since the mine is shut down now, it's unlikely to be studied more.
Damn, I'm annoyed that it's in that province. I was looking forward to taking a side trip to Oklo after some up-coming work out of Gamba and Libreville ; but somehow I don't particularly fancy driving several hundred kilometres for it. Would have made for some amusing questions when bringing samples back home - though being a card-carrying geologist should render such materials perfectly reasonable.
and crystals manage the organized self-replication with errors. If the errors were cumulative instead of structural they would be evolving already.
Take a look at some of Graham Cairn-Smith's work on crystal evolution and development. "Seven Clues" was a very interesting read ("Seven Clues to the Origin of Life", CambridgeUP, ISBN 9780521398282).
the cost of both solar panels electric-car battery packs will decrease, right
Wrong.
Present battery technologies will get cheaper for a while, but eventually the supply of - say - lithium will be exceeded and the price will start to go up.
Any future battery technologies that depend on uncommon materials will have the same problem. Possible disruptive events such as development of a new battery chemistry which doesn't require uncommon minerals may happen (I'm still waiting for the mid-1990s discovery of a potential magnesium-based rechargeable battery chemistry to make it to market), but are certainly not guaranteed to happen.
Improvements in recycling may blunt the cycle, but in a finite world (i.e., the one we live in) you're always going to run into supply problems if you use uncommon minerals.
We have a community kitchen that is a disaster area to walk into, and are not allowed to do any cooking in our rooms other then in a microwave. So unless I want to be living off of Swanson boxes, I have two options for food.
Third option : man up (or woman up, if that's your thing) and sort out the kitchen. If the other students using your kitchen area (for which you are paying as part of your fees) are disgusting slobs, then the university authorities had better have a policy that requires them to adhere to certain reasonable minimum standards, and some enforcement protocol.
When I was in halls - 1 year out of 4 at university - people could be expelled from the university for misbehaviour like that. More often, they'd come back from half term or full term break to find that they didn't have a place in halls any more. (Everyone had to move out of their rooms during every vacation - the rooms were rented out for the conference and vacation business. There were storage lockers for rent.)
The rules are there precisely to prevent this sort of problem. It's up to you to use the rules though.
I've never used a rebreather, but I understand that they have about a 2 hour time limit at 200 feet,
Depth and time are a complex equation, of course. In the early 1990s I had friends doing 4-hour-plus exploration dives up to several kilometres from an air surface and using open circuit air in 200-bar bottles, self staging on the way in. More recent (recreational, extreme) limits are up in the 8-10 hour range, when hypothermia (water temperature ~4 centigrade) and exhaustion are becoming limits.
and that they are too complicated and expensive for the typical recreational diver.
Of a dozen active members of my SCUBA club, one dives on a KISS rebreather and one has started learning to use a Poseidon Discovery. They're both experienced amateurs divers, but nothing extraordinary. Between the two, they've probably spent less on re-breathers than I did on the car my wife uses to get to and from work.
You are basically replacing the dangerous pure O2, toxic CO2 absorbant, and expensive triple-redundant computer systems of a rebreather with a cheap membrane that controls itself using physics.
A real system would certainly need at least one backup system. No-one but a blithering suicidal idiot(*) dives without a backup system, and preferably a backup which is substantially different to their prime system. And it would take decades for these putative membrane systems to prove themselves of comparable reliability to open circuit SCUBA (60-odd years of large scale use), manually-controlled closed circuit rebreathers (80-odd years of use, never large scale), or computer controlled closed circuit rebreathers (approximately 30 years of development, depending on what you consider a "computer" ; going back to Stone's work for NASA at Wakulla in the late 1970s/ early 1980s).
These putative membrane systems will not be entering an empty market place.
And, to be honest, there will be fatalities while people discover different ways to kill themselves with this equipment, and the equipment designers discover unexpected ways for the equipment to kill customers. It's a 2-way street.
(*) Caveat - some extremely good, or wildly overconfident, divers will occasionally do a dive without backup better than "Available Lung Power". I've done it myself, and decided that on a return visit, I simply wouldn't take the diving kit. It's very much a reconnoitre technique.
My understanding is that they've never seen the underside of a Martian rock.
So... those scoop arms on the Viking landers, and the Phoenix lander didn't turn over any Martian rocks? Not one? And not one overturned rock in the miles of tracks left by Pathfinder, Spirit (with it's dragging wheel), Opportunity Curiosity?
No, "whitespace" is a programming language encoded in the various different types of whitespace - spaces, horizontal tabs, vertical tabs, backspaces, page breaks.
Mad. As. A. Hatter.
Hang on - don't I know that name? Edwin Brady, izzat you?
Many Europeans are already used to using different keyboards at different times.
Yep, absolutely normal. When I'm at work I'll have my employer's laptop (with a UK keyboard) in front of me ; to the far right, a French contractor's machine providing some data, obviously with a French keyboard ; to the rear right, a US contractor (staffed by Nigerians, of course ; actually it's the same company as the French, but a different division ; I forgot they'd merged) has another machine I need to input and extract data from, and that's got US layout (but with a British layout physical keyboard) ; then there's the client's two computers - one with a Norwegian layout for the old data system and the other with a UK layout on a physical Dutch keyboard for the new data system.
Oh, and my tablet, which is probably a Chinese layout keyboard, but I've never tried to remember. It's got a physical keyboard, but it's in my rucksac and I'm not getting it out.
The ASA and ABA will in fact revoke a physicians board certification for participating in an execution.
Since the medics involved all took an oath to "first do no harm", then to excommunicate an oath-taker for violation of that oath is perfectly reasonable.
(The exact wording of the Hippocratic oath varies between medical schools. But if you know of an example which doesn't include that injunction, then I'd like to know, to avoid their graduands.)
The next line of attack will is, of course, to prevent sales of these drugs to murdering states. That is in process. So I'd hope for your plan that the drugs you mention are ones that can be manufactured in the US. Because otherwise... no supply.
It could also be driven by the diver like an underwater jet ski. The diver would limited in his movements, but could stay underwater for an indefinite amount of time. It could also extend the maximum diving depth to 500 feet by allowing for a longer ascent time.
No, it wouldn't. You'd run into other problems. Your diver needs to eat and drink. With present real-world technologies, we're approaching those limits. Professionals don't really like doing more than an 8 hour dive before going back to the saturation system to dry out - the skin falls apart after just a couple of weeks "in the pot" if you don't dry out, and wiping the shit out of your belly button (it always gets into your belly button, no matter how carefully you fit the diaper) gets old pretty fast. Then there's the HPNS (High Pressure Neurological Syndrome ; good luck knowing what that is, because no-one I've heard of does. But it kills nerves, including in your brain.)
Amateur dives have been going over 12 hours for years. It's getting more common with rebreathers, but it's not news.
If this is anything more than a bullshit design exercise (and I don't think that it is), then it's a solution looking for a problem. Existing rebreather technology provides the dive times, with the necessary system-level redundancy, and the limitations of human physiology are what they are already. (We may not know exactly where those limits are - but that's because finding the limits will inevitably involve exceeding them, which means killing people.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, how DID Douglas Adams know about Apple's OS naming policies in the early 1980s?
And to think, we're only 39 versions away from the Ultimate Kernel. That'll make it ... about year 2460 for the end of computing?
As the theropod dinosaurs are increasingly well known, in terms of both species count, and the level of detail of individual species, it is becoming increasingly evident that many of the characters that we used to consider uniquely "avian" are actually synapomorphies with the rest of the theropods. The wide distribution if scale-derived integumentary structures ("feathers" in birds ; feather-like forms in other theropods) is probably the best known example, but the presence of pneumatic bones is also a theropod characteristic, not just an avian one. And that is a big structural rearrangement. Or, possibly, since the same character is also found in ancient pseudosuchians ("pseudo-crocodiles", they're closely related to crocodiles, but not direct ancestors), they're a primitive character for all archosaurs (birds + dinosaurs + crocs + pterosaurs + (IIRC) mosasaurs, but not ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs), which were lost in the ornithischian clade of the dinosaurs.
There, I said it : "clade". Rude word in polite company. But, unfortunately, the jaw-cracking terminology and eyeball-searing deductive rigour of cladistics is necessary to sort this stuff out. As well as adequately preserved, discovered, adequately prepared and adequately described, material.
Palaeontology is a fast moving field, despite the boxes of dusty bones all around the department.
I've not heard of such. But I don't have close knowledge of the Rifts. Great, Eastern or Western. There's certainly some weird volcanism associated - hyper-alkaline, highly potassic, things like the "baking soda volcano of (pardon my spelling, it's too late to be looking it up) Oldo Lengai. Those have some pretty exotic chemistry - "baking soda volcano" is not exactly a jest. I have a very vague memory of uranium minerals being reported in association with carbonatites (Oldo Lengai is a carbonatite volcano), but not as ores.
Africa is a big place, with a complex geological history. But generally, for a long-term dump (hundreds of millions of years is ridiculously too long a time scale; a few hundred thousand years is entirely adequate from a radiation safety point of view) you want to be away from water (most of Africa outside the Namib and Sahara deserts is pretty damp, and the Sahara has been damp in large parts within the history of our species), and you want to be away from active volcanics, earthquakes, etc. Which leaves you with mid-continental deserts - depressingly similar to Yucca Mountain. There may have been lots of pork barrel involved in the lobbying for (and against) the proposed repository there, but it's not a particularly bad site. Nor, to be honest, is Sellafield/ Seascale, or the place the Finns are proposing.
Huh? In Oklo? Water was an essential component in Oklo - without the water (these were seabed deposits, IIRC) to act as a moderator, you'd have had hardly any nuclear interaction at all. To get efficient fission of 235-U you need slow neutrons, but 235-u yields fast neutrons ; so you need a moderator.
Iceland already has multiple geothermal plants scattered around it's widely dispersed population and industry. It also has considerable hydroelectric, having suitable terrain.
Adding deep wells to reach higher temperatures would allow for increased power generation at sites that need it. I note that the site they've been working on is on the north coast, which is relatively sparsely populated, but does contain at least one major aluminium smelter. So I'd guess that they're looking to boost output there above what they can reliably get from local hydroelectric.
You're thinking, perhaps, of one power plant to supply the entire country? since the large majority of the Icelandic population live close to the coasts, and the interior is relatively lightly populated, that's not a model that is going to be efficient due to power line losses. Add in the inevitability of geological disturbances (volcanoes, earthquakes) and dispersed power production becomes inevitable.
Hmmm, that's certainly not impossible, but I can't think of a SWISS example that you're thinking of. There was an Italian town severely trashed in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Of the order of a thousand dead. But that was in consequence of a (earthquake assisted) slope failure above an artificial dam, leading to the dam being over-topped. Hardly the same thing. Nasty, but that's the closest I can think of to your description. There are also some very large landslide scars in several parts of the Alps, but I think they're all prehistoric, or at least pre-urbanisation. [Self : wikis : "Monte Toc landslide (260 millions cubic metres) falling into the Vajont Dam basin in Italy, causing a megatsunami and about 2000 deaths, on October 9, 1963" ; close enough for my memory.]
I think that you mean the Channelled Scablands, which IIRC are in Idaho (not my country or continent) ; but yes, probably a jokullhlaup. (When it comes to glaciers and water, the Icelanders often have an appropriate word. In this case, the translation is approximately "icecap vomiting". Which fits closely enough.)
Several years ago, Scott Maxwell - one of the more recent Mars rover drivers - wrote an app for his phone to tell him what the time was on Mars, because he, like many of the rest of the rover management team, was required to work on a Martian day-night cycle, not a terrestrial one. So that meant slipping 2 hours on the clock every 3 earthly day-night cycles.
He now write software for some American company, but still tweets as #Marsroverdriver. Once a Mars rover driver, always a Mars rover driver.
I bet your job title isn't so cool.
(And he comes to Slashdot too, from time to time.
What is to guarantee that having an armed guard is going to protect the load in transit? A bottom-dollar gun-toting guard given a choice between getting shot for his minimum-wage job and saying "take it" ... isn't going to take a bullet.
That's if he (or she) isn't in the pisser when the truck is stolen.
You won't be able to do that until Win10 (SP2).
I agree that the using up of resources would be a problem for a re-emerging civilisation, but I don't think that it's quite as bad as you make out. what tends to happen is that early-established mines (oilfields, etc) tend to be exploited as technology has been expanding, but then are abandoned as newer, more easily exploited or larger resources are found. Specific examples : the Romans started mining lead in the Peak District of England in about 60AD (in the process leaving lead pollution traces detectable in the Greenland ice sheet) and it continued until the early years of last century before being rendered uneconomic by discoveries in the New World. But the mines are still there, and still have ore in them. Not a lot, but it is still there. Example #2 : I was just researching the natural nuclear reactors at the Oklo mine in Gabon (equatorial Africa) and discovered that the mine was actually being shut down because it's unable to compete with other larger mines. But it's still got ore in and is workable.
Civilisation collapse isn't a nice prospect, but it's not a total dead end.
You use the word "never" in a thread about events on a geological and/ or astronomical timescale? The only way you could be serious about using that word could be if you expect our species to become extinct before we get an answer to the question "is there other intelligent life in this galaxy". Which I guess is possible, but pretty pessimistic.
As "sandertje" says, we're already capable of measuring the composition of (some) exoplanet atmospheres. When we find one that is significantly out of equilibrium (suggesting the presence of life, and possibly indicating it's chemistry), we'll have our first estimate for fl. And I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll find an indicator for fi too, whether by radio, laser, maser, or anal probe.
Another bit of bullshit from some religious twat. Learn to do your fact-checking before spouting shit in public. With 5 instruments on two sites and 16 senior staff, it's a perfectly respectable observatory, but claiming that it's one of the planet's largest is just plain stupid. Fuck - I've worked at comparable observatories and I'm only an intermittent amateur astronomer.
For comparison, one of the largest observatories in the world is the European Southern Observatory, with 700+ staff, a Mâ150 budget, 6 major instruments comprising 10 major telescopes and hundreds of anciliary ones (some instruments are arrays of telescopes). Different league.
I don't know why you've got quotes around the "natural".
The Oklo complex contains many distinct reactive centres. It's in Gabon, on the Atlantic coast, not in the Rift Valley which is on the other side of the continent. There are at least 15 activity centres in the Oklo mine and another one in a different mine some 35km SE from Oklo. A number of boreholes (for assessing more reserves) suggest activity at other centres, but since the mine is shut down now, it's unlikely to be studied more.
Damn, I'm annoyed that it's in that province. I was looking forward to taking a side trip to Oklo after some up-coming work out of Gamba and Libreville ; but somehow I don't particularly fancy driving several hundred kilometres for it. Would have made for some amusing questions when bringing samples back home - though being a card-carrying geologist should render such materials perfectly reasonable.
... to the continuing absence of intelligent life on Earth?
Isn't it wonderful that science isn't a democracy, and most people don't get a vote.
Take a look at some of Graham Cairn-Smith's work on crystal evolution and development. "Seven Clues" was a very interesting read ("Seven Clues to the Origin of Life", CambridgeUP, ISBN 9780521398282).
Wrong.
Present battery technologies will get cheaper for a while, but eventually the supply of - say - lithium will be exceeded and the price will start to go up.
Any future battery technologies that depend on uncommon materials will have the same problem. Possible disruptive events such as development of a new battery chemistry which doesn't require uncommon minerals may happen (I'm still waiting for the mid-1990s discovery of a potential magnesium-based rechargeable battery chemistry to make it to market), but are certainly not guaranteed to happen.
Improvements in recycling may blunt the cycle, but in a finite world (i.e., the one we live in) you're always going to run into supply problems if you use uncommon minerals.
Third option : man up (or woman up, if that's your thing) and sort out the kitchen. If the other students using your kitchen area (for which you are paying as part of your fees) are disgusting slobs, then the university authorities had better have a policy that requires them to adhere to certain reasonable minimum standards, and some enforcement protocol.
When I was in halls - 1 year out of 4 at university - people could be expelled from the university for misbehaviour like that. More often, they'd come back from half term or full term break to find that they didn't have a place in halls any more. (Everyone had to move out of their rooms during every vacation - the rooms were rented out for the conference and vacation business. There were storage lockers for rent.)
The rules are there precisely to prevent this sort of problem. It's up to you to use the rules though.
Ach, it's an AC ; waste of electrons.
It's nearly 50 years since the book was written, which (IMHO) is far superior to the film.
Depth and time are a complex equation, of course. In the early 1990s I had friends doing 4-hour-plus exploration dives up to several kilometres from an air surface and using open circuit air in 200-bar bottles, self staging on the way in. More recent (recreational, extreme) limits are up in the 8-10 hour range, when hypothermia (water temperature ~4 centigrade) and exhaustion are becoming limits.
Of a dozen active members of my SCUBA club, one dives on a KISS rebreather and one has started learning to use a Poseidon Discovery. They're both experienced amateurs divers, but nothing extraordinary. Between the two, they've probably spent less on re-breathers than I did on the car my wife uses to get to and from work.
A real system would certainly need at least one backup system. No-one but a blithering suicidal idiot(*) dives without a backup system, and preferably a backup which is substantially different to their prime system. And it would take decades for these putative membrane systems to prove themselves of comparable reliability to open circuit SCUBA (60-odd years of large scale use), manually-controlled closed circuit rebreathers (80-odd years of use, never large scale), or computer controlled closed circuit rebreathers (approximately 30 years of development, depending on what you consider a "computer" ; going back to Stone's work for NASA at Wakulla in the late 1970s/ early 1980s).
These putative membrane systems will not be entering an empty market place.
And, to be honest, there will be fatalities while people discover different ways to kill themselves with this equipment, and the equipment designers discover unexpected ways for the equipment to kill customers. It's a 2-way street.
(*) Caveat - some extremely good, or wildly overconfident, divers will occasionally do a dive without backup better than "Available Lung Power". I've done it myself, and decided that on a return visit, I simply wouldn't take the diving kit. It's very much a reconnoitre technique.
Yeah ; happens. Many a slip 'twixt keyboard and post, as Shakespeare probably meant to say in Sonnet 34.
So ... those scoop arms on the Viking landers, and the Phoenix lander didn't turn over any Martian rocks? Not one? And not one overturned rock in the miles of tracks left by Pathfinder, Spirit (with it's dragging wheel), Opportunity Curiosity?
Incredible! (Literally, not figuratively.)
No, "whitespace" is a programming language encoded in the various different types of whitespace - spaces, horizontal tabs, vertical tabs, backspaces, page breaks.
Mad. As. A. Hatter.
Hang on - don't I know that name? Edwin Brady, izzat you?
Yep, absolutely normal. When I'm at work I'll have my employer's laptop (with a UK keyboard) in front of me ; to the far right, a French contractor's machine providing some data, obviously with a French keyboard ; to the rear right, a US contractor (staffed by Nigerians, of course ; actually it's the same company as the French, but a different division ; I forgot they'd merged) has another machine I need to input and extract data from, and that's got US layout (but with a British layout physical keyboard) ; then there's the client's two computers - one with a Norwegian layout for the old data system and the other with a UK layout on a physical Dutch keyboard for the new data system.
Oh, and my tablet, which is probably a Chinese layout keyboard, but I've never tried to remember. It's got a physical keyboard, but it's in my rucksac and I'm not getting it out.
Oblig XKCD.
Since the medics involved all took an oath to "first do no harm", then to excommunicate an oath-taker for violation of that oath is perfectly reasonable.
(The exact wording of the Hippocratic oath varies between medical schools. But if you know of an example which doesn't include that injunction, then I'd like to know, to avoid their graduands.)
The next line of attack will is, of course, to prevent sales of these drugs to murdering states. That is in process. So I'd hope for your plan that the drugs you mention are ones that can be manufactured in the US. Because otherwise ... no supply.
No, it wouldn't. You'd run into other problems. Your diver needs to eat and drink. With present real-world technologies, we're approaching those limits. Professionals don't really like doing more than an 8 hour dive before going back to the saturation system to dry out - the skin falls apart after just a couple of weeks "in the pot" if you don't dry out, and wiping the shit out of your belly button (it always gets into your belly button, no matter how carefully you fit the diaper) gets old pretty fast. Then there's the HPNS (High Pressure Neurological Syndrome ; good luck knowing what that is, because no-one I've heard of does. But it kills nerves, including in your brain.)
Amateur dives have been going over 12 hours for years. It's getting more common with rebreathers, but it's not news.
If this is anything more than a bullshit design exercise (and I don't think that it is), then it's a solution looking for a problem. Existing rebreather technology provides the dive times, with the necessary system-level redundancy, and the limitations of human physiology are what they are already. (We may not know exactly where those limits are - but that's because finding the limits will inevitably involve exceeding them, which means killing people.)